Mary Elizabeth would recognize in herself the inability to speak at moments of heightened tension. She would warn would-be suitors about this characteristic. She would avoid action movies and horror movies because they made her too tense. She would engage in yoga and meditation, in college and then in graduate school. She would always want quiet. Music rarely played in her house. She lived on quiet streets, on dead ends or in buildings set back from the road. Nightclubs, concerts, and sporting events were generally off-putting to her. She lived in a calm and steady darkness that she’d learned from Arthur Gardenia.
“It’s almost,” she later said, “it’s almost like noise erases me.”
But on that day she stood in the foyer, watching first with the arms of her neighbors around her, then Arthur’s hand in hers, and she knew her father had said, in fists and in rage, what she had been unable to: No. Not this time. Not Mary Elizabeth McPherson. This wouldn’t heal her. This wouldn’t make their relationship smooth and easy, but it would be an image, a moment for her to remember, to recall in times of doubt. To Mary, it seemed suddenly that her father fought a lot of things. He fought people and their ideas, he fought his wife, his children. He fought her. He fought his career and his inertia of failure and much of the movement of life around him. He fought his boss, he fought his clients, he fought utility companies and bureaucracy and neighbors. He fought illness in others, and in himself. He fought crabgrass and weeds and overheated radiators. He fought banks and credit-card charges. He fought his own heart, his own mind, his own desires. Sometimes, it seemed, he’d take on the sun if he thought it might fight fairly. But this moment, this day, captured digitally and played over and over again in evening-news cycles—a man collapsing under the pressure of his home’s burglary, said the media’s logic—on this afternoon before news of her mother reached them, before her father’s arrest and sentencing, before they moved and everything changed and she never saw a single Ilios Lane resident again, she had this image:
Her father.
One single afternoon.
Enraged.
And fighting for her.
Epilogue
Thursday, April 8, 2004, 6:30 p.m.
When Susan finally opened her eyes, she could feel a crust around her eyelashes, and someone had removed her contacts so that the whole room was blurry. To her right, her daughter sat in a chair staring at her own knees, her shoulders arching forward as if the weight of her body were too much to hold up. She wore her winter fleece, even though Susan thought the room was too warm. She wanted to tell her daughter to sit up straight, to look ahead, but a searing pain in her thigh caught her breath and she inhaled sharply, and Mary suddenly looked up at her, and that’s when Susan noticed someone else in the room, someone who wasn’t Michael, though she could not make out who it was until he spoke.
“It’s best if you lie still,” Arthur said. “Just try to relax, Susan.”
Mary seemed to be vibrating in her chair, her whole body in a kind of quiet movement. Arthur Gardenia sat next to her, and Susan had no idea why. She could feel the irritation of a breathing tube in her nose, and her thighs itched furiously, which was a result of the morphine, though she did not yet know this.
Arthur told her about her injuries. A dislocated hip and broken femur. A cracked rib, a small tear in her earlobe. Pins in her leg. A smooth-as-could-be-expected operation. A long road ahead of her, certainly, but no reason she couldn’t expect to make a full recovery. On a far table she could see colorful blobs, flower baskets it seemed, and a couple of pink and yellow balloons.
“Your cheek,” Mary said, “it’s like really swollen. But don’t freak out. The doctor said it’ll be fine.”
Susan finally managed a word: “Cheek.”
“It was pretty bloody.”
Susan nodded. “Water.”
Mary took a plastic cup from the bedside table and bent a straw toward her mother’s mouth. Susan tried not to gulp, but she was so very, very thirsty. Outside her door she heard someone call out, “That’s okay, honey,” and break into laughter. Footsteps faded away. This was the first time, Susan realized, that she’d been in a hospital bed since Mary had been born, and now here was that same tiny baby, grown-up and helping her own mother drink. Susan had to concentrate hard not to cry. What had she done with all those years? She could not remember anything between that seven-pound baby and this fifteen-year-old girl. Nothing of Mary’s childhood came into her mind, and she felt a tiny panic spring in her belly. Then an image came to her, a mermaid cake, a child’s birthday, and she relaxed a little.
