Ghost Country (40 page)

Asking about his son, a junior at MIT, smiling but not hearing the reply, automatically slipping a five into his discreet hand. Then running again, up the drive into the lobby, her shoes sighing in the great Aubusson carpet, her smile a painful grimace as bellmen and
concierge greeted her with the same deference Grandfather received at the hospital. We hear you’re getting things cleaned up down there, Ms. Stonds, we’ll be glad when the rooms fill up again.

Dancing with impatience in front of the garage elevator while a waiting guest stared stolidly ahead, finally too nervous to wait, taking the four flights of stairs down at a reckless gallop: numerous suits filed by employees stumbling and falling on these stairs, she should know to be careful, but she couldn’t slow down.

As soon as she opened the stairwell door she heard screams spilling into the garage from the street. The night attendants, Nicolo and his two colleagues, were standing at the entrance. Harriet ran to join them, but couldn’t move further than the mouth of the bay, the mass of people out front was so dense.

Nicolo started to explain that it wasn’t possible to get cars out tonight, very sorry, madam, but you see we having trouble. Then his voice changed, became colder: Oh, you the lawyer. You know about this trouble, right?

Harriet ignored him, climbing onto a car bumper to see over the crowd. The police had bottled up all the miracle seekers against the curb. They were demanding IDs, and shining flashlights into faces. Men in riot gear blocked the stairwells, the streets, and the alleys that backed onto the hotel. Anyone who didn’t have identification was being put into one of the paddy wagons at the west end of the street. Women screamed as mounted officers pushed them against the spikes at the far end of the wall.

Up the street Harriet could see Judith Ohana from the First Freedoms Forum. Ohana was trying to argue with the sergeant in charge. Harriet couldn’t hear what Ohana was saying, but guessed the Triple-F lawyer was making the mistake of assuming a policeman leading a riot was interested in the First Amendment. Harriet sucked in her breath in horror as one of the patrolmen hit the civil liberties lawyer in the skull with his club. Judith Ohana collapsed to her knees. Two officers dragged her half-conscious body to the paddy wagon.

“Who ordered this? Oh, who ordered this?” Harriet cried.
“The city said this afternoon they wouldn’t harass any of the people down here! Did—did Brian Cassidy or Mr. Palmetto start this? We have to do something. I need to stop them. They weren’t supposed to do this.”

Nicolo grabbed her as she tried to leave the garage. “No, missus, no doing nothing now. Maybe you starting all this, but you not stopping now. They only hit you—boom—like they just do the other lady lawyer. You not going out there.”

Harriet demanded Brian Cassidy: was this his doing? Cassidy had returned from his stay in the hospital, but he was still hoarse from the lesions on his lungs, and seemed smaller: his ape arms had shrunk into his suit and he spent most of his shift huddled in his office. At the sight of the paddy wagons he had disappeared into the main body of the hotel. Nicolo’s English disintegrated from the effort of trying to explain this.

Harriet, too distracted to pay attention to her own question, or his stumbling answer, interrupted him. “My sister. Mara, do you know her? She—she’s often with Starr, she’s tall, she shaved her head … did they … was she here tonight?”

“Your sister? That girl your sister, missus, and you treating her so bad? Why you want her now?”

“I need to tell her, find her, hide her, they want to put her in the hospital, shoot her full of drugs, Oh, please, just answer me, was she here when they started this?”

He looked at her suspiciously. “You lawyer, you make these spikes, one lady, poor
ingenua
, kills herself, now this! What you do to your sister now?”

The cords in Harriet’s throat stood out. “Oh, what can I say to you—I have to find my sister before my grand—before the police do. Please help me. Where does she go at night, surely you know?”

Nicolo frowned at Harriet, trying to decide whether to trust her. At last he said, “Is okay, missus. Your sister here before, but is away when these polices come. They wait, the polices, until no television, then suddenly, boom, all come on horses, like you seeing.”

“Do you know where she goes when she leaves here?” Harriet was gulping on her words, poised to take flight again, to continue her search.

