by Mary Kubica
It isn’t until a woman standing on a street corner stares at me like I’m crazy that I realize I’ve been speaking out loud.
In time I find my way into the Loop. It isn’t intentional. I don’t go there on purpose. It’s something far more subliminal than that, that makes my legs pedal hard, steering me to the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue, where I park Old Faithful just steps from the bronze lions and walk.
I don’t go to the museum.
Rather I head to the south end of the building where, just off Michigan Avenue, I slip into this secret world of raised flower beds and a grove of hawthorn trees. I’d never have known what kind of tree they were, but Mom knew, Mom who found this spot by accident one day when I was young and we were exploring. It was fall and the trees were angular and uneven, a brassy shade of copper that peeked through the green of nearby trees as they do now.
Let’s see what this place is, Mom had said that day, grabbing a hold of my hand and drawing me in. That first day, I didn’t want to go. Rather I wanted to climb on the lions’ backs and ride. But Mom had said no. The lions were to look at. They weren’t for riding, though she let me pet them as we passed by.
The entrance to the garden is guarded by honey locust trees, which keep the rest of it hidden from the urban world on the other side. I slip in. I walk down a handful of steps that dip inches below street level. I move between the trees, lost in an enclave beneath an awning of leaves. Transported somewhere hundreds of miles from a city street.
There are people here. It’s not as if I’m the only one who knows about this place. And yet those that are here are placid. Quiet. Drinking coffee and smoothies, reading books, staring into space. A woman picks at the edges of a muffin wrapper, offering scraps to a nearby bird.
This was one of Mom’s favorite spots in the city. We’d come here and she’d spend hours sitting on the edge of the raised beds. She’d watch as I scaled them with my arms extended, imagining myself as a tightrope walker. They’re large—a good twenty feet by twenty feet or more—so it was always quite the feat when I could get around without falling.
Mom let me do it for hours. She never got bored.
There was one place in the garden Mom liked more than the rest because it was secluded, set back from the street entrance, the water fountain and the pool. Even in the most secluded of places, she found the most covert place to hide.
I make my way there now because I think that somehow I might feel closer to Mom if I sit there. That somehow we’ll be able to commune.
But when I get there, that spot is already occupied. A man sits there, reading the newspaper. Truth be told, it makes me crabby, thinking what nerve he has to sit in Mom’s favorite spot. And so I sit opposite him on another bed, twenty feet away or more, watching him, waiting for him to leave. I stare at him, thinking it’ll make him uncomfortable and he’ll go.
But he’s not uncomfortable because he doesn’t even see me staring. He’s too preoccupied by the newspaper in his hands.
I can’t say one way or the other if he’s tall or short because he’s sitting. He’s got his legs crossed, ankle to knee, and his clothes are all sorts of nondescript. Pants, shirt, shoes. Nothing noteworthy about them. They’re clothes. The sleeves of his shirt are thrust to the elbows. There, on his left arm beneath the cuff of the shirt, is a scar. It peeks out from beneath the sleeve, a six-inch gash that’s healed poorly. The skin around it is puckered and pink.
His face looks sad. That’s the first thought I have. That the expression on his face—that and his body language—is one of sadness. The way his mouth pulls down at the corners, a slight tug there at the edges of his lips. The way his shoulders slouch. I should know because each time I look in the mirror, I see the very same thing. On his face is a patch of hair, a tight beard, trimmed and tidy. It gives off an aura of mystery and regality. His skin is tanned like the hide of a moose, stretched and dried in the sun before being smoked over a fire. Like he’s spent too much time outside in the sun.
He isn’t thumbing through the newspaper, but instead he’s got his eyes peeled to some story on the top page, the paper folded so that he can hone in on it. Something bad has happened in the world, I think. Something bad always happens. I wonder what it is this time. Terrorist attack. Women and children being slaughtered by their own leaders. A shooting in an elementary school. Children murdered by their own moms and dads.
