What We've Lost Is Nothing (22 page)

The three Cambodian boys were the first to reach Michael, after Dan fell back from the force of Michael's arm.

The camera never stopped.

Michael's nose was broken.

Mary saw Arthur then, who had come to stand beside her, and she reached for the collar of his Members Only jacket and was suddenly released by Helen and Alicia into Arthur's arms. She did not think of his blindness then. Not that day. But for every day after. How in all the noise, all the chaos, all the injuries and confusion and rage, he had found his way to her.

“Arthur,” she said. “Arthur.”

He did not say,
Sssshhhhhh
. Instead, he whispered in her ear, “Close your eyes.”

And she did.

Caz tore a ligament in his left ankle tripping over the doorframe with Michael McPherson atop his back, and Caz heard a familiar sound, emanating from somewhere behind him though he would not be able to place it for a long time to come. Michael dislocated Caz's jaw and left shoulder, cracked two ribs, and Caz would be unable to talk in his own defense in court. This would understandably make the jury more sympathetic, and so for those few weeks he was thankful for the injury. It was the only time in his life he would be given the benefit of the doubt, the only time in his life he would be the recipient of empathy. His jaw would heal cockeyed, just two small millimeters off course, so that he appeared always to be grinding his teeth, to be thinking every possible thing through, even the smallest, most inconsequential thing (rum and Coke, or Jack and Coke? Marlboro Reds or Camels? Doggy or missionary?). Later, driving a truck across country just as his father had, he would earn the nickname Gnarly, not as in cool dude, but as in gnarled. As in twisted limb and jagged root. He would never tell the story of Michael McPherson, of how he got a gnarled jaw, and that sound—what
was
that sound? Both familiar and distant—would haunt him. Of his scar, he would fabricate a story about an ice-hockey pickup game, the fucking puck coming right toward him. Bam!
Into the jaw.
Bam! The story he told. The story would feel real after a dozen tellings, after he'd lived a dozen years, after a woman whose name he couldn't at first remember would give birth to a little girl she claimed was his, and it would turn out to be true, and he would remember that afternoon and he would finally know that if he couldn't ever forgive Michael McPherson, he could at least understand. He'd feel the urge to find Mary, to search for her and look her up and apologize, and every few years the urge would overtake him, but he would drink it away. He'd visit with his daughter as she grew and he'd vow to protect her in his quiet moments, in front of mirrors, or driving down long stretches of highway parting Midwestern cornfields. He'd keep her away from boys like him. He would make this vow as Mary's father had once done, and so many other fathers across time and history, because they believe themselves somehow stronger than the forces of the world. They make their vows and still their daughters are never safe.

Then one day in a flash it would come to him. The sound he'd heard. The familiarity. Mary's screaming, Mary's sobbing. He'd heard it once before. From another woman he'd known. His mother. No one would have to tell him that trauma and memory were not false, not for the weakhearted. No one would have to tell him what he'd done and what he'd lived through. It would come to him at once, a weight so overpowering and so overwhelming he would suddenly understand them all—his mother, his father, his own past, his daughter and her future, and what he'd taken from Mary, and he would give in. Give up. His body would not be found for days.

The police were quick to come. This was Ilios Lane, after all. This was one day past
the
day. This was a street, Sary would later say, where the ghosts were thick with rage. Sofia watched her three cousins make their way to Michael McPherson with determined strides.
I should stop them,
she thought, one second too late.

“Get off me, you goddamned dropouts,” Michael yelled to the Cambodian boys. The boys who were winners of merit scholarships and travel grants. The boys who were bilingual and averaged, collectively, 3.8 GPAs. “Get the hell off me.” He swung his arm just to break free, he would tell the police, would tell Detective Wasserman. He wasn't trying to harm the boys. His only focus was on Caz, the rapist. The word would make Mary Elizabeth flinch. She wouldn't know if it was an accurate description of Caz for many years.

The three Cambodians converged on Michael, pulled him off Caz, who sat dazed on the cold ground in front of the McPherson house with his belt unbuckled and blood splattered down his olive-green T-shirt, his jaw slack and hanging, dizziness surrounding him.

