Carry the One (13 page)

Gabe sat silent once he had the construction paper on his lap and they were on their way again. She interpreted his silence as a guilty one, but when they pulled up across from the school, he hopped out quite chipper with his backpack and his drawing folder and came around to the driver’s side window. He stuck his right hand in for Carmen to shake and just as she was thinking what a little gentleman, she felt a sharp, sudden buzz run up her palm into her wrist. And Gabe was laughing
so hard he dropped his stuff on the street. In moments like this, everything else, all the trouble fell away and Carmen was just the luckiest person in the world.

“Where’d you get that piece of evil?” she asked as she plucked the joy buzzer out of his hand. It looked serious, professional strength, from the high end of practical joke devices. “Do they sell this to children?”

“Alice got it for me,” he told her.

“That was so nice of her,” Carmen said, shaking out her zapped hand. “I’ll have to thank her for that.” What she was thinking was how did she deserve this wonderful child. As difficult as it was for them to manage in the day-to-day, she missed him if he was gone, even overnight. Missing him was the worst part of her recuperation last winter. He stayed a week with Alice while Carmen had more surgery on her ear.

Gabe was picking up his backpack when a car came around the corner way too fast. Carmen reflexively reached out the window and pulled him flat to the side of the car—a rush of relief at having gotten him out of harm’s way, followed by a vague drift of guilt for protecting him where she had failed the girl.

The next segment of the game show—the part with tunnels and chutes—was Carmen’s workday. She was now executive director at Hearth/Home. As she hurried through the activity room on her way to her office, she was flagged down by Maureen McCrachy, and spent the next fifteen minutes or so on a plaid sofa next to Maureen, who believed the mice in the shelter were not only multiplying, but growing in size. Maureen was not a lovable client. She was dismissive of the shelter, thought the food was terrible, the bingo rigged, the temperature too warm in the summer and too cold in the winter. Also, she maintained an extreme lack of hygiene. Close encounters with her were always a little swoony. An ancillary problem had developed with Maureen’s mouth, which was only partially toothed, and those remaining in varying shades of black and brown. These troubles were,
of course, accompanied by a breath problem to add to her body odor problem. Sometimes Carmen thought: forget food and shelter and job training and counseling, just fix everyone’s teeth.

“The mouse I saw last night was big as a cat.” Forming the words “mouse” and “last” caused Maureen to whistle through her dental gaps and spit a little onto Carmen’s lap. “A cat,” she repeated for emphasis. “And in its mouth it was dragging around a baloney sandwich.”

Carmen couldn’t be entirely sure this was a delusion.

“I’ll check it out,” she said. “We’ll get rid of them. I promise.”

“Otherwise,” Maureen said in a mafia whisper, “I might have to move on.”

The great emptying of mental institutions in the 1970s filled the streets, at least in Chicago, with some very crazy people. A good part of the clientele at the shelter were women who were not so much homeless as lacking an asylum. Part of sheltering them was finding out what meds they were supposed to be on, then making sure they took them. Not an easy business. After she got used to feeling better and more stable on a prescription, the mentally ill person often took this as a clear sign—usually from God—that she no longer needed medication. It was difficult to reason with someone in this position. And, of course, it was particularly difficult trying to talk down someone with a mouse phobia when your facility was infested with them. Almost as soon as Carmen sat down in her office, one skimmed out from under her desk and across the ancient linoleum floor, making a mad dash from one crack in the wall to another. She didn’t know what to do about the mice. All the alternatives were terrible. She could poison them, or snap their heads under a sprung bar, or let them get stuck on a glue pad until they starved, or worse, gnawed off a leg to free themselves. None of these methods survived a pass through her conscience.

Still, she couldn’t just let them run free. The mice seemed to spend their vast amounts of free time dining in the pantry and having sex, so where there were only a couple of mice two weeks ago, their current
number seemed to be several verging on many. Until recently, she only saw them skittering around the pantry and the back of the kitchen. Now they’d migrated into her office, where there wasn’t any food. Which meant they were going back and forth for meals. They were commuter mice.