Susan could feel her hair matted to her forehead, to the pillow. Pastel wallpaper spanned the room, a peach curtain separating her bed from another patient’s. She smelled dried sweat and ammonia and then something else, something delicious, like garlic and cheese and other things she had no names for in her blurry state.
“I slept at Arthur’s last night,” Mary said.
Susan understood that her daughter was speaking to her, but the room was strange, as if the walls were unsound, as if they might collapse on her. Where was Michael? she wondered. Talking to the doctor? Looking for a parking spot? Out getting coffee in the hospital’s cafeteria? She began to remember, to put it all together. The burglaries. Her daughter home. Safe. And not safe. It seeped back in. The missing pieces of her recent life, how she’d rushed home from the office and run toward Mary, even as she saw that her daughter was unharmed. How she felt for a moment as if she’d always be running, trying to outrun, outmaneuver, outsmart, anything that came near her daughter. Then the boys. And the wolves. And she remembered, all of it.
“It’s just temporary,” Arthur said. “Until you’re home.” They’d move a bed into the living room of the McPherson home, he said, so Susan wouldn’t have to navigate the stairs. And Arthur would be there. Yes, he would. Even a blind man could stick dishes in the dishwasher, he’d said, and smiled. Toss some clothes into a machine. Michael, well. That’s all Arthur could say about him.
“It’s been quite a while since I had the great opportunity to offer help to someone else,” he told her. “I’m not much of a cook, but I’m quite adept at opening cans.” Then he pushed a small bag toward her on her tray table and the food smells grew stronger. She noticed Mary nodding at everything Arthur said. She was wearing an oversize men’s flannel shirt that Susan recognized from Michael’s closet.
“And Étien—Edward. Mr. Lenoir. He brought over a bunch of food earlier today. Tons, actually,” Mary said. “He’s starting a whole new restaurant. He told me and Arthur. It’s like some kind of fancy hamburger place.”
“He knew the hospital food would be ghastly,” said Arthur. “He’s asked us all to be culinary guinea pigs for some new grand idea he’s not quite unveiled.”
“Michael, well?” Susan said. Such small talk. What was it all about? A machine beeped rhythmically, something squeaked in the hallway.
Arthur and Mary exchanged looks, and Susan suddenly suspected that the conversation they were having had nothing to do with food or beds or care, and that her husband, Michael, was not speaking with the doctor or getting coffee in the cafeteria or trying to find a spot on the street to avoid a large parking fee. The specifics were lost on her, but she felt a heaviness in the room, as if the edges of the television and the tray table and the bed, and the doorframe and even her neighbor and her daughter, had trailed off into the distance. What might have happened if she hadn’t gone for a run? If she had just once remembered to bring her cell phone? The smallest decision, the smallest step to the left, or to the right, the smallest remembrance, the smallest moment, in anyone’s life can upend so much more. One small inch. Could change everything. If she reached out, if she touched her daughter on the knee, on the leg, on the hand, just anywhere she could reach, could her daughter hold that tiny touch forever?
“You were very lucky,” Arthur told Susan. “Very lucky someone
was right there when you were hit. Called 911 immediately after the damn driver sped off. Do you remember being hit by the car?”
A nurse barreled into the room and announced himself as Todd. “Glad to see you’re awake, Mrs. McPherson.”
Susan managed a half smile, but she was trying to remember what Arthur had just said. About someone calling 911.
Todd looked at her chart, lifted one side of her blanket, and peeked at the cast. He took her pulse.
“You’ll surely be feeling yourself soon, so don’t you be afraid to ask for something, you got me? That pain’ll hit you like a train wreck.”
Susan nodded. She understood, then. Not that she’d be feeling like herself soon, but that she’d be feeling herself soon, her broken body. She found herself wanting to say, almost like a confession to Todd, that she had not quite felt herself for a little while now.
Todd winked at Mary, said he’d be back in a while, and disappeared out the door.
Then Susan allowed her mind to remember, the secret she would never share. The Eternal Boys. The wolves. “Who called 911?” she slurred, her lips thick and dry.
