Playing Dead

CHAPTER 22

I kept the manila envelope sealed until Hudson and I were crammed onto the Chicago El in two plastic blue seats that were sticky with a substance I thought best not to identify. We sat directly across from a public service ad recommending the use of pink condoms for Breast Cancer Awareness. I guess that isn’t much odder than NFL players wearing fuchsia shoes on a field where they are trying to kill each other.

Hudson had chosen our mode of transportation for the morning. He’d been quiet, almost sullen, ever since I ran the slide show for him back at the hotel. He didn’t like being a sitting duck in a cab he wasn’t driving, but a crowded train that allowed us to dodge and duck and leap from car to car was apparently acceptable. Just one of his many control issues.

Then again, I felt lucky that he agreed to this side trip to see Barbara Monroe at all and that at this moment his thigh was pressed against mine like a hot waffle press. It was a bonus that either one of his fists could concuss someone with a glancing blow.

While Hudson casually scoped the occupants of our car, I did the same. In one corner, a man and woman in jeans and matching turquoise Cancer Fun Run T-shirts were quietly arguing. In the other, a businessman in an ugly tie read a weathered John Grisham paperback. Everybody else appeared equally harmless, but then, I’d lost my instinct for this sort of thing.

I turned my attention to the envelope.

Actually ripping it open turned out to be a letdown, not the dramatic eureka moment in the movies. I realized that a tiny part of me wondered whether the face inside would look like Sadie, a sure sign my senses had left me, since I held her the day she was born. Rosalina’s missing daughter would be older anyway. My age.

“Barbara Monroe was ripped off,” Hudson said, leaning over to look. “The nose is crooked. Sort of Michael Jackson-y.”

“She didn’t pay for this,” I said, but Hudson had already started a conversation with the middle-aged Hispanic man nursing a Starbucks next to him. They slipped into a highly animated stream of Spanish about last night’s Cubs game.

I stared at the computer-generated color composite in my hand. An unhappy woman in her late twenties with short black hair and funky red highlights stared back. She had Rosalina’s eyes and a small, pursed mouth that looked like it wanted to spit out, “Who the fuck are you?” The nose tilted up and left, as if the artist couldn’t quite decide what to do with it. There was no resemblance to the gleeful copper angel in Rosalina’s fountain.

The image radiated an unreal quality, like someone improperly embalmed.

Waxy, shiny skin. Parts that didn’t fit together. The hair, stiff, like it had been sprayed to death. How in the hell did the artist commit to red highlights?

I flipped over the picture and found a note that Barbara had scribbled to me, saying that she’d provided the artist with a picture of Rosalina and a blurry police mug shot of the guy she says raped her. What a crapshoot. She signed off with, “Hope this helps!” and a giant B scrawled underneath like two perky cartoon boobs.

Age progression had advanced significantly beyond the scope of the amateurish portrait in my hand. How did Barbara Monroe think this could possibly help me?

The sweaty, extra-large man on my other side stunk like a combination of Old Spice, onions, and garlic. His thigh crept onto my side of the blue plastic seat by about two inches. I smiled politely and pulled out the first of Barbara’s notebooks.

They were a newspaper lawyer’s worst nightmare. Barbara used a bastardized shorthand that was, at best, cryptic: sweeping, curlicued handwriting with bursts of short phrases or words and the occasional full quote, often marked with three or four exclamation points. Like her stories, the notebooks read a little fast and loose, mostly posing questions and notes to herself.

Lttle grl’s white shoe.

Rosalina drunk???

Blck sedan.

I knew psychologists who worked like this-scribbled diligently, using their notebooks more as a prop than anything else. But they also backed themselves up with a tape recorder. Then again, maybe I was being too hard on her. I’d met and envied a few people with photographic memories, including an autistic nine-year-old able to describe the peacock tattoo of the man who mugged his grandmother in such exquisite detail that the jury returned a verdict in ten minutes.

A name stood out amid the rubble of words: Rosalina’s witness.

Not Gabriella, but Gisella. Gisella Russo, which looped at a slant across a whole page, along with the single descriptive phrase pretty fat for a stripper.

And the name of the first cop on the scene-Milt Dobrzeniecky with a large SP? Check it!!! by his name. At least she was careful about some things. I tried to make out the near-illegible phrase beside his name, holding the page up to the window as a row of track houses zipped by, playing havoc with the shadow and light in the train.

I nudged Hudson, now dozing with his head slumped as if he’d had sex all night with me instead of sleeping for nine straight hours.

