Derailed

FORTY-SIX

I left that night.

But before I walked out, before I held Deanna for what seemed like twenty minutes with neither of us saying a word, I tiptoed upstairs and looked in on my daughter.

She was fast asleep, with one arm thrown over her face as if she didn’t wish to see something. Bad dream, maybe. I whispered good-bye to her.

I didn’t have a destination.

My destination was anywhere far from there.

I took a Greyhound bus at 6:00 in the morning that was headed to Chicago. It seemed as good a place as any.

I sat next to a thin and restless prelaw student who was on his way back to Northwestern.

“Mike,” he said to me, and put his hand out.

“Lawrence,” I said. “You can call me Larry.” It was the first time I’d really used my new name — that I’d said it out loud. It felt odd, like seeing myself with a beard. I would have to get used to it.

Mike was a sports junkie; he wanted to be a players agent when he graduated, he told me. I was going to tell him that maybe I could help him, that I knew one or two agents, having used athletes in commercials for years, but I stopped myself. From now on, I wasn’t in advertising. From now on, I'd never been in advertising. Which got me thinking about what I did do if someone asked. And what I would do whenever I got to where I was going.

Except for a teaching degree I’d gotten from Queens College — not because I particularly wanted to be a teacher, but because I didn’t know what else I was going to do back then — advertising had been it. How was I going to make a living now?

I fell asleep a few times on the way to Chicago. And dreamed. About Winston. He was sitting with me in my old office, and we were talking about the Yankees’ chances in the coming season. Then Winston heard a dog barking — he got up and left. When I woke, Mike was looking at me oddly, and I wondered if I’d talked in my sleep. But Mike just smiled and offered me half of his tunafish sandwich.

When we got to Chicago, I shook hands with him and wished him luck.

“You too,” he said, and I thought that I would probably need it.

I found an apartment over by the lake.

I’d brought enough money to tide me over for as long as it might take. More than enough, anyway, for one month’s security and one month’s rent.

The neighborhood was largely Ukrainian.

Neighbors sat on brown stoops when the weather was nice. Kids rode bicycles in the street and played stickball. One month after I moved in, they held a block party. A bald, sturdy-looking Ukrainian man knocked on my door and asked me if I wanted to chip in.

I gave him twenty dollars, and he seemed very happy. He made me promise to come down and join them later.

I wasn’t intending to; I was going to stay put up in my apartment and read the Chicago Sun-Times. The torrent of articles about the Fairfax bombing had slowly lessened to one or two a week. But there was an updated death list in today’s issue. Even though I was expecting to see it there, even though I was looking for it, the sight of my own name in stark black and white caused me to turn pale and nearly drop my coffee. My name had migrated from the missing to the dead. It was official now.

And someone else’s name had finally shown up on the list of victims as well. Raul Vasquez — they’d finally ID’ed him.

I got up and walked to the window. I could hear music and laughter drifting in from the street below. I suddenly realized how lonely I was.

I went downstairs.

A local band was playing Ukrainian folk songs — at least I assumed they were, since everyone seemed to know the words and at least twenty people were in the middle of the street dancing to them. Portable grills were set up on the sidewalk. A young woman offered me a kind of sausage wrapped in sourdough, and I thanked her and dug in.

Then a policeman came walking toward me.

“Hey you,” he said.

I froze. Every fiber in my body told me to run, to throw down the sandwich and take off.

“Hey.” The policeman held something out to me.

A beer.

He was off duty and lived in the neighborhood. He was just being friendly.

I let the air go out of my body; for the first time since I’d come to Chicago, I relaxed. I stayed down there till midnight. I drank beer and ate sausages and clapped to the music.

The second hardest part of all this was not seeing them. Deanna and Anna.

The hardest part was knowing what Anna was going through.

Once a week, I called Deanna’s cell. From a public pay phone, just to be on the safe side.

Once a week, I asked Deanna how Anna was dealing with it, and Deanna would sigh and tell me.

“It’s so hard not telling her, Charles. The other day . . .” But she didn’t finish.

She didn’t have to.

I could picture Anna clearly. I spent hours and hours up in that apartment doing nothing else. I tried not to, but it was like trying to keep those pictures of Winston out of my head.

“Maybe we can — ” I started to say, but Deanna interrupted me.

“No, Charles, not yet.”

“They want me to hold a memorial service for you,” she told me a few weeks later.

“Aunt Rose and Joe and Linda. . . . I told them you were missing. That until they officially declared you dead, I was going to hold on to the hope that you were still alive. Joe thinks I’m delusional, of course. He thinks it’s been long enough and I have to face reality. I told him to mind his own business. He didn’t take it very well. I think the family’s starting to choose sides, Charles. All of them against the lunatic.”

“Good,” I said.

That, more or less, was our plan.

In five months, six months, seven months, Deanna and Anna would be coming to join me. And leaving all family behind. They belonged to our other life. They couldn’t be part of this one. It would help, we thought, if they were all estranged from each other. Deanna’s refusal to face facts and her family’s insistence she do just that gave us an unexpected way to accomplish that. The flood of sympathetic phone calls from close and distant relations had already thinned to a trickle. Walls were being erected, barriers put in place. The one exception was Deanna’s mom. We’d agreed that at some point we’d have to cross our fingers and tell her.