“I don’t know,” Arthur said. “A young boy. Stayed with you till the ambulance came. The driver said he had you in his lap, talking to you like you were his own mother. Telling you to keep yourself strong, keep on breathing. Said he’d learned CPR after his brother was shot, some years back. Didn’t need it for you, thank God.”
Just one. Eternal Boy. Who would not leave her.
She saw her head in his lap.
She heard him talk to her.
Susan felt her eyes grow warm, felt the tears rise up from where she lay.
“You’re cracking again, Mom.” Mary’s voice was dry and monotone, and Susan realized that Mary, too, was crying.
Mary had never seen her mother cry like this. It made her think of a cavern, the endless space of something hollow and shapeless and infinite.
“I don’t believe they got the boy’s name,” Arthur said.
Of course they didn’t. The world was full of ghosts and spirits, things they once held that were gone, and things intangible, equally gone. Because it wasn’t the items in their homes they’d lost, Susan would someday think, it was their own tiny empires. Their own lost cities.
Mary reached out and covered her mother’s hand with her own, then scooted her chair over and lay, forehead down, on the mattress at Susan’s shoulder. Mary’s body shuddered. Susan could not remember the last time her daughter had reached for her.
“Tell me,” Susan said, reaching her left hand across her own body and touching Mary’s kinky, curly hair, the thick mass her daughter hated so much, the strength of Samson, which was—they both knew—just the kind of tall tale a child believes for far too long, “tell me everything that happened.”
Author’s Note
Though the characters and events of this book are entirely fictional, the Oak Park Community Housing Office is inspired by the real-life Oak Park Regional Housing Center. Oak Park’s Diversity Assurance program is similarly based on an actual program in the Village (one of many throughout the years). I have collapsed several different programs under the umbrella of Diversity Assurance here for the sake of narrative clarity. Oak Park itself has been the study of demographers worldwide for many years. In the years it took to write this book, I read blogs, letters, Listservs, and community articles that discussed the diversity programs, and the area’s longtime integration efforts, with more detail than any casual reader is likely interested in. But those sites showed me that while the methodology might not be agreed upon, the heart and soul of the real Oak Park community shares a deep and abiding commitment to inclusion.
My interest was more than academic, however. I first moved to Oak Park in 1992, right out of college, into a building on Austin Boulevard owned by Russell and Kevin Schuman, who had a company called RK Management. They believed in the mission of integration, and still do today, and I am profoundly grateful to have crossed paths with them. They owned several large buildings on Oak Park’s east side, and had hired a resident manager for each. The woman who managed my building—Ann Maxwell—was also fresh out of college. Ann was the first community activist I’d ever met, the first person to show me that a neighborhood with diverse faces and voices and viewpoints offered a much richer experience, a better world, than one of homogeneity. In the early nineties, Ann used to hold potluck dinners for the tenants of the building so we’d get to know one another. She started what was then a radical program: having renters in a multi-unit building recycle their waste. She swept the alleyways and picked up trash and calmed tenants during stressful times. Once, when the power went out during a storm, she invited all the neighbors she could find to play cards by candlelight in her apartment. It is hard to capture all that she has added to my life over the past two decades. She is my soul sister, my closest confidant, and the person I most aspire to be like: humble, curious, brilliant, empathic, steadfast, and hilarious.
Eventually, I became a resident manager myself for RK Management, at a building three blocks west of Austin Boulevard, and just around the corner from Ann. On paper, my job was to clean the building, show apartments, and be a point of contact for complaints or issues. But my real job was to create community. We managers were the most visible and present manifestation of a belief system that said all people had a right to live where they choose, free from crime and racial intolerance. We tried to make neighbors known to neighbors, to foster friendships and relationships—things that often prove challenging among renters. Everything one could imagine happened during my five years in that job: fires, floods, break-ins, drug dealing, domestic violence. One girl who’d gotten addicted to crack was wheeled out of the building on a gurney multiple times; she was fifteen years old. When she eventually moved, we found locking mechanisms outside her bedroom—the sign of a mother perhaps in equal measures abusive and terrified. Another woman was regularly beaten by her boyfriend, but refused to cooperate with police when they were called to the scene—an act I only later discovered was likely her means of self-protection when the officers left. Those were some of the worst moments. We had many, many beautiful ones, too. One tenant taught his neighbors how to dance. Another group began an annual camping trip together. We planted a collective herb and vegetable garden, and held building-wide courtyard parties and potlucks. Of the many, many lessons I garnered while in that job, perhaps none has been more profound than the realization that if you come from the majority culture you have the luxury of racial oblivion, by which I mean you need not think that race is part of everything; minorities very often do not know such luxury. It is a lesson I try to impart on my daughter. Though she is only five, when I walk into a classroom—my own or hers—or an event or a party, I find myself instantly scanning the faces for diversity—in race, in culture, in gender. Too often, I am disappointed by what I see.