“What do you think that says?” I demanded, pointing to the words. He picked up the pad and gave it a cursory glance before tossing it back in my lap, confirming what I thought.

“It says ‘nose hairs,’ ” he said. “What’s for lunch?”

I stepped inside my hotel room, suddenly overwhelmed with the certainty that Mama was taking her last breath, right now, a thousand miles away from me. I tapped out the number to the hospital with shaking fingers.

The nurse on duty was calm.

No change. Wade was sitting with her.

No change, I thought bitterly.

I threw the phone with such force that it bounced off the bed and onto the floor. Childish, I knew, but I was consumed with anger. Hot, bitter anger, stoked a little more every day by the knowledge that the woman staring blankly at the cracks in a hospital ceiling had waited too long to ever tell me the truth.

Were there moments when the words hung on her lips? When we swung high in the hammocks staring at the stars or at spectacular cloud shapes? When she helped me with a genealogy tree in sixth grade? When I took off for college? I’d never know.

I heard the faint clicking sound of a keycard in the lock and the door burst open, slamming into the wall. It happened so fast, I only had time to slip halfway behind the heavy curtain at the window.

Hudson.

Back from his trip to the vending machine, Coke in hand. I didn’t remember giving him a key.

“Where the hell is the guard?” he asked angrily.

“Do you ever, ever make a quiet entrance?” I emerged from the curtain, my heart still knocking around. “I have no idea why there isn’t a guard anymore.”

“We’ll see about that.”

He went to work on his phone.

“Agent Waring? Hudson Byrd.”

Even four feet away, I could hear the high chatter of a female voice rolling in an uninterruptible stream.

“Right,” Hudson said finally. “Yes. I do want to be there. About twenty minutes. Where’s the detail on Tommie’s room? Sorry to hear that. Uh-huh. I agree. She can stay in the room while I’m gone.”

This lit a little fuse in me.

“Thanks. Be there soon.” He tucked the phone back in a case hanging off his belt. I caught the glimpse of a gun tucked into the band of his jeans underneath his loose-fitting fishing shirt. A Hawaiian shirt or a fishing shirt on a Texas man was a big clue that he was concealing a piece. Fashion be damned.

“Louie’s lawyer showed up. They’re inviting me to sit in on the second round of questioning. Your guard was called off to a school shooting.” He held up his hand when he saw my expression. “Nobody hurt bad. As for Louie, the safest place for you is right here. He was caught in the act. All they need for now is the statement you gave them. I’ve got the feeling they want to use your kidnapping to get Louie to roll on something bigger. Like his family’s drug op.”

He tugged open the nightstand drawer and pulled out a Gideon Bible, blue with gold lettering. In perfect shape, like it had never been touched. Placed in hotel rooms since 1908. Gideon, I remembered, did whatever God wanted him to do. No matter what.

“Swear you’ll stay in the room. That you’ll throw the deadbolt when I leave.”

The tough-guy soldier stood in front of me holding a Bible.

Pleading.

“Swear on this Bible and the soul of the Virgin Mary.”

I’d forgotten he was a devout Catholic. He’d forgotten I couldn’t always be trusted even when there was a Bible involved.

I nodded imperceptibly.

He glanced at his watch. “I’ll be back at five. That will be enough time to navigate the security lines at the airport.”

As soon as he left, I sucked in the feeling of a hotel room nipped and tucked into shape and reminded myself to leave a big tip for the tired maid I’d seen in the hallway.

Then I imagined the tiny skeletal bone of a finger under the rigid eye of an airport X-ray machine. In the bathroom, I stuffed the little red box into my cosmetic bag, hoping it would blend in with the mess of lipstick tubes and mascara.

I was itching to get out of the room. Instead, I popped open my laptop and stuck in an old flash drive I’d found in the bottom of my computer bag, copying the slide show and carefully zipping it into a side compartment of my purse.

With even less enthusiasm, I tackled the canvas book bag that held the disarray of clips I had copied at the library the day before. I painstakingly separated the stories about Adriana Marchetti’s kidnapping and the stories about the Fred Bennett murder case, then arranged them in chronological order and highlighted the names of people whose brains I might want to rattle out of retirement. More phone numbers to chase down. This was like cleaning the oven-drudgery coupled with the nagging feeling that it wouldn’t matter a bit if I didn’t do it at all.

