What We've Lost Is Nothing (2 page)

Mary forced herself to look into his eyes. Brown and dark. She understood why people called them chocolate-brown eyes, but to her they were more like the brown of fall leaves, misted with the change of seasons. He reached over and flicked on the radio, stationed to the Loop. Foghat streamed through the kitchen. Caz's hands found her hips. She felt the countertop to her left, the ocher curtains hanging at the glass door. She felt his hands move around her, rounding her ass, down, slowly, and then back up. Her chest rubbed against his jean jacket as he pulled her in close. She wanted to get him up to her room, but that could wait just a minute. Then he bent his head, just an inch, and he leaned in to kiss her.

Tuesday, April 6, 2004

3:10 p.m.

S
usan McPherson ignored her husband's phone call. The couple sitting at her desk were in a rush. Away from work for a long lunch break, only a few minutes to sign the lease and write the check. They'd managed to convince the landlord that the two-cat policy could be stretched for their three kitten siblings. What can you do? Heartless to separate them and so forth—and Susan had subsequently ignored the phone. She had no other clients scheduled for the afternoon and had toyed with the idea of going to Buzz Café down on Harrison just to relax and read the paper for an hour. It would have been a rare moment to breathe, except that half the people in this town knew her, and so if she really wanted to get away, she needed to go into the city, to an anonymous café in Wicker Park, perhaps, or the Ukrainian Village. She stapled the security deposit and rent receipts to the couple's rental application and tried to place the stapler back in the exact dust outline from whence it had come.

Her husband was insistent on the phone. She smiled, nodded at the clients. The man handed the lease to his wife to look over. Michael would call again, Susan knew. And he did. Again his number popped up on the caller ID on her desk phone. After a moment, she heard her cell phone vibrate in her purse—a desperate move since she so often left it at home, or forgot to charge the battery.

“It's supposed to
help
us,” he'd once yelled at her, “these modern conveniences. Make our lives
easier.
” She suspected he'd bought it for her so it could make
his
life easier. (“Can you pick up some steaks on the way home?” “Can you drop the tax returns at the post office so they're not late?” “Cable guy's changed his appointment window. Can you run home to meet him?”) The combination of having a cell phone and working a mile away from home often worked against her. But his insistence this time was unusual. So she held up one hand in apology and took the call: “Housing Office, Susan McPherson.”

“Robbed. The house. Arthur, too.” His voice was midsentence, harried, higher than normal, and angry at having had to call and call and call, she suspected. Robbed. It took her a moment to connect his broken sentences. Their house.
Her
house. It was the middle of the afternoon, on a sunny April day, one of the first nice days they'd had since winter.
Who robs a house in the middle of the afternoon?
She could hear the turn signal blinking in his car, a distant car horn.

She'd soon learn that the afternoons were prime time for home invasions. That crime spiked in the first warm days of spring. She'd learn their neighbors had also been robbed, and that
robbed
was the wrong word.
Burgled
was what had happened to them. Robbery was just stealing, but burglary was breaking in
and
stealing. But of all the things she'd come to learn about burglary, none mattered to her much at all when she heard the next thing Michael said.

“She's fine.”

Susan hadn't understood at all what he meant. Who was
she
? Fine . . . ? Michael repeated himself. Susan couldn't seem to make her mind process the words.
Mary is fine. Mary is fine, though she sounded a little funny on the phone. You need to get home, Susan. You'll get there sooner than I can. I'm in the car now.

Mary is fine Maryisfinemaryisfine . . .

But the words got stuck somewhere after
fine.
Mary?

“Why wouldn't Mary be fine?” She noticed the rectangle of dust, the inexact placement of the stapler, thought for a moment how the office had scaled back the cleaning crew. Budget cuts. The clients began to fidget, the woman checking her BlackBerry. A lawyer type in a dark blue suit and trench coat, her brown hair in a tidy ponytail at the base of her neck. Why did this woman want to live in Oak Park anyway? Wasn't she more the Gold Coast type? Susan knew the reason, though, even if this woman didn't: kids. The couple were testing out the most urban of suburbs, seeing if it fit, seeing if it was a haven to raise your kids and walk your dogs and cultivate your garden. Susan herself had chosen to raise her kids here, one of whom was at this moment
fine
. Which is another way of reminding one of luck and chance.

