Lotty dismissed the residents and the student, and sat on the edge of the bed, frowning. “I was thinking more about your recklessness. Does he have any proof?”
“I don’t know. You booted him out before I could get him to come clean. I wouldn’t even be worrying about it if the woman from Homeland Security hadn’t pressed me on what Sister Frances told me about the Newsome inquiry.” I looked at Lotty’s dim outline. “Lotty, I can’t go home with you if I’m a target of fire bombers. I can’t risk you being hurt.”
“You’d be safer at my place than in your own home. We have a doorman, we have security. You’re completely exposed in your building. And if someone threw another fire bomb, those children on the second floor would be hurt.”
“I’m so helpless!” I burst out. “To save my eyes and skin I have to sit in the dark. I need to be out talking to people, I need to be at my computer looking up data. What am I going to do?”
Lotty put an arm around me. “Does everything have to happen today? In a few days, you’ll be able to get around, as long as you’re careful about the sun. You know how it is when you’re in the hospital: you feel more helpless there than after you get out.”
She stayed until a supper tray arrived at six and insisted on my eating something that might once have been a chicken. When she left, I tried to sleep, since I couldn’t read or watch TV. Instead, I kept thrashing around in the narrow bed, worrying about my role in Sister Frankie’s death.
A little before eight, a volunteer came in with a shopping bag that had been left at the front desk for me. Murray’s gofer had come through with my clothes. The bra was a plain white that I wouldn’t have chosen for myself, but it didn’t matter. With my bandaged hands, I couldn’t fasten it, anyway. I managed the buttons on the shirt and pulled on the jeans. The gofer had dutifully brought me a size 31. After two days of living on IVs, I could have gotten away with a 30.
Just being dressed made me feel better. I pulled on my soft brown boots again and looked in the bathroom mirror. Something would have to be done about that hair: I looked like a freak show.
The by-product of hospitalization is plastic. The room was full of bags and trays and specimen cups and banana-shaped things for throwing up in. I filled a bag with cups, made a hump in the bed that might look like a sleeping V.I., turned out the lights, and looked into the hall.
Eight o’clock. Visitors were leaving, nurses were handing out meds. A crowd to mingle with. Auspicious.
You know the old movie where Humphrey Bogart has been sandbagged and pumped full of drugs and, even though his head is spinning, he gets up and goes after serious bad guys? I’ve always thought it was really stupid and unrealistic.
I was right. I tried to stride confidently, despite my freaky hair and the big plastic glasses, but, like Bogie in The Long Goodbye, I saw the hall spin around me. I had to clutch the wall to keep from falling over. Not so auspicious.
When I reached the front lobby, I was sweating and light-headed. The hospital was a bit over two miles from the building where Sister Frankie had lived. Normally, I could have walked it, but I was nowhere near normal. I still had eight dollars. Not enough for a taxi, but it would get me there and back on the bus.
I wobbled my way two blocks north to a Lawrence Avenue bus stop. Murray had unsettled me. I kept stopping, not just because I was unsteady but to see if I had company, whether cops or robbers. If I really had been the fire bombers’ target, I was hoping they were monitoring me so closely that they knew I was still in the hospital. Tonight might be my one chance to go back to the Freedom Center apartments without anyone knowing.
One thing about the Uptown neighborhood: women with weird hair who have trouble staying upright are a dime a dozen. Two women just like me, stooping to scoop up cigarette butts in the midst of a ferocious shouting match, passed while I waited for the bus. No one gave any of us a second glance.
A bus lumbered up to the stop. I fed two of my crumpled bills into the money maw, awkwardly because of my gauzy mitts, and slumped back onto one of the seats set aside for the disabled and elderly. I felt disconnected from the world around me, and when we got to the Kedzie stop I had to coach myself on how to walk down the steps.
My car was parked on Kedzie, but my keys had been in the handbag I’d dropped in Sister Frankie’s apartment. I walked up Kedzie to see if I could get into my Mustang-I have picklocks in the glove compartment-but of course I’d locked all the doors. However, the city hadn’t forgotten me: three tickets for meter violations were stuffed under the wipers. I ground my teeth but left the tickets. I couldn’t do anything about them tonight.
It was easy to spot Sister Frankie’s apartment from the street: the windows were boarded over and the brick and concrete around the frames were charred black. Lights showed through open windows on some of the upper floors, though, meaning the fire had been contained quickly enough for the building’s wiring and plumbing to be usable. That was one mercy, that others hadn’t been injured in or made homeless by the blast. It also meant the federal morons watching the building hadn’t stopped the fire department from doing their job.
The street was full, as it had been three nights ago, with kids and shoppers and lovers and drunks. People stared at me: the building was a stage and I was a new actor on it, but I couldn’t help that.
I took off my plastic dark glasses. The sun had set, the streetlamps were on, and the city was bathed in the haze of midsummer twilight. Surely that wouldn’t hurt my eyes. I pushed the gauze back on my right hand, exposing my thumb and my forefinger, and used the edge of the glasses to push in the tongue on the front door. As I’d thought the other night, it was a simple lock to undo. I hoped if OEM was watching, they wouldn’t come after me.
The stairwell smelled like a lab sink, a musty, sour chemical stench mingled with charred wood and damp. I wished for a flashlight, the only light coming from a single bulb two stories up. I worried about missing steps or tripping on debris, but my flashlight was also in my glove compartment. The things you can do so easily with money: walk to the nearest drugstore, buy a flashlight. Hop a cab, buy a new outfit. No wonder women who look like me walk down the street shouting their heads off.
I stopped at the landing in front of the Virgin of Guadalupe. She was barely visible in the dim light. I stroked her rough-carved wooden cheeks. It would be so wonderful to think she could protect me, to believe Sister Frances was even now clasped to her bosom. I crept on up to the second floor and turned right toward Sister Frances’s apartment.
The hall was even darker here because the windows facing the street were boarded over. Each step was a gamble, like walking on a rocky beach in the dark. I couldn’t tell what I was stumbling across: wallboard, wires, parts of light fixtures. I ran my fingertips along the wall to steady myself but lost my footing when the wall disappeared. I grabbed at open air and found myself on my knees in the rubble.
Even to my damaged eyes, the yellow crime scene tape across Sister Frances’s door gleamed dully in the dark. I found the knob and turned it. Unlocked. The door was sealed, but it gave way to a firm shoulder push.
Inside the apartment, the air was so acrid that my eyes started to tear. I put my plastic glasses on to protect my eyes, then took them off. The thick lenses meant I couldn’t see anything at all.
I stepped backward, catlike, from the heart of the damage. Sister Frances had brought tea in from the kitchen, and I was hoping I might find a flashlight in there. In the dark, there is no sense of distance or space. I kept banging into furniture until I found a wall that I could follow step by cautious step.