What We've Lost Is Nothing (7 page)

7:25 p.m.

A
rthur loved to walk at night. The later the better. Tonight, however, with a smattering of news vans still parked outside, Michael McPherson had called a meeting of the neighbors, an
action committee
he'd said, and Arthur was steeling himself to go. He barely knew his neighbors. There was Étienne, the restaurateur next door. And there were the McPhersons and Mary Elizabeth, of course, whom he knew better than anyone else. There were the couple with the barking dog, the immigrant family, the family recently separated with the father left behind. But they were more or less anonymous people to Arthur.

Somewhere in an alley several streets over, he detected a garbage truck and the soft whoosh of a car. He could hear ambient talking, a collective of voices—police officers outside, neighbors, newscasters, cameramen, gawkers.

The police were gone from his house and already a locksmith had installed a shiny, new door lock. He didn't worry that he'd be burglarized again. And he didn't care about most of the stolen items—the old speakers and the handheld voice recorder for auditory notes. The half-drunk bottles of rum and vodka. An answering machine that he hadn't used in years. A handful of CDs and the electronic photo album his sister had made for him several Christmases ago. It was the small stack of Mole­skine notebooks ­fifteen, sixteen years old that he'd kept beside the answering machine on the counter and which represented perhaps five years of speechprint work. He'd always thought of photocopying them, of hiring a transcriptionist in case of a fire. But burglary? Of personal handwritten notebooks? If he were the police, he'd dismiss such an item outright. Who goes into a pawnshop in search of used notebooks? What was the street value for such a personal item? Arthur fought waves of nausea and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. He couldn't even search for them himself, his vision was too poor. They were simply gone.

He sat on his bed, fighting a growing sense of helplessness, waiting, it might seem, until the sanctity of his haven was restored, the one place he felt he could emerge from his own helplessness. This, too, he had to admit, was what had been invaded. Not his home, but his sense of security. He did not want to walk tonight, and he did not want to go to Michael McPherson's meeting because he did not want to face the emptiness of his own downstairs, the bleak square where his notebooks once sat.

Normally, Arthur loved the night. The full silence of it. Cars, birds, sirens, voices, they were all packed up and put away till morning. In all the years he'd lived on Ilios Lane, he'd never had a problem until today. He'd pass the occasional dog walker, or the occasional teenager sneaking home after curfew. But generally Arthur was alone, and he knew the shape of every house, the smell of every garden, every rose and trellis.

He remembered the first night he met Mary Elizabeth McPherson. He was out for a walk, rounding the corner of Taylor Street, when he knocked into her on the sidewalk. She was carrying a half gallon of milk and a Snickers. She recognized Arthur as the recluse who lived across the street and assumed him to be lost. She offered to walk with him.

“I live across the street,” she told him. “Across from your house.” When he failed to respond, she added, “Michael and Susan's daughter? McPherson? My name's Mary Elizabeth.”

It was late, and Arthur felt a reluctant responsibility to walk the girl home. Her hair was a dark nimbus, a single organism that reminded him of the kind of earthy, ordinary girl who has just one small otherworldly quality. Perhaps, he thought, she was scared to be out alone and was too proud to properly request a chaperone, and in this way, each believed one was the other's protector.

“I don't see you out very much.” Mary Elizabeth was quiet for a few seconds, then added, “You're like a recluse.”

Arthur smiled. Stars poked through the nighttime clouds. “I'm the terrifying man in the movie. The one in the haunted house who scares little children and keeps skulls in his basement?”

“I guess.” Mary Elizabeth laughed. “He scares little kids, but he always turns out to be, like, lonely and misunderstood, right? Like Edward Scissorhands?”

They walked on, their rubber-soled shoes in step with each other.

“Don't worry,” Mary said. “I don't think you're terrifying. My mom told me you were blind.”

Arthur liked the quiet slap of her tennis shoes against the sidewalk. The gentle, rhythmic sound had just the hint of a person, a contour. He hated the hard, abrasive soles of business shoes and cowboy boots on concrete.

“You walk pretty well for someone who's blind. You don't have a dog or one of those tapping sticks or anything.” She wanted to ask him, but didn't, if he ever fell off curbs or walked into signposts. She suppressed a laugh at the image.

“Goodness, no! But perhaps that's because I'm not quite entirely blind, you see. Especially at night.” He explained hemeralopia to her. By the time he was finished, they'd arrived on the corner of Ilios Lane, just in front of Mary Elizabeth's house. She showed no sign of retreating inside. It must have been after ten, Arthur figured. Far too late for a schoolgirl to be out.

