The Invisible (27 page)

Last night at dinner, my father went on at length about his new construction philosophy.

“We need to rebuild higher,” he said, his eyes wild. “To show them they’ve been beaten.” He looked so obsessed that I had to look away out of embarrassment.

And Zahra met someone on her journey out of town. A boy named Fred. She keeps texting him, lying here on my bed. “Did I tell you Fred knows how to chop down trees with an axe and that we built this huge fire in the cornfields behind his house? I never thought I’d be into a woodsy guy, but Fred . . .” She sighs, her face screwed into an expression of semi-ironic enchantment, her rosebud mouth (lipsticked hot pink) twisting an unsuppressible grin. “He’s got the goods. He hooked me.”

“I’ve been briefed.” I roll my eyes. This is the third time I’ve heard about Fred’s skills with an axe. “You’re going to be one of those exurban girls who wears long dresses and bonnets, aren’t you? One of those back-to-the-land girls?”

“Maybe a long dress. Never a bonnet.” Zahra grows serious then, grimacing over the word
bonnet
. “I’ll admit it has occurred to me I
might
get bored in the woods. Who knows, maybe it won’t last.”

“You never know,” I say, thinking of Ford. Love sneaks up on you sometimes. Makes you a different person than you thought you were. I never thought I’d spend time in a boxing gym and actually like it. But I do. I like everything about it.

The TV is on in the other room, the news reporting on Invisible, who’s been held and questioned for two weeks now. Officer Rodriguez hasn’t breathed a word about how she found him, at least so far. Her explanation is that she received an anonymous tip.

Invisible has a name: Aaron Lift. He’s thirty-one. The news anchor breathlessly repeats the story we’ve been hearing for two days already, and it drifts into my bedroom: “Aaron Lift had a normal childhood, until the fateful day his father, Ignatious Lift, was arrested for fraud. Then everything changed for young Aaron.” Cue the ominous music. Cut to a commercial for Motoko Cars, on sale this weekend at Bedlam Wheel City. When the commercial break is over, the story will continue: Leaving the North Side with his mother, moving to The Sigh Houses, a housing complex near the bridge. And getting in the way of a bullet not meant for him. He lied about a lot of things, but he was telling the truth about that.

“Ant.” Z gives me a serious look, takes a deep breath like she has something important to say. “Aren’t you curious?”

“What do you mean?”

“He went to Cathedral. He mentioned your sister. He must have known her. Aren’t they around the same age, or would be if she was alive?”

I do the math. I’m seventeen, so if she’d lived, Regina would be around thirty-two now. “I guess so, yeah.” But I’m apprehensive. Do I really want to dive into Aaron Lift’s life? What’s the point?

“Remember when we used to go in there and look through her stuff? I seem to remember old Cathedral yearbooks on the bottom shelf.”

My stomach jumps. I stopped looking at them when I was younger. I decided it was morbid. But maybe it does make sense to look for him there. Just to know. Just to see.

“Yeah. We could look at them, I guess.”

“Don’t get so excited,” Z murmurs sarcastically, pulling me up off the bed.

I let her pull me toward the room, surprised I haven’t thought of it myself. I used to spend hours in Regina’s room, until I decided it was unhealthy, like trying to conjure a ghost. But I still remember the details of her bookshelf, with every yearbook lined up from kindergarten through tenth grade—the year she died. And I remember Zahra going with me on these snooping expeditions. But is it still snooping if the person is dead? We used to debate this question. Now the idea just seems silly. Of course it’s not snooping. It’s
research.

“I haven’t been in here forever,” Z says when we move down the hall toward Regina’s closed door, separated from my room by just fifteen paces, with a linen closet and a bathroom door between them. Years ago, my mother walled off her entrance to the bathroom our two rooms once shared. She thought it would be traumatic for me to “share” a bathroom with the shrine to her first daughter, I guess. Of course, nothing as simple as drywall could fix the feeling of being haunted by her presence.

“Ready?” Z breathes, her hand on the knob. I nod, butterflies flapping in my gut. What will it mean to see a young Aaron Lift in the same book as the sister I never knew?

Maybe nothing. Maybe something.

