What We've Lost Is Nothing (9 page)

9:50 p.m.

O
n the flight from Miami to Chicago, Dan Kowalski had attempted to make a list to coordinate his upcoming investigation, while Alicia dozed beside him, the Xanax making her snore gently. Perhaps
investigation
was too large a word . . . his own, as he'd call it,
poking around
. He'd follow the police on their leads, but he needed to look up the crime stats of his neighborhood. How many of those crimes were solved? How many had turned violent? As both a known local media voice
and
now a victim, surely he could get a level of access like no one else. Maybe his story would surpass just a recounting of the investigation, maybe it could say something about all of them, the progressive politics of Oak Park as it abutted this new crime wave (could he call it a crime wave? Could that be fact-checked?). Maybe he could even look beyond the
Oak Park
Outlook
and go to the
Chicago
Tribune.
Of course he would start with the police. He knew a fair number of them from his
Village Life and Letters column.

He had to wonder—though he'd never say it aloud—where had all his neighbors been? Not that he was blaming his fellow victims. But the Cambodians, were they even legal? Did they even speak English? He wasn't a great proponent of hard-line assimilation—live and let live in the US of A—but perhaps just a small starter course of sorts wouldn't hurt? There was no blame here, but for all he knew, they were living among fugitives.

From O'Hare, Dan and Alicia sat anxiously in the backseat of the taxi. They were nearly home now, waiting at the light at the off-kilter intersection of Harlem and Chicago Avenues. “I hate this intersection. In a town built on the grid system, how do you mess that up?” he asked Alicia, as they waited for the light to change.

“You ask me that every single time, Dan.”

“Yes. Because I still don't have the answer.”

She glanced out the window. A tiny woman, hunched over and still wearing a winter coat in the spring weather, filled her gas tank at the station on the corner.

“I mean, seriously. I'm just saying, how hard could it have been?”

“Every. Single. Time.” Alicia said very, very quietly.

Dan thought of the flatscreen television—George had already told them it was gone. Along with his Xbox and his set of beer coolers from Bali. Alicia's parents had given them the television on their tenth wedding anniversary, two years earlier. He'd resented it at first. Were they suggesting Alicia and Dan couldn't afford to buy one themselves? But, as usual, Dan had been charmed by Alicia's father, who'd joked that it was a reward for enduring a decade under the same roof as Alicia. The
Reed
women, George had said, laughing, placing an unspoken verdict on his own wife's maternal line, as if he and his son-in-law were doing the world a
favor
by taking Arlene and Alicia and the mothers and grandmothers who preceded them (Ada and Beatrice and Irma, et cetera) off the matrimonial market. Dan had laughed, nodded knowingly, then felt a mild twinge of guilt for not standing up for his wife. But even Alicia admitted that she was, in her words, “just this side of crazy.” It hadn't taken Dan long to thoroughly enjoy the new television, which had a sharp, luminous picture. Almost like a cinema display, Dan learned. High-definition. And cinema quality came at a price.

Unable to sleep on the plane, he'd already begun a column about the burglary, conscripting the words of his neighbor, Michael McPherson, after he heard them on the news.
What w
e
've lost is nothing,
Dan began,
but more important, what those thieves do
n
't know is who the
y
're really dealing with here. We are not an easily intimidated people. We are more than neighbors. We are friends. We are community. We are people who band together in adversity. What's happened to our little street is a tragedy, but it's a tragedy of 
. . .
That's where he got stuck. A tragedy of opportunity? The sentence carried too much drag. Maybe he'd write about the takeaways, the lessons parents could impart. Oak Parkers loved to talk about lessons for children. Not that he and Alicia had any. But children were good. Children resonated.

The taxi rounded Taylor Street, and Dan began to make a mental list of his contacts at Village Hall. Suddenly he realized Alicia had been talking to him, and he had no idea what she'd said.

“I'm not sure,” he said, hoping the generic response would suffice.

“Oh my God, Dan?!” Alicia said. The light turned green and the taxi lurched forward. “How can you be so cavalier?”

Dan noticed a vein in Alicia's forehead begin to pulse, which happened whenever her blood pressure rose.

