What We've Lost Is Nothing

  Sincerely,

  Allison Cantor

  Allison Cantor

  Office Manager

  Oak Park Apartment Doctor, Inc.

  Chapter 37

  4:07 p.m.

  Mary Elizabeth gagged and choked and felt uplifted once Caz removed his penis from her mouth. It disgusted her. It felt very much to her like suffocation, like being a captive, tortured for information. He pushed into her and she gagged. He pushed into her again and she gagged again. He tried for a third time and again she could not breathe and he pulled it out and said, “What are you, a fucking amateur?”

  She didn’t know what to say. She knew the word. Knew how to form it, how it was supposed to sound. She’d used it her whole life. Used it most often when talking to her parents:

  No.

  But she could not. It was as if Caz had stolen her voice. She was freezing, goose bumps temporarily scarring her entire body. Her arms were shafts, locked at her sides. Caz had turned up the kitchen radio so that loud, hissing heavy metal held her in a kind of noise box. If she sat here long enough, maybe he would just leave, maybe he would get bored with her. That was his reputation, right? Hook up with a girl and then dump her. It was the challenge of holding on to Caz that most attracted the girls, the reputation he carried of getting whatever he wanted whenever he wanted from whomever he wanted. The girls loved him because they wanted to fulfill all they’d learned of love from the movies—that is, that it takes one right girl to set straight a wayward boy. One girl who can make a difference, crack his shell, reach his heart. Because teenagers always believe in the One Girl Theory. Twentysomethings believe. Thirtysomethings believe. We all believe in such mythmaking.

  Once, at a party, long after Cindy Hamilton had switched schools and the pictures of her stopped making the e-mail rounds, Caz had bet the boys $5 he could get Amber Belonsky to give Jeremy Busch, Jim Vigham, and Carl Lindorph blow jobs in front of everyone. Given what had happened with Cindy a year earlier, few doubted it, but there was something collectively titillating in the expectation. Amber was overweight, but not unattractive. She wore jeans with frayed bottoms and always needed a haircut. Caz had plied her with vodka and Hi-C fruit punch until she was wobbly and giggling. He kissed her in front of everyone, grabbed her breast as her head lolled back, and then asked her to kiss a few of his friends, his very good friends. Amber vomited halfway through Jim Vigham, and the others had gone home with tiny splashes of puke over their black motorcycle boots, but the damage had been done. Caz’d left the party $200 richer and secured his reputation. By the end of the year, Amber had transferred to Julian. Mary Elizabeth had laughed at Amber right along with the other kids.

  Over the past few years Mary had pushed Susan away, but now she was trying to channel her. How would she keep Caz’s interest without compromising her integrity?

  “Caz. Caz, let’s go to my room.”

  Mary Elizabeth wanted him to sense her no without having to say it. To hear it from the way her body failed to move, the way she shifted as if her limbs were a series of planks, unbalanced, toppling, unyielding. This was the difference between real life and the movies; in real life no one ever read other people’s minds, even if they could, because to do so would mean concessions they were almost always unwilling to make, concessions that meant the inability to push one’s own agenda. Caz had taken her clothes off. All of them except her socks and her bra, which remained hooked behind her, her breasts dangling out of it. The music was loud enough that she had to raise her voice to talk over it. He was dressed still, his penis jutting out from his pants, the only flesh he revealed to her.

  “Caz,” she whispered. “Caz. Please.”

  “I know. I know, baby.” He told her to get on the floor, under the table. “I know you want it. I’m getting there, baby.”

  If they could only go up to her room. Escape the public space of the dining room. Led Zeppelin wafting into the dining room. “We can go upstairs.”

  “You gotta reclaim this space,” he said. “Take charge of it.”

  Caz turned her over, pulled her up by the hips. She was half under the table, her head and shoulders in shadow and, from the waist down, open to him. She felt a pressure behind her. She thought momentarily of the kids at school, of lunch, of how her hips had seemed so aligned with Caz’s then, so on fire, so joined. How she’d felt so beloved at that moment. Beloved.

  Be.

  Loved.

