by Mary Kubica
“So somehow I got placed on this list, and now my social security number is good for nothing until I clean up this mess. Because on paper, I’m dead. And I can’t find my social security card or figure out how to get a new card because I don’t have the other documentation I need to do it.”
“Listen to this,” Liam says as a disclaimer pops up on his phone and he reads, quoting verbatim, “‘In rare instances it is possible for the records of a person who is not deceased to be included erroneously in the DMF.’”
I ask him how that can happen. “A clerical error,” he says, meaning with the stroke of one wrong computer key someone who’s alive and well is suddenly dead. Or not dead but undocumented, which is almost as good as being dead, I’m quickly learning.
The only reason my own death went unnoticed for all this time, I think, is because I haven’t once been asked to give my social security number. But sooner or later it was bound to happen. When I sought out a driver’s license, made an attempt to open a credit card. An attempt that would have been denied.
As we scoot onto the pedestrian side of the Clark Street Bridge and cross over the Chicago River, I think of people in the same situation as me, unable to access their own bank accounts and going broke. Those who don’t have the money for food or shelter, though they do have the money; it’s just that it’s tied up in some bank account they can’t access because the bank is certain they’re dead.
“People get locked out of their own lives, interrogated by police for suspected identity theft when the person whose identity they’ve supposedly stolen is themselves,” Liam says as he drops his phone into the back pocket of his pants, and I utter under my breath, “What a mess.”
I stare down below, beneath the metal grates of the bridge, where a tour is underway, tourists exploring the polluted grayish-green waters of the Chicago River. The tour guide steers passengers’ attention to the bridge—built in 1929, a bascule bridge, she says—and all eyes move to Liam and me, taking photos, pointing upward some twenty feet or more to the bridge on which we stand.
“You really are Jessie, aren’t you?” His words are dry, meant to be funny, though they’re not. His tone is deadpan, his face expressionless.
And though I know it’s in jest, it’s a question that nags at me.
I am Jessie, aren’t I? Am I Jessica Sloane?
We continue to walk. Down Clark and left on Superior, my feet following Liam’s lead. We’re quiet. We don’t speak much. He asks if I’ve been sleeping. He says that I look tired and I pause, looking at my own reflection in the glass facade of a building. I see what he sees. The sunken eyes surrounded by puffy red skin, the tip of my nose red.
I make light of the insomnia. I say that sleep is a waste of time. That there are so many more productive things I could be doing instead of sleeping.
“It’s not good for you, Jessie,” he tells me. “You need to sleep. The melatonin,” he says, same as he did in the hospital when he slipped those pills into the palm of my hand. “Give it a try.” I did give it a try, I think. I tried the melatonin—that and the clonazepam—and slept right on through Mom’s death. Never again.
I tell him that I will but I won’t.
And then he stops beside a mid-rise, saying, “This is me. This is where I live.”
This building beside us is five or six stories tall, flanked with floor-to-ceiling windows. A sign out front offers spacious open-plan lofts for sale. A doorman patrols the revolving front door and there’s something very moneyed about it that makes me feel out of place and ill at ease. The Liam before me is suddenly at odds with the Liam I remember from the hospital, the one who was bedraggled, a bit dog-eared like me.
A look of confusion must pass on my face. “My brother and I lived here together,” he explains. His voice is deep and there’s no rise or fall to his intonation as he speaks, telling me, “He was a software engineer.”
I fill in the missing pieces. His brother made the money. He paid for the condo. And now he’s gone.
“You’ll be okay?” I ask, and his reply is detached.
“What’s that they say?” he asks, plucking at the row of rubber bands on his wrist so that I see now what it says on his hand in the blue ink. Adam. His brother’s name, I think. “About death and taxes?”
That nothing is certain but death and taxes. That’s what they say. But he’s not looking for an answer. What he’s saying is that he may or may not be okay, but there’s no way to know right now. Same as me.
