Sorry for Your Loss

by Jessie Ann Foley

  And, in a way, he was right: It was nothing like a soap opera. If it was, Patrick, in that faraway, underwater state he was in, swimming in the abyssopelagic depths of his own brain, would have been called back up to the surface by their voices, by their pleading voices that gathered around his bed to whisper and bargain and pray for him to wake up. Their words would have pierced the darkness and he would have swum back up to them. It would have happened slowly, beautifully, the climactic tear-jerking scene: first, the miraculous wiggling of the fingers. Then, the faintest flutter of an eyelid. And then suddenly, the heavy lids would flick open, revealing those clear blue eyes, awake, alert, alive. “Where am I?” he’d mumble, and the hospital room would become the corner of Clark and Addison at the moment Michael Martinez’s grounder landed in Rizzo’s glove during the tenth inning in game seven of the World Series, times a thousand. Times a million.

  But this wasn’t a soap opera and it wasn’t playoff baseball, and Patrick would never open his eyes again. As soon as Pup saw his brother lying there in the bed, his face an expressionless mask, his chest as pale as carved marble and pocked by wires and tubes, he understood this. Everybody did, even his mother, even if it took her two more days before she could agree to turn off the machines.

  Pup slipped his phone back into his pocket and climbed through the window back into the bedroom. He went into the closet and rummaged into its farthest reaches, past the clutter where Luke had discovered Patrick’s protein powder, to a little nail all the way in the back, on which hung his brother’s stained and faded Cubs hat. He lifted it from its nail with his fingertips, then crawled beneath the hanging clothes and out of the closet. Still holding the hat with the edges of his fingers, he folded himself through the small front window and climbed out to the roof. Then he lay down on his back and dropped the hat gently over his face, so that the sunset coming through was filtered into a muted, warm gray-blue, the color of the sea.

  Pup breathed.

  He’d done this before, just once or twice. Only on the very worst days. He couldn’t do it regularly, he knew, because if he did, he would destroy it. The hat still possessed the faintest, faintest scent of Patrick—shampoo, deodorant spray, and that other, ineffable Patrickness that could never be re-created and that would never again exist anywhere in the world except in the fibers of this hat. Like a rare sea scroll or a lost page of an ancient text, Pup knew that if he touched it too much, he would soil it, and the very thing that made the hat so precious would disintegrate.

  Once he’d arranged the hat over his face, he didn’t try to speak to Patrick. He’d tried too many times, and too many times he’d been answered with silence. So instead he just breathed, and after a few moments the memory came stealing along, settling down around him as gently as a cool sheet on a hot night.

  August. Two weeks before Pup started high school. Two months before Patrick died. It was the first in a three-game Cubs-Pirates series and their seats were terrible, partially obstructed in the upper reaches of Terrace Reserved, but at least they were free: Noreen’s friend had been called out of town at the last minute and couldn’t use them. The game was just as terrible as the seats; eight scoreless innings, followed by an Andrew McCutchen solo shot in the ninth, and the Cubs lost. Still, it was summer, and it was Chicago, and it was Wrigley Field, and Pup had spent the day in his obstructed seat eating nachos and filling in box scores with his two brothers, and that meant it was still a very good day. When the game was over, Luke wanted to burn off his beer buzz before they made it home for Sunday dinner. He suggested that they walk the three miles to the Addison blue line and take the El the rest of the way home. “Why not?” Patrick had shrugged, and they’d set off, walking west across the city.

  They were a couple blocks from the station when they passed a bar. It was a dumpy old place with grimy windows, a brick facade in major need of a power washing, and fossilized gum all over the sidewalk. In the doorway, an old man in a filthy winter coat and duct-taped gym shoes stood begging for change. As soon as he saw them coming, he stepped out into the middle of the sidewalk and blocked their way.

  “Let me guess,” he slurred. “Brothers?”

  “Yeah, man.” Patrick smiled at him. “How’d you know?”

  “The eyes. You all got the same eyes.”

  He stepped closer to them, peering, turn by turn, into each of their eyes. There was something mesmerizing about him, so that even Luke stood passively and allowed the man to peer up at him, close enough to touch. Pup could see now that he wasn’t old, as he’d first appeared. He was maybe a couple years older than Annemarie, not quite thirty. But booze and drugs had done something to his skin, putting cracks into everything. His hands were shaking so hard it looked like he was dancing.

