Chapter 2
Angela
The trick to forging a utility bill was committing to the watermark.
Amateurs left it off. Amateurs thought nobody looked.
But the watermark was the first thing a tired front-desk clerk’s eyes went to when they tilted the page toward the fluorescents, and the absence of one was the kind of small wrongness that made a person ask for a second form of ID.
So I built mine with care. Forty minutes of patient layer-work in a free design program on a public computer that wheezed like it had emphysema, while a man two carrels down clipped his fingernails into a paper cup and a woman in a parka the color of dishwater slept with her cheek pressed to her keyboard, a string of capital Y’s snaking down her screen.
The third floor of the Harold Washington smelled of old carpet, warm electronics, the faint sour ghost of someone’s microwaved lunch. I loved it. It felt like I was visiting church—a holy space, somewhere for everyone but also just for me.
The bill I was working from was real. I had pulled it that morning out of the recycling bin behind a six-flat in Lincoln Park, peeling it off a banana peel like an archaeologist, and I had carried it eight blocks in my coat pocket with the smug satisfaction of a woman who knew that a real ComEd bill was worth more than money.
The address belonged to a unit I had clocked off a Craigslist vacancy listing.
The previous tenant had moved out three weeks ago.
Nobody was getting mail there yet. Nobody would for a month.
I scanned it. I lifted the bill code, the account number, the cheerful little ComEd lightbulb logo.
I dropped in my new name—Anna Ancelotti, the name I had been wearing for fourteen months, and a service date from last month, and a billing total of one hundred and thirty-seven dollars and twelve cents.
I sighed. It was hard to believe that just two years ago I had been a forensic analyst at a hedge fund.
Harder to believe that right now, the principals of that hedge fund were doing federal time partly on the strength of my testimony.
The part of my brain that had built that case had never powered down.
It just sat there now, mostly unused, like a Ferrari in a garage in a town with no roads.
Anna Ancelotti.
I tried the name on in my head the way I did every morning, like a coat I had to wear.
It still didn’t fit. It had never fit, which was the point—WITSEC handed you a life that was meant to feel like someone else’s, on the theory that someone else’s life was harder to find.
Mine had been a forty-three-year-old paralegal from Akron, on paper.
In practice she was me, awake at three in the morning, listening to the radiator pipes in a stranger’s apartment and counting the exits.
Until six weeks ago, when I had come home from work and seen that the dish towel I always left hanging on the oven handle had been folded and put back on the wrong hook, and I had not slept indoors since.
The print queue beeped. I walked to the printer with my hands in my pockets, and collected my single sheet for twenty cents. ComEd. Anna Ancelotti. 2247 N. Sheffield, Unit 3F. Past due notice in friendly orange.
Beautiful. Truly.
I folded it once, twice, three times. I ran the creases hard with my thumbnail and then I un-folded it and creased it the other way and folded it again, until it had the soft drape of a document that had been shoved into a purse and then a drawer and then a hand.
I held it up to the long fluorescent. The watermark glowed at exactly the depth it should.
The lightbulb logo sat a hair to the right of true centre, the way the real one did because some graphic designer at ComEd in 1998 had laid out the template wrong and they had been printing it wrong ever since.
I let myself smile. Small. Private. The kind of smile you allowed yourself when you had been very good at something nobody was ever going to clap for.
The sleeping woman in the dishwater parka snored. The fingernail man clipped on, oblivious. Somewhere on the other side of the floor a child was being told, in the patient hiss of a mother running out of patience, that we do not climb on the magazine rack, Devon, we do not, we do not.
I slid the bill into the inside pocket of my coat, against my ribs, where the warmth of my body would finish aging it for me by lunch.
Six dollars and forty cents in my wallet.
Three hundred and twelve in the lining of the coat.
Four hundred and eighty-six rolled into the toe of the left boot in my bag.
Eight hundred and four dollars and forty cents, total.
That was what I had to make last until I figured out the next thing, which I had been about to figure out for six weeks.
The Marian House Hostel was twenty-eight a night with an Illinois address and proof of residence, which I now had folded against my ribs.
A week’s bed. Seven nights of a door that locked, a shower, a pillow that was not the inside of my own coat.