The attendant shook his head. “The doctor, he knows, he coming with men, oh ten minutes from now, I think they saying, the beach, they go to the beach.”

Ten minutes from now? Harriet was too frenzied to make sense of Nicolo’s depiction of time. She pressed her hands across her face, trying to force herself into enough calm that she could think. The doctor. That couldn’t be Grandfather—he’d been in the apartment when she left. Dr. Hanaper, maybe? He would always do just what Grandfather said. Whoever it was, the ten minutes from now lay behind them, the doctor had been here already. And now was out looking for Starr.

Nicolo couldn’t tell Harriet what beach. “The homeless ladies, very many sleep by the lake in summertime, but is a big lake, missus.”

Harriet turned from him and began running again, through the garage, back up the stairs. The lobby was bizarrely quiet and serene, the few guests moving like the blessed in heaven, impervious to the howls of the damned at their feet.

In the drive she sprinted past Leigh Wilton, come to pick up the Olympus president and Gian Palmetto for dinner. Harriet didn’t recognize them until Wilton called her name, sharply, and demanded to know where in hell she thought she was going.

“Leigh!” She was panting. “Do you know what’s happening down at the wall? Do you know the cops just hit Judith Ohana on the head? Your stupid clients are up to their armpits in boiling water but you are not going to blame this fiasco on me.”

He stared slack-jawed as Harriet whirled around and ran on down the drive, past the doorman’s smiling “See you soon, Ms. Stonds,” into the car, trembling so violently she could hardly turn the key in the ignition, so distraught she had trouble steering.

The beaches started at Oak Street, at the edge of the Gold Coast. That was where the rich kids hung out, along with white
suburbanites, who called the cops in terror if a black Chicagoan showed up in their little towns, but had no problem using the city’s beaches for free.

Harriet, not knowing where to look or how to organize her search, decided Mara wouldn’t drag homeless women into this dense pack of tourists. She drove to North Avenue, her skin quivering with anxiety as she tried to find a place to park her little sports car, finally squeezing it between a couple of vans, not quite a parking space, bruising her thighs as she slid out the half-opened door.

Harriet stood by her car, feeling desperate as she studied the crowded park. Even at twilight joggers, Rollerbladers, bicyclists were thick on the cement paths, while the beach itself was covered with families and necking couples, solitary drinkers and rowdy parties. Dozens of volleyball nets stretched up the lakefront here; despite the fading light some people were still playing.

How could she ever find Mara in such a mob? She snaked a hand back into her car and fished a flashlight from the glove compartment. She began to jog along the beach, feet slipping in sand, shoes filling with sand, until she finally took her shoes and socks off and made her way barefoot. In the waning light she scanned the clumps of people, looking for Starr’s gigantic pompadour, Mara’s bald head. As the dark deepened she zigzagged along the beaches, shining her flashlight, eliciting indignant insults from couples sharing love or drugs, too frantic to notice what she saw or heard.

For a mile the beach was a thin corridor between lake and highway, but when she got to the outdoor theater at Fullerton Avenue, the sand disappeared. The shoreline turned jagged, with rocky outcroppings surrounding inlets and harbors, while the park spread away to the west in an expanse of grassland and trees.

Harriet sat down on a rock to put her shoes back on. She was gasping for breath, clutching her side as she staggered, rather than ran, from one dark clump to another. Night was now absolute. She had to use her flash to make sure she didn’t trip over some person or rock. The batteries began to fail. She stumbled over discarded
whiskey bottles and beach balls, until she tripped on an exposed tree root and fell heavily to the ground.

She lay sobbing. She was alone, with no one to turn to. She could hardly remember now why she had set out. She needed Mara, which was strange: she never needed Mara.

When Mara was small Harriet used to hear her crying sometimes in the night. She would tiptoe down the hall to the baby’s room, never decorated for a child, always hung with dull crimson drapes, and pick up the little sister and hold her, feeling a strange comfort from the milky smell, the wet warmth against her, the baby howls subsiding as Mara fit herself around Harriet’s skinny teenage body. One night she fell asleep in the chair holding the baby.

