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Authors: Rachel Louise Snyder

What We've Lost Is Nothing

BOOK: What We've Lost Is Nothing
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To my gang of five: Ann Maxwell, Don Rutledge, Julie Gibson, Soleak Sim, and Yasmina Kulauzovic

And to Caroline Alexander, who made so much possible

All things are in the hand of heaven, and Folly, eldest of Jove's daughters, shuts men's eyes to their destruction. She walks delicately, not on the solid earth, but hovers over the heads of men to make them stumble or to ensnare them.

—
Homer,
The Iliad

Contents

PROLOGUE: WEDNESDAY, APRIL 7, 2004, 3:20 p.m.

PART ONE: TUESDAY, APRIL 6, 2004

Chicago Tribune, Breaking News

Chapter 1. 3:10 p.m.

Chapter 2. 2:10–5:00 p.m.

Chapter 3. 1:58 p.m.

Chapter 4. 4:00 p.m.

Chapter 5. 4:15 p.m.

Chapter 6. ;5:17 p.m.

Listserv: Oak Park Moms

Chapter 7. 7:10 p.m.

Chapter 8. 6:23 p.m.

Chapter 9. 4:13 p.m.

Chapter 10. 7:25 p.m.

http://www.oakpark.com/Community/Blogs/04-07-2004
/OP-lost_nothing_-_robbed: “What We've Lost Is Nothing”

Chapter 11. 7:50 p.m.

Chapter 12. 8:00–9:54 p.m.

Chapter 13. 8:00–9:54 p.m.

Chapter 14. 9:50 p.m.

Chapter 15. 10:05 p.m.

PART TWO: WEDNESDAY, APRIL 7, 2004

Chapter 16. 8:55 a.m.

Chapter 17. ;10:15 a.m.

Chapter 18. 9:35 a.m.

Chapter 19. 8:36 a.m.

Chapter 20. 1:20 p.m.

Listserv: Oak Park Moms

Chapter 21. 12:10 p.m.

Chapter 22. 11:40 a.m.

Chapter 23. 2:16 p.m.

Chapter 24. 2:38 p.m.

Chapter 25. 1:50 p.m.

Chapter 26. 3:15 p.m.

http://www.oakpark.com/Community/Blogs/04-07-2004
/OP-lost_nothing_-_robbed: “Reader Comments”

Chapter 27. 2:57 p.m.

Chapter 28. 3:40 p.m.

Chapter 29. 3:40 p.m.

Chapter 30. 3:51 p.m.

Chapter 31. 3:30 p.m.

Wordpress Blog: “The Truth of Diversity Hurts”

Chapter 32. 3:38 p.m.

Chapter 33. 3:48 p.m.

Chapter 34. 4:05 p.m.

Chapter 35. 3:54 p.m.

Chapter 36. 4:07 p.m.

Memo Re: “The Truth of Diversity Hurts”

Chapter 37. 4:07 p.m.

Chapter 38. 4:15 p.m.

Chapter 39. 4:01 p.m.

Chapter 40. 4:19 p.m.

EPILOGUE: THURSDAY, APRIL 8, 2004, 6:30 p.m.

Author's Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Prologue

Wednesday, April 7, 2004, 3:20 p.m.

M
ary Elizabeth McPherson could feel Caz's hand slide down her lower back and into her back pocket. He surreptitiously handed her a joint, and she took a deep, adrenaline-fueled toke, cupping it in her palm as she'd seen him do. She held the cough until her eyes watered, looking away from Caz, toward the Tasty Dog, where she and her friends sometimes shared milk shakes and hot dogs on the weekends. A wallet chain jingled against Caz's hip. His faded jean jacket quietly shifted on his shoulders, made him seem bigger than he was. She slid the joint back to Caz and exhaled. He took a hit, held it a second, then leaned in and blew the smoke gently across her face in what she interpreted as deeply romantic.

Caz was known for cutting class, known for his rap sheet, which included multiple school suspensions and carrying around a dulled fishing knife with a broken tip; he was also known for maintaining a deep and abiding contempt for anyone with ­authority. Once, back in his freshman math class two years earlier, he'd fallen asleep and Mr. Fonseca came up and squeezed his wrist tighter and tighter till he woke up. Without lifting his head, Caz had said, “Get your fucking hand off me, ­dickwad.” ­Fifteen years old. He got slapped with a three-day suspension, which only amplified his reputation, the hushed reverence with which kids approached him. A god of anger and contempt. Also: gorgeous. Mary wondered if he was this way at home, with his parents, or whether it was all for show.

Keep the conversation going, she told herself, keep him talking about things that mattered to him.
But what mattered to him?
Having never before been the object of a boy's fascination,
any boy
, let alone a boy such as Caz, left Mary flustered. She recognized this moment as one of those rare opportunities in life where one might shuffle one's standing in the high school caste system, and she knew it was only the burglaries the day before that catapulted her into Caz's periphery at all. When he'd sidled up to her that morning in class and said ­simply, “See you at lunch,” a revelation had presented itself to her. It was the first time Caz had acknowledged her in their two years at Oak Park River Forest High, all because of the burglaries on her street. News reporters had flocked to their house the day before, and her whole family appeared on television. A garden-­variety home ­invasion wouldn't have boosted Mary's social capital, but one element of the story had spread through the halls before the first bell even rang. During the burglary Mary Elizabeth had been home.

