“Best-case scenario, really,” Sachin said.
“No, that’s bad, too. I don’t have keys anymore, and everything inside belongs to the landlord. Possibly by law?”
I tried to picture Cam letting me back in to search for something of actual value. “I could try…”
“Yeah? That would be…”
Sachin might have fallen asleep mid-sentence.
“I’m going to go,” I said.
Sachin led me back to where I’d left my boots but must have felt something like pity for having to shove me back into the cold. “Can I interest you in some take-out fettucine?” he said.
I don’t know why, but the fettucine got me. I thought of Alex caving to my demands that McPhee’s use the ugly gray Earth-friendly to-go containers, even though he hated them and thought everyone else did, too, then of Oona wanting to hug me and stopping herself. Because of the spikes I’d inherited. No one could see them, but they could sense they were there.
“I was going to tell you,” Sachin said. “Earlier, about the song? The thing you were saying, about Joey?”
“The— Oh. I’m sorry about that. Can you just tell Heather… Actually, I don’t know what to tell her.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “That’s what I was going to say. The song. That made a lot of sense to me.”
“It did?”
“The song you want to sing, yeah. What I wanted to say is… It doesn’t matter that you don’t know the words. Or not that it doesn’t matter, exactly. Of course it matters, words matter.” He stopped and rubbed at the spot between his eyes. “I’m sorry. It’s been a long couple of days.”
Of course Sachin would be in mourning, too. And taking on so much of Heather’s grief, and the baby on the way. It was everything, and nothing I understood. But, for a moment, I could. I could feel the weight he carried—and Sicily, sobbing and begging someone, even me, the dead end I would turn out to be, to help her find her mom.
Howcoulda white suburban lady just disappear off the face of the planet? But Joey had, too, in a different way. Both of them, as they tried to be near me. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, to Sachin, to them all.
Just when I thought I could slip out, Sachin reached for me and pulled me into a hug.
I’m sure I stiffened. No one had hugged me in a long, long time. Just—
Joey.
Into my hair, Sachin said, “You came to see us, even though you knew it would be hard. Youknewit would be hard. The words don’t matter as much as… as you sing, anyway. Do you know what I mean? That’s what I wanted to say. Sing anyway.”
SACHIN OFFERED TO CALL MEa rideshare, but I didn’t want to bother him any more than I already had.
I was deposited back on the street, dark now, evening. Another long day, somehow spent. I lurched past all the identical houses of their neighborhood toward the main road and a bus stop. Wiping at my running eyes and nose, gut sick and aware of how out of place I must look to anyone peering out their windows right now, crying in fringe and cowboy boots along this cute street.
I didn’t want to go back to the apartment. Oona, if she was there, would pester me to talk or suggest another restorative walk with the dogs. Or worse.
Yoga.
She’d just be another person expecting me to have draped myself in widow black. It felt like a show. I usually loved a show, but…
Iwassad, but not just about Joey—about everything. Joey and Alex and Marisa and Heather and Sachin and the blue nursery somewhere in their house and Joey’s fingerprint somewhere along those walls, forever, blue. And also the state of the world and hungry people lined up at the food pantry on Lawrence Avenue every day and mylifeandeveryone’s life right now, man. Sometimes it was just too much to sort out. How did anyone get through this? This… thisliving? Wasn’t there anything for it, besides booze and pills and misery?
I didn’t want to be sad or confused or worried about the future oralonebut I had nowhere to be and no one texting me where was I and when would I be back.
And I didn’t have a working phone, so they couldn’t start, could they?
Who would I even hope to hear from?
Saturday night in the big city, and I would soon be on the bus back toward the apartment and—if Oona was out, if the people next door weren’t banging around, best-case scenario—silence.
I was not a person who suffered silence willingly. I preferred any kind of noise to the noise in my skull. Luckily, Chicago was a place filled with sound: the cacophony of voices on the streets, the rattle of a train on an elevated track. The car-horn section wailing. Oh, Chicago, music everywhere, when you listened. Street festivals in the neighborhoods every summer weekend, concerts in the shell downtown no one could keep you from enjoying from outside the fence. Magnificent Mile shops spilling pop tunes onto the sidewalks, and accompanying on percussion, celebratory fireworks any time of year and bucket boys banging on their five-gallon plastic tubs for whatever change you can spare.
