ROSA IS HEADED north on the L to see an old friend from college. The wheels squeal on the track. The snow makes things seem quieter when they’re not, she thinks. The train crosses the bridge at the river, curves between buildings where you can see people from time to time in their kitchens, making dinner, or drinking alone, or kissing in a stairwell, lit from behind like in a movie. She loved this about Chicago. That it went on with its business, no matter. She remembered once, years ago, riding the L with her dad and the train stopping for twenty minutes on the tracks for a man who was threatening to kill himself. People eventually got out and walked and made a point of telling the man what they thought as they passed on the platform catwalk above. “Lesson number one,” a man yelled down to him. “You gonna do something, do it right. Don’t *foot around.”
Her dad was going to need someone here to help out over the next few months. Surgery and recovery and radiation. And then what? She’d be flying back and forth, she expected. She couldn’t be sure he was even being straight with her. There would need to be more consultations. It was hard to see very far ahead.
The old friend she was meeting lived off Montrose Avenue, near a park. They’d gone to Loyola together. The friend, Jess, now had two girls, eight and ten. She still did some reporting here and there. Human interest stuff in the ’burbs for the Tribune supplements. Keeping a foot in the door, she said. Rosa had almost forgotten that her ex-boyfriend David had been the one who’d introduced them their sophomore year.
David, who, a year after she broke things off and four months after she’d gotten a restraining order after all the calls and threats, had gotten into her Austin apartment building on false pretenses, made his way upstairs, broken into the apartment he assumed was hers, and lay down in the bed. Then he’d poured camping lantern fuel over himself and set himself on fire.
Somehow he’d gotten her apartment number wrong. No one was home. Rosa had heard the banging and smelled the smoke, and they’d evacuated the building. Water from the fire hoses rolled down the stairs and pooled in the lobby. A fatality, the police said later. A man had set fire to himself. The next morning the building super, who knew about the restraining order, told her it had been David and she remembered the acrid smell.
She’d been lucky, was all. A transposed number in his head, like so many other chance events in her life and in the lives of those she wrote about and cared for. Eventually these events—the good and the bad—would seem inevitable. Would be claimed, finally, as their own by those who lived them, like lost children.
As the L slowed at a curve, she could see people moving inside the building next to them, dancing in gym clothes and leotards, and for a moment their figures were joined with the reflected figures and faces on the train.
Twenty minutes later, as she stepped off the train and onto the platform, she saw flashing lights below, a knot of cops and EMTs at the corner in front of a bakery. A half dozen police cruisers parked along the snowy street. Police tape. She was thankful she didn’t have to report what it was or who was hurt or what it might mean for those who would try to get beyond it.
She thought vaguely of the blue crate at home in Austin, its photos, interview tapes, transcripts, and false leads. The person of interest who’d apparently fled the state. Hollis Finger, the young man in the coat, the anonymous caller. All separate but somehow tied to one another. Like elements from a collective dream.
She saw the girls’ faces from the billboard. Her throat tightened.
It was colder out now, and she was glad it was only a short walk to the restaurant where her friend waited.
52
MICHAEL HAD FALLEN asleep on his mother’s bed and then woken to men’s voices downstairs. It took him a few seconds to get his bearings. On the bedside table, old photos of him and Andrew. Alice’s school photo from last year. Several others of Elise, he supposed. She looked nothing like the woman he’d met at the pizzeria. Dark eyes. A slight gap between her front teeth. He thought of Lucinda’s threats. Had she hired the other woman to take Alice?
The image of Alice in the wood-paneled room came back to him.
Blue and white lights tumbled on the ceiling.
He rose off the bed, thought about the bathroom, then decided on the closet, slid open the louvered doors and crouched in the back among his mother’s hanging dresses and luggage. Against his face, a gauzy dress fabric, a mask, a shroud. He could hear the heat kick on.