She hung up on my incoherent protest. I smiled a little-gruff to the end. I hoped I was that tough forty years ahead.
The only thing that really troubled me was Caroline Djiak; I couldn’t get her to talk to me. She’d resurfaced after a day’s absence, but she wouldn’t come to the phone, and when I drove down to Houston Street she shut the door on me, not even letting me in to see Louisa. I kept thinking I’d made a terrible mistake-not just in telling her about Jurshak, but in keeping up my dogged search when she’d been trying to call me off.
Lotty shook her head sternly when I fretted about it. “You’re not God, Victoria. You can’t pick and choose what’s best for people’s lives. And if you’re going to spend hours in lachrymose self-pity, please do it someplace else-it’s not an appetizing spectacle. Or find another line of work. Your dogged searches, as you call them, spring from a fundamental clarity of vision. If you no longer have that sight, you no longer are suited to your job.”
Her bracing words didn’t kill my self-doubts, but in time even my worries over Caroline receded. When she called in early June to tell me Louisa had died, I could accept her abrupt conversation with relative equanimity.
I went to the funeral at St. Wenceslaus, but not to the house on Houston for food afterward. Louisa’s parents were running the event, and whether they aped pious grief or murmured sly animadversions on divine providence I would be hard put to control my desire to decimate them.
Caroline made no effort to speak to me at the service; by the time I got home my lachrymose self-pity over her had been replaced by an older, more familiar feeling-irritation at her brattiness. So when I found her waiting on my doorstep a month or so later, I didn’t exactly welcome her with open arms.
“I’ve been here since three,” she said without introduction. “I was afraid you’d gone out of town.”
“Sorry I didn’t leave my schedule with your secretary,” I replied sardonically. “But then, of course, I wasn’t anticipating the pleasure.”
“Don’t be mean, Vic,” she begged. “I know I deserve it-I’ve been a horse’s rear end the last four months. But I need to apologize or explain or-well, anyway, I don’t want you only to be mad when you think about me.”
I unlocked the lobby door. “You know, Caroline, I’m reminded irresistibly of Lucy and Charlie Brown and the football. You know how she always promises this time she won’t pull it away just as he’s kicking-and she always does, and he always lands smack on his butt? I have a feeling I’m about to end on my ass one last time, but come on up.”
Her ready color came. “Vic, please-I know I deserve anything you want to say to me, but I’ve come here to apologize. Don’t make it harder on me than it already is.”
That shut me up, but it didn’t quiet my suspicions. I led her silently to my apartment, fixed her a Coke while I had a rum and tonic, and took her to the little ledge that serves as my back porch. Mr. Contreras waved at us from his tomatoes, but stayed below. The dog came up to join the party.
After she’d fondled Peppy’s ears and drunk her soda, Caroline took a deep breath and said, “Vic, I really am sorry I ran out on you last winter, and-and avoided you afterward. Somehow-somehow it’s only since Louisa died that I could see it from your viewpoint. See that you weren’t making fun of me.”
“Making fun of you!” I was astonished.
She turned crimson again. “I thought, you see, you had such a wonderful father. I loved your dad so much, I wanted him to be my father too. I used to lie in bed and imagine it, imagine how much fun we’d have when we were all together as a family, him and me and Ma and Gabriella. And you’d be my real sister, so you wouldn’t feel pissed off at having to look after me.”
It was my turn to be embarrassed. I tried muttering something and finally said, “No eleven-year-old wants to be saddled with looking after a baby. I expect if you’d really been my sister, I would have been more annoyed instead of less. But I wasn’t laughing at you for having a-a different father than mine. It never once crossed my mind.”
“I know that now,” she said. “It just took me a long time to figure it out. It was me that felt humiliated at the idea of Art Jurshak being-well, doing that to Ma. You know. Then when she died I suddenly saw what it must have been like for her. And it made me realize what a remarkable woman she was, because she was such a good mother, she was so lively, and really loved life and everything. And it would have been so easy for her to be angry and bitter and take it out on me.”
She looked at me earnestly. “Then last week I went-went to see young Art. My brother, I guess he is. He was pretty good about it, even though I could see it was just hell for him. Having to talk to me, I mean. It was awful for him growing up. Art wasn’t any kind of father. He only got married to keep the Djiaks from spoiling his political career, and after young Art was born he moved into the spare bedroom. He never wanted to have anything to do with his own son. So in a crazy kind of way I can see I was better off. You know, just with Ma. Even if-even if he hadn’t been her uncle, it would have been so much worse living with him than it was growing up without a father.”
My throat was a little tight. “I’ve been full of self-recriminations these last four months, thinking I made the colossal mistake of an egomaniac in keeping on the case when you asked me to quit. And then in telling you about him.”
“Don’t,” she said. “I’m glad to know. It’s better to find out for sure, rather than imagine it in my head, even if what I made up was a hell of a lot nicer than what reality turned out to be. Besides, if Tony Warshawski had really been my father, he’d seem like a pretty big sleaze moving Ma and me next door to you and Gabriella.”
She laughed, but I took her hand and held it. After a bit she said hesitantly, “I-this next part is hard to tell you, after all the insults I shouted at you about leaving the neighborhood. But I’m leaving, too. I’m moving away from Chicago, actually. I always wanted to live out in the country, the real country, so I’m going to Montana to study forestry. I never admitted it to anyone, because I thought if I wasn’t like you, doing social activism stuff, you know, that you would despise me.”
I gave an inarticulate squawk that made Peppy jump.
“No, really, Vic. But all these things I’ve been thinking about, well, I see you never wanted me to be like you. It was just part of my head trip, how I thought if I did the same things you did, you would like me well enough to let me really be part of your family.”
“No way, babe-I want you doing what’s good for you, not what’s right for me.”
She nodded. “So I applied out there and rushed everything through and I’m leaving in two weeks. I’m making Ma’s folks buy the house on Houston and that’s giving me the money to go. But I wanted to tell you in person, and I hope you meant it, that you’ll always be my sister, because, well, anyway, I hope you meant it.”
I knelt next to her chair and put my arms around her. “Till death do us part, kid.”
Sara Paretsky
Sara Paretsky has a degree in finance and a PhD in history, and has worked as a conference manager and a promotion manager for a large insurance company. She is now a full time writer with seven Warshawski novels to her credit, including TOXIC SHOCK which won the CWA Silver Dagger Award.