We both go quiet when we step inside, our bare toes sinking into the plush lavender carpet Regina chose for her room when she was eleven. The room is dark and odorless, sterile-smelling thanks to regular cleanings in here by the twice-weekly team of housekeepers we’ve had for years.

When I reach for the light switch, the bulb lights up, emits a loud pop, then dies.

I move to the window and pull back the gray-and-lavender striped curtains, sending a cloud of dust motes dancing in the still air. When there’s enough light to see, I join Zahra and kneel at the bottom of my sister’s bookshelf, feeling more and more nervous about what we might find.

“Where are you, Aaron Lift?” Zahra murmurs, running her finger along the spines of all the yearbooks, from elementary on up through tenth. She pauses, looks at me as if checking to see if it’s okay. I nod, and she pulls down ninth, hands it to me, and starts to page through tenth.

The yearbook is done in ocean colors and says in gold embossment
CATHEDRAL SPIRES—THE TIDE IS HIGH
. As we flip the pages, I’m transported back to being ten years old again, back when I used to come in here all the time and read all of my dead sister’s yearbooks. All the inscriptions, the drawn-in hearts, the scratchy signatures of the boys, the bubbly letters of the girls captivated me. I must have looked at each page at least fifty times, but of course I was never searching for anyone specific, just trying to get a sense of who she was. I look over some of the inscriptions and realize I remember seeing most of them before.

Stay sweet, Reg! Let’s party this summer! Love, Luella

To the smartest girl in Dr. T’s class. You’ll change the world one day, Reg. Or at least throw it a damn fine party. Don’t forget about me this summer, okay? I have a buzz hookup. Philip

Pleasure getting to know you, Miss Fleet. Remember what I said about taking your time, okay? No need to rush into life too fast. You’ve got a brilliant mind and the kind of passion we need more of in politics. With admiration, Dr. T.

I look up and stare into the bookshelf in front of me, the titles swimming in front of me, devoid of meaning. Dr. T is Dr. Tammany, my politics teacher. This is clearly a warning to Regina about something. But what? I make a mental note to ask Dr. T about my sister before school lets out.

And then I come to page nineteen, where a beautiful girl with white-blond hair crimped in perfect waves falls like a waterfall down her narrow shoulders. She sits cross-legged atop one of Cathedral’s metal tables, her plaid skirt dipping into her lap. I’ve seen this picture so many times. I remember being amazed that she wore the same plaid skirts I wear, because it meant I really was living the life she left behind.

But now it has a whole other meaning. Because now I know that the boy standing at her side, to whom she is giving her full attention in what looks like a serious conversation, is Aaron Lift.

“Look,” I whisper, and Zahra leans over to see.

“Oh my god. It’s him.” His head of wild brown curls has not changed much, maybe grown a little coarser. Her hand is on his arm. His mouth is partly open, like he’s not aware of the camera. They look intensely close, like the kind of friends who tell each other everything.

The caption below the photo says it all:
Regina Fleet shares a secret with Aaron Lift.

Regina Fleet shares a secret. The words give me chills. Exactly how well did Aaron know her?

“Wonder what the secret was?” Zahra says, reading my thoughts.

“We’ll never know,” I say.

“They look like they’re sharing some serious dirt.”

There’s a star next to the picture, drawn hastily. I flip through the book until I find another star just like it.

Yo Fleetfoot,

This year has been real. Or maybe surreal is a better word for it. Wonder if we both might not make it back to Catheter next year. Whatever happens, know I’m always on your side. No matter what our stupid parents put us through, we’ll always have us. And our good looks, ha ha.

Love,

Liftoff

“Catheter?” Zahra says, her expression blank.

“Cathedral. Not the most creative name.” I bite my cuticles and think. Aaron must have already known something was going on with his father. The arrest may have already happened. But why would he think Regina might not come back? He couldn’t predict that she would drown in the lake. Did he have another reason to think she wouldn’t return? And what was it he said to me? That he knew more about me than I know about myself? “But why did he think my sister wasn’t coming back?”

“You should go ask him,” Z says. “Call that cop who helped you. She’d set it up. She owes you.”

I flip back to the picture of the two of them again. Their heads are tilted toward each other. Both utterly serious. No clowning around, not them. So close, so intent. Like brother and sister.

