Hardball

27

LOTTY SAILED INTO MY ROOM JUST THEN, FOLLOWED BY two of the residents and a medical student. Lotty sent Murray out of the room with a comment that stung like the snap of a whip.

I fumbled for tissues on the cart next to me. Lotty found the box but warned me not to rub my eyes.

“How did Ryerson get in here at all?” she demanded. “What is going on in this hospital, that I give a specific order only to have it overridden? I have expressly forbidden any visitors in your room to make sure neither reporters nor police harass you. You didn’t invite Murray in, did you?”

She had two fingers on the pulse in my neck. “This is why you can’t have visitors. You’re vulnerable. You shouldn’t be crying like this. And they tell me you disappeared this afternoon while I was in surgery. Was that to organize this rendezvous?”

“I went down to the coffee shop for an espresso, and the trip did me in. I fell asleep in a chair and didn’t know people were paging me.”

I didn’t like lying to Lotty, but it was sort of the truth. I wondered if she was right, though. I wondered if I’d wanted to see Murray. I could have reported him to hospital security when I spotted him in the lobby, but I didn’t. Maybe my unconscious brain was hoping he’d track me down.

Lotty grunted, and asked the residents to update her on my progress. While the medical student stood respectfully to one side, the two residents reviewed the damage to my corneas and optic nerves. I felt a stab of frustration, followed by a bigger stab of guilt. I was alive, I would recover. Maybe while I was on the DL, I could train myself to sleep days and work nights.

“I’m thinking of bringing you home with me when they discharge you tomorrow.” Lotty sounded like she was adopting a dog that had been returned to the pound too many times by people it bit. “I’m worried about your health. And I’m worried about your safety.”

“My safety? Murray was saying that some sources think the bombers were after me, not Sister Frances. Have you heard the same thing?”

Lotty dismissed the residents and the student, and sat on the edge of the bed, frowning. “I was thinking more about your recklessness. Does he have any proof?”

“I don’t know. You booted him out before I could get him to come clean. I wouldn’t even be worrying about it if the woman from Homeland Security hadn’t pressed me on what Sister Frances told me about the Newsome inquiry.” I looked at Lotty’s dim outline. “Lotty, I can’t go home with you if I’m a target of fire bombers. I can’t risk you being hurt.”

“You’d be safer at my place than in your own home. We have a doorman, we have security. You’re completely exposed in your building. And if someone threw another fire bomb, those children on the second floor would be hurt.”

“I’m so helpless!” I burst out. “To save my eyes and skin I have to sit in the dark. I need to be out talking to people, I need to be at my computer looking up data. What am I going to do?”

Lotty put an arm around me. “Does everything have to happen today? In a few days, you’ll be able to get around, as long as you’re careful about the sun. You know how it is when you’re in the hospital: you feel more helpless there than after you get out.”

She stayed until a supper tray arrived at six and insisted on my eating something that might once have been a chicken. When she left, I tried to sleep, since I couldn’t read or watch TV. Instead, I kept thrashing around in the narrow bed, worrying about my role in Sister Frankie’s death.

A little before eight, a volunteer came in with a shopping bag that had been left at the front desk for me. Murray’s gofer had come through with my clothes. The bra was a plain white that I wouldn’t have chosen for myself, but it didn’t matter. With my bandaged hands, I couldn’t fasten it, anyway. I managed the buttons on the shirt and pulled on the jeans. The gofer had dutifully brought me a size 31. After two days of living on IVs, I could have gotten away with a 30.

Just being dressed made me feel better. I pulled on my soft brown boots again and looked in the bathroom mirror. Something would have to be done about that hair: I looked like a freak show.

The by-product of hospitalization is plastic. The room was full of bags and trays and specimen cups and banana-shaped things for throwing up in. I filled a bag with cups, made a hump in the bed that might look like a sleeping V.I., turned out the lights, and looked into the hall.

Eight o’clock. Visitors were leaving, nurses were handing out meds. A crowd to mingle with. Auspicious.

You know the old movie where Humphrey Bogart has been sandbagged and pumped full of drugs and, even though his head is spinning, he gets up and goes after serious bad guys? I’ve always thought it was really stupid and unrealistic.

