“It’s so unfair,” Stevie said bitterly. “So fucking unfair.”
Mom gave Stevie a look for cursing at the dinner table, but she didn’t reprimand him.
“Look, guys,” my dad said, running a thick finger across the drops of condensation that had gathered on the neck of his beer bottle, “the people who are outside of this, who don’t see what I see every day, they have no clue. You think the mayor gets it? Or the judge? You think the rich people living large up on the Gold Coast, in Lincoln Park, you think they get it? They act like they know this city, but they don’t. They don’t want to know.”
Stevie Junior nodded furiously in agreement, his eyes narrowed, his shoulders hunched forward.
“I don’t care what those nuns have taught you, kids. Not everybody in this world is a ‘child of God.’ There are some people who don’t have even a flicker of God within them at all.”
“Stephen,” my mom protested gently.
“I’m sorry, Bernie, but it’s true,” he said. “I’ve seen it. I know. And to let that evil continue to live among us, free, is a threat to our city. A threat to my children. Wendy could run into one of these people on the train, on the street. Then what?” He took a long drink and slammed his beer back down, suddenly angry. “I’m not sorry about what I did. I won’t apologize.” He looked at each of us in turn. “And neither should any of you. Don’t ever let anyone make you ashamed of being a Boychuck. Understand?”
I nodded, chewing the inside of my lip to keep from crying.
“All we can do now is pray,” my mom said softly. “It’s out of our hands.” She got up and walked to the windowsill above the kitchen sink, where she kept all her holy candles. She pulled her lighter from her pocket and lit them one by one. My mom was always lighting one holy candle or another. But the only other time I’d seen her light them all at once was the day my grandma went into hospice care. Two days later, grandma was dead.
In the dim flicker of the candlelit kitchen, we sat in a circle around the table and held hands while we listened to my mom recite the prayer to Our Lady of Lourdes, a prayer we’d heard uttered a thousand times, a prayer that every one of us believed in, even my cynical, blaspheming father. “O ever Immaculate Virgin, Mother of mercy, health of the sick, refuge of sinners, comfort of the afflicted, you know my wants, my troubles, my sufferings; deign to cast upon me a look of mercy. . . .”
“Stephen Boychuck,” the prosecutor said in her opening statement at the trial, “is a very, very bad man. I’d call him a monster, really. Or, if that’s too dramatic for you, a sociopath.” Her name was Stephanie Zot, and she had beady eyes and a huge purple-painted mouth, and throughout the trial, while she strode up and down the courtroom, berating my father while dressed in suits that were tight over her wide thighs and showcased the lines of her giant underpants, I sat there and prayed that she’d split a seam and have to feel, for just a moment, a shred of the humiliation she so clearly enjoyed inflicting on my family. If I thought about it logically, I knew that she was just doing her job, but it was easier to focus my energy on hating Stephanie Zot than on watching the grainy video footage of my father electrocuting a suspect’s balls with a cattle prod.
Even taking into account the videos the prosecution claimed my dad destroyed, there was a lot of evidence like that. The video that upset me the most still returns to me in my dreams sometimes. My dad was in this interrogation room with this guy. A boy, really. He honestly looked about my age. And in the video, my dad takes a plastic garbage bag and holds it over the kid’s head, tightening it until the kid is kicking and flailing and gasping like a fish flipping around at the bottom of a boat. Finally he goes limp. My dad takes the plastic bag off. Kicks the kid in the stomach. Leans down and spits in his face.
As Stephanie Zot played the video, on regular speed, in slow motion, sometimes zooming in on my dad’s face twisted up in this awful way I’d never seen before, I had to keep reminding myself that the kid he was interrogating was not a kid at all. He was a killer. A cold-blooded murderer. But sometimes convincing myself was hard to do. It’s one thing when you’re told things. It’s another when you’re forced to watch them for yourself.