She fielded a flurry of questions between classes.

Mary, were you scared?

Not really.

Did you see them?

No.

Did you hear them break the door down?

No.

Where were you when they came in?

Dining room. Under the table.

Wasn't it, like, during school? Didn't you cut class?

Wink, smirk.

She was surprised by her proclivity toward self-editing as the questions flew at her. Was she scared? Hell, yes, she'd been scared once she knew what was happening. But copping to her fear would not have won Caz's affection.

“What street do you live on again?” she asked him now as they walked in step.

His wallet chain hit a rivet on his jeans. “Madison and Austin.”

Mary stopped walking. “An apartment? Which one? Across from the bank, or . . .” She shut her mouth when she realized her enthusiasm was suspicious. Caz was glaring at her. “Sorry,” she said. Thankfully, his arm was still around her. She hadn't lost him yet. “That's one of my mom's buildings. I mean, not hers, but she shows the apartments in that building. I only know because she's always bitching about it.” Had she worded that right? Was
bitching about it
the right phrase?

Caz said nothing. Mary recognized that a fine line existed between conversation and chatter, between interest and disinterest. She pulled him by the pocket loop, began to walk again. “My mom works at the Housing Office, showing apartments to try to have diversity and all that. Like the buildings that want Diversity Assurance.”

“Diversity what?” His voice was rough, distant. They passed the joint back and forth again.

“Diversity Assurance? Integration and all that. You know, the east side. How it was so dangerous, like, back in the seventies or whenever and Oak Park created this program to get people to live together again?”

“No idea what you're talking about.”

“I mean, you know, blacks and whites? White people didn't want to live on the east side, and businesses wouldn't open up there, and now it's like got racial diversity?”

Mary knew all about the sordid history of race in Chicago, the stuff her mom talked about, like she was some sort of social ­crusader. Mrs. McPherson even came to Mary's school sometimes to talk about it, how investments weren't made in black ­communities and so the neighborhoods fell into disrepair. Then gang warfare and poverty from the west side of Chicago had supposedly trickled into Oak Park. The Housing Office, where Mrs. McPherson worked, tried to shore up the difference. Mary knew more about it than she cared to admit. She had never been warned to stay away from the west side of Chicago, from Austin ­Boulevard, yet still she'd instinctively avoided it. Never once had she wandered over there.

•  •  •

Caz had caught Mary Elizabeth on the local news the night before and suddenly remembered her as the head of hair that blocked his view of the blackboard in composition class
.
Until now, he'd only ever thought of her as
hair
. The burglaries were interesting not only because she'd been home, but because they'd spanned her entire street. Caz was mildly impressed by the audacity of such a crime (admittedly, a small part of him wished he'd thought of it). Looking at her on the news as she stood half-hiding behind her father, Caz saw something he'd never before seen: a girl who was . . . not bad-looking. A cheerleader, if he remembered correctly. And he wanted to see the street, see the houses themselves, see from his own view what lay inside the homes he'd wandered past, but never visited, those manicured lawns and pristine paint jobs he'd always lived near. The apartments he'd lived in his whole life were a mass memory of punched-out walls and broken mirrors, grates over the windows, and stale cigarettes crushed into carpets.

So he'd asked her to lunch, which was how he thought of it (not quite making the distinction between a statement and a question:
See you at lunch
versus
Would you like to sit together at lunch?
—the latter of which would never come from Caz's mouth). But then she'd asked that crazy question, thrown him that complete left hook:
What's the worst thing that ever happened to you?
Where had she thought of such a thing? What stranger asked that of another stranger? He'd worked hard to keep his own
worst thing that ever happened
out of his day-to-day consciousness, and he was largely successful. He couldn't remember a girl ever just asking him that, the worst thing. Even
he
didn't want to remember. And in his quieter moments—not that there were many—he was pretty good at not remembering at all. That's how it went in his house. Kill off the shit that could kill you.

He could hardly remember his mother now. She had brown hair. She watched soap operas. Her belly protruded when she lay on the couch. She called alcohol her “medicine.” He remembered finding her one night weeping in the corner of the basement, holding the phone to her ear.

“I need to disappear,” she said to whoever was on the line. “I got nothing. I got nothing here. Not a fucking set of dimes to squeeze together.” She was crying, her face slick and wet, and Caz, who was still little Chris back then, had snuck glances around the doorframe.

He started collecting change for her after that—little, glimmery shards on the sidewalks, or money tossed into fountains. He tried to find abandoned coins that would keep his mom from disappearing.

