Every Stolen Breath

by Kimberly Gabriel

  I continue sweeping. At least I’m doing something instead of pretending my dad never existed. And cleaning and reorganizing every inch of this house doesn’t count. Flaunting a perfect silverware drawer or linen closet doesn’t mean she has control of her life. Or what happened to him.

  “Whatever you’re trying to do, it stops here. I mean it. No phones. No Internet. It doesn’t take much for them to run your online activity. If the Swarm notices you’ve found out more than you should, they will kill you to keep you quiet. Do you understand?”

  I can feel her eyes boring into the back of my head.

  “If I need to take away every device you have, I will.”

  I wait for the inevitable “How could you do this to me?” follow-up, but instead her voice breaks as a sob catches in her throat. “Dammit, Lia.”

  I glance over my shoulder.

  Her body wilts, and for the first time I notice how old she looks. My favorite picture of my mother is from her wedding day. Her long, golden hair slightly blown back. Her eyes—narrow and green like mine—shine as she stares at my dad. They’re dancing. One hand covers her mouth like she’s laughing at something he said. I love the picture because I don’t know my mom that way. She never speaks about my sister, Annie, but my dad once admitted that my mom smiled less after Annie died.

  When my dad died, it sucked away any remaining happiness. I can’t even imagine what she’d do if something happened to me.

  “What were you thinking?”

  Something in me softens, and I consider giving her an honest response. I’m searching for the right words when she sees the neb cylinder isn’t completely drained. “You didn’t finish your meds!” she accuses, like she caught me snorting drugs.

  Any emotion she’d stirred up inside me flattens. I sweep a pile of lettuce and cheese into the dustpan and brace myself.

  “You can’t stop a treatment halfway through.”

  I squeeze the pan’s handle, dumping another pile into the trash. “They gave me two at the hospital.”

  “This isn’t something to mess with. If your lungs stop working . . .”

  It’s always about my lungs. My breathing. My body that doesn’t work right. “I hardly think—”

  “Exactly! You never think—that’s the problem. You just run around doing whatever pleases you in the moment without thinking about what’s going to happen next.”

  I bite the inside of my cheek and stare at the granite countertop, the broom and dustpan clutched in my hands.

  My mom rips off a paper towel and begins frantically wiping the kitchen sink until every drop of excess water has been rubbed away. She balls the paper towel, clenching it in her fist. “Do you have a death wish, Lia?”

  “No.” She doesn’t care that her insinuation hurts.

  “Your father was a smart man who planned everything out to the last detail, and he died investigating this.”

  It isn’t the first time she’s thrown in my face that I’m not the brainchild she hoped I’d be. Or the first time I’ve wondered if Annie would have been the prodigy expected from the offspring of the great Margaret and Steven Finch.

  She throws the paper towel into the trash. “You’re all I have. Remember that.”

  And there it is—her favorite go-to line. I feel horrible enough that someone’s in the ICU because I didn’t think it all through and plan it better. But any response would only continue the conversation, and more than anything I need her to leave. I need to study those images from the pier and prove to everyone that I can still salvage something from this: it’s not like I did it all for nothing.

  She rubs her temples with one hand. Her skin has become translucent. Her eyes flicker toward the neb parts. “Finish that.” She walks around the peninsula. “I’m headed to bed.” The intensity in her voice deflates. “Don’t open the door—for anyone. With any luck, they’ll give up within the next couple hours.” She glares sideways toward the front of our house on her way toward the stairs.

  With my mom finally gone, I stare at my computer, listening for signs that she isn’t coming back down. My body, which has ached with a dull throbbing since I woke at the mayor’s dock, grows light and jittery as I bide my time. I grab the neb parts on the counter and rinse them in the sink. Water splashes along the sides of the basin my mom just wiped. I set the pieces on a paper towel and wait. Upstairs, her faucet runs while she brushes her teeth. The drawers of her dresser roll out and back in. Then, silence.

  A car door slams outside. Aside from the low, white-noise rumbling of news teams doing whatever it is they do when cameras are off and the hushed droning of the TV, my house is quiet and still.

