“Where’d you learn to do that?” I ask. I look at the exterior doors and windows, searching for leaks.
“Do what?” she asks. She sets her hands on top of the picture, so I can’t see.
I stop what I’m doing. “Ice-skate,” I snap sarcastically. “What the hell do you think?”
“I taught myself,” she says.
“Just for the hell of it?”
“I guess.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
But she tells me anyway how she has two people to thank for her artistic talent: some junior high teacher and Bob Ross. I don’t know who Bob Ross is so she tells me. She says that she used to set up her paints and easel before the TV and paint with him. Her sister would tell her to get a life. She’d call her a loser. Her mom would pretend not to hear. She says that she started drawing early on, when she could hide in her bedroom with a coloring book and crayons.
“It’s not bad,” I say. But I’m not looking at her. Or the picture. I’m scraping old caulk from the window. It falls to the deck beside my feet, scraps of the white caulk that build up on the ground.
“How do you know?” she asks. “You didn’t look.”
“I looked.”
“You didn’t,” she says. “I know indifference when I see it. I’ve been staring at it my whole life.”
I sigh and mutter some curse under my breath. Her hands are still covering the picture. “What is it, then?” she asks.
“What the hell do you mean?”
“What’s it a picture of?”
I stop what I’m doing and stare out toward the geese. One by one, they leave. “That,” I say and she gives it a rest. I move onto another window.
“What did you do this for?” she asks, holding up the notebook.
I stop what I’m doing long enough to look. I’m going after that caulk with some brutality and I know what she thinks: Better the caulk than me.
“Why do you ask so many fucking questions?” I snarl and she goes silent. She begins to sketch the sky, low stratus clouds that wander just above the ground. At some point I say, “So I didn’t have to babysit you. So you’d shut up and stay out of my hair.”
“Oh,” she says. She stands up and lets herself back inside.
But it isn’t entirely the truth.
If I wanted her out of my hair I would have bought more rope to tie her to the bathroom sink. If I wanted her to shut up, I would have used duct tape.
But if I wanted to atone, I would have bought her that sketch pad.
* * *
Growing up, anyone could have guessed that I’d end up this way. I was always getting in trouble. For beating up kids, telling off adults. For failing and skipping classes. In high school the guidance counselor suggested to Ma that she take me to a shrink. She said I had an anger management issue. Ma told her that if she’d been through what I’d been through, she’d be angry, too.
My dad left when I was six. He stayed long enough for me to remember him, but not long enough for him to actually take care of Ma and me. I remember the fights, not just yelling. Hitting each other and throwing things. The sound of breaking glass when I pretended to sleep at night. Doors slamming and four-letter words screamed at the top of their lungs. I remember empty beer bottles and the caps that showed up in his pant pockets long after he claimed he was dry.
I got in fights at school. I told my math teacher to go to hell because he said I’d never amount to anything. I told my high school biology teacher to screw herself because she thought she could help me pass her class.
I didn’t want anyone to give a shit about me.
I found this life by accident. I was washing dishes at some pretentious restaurant in the city. There was the filth of other people’s leftovers on my hands, the scalding hot water as I stacked the clean plates from the conveyor dishwasher. My fingers would burn, my head drip with sweat. All for minimum wage and a share of the waitresses’ tips. I asked if I could get some extra hours. I said I was tight on cash. My boss said to me, “Aren’t we all.” Business was slow, but he knew somewhere I could get a loan. It wasn’t a bank. I thought I could handle it. I’d borrow a little, pay it back the next time I got paid but it didn’t work out that way. I couldn’t even cover the interest. We worked out a deal. Some bigwig owed about ten times as much as me. If I could get him to pay up, we’d be even. So I showed up at his Streeterville home, tied his wife and daughter to their antique dining room chairs and, with a borrowed gun to the wife’s head, watched him withdraw the crisp dollar bills from a family safe hidden behind a reproduction of Monet’s Water Lilies.
I was in.
A few weeks later Dalmar tracked me down. I’d never met Dalmar. I was in a bar minding my own business when he wandered in. I was the new kid on the block, their plaything. Everyone seemed to have something to hold over my head. And so it was out of necessity that when Dalmar claimed some dude had stolen his stuff, I went in to get it. I was paid generously. I could cover the rent. Take care of Ma. Eat.
But with every dollar I earned was also the knowledge that I belonged to someone other than me.
* * *
Every day she moves a little farther from the cabin. One day she goes to the bottom of the stairs. Another day her feet touch grass. Today she moves onto the dirt, knowing all the while that I sit at the window and watch her. She sits on the cold, hard earth, becoming numb as she draws. I imagine the air closing in on her, her fingers stiff. I can’t see what she’s drawing, but I imagine: bark and branches, what’s left of the trees now that the leaves are completely gone. She draws tree after tree. She doesn’t waste an inch of the precious paper.
She closes the notebook and starts to walk down to the lake, where she sits on the banks alone. I watch as she finds rocks and attempts to skip them across the surface of the lake. They all sink. She lets her feet take her along the lake’s shore. Not too far. A dozen or so feet to a spot that she’s never been before.
