Chapter 12
Sicily finally moved to my side of the desk and sat down, her hip sharp against mine. She hadn’t inherited Marisa’s caboose, like I had, the one that made all my vintage dresses just a little clingy at the back.
Clingy in a way no one minded.
I navigated the sticky mouse across Alex’s desk to get to the files for McPhee’s security cameras.
I was no expert here. The system was always recording into the cloud but usually no one ever needed the files.
If we watched the footage every night, we’d see a lot of dudes relieving themselves on the lamppost and clutches of drunk chicks telling each other he wasn’t worth it up against the windows next door.
Occasionally someone would notice a camera and flip us off or drop their pants.
A few times, fights had broken out on the street—once, a hit-and-run—and the cops had come in to see what we had.
Chicago was supposed to be some crime hub, right?
The city had its problems, sure, but it was also a beautiful place, green in the right seasons, with a downtown lakeshore held for public enjoyment, not sold off to be industrialized and polluted.
And it was friendly, a totally Midwestern town in that people looked you in the eye and said “ope!” or “may I have this dance” when you tried to pass one another on the sidewalk and both of you zigged the same way, laughing.
A city with its heart on its sleeve, city of big shoulders and big sleeves and big hearts right out there to be broken, every year at World Series playoffs, every day when you saw the same cardboard sign at the same intersection or heard about another senseless act of violence, so close to home.
But mostly the presence of McPhee’s cameras was the security system, and we didn’t need to review the footage. The files were automagically deleted after a week or so.
“Here we go,” I said. I’d finally located the most recent files for the security camera that shot out from the front door of the pub, angled north to include a slice of the street. I scrolled through to the clip for the day before, afternoon.
I let the file play a bit, but it was just a typical weekday on Milwaukee Avenue, grainier than real life, grayer. Cars parked, unloaded, reloaded, drove away. A car trying to parallel park nudged another car’s bumper.
Our beer distributor pulled up in his big logo truck, double-parked. The delivery guy appeared at the back of the truck and began unloading beer cases onto a handcart.
“That’s what the alley is for, Kyler,” I mumbled.
“He’s kinda cute,” Sicily said.
A guy whose car had been trapped in its parking space by Kyler’s truck came along and gestured a lot, probably swearing and yelling, but Kyler strolled his cargo past, mouth formed in a silent, to us, whistle. He did everything but wink into the camera.
“Really cute,” Sicily said.
She was not wrong.
“Does he come here every week?” she said.
On the screen, the irate guy turned up and down the street, scouring the scene for someone to take his case.
A big guy in a long, fluttering black coat and one of those flat caps pulled low came along as though he meant to come into the pub, but then veered, tense-shouldered, avoiding the stir the other guy was making in protest.
“That crybaby lost us a customer,” I said.
A few minutes later, Kyler rolled his empty cart back into the scene for more abuse. The guy on the street was still squabbling and gesturing while Kyler went about returning the cart to the back of the truck, jumping down, closing up, and pulling away.
The guy turned out not to be in such a hurry, after all. He had a little time to complain to anyone who happened by. When he finally ran out of steam and people to draw into his drama, he got into his car and peeled out of the spot.
McPhee’s door swung open, closed, open. Time passed. There was Primary Jim, going out for a smoke or whatever he did when he took the daily break from his busy schedule of weighing down the bar.
Next to me, Sicily fidgeted with the fringe at the end of her scarf, over and over threading the strings through her fingers. Over and over. I barely resisted the urge to slap at her to make her stop. Out in the hallway, one of the dogs collapsed heavily to the floor and sighed.
“How is this finding my mom?” Sicily said, pulling out her cell to thumb at it. “It’s boring.”
I found it fascinating, but whatever. Kids.
Oh, but here I came on the video, walking back from the missed bus stop, hauling my garbage over my shoulder. Cold in my leather jacket, sliding in my boots. Like an amateur music video, missing the music. And the budget.
Sicily leaned forward. “That’s you.”
“Sure is.”
“Are you taking out the trash?”
I hit fast-forward through the part where I fell on my butt. Marisa hadn’t come into the pub by the front door, anyway. She’d come in through the back, with me. But she would have departed by the front.
“A lot of people drinking on a weeknight,” Sicily mumbled as folks on the video Charlie Chaplined in and out of the bar.
“My band was playing.”
The kid’s eyes slid back to the poster.
Checking the date?
“You’re still—”
“Yep.” I pumped up the fast-forward to double-time.
“She came to see your show?”
I didn’t need to ask who the kid meant or mention she hadn’t stayed for the second set. Why had Marisa come? To tell me something, but she’d never managed it. To ask me something, but I hadn’t let her.
“She probably wanted to hear you sing,” Sicily said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”
People came and went. That trashy white truck with the bum tire pulled into the alley, and the homeless guy with the grocery cart rolled out, quickly.
Then here I came, from the alley, this time.
With the dogs. Or it was fair to say the dogs came out, with me, an accessory barely holding on.
There was Bern, the manager, ducking to the corner with a cigarette, almost out of view at the alley.
I was aware of Sicily’s breath next to me. This … person. She was real. What a trip. Wait until I told Joey—
Sicily looked over at me. “What?”
I must have made a noise. “Nothing,” I said.
On the screen, the street grew dark. The streetlights popped on, hot spots in the shadowy grays of the video. Cars parked along the street, unparked. Pedestrians passed, taking a look into the pub.
Then Marisa was standing on the sidewalk, lingering and still as the world moved at double speed all around her. I grabbed for the computer mouse to return the video to normal speed, and there she stood, considering the front door to the tavern.