I watch his eyes, the movement of them as he scans the story. Moving left to right. Dropping down to read the next line. But his eyes are lowered, gazing down on the newspaper and so I can’t see much, none other than the lashes and the lids. He bites a lip. He bites hard so that the pain of the lip overrides whatever it is he’s feeling on the inside. I do that too.
He reaches for a cup of coffee set on the marble edge of the raised bed. I read the corrugated sleeve on the cup. A coffee bar on Dearborn. I’ve never been there before, but I know the place. I’ve seen it before.
And then he gets up to go, and I ready myself to make a move for his seat. He slips an orange baseball cap over the brown hair, though as he goes, he leaves his newspaper behind. Because he’s sad. Because he’s distracted.
He walks away and I notice a shoe is untied, the cuff of a pant leg stuck in the shoe’s tongue. He leaves it there. For a second or two I watch him go.
But then, standing and making my way to the raised bed, I call to him, “Sir,” while grabbing the newspaper so that the wind doesn’t have a chance to scatter it around the garden. “Sir,” I call again, “your newspaper.”
But he’s walking away and before I can run to him, something leaps off the page at me. It grabs me by the throat so that I can’t speak and I can’t move. I’m frozen in place, a bronze statue like the lions who stand before the Art Institute, guarding its entrance.
There on the top of the newspaper is Mom’s beautiful face. Her beautiful brown eyes and brown hair, both watered down by the black-and-white newsprint.
Her obituary. The one I put in the paper because I needed the world to know she was dead. To solidify it. To make it real. Because only then, when it was written in print for all of the world to see, would I believe it.
This man. The sad man sitting in Mom’s and my spot in the garden. He was reading her obituary.
He had the newspaper folded so that Mom’s face was on top, and it was these words his eyes spanned as he bit his lip so that he wouldn’t cry.
Mom’s obituary is what made this man sad.
I read over the words. Mom’s death notice, which was brief because there wasn’t a whole lot of information to provide. No memorial service. No one to send flowers to.
The final line reads “Eden Sloane is survived by her daughter, Jessica.”
My legs lose feeling. I go slack jawed. Because there’s one word on the newsprint that the man has circled and it’s my name. Jessica.
eden
July 12, 2003
Chicago
The park is named after some poet, I’ve come to learn. Though no one pays attention to things like that because, to most people, it’s just a park where kids romp around on the playground and, on the other side of a chain-link fence, boys play basketball, the repeated thump, thump, thump of the ball on concrete a steady refrain. They’re older boys mostly, teenagers, and they spout from their mouths a flurry of curse words at regular intervals, and I feel grateful Jessie is still too young to know what any of it means, though she pauses from time to time to watch them. To just stand on the playground and stare.
There are baseball fields off in the distance, and on the other side of a bridge, a path that snakes along the river where she and I sometimes walk, but not today. Today she played on the playground, and for the first time ever, found a friend. Not the kind of friend we’d keep in touch with after today or invite over for a playdate. No, Jessie and I don’t have those types of friends.
Rather
she’s the kind of friend who, for fifteen or twenty minutes at best, is a bosom body. A soul mate.
I watched as Jessie and the little girl chased each other in dizzying circles, up the stairs and down the slide. Again and again and again. As far as I knew, they never exchanged names. Because that’s the way it is with kids. Uncomplicated. Straightforward. Easy.
There was no one else on the playground but the two of them, and the only ones sitting on the periphery of it were the little girl’s mother, pushing a newborn in an old-fashioned buggy, and me. It took some time, a few awkward glances my way, before she rose from her own park bench and came to mine, standing before me, offering a hello. I too said hello, staring down into the buggy at the infant sound asleep beneath a yellow blanket.
“How sweet,” I said.