  I race on my tiptoes to the living room and flip the laptop open. My fingers are clumsy and slow, and I fumble to type my password and access my online gallery. I scroll through the images. The videos. I don’t see anything from the pier, which can’t be right. I search pictures, then specialty videos—I even search under the date. I took dozens of them—hundreds. But according to this, the last time I used my camera was six days ago. Maybe they haven’t downloaded yet. They just need more time. But the sinking feeling in my stomach tells me otherwise. Somewhere in the back of my head, a tiny voice confirms that someone has hacked my phone, seen the evidence, and erased it.

  I stare blankly at the TV showing a bird’s-eye view of Navy Pier.

  If someone’s found my phone and deleted those images, it can only mean one thing. Someone knows why I was there. And they don’t like it.

  An image of the gray-eyed attacker flashes in my head. The clinical look on his face as he studied the water. The severity behind his eyes when he ordered me to jump. What was he trying to do? Help me? Kill me?

  A chill shudders across my neck. Did he really call my name?

  Outside lights flash on—several sets of them. The TV screen switches to Overly Tan News Anchor sobering his expression. Emi Vega’s picture, as she stands outside my house, appears in the upper corner. I leap toward the couch for the remote. I toss the blanket and throw pillows looking for it. I drop to my knees, stick my hand beneath the couch, and finally find it. My shirt becomes twisted. I crouch low, listening to Emi spew her thoughts, my wet hair clinging to my face.

  “. . . from Loveland, Ohio. Jeremiah Dopney, age thirty-three, had checked into the Westin by himself . . .”

  WGN shows his picture. He’s thin but attractive. Dark hair, blue eyes, dark scruff. He’s smiling in a way that lights up his whole face. He looks . . . friendly, sociable. The kind of guy who travels with people, visits people. Not the type to come to a city by himself.

  “Please don’t die,” I whisper.

  Emi says something about “critical condition” before my neighbor’s dog barks, jolting me.

  “Charlie!” I release my breath. “Shut up, you stupid dog.” As I say it, I imagine some slum reporter sneaking around the back for a glimpse of what I’m doing, and I’m somewhat relieved to have a guard dog.

  I glance toward the stairs, making sure my mom isn’t coming down. “Jeremiah Dopney from Loveland, Ohio” is the first real puzzle piece I’ve had in the last two years. Without the images from the pier, it’s all I have to go on.

  Dismissing the scrutiny I’m under from reporters, likely the Swarm, and my mom, who’s about to become the worst type of helicopter parent, I summon the energy to get up off the couch and head toward my dad’s office to figure out how it even possibly connects.

  CHAPTER 5

  A few months before my dad died, he bought an old six-foot print of Chicago’s skyline along Lake Michigan for his office. He was nostalgic like that. The first time I saw it, I didn’t get why he wanted it. The city looked stark and bare without the Lakefront mansions.

  After he died, I spent hours staring at it, taking consolation in the picture’s calming presence. Parks, public beaches, and harbors line the lake. Before its renovations, even Navy Pier’s small, rickety appearance had charm. I look at Navy Pier in the picture, imagining it swath
ed with emergency crews, awash in red and blue flashing lights. I’ll never see Navy Pier as charming again.

  Locking the office door behind me, I lift the picture off the wall and flip it around. When I don’t pass out, I scoff at my discharge papers for listing “lifting heavy objects” as something I shouldn’t do with a concussion. I lean the picture against the wall and step back to take it in. Covering the frame’s brown paper backing is a five-foot-long timeline with pictures and newspaper articles webbing out in all directions. My own mini crime wall.

  I squint, scrutinizing the details I’ve memorized. Prior to my dad’s death, there’d been eleven organized attacks. Thirteen deaths in nine years. When the attacks first began, they occurred every couple months. I barely remember that time, but according to my parents it was the scariest time to live in Chicago.

  Kneeling down, I trace my finger across attacks numbers nine through twelve, all separated by five or six months. My finger pauses over the twelfth, my dad’s name and date written in bold, black pen.

