Things Not Seen (15 page)

“…Okay.”

“Good. See you in twenty minutes.” Then I push the end button on the phone before she has a chance to think some more. Because if she did that, really thought about it, she'd probably say “No way!” And maybe she'd be right.

So I run up to my room, pull off my clothes, and roll up a handful of twenty-dollar bills.

On my way through the kitchen, I stop and write a short note:

And that's true. I probably will end up at Alicia's house. Just not right away.

And then I'm down the kitchen steps and out the side door. I'm off to commit my first real crime.

A
half hour later I'm shivering, standing at the corner of Fifty-seventh and Ellis. My hand is cramping up from holding the roll of money so tightly. I wait till the coast is clear and tuck the cash between my left arm and my rib cage, hidden by a layer of nonreflective flesh.

Alicia is late. I look at the bank clock and decide to give her until 11:22. Then I see her tapping toward me, and I start trotting the half block to meet her. It's too crowded, so I can't call out “Hey, Alicia!” or something.

I get close, and I'm about to say a quiet “Hi,” but there's something about the look on Alicia's face that stops me. I look behind her and I see the problem. The blind girl has a shadow. It's her mom. Mrs. Van Dorn is about thirty feet back, holding a book open in one hand and glancing down at it every few steps so she won't look odd for walking so slowly.

Falling in step alongside Alicia, I whisper, “Don't stop, and don't look toward my voice—your mom is behind you.”

Without breaking stride or turning her head, Alicia hisses, “I know! She can always tell when I'm lying, and it makes me crazy! And she's so stupid that she thinks I can't tell when she's following me! Our front door makes this squeaking groan, and I can hear it half a block away.”

“So, what are you gonna to do?”

“Go to the library like I told her. And once I'm there, she'll get bored and leave.”

We get to the library and Alicia goes in and up the elevator, and her mother just sits down on a bench out front, reading her book and glancing up at the doorway now and then.

The look on Mrs. Van Dorn's face makes me feel sorry for her. She seems so sad and alone. She's wearing the same look I keep seeing on Mom's face. I'll walk quietly into the den or the kitchen, and Mom will be in the middle of something, but stopped, not paying attention to the computer or the book she's reading, and she'll have that same kind of sad, distant look in her eyes. And I always have the feeling that she's thinking about me. I think Alicia's mom must do a lot of worrying too.

Ten minutes go by, and then Mrs. Van Dorn gets up, heaves a big sigh, puts her book under her arm, and starts walking slowly back toward her house. She can go be sad and lonely at home.

When I'm sure she's really gone, I go up to the third floor of the library, find Alicia, and in five minutes we're looking for a cab to take us to the Sears corporate headquarters in Hoffman Estates.

The first two cabs refuse the fare, and I don't blame them. It's about a forty-mile trip. The third cabby looks at Alicia and says, “For you, fifty-five dollars—one-way. Okay?” I whisper, “Okay,” Alicia nods to the driver, and we get inside. When we're settled, I take her right hand and press my money into her palm.

Our driver heads straight for Lake Shore Drive north. There's a thick metal-and-Plexiglas divider between the front and back seat, plus, the driver's listening to some tinny music. Greek, I think. So Alicia and I talk softly about the plan. Which is pretty basic: I go snoop, she waits. I come back, we leave.

“But where should I wait? I can't just hang around in some lobby for an hour.”

“Of course you can. Lobbies are made for loitering.”

“Great. I just love to loiter.”

So I say, “Fine. Here's a better idea. When we get there, you can ask somebody where you go to get a job application.”

Alicia wrinkles her nose. “A job application? Me?”

“Sure. Companies love it when…um…people like you apply for jobs.”

The eyebrows go up. “People like
me
?” she says. “You mean people with disabilities, right? Go ahead and say what you mean, Bobby. I know I've got a disability, okay? I'm not a baby. Just say it—disability!”

The driver is craning his neck, looking at Alicia in his mirror, uneasy about this angry outburst from his lone passenger.

I whisper, “Shh, the driver. Okay, okay: people who have disabilities. They'll be happy to interview you because they actually have to prove that they try to hire everyone. It's a federal law or something.”