“Is there something that gets rid of mice, but doesn’t hurt them?” she asked Slawek, the building janitor. He looked back at her from under the heavy eyelids of a man who had lived through harsh winters in an under-heated Krakow apartment block by stuffing his clothes with newspapers. He had had several root canals without Novocain, just gripping the arms of the dentist’s chair. He traveled the first leg of his escape to freedom in the trunk of a car. The suffering of mice did not enter his field of moral vision.

The silent end of their small conversation was interrupted by a layered ripple of screams and screeches from the activity room. In her mind’s eye, Carmen saw ladies in sweatpants standing on chairs.

“Do whatever you have to, I guess,” Carmen told him. “Just don’t let me know what it is.”

“Got a minute?” Ann Welch poked her head into the doorway.

Ann was Carmen’s assistant. She had been working through the morning with a young woman and her little boy. A referral from the hotline. The woman—her name was Nadine Mooney—was on the run from her partner.

Days earlier, Nadine had arrived too hysterical for a conversation, Carmen gave her a Valium from an infinite-refill prescription her mother passed along to her every once in a while. She supposed this wasn’t exactly kosher, but tranquilizers, she had found, were extremely helpful in getting someone bent out of shape back at least into a sort-of shape where she could begin to be helped.

Ann had found a room for Nadine and her son at a halfway house; Hearth/Home was too small and underfunded to offer overnight shelter. She had the boy enrolled in the closest grade school and a job interview
lined up for Nadine at the McDonald’s on Wilson at Sheridan. Nadine was nervous about this. Her only work experience had been picking—tomatoes and berries. She came up on a night bus from a place in Mississippi so rural it didn’t even have a McDonald’s. She said she came up to Chicago to be near her sister, but then the sister turned out not to live here. A lot of the stories women came in with had these sorts of narrative trapdoors.

“I need you to pep talk her a little. She’s losing her nerve. You’re so good at this stuff.”

As Carmen made her way back to Ann’s office, she tried to gather up an inspirational air. Women like Nadine, barely free of the clutches of the boogeyman they’d been trapped by, always thought these were the scariest days of their lives. They never saw that the truly scariest were the ones they’d just lived through, usually with husbands, but sometimes, as in this instance, with girlfriends who beat them and drank up all the money.

Nadine, Carmen saw as soon as she came into the room, had been hit so much and so often that one side of her face appeared to be not just bruised, but softened. Some of the wounds were fresh, but Carmen saw, beneath and behind the recent trauma, that this woman had been beaten for a long time.

Carmen sat with her, pulled out some toy trucks for her boy, who was both shy and surly. She talked with her about what she was going to have to do, getting things down to a task analysis—Step One followed by Step One and a Half. Step Two was way too far off. Nadine appeared so grateful Carmen couldn’t look at her directly. Still, when she had gone, Carmen leaned against the doorjamb to Ann’s office and told her, “She’ll fold. Two days tops and she’ll be on the bus back to Big Mama.”

This was a discouraging part of Carmen’s work. She tried to put it out of her mind, tried instead to imagine this woman six months on, working at a decent job, her face healed over, her kid not traumatized every night. Sometimes this did happen.

When she got to his school, even though she was a little late, Gabe was not out in front. She tracked him down to the art room where he was lost in a painting, a detailed interior of what she assumed was his bedroom at Matt and Paula’s. Back from Nigeria, they had moved into a huge, ramshackle house on Byron. They got it cheap because of its disrepair. Not broken windows or tacky paneling, nothing easily fixable like that. In this house, the floor of the upstairs bathroom was almost entirely rotted away. A nest of rats lived inside the engine of an abandoned car in the garage. The elderly man who owned the place died in an upstairs bedroom and hadn’t been found for some time and the whole place reeked of both his sickness and his death. Carmen knew these details from Gabe, who was an eager gossip. The only thing the house didn’t have was a corpse in the crawl space. But even if it had, Matt and Paula would have bought it, they so desperately needed the room for the orphans they’d adopted. Nigerian sisters, seven-year-olds, twins—Cheluchi and Chetanna—adorable, but with a penchant for setting small fires. Also, just a couple of months ago, they got a depressed, colicky Romanian baby who came with the name Vlad, which everyone agreed was too vampiric, and so they changed it to Mike. Gabe seemed totally good-natured about all these instant siblings.

It was so peaceful in the art room; the only noise came from a radio turned low.