I sat down at my laptop again and randomly typed “Gisella Russo” into a Google search. I found a thirty-year-old obituary notice within five minutes. Gisella was survived by her mother and two younger sisters. In lieu of flowers, the family had requested donations be made to a local Catholic church’s antidrug campaign. Rosalina’s friend had lived only one more year after Adriana’s kidnapping.

Still restless, I Googled “Ellis Island.” I clicked on the nonprofit website, created a password and username, and started a search for a passenger named Ingrid Margaret Ankrim, the great-grandmother of my mother’s legend. No matches. What a surprise.

On a whim, I typed in Ingrid Margaret Roth, the surname Jack dropped in the hotel room. To my surprise, I got a hit. I clicked on the manifest. There she was. Ingrid Roth, sixteen, left the German port of Bremen in 1892.

Something that was true.

I was overcome with a profound longing to talk to Sadie and Maddie, to connect with the people I loved. I still hadn’t heard from them, which worried me.

I glanced at my watch again. Two and a half hours to go. It seemed wrong to break my promise to Hudson. But I was packed. Agitated.

I needed to do something.

It didn’t take long to find the phone number the old-fashioned way, through telephone information.

Or to convince him to meet me.

He made a stark and poignant figure at the top of the hill, bent like a tree seedling fighting the wind. I spotted him immediately as the cabbie rounded the corner, eliminating the need for the cemetery map I picked up at the gate. The old man was my guidepost.

I slid up in the backseat and pointed. “Stop as close as you can to that gentleman.”

The cabbie pulled over next to a stone mausoleum with a rusty lock and a crumbling shepherd guarding the door to a family’s forgotten bones.

The old man was several plots away. He didn’t turn around, now kneeling and pulling away weeds creeping like spiders over a grave.

The sky seemed bigger here. The cemetery, dotted with trees and thousands of headstones, stretched out in all directions. Clouds swirled like black smoke in the eastern sky, and the cabbie told me to hurry, that the radio was predicting a nasty surprise storm.

I stepped awkwardly over the gravestones, thinking what a perfect target I’d make for a sniper, briefly but seriously considering throwing open my arms and screaming, Shoot me now!

Get it the hell over with.

Instead, I slowed down, a perfectly respectful mourner carrying a semi-tasteful plastic wreath of white orchids that I’d picked up at one of the flower shops ubiquitous around Chicago cemeteries.

The wreath seemed silly now, fake in every possible way.

The saleswoman instantly made me as a novice, presenting me with a laminated card of “10 Flower Rules You Must Follow for Chicago Cemeteries” and leading me to a greenhouse of artificial plants and buckets of tiny plastic Virgin Marys and Josephs and angels perched on top of sticks. I looked obediently through the buckets, thinking the plastic Christian icons were probably mass-produced in China by Buddha worshippers.

I skipped the Virgin Marys, who gazed at me reprovingly, and picked a gold plastic angel, wondering how many thousands of these were not decomposing in the ground at local cemeteries.

Now I wish I’d stuck to my original thought of a single rose, cliché as it would be, Chicago cemetery rules about live flowers be damned. My foot sank on top of a soft, grassy space where a head rested ten feet under. I shivered and silently apologized to Peter Theodore Ostrowski, who’d been camped out there since 1912.

By the time my shadow fell over her grave, the old man had yanked most of the grass and clover away from the tiny square marker lying flat in the ground.

Susan Bridget Adams

Our angel, still climbing

Jan. 3, 1977-Jan. 19, 1980

“She loved to climb trees,” Susie’s father said. He was still kneeling, facing away as if he couldn’t bear to look at me. “If you didn’t watch, she’d go all the way to the top of the old oak in our backyard. I was supposed to watch. But I went inside, just for a second.”

Just for a second.

I’d once counseled a grieving young girl whose one-year-old sister drowned at a backyard pool party while the adults stood around talking and drinking wine.

Six months ago, a Cheyenne first-grader chased his soccer ball into the path of a UPS truck when his mother stepped inside to get her ringing cell phone off the front hall table. He insisted we lift him out of his wheelchair onto a horse his first day at the ranch.

Just for a second, his mother told me, and now he’ll wear a prosthetic leg forever.

“She stayed in a coma for three months,” Mr. Adams said. “I think that made it worse. To have hope.”

He made the sign of the cross and then struggled to pull himself up with his cane. My arms instinctively reached out to help. Abruptly, I remembered he was only in his sixties. Not that old. Grief had chiseled away at him.

I don’t know who moved first.

We stood there, two strangers clasped in a tight embrace on a lonely hill, until a light rain began to fall.