By the end of the trial, I had begun to feel it: the black seed of disloyalty flowering within me. It was like everything I ever believed about my life, about goodness and badness and fairness and the way of the world, was being washed away. How could the man in those videos be my father? My laughing, big-hearted, Mustang-polishing, Bruce Springsteen–bellowing dad? I almost began to hope that he’d be found guilty, so that I wouldn’t have to live alongside him anymore, watching him drink his morning coffee or make his famous steak marinade as if he hadn’t just spent his evening with his gun shoved down some sixteen-year-old’s throat. I never told anyone I felt this way, though. My heart was twisted up like a pretzel. I mean, it was definitely wrong to turn against your own father, right? But what about all those victims? How could I feel compassion for them and still want their torturer to be free? Forced confessions, Stephanie Zot had pointed out during the trial, often end up being false confessions. How many of those “scumbags” weren’t scumbags at all, just innocent people who confessed to crimes just so my father would lift his boot from their neck? I was the product of nine years of Catholic schooling, of religion classes and retreats and soup-kitchen Sundays and service trips, yet here I was, facing a real-life moral dilemma instead of a hypothetical essay question on a theology test, and I had no clue how to handle it.
As the summer went on, I avoided turning on the TV or reading the newspaper headlines or, God forbid, looking at Twitter or the comment sections of news websites. The Boychucks were the most famous family in Chicago, and for all the wrong reasons. A city of three million people had never felt so small. Every time I left the house I was gripped with paranoia that someone would recognize me. I couldn’t think straight. I could barely breathe.
Alexis Nichols had been my best friend since kindergarten, and in late July, the night before my dad’s sentencing, I showed up at her front door. In the kitchen, her little sister was helping her mom wash the dinner dishes, and a lingering scent of grilled chicken and boiled corn hung in the air. Her dad was sitting on the back porch, smoking a cigar and reading a fishing magazine. It was all so beautifully normal, so calm and ordinary, and so far from what my own family’s life had become, that before we could even make it up to her room I crumpled into tears.
“Come on,” Alexis said, putting her arm around me and steering me around and right back out the front door. “I’m taking you somewhere.”
Alexis was normally so quiet and passive that her sudden determination stunned me into following her, quickly and without asking any questions, out the door, down to Jefferson Park el station and onto a westbound blue-line train. We rode all the way through that weird depressing blend of land that isn’t quite city and isn’t quite airport, the gray industrial parks and the planes that roared above us at intervals like giant silver albatrosses, all the way to the end of the line, where the train burrowed underground and came to rest deep in the underbelly of O’Hare airport.
“Follow me,” she said.
I did as I was told, up the escalator, through enormous hallways that echoed with the electronic hum of the moving walkways and the clatter of suitcase wheels. A solitary busker played the saxophone for loose change beneath a painting of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley. Alexis stopped walking and stood in front of him, listening carefully, her head cocked to one side. Then she turned to me, grinning.
“That’s Rachmaninoff!”
“Who?”
“This ridiculously amazing Russian composer. I’m giving him a dollar.”
She opened her purse, found a folded bill, and placed it in the velvet lining of the saxophonist’s open case. He winked at her, never breaking his rhythm.
“Is that what we came here for?” I asked.
“No.”
We continued on our way. Three moving walkways later, when we
had reached the international terminal, Alexis finally stopped walking and sat down in a plastic chair in front of a large digital flight board.
“We’re here,” she said.
“We’re where?” I looked around. “Are you proposing I run away? Even if I had the money for a plane ticket, I don’t even own a passport.”
“Neither do I.”
“Okay.” I sat down next to her. “I’m probably gonna need an explanation at this point.”
“So,” Alexis said, turning to face me. Her eyes were bright in a way I’d never seen them before. “Sometimes, I feel like I just want my life to begin, you know? Not high school, I mean. High school’s not real life. It’s just the place where you do stuff to get you to real life. I mean college. Beyond college. Going to see Carmen at the Royal Opera House in London. Or seeing a symphony at the Vienna Philharmonic. Or, maybe,” she added softly, “playing in a symphony at the Vienna Philharmonic.”
She shook her head, her ears turning pink.
“I mean, that last thing, that’s obviously a ridiculous dream. But that’s why I come here. To dream ridiculous dreams.”
She pointed up at the flight board above our heads, where the names of faraway cities flashed across the screen like titles of dreams: Abu Dhabi, boarding in ten minutes. Bangkok, final boarding. Berlin, on time. Karachi, at the gate.
