What We've Lost Is Nothing

  Michael took two steps into the dining room.

  He would recall only colors later. And the sound of Linkin Park.

  Blue jeans.

  Black boots with thick soles.

  The roundness of his daughter’s hip.

  The bottom of her socks.

  She was under the table, most of her hidden, visible from the waist down, as she knelt on all fours in front of a boy Michael had never before seen. A boy with dirty-blond hair that hung long and limp past his shoulders. An olive-green T-shirt, faded with age around the shoulder blades, jean jacket tossed in a bundle to the floor. Michael thought he heard the tinkle of a belt, prong against buckle, prong against buckle, prong-buckle, moving, moving, moving. His daughter’s knuckles, gone white with her fingers grabbing at the rug.

  Then the boy was on the wall. His neck under the forearm of Michael McPherson, the sweat from his tryst with Mary mixing with the sweat of his surprise. The shock not just of her father, but of all these people. Everyone in the room flushed with a mutual, breathless shock.

  Who the hell are all these people? Caz thought. The ground was not beneath his feet. His penis, slick and hard, bobbed in the air, and he first tried to find his pants, his zipper, then reached to get out from Michael’s forearm. He hung there, one hand clutching Michael’s forearm, the other trying to tuck his penis back into his underwear.

  He gasped, “She fucking asked for it, you asshole.”

  Michael stumbled backward. The boy slid down the wall, collapsed, righted himself. Had a boy, had this boy, said what Michael heard? Had a boy ever said such a thing to an adult?

  Michael’s voice was a growl. “What. Did. You. Say. To. Me?” His flesh was red, his hands clenched, his legs shook. He could not look down toward the table, toward his daughter, sobbing, scrambling, screaming for her clothes.

  Alicia covered her eyes.

  Arthur recognized the scream. Reached for it.

  Dan stared at Mary Elizabeth’s feet as they frantically searched for the leg openings of her jeans. The front door had been left open.

  Helen bent down to help Mary Elizabeth put her clothes on.

  “Mr. McPherson,” Paja Coen said cautiously, holding out one arm, looking first at Michael, then at the boy, who was heaving, who was trying to buckle his belt, but his hands were shaking too furiously and he couldn’t find the holes. The rage of adults had long since ceased to terrify him.

  “I said,” Caz spoke slowly, matching the sinister quiet of Michael’s tone, “she fucking asked for it.” Caz turned, glanced under the table for a fraction of a second.

  Mary Elizabeth saw it all then, the entirety of her immediate future wrapped up in an infinite black tunnel. Caz’s eyes, glazed over as he glanced in her direction, unfocused. It was as if she were camouflaged inside her own dining-room wall. She suddenly knew the answer to a hundred questions, some she had asked, many she had not.

  “No,” Mary Elizabeth screamed. “No, I did not, you fucking asshole.”

  “You sure as fuck did, you bitch.”

  Mary snapped her mouth shut, could not look at Caz, who seemed to her to have morphed into some kind of animal. Helen was kneeling over Mary, brushing her hair back with her hands, telling her it would be all right, and Mary wanted Helen to stop.

  Michael McPherson got hold of a clump of Caz’s T-shirt. He was saying nonsensical things: “pissant” and “learn a lesson” and “invade my family.” Mary had never heard her father like this, so angry he couldn’t finish a sentence. The collective sound was overpowering, everyone hollering at once, and Mary was trying to decipher whose words belonged to what voice, and it seemed to her that noise could carry a physical weight.

  Paja and Arthur would remember Michael’s scream later. Paja would compare it to a bear, Arthur to a volcano. Dan pushed Alicia out of the way, back into the living room where the front door stood open.

  Wrapping her arms around Mary Elizabeth, Helen pulled the girl up.

  “Where is my mom? Where is my mom?” Mary Elizabeth sobbed. Whereismymommymymommymom?

  No one would know for several hours.