  “Help a guy out, will ya?” He held out a battered Dunkin’ Donuts cup, and the change rattled itself.

  “Sorry, man,” said Luke. “I spent all my cash at the game.”

  He tried to keep walking but the man caught a handful of Luke’s jersey from behind.

  “Hey!” Luke yanked his shirt from the homeless man’s grip and shoved him backward. “Keep your hands off me.”

  “Why should I?” the man shouted. His coat had fallen open, revealing a bare, yellowish chest and a belly as distended as a pregnant woman’s. There were two small purple circles—bruises, lesions, cigarette burn scars, maybe—just beneath his ribs. “Why should I?” he yelled again. “You got your family. You got your two brothers here. I got nothin’! No family. No brothers. Nothing. And you’re standin’ here, tellin’ me you spent all your cash at the game?”

  “Here, man.” Patrick leafed quickly through his wallet and pressed a wad of cash into the man’s hands. “Go get yourself something to eat, okay?”

  The man took the money and stuffed it into his coat pocket. Giving Luke one last vicious glare, he retreated back to the doorway and into the bar, the screen door slamming behind him.

  “Saint Patrick.” Luke brushed off his jersey and rolled his eyes. “You really think he’s going to go buy himself a sandwich with that money?”

  “It’s his business what he does with it,” Patrick said quietly. Through the shadow of the screen they could see the man approaching the bartender, ordering something brown in a short glass. “It was mostly singles, anyway.”

  Just like that, the day was spoiled. The three brothers walked the rest of the way to the train in a moody silence. They rode home in silence, and they walked from the station back to Flanland in silence. It was only just before they went in the house that someone finally spoke.

  “Hey, Luke,” Patrick had said. “I’m not trying to be, like, preachy. But next time you see a homeless guy like that who wants some money, just try to remember what Mom always says.”

  Pup knew immediately what Patrick meant. There but for the grace of God go I was a favorite phrase of their mother’s. Luke must have known, too, because he rolled his eyes and went inside, letting the screen door bang behind him right in Patrick’s face.

  Pup sat up with a start and tore off the Cubs hat. The sun was sinking behind the apartment buildings just west of Flanland, and his shadow had grown long.

  He knew, at last, where to find his missing brother.

  31

  THE CICADAS HAD COME EARLY this year. Usually it wasn’t until later in the summer that their collective chirping reached this crescendo, a relentless blood-beat thrumming that began just around sunset, drowning out all other sounds. As Pup got off the train and stepped out into the twilit city, the insects’ molted shells lay scattered all over the sidewalk, gleaming in the streetlight like broken glass. They crunched under his Nikes like dead leaves. Luke had been gone for just over three weeks now, and as Pup approached the doorway of Mayor’s Packaged Liquors and Tap on shaking legs, he knew in his bones that if Luke wasn’t here, then Luke was gone forever.

  The bar stood between a bankrupt sandwich chain and a for-rent former insurance office. If Pup hadn’t seen the place so clearly i
n his memory, he might have walked right past it. It was exactly the kind of place that was meant to go unnoticed until it caused a problem, like the hardy, scuttling cockroaches that had lived in the cabinets of Sal and Annemarie’s first apartment. And, like cockroaches, who were rumored to be the only creatures equipped to survive a nuclear holocaust, Mayor’s Packaged Liquors would keep surviving long after the trendier, flashier places that surrounded it came and went, an ugly but necessary part of the urban ecosystem.

  It was hard to tell whether the place was open or closed, since Pup could hear no music or noise coming from inside, and the windows had been soaped up to prevent anyone from seeing in or out. But before he could even put his hand on the front door handle to find out, a white, familiar shape in the alley beside the sandwich shop caught his eye. There, parked in front of a locked dumpster, its windshield bristling with orange parking tickets, was Luke’s white Jeep.

