Alice had stopped asking about Chicago and her mother’s past when she was a child, for her mother’s sake. She’d accepted that the place and people her mother had decided to withhold were never going to be part of her life. When the Internet had become easily searchable, in Alice’s late teens, she’d considered looking up her mother’s sisters, but—apart from tracking down Cecelia’s artwork—she’d given the idea up almost immediately. Alice knew her mother wouldn’t want her to, and since Alice no longer needed more family to feel safe, she didn’t seek out the information.
But Alice had been an idiot. She’d always known her mother was hiding something; that was why she’d gone through Julia’s drawers while she was in middle school. She’d thought the secret was Julia’s, though, and had nothing to do with her. Alice checked facts for a living. She knew how to look for evidence and confirm sources. Julia had offered the young Alice very few facts, however, and there had been no sources to reach out to for verification. What Julia said went unverified, and Alice could see that now. She could see the weakness of what she’d been handed, and she could see her own weakness in accepting it as truth.
Perhaps other people might have helped her figure this out—Rose, Carrie, Rhoan—but the young Alice had grown so tall that no one ever thought to help her, and she prided herself on never asking for help. Everyone—men and women—rushed to Carrie’s aid, even when she was perfectly fine, because she was cute and five feet tall. But the assumption was that Alice never needed help. She could, after all, reach every high shelf and carry her own luggage with no problem. When someone did try to assist her, she suspected them of ulterior motives.
“Are you still there?” Rose asked.
“Yes.” Sound intensified on the street out of nowhere—a tornado of noise. Countless decibels hit at once. Two ambulances passed Alice, driving in opposite directions. Taxi drivers laid on their horns. The air vibrated with sound, and Alice and Rose had to wait to have any chance of speaking or hearing. The city is talking to us, Carrie would have said if she were there.
Rose said, “Your mother and aunts have made a real mess of things over the years. There’s no point in denying that.”
“Why didn’t you tell me the truth, Grandma?”
Rose harrumphed, “Do you think I didn’t tell your mother she was crazy to lie to you? She didn’t speak to me for a couple years because of that. She started sending me those damn postcards.”
“No,” Alice said. She had taken a home economics class in high school, which mostly involved learning to needlepoint. Alice had been terrible at it, and the teacher would lean over her desk, smelling of cinnamon, and cut away her stitches with tiny scissors. Alice felt like someone—her mother, she supposed—were cutting away tiny stitches inside her now. “That’s not what I asked you. If you didn’t want to tell me while I was living with Mom, I can understand that, I guess. But I’m twenty-five. You could have told me the real story when I visited you last fall. You could have told me anytime.”
Alice could hear her grandmother rustling in her kitchen chair, gathering herself into a storm cloud. “I don’t think I’m the one you should be mad at,” Rose said. “William could have told you himself, couldn’t he? He’s your father, and if he’d showed up, it wouldn’t have mattered what your mother said to you.”
Alice considered this. “That’s true,” she said. “I need to know the timeline.”
“The timeline? What’s that?”
Alice shook her head. She heard the restaurant door open and close behind her and sensed her mother’s energy nearby again. Alice felt her shoulders hunch up, as if to protect herself. She wasn’t going to explain timelines to her grandmother, how if the chronology of a story wasn’t clear, nothing made sense. Alice almost cried out, because her mother was standing right beside her now. The tiny scissors were cutting, cutting, inside her.
“What is wrong with this family?” Alice said.
“That’s a fair question,” Rose said.
Julia was clutching her purse as if it were a life preserver. There was an unsteadiness to her face. Alice looked at her and thought, I could be mad at you. I could scream at you. But I won’t. You raised me to take care of myself, and I will.
William
November 2008
Cecelia texted William an address and told him to go there. This is just the first one, the text said. There will be more of her. But I want you to see it.
He left work a few minutes early and walked across several neighborhoods. It was a week into November, and he was glad for the cool temperatures and the opportunity to move at full speed. He ended up in North Lawndale, a part of Chicago that the city government had not only neglected but treated badly for a hundred years. William looked around at the sagging housing and remembered walking through this area the night before he’d tried to kill himself. He’d had no idea where he was at the time—he’d known only the terrain close to Northwestern in those years—and he’d seen Charlie. William smiled at the memory of his father-in-law appearing in a doorway. Charlie had been deemed a failure in his lifetime, but almost thirty years after his death, his daughters’ love for him ran so deep that he could be considered the most successful person William had ever known. People still came up to Sylvie in the library, after all this time, to tell her about a kind thing her father had done for them. Sylvie, Cecelia, and Emeline had told Izzy so many stories about her grandfather that she could probably win a trivia contest about the paper-factory worker who’d died when he was close to the age William was now. All the memories Sylvie wrote about her family focused on either her father or her older sister, as the two cornerstones of her being.
The address turned out to be a playground. There was a beat-up basketball court, a set of swings, and a climbing structure that was in terrible shape. Several teenage boys were playing three-on-three on the court. One of them spotted William and called out, “Hey, Coach! What are you doing here?”
William waved his arm in greeting—the boy was part of Arash’s clinic—and shrugged. The rectangular playground wasn’t full, because of the hour and the time of year, but kids wandered in small groups and several girls were perched on top of the jungle gym as if it were their nest. When William reached the center of the space, he turned around in a circle, not sure what he was looking for, until he saw it. A giant mural was painted against the back wall. William walked in that direction and took a seat on a bench that offered a good view. He examined the lower corner and saw the CP flourish, which was how Cecelia signed her work. A handful of young boys ran around William’s bench, gulping with laughter, and then sped off in different directions.
The mural showed roughly twenty kids standing together, as if for a school photo. The children were smiling brightly in unison, suggesting the photographer had just told them a joke. William ran his eyes along the top row of kids; this was a habit, because he had always been put in the back row of every picture growing up. At the end of the back row stood a white girl with blond-brown hair, wearing a shy smile. William stopped breathing for a moment. The little girl’s face looked exactly like his own as a ten-year-old. She couldn’t be anyone other than his daughter. It was Alice. He continued to move his eyes, like a typewriter spitting out words, unable to take in what he’d just seen. William studied the middle row, where one beaming child stood beside another. These kids looked like younger versions of the boys and girls in Arash’s clinic, and they might have been, since many of the players lived in this neighborhood. At the end of the bottom row, there was a redheaded girl—brighter than all the other children, probably because she had recently been painted onto the wall. Cecelia had taken care to blend her in and had updated some of the lines in the rest of the mural, so Caroline didn’t stick out. But still, with her red hair and excited grin, she looked the most alive, the most keen to leap off the wall and run toward the swings.