Alicia hisses, “It's called the Americans with Disabilities Act, Mr. Smartguy, and I know all about it, okay?”

“Fine.” And I sit back and look out the window past the lakeside park to the choppy waters of Lake Michigan. A mile or so out to sea, a huge tanker is steaming north. I wish I were on it.

Once we're on the Kennedy Expressway, we start talking again and work out the rest of the plan. Nothing much to it.

And then I look out the window and start counting the planes circling O'Hare Airport. I spot seven without even trying.

Then I start watching Alicia's face. And it's amazing to me, because I can look at everything—the whole overpopulated, overtraveled, overtrucked, overpaved, overbillboarded, full-color, three-dimensional world zipping by at seventy miles an hour—and I can get bored. And Alicia's got nothing but her own thoughts and whatever she sees inside her head, and she's not bored at all. She's soaking up the trip. Completely alert. I watch, and she has a slight response to every little hum and thump of the tires, the jangling radio music, the flutter and rush of air in the window, the static and garbled bursts from the driver's two-way, the rumble of a big Kenworth tractor, the whine of a jet on approach, an ambulance screaming past on the eastbound side. A constant flow, bright, fresh pictures with every second. As we sway and bounce and change lanes and brake and accelerate and feel our way along the highway, her nostrils flare like a wild pony sniffing the wind, and I know Alicia's also processing the smells—the exhaust and kerosene, the accumulated scent of a thousand cab passengers, that half-eaten tin of salad on the seat by the driver—an ocean of airborne information to sift and sort.

And watching her, I'm not bored.

Still, it's a long ride. When we finally arrive, I'm not prepared for the scale of things. The concrete and glass buildings are huge, not tall, but wide and deep and far apart. The place looks more like a college campus than the home of a retail giant. It's like they took the whole huge, black Sears Tower, broke it up into short chunks, painted it with friendlier suburban colors, and then spread it out over two hundred acres of farmland. Bike paths, a fake pond or two, a basketball court, a huge day-care facility. Very pleasant. Unless you don't know where you're going.

The young woman at the reception desk inside the foyer of the main building looks at Alicia, takes in the whole picture, and then says, “Miss? May I help you find someone?”

Alicia goes to work. She faces the woman's voice, smiles, and says, “Yes. I'd like to speak with someone in the employment office. I don't have an appointment. I'm just looking for some information…about hiring practices for persons with disabilities.”

“Of course. May I have your name?”

“Alicia Van Dorn.”

“Please wait just a moment, Miss Van Dorn.”

While the lady punches out numbers on her phone, I scan the Sears Merchandise Group map and directory on the wall behind the desk. And I find what I need. Legal services is in a building about a quarter mile away.

I make a mental note of where the employment offices are, and now I can leave. That's what Alicia and I planned. She's going to do her thing, and I'm going to do mine. When I'm done, I find her. It was 11:45 when we got out of the cab. The deal is that if I don't find her by 1:15, she has someone call her a cab, and she goes back to the library in Hyde Park.

But I don't leave. I wait. And I can't talk, but I tap lightly on Alicia's cane, and she stiffens, then smiles slightly, and motions with her head and eyebrows, urging me to get going. But I wait anyway.

About two minutes pass, and a young man wearing chinos and a blue dress shirt with a loud tie comes out of a corridor and walks right over to Alicia. “Miss Van Dorn?”

Alicia turns and smiles. “Yes?”

“Hi. I'm John Freeman. I'm with personnel, and I'd be happy to try to answer your questions. Let's head this way. Would you like to take my arm?” He turns and offers his left arm, elbow crooked just right. He's helped blind people before. And he looks like a nice enough guy.

Alicia says, “Thanks,” lifts the end of her cane off the floor, and takes hold of his elbow. And they're off.

And now I've got one hour and ten minutes to find the names of some unhappy customers.

N
ews flash: Invisible people make excellent spies and thieves.

Finding exactly what I want at the legal department is ridiculously easy.

Access through the security doors? A snap: I wait for a slow moving person of considerable size and slide through the doorway right behind his behind.