Though the mission of the Housing Center is controversial to some, at its core it was begun by a group of idealistic people who believed integration was a primary marker of both social progress and a rich and varied life, and who fervently espoused the view that decent housing in a safe community with a good school district was a basic human right. Even in the late sixties in Oak Park, it was entirely legal for Realtors to refuse to show properties to minority families. Roberta “Bobbie” Raymond began the Housing Center out of a church classroom, with the aim of correcting some of the grave injustices committed under the discriminatory practices of redlining and blockbusting—practices rampant in Chicago and many other cities across the U.S. in the early part of the twentieth century. Recently, she completed a DVD for the Oak Park Library’s historical archives about what it was like to start the Center forty years ago. She and her colleagues received death threats at the time. But the question, she said in the interview, is the same today as it was four decades earlier: “How much do you intervene? . . . You wish that it all were
not necessary.”
Indeed.
But as a writer and a humanist, I am grateful for the legacy—and the challenge to do better—that she and so many others have left me.
Acknowledgments
I am thankful to my incredible support system of early readers: Ann Maxwell, David Corey, Andre Dubus III, David Keplinger, Danielle Evans, Stephanie Grant, Glenn Moomau, and Gayle Forman (who deserves extra kudos for answering a panicked call from me in the middle of the night from South Korea). For research help on police procedures and common burglary patterns, Deputy Chief Robert Scianna, Detective Robert Wile, Marcello Muzzatti, and Betty Ballester were integral. Dr. Arthur Shapiro deserves thanks for allowing me into his lab at American University and devising an experiment that enabled me to experience hemeralopia. Steve Carr taught me more about bridges than I could possibly include here, and I think of him every time I cross one. For all public radio wisdom: John Barth, Israel Smith, Vidal Guzman, and Nancy Robertson. Joellyn Powers and Bryan Freeland were fantastic research assistants; Debby Preiser of the Oak Park Public Library and Rob Breymaier of the Oak Park Regional Housing Center both offered eleventh-hour help. Bobbie Raymond took time from her holiday to keep me from embarrassing myself with historical inaccuracies; thanks to her fact-checking, but especially to her vision and passion.
I would also like to thank the following: Ted Conover, Richard McCann, Kyle Dargan, Elise Levine, Mia Jordanwood, Bree Fitzgerald, Alison Brower, Elizabeth Becker, Sarah Pollock, and Caroline Alexander, who first told me of a mass burglary in Georgia back in the 1980s while we were standing on a hilltop in South Vietnam with the U.S. Army, and which later became the seed for this novel. For twenty years, my agent, Susan Ramer, has fought for me and believed in me and cheered for me, and I wish for everyone to have someone like her fighting their corner. My team at Scribner was so beautifully engaged and enthusiastic that I feel both undeserving and profoundly grateful: John Glynn, Gwyneth Stansfield, Steve Boldt, and Dan Cuddy. My family has the fortune—good or bad—to be filled with writers and in particular my cousin, the poet Lance Lee, provides eternal inspiration and advice. My brother, David, inherited the best of my family while often enduring the worst. My Aunt Barbara and Uncle Wes have been surrogate parents to me. Thanks, also, to my father, Richard Snyder, my stepmother, Barbara Snyder, and my siblings: John, Josh, Kristi, and Doug. Finally, I thank my husband, Paul, for continuing to believe in me and for giving me the greatest gift I’ve ever received: my daughter, Jazz. The harmony and rhythm of my life. Who knew you could love someone this much?
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