“It's weird when you think about it,” Mary Elizabeth said. “How you're blind and also not blind. It's like a superhero power.”

Arthur laughed. Her frames of reference seemed limited to movies and cartoons, and he wondered how much the girl read. So few young people read books anymore, it seemed. “How so?”

“Well, you can sometimes see and sometimes not see. I guess it would be more of a power if you could turn it on and off. Like if you're in love and you see your girlfriend with another guy, you can just turn off your eyes so you won't have to see it.” She flopped down on the grass in front of him, tossing her milk onto its side. The candy bar had disappeared.

Arthur rubbed his hands together to stave off a chill, unable to bring himself to sit on the grass beside her. Instead, he leaned on her mailbox: 103 Ilios Lane.

“I guess that's pretty stupid,” Mary Elizabeth said.

“Not at all. In a way, I suppose it does give me certain, shall we say, power. Not power exactly. But I have perceptions that most people don't.”

“Like what?”

“Like what. Well, I've learned to listen to the way people talk and
how
we say what we say.”

Mary Elizabeth plucked a handful of grass and began to tear the blades down the middle, discarding one and starting another in that teenage way of absent destruction. “So, like, do I have a weird way of talking?”

“Well, it's difficult for me to listen to you linguistically and socially at the same time. You certainly have your own unique linguistic rhythm. But I couldn't write out the pattern just yet.”

“Why would anyone do that? It sounds totally boring.” She lay back and rested on her elbows. She wore an oversize flannel shirt and jeans with carnation-pink Chuck Taylors.

“Boring is relative. I'd hardly find a high school social engaging.”

“They're not called
socials.
”
Mary laughed. She waved her fingers through the coolness of the grass surrounding her. “It must be pretty bad, being blind. I mean, it's cool that you have this whole language thing, but still . . . it must suck to be . . . blind. I'd rather lose my taste buds.”

Arthur shifted on the mailbox and it creaked. The conversation made him think back to that first year, when he thought his life was over. He tried not to remember that year. He'd been offered prescriptions for how to go on living, as if anyone knew what he was up against. No one, not his sister, not his former colleagues, not his doctors, not a single person in Arthur's life, ever said what this young girl said to him. This stinks.

“I can say this much. I'd never hear the things I hear without having lost the ability to see the things I once saw.” Arthur couldn't decide if he sounded wise or just old.

Mary Elizabeth put her head back and looked up toward the sky. A plane quietly made its way across the horizon. “Still, aren't you mad about it? Mad at God or whatever?”

“In order to be mad at God, one must first believe in God. And if I believed in God, my dear, I'd be questioning a good many other things about the world than just my own burdens.”

A silence settled between them and Arthur realized that he did not feel uneasy with her. He heard a scratching sound, a squirrel or a cat on tree bark. He wondered why Mary Elizabeth didn't stand up to leave, why she possibly wanted to sit here talking to him. Surely she had scores of friends her own age, boys to chat with late into the night.

“I have this theory,” Arthur said finally, “that the world is divided into two kinds of people. Those who can answer one single question immediately and those who cannot. And those who
can
answer it experience life very differently than those who cannot. It's a very dear price, but I think they get to live a larger life.”

Mary Elizabeth stared at him. “Well? What's the question?”

The headlights of a car cruising down Taylor Street illuminated her face for an instant. He yearned to know the color of her eyes. He wondered if Mary would remember him twenty, thirty, forty years from now, when she sent her own daughter out for milk. If she'd remember this tiny moment in their lives. “The question is this.” He leaned in just a fraction toward her. “What's the worst thing that ever happened to you?”

He paused for a moment of drama before straightening up again.

“You went blind,” Mary Elizabeth shouted in the excitable manner of a game-show contestant. She'd answered in a second.

“Ding, ding,” Arthur said, tapping his nose. “I did.”

“That's the worst thing that ever happened to you.”

“Yes.”

She felt the dew from the grass slowly seeping into her jeans and wished she were curled up under the paisley covers of her own bed. Arthur stopped leaning on the mailbox, started to offer her his hand.

