He’d called his dad and Margo earlier but had gotten Olive, Margo’s mother. She said Margo was resting. “She has conceived,” Olive said. He said, yes, he remembered. “Is Darnell there?” he asked, something hard rising up in his chest. There was a fumbling on the phone. “Do you know what it is to be a woman?” Olive asked him. And then the phone went dead.
His brother whispered something unintelligible in his ear.
He was the do-right man.
When the men came up the stairs, they carried Michael’s mother’s voice up with them. They heaved the weight of it room to room, looking for him, their feet creaking on the wood. And when he rose up from his hiding place and his legs moved with infinite slowness toward the door and into the hall, then down the stairs and across the living room, he felt an odd pulling just below his stomach and imagined, in the seconds before he plunged out the front door into the bitter cold and shifting light, an umbilical cord trailing behind. He ran across yards, jumped over walls and fences. After a few blocks, his legs began to cramp. He came out of an alley, turned up Montrose Avenue toward the brightly lit L.
They found him in front of a small bakery. A police car cut him off at the corner and the officers inside leaped out and chased him. They didn’t even know who he was. It didn’t matter. They caught him by his umbilical, slung him to the snowy ground.
When he tried to tell them that it was all a mistake, what he said made no sense. One of the officers Tasered him as he rose off the ground, and his body ignited and he could see the branching veins at the back of his retina. But to his great surprise he could still move, as if there was a bad connection, as if his body was wired wrong. He flung an arm up to ward off what was coming and struck one of the officers in the face. And then something unbearably hard shattered his ribs on his left side. And he heard one of the officers shout that he’d better get the fuck down, and, as he was retching in the snow from the pain, he thought how strange it was that the officer couldn’t see that he was down. Above him, one of the officers fumbled with the Taser, cursing its unreliability. The second time Michael rose, he thought he saw, at the edge of his vision, his mother’s old Buick station wagon that she’d traded in years ago, pull to the curb. The front passenger door was open and there beside his mother on the seat sat Alice, looking out at him with great curiosity. And in her eyes was the boundless lake.
Beyond them, down the street, the L platform gleamed. He could hear a train approaching.
When one of the officers grabbed his shoulder, Michael clutched at the man’s jacket, his belt, spun himself loose. The officer grimaced and grabbed his own neck. Blood was on the snow. Michael stood in front of the bakery windows, his breath pluming, the officer’s utility knife in his hand. And then Michael knew the man staggering there was his brother and that the blood on the snow was his blood and Michael moved toward him to carry his burden. And the other officer raised his gun and shot Michael in the chest.
53
KATE IS FEELING her way along a rope. Down in all that dark and smoke and water. It’s not a place to be but a place to not be. She knows this. Even so, she’s here. Every so often she feels a knot, a knuckle along a spine. Every so often she feels a small tug at the other end. There’s a tip-of-the-tongue taste of something sweet in the air. Her heart beats faster.
She’s groping along like this for hours, it seems, ankle-deep in water. And then the rope, which she’ll still feel between her hands when she wakes, comes to an end.
54