“Whenever I’m feeling lonely or stuck, or like my real life is never going to get here,” she went on, “I remember that I’m a fifteen-minute train ride from the busiest airport on earth. The best thing about Chicago is that there’s no place in the world that’s easier to leave.”
“Sounds like you’ve given this some thought.”
“I come here all the time,” she said, her eyes never leaving the frenetic glow of the sign. “But I’ve never been on a plane. Never been to a different time zone. Never seen a mountain, or an ocean, or a weird-looking bird hanging out in a tree.”
“Don’t feel bad.” I shrugged. “I’ve been to California. Once. And Wisconsin. That’s about it.”
“But we will see the world,” she said fiercely. “Both of us. We may just be neighborhood girls now, but we don’t always have to be neighborhood girls.” She turned to me, and her eyes reflected the lit names of unfathomable cities: Shanghai. Amman. Mexico City. “Wendy,” she said, “we are going to have the best lives. I know it.”
She nestled into her chair, folded her hands behind her head, and began to read. “Try it. You’ll see what I mean.”
“Try what?”
“Tonight,” she said, “I go to Paris. My flight leaves in twenty minutes.”
“Paris, huh?” I smiled in spite of myself. Just the word made me think of delicate crepes bubbling on the griddle and people drinking coffee hunched together under green-and-white awnings and cobblestone streets that smelled like fresh bread and rain.
“Oui.”
“Well, I’m going to . . .” I looked at the sign, searching. “Kuala Lumpur.”
“Malaysia, huh?”
“Is that where it is?”
“Yes. Learn your capitals.”
“What are the chances that your average Kuala Lumpurian has heard of Sergeant Stephen Boychuck?”
“Slim to none.”
“Good. Kuala Lumpur it is.”
The following morning, my dad was found guilty of three counts of perjury, two counts of obstruction of justice, and twenty-six counts of torture and aggravated battery. When the verdict was read, he turned to look at us, his mouth straight and defiant. My mom crumpled to the courtroom floor, crying out like a wounded animal, but I was grateful for the distraction—it gave me an excuse, as I leaned down to help her to her feet, not to meet my father’s eyes. Out in the parking lot, Stevie Junior punched the car door, splitting open his knuckles and bleeding all over his brand-new suit. He held his broken hand to his chest, wrapped in a wad of McDonald’s napkins my mom kept stashed in the glove compartment, as we drove home in stunned silence. My father had been sentenced to seventeen years in a federal prison in Clay County, Nebraska. Seventeen years: three years longer than I had been alive.
For the rest of that summer, whenever we had nothing better to do, Alexis and I rode the blue line out to the airport, sitting in front of the international terminal’s flight boards and trading dreams. Tegucigalpa. Florence. Dusseldorf. Ulan Bator. Names like flowers and unknown spices we’d never tasted. At night, we wandered the quieting terminals and traded facts about the far-flung places on the screens that we’d filed away in memory in order to impress each other: In a cave near Happurg, Germany, archeologists have recently discovered the world’s oldest instrument, a forty-thousand-year-old flute made from a vulture’s bone. In Caracas, Venezuela, a forty-five-story half-finished skyscraper stands in the middle of the city, occupied by over three thousand squatters complete with barber shops, security guards, and day care centers for their kids. Reykjavik, Iceland, is home to the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which displays over 280 preserved penises, belonging to whales, seals, and yes, even human beings. At last, when our eyes were like paperweights and the sharp edge of the night was dulled by our fantasies and our exhaustion, we finally turned around and got back on the downtown-bound blue-line train. Fifteen minutes later we were standing again at Jefferson Park station, but it didn’t feel so claustrophobic anymore. The world felt bigger. The stranglehold my dad’s crimes had put on my life seemed to loosen, just a little bit, and I thanked God for a best friend like Alexis.