Then she finally heard Michael. “She was
home
,
Susan.”

Susan looked down at her desk at the three-cat clause in front of her. The air felt thinner suddenly, as if her office were lifting, hurtling toward deep space. “Mary was home?”

“Jesus,
hello
! This is what I've been telling you.”

“Home? During the robbery?”

“She's fine. The police are there now, but you need to get home, Susan.”

She began to feel her daughter's presence underneath her own skin. Why had Mary Elizabeth been home? Was she ill? How close had she come to . . . ? No, this was not the place to go. If Susan allowed herself, she could picture all kinds of grim scenes for her daughter, and her stomach would fill with dark, gnashing fear. When Mary had been a baby, Susan had a recurring dream about the two of them swimming in a pool, and as they swam, the pool got deeper and deeper, falling away from their feet until they were treading water. Only they didn't notice. They were laughing and splashing, weightless and graceful, and then Mary said she wanted to show her mommy how she could hold her breath, how she could go under, and Susan laughed and nodded and watched her daughter bounce up once, take her lungs full of air, and disappear underneath the surface. Susan kept laughing, and waiting, and in a few seconds she, too, went underwater and watched her daughter's tiny legs as she was sucked into an enormous vent far away on the side of the pool, and when Susan began to swim toward it, the hole of the vent slowly began to shrink back to its normal size, the tiny feet of her daughter kicking furiously, disappearing to a place unreachable. Susan would wake, suddenly, in a cold sweat and have to go into Mary's room and make sure the little girl was still sleeping. And always, always, she was, sleeping peacefully, curls stuck to the pale skin of her forehead. But the image of those legs slowly receding, kicking furiously, the tiny feet in the crystalline water as they vanished—all the images stayed with Susan. As the years passed, she had forced her mind to stop when such grisly, terrifying scenarios filtered into her consciousness. Now though, this moment was like her dream, her daughter being taken away from her by forces too strong for Susan to fight, watching, her own call for help silenced. It didn't matter that Mary was fine. What mattered was how close she had come to
not
being fine.

The clients to Susan's left faded from her periphery; a single loud laugh from the break room melted into the background. She grabbed her purse to go. She thought she could feel her heart begin to work more quickly, to keep her conscious, yes, that's what hearts did, pushed the blood around your body when you weren't quite capable of keeping yourself upright.

Susan pictured Mary's bedroom, the posters of rock stars who were hidden behind $1,000 jeans and push-up bras, pink hair and thick lipstick and airbrushing, so unapologetically stylized. The unmade bed, the clothes spanning the entirety of the floor, one wall painted a dark purple that Mary had been threatening to paint black. She pictured sealing herself in the house with Mary. This was the great secret of parenthood. As the childless couple sitting beside her began to contemplate their next move, what they were really asking was “Where is the safest place I can raise my child? Where can we go to keep the world at bay?” Susan apologized to them. She had to leave. Parents knew the world offered no such place. Not here in Oak Park, not in Chicago, not in the state of Illinois, not anywhere across America or beyond. The world had a way of reaching that child. And Susan knew that the world had just reached hers.

She scanned the office for her boss, Evan. She would remember the sunlight streaming through the plate-glass window of their shared office space, the silk roses gathering dust in a thin vase on her coworker's desk, a tape dispenser shaped like a cow; she would remember the angry looks on the faces of the clients and how she wanted to slap them out of their selfishness, slap them into knowing—before they were quite ready—what vulnerability
really
felt like, slap them into recognition of their own safety; she would remember searching for her purse, her head darting around the desk, under the desk, atop the desk, until she realized she'd been looking at it the whole time. She would remember thinking just how far a single mile felt, as if gravity had suddenly become something other, something to fling her away, rather then keep her on the ground. How close? How close had Mary come?

2:10–5:00 p.m.

