Chapter 35
All the cases of our gear in the storeroom had been opened, the cords strewn around.
Everything thrown into a heap. The carpet had been pulled up from all corners of the room, and a couple of chairs tipped over and slashed through the cushions.
That was just spite. Even the rusty filing cabinet kept in the corner had been pulled from the wall.
I counted speakers and monitors, sifted through the cords and mics. Nothing seemed to be missing or damaged, only moved around, dumped out. A mess. Mischief.
Alex would have to move the filing cabinet; it was too heavy for me.
I opened the top drawer. No wonder. It was still full.
All the drawers were still stuffed with years of paper, old invoices and tax returns and whatever Alex felt had to be kept for eighty-three years.
If the marauders had been looking for a way to cause trouble, they’d missed a trick.
If I had been on this wrecking crew, I’d have made confetti out of all this. I’d have done it up, big.
In the dinky little toilet, the bandits had managed to yank the medicine cabinet mirror half off the wall.
It hung a little crookedly now, and the mirror was cracked through the middle.
The bathroom was as freezing as usual, the mysterious nor’easter always blowing through there going strong, a thin needle of its whine in my ear.
I felt around the edges of the cabinet until I found the draft.
Alex could fix this. The mirror, anyway. He’d never been able to fix the draft.
I went to see the rest of the damage.
I’d expected to find Alex in the office, shoveling out.
But he wasn’t there, and actually that room wasn’t much messier than it normally was, just a bookcase knocked over and the desk shoved at a cattywampus angle.
The stuff from the shelves now lay strewn on the floor, and the frame of the band poster that normally hung behind the desk was pulled down, resting rather politely against the wall.
The computer was already on. I checked the security system. My hidden files were safe but Friday’s footage and everything since had been wiped.
But by who?
Alex again? Or a burglar who knew to erase evidence of his visit?
I double-clicked one of the copies I’d stashed of the video from Wednesday and watched it at four times speed: cars, bumper bumped, Kyler loading in, cranky guy on the street, Kyler back out, Quin off to make a call or whatever, me and the dogs out, Bern grabbing a ciggie, Marisa making a choice, the truck pulling out, me and dogs back, and then Alex—
I slowed down the footage, hope taking wing …
I’d got it in my head since seeing a hat like Joey’s at the Addison Rose that maybe, maybe it wasn’t Joey that Alex was bullying away from the pub. Maybe it was another guy in a—
Nope. That was indeed Alex shoving, yes, definitely Joey away from McPhee’s. I stopped the video and quit the program and sat thinking until the screen went to sleep.
Alex was in the kitchen at the sink in the back, his shoulders working over something with a brush. I checked the till but the drawer was as full as Alex ever left it overnight. Even the booze was still in place on the back bar.
“That is the worst robbery I have ever seen,” I called through.
On the bar sat the keg couplers, pulled loose. The taps and faucets soaked nearby in the bar sink. He’d have liquid cleaning solution shot through the keg lines in a minute. The bar mats were also pulled, which was probably what he was scrubbing at back there.
“This is every-other-Tuesday morning cleaning, isn’t it, Alex?”
He cleaned at times of peril, when he was mad, miserable, or processing.
Or all three.
For a break-in, we hadn’t sustained much damage. The bathroom mirror could be replaced, right? But we didn’t even use it that much. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world. The worst thing in the world had already happened.
“Did you want me to call it in?” I said.
Could he hear me? I watched his shoulders grinding at the sink. He could hear me.
Can you be okay with it? he’d asked. And I hadn’t answered.
I went to get the broom.
Sweeping the hall back toward the pub, I remembered a hundred days just like this one, helping Alex open or close the bar, sometimes just to be near him, to be part of his life. People had tried to intervene, but it had always been the two of us.
Forgive me for freaking out that someone else had nosed into our family, without me realizing.
I would figure it out. I had dealt with change over and over again as a kid.
Not willingly, and not well. Alex was the one who had trouble with surprise.
So maybe I’d become more like him over the years.
Marisa had made me one way, and then Alex had made me another.
Was I somehow a product of both of them?
It felt weird to think of myself that way.
As a product of the two of them. Alex was not my bio dad; that has always been made clear.
But it was also weird to think of myself as a product.
As a result, instead of something in progress. I felt very much still in progress.
I swept along the stage, everything in me pulling toward that spotlight.
