Ghost Country

by Sara Paretsky

  “But they’re not happy.” Luisa was hung over and querulous. “Free food doesn’t stop them fighting—yours is bigger than mine, I wanted turkey not ham, I hate cheese or mayonnaise. Why can’t they just be grateful for what they get?”

  “And you,” Mara retorted. “You were happy with what you got? A diva with an international reputation, but you fought with everyone just the same.”

  Luisa stalked off in dudgeon, as she did once or twice a day. The first time it happened Mara started after her to apologize, to beg her to come back, but Starr seized her arm as she darted down the street and pulled Mara to her side. Even though Mara couldn’t interpret her grunts and glances as Luisa claimed to, Starr’s touch on her arm made her think—Luisa has to sort this out for herself; she’s not Grandfather, I don’t have to placate her. And then, as Starr drew Mara to herself, kissed her, licked her broken stub of a tooth so that the throbbing in it eased, Mara thought, no, I don’t have to placate him, either, I can just be me, Mara. Grandfather named me Mara because I was a bitter pill to him, but I don’t have to be bitter to myself. And when Luisa returned some hours later, to where Mara lay with Starr in the tall grasses, Mara rose to kiss Luisa in turn, to wipe the trail of dried beer from her mouth, to lay her tenderly in the sand next to Starr.

  Despite the days and nights in the open air, the shortage of food, showers in beach houses without soap or towels, so that she woke each morning with sand in her hair, Mara felt—not just happy, but strong, as if she could run the length of the city and not be winded. On nights when they had food to hand out to people she seemed able to walk, touch, calm screaming infants, feed a whole crowd without fatigue.

  By day they roamed the streets and parks with thousands of other homeless Chicagoans, and at night they slept where they landed. Their second night in the open they had wandered into the northern suburbs, to the clean beach Luisa remembered from her high school years. Police roused them around two in the morning, smacked Mara hard enough to leave her with a black eye the next day, pushed the three women into the back of a squad car, drove them to the Chicago border and warned them never to return.

  Luisa had screamed curses at them: do you have any idea who I am, you oafs? I grew up in this redneck suburb and became the greatest interpreter of Verdi your generation will ever hear, and tried to launch herself into “Sempre libera,” her voice coming out in a hoarse parody of music. The young cop, his fair chin still free of hair, kicked Luisa in the kidneys as he dumped the trio over the city line.

  The next day Luisa was bleeding and feverish. Mara wanted to get her antibiotics, but that meant seeing a doctor, who might lock them up. She tried to explain the problem to Starr, while Luisa lay green-faced and waxen in the big woman’s arms. Mara began to weep with frustration as the black eyes stared unwinking at her. Her explanations became more difficult to understand, even to an English speaker, until, to Mara’s futile fury, Starr began to chew a piece of bread. Mara was about to throw away all her cautions and phone for an ambulance when Starr took the mushy bread from her mouth and forced it down Luisa’s throat. Luisa choked and gagged, but within half an hour the waxy greenness had faded from her face. By afternoon she seemed very much herself again—imperious, impervious, and longing for liquor.

  “What did you feel?” Mara demanded. “Did Starr heal you? What was it like when you swallowed that bread?”

  But Luisa had no recollection of Starr and the bread. She thought she had been chained to the ground, that a terrifying old woman had hovered over her, wanting to keep her bound for all eternity. “And then one of my fans, one of the common people in Italy who still love music so, came along with a bottle of beer, just when I thought I might die of thirst.”

  Mara gave it up: Luisa had been delirious. But if Starr could cure Luisa’s kidney injury, why not her alcoholism, too? When she put it to Starr, the dark woman only stared at her until Mara felt uncomfortable, as she had all those times as a child when Mephers asked her if it was really necessary to mind other people’s business. And then Starr patted her hair, a signal that she wanted Mara to comb the sides out and wind them up again in their elaborate coils.

  Around nightfall Starr liked to go to the wall, but they couldn’t stay long: the cops were under orders to move them off, and threatened Mara and Starr with arrest if they lingered. Their favorite camping place at night was a little spit of land at the end of Montrose Harbor which had been planted with prairie grasses, but Luisa didn’t always have the stamina to trek that far. For some reason the little promontory was usually deserted after dark, so that Luisa could have some relief from the clangor that beset her whenever they were in a crowd.