D
uring the burglaries, Mary had been cutting class with her neighbor Sofia. They were high on ecstasy they'd gotten from a fellow cheerleader named Chelsea. (“Why do you think I'm always fucking smiling?” she'd said, handing them a tiny baggie in a school bathroom that smelled like matches and face powder.)

Mary and Sofia lay on a faux Oriental rug under the McPhersons' dining-room table, holding hands, letting the drug flood them with warmth and softness, wondering aloud why the underside of the table wasn't stained to match the top.

“Don't you think it's a rip-off?” Mary said. “To not stain the whole thing?”

“Who cares?” said Sofia (whose actual name was Sophea).

“I'm just saying.” Mary lifted her hand, felt the bare wood with her fingertips. It was rough to the touch. “Adults are so stupid.”

An intruder was in the study, tugging a Dell laptop into a cloth gym bag, or maybe it was a pillowcase, snatched from the house next door. While Mary crawled under the table, listening to Coldplay and Aerosmith, the intruder slung Mr. McPherson's iPod into a pocket. The stranger wore Nike Air Max gym shoes (size ten, pebble dash soles). That's all they knew for certain. He swiped Susan McPherson's silver platter off a bookshelf. Mary Elizabeth rolled around in the other room, giggling, beneath the table, completely unaware. Her vision had tinted fuchsia. As she reached for the hand of her sometimes friend Sofia-but-really-Sophea, the intruder snatched Mary's father's engraved Parker pen set (black ink, roller ball tip). No reason to take this except that it could be taken. Computers, iPods, electronics. These had monetary value. Engraved Parker pen sets? That was pure malice.

Little shits, Mary would say to her neighbor Arthur Gardenia later, and he would laugh because he didn't mind her swearing, even though he was old and she was young.
The little shits even took my dad's pen set.
They'd also taken a gold-plated paperweight globe, Michael's brushed-pewter pen/laser printer/flashlight from Brookstone (he was prone, consumeristically speaking, to combo packages), and one collection of silver-dollar coins kept in a ceramic, green bank shaped like a dollar sign. In the garage, two baseball mitts and a baseball, an electric drill, and a bag of beach toys.

They had not noticed anything amiss at first. And they hadn't heard a thing. Thirst drove Mary from under the dining-room table, where they'd been lying for a half hour. Sofia, curled up and giggling, waited for Mary to return with their Diet Cokes. A warmth rose up from Mary's belly and radiated down to her fingertips, everything in soft focus, wrapped in silk. She didn't walk, she danced, she floated, she
sashayed
. Suddenly she was aware of her beauty.
Stunning,
she thought.
I am absolutely stunning.

She saw the police car outside Arthur's house and the warmth ebbed. Were they looking for her? Had someone from school narced on her and Sofia? Were the police now simply going door-to-door to find kids who skipped school? Was there some new underground truancy unit?

“Sofia,” Mary hissed. “Get over here. Sofia!”

“Okay, love,” Sofia sang.

Mary shushed her, though something in her brain managed to confirm there was no way the police could actually hear them. Instinctively they hunched beneath the window.

Sofia gasped, suddenly sobered up.

“I know! WTF!” Mary said. “What do we do?”

The girls spotted two police emerging from Arthur's. One walked next door to where the Francophile chef lived, while the other headed in the exact direction of Mary's front door. Neither girl knew, yet, that it was standard procedure for police to check with neighbors in the immediate aftermath of a home invasion. Once the police established that the McPherson home and the Lenoir home had also been targeted, they wouldn't take long to widen their search area, to cordon off the whole of Ilios Lane, to see that the Rutherford home had been targeted, and the Kowalskis and the Oums and Coens and Pappalardos, one after another after another in lightning succession. But in this moment, Mary was sure these serious-looking police officers making their way toward her home at a jog had been called in by the Oak Park River Forest High School to track down two truants. Sofia cried out and bolted for the back door, leaving Mary standing alone, holding two Diet Cokes. She didn't know whether to wait and answer the door, to run, to ignore it, or to stand stock-still. So she did what any unthinking, terrified teenager might do: grandly attempted to reverse course. Carrying the Cokes, she dashed back to the dining room and, under the table, lay with her arms splayed out sacrificially, breathing like a trapped gazelle.