I logged out of the computer. I cleared the browser. I wiped the keyboard with my sleeve, which was less about prints—they would not be looking for prints—and more about the small superstitious pleasure of leaving nothing behind.
My stomach made an angry sound. I had eaten a banana at six and half a granola bar at nine. Not enough. Not even close to enough.
I shouldered my bag and walked toward the elevator with my chin up and my hands in my pockets and the small forged sun of my new address tucked warm against my heart.
A forger, a runaway, and a federal witness walked into a library, I thought. The librarian looked up and said, you again. And I almost laughed.
Almost.
Iwalked from the library to State and Lake with my hands shoved deep in my pockets, the forged ComEd bill warm against my ribs, and the wind doing that thing it did off the river where it tried to crawl up your sleeves.
The alcove was behind the shoe repair, in the slot between the building and the dumpster, sheltered on three sides.
He had set it up like a small careful room.
A flattened cardboard box for a floor. A plastic milk crate for a stool.
The army surplus blanket I had given him three weeks ago, folded twice and tucked around his legs like an old man’s lap robe in a parlor.
He sat on the crate with his back against the brick, reading.
A Walter Mosley paperback. The spine had gone soft and pale at the creases. He was about a third of the way through. He had been about a third of the way through last week, which told me something about how often the cold made it hard to focus enough to read.
He looked up when my shadow fell across the page and his whole face creased, the way a paper bag creased when you smoothed it out a second time.
“Miss Anna.”
“Mr. Wendell.”
I held out the coffee. Medium, black, two sugars, the way he had told me the first time, looking embarrassed to be specific.
And the brown paper bag with the buttered roll, still warm from the bakery on the corner where the woman behind the counter had stopped charging me for the rolls about ten days ago, which was its own problem and one I was not currently equipped to solve.
He took them both with both hands. He did that every time. He took them the way you would take a baby being handed to you, with the slight settling of the shoulders that meant whatever else this was, it was going to be done with attention.
“Sit a minute,” he said.
I sat on the corner of the cardboard, knees up, bag between my feet. The dumpster smelled less than you’d think. He was meticulous about which side he sat on, depending on the wind.
“How’s Mosley?”
“He’s alright.” He took the lid off the coffee and sniffed at it like he was paying his respects, then sipped. He closed his eyes. He opened them again, looking at me like he wanted to make sure I’d seen him appreciate it. “Two sugars. Lord.”
“Same as last time.”
“You don’t forget.”
“I forget plenty of things. But coffee orders are sacred.”
He smiled at that, and tucked the bag with the roll into the inside of his coat, against his chest, the same place I had put the forged ComEd bill twenty minutes ago. I made myself not see the symmetry.
He frowned then. Slowly. Like a man who had spent his life noticing things and was about to notice another one.
“Miss Anna.”
“Mm.”
“Where’re your gloves?”
I looked down at my hands, which had come out of my pockets at some point to hold the coffee while I’d been handing it over, and were now resting on my knees in their pale, ridiculous nakedness.
The knuckles were red. The skin between my thumb and forefinger had split. I had been ignoring it for a week.
“Oh,” I said. “Left them at the shelter. Idiot.”
This was a lie of a kind I had become disturbingly fluent in.
There was no shelter, exactly. There was a rotation: two nights in the women’s overflow at the Catholic place on Wabash when they had a bed, one night in the chair at the twenty-four-hour diner on Wells when they didn’t, the rest of the nights on the el if the el was running and on a stairwell I knew about in the south Loop when it wasn’t.
None of these places held my gloves for me, because I did not own any gloves.
He looked at my hands a long time.
“Miss Anna,” he said again. He said my name the way a person who had not been called by his own first name in a while said other people’s names. With care. With the slight ceremony of returning something to its owner.
Then he reached into the blanket on his lap.
“Mr. Wendell —“
“Found ’em,” he said.
He held out a pair of gloves. Grey. Knitted. Too big — they were a man’s, and a big man’s — and beautifully, almost ostentatiously clean. They had been washed recently. I could smell the soap on them from where I sat.
“I can’t,” I said.
“They’re yours.”
“Mr. Wendell. They’re yours. I can’t —“