We say our goodbyes. I watch as he slips through the doors of the apartment building, disappearing behind a wall of glass.
eden
November 14, 1996
Egg Harbor
It’s November now.
The gray skies have descended, everything perpetually overcast and sad. The boats have been pulled from the bay, leaving it barren and empty, like my womb. The seasonal shops are closed. The tourists took their cue to leave.
Two weeks ago, on the first of November, Miranda had that baby of hers, a seven pound, three ounce beautiful baby boy who she and Joe named Carter. I visited in the hospital the day after he was born, her only visitor aside from Joe. I saw it in her eyes as soon as I entered the postpartum room, Miranda swaddling baby Carter with a look of arrant dissatisfaction on her face. Her lips were pursed, her eyebrows creased, crow’s-feet forming around the eyes.
As I walked in—swapping places with Joe, who went to the cafeteria for coffee—her disillusioned eyes rose to mine and she confessed aloud so that baby Carter could hear, not bothering to lower her voice or to press her hands to his ears to muffle the rotten words, “All I wanted was a baby girl. Is it too much to ask for one little girl? But instead it’s another goddamn boy.”
Her words knocked the wind out of my lungs. They made it hard to breathe. They were so ugly and vile, and I saw a look in Miranda’s eyes as she spoke of him, eyes dropping to his. A look that made my heart hurt. Only a day old and already she abhorred her baby boy.
I asked if I could hold him and she said yes, handing him off with too much inclination, too much ease, as if grateful to be rid of him. I took baby Carter to a chair in the corner of the room and peered at his inappreciable wisps of blond hair and his heavy, tired eyes, thinking to myself, What difference does it make if he’s a boy or girl, only that he’s happy and healthy?
And I felt angry for the first time at Miranda. Not just annoyed but truly angry. Angry that she had three beautiful baby boys and I had none. Angry that she didn’t love her babies or value her babies, that she couldn’t understand another woman—one like me—would give life and limb for a child.
Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a child.
I had a thought then.
Would Miranda care if I rose to my feet and carried baby Carter from the room?
Would she even notice?
The hospital experience, for Miranda, was a welcomed furlough from motherhood. From what I’d been told, Carter spent his time in the nursery, being cared for by nurses round the clock except when he needed to eat, and only then did nurses carry him, crying and discontent, to his mother, and she welcomed him grudgingly, embittered to her chest. And then as soon as he was full, his eyes drifting lazily to sleep, she asked the nurses to take him away so that she could sleep.
Spread out on her hospital bed in an indiscreet polka-dot gown, I watched Miranda sleep. Or pretend to sleep at least, so that she didn’t have to tend to her child. She was exhausted, yes, from many hours of labor and delivery, from the every-other-hour feedings, and yet I wondered if her eyes were merely closed so that she could remain insensible to her baby boy, who lay limply in my arms, head misshapen, skin wrinkly and pink as a newborn’s should be. Miranda’s hair was brushed away from her face, pulled taut into a ponytail that lay flat against the bed. Her arms and hands were stretched out by her sides. She breathed with her mouth open, nostrils f
laring with each inhalation and exhalation of air.
I whispered her name. There was no reply.
It was almost as if she was asking me, begging me, daring me to take her child.
And so I did.
I stood from the inflexible armchair, slowly, gradually, piecemeal-like so that the chair wouldn’t make a sound. So that the floor wouldn’t cheep. So that my own two feet wouldn’t betray me. I flexed one muscle and then the next until I was standing upright, holding my breath.
I crossed the room, creeping by degrees so my shoes wouldn’t squeak on the floors. Miranda’s eyes were closed, enjoying the peace and serenity of having someone else care for her child.
It didn’t occur to her for one instant that someone might try and take her baby.