Then the doorbell rang.

•  •  •

Over the next couple of hours, the police found shoe prints: the Nike Air Max with a pebble dash bottom. Size ten. The prints were twenty feet from where Mary had lain, a radio in the kitchen still turned to 97.9 The Loop. The items taken were only surface things. Things that lay atop shelves and desks. No drawers, no closets, nothing that opened.

He, she, they, those . . . Mary didn't know how to grammatically refer to them—
those
people had robbed the house next to hers, and next door to them, and across the street from her, and next door to him, and next door again, and again, and again. Eight homes in total. The whole of Ilios Lane. Those people would wander across the world, skittering, careening is how Mary imagined them, those people would offer no penitence, no remorse that she would ever see. It didn't matter that crime was down if fear was high. And Mary would learn, not right then, but soon, how one meanness can spur another.

“A crime of opportunity,” one detective told her after he'd arrived at the scene.

What crime isn't a crime of opportunity?
she wanted to ask.

The police asked her what she remembered, and she laughed. She was still rolling hard on ecstasy. What did she remember? She remembered thinking, as she lay beneath the table, how odd it seemed that something as warm as the sun was yellow. Such a thin color, yellow. So layerless. Fuchsia would have been a much better color choice for the sun. Sunsets were God's indecision, Mary had thought. Her mind had then skipped along a series of randomly connected thoughts: She didn't really know if she believed in God. Maybe, Darwin screwed up. But Darwin didn't create the sun. Who did, though?
This clover of thoughts had made her laugh so hard tears had rolled down her face, her temples, and disappeared into the Oriental rug, into her crispy hair as she sometimes called it, and her cheeks had started to hurt. Not because there was anything humorous at all in those disjointed meanderings, but because the questions only led to more and more and more questions, and so the asking of the one felt as endlessly futile and frustrating as utter silence itself.

But she knew enough not to tell this part of the story. She stopped at fuchsia. If the world could be calculated ­mathematically as Mary's algebra teacher always insisted, what was the equation for colors? Darwin would know. What had Darwin looked like with a smile? she wondered. She only remembered pictures of him stern-faced and serious, like that soccer player's wife from En­gland, who always looked to Mary like a cardboard cutout. Thin, sharp-angled, speechless, smileless. No one smiled in pictures from ­Darwin's time. Not like now, when people smiled all the time, smiled even when they didn't feel like smiling. She noticed this about Sofia's mom, who was Cambodian and didn't speak English, but still she smiled so much she appeared simple. It unsettled Mary. Made her consciously not smile back, which seemed the wrong response.

So many police milled around Mary's house she couldn't count them all. One man in gloves spread white powder everywhere searching for more prints. An enormous gray toolbox sat outside the door to the basement. Mary and her mom were stationed in the dining room, at the table, told not to disturb the “ongoing investigation.” Mary imagined herself melding into the chair, starving, dehydrating, while a funnel-shaped investigation raged around her. She imagined the detective returning the next day to find her still there, waiting for her dismissal.

She expected her mother to cry. Not because Susan ­McPherson was prone to tears, necessarily, but because this seemed like the kind of thing that might elicit the waterworks, and indeed Susan had rushed in the door red-rimmed and hysterical. She sprinted toward Mary and threw her arms around her in a kind of suffocating, boa-constrictor way.

“Um. Mom? You're cracking again.” (Which was Mary's code for “crying.” As a toddler, she'd once looked at the blood vessels in the whites of her mother's eyes and declared them “cracks.” Tears, logically, were simply the cracks leaking. Over the years,
cracking
had become a kind of familial shorthand.) Susan kept grabbing at Mary Elizabeth, wiping at her cheek, putting one arm over her shoulder, just
looking
at her over and over as if they were long-lost relations separated by the ravages of war and time. Someone turned off the radio. Susan reached over and touched Mary's hair, pushed it back from her face.

“Mom. Please!” Mary shrugged away.

Susan had always loved her daughter's hair, the thick mass of it. “Strong as Samson,” she used to tell Mary as a child. “That hair makes you
unbreakable
, sweetheart.” Mary had believed it far longer than she should have.

