I say that my mom got my clothes from resale shops, that we’d drive around town on garbage day loading Ma’s station wagon with whatever we could find. We got evicted more than once. We’d sleep in the car. We used to run to the gas station before school so I could sneak into the bathroom and brush my teeth. Eventually the attendants got the idea. They said they’d call the cops.
I tell her about all the times, in the grocery store. Mom would have twenty bucks and we’d fill a basket with stuff we needed: milk and bananas, a box of cereal. At the register, it always totaled more than twenty bucks, though we tried to do the math in our head. And there, we’d have to pick—the cereal or bananas—while some prick in line sighed and told us to hurry up. I remember one time, some asshole from school was in line behind us. I heard about it for the next two weeks. About how Thatcher’s mom didn’t have enough money for fucking bananas.
I’m quiet and she doesn’t say a thing. Any other girl would offer sympathy. She’d say she was so sorry. She’d say how it must have been so hard. But this girl doesn’t. Not because she isn’t empathetic, but because she knows it’s not compassion that I want or need.
I never told anyone else about my father.
I never told anyone about my mother. But I do. Maybe it’s the boredom, I don’t know. We’ve run out of things to say. But somehow I think it’s more than that, something about this girl that makes it easy to talk, makes me want to tell her, makes me want to get it off my chest. Because then maybe I’ll be able to sleep.
“When I was five or six, she started to shake,” I say. Her hands first. She started having trouble at work. She kept dropping things, spilling shit. Within a year she was shuffling around. She couldn’t walk right. She’d barely move her feet, didn’t move her arms. People would fucking stare, tell her to hurry up. She stopped smiling, stopped blinking. She became depressed. She couldn’t hold a job. She was too slow, too clumsy.
“Parkinson’s disease,” the girl says, and I nod, though of course she can’t see. Her voice is close enough to touch, but I can’t see the expression on her face. I can’t make out the sensitivity in her blue eyes.
“That’s what the doctors said.” By the time I was in junior high I had to help my mom get her clothes on, always sweats because she couldn’t handle a zipper. By high school I had to help her pee. She couldn’t cut her own food. She couldn’t write her name.
She took drugs to help with the symptoms but they all had side effects. Nausea. Insomnia. Nightmares. So she stopped. I started working when I was fourteen. I made as much money as I could. It was never enough. My dad was gone by then. As soon as she got sick he took off. I turned eighteen, dropped out of high school and left home. I thought I could make more money in the city. I sent her everything I made to pay the medical bills and have food to eat. So she wouldn’t wind up on the street. But there was never enough money.
And then one day, I was washing dishes in a restaurant. I asked if I could get some extra hours, 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.
And the rest is history.
Gabe
Before
I track down a next of kin in Gary: Kathryn Thatcher, Colin Thatcher’s mother. We had found a cell phone stashed in a drawer in Thatcher’s kitchen—registered to a Steve Moss, a.k.a. Colin Thatcher—and pulled the records. There were many calls, almost every day, to the middle-aged woman in Gary, Indiana. The other thing that caught my attention were three calls made to a prepaid cell phone on the evening that Mia disappeared as well as about ten missed calls from the same number in the early hours of the following morning. I have the techies dump the voice mail and when they do, we all hover around and listen to the messages. Some guy wanting to know where the hell the girl is, the judge’s daughter, and why Thatcher missed the drop-off. He doesn’t sound happy. In fact he sounds really, really unhappy. He’s pissed.
It’s then that I realize Colin Thatcher is working for someone else.
But who?
I try and track down the owner of this prepaid cell phone. I know it was purchased at a convenient store in Hyde Park. But the owner of the store, an Indian man who barely speaks three words of English, doesn’t have a clue who bought it. Apparently it was paid for with cash. Just my luck.
I decide to question the mother myself. The sergeant wants to use his clout to have a guy in Gary do it; I say no way. I’ll do it myself.
In Chicago, Gary, Indiana, isn’t spoken of highly. We like to think of it as a hellhole. Much of the population is poor. There is a large African-American population, and it’s home to massive steel mills that sit along Lake Michigan and puff obnoxious smoke into the air.