An ambulance was called. The cousins jumped Michael, and in a rush of adrenaline he lashed through the air. Ken, who weighed no more than 110 pounds (less than the tensile strength of a pair of Levi's), flew off Michael's arm like a balled-up wad of paper and hit his head on the sidewalk, and it bounced up once and came to rest at the foot of Paul Patterson, whose camera panned over Ken's body from his tennis shoes, up his torn jeans and across his unbuttoned flannel shirt, and up to his blood-soaked bandanna.

His concussion was the opposite of minor. A blunt-trauma head wound. A hospital stay and a high school career extended by one semester. His concussion would slur his speech, blur his vision for months. It would end the budding friendship between Mary Elizabeth and his cousin, Sofia, and render Michael McPherson—from the standpoint of American actuaries and their risk graphs and their forecasting charts—an uninsurable homeowner for the rest of his life.

Wasserman arrived moments after the first police cruiser, followed immediately by one ambulance and then another (the following month, Paul Patterson would be offered a job on WGN news).

“It's not what it looks like,” Michael said to Wasserman. He was out of breath, but already his hands had been cuffed behind him, his face sheened in sweat, blood spattered from his nose down his shirt, one eye bloodshot.

“You can open your eyes now,” Arthur whispered to Mary.

The human cacophony stopped abruptly.

“I'd advise you to keep quiet, Mr. McPherson,” Detective Wasserman said.

“That
boy—
”

“For your
own
good. Take my advice now on this, Mr. McPhe­rson.”

Wasserman scanned the scene. The McPherson girl looked disheveled, her eyes—clenched shut when he'd arrived—were open now and staring at her father. The blind man across the street was beside her, gently holding her hand. A young Asian boy Wasserman had never before seen had paramedics hovering over him. They shone a light first in one eye, then the other. Another boy with long, stringy hair lay strapped to a gurney, his head secured in a neck brace. It was, Wasserman knew,
exactly
what it looked like. He nodded toward the officer holding Michael's arm. The officer led Michael to the police cruiser, and Michael turned around and saw that Mary was beside Arthur, and even though Michael knew Arthur could not see him do so, he mouthed a thank-you to the old man.

The verdict was guilty.

Caz was a minor by a year. His prior record made the judge go easy on Michael McPherson. The lack of a prior record for Ken, in turn, made the judge go harder on Michael McPherson. His wife's long-standing favor in the community coupled with her injury would also make the judge go easy on Michael McPherson. The loss of his daughter, wholly and completely, went unnoticed by anyone except Michael McPherson. At the end, the score would be even—two easies, two hards. Two boys injured. Two women lost.

Probation. Two years. Thirty days' jail time. The judge let Mary Elizabeth, after pleading and begging and writing a letter on her own behalf, have Arthur stay with her for those thirty days, and in that time she learned to live in the dark, and eventually she would seek out the darkest places she could find. She'd write a dissertation about Bosnian women refugees in Chicago, about how trauma skips a generation and embeds itself in the generational memories of grandsons and granddaughters, and she would be given a grant from the National Science Foundation to continue her research on women from Burma, from Iraq, from Syria and Afghanistan and Somalia and Rwanda, and always she would seek out the darkness. She would replace her own story with the stories of women she met who'd lived through worse. She'd think of Arthur. All the time, Arthur. But she'd never ask the question again. Of herself. Of ­anyone.

The burglaries were forgotten in the wake of an adult's ­beating—
beating
—two minors. The minors were never named. Alleged sexual assault was never proven.

Mary Elizabeth would recognize in herself the inability to speak at moments of heightened tension. She would warn would-be suitors about this characteristic. She would avoid action movies and horror movies because they made her too tense. She would engage in yoga and meditation, in college and then in graduate school. She would always want quiet. Music rarely played in her house. She lived on quiet streets, on dead ends or in buildings set back from the road. Nightclubs, concerts, and sporting events were generally off-putting to her. She lived in a calm and steady darkness that she'd learned from Arthur Gardenia.

“It's almost,” she later said, “it's almost like noise erases me.”