  Michael had Caz by the back of his jeans now, by the belt, by the loops (the seams of a pair of Levi’s had a tensile strength of 142 pounds. They would learn this in court). Caz was bent over, clawing at the floor, clawing his way out toward the front door, a flailing, downward dog. Michael tripped after him, holding tight to his jeans. Someone was screaming for Michael to let go. For Michael to calm down. For Mary Elizabeth not to look. For Caz to get out. For everyone to calm down. Only Arthur stayed silent, focused on the voices, trying to find Mary Elizabeth by the sound of her sobs.

  Caz made it to the door.

  He made it outside.

  He tumbled, rolled. With Michael on top of him. Around him. Holding on. Dan left Alicia and ran toward Michael.

  Paul Patterson’s little camera sprang to life. “What the hell’s going on?” he shouted, running across the lawn, one of his shoelaces flapping ominously.

  Dara and his nephews ran toward Michael. Sofia and Sary followed across the yard. Sofia felt a kind of sickness spread through her body because she recognized the boy as Caz and she knew immediately what had happened, that Mary’s father had walked in, had seen too much. Sofia had encouraged Mary Elizabeth to hook up with Caz, and nausea rose from Sofia’s stomach. Mary’s dad tackled Caz in a rage, and for a moment Sofia feared for Caz’s life. One of her cousins threw a protective arm across her body, and Dara yelled at her to stay away. There were too many voices, too many bodies running toward and away, and she could not make out who anyone was, what anyone was doing. She stopped at the edge of the McPherson lawn and felt her mother come and encircle her with her arms. The shame, the terrific, horrible thing she had done, burrowed into her. She never said a word. Would never tell Mary how wrong she had been, how terribly, terribly wrong.

  Blood bloomed across the face of the blond boy with the dangling belt. Spread like drops of water blown across glass.

  Dan Kowalski could not get a grip on Michael. Dan was not given to physicality in any way, and so his arms felt uncoordinated and perhaps a little rebellious, suggesting through returned impulses from his brain that he was ill prepared for this kind of fight. He was wearing boat shoes and they slipped off his feet, and then someone—maybe Caz, maybe Paul Patterson—tripped over one and yelped.

  Paja Coen stood on the stoop at the front door and yelled for Michael to stop.

  Aldrin Rutherford came running out of his house at the commotion, stopped short at the end of Helen’s lawn, and watched, his mouth agape, his T-shirt damp with sweat and dark with dirt. Before the summer was over, a RE/MAX FOR SALE sign would appear on the Rutherford lawn.

  Alicia Kowalski went to Helen and Mary Elizabeth. Alicia held on to the other side of the girl, linking her arms around Helen’s, the two women forming a circle, cocooning Mary Elizabeth, who was crying so hard Helen feared she would hyperventilate, so she simply said, “Sssshhhhhhh, I know. Ssssshhhhhh. Sssssshhhhh . . .” But she didn’t know.

  Mary Elizabeth took no comfort from these women. No safety. She felt trapped, held there against her will. She would not remember their names, these strangers who would populate her life for just this moment and then, one by one, slowly dissolve from the frame. She would remember feeling as if her mother were nearby, arm’s ­distance away, and these women seemed to be keeping her from Susan, trapping her there between them, and she had an ­irrational, fleeting thought that Caz had somehow managed this, too. Her continued captivity.

  “Ssssshhhhhh,” Alicia joined Helen. “Ssssshhhhhh.”

  Because there was nothing else that could be said.

  For a long, long time.

  For years.

  Paul Patterson ran to Arthur. “What happened in there?”

  Arthur adjusted his dark glasses, but did not r
espond.

  “Sir. Can you tell me anything?”

  Arthur stood. Silent. He was used to his own silence. He could outsilence anyone. He thought of Mary Elizabeth. Who cleaned his house. Who read to him. Her voice had always been soothing. He’d loved that voice. He’d know it anywhere, even now as it was. Sobbing, screaming. It had always carried heat to him, a rich, quiet softness. He’d loved how her statements often ended in a kind of gentle question. Tell me, she might have said, tell me about what is to come. Tell me what to expect. Tell me what it’ll be like. Adulthood, she wanted to know. His theory of questions. Is it bad that I can answer for you, but not for me? Her real question, he knew but had never articulated until this moment, was whether there was ever a moment in your life when you felt you had control? It was another way of ­asking about happiness. When it would come. If it would come. If it demanded a high price. If you could survive enough to eventually make your way toward it. He thought back to that night when he’d first run into her near the 7-Eleven last fall. How he’d leaned on the mailbox and she’d sat on the ground. So limber. So free to move as she desired. The young own their bodies in ways they don’t fully grasp, Arthur thought, until they are forced to give up ownership, as he had done, as everyone must someday do. He did not have a daughter, but he knew if he had, he would do exactly what Michael McPherson was doing now. And so he remained silent.