But then something happened that changed everything. It was at the end of August, just before we were about to start high school. David Schmidt had a graduation party and he invited every single person from our eighth grade class, even the nobodies like Alexis and me. This act of kindness was a very David Schmidt thing to do: he wasn’t like the rest of the kids at Queen of Heaven Elementary School. He could afford to be nice to everyone, even the dorks, because it didn’t cost him anything socially. There was something mature about David, even cosmopolitan. Maybe it was the fact that his parents were divorced, and on weekends he lived in his dad’s condo in River North where he did things like go to brunch and hang out at the skateboard park with a mysterious gang of public school friends, many of whom were already in high school and weren’t even Catholic. Or maybe it was the fact that outside of school, all the other boys in our class wore backward hats and jerseys and listened to hip-hop, while David dressed in crisp button-down shirts and fitted jeans and listened to EDM. Whatever. It doesn’t matter: The point is, he wasn’t like the rest of us, and because you could tell that he didn’t want to be like the rest of us, he got to play by his own rules. When I got the invitation to the party on the rooftop of his dad’s building, I was beyond thrilled.
Once Alexis and I had gotten over the shock of being invited, we spent the ensuing days agonizing about what we were going to wear. Well, that’s not exactly true. Alexis never really cared about clothes. I agonized about what I was going to wear, furiously scrolling through fashion blogs for inspiration and fretting about the size of my ass in front of her bedroom mirror while she sat on the window seat that overlooked the sour cherry tree in her front yard, the breeze stirring her hair, and drew the bow lovingly across the strings of her beloved violin, or lay on the carpet with her eyes closed and her hands conducting in the air, her giant headphones blaring Beethoven’s symphonies.
The night of David’s party finally arrived, a gloriously hot, clear, end-of-summer night. I wore a two-piece white dress that showed off my midriff. I’d chosen it because I knew that my dad would never let me out of the house wearing something like that. But he wasn’t around, and neither was my mom, who’d been working at the hospital around the clock to earn extra money for all of our legal bills. I had become, all of a sudden, the type of kid who could dress and act however I wanted, but it didn’t feel nearly as good as I thought it would.
Alexis and I took the el downtown together, and as soon as we got on the train I began to feel self-consciou
s. I felt like everyone from my graduating class was going to think that I was slutty or, worse, conceited, thinking I could pull off a hot outfit when everybody knew I was a loser with a criminal for a father. I wished I had worn something more like what Alexis had on—the same dress she’d worn to our eighth-grade graduation dance. It was floral and modest and vaguely dorky, way too young-looking for a soon-to-be high schooler. But at least she wasn’t trying to be anything more than what she was.
“Or maybe,” she said when I began to express my anxiety, “they’re just meaningless pieces of cloth and you should try to forget about them and just have fun tonight.”
When we walked into the party, David’s stepmom, who was younger and shorter-skirted than any other mom I knew, handed each of us a name tag with a photo of our first-grade picture that she had tracked down from an old Queen of Heaven yearbook. It was a perfect icebreaker, with all of us leaning in close to one another to compare our old chubby, baby-teethed faces with the ones they’d grown into eight years later.
There were massive trays of appetizers arranged in neat little rows: dates wrapped in crisp bacon, fresh cherry tomatoes skewered on toothpicks between smooth balls of fresh mozzarella and deep green basil, flaky pastries folded over thin slices of salty ham. Every other graduation party I’d ever been to had been fried chicken and Italian beef congealing with hunks of white fat. A waiter walked around with a big tray, handing out flutes of sparkling grape juice. There was even a DJ, one of David’s skateboard park friends, and he spun mixes of all the big pop songs of the summer, and it was all so crazy and glamorous that I forgot to be self-conscious about my outfit or my last name or anything at all. Alexis and I talked to kids who had ignored us since kindergarten as if it was no big deal. That night, I wasn’t a loser, and I wasn’t the daughter of Chicago’s most ruthless cop, either. I was just a person, you know? An actual person with three dimensions.
Later in the night, Josh Gonzalez, who was the best dancer in our class, tried to teach everybody how to salsa. He was all hips and feet and sweat seeping through his blue dress shirt. His joy and his confidence were sort of infectious, and before I knew it Alexis and I found ourselves folded up into the crowded dance floor, and just before it was time to go home Josh came up behind me and put his hands on my waist, on the bare skin between my top and skirt, and whirled me around and danced with me until I was sweating, too, and laughing, and moving my hips for all they were worth.
Neighborhood Girls Page 5