“Good idea,” I mutter. I need to find out what Aaron knew—what he
knows—
and I need to do it soon. God knows where he’ll end up after his trial. I look toward the window and watch the dust motes dance in the sunlight, a mini scene of chaos. And in my head I start to compose a script full of good reasons to give to Officer Rodriguez to let me have a few minutes alone with Aaron Lift.

The tip came from an anonymous caller. A baby wailing in the background. A woman with a foreign accent he can’t place. “Leave one hundred thousand dollars at the corner of Vine and Poppy and wait for my call. I know where your daughter is.”

It had been over six months and his leads have all run dry, have been dry for months. What can he do but try it?

He takes the money from the safe in his office. It’s nothing to him, nothing at all. Anything to make the apartment alive with Reggie’s presence again. Anything to get Helene to stop wailing each night. To bring back his little girl.

Harry is a bad man. He knows this. But he doesn’t deserve to have his family ripped away from him. Not when he’s done it all for them in the first place. All the bribes, all the payoffs. All the Syndicate activities that have disposed of certain people, that have made the South unpalatable as a place to buy a home and have made the North easier to rejuvenate, to sell. All the “urban planning” he’s done over the decades. It’s provided well for them. His girls. His loves.

Waiting for the next call in his office, Harry thought of his own childhood, cut short at twelve when he was told by his mother to leave because his father didn’t like his smart mouth and she was afraid he’d take a hand to him, her boy.
Harry
, she’d said.
You need to get away from him before things get uglier.
Things were already plenty ugly. His father was the kind of man who would drink, then raise a chair over his head and break it over the nearest child. And there were so many children. More kids than they could properly feed.

So little Harry Flatts left. And after he left, he changed his name. Harris Fleet sounded rich. It jingled like coins in his ears.

Harry began a slow rise in the ranks of the Syndicate. And after the years piled up and he was close to the top, he got out. He moved into real estate development. Not that you ever really got out from under the Syndicate in this city, not really.

He played the part of the sophisticated, cultivated father and husband well. He never beat Reggie when she misbehaved, never lifted a chair above his head and smashed it down upon her small body. Never even raised his voice. He acted the easygoing charmer. Inside he sometimes raged and seethed, but on the surface? He’d become everything his own father wasn’t. Not a trace of the person he could have become if he’d stayed Harry Flatts. He shed his accent, his poverty, his South Side manners. And he’d broken the cycle of violence. At least in his home. At work, he did what he had to do to be intimidating, to rise in the ranks. But once he reached a certain position, he had the luxury of leaving the violence to the others.

In this way, Harry Flatts was scrubbed clean. So clean that not even his right hand, Serge, knew about Harry’s days as a Syndicate foot soldier. He prided himself on keeping Serge as ignorant of all that as he possibly could.

So why did Reggie leave? Had his explosion when she told them about her boyfriend been that frightening? How could she cut off contact for nearly eight months when she knew that she was all they had? Their bright star, their beautiful girl. Gone.

So of course he put the money in the trash can.

Of course he waited and watched, with Serge, as a woman with neatly braided blue-black hair came and got it, looking both ways before she stuck a ringed hand in the can and grabbed the duffel.

Serge followed her, but he needn’t have. Twenty minutes later, Harry’s phone rang. He wrote down the address, his hands shaking with excitement. With
love
.

It’s easy to find. Close enough to the city dump that the whole street reeks of garbage. A sagging brick monolith, blotting out a big swath of sunrise. When they pull up, it’s 5:47
A.M.
according to Harry’s watch. He leaves Serge in the car. This, he’s got to do alone.

When he reaches the entrance, Harry looks down at the scrap of paper written in his own hand. 4B. He considers ringing, but once he speaks and she knows it’s him, she won’t let him in. The boyfriend will defend the place by force. The only way is to take them by surprise. Then make her see reason.

Back in the Syndicate days, he was a specialist at breaking and entering. But that was years ago. And lock technology has improved somewhat. He moves toward the door, trying not to breathe too deeply for fear of the garbage smell getting in and then never leaving his nostrils. My god, he’s gone soft. His shoes, which he keeps obsessively shined, click on the sidewalk.