  By someone who meant something. By someone whose presence was noticed at school. She belonged then, for a moment. And in her belonging why hadn’t she eaten the cookie? The whole fucking cookie? She could no longer remember. Had she thrown it away, even?

  She saw the dark posts of the chair legs. “I don’t need to reclaim this space.” The words tumbled out of her quickly. “I was only here for a minute yesterday. I was with Sofia Oum. Do you know her? She’s very popular. I didn’t even know—”

  The space. Under the table.

  She felt a tearing, searing pain behind her.

  Her breath came in sharp bursts, held then released, held then released.

  Felt the halves of herself separating, whittled away to thin, sharp wedges.

  She hit her head on the side of a chair seat. Tried to move her legs, her knees closer together, so it wouldn’t hurt so much. Caz pushed her knees apart on the carpet. Pushed her head down so she was kissing the rug.

  Heard the hard slap of Caz’s skin against hers.

  The space. Under the table. Reclaim. To demand the return or restoration of.

  She would avoid this room until she left for college two years later.

  Chapter 38

  4:15 p.m.

  A caravan of cars returned to Ilios Lane from the police station. Michael McPherson, Arthur Gardenia, the Kowalskis, Helen, and Paja poured into the street, and Michael invited them over to discuss the case, their insurance plans, but mostly to discuss their fear. As Michael expected (and hoped), Paul Patterson, the lingering reporter, tore an immediate path to him.

  “Listen,” Michael blocked Paul’s tiny camera with his palms, “there isn’t much to say here. The investigation is ongoing. The police have some interesting leads.”

  In his periphery, Michael McPherson could feel the Cambodian teenagers staring at him, mesmerized, it seemed. If only Paul Patterson weren’t here, he’d march right up to that little Sofia and give her a piece of his mind. How dare she convince his daughter to skip school? Who did she think she was? She was lucky to be in America, and Michael McPherson had a fierce desire to remind her of that. So far as he was concerned, the lot of them could march right back to where they came from.

  “I’ve provided the police with a list of possibilities,” Michael McPherson said. He had trouble keeping his eyes on the young reporter, his vision wandering left, wandering toward the Cambodians, the boys who leaned as graceful as ballerinas against their rusting car, their bodies lean and slim, all muscle and sinew. They wore bandannas. They wore torn jeans. They smirked at Michael.

  “What do you mean, possibilities?” Paul Patterson asked.

  Michael looked to Arthur and Helen. They were waiting to come in. Dan and Alicia were talking to Paja in a tight little trio, and the Cambodians were laughing to themselves, eating something. Chips maybe. “We thought we could go over the neighborhood-watch protocols again. Insurance. We ought to just . . . be there a bit. For each other.”

  “Yes, definitely,” Helen said, touched by Michael’s apparent inability to articulate whatever he was trying to say. “You know, Susan and Mary were such a big help to me yesterday, Michael. Cleaning up my house.”

  Michael nodded once and turned around. Arthur mumbled his assent and started back toward Michael’s house with Helen following, saying, “Maybe we could help each other organize a bit, you know?” Helen noticed Michael’s gaze had shifted and he was staring a
t the Cambodian boy with the roughest look. She, too, looked toward the Cambodians, but failed to see whatever it was that had caught Michael’s attention.

  Michael narrowed his eyes at the Cambodian boy down the street that he recognized from the day before, and the boy didn’t look away. At least not immediately. The direct challenge of such a look! Michael thought. He felt the anger pooling. What did that punk do when he wasn’t on Ilios Lane, Michael wondered. Loiter near their houses, watching, waiting perhaps? And learning. Oh, yes. This boy had been learning. Had been studying them, hadn’t he? Had discovered who was who and what was what and where they all did what they did and when and with whom.

  This boy, Michael McPherson suddenly suspected, knew everything.