“I mean, if the old lock didn't keep them out, how can a new lock keep them out? It's totally stupid. Maybe this was just a precursor, a kind of warning.”

He noticed she'd begun to shake. “Burglars never hit the same house twice,” he blurted. He hoped this sounded less the obvious fabrication it was and more the comfort he'd been shooting for.

“You don't know that, Dan. You don't know.” Her voice rose, she turned toward him and her eyes had a kind of wildness.

He wondered how long she'd been talking to him before he tuned in. He wished he were a better listener, a better husband. He'd never been good in emergencies. He froze rather than acted. He'd climbed a tree with a friend once as a kid, maybe they were six or seven, and the kid fell out of the tree as might have been predicted, and he broke his wrist and lay on the ground writhing while Dan sat in the tree staring down, frozen into a kind of stupor. A neighbor, finally, came out and saw the boy and called an ambulance.

“Alicia, calm down.”

“What if this was something, I don't know, something to see if they could pull it off? What if there's an even bigger plan sometime in the future? I know they won't come back tonight, but what about next month? Next year? How can we know?”

The taxi was nearing their street and Dan needed to direct the driver. “Alicia”—Dan put his hand on her thigh—“don't borrow problems from the future and put them in the present.—Left here, please.”

She shoved his hand off her leg. “Are you fucking kidding me? Did you
really
just say that to me?”

One of Alicia's shrinks once suggested this to Dan, that in the absence of current troubles, Alicia borrowed them from the future. The line had stuck with Dan.

When they arrived at the entrance to Ilios Lane, they were surprised to see yellow police tape spanning the entire width of the road. Several news vans were parked along Taylor Street along the side of the McPhersons' house. The bigness of it all stunned them into a momentary truce.

“We'll have to go to the alleyway,” Dan told the driver. “To the back door.”

“You live on this street?” The driver perked up in his seat. It was the first he'd spoken to Dan and Alicia. “That's some bad luck, friend.”

10:05 p.m.

É
tienne left his car at the restaurant and walked the mile back home to Ilios Lane. As he approached, he could see the bright lights of television news crews still parked on the street, their spotlights like oversize, garish stars.

After the police left, he'd spent a long time cleaning the restaurant's kitchen. The shallots went into the garbage. The brass cleaner came out from the dry-goods closet and he began to shine his two large copper sauté pans. He'd found them in an antiques store years ago in the tiny mountain town of Jerome, Arizona. The idea of culinary continuity, twenty-first-century food prepared in nineteenth-century pans, thrilled him. His own favorite cookbook had also come from the nineteenth century: Jules Gouffé's
Royal Cookery Book
(
Le Livre de Cuisine
). Gouffé was the first to combine what he called “Domestic” and “High-Class Cookery,” which appealed to Étienne's sense of egalitarianism. The book had woodcuts that repulsed most diners: a rabbit on a spit, severed calves' feet in a mock embrace around its head, the head of a wild boar with thick whiskers and snout hair. But Étienne loved how the pictures today seemed mildly subversive.

After several hours of cleaning, he found himself turning to his favorite recipe—one he'd never offered on his menu. He warmed equal amounts of flour and butter in a saucepan until it was a smooth paste, then mixed it with minced beef in a stainless-steel bowl, adding beef broth, salt, and pepper. He cooked the mixture lightly for a few seconds, then took it off the heat, sprinkled in fresh parsley, thyme, and chives, a smidgen more of broth and one egg. Voilà!

The hamburger.
Exalted
.

Étienne ate two, not bothering with buns (he hated how they always fell apart under the stress of what he believed was the perfect burger). After he'd cleaned up, he tossed his apron in a small tub of dirty linens and closed up the kitchen.

Étienne could not pinpoint exactly where his love of France had originated. He was, according to his father, one-quarter French. He knew the arrondissements and the metro lines; he'd spent some time studying Guillard, the designer of the art nouveau metro stations in much of Paris. And the food had been his educational inspiration: mascarpone, crème fraîche, moules-frites, chèvre chaud, coq au vin—he valued the basics. He loved how these things were both routine and extraordinary. And the country itself, so warm, so washed-out, colors that bled softly into one another. When he closed his eyes and thought of France, he envisioned pale lavender, pink, gold . . . colors that kept and comforted you. Not the drab browns and grays of his Midwestern existence, winters where the colors disappeared under dirty snow, summers where the houses, so stately in size and architectural detail, were diminished by the blandness of their palettes.