But on that day she stood in the foyer, watching first with the arms of her neighbors around her, then Arthur's hand in hers, and she knew her father had said, in fists and in rage, what she had been unable to:
No. Not this time. Not Mary Elizabeth McPherson.
This wouldn't heal her. This wouldn't make their relationship smooth and easy, but it would be an image, a moment for her to remember, to recall in times of doubt. To Mary, it seemed suddenly that her father fought a lot of things. He fought people and their ideas, he fought his wife, his children. He fought her. He fought his career and his inertia of failure and much of the movement of life around him. He fought his boss, he fought his clients, he fought utility companies and bureaucracy and neighbors. He fought illness in others, and in himself. He fought crabgrass and weeds and overheated radiators. He fought banks and credit-card charges. He fought his own heart, his own mind, his own desires. Sometimes, it seemed, he'd take on the sun if he thought it might fight fairly. But this moment, this day, captured digitally and played over and over again in evening-news cycles—a man collapsing under the pressure of his home's burglary, said the media's logic—on this afternoon before news of her mother reached them, before her father's arrest and sentencing, before they moved and everything changed and she never saw a single Ilios Lane resident again, she had this image:

Her father.

One single afternoon.

Enraged.

And fighting for her.

Thursday, April 8, 2004, 6:30 p.m.

W
hen Susan finally opened her eyes, she could feel a crust around her eyelashes, and someone had removed her contacts so that the whole room was blurry. To her right, her daughter sat in a chair staring at her own knees, her shoulders arching forward as if the weight of her body were too much to hold up. She wore her winter fleece, even though Susan thought the room was too warm. She wanted to tell her daughter to sit up straight, to look ahead, but a searing pain in her thigh caught her breath and she inhaled sharply, and Mary suddenly looked up at her, and that's when Susan noticed someone else in the room, someone who wasn't Michael, though she could not make out who it was until he spoke.

“It's best if you lie still,” Arthur said. “Just try to relax, Susan.”

Mary seemed to be vibrating in her chair, her whole body in a kind of quiet movement. Arthur Gardenia sat next to her, and Susan had no idea why. She could feel the irritation of a breathing tube in her nose, and her thighs itched furiously, which was a result of the morphine, though she did not yet know this.

Arthur told her about her injuries. A dislocated hip and broken femur. A cracked rib, a small tear in her earlobe. Pins in her leg. A smooth-as-could-be-expected operation. A long road ahead of her, certainly, but no reason she couldn't expect to make a full recovery. On a far table she could see colorful blobs, flower baskets it seemed, and a couple of pink and yellow balloons.

“Your cheek,” Mary said, “it's like really swollen. But don't freak out. The doctor said it'll be fine.”

Susan finally managed a word: “Cheek.”

“It was pretty bloody.”

Susan nodded. “Water.”

Mary took a plastic cup from the bedside table and bent a straw toward her mother's mouth. Susan tried not to gulp, but she was so very, very thirsty. Outside her door she heard someone call out, “That's okay, honey,” and break into laughter. Footsteps faded away. This was the first time, Susan realized, that she'd been in a hospital bed since Mary had been born, and now here was that same tiny baby, grown-up and helping her own mother drink. Susan had to concentrate hard not to cry. What had she done with all those years? She could not remember anything between that seven-pound baby and this fifteen-year-old girl. Nothing of Mary's childhood came into her mind, and she felt a tiny panic spring in her belly. Then an image came to her, a mermaid cake, a child's birthday, and she relaxed a little.

Susan could feel her hair matted to her forehead, to the pillow. Pastel wallpaper spanned the room, a peach curtain separating her bed from another patient's. She smelled dried sweat and ammonia and then something else, something delicious, like garlic and cheese and other things she had no names for in her blurry state.

“I slept at Arthur's last night,” Mary said.

Susan understood that her daughter was speaking to her, but the room was strange, as if the walls were unsound, as if they might collapse on her. Where was Michael? she wondered. Talking to the doctor? Looking for a parking spot? Out getting coffee in the hospital's cafeteria? She began to remember, to put it all together. The burglaries. Her daughter home. Safe. And not safe. It seeped back in. The missing pieces of her recent life, how she'd rushed home from the office and run toward Mary, even as she saw that her daughter was unharmed. How she felt for a moment as if she'd always be running, trying to outrun, outmaneuver, outsmart, anything that came near her daughter. Then the boys. And the wolves. And she remembered, all of it.

“It's just temporary,” Arthur said. “Until you're home.” They'd move a bed into the living room of the McPherson home, he said, so Susan wouldn't have to navigate the stairs. And Arthur would be there. Yes, he would. Even a blind man could stick dishes in the dishwasher, he'd said, and smiled. Toss some clothes into a machine. Michael, well. That's all Arthur could say about him.