  They reached the promontory tonight around sundown. Families with small children were starting to pack up for the day, while dopers and bikers began joining necking couples on the rocks that lined the harbor. Mara watched Luisa stomp off to the rocks. She would cadge a bottle and come back drunk in an hour.

  Mara had no way of knowing if Starr hated Luisa’s absences, or her drunkenness. When the diva was gone there was no one to explain the world to Starr—or Starr to the world—but the big woman never showed any impatience with the diva.

  Mara sometimes wondered if she’d only imagined the episode with Luisa’s bleeding, and Starr’s piece of bread. She could hear Grandfather chewing her out for making up stories in the hopes of being the center of attention. He would dismiss Starr and Luisa with a snort as well: histrionics, ignore them and they’ll behave in a civilized manner fast enough.

  Mara laughed to herself, trying to picture Luisa and Starr in the Graham Street apartment, Harriet prim and flustered, Mephers furious but forced into silence. And Grandfather thoroughly humiliated once and for all, as had happened to Dr. Hanaper and Pastor Emerson the day they came to the wall with some Catholic priest who claimed to be an authority on miracles.

  Tonight Mara took off her clothes, hiding them with her sleeping bag behind a rock: torn and dirty though they were, someone might easily steal them while she swam. The day before, the waves had been six feet high, crashing over the breakwaters and slamming against the sand. Tonight the water was as calm and gentle as a cradle. July had slipped into August. In a few more weeks the water would turn cold, but right now it was warm, caressing her naked body like silk.

  Mara swam hard around the spit of land, then turned over and floated gently back toward her cache. Out on the lake she could see the lights of dozens of sailboats. Maybe Harriet was out there with a suitor.

  Mara suddenly felt a pang of longing for her sister: beautiful Harriet, did I ruin your career? Will you ever speak to me again? She couldn’t stay in the park with Starr forever. If she went to Harriet, would her sister welcome her back, or at least help her find a place to live and something to live on? Or would she slam the door on Mara, her fine-boned face as rigid as Grandfather’s?

  The waning moon hung pendulous above her, its belly distended like a pregnant woman’s. The moon’s face was sallow, and looked angry and crumbly with age. Mara suddenly felt alone in the water, despite the calls of parents and lovers from further down the shore. She turned onto her stomach again and swam as fast as she could to shore, running from the water to pick up her clothes, arriving breathless at their little campsite.

  Luisa had returned, bringing with her Jacqui, Nanette, and La-Belle, a tepid bottle of muscat, and a bag of cold hamburgers. The four women were hunkered down near Starr, eating. When Mara stumbled up next to them they nodded to her, and handed her a burger, but no one spoke.

  The night was filled with winking lights—cookout fires, cigarettes, bicycle lamps. A flashlight stuck prying fingers around the edge of the prairie grasses. At first Mara, filling herself with the glutinous lumps of meat, paid no attention, but as the light poked through the grass, she realized it was an organized search.

  She clutched Starr’s arm, choking on the burger. “Someone’s hunting us.”

  Jacqui and Nanette stopped their murmured talk and turned to
watch. Suddenly, behind the lights, a hoarse voice shouted, “Starr, it’s Hector. I’m here with men from the hospital, Starr! We want to put you in restraints again, feed you on drugs. We’ll take you away with us, Starr, away from the sand and the streets. Come now, Starr, come with me if you want that.”

  44

  On the Run

  HARRIET HAD BEEN running since she left the apartment, running to her car, pushing on the steering wheel so hard her shoulders ached. Let Mara be at the wall. Let me find her before Grandfather. The chant moved through her head as she idled at lights, tears of impatience pricking her—why don’t they change? A narrow miss at the corner of Michigan and Upper Wacker—furious honking, swollen-faced man giving her the finger, but she so bound in her terrors she didn’t notice—swinging the car into the main drive at the Pleiades, forcing a smile for the doorman, who recognized her Acura and trotted over to open her door.

  “You coming to pick up the gentlemen from headquarters for dinner, Ms. Stonds?”

  With a great effort she slid her mask of calmness into place and smiled at him. “No, Dimitri, I’m not able to join them. I just need to go down to the garage, check on things there. Can I leave the car here for five minutes?”

  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 twi
light 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.