Sicily sucked in her breath. “That’s her.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
Sicily looked at me, then away. I could tell she hadn’t really wanted to believe me that Marisa was my mother, too.
She’d been holding out hope that we were talking about two different women, poor kid.
And now she knew: My drug addict was the same as her Brownie troop leader, confirmed—and truth?
—we were both feeling some kind of way about it.
Dog nails clacked along the hallway and through the door, and Bear shuffled in. He came up to the chair we both sat in, and put his chin on Sicily’s thigh. She looked down, surprised, and then put her hand on his head, petting him absently as she turned her attention back to the video.
“Why is she just standing there?”
“It would be a guess,” I said, “but I think she’s trying to decide if it’s worth the trouble of coming inside.”
“What trouble? Because it’s a bar?”
“Because I’m inside the bar,” I said. “Or I will be, soon.”
On the screen, Marisa pivoted and walked north along the sidewalk to the alley and disappeared.
“Wait,” Sicily said. “Where is she going?”
I checked the time stamp. “She walked around back and came in that way,” I said. “She was already upstairs when I went up to my apartment.”
“You live here?”
What was interesting was that Marisa had known I lived here. I hadn’t wondered how until now. On the screen, the dogs and I were coming up to a blind spot, where Bern was leaning against the bricks.
I reached for the mouse and sped up the action again. That truck pulling out, finally, then I thought I spotted Alex’s plaid shirt out by the alley, too, but didn’t slow the feed to see what he was doing. Probably moving a drunk along, something he had to do often enough.
I watched the time stamp for about the time Marisa had been bothering Alex at the bar.
On the screen, people were out front, laughing and having smokes.
Steve’s girlfriends from the ladies’ room emerged onto the street, picking along the sidewalk with tiny steps in uncomfortable shoes. Going home alone.
And then there she was again. Marisa, coming out of the bar by the front door. I slowed the video again and let it play, listening to Sicily’s breath go deep with longing at the sight of her mother.
On the video, Marisa’s dye job shined white in the light of the streetlamp.
She looked young, somehow, there on the street.
Alone, vulnerable. She turned to look down Milwaukee, and the camera recorded a shadowed profile, a straight nose that I sort of recognized from photos of myself, a lip moving as she chewed on it or spoke to someone—
“Is she talking?” I said.
She was crying.
Sicily sat up straight. “Why is she—”
“I don’t know.” But I sort of knew, didn’t I? Things hadn’t gone how she’d hoped. I’d made sure of it.
Marisa started walking north. At the alley, she paused, made a step into the dark, and then continued out of frame. Sicily turned to me.
“Wait,” I said. A car had just driven by, stopping abruptly, the taillights just visible. The barest slice of shadow played at the edge of the camera’s field of vision. I felt as though we could see what was happening, if only I nudged the computer screen an inch.
“What?” Sicily said as I backed the video up a few clicks.
I set it to play again. “I think she stopped to talk to whoever’s driving that car. See? She walked off just there, and then the car slows down and stops. See that shadow moving? I think it’s the door opening.”
We watched it through a long, boring bit where nothing seemed to happen.
There was a shadow at the very edge of the camera’s scope and then someone going into the alley, maybe.
Was it Marisa? But then nothing. We watched, real time, for a long time, but Marisa never reappeared.
I wasn’t sure what we’d seen. I rewound it and played it again.
Had she grabbed a ride? With someone she knew, or a rideshare?
“I’m not sure how helpful this will be to the police,” I said. “Too bad we’re not characters in one of those crime shows where they can take a photo from space and still get the license plate number.”
Sicily had been quiet, working at her scarf with the other hand stroking Bear’s ears. She was staring at the screen. I hit pause on the footage, and the kid didn’t even blink.
“You know whose car that was,” I said. “Don’t you?”
Sicily snapped back to attention. “What? No?”
“Yeah, you do,” I said. “Great. You know who she went home with, then you can track her down and you and your dad can sort out whether you’ll let her back into the bosom of the family.”
Sicily shifted her eyes away from me.
“So if you’ll excuse me,” I said more forcefully, “what I need is a shower, a job, and a different outlook on life. Pretty confident I can manage the shower.”
I made sure the footage was downloaded to the hard drive, just in case, and then backed out of the system and closed it down.
“But—” Sicily said.
“What now?”
“That car had a sticker on the back window. Like my aunt Edie’s car.”
The kid’s family folded out like a map to the universe, forever and ever, so many folds, so many panels. So many people to keep track of, to care about.
What a drag.
“Well, that’s a relief,” I said. “Right? Give my regards to Aunt Edie and tell her to drive a little slower along this stretch of Milwaukee Avenue next time. There are a lot of drunk people along this block, no idea how that happens. Someone really should talk to the alderperson.”
“No, you don’t get it,” Sicily said. “If Aunt Edie picked up my mom last night, why haven’t I heard from one of them? I already called Aunt Edie, first thing. She’s Mom’s boss, her best friend in the world.”
“And?”
“Her phone just goes to voicemail.”
At the note of distress in her voice, Bear lifted his head from Sicily’s leg. The tough chick who’d told me to piss off was gone, and in her place was this little figurine. Ceramic. A breakable girl.
Had I ever been this sort of helpless? Had I ever been given the chance?
“I don’t—I don’t know what to do,” Sicily said, barely audible.
Bear stretched his neck to give her wrist a lick. Whose side was he on?
The chance of me getting that shower anytime soon had already rushed right down the drain.