I surveyed the street behind her. “Were you followed here?”
“I don’t know. I hope not. I went out the back door and crossed the neighbor’s yard to come out on Twenty-second Street. Why are you putting Clara in harm’s way? Why did you get my Nadia killed?”
Mr. Contreras said, “She ain’t the person killing your children. If you’d been a better ma to your girls, not blaming them for the lives they were leading, your oldest kid wouldn’t never have gone off to Iraq in the first place.”
“How dare you!” Cristina said to him. She turned to me, “Is this your husband?”
The question embarrassed me almost as much as it did the old man, but I didn’t bother to answer. We were starting to draw an audience, people wanting to know who was attacking who here—and it was hard to tell, from the way we were standing, who was the assailant, who the victim. Since I was a well-dressed gringa in a poor area, I didn’t want to push my luck.
“We need to get you and Clara and the rest of your family to a safe house,” I said. “I want to take you to Arcadia House. It’s a women’s shelter, and they are expert at keeping their residents free from harm, as long as we can think of a place for your husband to stay.”
“Papi could sleep with his cousin Rafi,” Clara offered. “He does, sometimes, if the weather is too bad for him to make it home. Rafi lives in Bensenville, up by the airport.”
“We can look after Clara,” Cristina Guaman said fiercely. “I will not have her stay with strangers, especially strangers who will judge us. I know the kind of shelter you mean, where they look down their noses at us for being Latinas.”
“I don’t think the staff at Arcadia House behaves that way,” I said, “but, even if they do, better to be in such an environment for a week than face those thugs in your house again tonight.”
Cristina Guaman looked at the group on the sidewalk, who continued to interject their own comments and queries—some of them knew her from the hardware store—and told them in Spanish that she was all right, just distracted with worry over Ernest’s health and Nadia’s death.
That marked the turning point in our confrontation, although it took another minute of cajoling before she and Clara got into the backseat of the Mustang. I drove to the house behind the Guamans’, to the neighbor whose yard Cristina had used when she left her own house. She crossed their yard to her boarded-over back door and returned in fairly short order with Ernest, her mother-in-law, and a couple of suitcases.
I drove a circuitous route to Arcadia House’s shelter, an anonymous building that lay just beyond the big medical complexes on the near West Side. It took some time to explain the Guamans’ situation to the staff. Arcadia House was bursting at the seams, and they weren’t happy about offering an adult male shelter, but after a prolonged conversation with him, and among themselves, they finally agreed to let the four Guamans stay for a few nights.
“If it’s any longer than that, Vic,” the executive director said, “you’re going to have to make other arrangements. In this economy, more and more families are breaking down into violence, and we’re overcrowded as it is.”
“If I can’t fix this situation within a week,” I said, “I’ll probably be dead, anyway. I’ll be in touch later today to tell you who will show up in the morning to escort Clara to school.”
49
Darraugh Gets Things Done
I was running out of time to make my meeting with Darraugh. I told Mr. Contreras I’d get out at Darraugh’s building on Wacker Drive.
“Can you take the car home?” I asked. “I’ll be checking into a hotel tonight, but I’ll get you word somehow about where I am and where to meet me. There’s a lot of work to do and not much time to do it in. Will you call Petra, too, and tell her to lie low for now? I don’t want her running around town, exposing herself to danger.”
Mr. Contreras was delighted to be part of the team. When we reached the building on Wacker where Darraugh had his headquarters, my neighbor gave me a rough hug and told me not to worry about Petra, he’d take good care of her.
I jogged inside, trying to comb my hair while I waited for the elevator. As I got off on the seventy-third floor, I thought it was a pity Arcadia House couldn’t lease Darraugh’s lobby. It seemed to be bigger than the entire shelter on Taylor Street.