The baby, Piper, she told me, was twelve days old, born on the first of July. The woman moved guardedly, as if in pain, and I didn’t ask before she told me, “Piper was breech,” telling me how her baby was fully intent on entering the world feetfirst. “The doctors did everything they could to change that. But no such luck,” she explained, sitting softly beside me on the park bench and describing in too much detail what a C-section is like. The incision. The surgical staples. The scar she’d no doubt have. She lifted the hem of her shirt then so that I could see it myself, and I blushed at the sight of her still-pregnant belly, at the bloated butterfly tattoo that sat just inches from the healing incision, at the canvas of fair skin. She was oversharing and I blamed the newness of childbirth for it, the fact that to her it was still fresh. The only thing these days that occupied her mind.
“With Amelia it was different,” she admitted, and I made the easy assumption that Amelia was the older of the two, the little girl, maybe five years old, who Jessie made a train with at the top of the slide—wrapping her skinny legs around the midsection of a girl she hardly knew—and together they catapulted down to the wood chips below, landing on their rear ends, laughing. “Twenty-some hours of labor, three hours of pushing,” she said, going on far too long about the gush of water when her membranes ruptured, like the pop of a water balloon. Her, worried only that she might poop on the bed, as one of her girlfriends had done. The broken blood vessels left behind on her face from hours of pushing, thin, red veins that snaked this way and that across her skin. Some doctor she didn’t know delivering her baby. Her breasts engorged, her unable to produce milk following childbirth. Having to relent to formula, which her mommy’s groups abhorred.
I felt uncomfortable, if I was being honest, about this sudden revelation of information from a woman I didn’t know. But it dawned on me then that this is the type of thing women do, this is the type of thing mothers do: share their experiences, swap stories, foster camaraderie.
She looked at me expectantly, as if it was my turn to share. She was quiet, watching me, and when I didn’t respond, she prompted, “And your girl?” and I knew then that I must tell her something, that I must offer up some version of the truth. I pictured those wide hospital halls, the glaring lights. “She was a vaginal birth?” she asked, that word alone—vaginal—making me turn redder than I was before. Because these were the kinds of conversations I didn’t have. Intimate. Friendly.
Most of my conversations ended at hello.
I felt my head nod without my permission, and I knew I must say more, that a nod of the head alone wouldn’t suffice.
And so I told her about the hospital room. I told her about the huddle of people who gathered around me, the nurses clinging to either of my legs, encouraging me to push. Incanting it in my ear—push, push—as I gathered handfuls of bedding in my hands and bore down with all of my might. The epidural had worn off by then, or maybe it was never there to begin with. All I felt was pain, a pain so intense it was as if my insides were on fire, about to rupture. I was certain I would soon explode. A hand stroked the sweaty hair from my face, whispering words of encouragement into an ear as I screamed, this crude, ugly scream, but I didn’t care how crude or ugly it was. The nurses wrenched on either of my legs, stretching me apart, making me wide. Push, they said again and again, and I did, I pushed for dear life, watching as that flash of black spilled from inside of me and into the doctor’s gentle hands.
But then I remembered.
That wasn’t me.
jessie
Before I can tear my eyes from Mom’s face on the newspaper’s obituaries page, from my own circled name, the man has slipped from the garden and disappeared from sight. I attempt to run after him, barreling through the rows of hawthorn trees as quickly as my legs can carry me. But still, when I come rushing out onto Michigan Avenue, chest heaving, breathing hard, he’s gone. The sidewalk is inundated with people, with kids, a middle school field trip to the Art Institute, and they’re all lined up in two parallel rows before the museum’s concrete steps. Clogging the sidewalk. I push past bubbly preteens who are incognizant of my desperation, who don’t care. By the time I reach the other side, there’s no sign of the man anywhere. The man with the sad eyes and the untied shoe.
I stare up and down the street, completely aghast. A muscle in my eyelid twitches, a spasm. Something involuntary, something I can’t make go away though I try. It’s extremely annoying. The street is a wide six-lane divided street jam-packed with people and cars, a median strip in the center that’s plugged with flowers and trees, making it even harder to see the other side. But still I walk, searching the streets for the man.
