Then Marisa was standing on the sidewalk, lingering and still as the world moved at double speed all around her. I grabbed for the computer mouse to return the video to normal speed, and there she stood, considering the front door to the tavern.
Sicily sucked in her breath. “That’s her.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
Sicily looked at me, then away. I could tell she hadn’t really wanted to believe me that Marisa was my mother, too. She’d been holding out hope that we were talking about two different women, poor kid. Andnow she knew: My drug addict was the same as her Brownie troop leader, confirmed—and truth?—we were both feeling some kind of way about it.
Dog nails clacked along the hallway and through the door, and Bear shuffled in. He came up to the chair we both sat in, and put his chin on Sicily’s thigh. She looked down, surprised, and then put her hand on his head, petting him absently as she turned her attention back to the video.
“Why is she just standing there?”
“It would be a guess,” I said, “but I think she’s trying to decide if it’s worth the trouble of coming inside.”
“What trouble? Because it’s a bar?”
“Because I’m inside the bar,” I said. “Or I will be, soon.”
On the screen, Marisa pivoted and walked north along the sidewalk to the alley and disappeared.
“Wait,” Sicily said. “Where is she going?”
I checked the time stamp. “She walked around back and came in that way,” I said. “She was already upstairs when I went up to my apartment.”
“Youlivehere?”
What was interesting was that Marisa had known I lived here. I hadn’t wondered how until now. On the screen, the dogs and I were coming up to a blind spot, where Bern was leaning against the bricks.
I reached for the mouse and sped up the action again. That truck pulling out, finally, then I thought I spotted Alex’s plaid shirt out by the alley, too, but didn’t slow the feed to see what he was doing. Probably moving a drunk along, something he had to do often enough.
I watched the time stamp for about the time Marisa had been bothering Alex at the bar. On the screen, people were out front, laughing and having smokes. Steve’s girlfriends from the ladies’ room emerged onto the street, picking along the sidewalk with tiny steps in uncomfortable shoes. Going home alone.
And then there she was again. Marisa, coming out of the bar by thefront door. I slowed the video again and let it play, listening to Sicily’s breath go deep with longing at the sight of her mother.
On the video, Marisa’s dye job shined white in the light of the streetlamp. She looked young, somehow, there on the street. Alone, vulnerable. She turned to look down Milwaukee, and the camera recorded a shadowed profile, a straight nose that I sort of recognized from photos of myself, a lip moving as she chewed on it or spoke to someone—
“Is she talking?” I said.
She was crying.
Sicily sat up straight. “Why is she—”
“I don’t know.” But I sort of knew, didn’t I? Things hadn’t gone how she’d hoped. I’d made sure of it.
Marisa started walking north. At the alley, she paused, made a step into the dark, and then continued out of frame. Sicily turned to me.
“Wait,” I said. A car had just driven by, stopping abruptly, the taillights just visible. The barest slice of shadow played at the edge of the camera’s field of vision. I felt as though we could see what was happening, if only I nudged the computer screen an inch.
“What?” Sicily said as I backed the video up a few clicks.
I set it to play again. “I think she stopped to talk to whoever’s driving that car. See? She walked off justthere, and then the car slows down and stops. See that shadow moving? I think it’s the door opening.”
We watched it through a long, boring bit where nothing seemed to happen. There was a shadow at the very edge of the camera’s scope and then someone going into the alley, maybe. Was it Marisa? But then nothing. We watched, real time, for a long time, but Marisa never reappeared. I wasn’t sure what we’d seen. I rewound it and played it again. Had she grabbed a ride? With someone she knew, or a rideshare?
“I’m not sure how helpful this will be to the police,” I said. “Too bad we’re not characters in one of those crime shows where they can take a photo fromspaceand still get the license plate number.”
Sicily had been quiet, working at her scarf with the other handstroking Bear’s ears. She was staring at the screen. I hit pause on the footage, and the kid didn’t even blink.
“You know whose car that was,” I said. “Don’t you?”