  Paul Patterson had sidled up to Michael once again and was asking him about possibilities and probabilities, lists and developments. This tiny, little husk of a reporter, this freelancer, this lone vulture trying to get ahead. Michael could see it now. How quickly they were all forgotten, how little anyone really cared. Their things scattered across some indistinct geography, their homes in disarray. They were all terrified, weren’t they? That’s why they agreed to come to the McPhersons’. No one wanted to go home. Michael couldn’t remember what he’d been talking about to Paul Patterson and said, “That’s all I can say for now. I’ll give you an update when I can.” Michael turned and motioned for his neighbors to follow. Up to his front door. He inserted his key, turned the knob, heard his daughter’s music blasting from the small kitchen radio.

  Chapter 39

  4:01 p.m.

  Susan could hear traffic in the distance. The rush of tires on asphalt, quiet screeches from brakes in need of pads, the occasional horn. Toward the traffic. That’s where she should go. Was she hearing the Eisenhower Expressway? She thought of Arthur, of how he believed his ears were better attuned to the world than the average person’s because of his condition. Absolute-pitch theory, he had called it, except rather than music, he heard language. Eventually, he had told her, he could recognize and name the speaker without the use of references at all, if it was someone he’d heard enough, someone whose pattern of dialogue and dialect he had diagrammed himself. “Give me time,” he’d told her, “and I’ll know you from anyone with just a single phrase.”

  Absolute-pitch theory.

  Would Arthur have been the one to recognize her scream?

  The boys kept up around her. They were taunting her. They had turned to the place all young boys turn to when they don’t understand their own power: to ridicule and jest.

  “Whatthefuckyoudoin’overinhere, layyyyddeeee?” one taunted.

  Susan didn’t know.

  What the fuck was she doing over in here?

  Madison’s zero, Susan thought, trying to remember how the grid system worked. Move north by the hundreds. Chicago Avenue, eight hundred north. Eight blocks north. Division Street, five hundred north. Five blocks north. Washington and Randolph, one hundred, two hundred. The boys quieted for a moment. She heard a mumble. She heard their footsteps as they retreated somewhere behind her and she nearly fainted with relief. She was so exhausted her breath was ragged, her heart bursting inside her, her throat burning. Her right ankle throbbed from slipping on the McDonald’s bag; her hair was damp with sweat.

  On a stoop two houses up, another group. Young men, music blaring from a boom box on one of the steps. Inside the house, a young girl was screaming in rage: You muthafucka, whatchyoumean you ain’t gotta. . . . You muthafucka . . .

  She heard more boys hollering from chipped maroon steps, and her heart dropped and she knew they would not leave her. They kept shouting at her that she was lost, just a little, lost white lady. They kept telling her what she already knew. That she had come someplace she wasn’t welcome, and she didn’t know what in the hell she was doing. She had believed herself connected to them, to their world.

  She had been connected, but they never were, never had been.

  They’d never cared about her caring.

  And she pictured them, then, as eternal boys, always around her, in everything she would ever do. Eternal Boys running all the way home with her, up her front lawn, and into her house. She pictured the Eternal Boys in her kitchen, crowding her as she filled the dishwasher, squeezing into her car as she went to the grocery store, stealing the available oxygen around her. She pictured them sitting on her desk at the Housing Office laughing at her demographic spreadsheets, sprawled on the floor around her, moving ever closer like walls contracting, and she heard them cackling as she tried to tell a new client about life in east Oak Park. Oh, yeah, they’d say, we can assure your diversity, baby. We can assure you a unique and satisfying living EX-PER-I-ENCE. She felt them crowd her bed at night, lying beside her and on top of her so that she would always have to gasp for breath. She saw them, standing there, waiting, bent over in a runner’s stance, ready to sprint, ready to pounce, ready for every moment. Asleep. Awake. Walking. Running. Talking. Reading. Ever present.

  And then she pictured her daughter.

  Mary Elizabeth McPherson.

  And in her mind the Eternal Boys began to move, slowly, cautiously, away from Susan, to her daughter, their breath coming in short, sharp ringlets from their noses, their eyes narrowed, focusing, and she pictured her daughter taking steps backward, taking deep breaths, too, deeper and deeper, until she began to gasp for breath, until she, too, began to suffocate. And Susan would not let this happen to her daughter from these Eternal Boys. These pitiful, little, motherfucking, small boys. She would not. So she screamed a short, sharp, simple “No!”