Man, I hoped I was still in progress.
I swept around the legs of the tables and started pulling the chairs down. As chair legs scraped noisily into place, Alex lifted his head and our eyes met briefly through the pass-through, an acknowledgment of something, without words.
I had some say in who I was, what I became, didn’t I? Who did I want to be?
Petty and small in the face of someone else’s big happiness?
A spangled girl, brash and big-mouthing about the truth, when everything about her was constructed for an audience?
Was I no closer to the person I wanted to be than I was twenty years ago when I’d slipped that butter knife off Alex’s kitchen table into my pocket?
I was sweeping under the corner booth, noticing the red café curtains in the window were still tied in a knot, when I saw something poking out from between the seat cushions.
Ah, the Capone hoard, at last.
Usually the only thing to be found stuffed between these cushions were crumbs, but I’d found a pair of women’s underwear there once. People could be messy in so many ways.
This whatever-it-was was red, and the booth leather was red, so I almost hadn’t spotted it in the shadows under the table. It was really shoved in. I wrestled it out, plenty of crumbs in the bargain.
It was a flat, squarish package, in red Christmas paper that had seen better days. The paper was dotted with little white snowflakes. With a crushed stick-on bow.
Alex stood at the bar. “Something for lost and found?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I mean … I don’t think so. I think this is … I think this is for me. From Marisa.”
He walked over and we both stared at the package. “She must have been visited by three ghosts,” he said.
“I think she might be … sorry?”
“That is a dangerous position to take,” Alex said.
Buddy, I knew it. I looked up at him, then away.
“The police came by,” he said.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Different police. From the suburbs, about her.”
I’d seen that visit on the footage I wasn’t sure I was supposed to have watched. “Oh. Right. They find her car?”
“Yeah. Towed from here. I guess that’s why you were with her, uh, your sister,” he said. “You could have told me Marisa was missing.”
“You could have told me about Oona.”
But I hadn’t seen Alex to tell him about Marisa or even mention the damage to the floors I’d discovered next door. And now I knew why he’d been so twitchy. And so elusive. He’d been with Oona. Two blocks in distance, but so far away from me.
I didn’t want to talk about hardwood floors. I put the gift down to deal with later. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll be okay with it. You and Oona. I’m … happy. That you’re happy.”
He nodded but he still had a little tuck in the spot between his eyebrows.
“You are happy, right?” I said. “You seem … I don’t know. Anything you need to tell me?”
“I need to tell you something,” Alex said, as though I hadn’t prompted him.
I braced myself.
“I have an offer to buy the building,” he said. “A good one.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh. I didn’t realize … I didn’t know it was for sale.”
“It wasn’t.”
Edith Maxwell, that bitch. I couldn’t wait to black out the teeth in her stupid face the next time I saw one of those bus benches. I should have snatched that peacock feather. “And you’re going to accept it? The offer?”
“Well,” he said. “Well, I wanted to talk with you. Before I made any decisions.”
“Okay.”
We both waited. A long empty minute passed. It was hard to tell with Alex, sometimes, if a silence was a pause in the conversation he had designed, in order to process and arrange his thoughts, or a silence he expected someone else to fill.
“You wanted to talk to me,” I said. “Do you mean, you want to know what I think?”
“What do you think?”
I had a lump in my throat. I’d been a kid here, once, building a fort under the corner booth, crawling all over the place, up and down and between the two apartments through the scuttle space. I couldn’t even look in the direction of my stage. My stage.
All my joy had come from this place, every good memory. Everything that I’d come through, this was the place that called me home. I swallowed my grief and said, “I think it’s your decision. The building’s yours.”
“It’s yours, too.”
All those ideas I’d had to share the stage—poof, gone. “Maybe it’s time I tried to get on someone else’s stage,” I said.
He reached for the back of his neck and pulled. A nervous tic.
“Oh, you mean the apartment,” I said. “Right. But I never meant to stay upstairs long term, anyway. I guess I could move back into my— Oh. Oona. Oona will need to move…” Revelations tumbled like dominoes. “Oh. Oona will move into the house, with you. Is that…? Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.”
“I didn’t mean the apartment,” he said, trying to look me in the eye, and failing. My shoulder was getting the brunt of his attention.
“What then?”
“The pub,” he said. “The pub could be yours. Someday.”