“Arthur,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Is it bad that I can answer for you . . . but not for me?”

http://www.oakpark.com/Community/Blogs/04-07-2004/OP
-lost_nothing_-_ robbed:

What We've Lost Is Nothing

Candy Kane, blogger

I can't sleep. Perhaps many of you cannot, either. If I'm honest, I don't know whether it's sympathy for the Ilios Lane families who lost so much, or if it's fear that I'm next. That my friends or family are next. How terrified we are of their tragedy (“But by the grace of God,” we say, though who's to say a couple of them didn't have the grace of God?).

We say they're lucky, don't we—especially the daughter home alone. No one was injured. It was only “stuff” those families lost. But I don't think that's true. Our homes are the haven of a heartless world, are they not? The place we are most ourselves. What happens when some uninvited person invites himself in?

Yes, I said
him
. I cannot imagine a woman committing such a crime. Maybe this is small of me. Guess it's kinda sexist—and here, in this diverse community, we like to believe we have moved past all that. But have we? I'm awake here, at nearly midnight, and I'm just really wondering.

Who were these thieves? What desperation, what desire, led them to such an act? How many thieves were there? Did they go to each house together, or have a ratio of thieves-to-households? One thief to two law-abiders? Were they after the stuff or the big giant story of it all? Did they target our community because of who we are? Because of what we believe? Worst of all to me to think . . . are the thieves now watching the local news, seeing their victims all upset and everything, and . . . laughing?

Even the stoic Ilios Lane resident from the news tonight—I can't remember his name (Mark? Michael? something like that . . . )—even he might recognize, in time, that what he's lost is actually quite something.

7:50 p.m.

M
ichael and Susan McPherson had gone from house to house in the hours after the robbery and invited the neighbors to a meeting at their home. Their street was still blocked off with police tape. As Michael and Susan walked, he put his arm around her. He felt the flash of cameras, the eyes of a dozen reporters following them from one door to the next. Every neighbor they'd spoken with had agreed to come by.

Michael McPherson had barely talked to Mary Elizabeth since she'd admitted to playing hooky and taking ecstasy. She refused to reveal whom she had been with.

“I'm already grounded for a month,” she'd said, laughing. “What're you going to do? Ground me for like a year if I don't tell you? Ground me till college?”

In a stroke of dumb luck, Mary may well have scared the faceless bandits away before they could steal more. And there were worse places she could have gone while cutting class. Michael didn't like what she'd done, certainly, but he was relieved she'd come home instead of wandering to the house of someone he didn't know, or taking the train in to some seedy section of the city. Now that the burglary had happened in this same space, how could Michael McPherson—amid the chaos—convince Mary that this was still her safe haven?

He had to wonder, had they really lost
nothing
, as he'd said to the media? Or had they lost something so enormous there existed no name for it?

Michael was having trouble reconciling the impotence he felt over failing to keep his family safe with the impotence he felt over failing to coax the full truth from his daughter. She refused to identify whom she had done ecstasy with. The way he saw it, she owed it to him to tell him everything. This was the hierarchy of parent-child relationships. One didn't need another reason.

“Look, Dad,” Mary had said, “I totally get why you want me to tell you, but I promised her, and you've always told me I should be loyal. You said loyalty is the hardest thing to get back from people once you've betrayed them.”

“Loyalty to your
family
,” he'd said.

Michael wished he were better with words. He didn't know how to handle Mary's insurrection. The great secret of parents, he realized, was just how powerless they really were.

The day Mary Elizabeth had been born, he remembered how Susan had cried; and he'd forced himself to cry with her.

“I know,” he'd said to Susan, smiling, hugging her.

Susan shook her head.

He sat back, then, stopped hugging her, and balanced on the edge of her hospital bed, thinking,
Hormones.
They'd been through it once already, with Thomas, three years earlier. In tears one minute and hysterical laughter the next.

“I'm crying,” she said, “because I can't think of a single place in the world that I can make safe enough for her.”

Now Mary Elizabeth was practically an adult, and the world seemed a more dangerous place. Michael remembered something that Susan had once said, when both the kids were small. How one of the scariest days for a parent wasn't when your kids got their driver's license or left home for college. It was when you realized their sense of logic and reason matched yours.

“You never specified
family
loyalty,” Mary had said. “You only said loyalty.”

Michael focused his eyes on her, tried to make his face stern enough to intimidate her into confessing. “Well, that loyalty includes a responsibility to tell the truth.”

“I
have
told the truth. Not telling you the name isn't lying. It's just not telling you the name. You can't just invent what you think truth is.”

“Watch your tone, young lady.”

