It seemed to happen more and more these days, that she spoke out loud without realizing it. Not a crime, or even a sin, just a nuisance, one of the many of growing old.
The aide carried a tray of mushy food into Claudia’s room. The television was on, as if grown women needed to have babble shouted at them twenty-four hours a day. The woman who shared the room with Claudia was rubbing the end of her blanket between her fingers, staring vacantly ahead. Claudia herself was asleep, her breath coming out in fast little snorts. Her hair hadn’t been washed, Miss Ella noted grimly, preparing her list of complaints for the head of the ward. That black hair, how it bounced and flipped when Claudia was young, all the way into middle age, really, before it started to go gray and she’d cut it short. She’d let it turn into an Afro, a crown of soft gray curls, while Ella adhered to a life of iron discipline, giving her head over to chemicals and hot irons every month.
Ella sat on her sister’s left side, where she still had feeling and movement. Claudia’s right hand looked soft, young, the hand of the beautiful girl Ella had been so jealous of all those years back, but her left hand was as knotted and gnarled with age as Ella’s own.
“The detective came today,” Ella said. “She took a picture of Lamont away with her, she’ll talk to people, she’ll ask questions. Does that make you happy?”
Claudia squeezed Ella’s hand: yes, thank you, that makes me happy.
“Maybe she’ll even find our boy. And then what?”
“ ’ Ate ’n’ ’ear,” Claudia spoke with difficulty. “ ’ Ate ’n’ ’ear al’ays wron’, Ellie. ’Ill e-d-estroy ’ou.”
She had trouble making her lips move to form consonants. The speech therapist made her work on them during the day, but alone with her sister at night she relaxed and did what came easiest.
Hate and fear. Always wrong, will destroy you. Ella knew she was saying that because she’d said it so many times in the eighty-five years of their life together. Pastor Karen thought some special gift of empathy lay between Ella and Claudia that helped Ella understand her sister, but it was only habit. She cranked Claudia up in bed and helped her eat a little meatloaf, a few spoonfuls of mashed potatoes, a bite of garish Jell-O.
“ ’ Ank ’ou, Ellie.” Claudia lay down, and Ella sat with her until her sister slid away from her into sleep.
5
IT’S A BIRD . . . IT’S A PLANE ... NO! IT’S SUPERCOUSIN!
TRAFFIC’S BECOME LIKE MARK TWAIN’S OLD BROMIDE: WE all whine about it, but no one tries to fix it. Even me: I complain about the congestion and then keep driving myself everywhere. Trouble is, Chicago’s public transportation is so abysmal, I’d never have time to sleep if I tried to cover my client base by bus and El. As it was, my trip home took over forty minutes, not counting a stop for groceries, and I only had to go seven miles.
When I’d squeezed my car in between a shiny Nissan Pathfinder and a boxy Toyota Scion, I couldn’t summon the energy to get out. As soon as I went inside, my downstairs neighbor and the two dogs would leap on me, all eager for company and two of them eager for exercise.
“A run will do me good.” I repeated the mantra, but couldn’t persuade myself to move. Instead, I stared at the trees through the Mustang’s open sunroof.
In June, summer comes even to the heart of a great city. Even to the world of the steel mills, where I grew up. The light and warmth of spring always fill me with nostalgia, perhaps more this year because I’d been immersed so recently in my mother’s childhood.
After seeing the rich green hills in Umbria, I understood why my mother kept trying to create a Mediterranean garden under the grit of the mills. By July, the leaves, including her camellia, would be dead-looking, coated with sulfur and smoke, but each spring the trees put out hopeful tendrils. This year, it will be different. Maybe the same would be true of my forebodings about my new client. This time, events would prove my pessimism false.
When I’d left Miss Ella’s apartment, I stopped at Karen Lennon’s office. Miss Ella had signed a contract agreeing to a thousand dollars’ worth of investigation—essentially, two full days at half price—to be paid in installments, with seventy-five dollars in cash in advance as a retainer.