  Pup approached the car cautiously, just as a huge gray rat with sleek, oily fur lumbered out from underneath it, so close he could hear the hiss of its tail as it dragged across the sidewalk. He jumped back as the rat scuttled past, his heart pounding, the cicadas screaming. He approached the driver’s-side window. He’d seen enough Dateline to know that when you find a missing person’s car, there’s a good chance your missing person is very close by. The only question is whether they’re dead or alive when you find them. Well, whatever was in that car, he was going to have to look. He might be the only son left in his family, and he owed that much to his mother. But as he peered inside the driver’s-side window, holding his breath, all he saw was a pile of empty gum wrappers on the passenger seat. The seats were not covered in bloodstains. There was no bloated body with wide, dead eyes staring back at him. There was no overpowering smell of a corpse rotting in the trunk. Pup let his breath go and jiggled the door handle. It was locked. Okay. He was getting close. He could do this. With a renewed sense of purpose, he strode out of the alley, braced himself, and threw open the door to Mayor’s Packaged Liquors, hoping, praying, that Luke would be crouched over the bar counter, drunk as hell, maybe, but alive.

  His hopes were dashed as soon as he walked inside. Luke was not sitting at the bar counter because there was no bar counter. Pup’s memory must have been wrong. Mayor’s Packaged Liquors wasn’t a bar at all; it was a down-on-its-luck liquor store, nothing more than a maze of cluttered aisles lined with grimy-looking bottles of booze, a lotto machine, and a bowl at the cash register filled with shriveled, brown-spotted limes.

  An enormous woman with skin the color of an uncooked turkey was perched on a stool behind the bulletproof glass of the cash register, fast asleep and snoring shallowly. When Pup cleared his throat, she didn’t even stir.

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  Snore.

  “Pardon me.”

  Snort.

  He brought his hand down gingerly on the little silver bell next to the bowl of limes and she startled awake, coughing phlegmily. In the next instant Pup found himself staring straight into the neat black hole of a cocked handgun. His intestines rearranged themselves into liquid form while he waited for the woman to take in his dorky backpack and his skinny praying-mantis legs and realize that he was no threat to her.

  “Sorry about that,” she said, stashing the gun back under the counter. “May I help you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Pup glanced down at his shorts to make sure he hadn’t peed his pants. “I’m—uh—looking for someone.”

  “In the tippling lounge?”

  “The what?”

  “The tippling lounge.”

  “Oh.” He looked at the woman. She didn’t exactly seem in the mood for questions. “Um. Yes?”

  “Well, you know the basics, right?” The woman adjusted herself on her stool like a roosting hen. “You get fifteen minutes for each dollar you spend. Bathroom key is a flat rate of five bucks. Cash only, of course.”

  “Of course.” Pup nodded vigorously, to make up for the look of total mystification that was surely plastered across his face. He reached into his wallet and peeled off a dollar from the small stack of singles he’d collected mowing his uncle Mitch’s lawn. “I guess fifteen minutes is enough?” He pushed the bill across the counter. The woman glared at it, then at him.

  “Boy, what you think I sell in this place for one solitary buck? The cheapest hooch in this store is still gonna run you five bucks, minimum. And I don’t sell loose cans anymore, so don’t even think about asking.”

  “Um . . .” Pup looked around the liquor store, half expecting to see a list of rules nailed to the moldy wall. Instead, all he saw was a faded Budweiser ad from the 1996 Super Bowl, so ancient that all the Clydesdale horses majestically prancing around that poster had probably long since been turned into glue. “Ma’am,” he finally said. “This is my first time here—”

  “You don’t say.”

  “—and so I don’t really know, like, the rules.”

  The woman opened her mouth, produced a prodigious yawn that exposed all the pink ridges of her throat, and heaved herself off her stool. She was so small and round that her chin barely reached the counter. “The rules are as follows,” she began, counting off on her stubby fingers. “One. For every dollar you spend in my store, you get fifteen minutes in my tippling lounge. So, for example: Buy yourself a twelve-dollar bottle of Jack Sprat Brandy, you get three hours in the lounge. Four dollars an hour, see? Treat yourself to a fifteen-dollar bottle of Captain Havana’s Fine Imported Rum, you get three hours and forty-five minutes. Get it?”

  Pup nodded, trusting her figures. Math had never been his strong suit.