“Yeah, okay, so if Mom went to the store and bought milk, eggs, and bread, and you asked what she bought and she said, ‘Milk and bread,' would she be lying because she totally left out the eggs?”

“Don't be ridiculous, Mary.”

“Seriously, Dad. I'm seeking your parental
wisdom
here. Would she? 'Cause the rules are a little unclear.”

Susan came into the dining room and led Michael out. It was best to let it go for now, she convinced him. They could dole out a punishment later. Susan had been in his office halfheartedly cleaning fingerprint dust. It found its way everywhere, onto tall shelves, into crevices, between the planks of the hardwood floor; places that hadn't been touched in years and years.

“There are bigger things to worry about right now,” she reminded him.

Michael always felt Susan was too easy on the kids—Mary Elizabeth and Thomas, who was now at the University of Illinois in Champaign. Michael would deal with the Mary situation once this neighborhood fiasco had died down. It was up to the McPherson family to show a united front.

When Michael and Susan stopped at the Cambodians' house, the father had had to call his daughter, Sofia, to come translate. Michael explained slowly, but beyond the door, as he invited them to the meeting, he could see an older teenage boy that he recognized from other visits. Michael was not introduced. He'd heard that the boy and his two brothers lived somewhere in the city, but they came every few days, their arrivals announced with blaring rap music out the open windows—even in winter—of a rusting Pontiac. The boy was wearing a stained tank top with an unbuttoned flannel shirt and a bandanna around his forehead; he served something cloudy in a glass—cider? Scotch?—to Sofia's mother, who sat on the floor, her back against the couch. She took the glass and nodded a weary thanks.

“So you'll come with your parents?” Susan asked Sofia, making sure she'd be there to translate. “Maybe about eight?”

Sofia nodded.

Michael saw the boy scowl and look in their direction, then quickly turn away. His jeans were torn at both knees, two of the belt loops dangling by mere threads.

“That your brother?” Michael gestured toward the boy. He knew that Sofia didn't have any siblings.

“Cousin.”

“Cousin, yes,” Michael said. Susan gently pulled at him to leave. “Is he in high school, too, then? Somewhere around here?”

The boy turned for a moment and gave Michael a deliberate stare. Then he disappeared farther into the living room.

“Michael?” Susan said, pulling harder.

Michael craned his neck searching for the boy, but couldn't see him. “You were in school today, then, right?” he called loudly.

Susan gasped, yanked on her husband's arm.

“We'll see you tonight, Mr. McPherson,” Sofia said. Michael was sure he saw fear in her eyes just before she shut the door.

•  •  •

Now, Michael stood before the bathroom mirror thinking about what he'd say when the neighbors came. He cleared his throat, tilted his head back, and began to floss. He had a constellation of shaving bumps on his neck.
What we've lost is nothing . . . compared to what we'll lose if we don't unite.
That was good. He'd try to remember that.
. . . Unite or we'll lose. . . .
He jotted it down on a notepad by the sink.
What we need is a task force.

After all, Michael's entire professional mandate involved connections. His company, Lowry Brothers, made modular steel bridges. They weren't beautiful bridges by any stretch, but they were resilient in times of chaos. Natural disasters, infrastructure improvements, war . . . those were the moments that called for the modular steel bridge. Michael reasoned that the invention of the modular had been akin to the invention of plastic or Ziploc bags or the microwave oven. It made people's lives so seamlessly easier, they had hardly noticed. The modular bridge was still utilitarian, yes, but this very element, Michael believed, was most relevant to their situation.

He dabbed a quarter-size dollop of Brylcreem into his cropped, wiry hair. The McPherson hair, Mary hated it. “It's like inheriting debt, instead of some rich aunt's estate,” she'd once complained on a particularly humid day. Then she rolled her eyes—how
do
teenagers become so adept at that skill?—and left the room. He'd never admitted to her how much he hated it, too.

“Your hair is part of your identity,” he'd yelled. “It makes you a McPherson. You should be proud of it!”

Mary had circled back to his room. Her look was toxic. When was it that children took flight from their parents? Michael suspected it was far earlier than anyone ever cared to admit, five, six years old.

Mary, it seemed to him, had been born taking flight.

“But, Dad,” she'd said, “what if you're exactly the person I don't want to be like?”

He washed the Brylcreem off his hands, made a final adjustment to his tie. The doorbell rang and he heard Susan's steps across the linoleum downstairs. The neighbors had begun to arrive. He wondered if Sofia would bring her cousin, and where he'd been all day.