On Erie Street, Étienne walked perpendicular to Ilios Lane, passing Arthur Gardenia's house on the corner—his own was beside Arthur's. He turned left up Taylor and walked through the Ramseys' yard through the alley and to his own back gate (he'd done this same trail earlier in the day when he'd discovered the wild mess of his burgled house. He'd jotted a quick note of what was missing and made his way back to the restaurant). The dark grass was damp from sprinklers, and Étienne could feel his ­tennis shoes taking in water. He emerged into the alley beside their garage, peeking left to make sure no news crews had set up shop. Then he dashed across the alley and in several large steps covered the length of his own weed-choked backyard and up the four wooden steps to his back door. Glass shards from his ­lavender bouquet crunched under his feet, dropped and scattered by the burglars on the way out. Inside the house, he retrieved the ­flashlight that he kept just inside the doorway. All his neighbors still believed he was on vacation in Paris. If he turned on the house lights, he'd cast suspicion.

Carefully, he bent and untied his wet shoes, wedging them off at the heels and leaving them by the threshold. He wasn't in the house three minutes before he heard an insistent knocking at his front door. He ignored it, but the knocking continued. He gingerly took off his wet socks and laid them atop his shoes, then rolled up his jeans to just above his ankles, sliding into a pair of slippers stationed at the back door. He could feel himself stepping on things in the dark—dirt, glass—the floor was slick with fingerprint dust. He accidentally kicked a plastic Tupperware tub and it skittered across the floor. Cabinets stood open, papers strewn about, a ceramic bowl in pieces in the doorway. Étienne's heart thumped. In the past, he'd spent the week in darkness to hide from his neighbors his not having gone anywhere; now, the burglary meant his home contained hazards he'd never before had to contend with in the dark. With the brokenness surrounding him, the chaos of his home, he considered giving up the charade. Meanwhile, the knocking grew louder. He poured himself a small glass of water from the filtered pitcher he kept on his countertop and snuck a glance through the side window. He recognized one of the detectives standing outside. Briefly, he toyed with ignoring them, but then thought better of it. They had already questioned him at the restaurant. They knew he was home. He had no choice but to swing open the door.

“Hello again!” he said in the same overly exuberant tone he'd used earlier that day.

Before the detectives could respond, Étienne spotted Michael McPherson emerging from his home—kitty-corner to Étienne's—and making his way toward the news crews, his face serious, stern. Other neighbors quickly followed, including Susan McPherson, trailed by Mary Elizabeth, then the Cambodian family, and Aldrin Rutherford and Arthur Gardenia, whose houses sandwiched Éti­enne's. Practically everyone on Ilios Lane, it seemed, except him. Michael McPherson, Étienne realized, looked exactly as he wished himself to look—confident and calm, yet serious and reliable.

Michael glanced across the street and stopped when he saw Étienne standing on his front porch. Étienne. Not in Paris. The news crews turned to see what'd gotten Michael's attention.

“Mr. Lenoir,” Detective Wasserman said, extending his hand. “I believe you've met my colleague.”

Étienne nodded, smiling and also not smiling, his eyes trained on Michael's.

“We wondered if you could answer a question for us?”

The news cameras raced over and their sharp lights suddenly began to shine on him.

“Of course,” said Étienne, conciliatory, shrinking. Suddenly he bent forward into a slow dive, the taste of hamburger rising from his throat. Étienne nearly vomited.

The following day the news stories would lead with this tidbit. Étienne Lenoir, who was supposed to have been on vacation in France, and who had never gone. Not this time, not ever. For Étienne, a deep and abiding shame came to replace whatever feelings he'd had over the loss of his things—not because he'd been so publicly caught in his years-long lie, but because the publicity of it made him realize he'd never had the courage to go in the first place. If the burglaries hadn't ever happened, he'd have kept up the façade of France forever.

“According to the National Passport Center records,” Detective Wasserman said to Étienne, raising his eyebrows, pretending to consult his notebook, “you have never received nor even applied for a passport.”