Mephers was shocked when she came on her in the morning: look at you, Harriet, that nightgown soiled. You should be ashamed to be sitting here with that diaper leaking over you: you’d think you hadn’t learned any better than Beatrix or Mara here to keep yourself clean and sweet. The doctor will be very disappointed. We’ll have to throw out this nightgown: I’ll never be able to wash out this stain. What were you thinking of, anyway, to let this bad baby get you up in the night? If you start giving in to them when they cry, pretty soon they’ll cry just to manipulate you.

After that, Harriet let the thin howling go on unanswered in the night. She would lie rigid in her bed, willing the noise to stop, thinking what a bad baby it was to be so demanding, not realizing until now, this moment lying here on the earth on the edge of Lake Michigan, that the wailing infant had been giving voice to Harriet’s own sorrow. In leaving the baby to cry uncomforted, she had lost all comfort herself.

She fell asleep. When she awoke, it was after midnight. Her right cheek was sore, bruised from a rock she’d hit when she fell. She got to her feet, stiff from her long run and her nap on the hard ground, and walked slowly across the park. The moon overhead, cold and disapproving, showed her a handful of other bodies sleeping under tarps or bits of cardboard. She felt unbearably lonely and
vulnerable, a target in the emptiness for anyone who might pass her with malice in mind.

A police car slowed on its way up the lake path and shone its light on her. She froze, remembering the scene at the hotel, the patrolman hitting Judith Ohana over the head.

As the men in the car studied her, Harriet tried to remember she was a Stonds, an important citizen by definition, as well as a member of the bar, but she was acutely aware of her dirtstained clothes and uncombed hair. She had always taken for granted that the police were there to defend her, Harriet Stonds, to safeguard her person and her possessions. Although her training had taught her in theory that no one was guilty until proven so in court, until now she’d believed deep down that the police didn’t arrest anyone if they didn’t deserve it, and police brutality was only a cry criminals raised to try to deflect attention from their crimes. Tonight at the wall, she’d seen that anyone could be vulnerable. Trapped in the searchlight, she tried to forget an impassioned account by Mara of a policeman raping one of the women at Hagar’s House.

The men switched off their lamp and drove on. Harriet released a tight-held breath and continued to pick her way across the park to the highway. With some difficulty she flagged down a cab: to her humiliation, the driver insisted on seeing her money before he would take her back to her car at North Avenue beach.

It wasn’t until she was driving out of the park that she realized she couldn’t return home tonight. Grandfather’s disapproving rage, Mephers’s hurt sulks, were more than she could face. She pulled over to the shoulder and counted the money she’d stuffed in her pocket. Fifty-three dollars. Could she even rent a hotel room on so little money? In her haste to leave home she hadn’t thought of bringing credit or bank cards. She hadn’t brought her mobile phone, either—she couldn’t call motels, she’d have to drive from spot to spot hoping she could locate something cheap but safe.

She made a loop under the highway and headed south, into the heart of the city. She drove randomly through the downtown streets, looking for hotels, when she passed the massive complex of
the Midwest Hospital. Perhaps Hector Tammuz was on call tonight. Grandfather’s prize loser. On television they said he spent a lot of time with the women at the wall. Maybe he had found Mara and had her safe. Abruptly she turned into the parking lot, found her grandfather’s space, and went into the building through the staff entrance.

The hospital was ghostly after hours with nothing but empty chairs and gleaming file cabinets in the corridors. The fear she’d felt in the lonely park returned, and she was absurdly pleased when she reached the emergency room and found nurses and orderlies gossiping under bright lights. She ducked into a bathroom and cleaned her face. There was something unnerving about the calm oval in the mirror. She had been in anguish all night, but her eyes remained a clear, remote blue. Except for a bruise on her right cheek from her fall, her face gave back no record of her troubles.

She walked out to the counter, her patina of authority so smooth that no one questioned her identity as Abraham Stonds’s granddaughter, nor challenged her demand that they page Dr. Tammuz.