In fact Zee had received her certificate in traumatology, having completed several internships in the prosaic trenches of a social-service agency. The birth of her student Shara Pick’s baby had been the first trauma she had witnessed; Shara had dropped away, had never returned to school, and was apparently raising her child with her grandmother and her sisters. Repeated calls to her had gone unanswered. But the experience of that trauma still lived sharply in Zee, and she was drawn back to find other such experiences and offer help of some kind. Apparently they were everywhere, different kinds of them, all over the South Side and beyond. You did not subspecialize, at least not in the certificate-granting program in which Zee enrolled, and which the Judges Eisenstat had kindly agreed to pay for. You had to be a generalist when it came to terribleness.
The first case Zee was called in for during her training involved a nail bomb that had been sent in the mail to the New Approach Women’s Clinic, and which had detonated in the waiting room, blinding the temp receptionist, Barbara Vang. The late-day crowd had been sitting and waiting for their Pap smears, their very first pelvic exams, their abortions, their pregnancy tests. The package bomb was opened without much interest by the temp, her fingernail slipping under the edge of the Scotch tape that heavily crisscrossed the surface as she set up a phone appointment for a man who had felt a pea-sized lump below his nipple. Would the clinic see him, though he was a guy? Yes, she said, they would. She pulled the tape and her hands opened the paper, and the afternoon waiting-room quiet was shockingly breached. When the crisis response counselors were hauled in, Zee was among them.
Her two leaders were Lourdes and Steve, older but not old, because probably not a lot of people could last into old age in trauma work. Both of them, she noted as they made for themselves and some of the witnesses a little yurt in the alley beside the clinic, possessed a composed and impressive calm.
Lourdes and Steve practiced a kind of listening that involved much more than simply paying attention with tilted head. Over time Zee would learn to do it too, but on that first day, in the ad hoc yurt with the weeping women who had been right there when Barbara Vang opened the package that exploded in her face, Zee just sat shallowly and respectfully listening, watching how her supervisors tried to ease traumatized people into a state in which they could bear to live. “We need to give them the equivalent of swaddling,” Lourdes had said. “We never increase their stress. We let them tell us how to treat them.”
Since then, there had been many improvised yurts, a whole tent city of trauma stations all over various parts of Chicago. By now Zee was a legitimate expert, and she ran her own trauma team and taught workshops for volunteers. She was doing an additional certificate program in a new post-traumatic stress method that involved guided imagery and special breathing. What made it manageable was that the traumas that filled her daily life were not her own, and so they were removed and at least a little distant.
But then Greer called. “I quit my job,” she said in a shaky voice, which was startling in and of itself, because to Greer, Faith Frank could do no wrong. But then, in tears, Greer went on to say, “It ended badly with Faith. A lot of shit went down.”
“Wow. What happened?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you. It’s complicated.” There was a sound of nose-blowing. “For a long time I thought I was doing something real and honest there. And you know it got semi-bullshitty, and that there was less for me to do that I cared about, but still I tried. And she gave me that speech to deliver, and it went so well, Zee, and I was so excited; it was one of those defining moments we’ve talked about. But it turns out it was something else. ShraderCapital did something wrong, and Faith is okay with looking the other way; business as usual. I even ate her meat,” she added. “Repeatedly.”
“What do you mean, you ate her meat?”
“Forget it, nothing.”
“So what will you do now?” Zee asked.
“I have no idea.”
“Come to Chicago.” Zee couldn’t remember offhand what the weekend held; whatever it was, she would try to move things around, to ask one of her colleagues to fill in for her. Her job required so much flexibility, because people’s emergencies did not happen according to any particular schedule.
Over the years at work, Zee had gotten her reorientation time down to practically nothing. These days she could answer a phone in the middle of sleep and sound perky. She could drive a car dripping wet from a shower. Sometimes she was awakened at dawn and had to get on the train while the sky was rosy with optimism, in order to head out to the scene of a homicide or suicide, a fire, a moment of unparalleled bleakness or chaos. Other times she drove to her job in the middle of the night, and was so hungry when she left that she would try to find one of those places where cops gathered on breaks, and there she would sit among men and women in uniform, ordering eggs and home fries and butter-soaked toast—hoping this would somehow shore her up after what she’d just seen.
She and Noelle lived in an apartment off Clark Street in Andersonville, which had a pretty significant lesbian population. Noelle had stayed on at the school in the Learning Octagon? network despite the many problems, and she was now principal, a terrifying figure to some of the students, but still a figure of resplendence to Zee. In Andersonville, a place where she and Noelle could sometimes walk around holding hands, she thought about how furtive she often felt most other places. It was as though she had folded the furtiveness into her entire self.
Over time she had begun to describe herself in a matter-of-fact way as queer instead of gay. Queer felt stronger, queerer, its difference front and center. For Zee, lesbian had gone the way of the cassette tape. She’d always said she was political, but looking back on it, she felt it had been an avocation; now her work life was political in some deep and consistent way, she thought, because she entered the homes of struggling people, and saw what their lives were like. The windows and bulletin boards of cafés and stores in this neighborhood were thick with volunteering signage. Zee gave hours to a group that was involved with homeless youth. And they always needed help at the HIV groups, and also a group that was organizing around racial justice. Someone Zee knew always wanted her to come to meetings in a church basement.
Zee did not want to spend her free time in a church basement. At first she pictured the low ceilings and the long tables with bottles of Apple & Eve apple juice. She saw folding chairs, and even heard the scrape of chair foot on linoleum, and the creak as more chairs were opened, and then someone said, “Make room, make room,” and the circle widened. But she came to like some of the meetings, and she started to run others. Noelle went sometimes too, though often she said no, exhausted at the end of a workday, feet up, more work to do.
Right now, when Zee got off the phone with Greer, Noelle was on the sofa composing her weekly letter to parents and guardians. “So listen,” Zee said. “Greer is coming here tomorrow. She’s going to stay with us. I assume that’s okay, despite not giving you any warning.”
When Greer rang the bell in the early afternoon the next day, having taken an Uber from O’Hare, Zee was ready for her in the way she was always ready at work. She was prepared for the emergency that was happening to her closest friend. She sat Greer down on the couch and put a glass of very cold water in her hand, because hydration was surprisingly helpful, one of her instructors had said, and water was free, and ubiquitous. It couldn’t put out anyone’s fire, but it could make the person remember: I am part of the real world, a person holding a glass. I haven’t lost that ability. Sometimes Zee would watch the person lift the glass and drink, and she was relieved to watch the hand move, the segments of the throat move, to see the way the body participated, even now.
Greer drank gratefully, and when she was done she looked up. “Thanks for pushing me to come here,” she said. “I really didn’t expect to suddenly be unemployed.”
“All right,” said Zee. “Talk to me.”
So Greer told her a long and convoluted story about young women in Ecuador; about a successful rescue, and a botched post-rescue. But when she was done talking she didn’t look any more relieved. She was actually wringing her hands, Zee saw. Always, with clients, Zee looked at the hands; were they in fists, were they in prayer formation, or were they in this kind of desperation?
“And there’s something else,” said Greer.