Detective Wasserman interrupted, bent over Mary as if she were hard of hearing. “You just never know how a small thing can be the very thing we need for our big puzzle here.”

A puzzle metaphor. Did he think Mary was an idiot? Did he think she was nine?

She shook her head. The color was still there a little, framing her peripheral vision. A fuchsia mist melted around her mother's worried gaze. Mary saw her mother hold her face in her hands for a moment too long, rub her eyes and grimace for a fraction of a second, washing away an unwanted thought.

Mary's father appeared in the doorway, trench coat slung over his arm, tie loosened, cell phone in hand. “I called State Farm,” he announced in a general directive, as if this were the paramount task that needed to be tackled in that moment. He hugged Susan, and then Mary, but then followed the sound of the detective's voice to the kitchen. Mary heard the footsteps of the investigating police everywhere, clomping on the hardwood. It sounded like ten men, a dozen, two dozen. It sounded like a house party of footsteps. She wanted to go and watch them.

Her father came back into the dining room and asked Mary, “What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”
(Popped E and rolled around under the dining-room table.)

“Why were you here, honey? At home?” asked Susan, reaching again for her daughter, then stopping short of a touch, catching herself and retreating.

“Why?”

“Why weren't you in school?”

That's when it escaped. A bubble of air rising to the surface. A kind of hiccup. A giggle. A gigcup, you might say. Things had been just fine until then. But there it was, unmistakable. It would come to be a great regret. Proof of an inability to control her own body—what came out, what went in. The gigcup had been a result of Mary's flummoxed mind, and in moments it would dawn on the McPherson parents.

“Mary Elizabeth McPherson, what did you see?” Michael McPherson glared down at her with angry, parental eyes.

A shrug. “Fuchsia.”

Detective Wasserman put his hand on Michael's shoulder, compelling him to sit down. Michael reluctantly sat.

An officer peeked his head into the dining room. “Corey in here?”

Detective Wasserman shook his head. The officer disappeared.

“Fuchsia what?” Susan McPherson asked. She appeared to believe this was a clue, something they should perhaps tell Detective Wasserman.

“Just fuchsia.”

“Mrs. McPherson,” the detective said, “please let us finish up here, and then you can ask her anything you want.”

“What do you mean? What does that mean? Were they wearing fuchsia?”

Mr. McPherson's home office and the garage appeared to be the only rooms disturbed in the house. “It's possible that the perpetrators were startled by Mary's presence and fled,” said Wasserman. Mary had seen nothing, sensed nothing. It didn't help that her dad's office was separated from the dining room by both the kitchen
and
the living room. With the radio on, it hardly seemed surprising that Mary had nothing to offer the police.

The evidence technician dropped his brush and it clattered across the wood floor.

Mary Elizabeth put her forehead on the table.

“Are you all right?” Susan put her hand on Mary's thigh. (Mary remembered Susan telling her once that a mother knows the answer to this question before she ever asks. But a mother always asks anyway.)

Michael McPherson was surveying the room. Nothing had been taken. Wasserman told them dining rooms weren't big targets, not like a few decades back when there was a market for secondhand silver and crystal. Now heirlooms were practically worthless. Brides these days wanted exotic vacations, kayaks, pink Cuisinarts. Thieves wanted iPods.

“Where were you exactly?” Detective Wasserman asked.

“Here,” Mary said, tossing her hand vaguely toward the floor, nodding once at the space under the table. Her voice was thin, as if her vocal cords had temporarily walked out on her.

“Where?”

“Here. Right here.”

Two chairs, pulled out slightly. The minute he'd walked in, Michael
knew
there'd been something off about the room. So subtle. But he noticed these things. Once, as an undergraduate, he and some friends had moved every piece of furniture by a single inch in his roommate's bedroom. The roommate never guessed what they'd done. He knew something was wrong—he'd banged his knee on the bed frame when he came in—but he never knew what it was. All semester long it irked him, until he eventually grew used to the difference and the difference became the habitual. One single inch. Could change nothing. Could change everything.