My car was parked on Kedzie, but my keys had been in the handbag I’d dropped in Sister Frankie’s apartment. I walked up Kedzie to see if I could get into my Mustang—I have picklocks in the glove compartment—but of course I’d locked all the doors. However, the city hadn’t forgotten me: three tickets for meter violations were stuffed under the wipers. I ground my teeth but left the tickets. I couldn’t do anything about them tonight.
It was easy to spot Sister Frankie’s apartment from the street: the windows were boarded over and the brick and concrete around the frames were charred black. Lights showed through open windows on some of the upper floors, though, meaning the fire had been contained quickly enough for the building’s wiring and plumbing to be usable. That was one mercy, that others hadn’t been injured in or made homeless by the blast. It also meant the federal morons watching the building hadn’t stopped the fire department from doing their job.
The street was full, as it had been three nights ago, with kids and shoppers and lovers and drunks. People stared at me: the building was a stage and I was a new actor on it, but I couldn’t help that.
I took off my plastic dark glasses. The sun had set, the streetlamps were on, and the city was bathed in the haze of midsummer twilight. Surely that wouldn’t hurt my eyes. I pushed the gauze back on my right hand, exposing my thumb and my forefinger, and used the edge of the glasses to push in the tongue on the front door. As I’d thought the other night, it was a simple lock to undo. I hoped if OEM was watching, they wouldn’t come after me.
The stairwell smelled like a lab sink, a musty, sour chemical stench mingled with charred wood and damp. I wished for a flashlight, the only light coming from a single bulb two stories up. I worried about missing steps or tripping on debris, but my flashlight was also in my glove compartment. The things you can do so easily with money: walk to the nearest drugstore, buy a flashlight. Hop a cab, buy a new outfit. No wonder women who look like me walk down the street shouting their heads off.
I stopped at the landing in front of the Virgin of Guadalupe. She was barely visible in the dim light. I stroked her rough-carved wooden cheeks. It would be so wonderful to think she could protect me, to believe Sister Frances was even now clasped to her bosom. I crept on up to the second floor and turned right toward Sister Frances’s apartment.
The hall was even darker here because the windows facing the street were boarded over. Each step was a gamble, like walking on a rocky beach in the dark. I couldn’t tell what I was stumbling across: wallboard, wires, parts of light fixtures. I ran my fingertips along the wall to steady myself but lost my footing when the wall disappeared. I grabbed at open air and found myself on my knees in the rubble.
Even to my damaged eyes, the yellow crime scene tape across Sister Frances’s door gleamed dully in the dark. I found the knob and turned it. Unlocked. The door was sealed, but it gave way to a firm shoulder push.
Inside the apartment, the air was so acrid that my eyes started to tear. I put my plastic glasses on to protect my eyes, then took them off. The thick lenses meant I couldn’t see anything at all.
I stepped backward, catlike, from the heart of the damage. Sister Frances had brought tea in from the kitchen, and I was hoping I might find a flashlight in there. In the dark, there is no sense of distance or space. I kept banging into furniture until I found a wall that I could follow step by cautious step.
I finally found the swinging door that opened into the kitchen. It seemed like the gate between normalcy and hell. On one side were the charred, sodden remains of Sister Frankie’s life, on the other was an Ozzie and Harriet set, everything clean and tidy. The windows weren’t boarded over, and, in the lights from the back stairs and the alley streetlamps, I could make out the shapes of stove, refrigerator, cabinets. The nun’s breakfast cup and bowl were on the counter with a box of cornflakes, set out for the morning meal she wouldn’t be eating. I tried the lights, but the power had been turned off to this part of the building.
I couldn’t find a flashlight, but I took a spatula and a ladle from a jar by the stove. I saw matches and a candle, but as my hand hovered over them my whole body shuddered at the idea of more fire.
Moving cautiously back to the front room, I could see enough in the ghostly light sifting in from the kitchen doorway to start picking through the debris. I wanted to find my handbag. But what I really wanted was glass from the Molotov cocktail bottles.