It was becoming more and more apparent that disappearing off the face of the earth wasn’t easy — ties had to be cut, loose ends knotted up. It was like planning a long and complex vacation, only a vacation you weren’t intending to come back from.

“Oh, your company called about your insurance, Charles,” Deanna said. “I was all ready to tell them that I wasn’t ready to admit you were dead yet. That they could keep their insurance, but she said she was calling to say they were fighting it. Because of your suspension — they’d stopped payments. She wanted me to know.”

Life was nothing if not ironic, I thought.

There were other ways I passed the time up in my apartment.

I set about creating more ID.

I had a driver’s license. I wanted more.

Winston had said getting a false ID was the easiest thing in the world, and he wasn’t far wrong. These days you just needed the Internet.

When I logged on at an Internet café and typed in “False ID,” I found at least four sites all too willing to help.

The secret was simply getting that first piece of ID. That one enabled you to get more. And thanks to Winston, I already had the first piece. A driver’s license, which, according to a Web site called Who Are You, is considered primary ID. That is, it enables you to get everything else. A Social Security card, for example, obtained through a simple application in the mail.

Slowly, I built up an identity.

A credit card. A voter’s registration card. A bank card. Discount cards for Barnes & Noble and Costco. A library card. All the things you would be expected to carry in your wallet.

But now that I had an identity, I needed a job.

One day the Chicago Tribune ran an article about the education crisis in the state. Apparently there was a dearth of teachers in Illinois. Qualified people were going into other, more lucrative fields and leaving schools terribly short-handed. Classes were being piggybacked with other classes. Programs were being cut. The state was considering running a TV recruitment campaign. And something else. They were down to letting even unlicensed people teach — anyone who’d taken some teaching courses in college and promised to complete the necessary credits concurrent with their teaching job.

It seemed like an opportunity for me.

The hardest-hit area, according to the article, was called Oakdale — about forty miles outside of Chicago. Once a mill town, it was now largely destitute. Mostly blue-collar and minority, and struggling along with sometimes seventy kids to a class. They were virtually begging for teachers.

I went there one day to look around.

I got off the bus and wandered down its main street. There were a lot of shuttered stores and broken windows. Parking meters had no heads on them. Only the bars seemed to be doing a decent business. It was just early afternoon, but they seemed filled with out-of-work men. I heard someone shouting from inside a bar called Banyon’s.

“Motherfucker!” Then the sound of breaking glass.

I hurriedly walked on.

I went into a luncheonette and sat at the counter.

“Yeah?” the luncheonette owner asked me. He was fat and tired looking; his apron looked as if it hadn’t been washed in years.

“A hamburger,” I ordered.

“How you want it?”

“Medium.”

“Okay.” But he didn’t get up from his seat.

After a few minutes, I said: “Are you going to make the hamburger?”

“Waiting for the cook,” he said.

“Where is he?”

But just then a woman came out through the doorway behind the counter. His wife, I guessed. She was smoking a cigarette.

“Burger,” the luncheonette owner said to her. “Medium.”

She took a frozen pattie from under the counter and placed it on the grill.

“Want fries with that?” she asked me.

“Sure.”

“Just move in?” the owner asked me.

“No. Maybe. Thinking about it.”

“Uh-huh. Why?”

“Excuse me?”

“Why are you thinking about it?”

“There might be a teaching job for me here.”

“Teaching, huh? You’re a teacher?”

“Yes.”

“I was never good at school,” he said. “Didn’t have the head.”

“Well, it looks like you’re doing all right.”

“Oh sure. It’s okay.”

His wife placed the burger in front of me. It looked pink and greasy.

“What happened to the parking meters?” I asked them.

“Oh those,” the man said. “Someone stole them.”

“They never replaced them?”

The man shrugged. “Nope. Wouldn’t matter. We don’t have any meter maids or anything, so no one was using them anyway.”

“No meter maids. Why not?”

“Because we don’t have anything. The city’s broke. We share a police force with Cicero.”

“Oh,” I said. Most citizens would be alarmed at having no police force to themselves, I thought, but not me. I found that piece of information comforting.

Oakdale, Illinois. It was seeming more and more like a place I might like to hang my hat.

I sent out a résumé and letter to the Oakdale School District.

I wrote that I’d taken teaching courses back in college but had gone in a more entrepreneurial direction after graduation. I’d run several successful businesses out of my home. Now I’d gotten the urge to give something back. To mold and shape young minds. Oddly enough, I wasn’t being untruthful here. I’d spent most of my life attempting to sell another credit card or slice of pizza; the thought of doing something that would actually benefit someone other than me was genuinely appealing.

I kept the résumé purposely vague. I wrote down “City University,” not specifying what college in the city university system I’d actually attended. I was banking on the fact that beggars can’t be choosers. That an underfunded and overworked school system in desperate need of teachers is not going to have the time or inclination to check facts.

I sent out the letter and résumé in July.

By August 10 I had my answer.

They requested I come in for an interview.