  Not for Mary, this time.

  But for Michael.

  The three Cambodian boys were the first to reach Michael, after Dan fell back from the force of Michael’s arm.

  The camera never stopped.

  Michael’s nose was broken.

  Mary saw Arthur then, who had come to stand beside her, and she reached for the collar of his Members Only jacket and was suddenly released by Helen and Alicia into Arthur’s arms. She did not think of his blindness then. Not that day. But for every day after. How in all the noise, all the chaos, all the injuries and confusion and rage, he had found his way to her.

  “Arthur,” she said. “Arthur.”

  He did not say, Sssshhhhhh. Instead, he whispered in her ear, “Close your eyes.”

  And she did.

  Caz tore a ligament in his left ankle tripping over the doorframe with Michael McPherson atop his back, and Caz heard a familiar sound, emanating from somewhere behind him though he would not be able to place it for a long time to come. Michael dislocated Caz’s jaw and left shoulder, cracked two ribs, and Caz would be unable to talk in his own defense in court. This would understandably make the jury more sympathetic, and so for those few weeks he was thankful for the injury. It was the only time in his life he would be given the benefit of the doubt, the only time in his life he would be the recipient of empathy. His jaw would heal cockeyed, just two small millimeters off course, so that he appeared always to be grinding his teeth, to be thinking every possible thing through, even the smallest, most inconsequential thing (rum and Coke, or Jack and Coke? Marlboro Reds or Camels? Doggy or missionary?). Later, driving a truck across country just as his father had, he would earn the nickname Gnarly, not as in cool dude, but as in gnarled. As in twisted limb and jagged root. He would never tell the story of Michael McPherson, of how he got a gnarled jaw, and that sound—what was that sound? Both familiar and distant—would haunt him. Of his scar, he would fabricate a story about an ice-hockey pickup game, the fucking puck coming right toward him. Bam! Into the jaw. Bam! The story he told. The story would feel real after a dozen tellings, after he’d lived a dozen years, after a woman whose name he couldn’t at first remember would give birth to a little girl she claimed was his, and it would turn out to be true, and he would remember that afternoon and he would finally know that if he couldn’t ever forgive Michael McPherson, he could at least understand. He’d feel the urge to find Mary, to search for her and look her up and apologize, and every few years the urge would overtake him, but he would drink it away. He’d visit with his daughter as she grew and he’d vow to protect her in his quiet moments, in front of mirrors, or driving down long stretches of highway parting Midwestern cornfields. He’d keep her away from boys like him. He would make this vow as Mary’s father had once done, and so many other fathers across time and history, because they believe themselves somehow stronger than the forces of the world. They make their vows and still their daughters are never safe.

  Then one day in a flash it would come to him. The sound he’d heard. The familiarity. Mary’s screaming, Mary’s sobbing. He’d heard it once before. From another woman he’d known. His mother. No one would have to tell him that trauma and memory were not false, not for the weakhearted. No one would have to tell him what he’d done and what he’d lived through. It would come to him at once, a weight so overpowering and so overwhelming he would suddenly understand them all—his mother, his father, his own past, his daughter and her future, and what he’d taken from Mary, and he would give in. Give up. His body would not be found for days.

  The police were quick to come. This was Ilios Lane, after all. This was one day past the day. This was a street, Sary would later say, where the ghosts were thick with rage. Sofia watched her three cousins make their way to Michael McPherson with determined strides. I should stop them, she thought, one second too late.