Finding the right information? A cinch: I've got a name to work with. Amber Carson is the woman who stonewalled Alicia on the phone about two and half hours ago. I find her office on the fourth floor, which is the only hard part, and then I wait patiently in an empty cubicle until she goes to lunch at 12:25.

Ms. Carson apparently trusts all her coworkers, because she doesn't log off of her computer. Which is good because it saves me the trouble of finding Alicia and telling her that this is going to take a lot longer—which it would have, because I'd have had to wait until Amber Carson got back from lunch, then I'd have had to look over her shoulder to learn her password, and then wait for her to leave her office again so I could use her computer.

I don't know if I could ever be a good lawyer. Lawyers are organized. The folks at Sears keep their files in such good order that I bet I could start from nothing and find whatever I needed in fifteen minutes or less. But I don't even have to do an actual search. That's because I've got inside information. I happen to know that Amber Carson accessed the very file I'm looking for earlier today when Alicia called her. So all I have to do is use the “Recent Documents” utility on her computer: point, click, and there it is. Which is kind of a shame. I went to a lot of trouble to memorize the model number of the blanket—all ten characters—and now I don't even need to use it.

The database notes show the entire history of my doomed electric blanket. Turns out 9,308 blankets were sold before it was discovered that some percentage of the controller units had been manufactured with faulty resistors. As of today, 379 consumers have complained, and of those, 163 have accepted a new blanket. When the problem was first noticed, the legal counsel had advised that there should be no product recall, but rather, Customer Service should go with a “replace as requested” plan. Only one customer had complained that he believed the blanket made his heart pacemaker malfunction, but there was no injury and no lawsuit. Still, to be on the safe side, the legal staff set the policy that any complaining customer with a pacemaker should be advised to discontinue use of the blanket and return it immediately for refund, credit, or exchange.

I'm glad I know enough about computers, because all I really want from the file is the list of 379 people who complained about the blanket. And with a couple simple sort functions, I've got their names and addresses and phone numbers isolated in a list. Printing out the list would make a big stack of paper—unless you know how to format, which I do. And it turns out that Amber Carson is an important enough person in the Sears legal department to have her own little laser printer on a worktable by a window that looks out over the rolling lawn. So I put the whole list into seven-point type, single-space it, format it into six columns, and print it out. I end up with just three pages—very small type, but readable.

I fold the stack of pages inward from top to bottom three times, and then fold the result in half lengthwise twice more. What I end up with is a wad of paper about an inch wide and two inches long, the perfect size to stick up into my left armpit—gross and uncomfortable, but effective. As long as I keep my left arm clamped against my side, the paper is completely hidden.

By 12:47, I'm on my way to hunt for Alicia. I could just go to the main entrance and wait for her, because that was our plan. But what's the fun of that? I'd rather track her down.

I glide through three different doors, then down one stairwell, along one corridor, through one last door, and then I'm outside.

It's a lot more springlike in Hoffman Estates than it was in Hyde Park. People are all over the place, eating lunch, resting, talking with friends. They look like creatures who have crawled out of burrows to soak up some sunlight. Except for the smokers. There's a little group of them outside almost every doorway, standing around, looking sort of defensive. They're not outside for the fresh air. I hold my breath when I go past so I don't have to smell the stuff.

The map at the reception area said the personnel offices are in a building that's close to the main entrance. Again I wait for someone to help me through the security doors. Once inside, I'm lost. I'm on the ground floor, and it's an area about the size of three football fields. There are partitions and corridors, nice offices around the perimeter, paintings and posters everywhere, bright and cheery, but it's still like a maze. This is an employees-only area, so there are no signs, no helpful maps or diagrams except for the occasional emergency evacuation poster.

So I just wander. My shoulder is aching and my arm is starting to go to sleep from the pressure of the clump of paper in my armpit. I'm almost ready to give up and head for our rendezvous spot.

Then I hear Alicia's laugh, complete with that little snort at the end. I follow the sound to a glass-walled conference room where she's sitting with a bottle of Snapple and a thick blue folder on the table in front of her. Alicia's smiling and nodding, moving her head to follow the voices of the people at the table. She looks like she could have just graduated from college. With honors. And three proposals of marriage.