When she died, he was six years old. She'd tried to shoot Caz first, but missed. Tried to set him free, she'd said
,
but his father made a run for her, and all she could manage in that split second after missing her son was
not
missing herself.

Caz was six years old. He'd scavenged $41.07 in change.

A decade had passed since that day, and Caz had survived. He wasn't into all that psychobabble bullshit about trauma and memory. Caz's mother had been too weak to hack it. Simple as that.

Caz shivered for a moment, and he felt Mary look at him. Her eyes held a kind of need, bottomless and also a little alarming, her thick, curly hair like rope. He managed to stop thinking about his mom and start thinking about the girl beside him, and how good her ass seemed to fit inside the palm of his hand. He gave her a squeeze, and a grin, and she squeezed right back.

•  •  •

Mary felt Caz's hand in her pocket. For a moment, she imagined reaching around him and yanking on his wallet chain, forcing him to spin in a circle. With another guy, this might have been funny, a lighthearted moment of young love. But not with Caz. He was all bluster and sharp edges. Much later, years later, she would know what it was to carry a smile on your face while the whole rest of your body frowned, and she'd remember that Caz had been the first person she'd ever seen do this. He was like a city under siege, full of broken buildings, and yet, inexplicably, light still flickered from some unknown source. She wondered what he normally did after school; she could hardly imagine him plopping down in front of the computer with a bowl of cereal, as she usually did. Maybe this could be the thing he did, come home with Mary. At least for a time.

“When my mom comes to school,” Mary said, “it makes me want to die.” It didn't, of course. “She always comes to talk about integration, and the Housing Office and all that. I bet she even talks about your building.”

Caz gave a guttural grunt in response. This past year had, in fact, been the first time Susan McPherson visited a class Mary attended. Until that day, Mary had never heard her mother talk about what she did for a living in such an idealized way and had thought of her mother more or less as a Realtor for renters. When Susan spoke of the importance of a diverse community, of empathy and tolerance, of the people who once risked their lives to break the cycle of injustice, Mary's teacher had called Susan one of Oak Park's local heroes, and Mary had begun to wonder, could her very own totally annoying and overly righteous mother also be a hero?

Mary didn't share any of this with Caz, of course. Mercifully, they'd reached her house through the back alley, and Mary pulled her keys from her backpack. Her large, pink, fuzzy heart keychain flashed a purple light at the center when you clicked a button. She didn't know if news vans still lined the street from yesterday's burglaries, and she certainly didn't want to be caught on camera, but part of her hoped Caz might see a reporter or two and think it cool. Day-old yellow police tape fluttered from an oak tree beside her house, and her parents still hadn't cleaned up the mess in the den, or entirely sorted out what had gone missing from the garage. They'd met with the other neighbors the night before. Everyone had been robbed. Everyone was freaked-out. But honestly, the whole thing felt to Mary as if the world were granting her the possibility of a brand-new version of herself. People who'd never before noticed her at school had been
so nice
to her. Teachers, the assistant dean, even a bunch of the popular kids. And now here was Caz, who'd acknowledged her in class for the first time ever, then sat beside her at lunch with the
whole school
watching, then promised to come hang out with her at her house after school. It was dizzying.

She shut the door. The house was silent and Mary Elizabeth felt reassured.

“Well, it's not like the black people in my building are chillin' with the whites,” Caz said finally, as if he'd spent the entire last five minutes of their walk conjuring up this brilliant response. “Doesn't sound like that diversity program is any kind of anything.”

Mary dropped her keys. She felt a surge of anger as she bent to pick them up. What was so bad about people getting along? About trying to include all kinds of people into your world? She was apathetic about her mother's work, sure, but she'd never heard anyone insult it, and she felt a sudden, unfamiliar desire to defend her mom.

“I mean, people are people. Blacks, whites, whatever . . . we're not going to stop hating each other,” he said.

They were standing in the kitchen. Mary Elizabeth felt a flutter on the top of her head, the light touch of fingertips. She looked up and Caz flashed a grin at her, then signaled down to his crotch with his eyes. Mary blushed and looked away. She tossed her keys on the counter, harder than she'd intended.

“Speak for yourself. I don't hate black people.”

“Me either. I'm just saying. It's a stupid program.”

“Your building is full of white
and
black people.”

“I guess so.”

“So it's working. I mean it worked. Think about what it would have been like in the seventies with all that crime. You're just ungrateful.” She thought of her mom, how frustrated she'd get when she'd spend a day showing beautiful apartments to people who would turn around and tell her they felt “unsafe” near Austin Boulevard, as if all those decades of creating community were for nothing. Fears, her mom called them, that were the impossible-to-excavate kind. Fears that just had to “die with the bigots who hold on to them,” she'd sometimes say.

“Well, maybe you're changing my mind, Mary Elizabeth McPherson,” Caz said in a quiet voice. A low, gravelly baritone, the voice he'd used at lunchtime. “Maybe you can teach me to be a little grateful.”

BOOK: What We've Lost Is Nothing
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