It isn’t that I think she’s gonna go. It’s that suddenly I don’t want to be in the cabin alone. She turns at the sound of crunching leaves behind her. I’m tromping out toward the lake, my hands stuffed into the pockets of my jeans, my neck buried into the scruff of the coat.
“Checking on me?” she asks impassively before I arrive.
I stop beside her. “Do I need to?”
We stand side by side without saying a thing. My coat brushes her arm and she steps away. I wonder if she could ever get this right. This scene. In her sketch pad. The shape of the blue lake and the leaves spilled across the ground. The forest-green pine and evergreen trees. The enormous sky. Could she ever get the wind whipping through the remains of trees? Could she draw the cold air that eats at our hands and ears until they burn?
I start to walk away. “You want to walk, don’t you?” I ask when she doesn’t follow. She does. “Then let’s go,” I say, though all the time I stay two steps ahead. Between us, there’s nothing but dead air.
I don’t know how big this lake is. It’s big. I don’t know how deep it gets at its deepest point. I don’t know what its name is. The shoreline is rugged, with rocky overlooks that peek down on the water. The evergreen trees come right up to the shores. There’s no beach. They circle the entire periphery of the lake, huddled close together, fighting each other for a view.
The leaves crunch beneath our feet like foam chips. She fights to keep her balance on the jagged ground. I don’t wait for her. We continue for a long time, until we can no longer see the cabin through the trees. I’m sure her feet are killing her in those stupid shoes, the ones she had on when we left. Fancy work shoes. But the cold air and the exercise feel good. A change from sitting around in the cabin feeling sorry for ourselves.
She asks something but I don’t hear. I wait for her to catch up. “What?” I ask sharply.
I’m not one for small talk.
“You have any brothers?”
“No.”
“Sisters?”
“You always have to talk?” I ask.
She passes ahead and takes the lead. “You always have to be so rude?” she asks. I don’t say a thing. This is the gist of our conversations.
The next day she’s outside again, moving aimlessly around the lot. She isn’t stupid enough to go where I can’t see her. Not yet, because she knows she’ll lose this privilege.
She’s afraid of the unknown. Of Dalmar, maybe, of what I’d do if she tried to run. It’s fear that keeps her within my line of sight. She could make a run for it, but there’s nowhere to go.
She has the gun. She could shoot me. But of course she hasn’t figured out how to shoot the damn thing. As far as she’s concerned, I’m worth keeping around just for that.
But with the gun in her possession, I don’t have to listen to the bitching anymore. For the time being she’s content. She can go outside and freeze her ass off. She can draw God-knows-what all day long.
She comes back in sooner than I expect. In her arms there’s a filthy cat. It isn’t that I hate cats. It’s just that food is scarce. Heat is scarce. There isn’t enough room for the two of us in here, much less three. And I’m not sharing.
Her eyes beg please.
“If I see that cat in here again,” I say, “I’ll shoot it.”
I’m not in the mood to be a Good Samaritan.
Gabe
Before
After waiting for what seemed an eternity—in reality it’s about three weeks—we finally get a good tip: an Indian woman living in a high-rise on Kenmore is certain our John Doe is her neighbor. Apparently she had been out of town for a while and this is the first time she’s seen his face on TV.
So I bring backup and make my way downtown—again. The high-rise is located in Uptown, certainly not the best neighborhood in the city; not the worst, either. Far from it. It’s a mix of people who can’t quite afford the classier areas like Lakeview or Lincoln Park, and an eclectic mix of men and women who just stepped off the boat. It’s very diverse. Ethnic restaurants line the streets, and not just Chinese and Mexican; there’s Moroccan and Vietnamese and Ethiopian joints. Regardless of its diversity, nearly half the population of Uptown is still white. It’s relatively safe to walk around at night. Uptown is known for its nightlife of historic theaters and bars. Many well-known names have made the trip to Uptown to perform for nobodies like me.
I find the apartment building and double-park; last thing I’m going to do is donate another penny to the city of Chicago to park my car. The butch cop and I head inside and take the elevator to the unit. There’s no answer and the door is locked. Of course. So we beg the landlord to let us in. She’s an old lady who hobbles along beside us and refuses to let us borrow the key. “You can’t trust anyone these days,” she says. She tells us that the unit is rented by a woman named Celeste Monfredo. She had to look it up in her files. She knows nothing about the woman other than she pays her rent on time.
“But of course the unit could be a sublet.”
“How would we know?” I ask.
The old lady shrugs. “We wouldn’t. Tenants are required to sublet their own units or pay to break the lease.”
“There’s no paperwork?” I can’t pick up Sudafed at the pharmacy without having to sign away my life.
“None that I keep. The tenants are still required to pay rent. Anything happens, it’s their problem. Not mine.”
I take the key from her hands and let myself in. The landlord pushes her way into the apartment beside Butch and me. I have to ask her more than once not to touch anything.