  “Get off me, you goddamned dropouts,” Michael yelled to the Cambodian boys. The boys who were winners of merit scholarships and travel grants. The boys who were bilingual and averaged, collectively, 3.8 GPAs. “Get the hell off me.” He swung his arm just to break free, he would tell the police, would tell Detective Wasserman. He wasn’t trying to harm the boys. His only focus was on Caz, the rapist. The word would make Mary Elizabeth flinch. She wouldn’t know if it was an accurate description of Caz for many years.

  The three Cambodians converged on Michael, pulled him off Caz, who sat dazed on the cold ground in front of the McPherson house with his belt unbuckled and blood splattered down his olive-green T-shirt, his jaw slack and hanging, dizziness surrounding him.

  An ambulance was called. The cousins jumped Michael, and in a rush of adrenaline he lashed through the air. Ken, who weighed no more than 110 pounds (less than the tensile strength of a pair of Levi’s), flew off Michael’s arm like a balled-up wad of paper and hit his head on the sidewalk, and it bounced up once and came to rest at the foot of Paul Patterson, whose camera panned over Ken’s body from his tennis shoes, up his torn jeans and across his unbuttoned flannel shirt, and up to his blood-soaked bandanna.

  His concussion was the opposite of minor. A blunt-trauma head wound. A hospital stay and a high school career extended by one semester. His concussion would slur his speech, blur his vision for months. It would end the budding friendship between Mary Elizabeth and his cousin, Sofia, and render Michael McPherson—from the standpoint of American actuaries and their risk graphs and their forecasting charts—an uninsurable homeowner for the rest of his life.

  Wasserman arrived moments after the first police cruiser, followed immediately by one ambulance and then another (the following month, Paul Patterson would be offered a job on WGN news).

  “It’s not what it looks like,” Michael said to Wasserman. He was out of breath, but already his hands had been cuffed behind him, his face sheened in sweat, blood spattered from his nose down his shirt, one eye bloodshot.

  “You can open your eyes now,” Arthur whispered to Mary.

  The human cacophony stopped abruptly.

  “I’d advise you to keep quiet, Mr. McPherson,” Detective Wasserman said.

  “That boy—”

  “For your own good. Take my advice now on this, Mr. McPhe­rson.”

  Wasserman scanned the scene. The McPherson girl looked disheveled, her eyes—clenched shut when he’d arrived—were open now and staring at her father. The blind man across the street was beside her, gently holding her hand. A young Asian boy Wasserman had never before seen had paramedics hovering over him. They shone a light first in one
eye, then the other. Another boy with long, stringy hair lay strapped to a gurney, his head secured in a neck brace. It was, Wasserman knew, exactly what it looked like. He nodded toward the officer holding Michael’s arm. The officer led Michael to the police cruiser, and Michael turned around and saw that Mary was beside Arthur, and even though Michael knew Arthur could not see him do so, he mouthed a thank-you to the old man.

  The verdict was guilty.

  Caz was a minor by a year. His prior record made the judge go easy on Michael McPherson. The lack of a prior record for Ken, in turn, made the judge go harder on Michael McPherson. His wife’s long-standing favor in the community coupled with her injury would also make the judge go easy on Michael McPherson. The loss of his daughter, wholly and completely, went unnoticed by anyone except Michael McPherson. At the end, the score would be even—two easies, two hards. Two boys injured. Two women lost.

  Probation. Two years. Thirty days’ jail time. The judge let Mary Elizabeth, after pleading and begging and writing a letter on her own behalf, have Arthur stay with her for those thirty days, and in that time she learned to live in the dark, and eventually she would seek out the darkest places she could find. She’d write a dissertation about Bosnian women refugees in Chicago, about how trauma skips a generation and embeds itself in the generational memories of grandsons and granddaughters, and she would be given a grant from the National Science Foundation to continue her research on women from Burma, from Iraq, from Syria and Afghanistan and Somalia and Rwanda, and always she would seek out the darkness. She would replace her own story with the stories of women she met who’d lived through worse. She’d think of Arthur. All the time, Arthur. But she’d never ask the question again. Of herself. Of ­anyone.

  The burglaries were forgotten in the wake of an adult’s ­beating—beating—two minors. The minors were never named. Alleged sexual assault was never proven.