I slipped into the hallway without a peep. Two left turns and there Carter and I were, standing before the nursery, staring through glass at a half dozen sleeping babies. They lay bundled like burritos in their pink and blue blankets, with knitted hats atop their near-bald heads. They were sleeping, every last one of them, completely tuckered out. The newborns slept in rolling bassinets all arranged on display so that grandmas and grandpas could see. If it wasn’t for the slip of paper in each bassinet with the baby’s name and date of birth in blue ink, there was no telling them apart aside from the obvious distinction of pink and blue.
How easy it would be for two to be swapped, or for one to up and disappear.
One nurse stood guard of them all, a shepherd in the pasture keeping watch over her sheep. What I wouldn’t give to be that nurse, to be tasked with caring for the infinite number of newborn babies that rotated in and out of the nursery each day.
I wondered if she ever had a weakness for any one of these babies. A fondness. Was there ever one colicky child who caught her eye, the runt of a litter of multiples she wanted to bring home as her own?
From down the hallway a door opened and I saw the main hospital on the other side, areas other than the labor and delivery ward. A common hallway. The hospital’s information booth. The doorway was twenty steps away at best, and there was nothing but two unlocked doors to prevent Carter and me from leaving. There was no alarm, at least none that I could see. There was no system to buzz people in and out. It was an open door, an invitation.
How easily Carter and I could just leave.
I looked around; the nursery nurse had her back in my direction, attention now focused on one little baby who was trying to wake up. Behind me, there was only a single woman at the nurses’ station, a middle-aged lady on the phone. Other than that, the ward was quiet and still, all patient doors pulled closed, mothers on the other side in the throes of labor or fast asleep.
I peered to the doorway again, those swinging double doors just twenty steps away from where I stood. I didn’t think about the rest, about what I would tell Aaron or what Miranda might do when she awoke and realized Carter was gone. My heart beat quickly as desire and instinct told me to do it and to do it quickly, to move with purpose, to not draw attention to myself. In my arms, I held the very thing Aaron and I had been trying for for months. A baby.
Miranda didn’t want him anyway. I was doing her a favor, I reasoned.
How easily this baby could be mine.
I thought of only one thing in that moment as I stood frozen, staring through glass at the plentiful sleeping babies.
How easy it would be to just go.
I didn’t do it, of course, but it would be remiss to say the idea never crossed my mind.
jessie
I pedal toward Roscoe Village. As I do, I stare over my shoulder, back into the Loop at the peaks of skyscrapers that rise into the sky like distant mountain summits. I watch as the urban streets become residential.
Once in Roscoe Village, I duck into a burger joint on Addison. My stomach is empty by now, the morning’s sugar high having given way to a glucose crash, one which makes me irritable and edgy. I’ve had nothing to eat but a donut all day—a donut and coffee—though since Mom’s death, my hip bones protrude from my waistline and the bones of my rib cage are startlingly transparent.
I’m not not eating on purpose. I’ve just had no desire to eat.
I order a hamburger and take it to the counter to eat. There, I stare out the window at the world as it passes by without me. A bus goes by, the 152 heading east. A plastic bag floats through the air, surfing the airstream. Middle school kids amble by in private school uniforms—starchy plaid split-neck jumpers; burgundy sweater-vests; pressed pants—with backpacks so heavy they nearly tip over from the weight of them. An older woman stands beside the bus stop. The 152 gathers her up and goes, disappearing in a puff of smoke.
I eat part of my burger, wrapping the rest up for the trash. As I’m about to go, a voice stops me. I turn to see a woman standing beside me in jeans and a cardigan, a pair of white gym shoes on her feet. Her graying hair is wound back into a bun.
“Jessie? Jessie Sloane? Is that you?”
But before I can say one way or another if it’s me, she decides for me. “It is you,” she declares as she tells me that she remembers me when I was yea high, her hand pegged at about thirty-seven inches in the air. And then she embraces me, this strange woman wrapping her thickset arms around my neck and declaring again, “It is you.”
Except that I don’t know who she is. Not until she tells me.
And even then, I still don’t know.