  “Two. You want a key to my bathroom, it’s a five-dollar flat fee. And if you can’t afford it, that don’t mean you can go defecating in my alley. We got a rat problem back there already, in case you haven’t noticed. Three. As far as beds, those are first come, first served. I wash the sheets pretty regular, but regular don’t mean daily—I’m a busy woman. Bed bugs and the like is a risk you take. This is Mayor’s Tippling Lounge. It ain’t the Four Seasons. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Pup said woodenly.

  “Four.” She leaned forward, her bosom straining against the puff-painted leopard that leaped across the front of her T-shirt. “And listen carefully because this is the most important rule. Rule number four is that I don’t bother you, and you don’t bother me. I ain’t asking you questions, because I ain’t want to know. You can laugh back there, you can cry back there, you can dance around naked and play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ on the kazoo for all I care. What you do in the tippling lounge is your business. But!” She held up a finger like a teacher driving home a particularly important point. “Just remember it’s your business alone—as in, no guests are allowed unless they get approval from me. This is a tippling lounge and not a brothel, understood?”

  “Okay,” Pup repeated.

  “Good. Now. You seem like a nice boy: sweet, scrubbed behind the ears, trusting if a bit dull. So I don’t think we’ll have any problems. But if you do decide to cause any trouble for me—fighting, fornicating, overdosing—I reserve the right to ban you for life. In other words: You die back there? I’ll kill ya.” She began hiccuping violently, and Pup was beginning to think she might need the Heimlich maneuver when he realized that was just how she laughed. “Now,” she said, wiping away the tears that were collecting in the pouches beneath her eyes. “What can I get for you?”

  “How much are the limes?” Pup indicated the sad-looking bowl perched on the edge of the counter.

  “What? I don’t know. Nobody comes to Mayor’s to buy produce. Only reason I still stock ’em is out of habit. Guy we all called Marbles—he had a turned eye that rolled around in his head just like a marble—he used to like to squeeze a lime over his tequila. But he dropped dead last year—massive coronary—and here I am, still stocking his damn limes.”

  “How about I give you a dollar for this one?” Pup chose a lime from the bowl, the least shriveled-looking one, w
hich still had patches of green between its puckered swaths of brown skin. “That buys me fifteen minutes, right?”

  The cashier scowled at him and snatched the dollar off the counter. “You’re a cheap little bastard, you know that?” She lifted an egg timer from a row of several that were lined up along the top of the cash register. “Now go on back there and get to work doing whatever perverted business you’ve got planned with that piece of fruit. You’ve got fifteen minutes and not a moment longer.” She cranked the egg timer so that it began to purr along with the faint chorus of the others. “Time starts now.”

  32

  THE TIPPLING LOUNGE WAS LOCATED through a metal door at the back of the liquor store and down an impossibly long flight of concrete stairs, as if they led to an ancient catacomb and not a standard Chicago basement storage room. As Pup made his way down the darkened stairwell, the air seemed to grow both muggier and colder at the same time, and the walls on either side of him grew slick with green lichen. He heard a faint skittering of rodent claws across stone, felt the drip of condensing water from an overhead pipe slide down the back of his neck. Down, down, down he went, using the flashlight app on his phone when it became too dark to see, until he reached a bumpy stone floor with crevices that were filled with shallow puddles of dark water. A wooden door stood directly at the bottom of the stairs, and a very faint light was coming through on the other side of it. Pup thought about knocking, but decided against it. He’d already bought his fifteen minutes. Like it or not, he had every right to be here.

  The lounge itself was as damp as the stairwell, the walls furry with moss. Someone had made a half-assed attempt to make the place more homey by putting down a large, square Oriental rug that was matted and stained in places with tarlike marks that Pup couldn’t identify as dried blood or bile or something worse. In the middle of this rug was a long, low, glass-topped coffee table with a centerpiece made of an upturned fedora hat filled with stubbed-out cigarette butts. The smell of sewage seeped from the half-open bathroom door, where a single toilet stood under a naked light bulb, as if it were being interrogated. In one corner, two mattresses were pushed up against the wall, each occupied by a human-shaped lump buried beneath a pile of thin, worn blankets so that all Pup could see were the bottoms of bare feet—large, calloused, filthy. In the other corner, sitting on a sagging futon with his hands resting on his thick thighs, his eyes half open, was Luke Flanagan.