  His absence hurts. Every day. I close my eyes, inhaling the scent of leather and paper—his scent. It’s the only room where he still exists. His chair. His desk. His antique desk lamp. His paperweight holding a picture of Annie and me from the NICU the day we were born. Side by side. Each hooked up to our own ventilator. As fragile and helpless as we look, I’ve always loved that picture. It was one moment in time when I had a sister.

  My eyes wrench open when Dopney’s screams start rattling around my head. I blink them away, bury them, send them racing down the dark tunnel to my gut before I start thinking about whether my dad cried out when the Swarm closed in on him.

  Hana, Hawaii. I cling to my happy thought and immerse myself in the memory, hearing waves crashing and swishing, seeing white foam swirling across the black rock beach. I smell the fresh drops of rain as they speckle the ocean and watch as the sun peeks above the horizon, bringing light to a deep purple sky.

  I stay in the moment, aware of my breath and my limbs until the trembling subsides. When my hand is steady enough, I grab a pen from the desk and push forward.

  Extending the timeline, I add today’s date and Dopney’s name. The two-year gap between my dad and Dopney is longer than any lapse of time.

  Charlie barks so suddenly, my hand jerks. The black pen makes a jagged dash along the brown paper backing. I lick my thumb and attempt to rub it off, but it smears, making it worse.

  “Charlie,” I say through gritted teeth.

  The office window overlooks our small side yard. I lift the wooden blinds just enough to peer outside. The last thing I need is to make myself visible for a fraction of a second and risk a camera going off in my face.

  Charlie stops barking. Other than a few rustling leaves in my neighbor’s yard, the night is still. I tighten the blinds and return to my makeshift crime wall.

  I study the snippets. Overly Tan News Anchor was right. Most of the attacks were on tourists. Only four of the victims, not including my dad, were Chicago residents, making nine dead tourists in nine years’ time.

  After his death, I found a handful of my dad’s case files locked in our file cabinet. I assumed someone from his office would retrieve them. Apparently, no one had the backbone to continue the case. The media easily convinced the nation that gangs were behind the Death Mob, and my father had pissed them off enough to make himself a mark. But Emi and everyone else are stupid to think my dad’s attack was the only targeted one.

  According to my dad’s theory, every hit was targeted. And the whole operation was run by a sophisticated organized crime cartel—not local gangs. As for Morrell, he was somehow involved, but he wasn’t the main guy my dad was after. I’ve never known whether my dad knew who was in charge before he died. If that’s what got him killed.

  I scan the articles for connections to Dopney or even Loveland, trying to figure out how he’s connected or who he’s connected to. I already know before I look that I won’t find anything here. I’ll have to dig deeper.

  I grab four square Post-its. One for Copperhead. One for Black Hat. One for Cropped Hair Girl. And one for the gray-eyed attacker who knew my name. I stick them beneath the heading “The Swarm,” next to Lip Spike’s name, before stepping back, frustrated I can’t picture more of them.

  Outside, Charlie’s barking reaches a manic level. Our neighbor’s boxer is harmless, but his barks sound vicious. He’s going to wake my mom, who would have me institutionalized if she saw any of this.

  I flip the picture and hang it on the wall. It takes longer than it should to balance the thing. Feeling a bit dizzy, I hurry out of the office and hop onto the living room couch as if I’ve been there all along.

  Charlie doesn’t settle easily this time. I chuck a pillow at the door. “Shut up!”

  Our motion sensors flip on.

  Outside, Charlie’s nails scrape against the fence as if he’s trying to climb over it. I stare at the thin curtains on our French doors that separate me from whatever is riling Charlie on the other side.

  A muffled thud comes from our back porch. Something, or someone, is there. I stop breathing. Flashes of the Swarm closing in on Dopney flood my head, and I pray it’s some abhorrent reporter.

  “Lia,” my mom whispers from the top landing. “What’s going on?”

  When I don’t move, she rushes down the stairs toward the French doors. She grabs a poker from the fireplace on the way. Pausing at the door, she looks at me one last time. She flips the poker in her hand as if finding the right grip and peels back one curtain to peek outside.