I’m not sure what strikes me first: an overturned lamp, lights on in the middle of the day, or the contents of a woman’s purse scattered across the floor. I reach into my pocket for a pair of latex gloves and roam the apartment. There’s a stack of mail on the kitchen counter, hidden beneath an overdue library book. I check out the address label; every single one of them has been sent to a Michael Collins at a P.O. box in the city. Butch slips her hands in latex and heads for the purse. She delves in and finds a wallet, and inside, a driver’s license. “Mia Dennett,” she says aloud, though of course we both knew exactly what it would say.
“I want phone records,” I say. “And fingerprints. And we need to canvass the building. Every unit. Is there a security camera?” I ask the landlord. She says that there is. “I need everything you have from October 1.”
I examine the wall: concrete. No one would have heard a thing that happened inside this room.
Colin
Before
She wants to know how much I got paid for this. She asks too many questions.
“I didn’t get paid a damn thing,” I remind her. “I get paid for finishing a job.”
“How much were you offered?”
“None of your business,” I say.
We’re in the bathroom, of all places. She’s on her way in. I’m on my way out. I don’t bother to tell her the water is ice-cold.
“Does my father know about this?”
“I told you already. I don’t know.”
The ransom was to be collected from her father. That I know. But I don’t have a damn clue what Dalmar did when I didn’t show up with the girl.
She smells of morning breath, her hair a labyrinth of dirty blond.
She closes the door on me and I hear the water begin to run. I try not to imagine her stripping away her clothes and stepping into the piercing water.
When she comes out she’s drying the ends of her hair with a towel. I’m in the kitchen eating granola and freeze-dried milk. I’ve forgotten what it tastes like to eat real food. I’ve got all the cash spread out on the table, and I’m counting what we’ve got left. She eyes the cash. We’re not broke. Not yet. That’s a good thing.
She tells me how she always thought some disgruntled convict would shoot her father on the courthouse steps. In her voice I hear a different story. She didn’t think it would happen. She hoped.
She’s standing in the hallway. I can see her shiver, but she doesn’t whine about being cold. Not this time.
“He was a litigation lawyer before becoming a judge. He got involved in a number of class-action suits, asbestos cases. He never protected the good guy. People were dying of these horrible things—mesothelioma, asbestosis—and he’s trying to save the big corporations a buck or two. He never talked about his work. Attorney-client privilege, he said, but I know he just didn’t want to talk. Period. But I’d sneak into his office at night when he was asleep. At first I was snooping because I wanted to prove he was having an affair in the hopes my mother might actually leave him. I was a kid—thirteen, fourteen. I didn’t know what mesothelioma was. But I could read well enough. Coughing up blood, heart palpitations, lumps under the skin. Nearly half of those infected died within a year of diagnosis. You didn’t even have to work with asbestos to be exposed—wives and children were dying because their fathers brought it home on their clothes.
“The more successful he was, the more we were threatened. My mother would find letters in the mail. They knew where we lived. There were phone calls. Men hoping Grace, my mother and I would die as painful a death as their wives and children had.
“Then he became a judge. His face was all over the news. All these headlines with his name. He was harassed all the time, but after a while we stopped paying attention to these unsubstantiated threats. He let it go to his head. It made him feel important. The more people he pissed off, the better he was doing his job.”
There’s nothing to say. I’m not good at this kind of crap. I can’t handle small talk and I certainly can’t handle sympathy. The reality is that I know nothing about the scumbag who thought it would be in his best intere
st to threaten some bastard’s kid. That’s the way this business works. Guys like me, we’re kept in the dark. We carry out an assignment without really knowing why. That way we can’t point fingers. Not that I’d try. I know what would happen to me if I did. Dalmar told me to nab the girl. I didn’t ask why. That way, when the cops catch me and I’m in the interrogation room, I can’t answer their underhanded questions. I don’t know who hired Dalmar. I don’t know what they want with the girl. Dalmar told me to get her. I did.
And then I changed my mind.
I stare up from my bowl and look at her. Her eyes beg me to say something, some grand confession that’s going to explain it all to her. That’s going to help her understand why she’s here. Why her instead of the bitchy sister. Why her instead of the insolent judge. She’s desperate for an answer to it all. How is it that in the blink of an eye everything can change? Her family. Her life. Her existence. She searches in vain, thinking I know the answer. Thinking some lowlife like me might be able to help her see the light.
“Five grand,” I say.
“What?” This wasn’t what she expected to hear.
I stand from the chair and it skids across the wooden floors. My footsteps are loud. I rinse the bowl with water from the faucet. I let it drop to the sink and she jumps. I turn to her. “They offered me five grand.”
Eve
Before
I let my days go to waste.
Oftentimes it’s hard to get out of bed and when I do, the very first thought on my mind is Mia. I wake up sobbing in the middle of the night, night after endless night, hurrying downstairs so I don’t wake James. I’m stricken with grief at all waking hours; in the grocery store, I’m certain I see Mia shopping the cereal aisle, stopping myself only moments before throwing my arms around a complete stranger. Later, in the car, I go to pieces, unable to leave the parking lot for over an hour as I watch mothers with their children enter the store: holding hands as they cross the lot, mothers lifting small children into the basket of the shopping cart.