Apparently the guy who picked her up from reception is the big joker, because as I approach, he says something I can't quite hear, and Alicia and the two other people in the room start cackling again. Also at the table is a man who looks as old as my dad, but with a wrinkly face with a gray mustache and not much hair up top. He's wearing incredibly thick glasses. The fourth person is a woman who's maybe thirty, maybe younger. She's got short blond hair and big earrings, and she's wearing a soft gray pants-and-jacket outfit with a pink shirt. A nice enough face, a good smile, but squinting. Then I see this lady's like Alicia. She's got a white cane on the floor by her chair.

The meeting's just breaking up, and I'm outside looking in. I get too close to the glass, and my breath fogs it up, so I move back a little. I watch Alicia. She shakes hands, first with the older man and then the woman. The smiles and handclasps are so strong, so real and warm. And it's like this wave sweeps over me, and my eyes get blurry, and I swallow hard. Alicia takes the arm of the younger man, and I turn and walk away fast. I don't want her to know I saw any of this. I don't want her to feel like I've been spying on her. I know she came on this trip to help me out. But this meeting she just had? These people she's met and talked to and laughed with? This is something she's done on her own. It's part of her life, not mine. It's got nothing to do with me.

I'm in the reception area when Alicia and her guide appear, and I keep well away. Another warm handshake, then he's gone, and the woman at the desk says, “Alicia, I noticed you arrived by cab earlier. Would you like me to call one for you?”

Alicia hesitates, so I hurry over and gently tap on her cane. She's startled, but doesn't show it, and then says to the lady, “Yes, that'd be great. And be sure the driver knows this is for a ride to Hyde Park in Chicago. Some drivers don't want to go that far. And thank you.”

“Certainly. We get good service from the local cab company. They'll take you wherever you need to go. There's a bench to the left outside the front entrance if you'd like to wait outdoors. Otherwise, I can show you to a seat inside the doorway.”

Alicia smiles again, says, “Thanks,” and heads for the doorway.

Thinking I'll be helpful, I take hold of her cane out in front of her hand. She stops and shakes her head sharply. I pull my hand away, and then follow her outside. I wait until she's found the bench and sits down.

No one's near, so I say, “I got in, and I printed out a long list of names. Can I put it in your backpack?”

Alicia nods, swings the pack off her back, and unzips the main compartment, holding it open. There in the bag I can see the thick blue folder that she had in the conference room. I glance around, take the list from under my arm, and drop it in. Alicia feels it hit the backpack, so she pulls the zipper closed, swings the bag behind her, and loops the straps back over her shoulders. She whispers, “So, you got something?”

And I whisper back, “Yeah.”

The cab that arrives has no divider between the front and back seat, so I can't talk to Alicia. There's nothing to do but settle back in the seat and look out the window.

The outer highways aren't too crowded, but when we get closer to O'Hare, everything bogs down. The cab is crawling through afternoon traffic, I'm three feet away from two other people, and I can't talk to either of them. I've never felt this alone. And the worst part is that Alicia seems perfectly content not to talk. She seems glad that she doesn't even have to try.

The driver looks up into his mirror and says, “My sister? She works at Sears out in Rockford. Good company, y'know? Good benefits.”

Alicia nods and smiles, then turns her face toward the window. The cabby makes a few other attempts to get a conversation going, but Alicia just nods or murmurs a little, so the guy gives up and punches up a country station on the radio.

It's a slow ride home. It's almost three, and right on schedule, the cab arrives at my house. I've got the list of names stuffed back under my arm. The driver puts the car into park and says, “That'll be fifty-eight dollars, miss.”

Alicia pushes her door open and I scramble out. Then I lean back inside and I whisper, “Call you later. And thanks.”

Alicia nods slightly to me, then faces the cabby and says, “I'm sorry—I just remembered an errand I have to run. Could you drop me at the big library on Fifty-sixth Street between University and Ellis?” Because that was our plan.

The driver shrugs and puts the car back in gear. “It's your money.”

Alicia closes her door, and the cab pulls away. I watch her go.

There's a gust of wind from the east, and I shiver. I turn to go inside.

And I feel like something has ended. Or maybe begun.

Or maybe both.