I was right. I tried to stride confidently, despite my freaky hair and the big plastic glasses, but, like Bogie in The Long Goodbye, I saw the hall spin around me. I had to clutch the wall to keep from falling over. Not so auspicious.

When I reached the front lobby, I was sweating and light-headed. The hospital was a bit over two miles from the building where Sister Frankie had lived. Normally, I could have walked it, but I was nowhere near normal. I still had eight dollars. Not enough for a taxi, but it would get me there and back on the bus.

I wobbled my way two blocks north to a Lawrence Avenue bus stop. Murray had unsettled me. I kept stopping, not just because I was unsteady but to see if I had company, whether cops or robbers. If I really had been the fire bombers’ target, I was hoping they were monitoring me so closely that they knew I was still in the hospital. Tonight might be my one chance to go back to the Freedom Center apartments without anyone knowing.

One thing about the Uptown neighborhood: women with weird hair who have trouble staying upright are a dime a dozen. Two women just like me, stooping to scoop up cigarette butts in the midst of a ferocious shouting match, passed while I waited for the bus. No one gave any of us a second glance.

A bus lumbered up to the stop. I fed two of my crumpled bills into the money maw, awkwardly because of my gauzy mitts, and slumped back onto one of the seats set aside for the disabled and elderly. I felt disconnected from the world around me, and when we got to the Kedzie stop I had to coach myself on how to walk down the steps.

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.

I’d been in a chair near the door when the barrage had started. I’d put my bag on the floor next to me. I squatted on my haunches and shuffled forward. My fingers pressed against a damp, matted mess. It felt like a clump of rotting lettuce, but when I forced myself to delve more deeply I realized it was a book. The floor was thick with dead books, and I shuffled past them on legs that shook with grief as much as fatigue.

I found a damp, revolting mass of Styrofoam that might have been the chair cushions, and bits of the frame of the chair, but I didn’t come across my bag. However, in the middle of the room one of my clumsy hands closed on a piece of glass. It took several tries with the spatula to lift the shard from the floor and into the ladle and then into one of the plastic cups in my bag. Feeling around the area, I found bigger pieces: the neck of a bottle and a chunk that might have been part of the base. I collected these in my makeshift containers as well.

I had no way of photographing the spot where I’d found this evidence or labeling the evidence bags, which, anyway, weren’t certifiable as free from contamination. And while this evidence could never be used in court, it might tell me something helpful about the assailants.

I pushed myself to my feet. I was spasming up and down my body with fatigue. I longed to lie down where I was, on the pile of soggy books, and give way to exhaustion. I groped for a wall to steady myself. My mother’s face came to me, the day she came home from the doctor to tell me there was no hope, no treatment, no help, her dark eyes large against skin turned transparent and luminous with mortality.

“Victoria, my darling one. Grief and loss and death, they’re part of life on this planet. We all mourn, but it is selfish to turn mourning into a religion. You must promise me that you will embrace life, never turn your back on the world because of your private sorrow.”

My grief had come in the loud sobs of adolescence, and then in shouting matches with my dazed, helpless father.

“Your papà is not as strong as you and me, carissima. He needs your help, not your anger. Don’t turn against him now.”

The words had brought no comfort then and brought no comfort now. They were a burden, a load I had to carry, that of needing to be stronger than the strongest person near me. Sister Frances had died. I had to be strong enough to look after her in death since I’d been unable to look after her in life.

I picked my way backward, slogging through books and boards and cushions like an Arctic explorer who’d never reach the Pole. I was nearly at the door when I saw a light dance underneath it and dance away. I held my breath. A phantasm of fatigue? It came again, a flashlight poking along the jamb. OEM? FBI? Punks? I had nothing to defend myself with except a kitchen spatula and no strength to use it.

The door opened. A tall figure stood there hesitantly, playing the flashlight around the room, and then turned to look over the shoulder. The movement swept the light upward so that it played on the figure, revealing spiky hair.

“Petra Warshawski!” I said. “What are you doing here?”