“It’s me,” she says. “Mrs. Zulpo. Eleanor Zulpo. Your mother used to clean my home when you were a girl. In Lincoln Park,” she tells me, tacking on details as if it might help me remember. “Tree-lined street, beautiful box beam ceilings, rooms flooded with natural light,” she says, though she and her husband don’t live there anymore, not since the housing market crash when she had to give up her home. When they had to downsize. That’s what she tells me.
I draw a blank. I don’t remember.
Like me, Mom used to clean homes. Mostly upscale places that we could never afford. She taught me everything I know. My first foray into the family business came when I was about twelve years old and would get down on my hands and knees beside her and scrub floors.
But before that, when I was too young to clean, Mom would lug me along on assignments and there I’d spend my days playing pretend in strangers’ homes. Cooking imaginary meals in their palatial kitchens, tucking my imaginary children into their mammoth beds before Mom scooched me out of the way so she could wash the sheets.
“You don’t remember me,” Eleanor Zulpo decides, realizing that it must have been sixteen or seventeen years ago or so, when I was three or four. “Of course you don’t remember,” she says, loosening her hold on my neck, telling me that I look just the same as I did back then. “It’s those dimples,” she says, pointing at them. “Those adorable dimples. I’d know these dimples anywhere.
“I read about your mother in the paper,” she says then, sitting beside me on her own stool, unwrapping a hot dog. The sight of it alone, that hot dog, lying out on a foil wrapper, slathered in ketchup and relish—that and the smell—reminds me of the dead bird. The pigeon. And instead of a hot dog, I suddenly see blood, guts, gore, and I gag, vomit inching its way up my esophagus. I reach for my drink and force it back down, gargling, trying to get the taste of vomit from my mouth.
Mrs. Zulpo—Eleanor, she says to call her—doesn’t notice. She keeps going. “I saw her obituary,” she’s saying. “It was a great write-up, a lovely tribute for a lovely woman,” she says. I tell her that it was.
I submitted the death notice to the newspaper. I covered the cost of the obituary. I found an old photo of Mom to use, one that was a good six years old at least, taken back before she got sick.
We’d lived our entire lives in private, but for whatever reason I felt the whole world should know that she was dead.
“There have been other cleaning women since your mo
ther. But never anyone as good as she was, as conscientious, as thorough. She was one of a kind, Jessie,” she says, and I tell her I know. Eleanor tells me stories. Things I didn’t know, or maybe I did. Memories that have been lost to time, erased clear from my brain’s hard drive. About the time I helped myself to her Wedgwood china when Mom was cleaning. How I snatched it right from her hutch and set the dining room table to have a tea party with. “Wedgwood china,” she tells me, grinning. “A single cup and saucer go for about a hundred dollars each. They had been my own mother’s, given to me when she died. Heirlooms. Your poor mother,” she laughs. “She nearly had a heart attack when she found you. I told her it was fine, that it wasn’t like anything had gotten hurt. And besides, it was nice to see the dishes being put to use for a change.”
And then she tells me that, at her suggestion, the three of us sat down at the dining room table and drank lemonade from the Wedgwood china.
It fills me with a sudden sense of nostalgia. A yearning for the past.
“What else do you remember?” I ask, needing more. Needing someone to fill in the gaps for me, all those details I can no longer remember.
Eleanor tells me how her children were grown by the time I arrived, and so it was nice to have a child in the house again. She didn’t work outside of the home. When Mom and I came, she was grateful for the company. She used to look forward to the days we’d come. Usually she’d play with me while Mom cleaned, hide-and-go-seek in her home, or build forts from the newly washed sheets.
“You were a funny girl, Jessie,” she tells me. “Silly and strong willed, a great sense of humor to boot,” she says. “A bit ornery too. But those dimples,” she adds as she takes a bite of the hot dog, speaking through a full mouth, “with those dimples you could get away with murder, Jessie.” She laughs.