I hurry down Michigan with a heavy, desperate tread. The wind is a wall by now, and I lean into it to walk. It’s exhausting. All the while, my eyelid twitches. I turn left at Randolph, a temporary reprieve from the militant headwind, which now comes at me from the side so that I slope laterally, a perfect seventy-five-degree angle. At Clark, I turn right, not quite knowing where I’m going, but trying desperately to find the man. I climb northward, gazing into storefronts to see if he’s there. I stare down alleyways, out of breath by the time I come to a six-story building on Superior Street, one that’s flanked with floor-to-ceiling windows and looks oddly familiar to me.
I spin in a circle, taking it in, the doorman in uniform, the sign outside that reads Spacious, Open-plan Lofts for Sale. Inquire Inside. I know where I am. I’ve been here before.
Just like that, I’m standing at Liam’s front door.
I didn’t know I was coming here. I didn’t come here on purpose. But here I am, and now that I’m here, I make an attempt to scoot past the doorman and into the building. Because maybe Liam can help me think this through. The little girl in the car accident, the man in the garden. He’ll make me see that there’s nothing sordid going on. That it’s only a coincidence.
The doorman stands on the curb, hailing a cab for a resident. “Can I help you, miss?” he asks, catching sight of me out of the corner of his eye, as he steers the resident into the back seat of the cab and closes the door for her.
He steps closer to me. “I’m here to see Liam,” I say.
His smile is mocking. Wary. “Liam who?” he asks, playing dumb, and I freeze, realizing only then that I don’t have a last name. That to me he’s just Liam. That until yesterday he wasn’t even that, because before yesterday he didn’t have a name. He was only the guy from the hospital, the one with the blue eyes.
But I also realize that the doorman knows fully well what Liam’s last name is. He isn’t curious. He’s testing me, checking to see how well I know Liam before he lets me in.
“I don’t know his last name,” I admit, feeling uncomfortable as my feet shift in place. At first he’s hesitant, not sure he wants to phone Liam or not. For all he knows, I’m someone Liam is avoiding, someone he doesn’t want to see. And that’s his job, to keep unwanted visitors at bay, unwanted visitors like me.
He sizes me up and down. He asks twice what my name is. Both times I say Jessie, though for the first time I start to doubt that it is. I feel disheveled, disorie
nted, and though I have no idea what I look like, I can see it in the doorman’s eyes. It’s not good. I run my hands through my hair; I rub at my twitching eyes.
“Is Liam expecting you?” he asks, and I’m not quick enough on my feet to lie. I tell him no.
“Can you call him for me, please?” I plead, the desperation in my voice palpable to both him and me.
The doorman reluctantly phones Liam for me, but Liam doesn’t answer his call. “He’s not home,” he tells me, setting the phone down. I feel the skeptic in me start to take hold. He’s lying. He didn’t call him. He only pretended he did, but he didn’t. I think that maybe the number he dialed wasn’t Liam at all, or maybe he didn’t push enough digits for the call to go through. Or he hung up before Liam had a chance to answer.
I’m about to get angry, but then I remember. The funeral. Liam’s brother’s funeral is today. He’s at the funeral. He’s not home.
I excuse myself, walking from the building, feeling muddled. There’s a convenient mart next door to the apartment building. I slip inside and buy a Coke, hoping the caffeine will make me feel less mixed-up. Or, at minimum, curtail the throbbing in my head from the day’s lack of caffeine.
Back outside, I drop down onto the curb to catch my breath. I need to think things through, but my mind can focus on only one thing. What if Jessica Sloane with my social security number did die when she was three? She wasn’t erroneously classified as dead because she was really dead. Then I’ve been living with a mistaken social security number all this time, with a mistaken identity.
Is it possible that the other Jessica Sloane and I have social security numbers so close they’re off by only a single digit, or have two numbers that are interchanged? Maybe she died and someone unwittingly typed my social security number into the death database. The names matched, so they didn’t think twice. An oversight only.
Doubtful.
And then my mind gravitates to the man in the garden. Who is he, and what was he doing there? What does he want with me?