My stomach suddenly hurt. Or some organ in the middle? Just under my ribs.
“I don’t know if running McPhee’s is my, uh, career path,” I said. “Not like it was yours.”
“It wasn’t my career path,” he said. “It’s just what I do.”
I wasn’t sure I got the distinction. “Okay, but I want to be around music. You know. I want to play music and write music and be around musicians.”
“Musicians like to drink,” he said.
Understatement. “What I mean is that you don’t have to check with me if you want to sell the pub,” I said. “I don’t know how you ran it this long, given, you know…”
Alex frowned. “My relationship to alcohol and drugs.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I am not this place,” he said. “I run it. I work here. But McPhee’s isn’t the only thing I am.”
I was starting to understand that. “But wouldn’t it be easier not to be around booze all day? Not to go home smelling like the beer some drunk spilled on you?”
“I’ve never not been around it all day,” he said. “I grew up here. This is the place I know. And I get to be myself here. That’s easy, to be exactly yourself.”
“It’s not that easy.” Was it?
“I wouldn’t have been myself in some office,” he said. “I like listening to people’s stories.”
“And answering questions about Capone and the ghost,” I said. “And keeping the treasure seekers from pickaxing the back hallway.”
Except the new tenants next door had done exactly that. I glanced at Alex nervously. If he was going to sell the building, what did it matter what had been done to the floors next door?
But it would still hurt him to learn about the damage. Beautiful, historic floors. Floors his grandfather had swept, his father. This place was everything to him.
“Don’t sell it,” I said. “Why would you sell it? You love this place.”
“Because the offer is a lot of money. Maybe it won’t ever be as much again. And if you don’t want the pub someday … The money could help you now. Maybe you’d like to go to college—”
“Nope.”
“Or get your own place,” he said. “Anyway, it’s not the building I love.”
I was suddenly very uncomfortable. He was standing too close to me, even though he wasn’t. The sweater I was wearing was too thick and heavy, weighing me down.
“I—”
I needed … air. I needed to get out of here.
Alex stood between me and the door. I looked toward the window, and the street beyond, open and wide and cold. The curtain at the window in the big booth, in a knot.
“I didn’t know what your future would be,” Alex said. “I’ve turned down offers before. I wanted to see what you would do. Before I sold it.”
Joey had been right. Talking about the future made me sweat.
I didn’t like thinking of Alex putting his life on pause for me, but of course, he must have.
When he took Marisa’s call, twenty years ago, he’d made a choice that had changed his life as well as mine.
In all the years I’d been in care, he had never missed a monthly visit, never put me off to do something more fun than check in on some kid who wasn’t his.
He’d never married. Had he ever dated? I wasn’t really sure that he had any good friends. Just the Jims as they came and went.
And now he got to watch me fail to launch.
“Do you mean, to see if I got a record deal?” I asked. “Got married? Popped out a few kids?”
“I don’t like to guess,” he said. “It’s your future. You would do whatever you did. Then I would know what it was.”
But he had made some choices for me. Joey had shown up, just as Ned had predicted, but he hadn’t been allowed near me. “What if I had wanted to marry Joey?” I asked cautiously.
He thought it over. “Did you want to marry Joey?”
“He had a ring,” I blurted out.
Alex’s eyes roved all around me without landing. “He was going to ask you?”
“At some point,” I said. “Apparently. Not necessarily … soon.”
“If he had the ring in his pocket…” Alex said.
I recognized processing silence this time and turned for the big booth, crawling onto the cushions on my knees to reach the curtain and be near the cool of the window.
Through the glass, Milwaukee Avenue was waking up, proper morning at last. What this neighborhood needed was a pancake place.
But I realized, with a lump in my throat, that I could stop wishing for the place next door to be something useful to me.
I reached for the curtain and unknotted it.
“Or the ring could be at your apartment,” Alex said.
I still had the curtain fabric in my hand when the deepest déjà vu feeling washed over me. I was side by side with another time and place, twinned, like the apartments upstairs.
Something I was supposed to remember?
Whatever it was, it wouldn’t fall away. I was caught there, the edge of the stained curtain in my hand. How many years had this thing bothered the customers and we’d never had it hemmed—
I suddenly knew where I was, and when.
“I need to go to my old apartment,” I said.
“Okay,” Alex said.
I didn’t have a key. “I need to break into my old apartment.”