“It's been quite a while since I had the great opportunity to offer help to someone else,” he told her. “I'm not much of a cook, but I'm quite adept at opening cans.” Then he pushed a small bag toward her on her tray table and the food smells grew stronger. She noticed Mary nodding at everything Arthur said. She was wearing an oversize men's flannel shirt that Susan recognized from Michael's closet.

“And Étien—Edward. Mr. Lenoir. He brought over a bunch of food earlier today. Tons, actually,” Mary said. “He's starting a whole new restaurant. He told me and Arthur. It's like some kind of fancy hamburger place.”

“He knew the hospital food would be ghastly,” said Arthur. “He's asked us all to be culinary guinea pigs for some new grand idea he's not quite unveiled.”

“Michael, well?” Susan said. Such small talk. What was it all about? A machine beeped rhythmically, something squeaked in the hallway.

Arthur and Mary exchanged looks, and Susan suddenly suspected that the conversation they were having had nothing to do with food or beds or care, and that her husband, Michael, was not speaking with the doctor or getting coffee in the cafeteria or trying to find a spot on the street to avoid a large parking fee. The specifics were lost on her, but she felt a heaviness in the room, as if the edges of the television and the tray table and the bed, and the doorframe and even her neighbor and her daughter, had trailed off into the distance. What might have happened if she hadn't gone for a run? If she had just once remembered to bring her cell phone? The smallest decision, the smallest step to the left, or to the right, the smallest remembrance, the smallest moment, in anyone's life can upend so much more. One small inch. Could change everything. If she reached out, if she touched her daughter on the knee, on the leg, on the hand, just anywhere she could reach, could her daughter hold that tiny touch forever?

“You were very lucky,” Arthur told Susan. “Very lucky someone was right there when you were hit. Called 911 immediately after the damn driver sped off. Do you remember being hit by the car?”

A nurse barreled into the room and announced himself as Todd. “Glad to see you're awake, Mrs. McPherson.”

Susan managed a half smile, but she was trying to remember what Arthur had just said. About someone calling 911.

Todd looked at her chart, lifted one side of her blanket, and peeked at the cast. He took her pulse.

“You'll surely be feeling yourself soon, so don't you be afraid to ask for something, you got me? That pain'll hit you like a train wreck.”

Susan nodded. She understood, then. Not that she'd be feeling
like
herself soon, but that she'd be
feeling
herself soon, her broken body. She found herself wanting to say, almost like a confession to Todd, that she had not quite felt herself for a little while now.

Todd winked at Mary, said he'd be back in a while, and disappeared out the door.

Then Susan allowed her mind to remember, the secret she would never share. The Eternal Boys. The wolves. “Who called 911?” she slurred, her lips thick and dry.

“I don't know,” Arthur said. “A young boy. Stayed with you till the ambulance came. The driver said he had you in his lap, talking to you like you were his own mother. Telling you to keep yourself strong, keep on breathing. Said he'd learned CPR after his brother was shot, some years back. Didn't need it for you, thank God.”

Just one. Eternal Boy. Who would not leave her.

She saw her head in his lap.

She heard him talk to her.

Susan felt her eyes grow warm, felt the tears rise up from where she lay.

“You're cracking again, Mom.” Mary's voice was dry and monotone, and Susan realized that Mary, too, was crying.

Mary had never seen her mother cry like this. It made her think of a cavern, the endless space of something hollow and shapeless and infinite.

“I don't believe they got the boy's name,” Arthur said.

Of course they didn't. The world was full of ghosts and spirits, things they once held that were gone, and things intangible, equally gone. Because it wasn't the items in their homes they'd lost, Susan would someday think, it was their own tiny empires. Their own lost cities.

Mary reached out and covered her mother's hand with her own, then scooted her chair over and lay, forehead down, on the mattress at Susan's shoulder. Mary's body shuddered. Susan could not remember the last time her daughter had reached for her.

“Tell me,” Susan said, reaching her left hand across her own body and touching Mary's kinky, curly hair, the thick mass her daughter hated so much, the strength of Samson, which was—they both knew—just the kind of tall tale a child believes for far too long, “tell me everything that happened.”