Frank grabbed my hands. “Tori, that’s why I thought—hoped—don’t you remember, that was the night—Annie was that upset, I never saw her like that, when Ma dragged her home—if someone told me Ma or Annie, one would kill the other, I would have thought Annie for sure, after your ma’s funeral. But I—don’t you remember?”
My mother’s funeral was a blur in my mind. My father and I, uncomfortable in our dress-up clothes. The pallbearers—my uncle Bernie; Bobby Mallory, my dad’s closest friend on the force; other cops, all in their dress uniforms; a police chaplain, since my unreligious mother hadn’t known a rabbi. Gabriella had been a wisp by the time she died; her coffin couldn’t have taken six big men to lift it.
Mr. Fortieri, my mother’s vocal coach, fought back tears, twisting a silk handkerchief over and over, but Eileen Mallory wept openly. I could feel the tightness again in my throat—I had vowed I wouldn’t cry, not in front of my aunt Marie. Annie Guzzo’s sobs had angered me. What right had she to cry for Gabriella?
And then Stella roared in, beside herself. Mouth flecked white with spit, or was that a detail I was adding? At home that night I’d sat alone in the dark in my attic room, staring at the street, unable to move, leaving my dad to deal with his drunk sister Elena and the stream of neighbors, of cops, of my mother’s piano and voice students. And then—
Frank had appeared at the top of the steep flight of stairs, come to say how sorry he was, for my loss, for his mother’s behavior. In the dark, sick with loss, tired of the adult world on the ground floor, I’d found a comfort in his embrace. Our teenage fumblings with clothes and bodies, neither of us knowing what we were doing, somehow that got me through the first hard weeks of Gabriella’s death.
I squeezed Frank’s fingers and gently removed my hands. “I remember. You were very kind.”
“So will you do this, Tori? Will you go back to South Chicago and ask some questions? See if there’s something that didn’t come out at the trial?”
Past the naked, unbearable pleading in his face, I could see him as he’d been at seventeen, athletically slender, red-gold curls covering his forehead. I’d brushed them out of his eyes and seen the lump and bruise on his forehead. I got it sliding into second, he’d said quickly, scarlet with shame, pushing my hand away.
My mouth twisted. “One free hour, Frank. I’ll ask questions for sixty minutes. After that—you’ll have to pay like any other client.”
HOME BASE
Over dinner that night with Jake, I found it almost impossible to explain why I’d agreed to go back to South Chicago.
“This woman—what’s her name? Medea?—she doesn’t even merit a phone call,” Jake protested. “You know she was guilty, you know she’s venomous, why go near her?”
“It’s not about her, so much,” I said.
“What—this guy, Frank—you want to recapture the dreams of your youth?”
“Jake!” I said. “Don’t start carrying on like a low-rent Othello, where you run around the stage in the third act shooting yourself because jealousy got the better of you in the second.”
He made a face at me. “I hate guns. I’ll stab myself with a bow in the last scene, way more melodramatic, and heartbreaking because it will be a historic bow that makes an ominous appearance in Act One. But you did date him.”
“When I was sixteen and he was a good-looking ballplayer.”
“Is he still good-looking?”
“In a way.”
“The way being?”
I paused, enjoying the way Jake’s lips twitched. He spends his days around twentysomething violinists with long straight hair and serious dedication. I try not to be jealous but I liked seeing I could inspire a twinge in him.
“Oh, if you like a big feather pillow to sink into on cold winter mornings.”
Jake shadowboxed me. “Then why bother? From the sound, you don’t owe him or Medea anything. And it’s not like you have any real ties to South Chicago anymore.”
“You didn’t grow up in a neighborhood. You got together with other kids when your moms organized playdates. Besides, you were a boy wonder on tour from the time you were eleven. But South Chicago, those people, we lived on top of each other like puppies in a pet store, they’re who I am. When they call on me, it’s like some—”
I broke off, struggling to put my complicated feelings into words. “It’s way more melodramatic than you being jealous of a guy I dated for six weeks thirty years ago. It’s more like one of these horror movies, where some chip was planted in my blood, and when the master monster presses a switch, I’m sucked into the vortex willy-nilly.”
Jake pulled me to him across my plate of pasta. “Not going to happen. I will knot my bass strings together and attach them to your waist so I can haul you out.”
We heard my front door slam; a moment later, Bernadine Fouchard clomped into the room. She was small and it always amazed me how loud her footsteps were. She bent over to kiss me, said the dinner smelled “divine,” and went into the kitchen to fix herself a plate.
Bernadine—really, just Bernie—looked like her father, the same smile—a lightning flash that lit her whole face—the same soft brown eyes, the same reckless self-confidence. She’d been named for my cousin, Boom-Boom, Pierre Fouchard’s closest friend on the Blackhawks. Boom-Boom’s birth name had been Bernard, but only his mother ever called him that.
Pierre had phoned me a month earlier to say that Bernie was planning to visit Chicago. “She’s such a skater, Victoria, such a natural on the ice. If the NHL wasn’t a bunch of sexist you-know-whats, she would be playing on a farm team right now! Boom-Boom would be so proud. One of these expensive universities, Northwestern, they are inviting her to play for them, all expenses paid for an education if she will show them good form, which she will—that goes without saying.”
And then the request—Bernie was being recruited by many schools, but because Pierre and Boom-Boom had played for the Blackhawks, well, it stood to reason that Chicago would be her first choice, naturellement, only before she committed herself she would like to see the city, visit the school, all these things, and this was his busy season—he himself was a scout for the Canadiens, and Arlette, poor Arlette broke her leg skiing, so would it be possible—
I’d interrupted to say of course, I’d be delighted to put her up, show her the sights. Her school year was essentially over; she’d go home for graduation, but her parents had gotten the Quebec high school to agree to let her turn in her final papers early. She’d be spending an intense summer in hockey training camp, and they wanted her to have a few months of freedom. Syracuse and Ithaca were apparently willing to wait-list her if she decided against Northwestern after spending a few weeks here.
I’d picked her up at O’Hare a week ago. I’d been afraid that a seventeen-year-old would be a worry or a burden, but as Pierre had said, Bernie had her head screwed on right. She enjoyed exploring the city, she helped me run the dogs, she delighted Mr. Contreras, my downstairs neighbor, who’s been bereft since my cousin Petra joined the Peace Corps in El Salvador. The only major change in my life was that the nights I slept with Jake Thibaut were spent exclusively in his apartment.
Five days into her stay, Bernie hooked up with a team in a girls’ peewee hockey league, as a volunteer coach. She loved teaching the girls and began toying with the idea of spending the rest of the spring in the city if she could find a job.
She approached the world around her with the confidence bordering on recklessness that reminded me of my cousin, or perhaps myself when I was a teenager, when I didn’t feel the anguish of people whose lives had come uncoupled from their dreams.