  She broke free of them and she ran and she tripped off the sidewalk and she never even noticed the bumper at all. Only knew that she was free of the boys. And her daughter would be free, too.

  Chapter 40

  4:19 p.m.

  At his front door, Michael glanced one last time at the Cambodians, standing around that beat-up Pontiac parked on the street in front of their house. Sofia gave him a tiny wave, and he balled and stretched his fists. What kind of illusion was she under that she had any right at all to wave to him? What kind of parents did she have? he wondered. If only he could give them a piece of his mind. But he knew this was not the time to confront her, to confront any of them, not with a news camera so nearby.

  But those boys. Oh, he could see those cousins of hers, those three, with their torn jeans and their bandannas and how they’d never quite look you in the eye when you talked to them (not that he had ever tried). From afar they’d stare at him with a hardened bravado that amplified the distance.

  And how, he wondered, how had Dara and Sary escaped the burglaries so completely? Not a single electronic stolen beyond the wife’s cell phone? Not a TV or a DVD player or a computer? Why had he and Susan let them off so easily about this? Why hadn’t he confronted them? Or Sofia? Why had he spared the girl’s feelings? After all, she’d been the one to ditch school with Mary Elizabeth. She’d been the one high on ecstasy with his daughter.

  And it all made sense now. The boys, Sofia’s cousins from the city, surely they’d been the source of Mary Elizabeth’s drugs. Surely they’d passed them to Sofia, who’d convinced Mary Elizabeth to take part, and now here those boys were, loitering like the hoodlums he knew them to be, right in front of Paul Patterson’s news camera. What did the others think? Was he the only one who could see them for who they were? The only one bold enough to stand up to them? He could feel the same rage he’d felt just an hour or so earlier, standing in front of the police station with Étienne, a sharp, dark clot of anger that began somewhere in his abdomen and spiraled out through the rest of his body. One of the boys, the middle one, widened his eyes and lifted his gaze and met Michael’s for one split second. One tiny moment that only the two of them shared, and there was nothing there, no understanding, no attempt at camaraderie. Michael despised him. And he, in turn, despised Michael. The camera
, Michael thought, is saving your ass, little man.

  He turned and walked in his front door. Arthur, Dan, Alicia, Paja, and Helen followed. He heard the music from the Loop, louder than Mary usually played it. He was surprised Susan let her keep it this loud. Why was she playing the kitchen radio anyway and not hiding out in her room as she usually did? He recognized the drums, the angry melody of one of Mary’s favorite bands. He’d heard it ­coming from his daughter’s room a hundred times. ­Lincoln Park. Like the north-side neighborhood where wealthy white ­urbanites lived in their tree-lined Chicago brownstones. But, no, it wasn’t ­Lincoln, Mary had said (why such scorn in her voice?), it was Linkin. Linkin Park. “Just because you’re a rock star doesn’t mean you are required to have bad grammar,” her mother had said. Laughing. Diffusing the moment. That was Susan’s role. The Grand Diffuser. A meteorological force for peace and harmony in the house.

  Where were they? Susan and Mary Elizabeth?

  It seemed that something had gone haywire with Michael’s family, with his life. Shouldn’t he be further along by now? Vice president of something, director of such and such? Healthy pension fund growing exponentially? Wasn’t middle age supposed to be one’s golden years? Where was he on this scale? Another decade of house payments, college tuition still to come for Mary Elizabeth. Susan pulled in a pittance from the Housing Office, and his salary, so dependent on sales, was volatile. His pension? Nine-eleven had taken care of that, and who knew when, or if, the market would ever recover? He didn’t even own his car outright.

  Michael stood on the foyer’s tile for a moment.

  He listened to the music streaming from the kitchen, a solid wall of instruments, he thought. No nuance. No subtlety. Just noise. He felt himself recoil at the sound: “All I want to do is be more like me and be less like you . . .” Behind him, Michael heard Helen mention something about children to Paja. Dan put his hand in the small of Alicia’s back.