“Hey.” She came up behind Gabe at a table easel. He turned and smiled, twirling his hands a little, singing, “Yabba dabba dabba dabba dabba dabba dabba said the monkey to the chimp.” A song she taught him when he was first starting to talk. He often surprised her with what he remembered.

“Don’t blame me,” his art teacher said. “I told him to go home.” The teacher, Ryan Hadley, was fresh out of art school, impossibly full of energy. At the moment, he was painting a mural of the first Thanksgiving
on a long piece of brown wrapping paper stretched across four tables. “Bulletin boards,” he told Carmen. “The cornerstone of elementary education. I wanted to make a panorama of how we sold out the Indians, took their land, got them into alcohol and shoved them into reservations, but that didn’t fly with management.”

“A casino,” Carmen said. “You’d want to put a casino in there somewhere.”

Gabe cleaned his brushes and racked his painting. Although Ryan always had one or another reason he needed to stay late, Carmen suspected he hung out this extra hour to give Gabe a casual sort of instruction. He thought Gabe was hugely talented, had told Carmen, “I just want to be around this. To see how much can happen, even in the beginning.”

In a brewing turf war, Alice was suspicious of Ryan without even having met him. She worried he was turning Gabe into a “decorative” painter. Yeah yeah yeah Carmen told her. She figured that, at nine, he was not being hopelessly corrupted by one or another artistic faction.

“Hey, can I drive?” he said, swinging his backpack as they went through the parking lot. He liked to ask. He had only seven years to go.

She had a sitter for tonight. One of the two high school Jennifers who lived on the block. Thursdays she and Alice went to a Proust class at the Newberry.

“I don’t think we’re supposed to park in here,” Carmen said as Alice swung into the lot behind the library, clearly marked “
EMPLOYEES ONLY
.” Alice didn’t hear this. She pulled into a spot designated for Mr. Fox.

“Come on,” she said to Carmen. “We’re late.”

The class had about a dozen students and an earnest teacher, Mr. Costello, who loved Proust, and tried to spark a sophisticated literary conversation about the book and the architecture of Parisian society at the turn of the century. He swam against the hard current of the class bores—there were three—who could relate every incident in the book
to something in their own lives. Proust spoke especially to them. Alice wanted to follow each of these blowhards home after class and deflate their car tires with needle-nose pliers.

“You know. Send a message.”

During the break, one of the few guys in the class came up to Carmen and Alice in the hall. “M&Ms?” He offered a pack with the corner torn off.

“Who’d say no?” Carmen said and he tapped a few into her palm. Then another few into Alice’s.

“Where’d you get these?” Alice asked. “Is there a machine?”

“I picked them up on the way from work.”

“That just seems like incredible forethought.”

Carmen was glad Alice was doing the talking. She had trouble making conversation with guys like this. “Like this” meaning anyone who might be flirting with her. Of course, he might well be, probably
was
, flirting with Alice. Carmen had noticed him in class. They all had name cards propped in front of them. His said Rob. He wore expensive sweaters, cashmere v-necks, but with nothing underneath. Also something gold on a thin chain around his neck. His hair was manicured. Every hair had its exact place. He wore some kind of manly cologne. From his remarks in class, he seemed to be clueless about what Proust was trying to get across. He thought Charles Swann should give up on Odette and get out of Paris. Get over being so French. Get his head on straight. Maybe move to New York. This bone-headedness made Carmen think he was only in the class to pick up women. And that once he saw he was barking up the wrong tree with Alice, he would turn to Carmen. She knew she signed up for the class mostly to meet someone, but that someone was not Rob. That someone was Ralph Fiennes.

The thing on the chain around his neck, she saw at closer range, was a little Egyptian ankh symbol. She could already imagine his apartment. The leather sofa, the dimmer switches. The Luther Vandross
collection. Rob was art director for a chain of hair salons, whatever that meant. She was being a hideous snob, she realized, particularly for someone who got left by a guy she thought she was doing fine with, and further was now a person with only half her hearing and one ear that looked as though it had been drizzled onto the side of her head from a melting candle. This was a guy she’d probably be lucky to get, and before he had even put himself forward she was already rejecting him. The social road ahead looked like a bleak highway, post-apocalyptic, overblown with dust, gray and lifeless except for mutants popping up here and there.