  My mom looks confident, resolute. For several seconds she doesn’t move as I dig my fingernails into the couch, anticipating what she sees. Emi Vega? A camera waiting to snap a shot of me petrified like an idiot? A mob of teenagers waiting to kill me?

  She unlocks the door and steps outside.

  “Mom!”

  She disappears.

  For several agonizing seconds, I imagine her screaming, getting attacked, being murdered. My breathing grows rapid. Just as I’m about to go after her, it turns hysterical. I can’t slow it down. All the drugs I’ve inhaled today are suddenly not enough. My lungs burn and pump quickly, in short, constricted bursts. I fall back on the couch. Stretch out. Give them room to take in air until my body is so stiff I can’t move. Scenarios reel through my mind—most of them including my mom, the last of my family, dying on the back porch while I’m trapped in my own skin, completely immobilized. The pressure around my chest intensifies. It squeezes my ribs, my throat. I gasp for air, but my lungs are wearing down. I’m losing control of my breath and my body when she walks back inside the house.

  “Lia!”

  She runs to the kitchen. I lose sight of her as the weight of the world presses down on me. Crushing me. The junk drawer rattles. My throat constricts. Feet brush against the wood floors. There’s stabbing pain like my chest is about to collapse. Just as I think it might, my inhaler is thrust into my mouth.

  Mist hits the back of my throat, and I breathe in. It trickles down to my lungs, opening them, giving relief. Air pumps in and out. My breathing slows until it finally matches my mom’s.

  She crouches in front of me. Her voice is hard. “There’s nothing out there.” She looks me over, assessing the damage. “The trash can lids were knocked off. Probably an animal.”

  I concentrate on the routine of my breathing and nod.

  “Deep breaths,” she says. Twice, her breaths mimic mine, and then she watches me, scrutinizing the mechanics behind each inhale. “How do you feel?”

  I nod again. “Better.”

  She heads to the kitchen and comes back with an ice cube. She presses it into my palm and wraps my fingers around it. “Give me a minute to get dressed. We’ll go back to the hospital . . .”

  “Mom.” I push the words out as the cold begins to sting my hand. “I’m fine.”

  My mom studies my expression like I might be lying to her. She walks over to the door, locks it, and picks u
p a bag she must have brought in from outside. She sets it on the armchair and heads to the fireplace to put the poker away.

  As if in slow motion, my gaze drifts to the bag—my bag.

  Dizziness rushes to my head all over again.

  “Where’d you find that?” I force myself to remain calm.

  “On the table outside. You need to stop leaving your stuff lying around the porch. Any of those reporters out there would love a chance to rifle through your purse.”

  I stifle a gasp, but my mom doesn’t seem to notice. She heads to the kitchen to straighten and close the junk drawer. She taps one nail on the granite like she’s debating whether to drag me back to the ER.

  “Turn out the lights when you go to bed,” she says at last. She walks up the stairs, her shoulders tight, her bathrobe fluttering behind her.

  I look to the armchair and press my back into the corner of the couch as the ice cube slides from my grip, landing somewhere on the floor.

  Anyone could have picked up my bag and returned it. Dozens of firemen, police officers, paramedics, and reporters continue to comb the area. And the entire city now knows where I live. But only the Swarm would break into my backyard and leave it on my porch.

  Like a deadly addiction, I reach for it. I peer inside to find papers I’ve never seen before. A packet folded in half that someone wanted me to find.

  I should get my mom, call Detective Irving.

  Instead I pinch the corner with two fingers and pull it out like a bomb. They’re printouts. Newspaper articles.

  In one hasty movement, I unfold them, spread them over the coffee table. Three articles. I scan their headlines, wondering what this has to do with me.

  “Blogger Killed on Bike by Hit-and-Run”

  “Local Beat Reporter Stabbed to Death; Pulled from Chicago River”

  “Body Found Near Ravenswood Metra Tracks”

  I dig through my purse for anything else, unsure of what it means to find my phone at the bottom.

  A tiny spark of hope flickers inside me, and I suppress it. Finding them now, like this, would be too easy. Illogical even. I key in my passcode and scroll through my images. Like I thought, they’ve been erased. Everything from Navy Pier.