1985
Yale watched, relieved, as a car rumbled down Belden. Someone unlocked the door of the house across the street.
If he moved faster, it would only take half an hour to get home—but he went as slowly as he could. He didn’t want to walk into an empty apartment, or—worse—find Charlie there, ready to tell him whatever horrible thing had sent everyone out of the house. An emergency call, another death. They might have turned on the TV, seen news from Russia, something so alarming they’d had to run home, make preparations.
He turned onto Halsted: a long, straight path to his own bed. He looked into shop windows, stood at “Don’t Walk” lights even when he could have crossed. He let people pass. Maybe he expected the whole party to come up behind him, to say they’d gone barhopping and wondered where he’d been.
He walked much farther than he needed to, beyond his own corner. He looked into each bar he passed—opening the door when the windows were mirrored or painted black—scanning for Charlie, for Fiona, for any of them.
In one dank entryway, a man leaned on a cigarette machine, his hand down the fly of his jeans. “Hey,” the guy said. He was wasted, his voice full of slobber. “Hey, gorgeous. I got a job for you.”
At the next bar, a nearly empty one, a TV on the wall was for some reason showing 60 Minutes instead of porn or music videos. The giant stopwatch, ticking down. No nuclear war, at least. No breaking news.
Yale’s legs were tired, and it was late. At the police station he stopped and walked back down the other side of the street, all the way back to the corner of Briar. He turned down it and looked for lights on the top floor of the three-flat. There were none.
He didn’t go in. He walked, slowly, a block and a half east to the small blue house with black shutters, the shiny black door. Most of the houses on this street were as large as the structurally unsound one-time mansion that contained Yale and Charlie’s apartment, but Yale had always loved this little one that stood sandwiched between stone giants. Compact and tidy and not too glamorous, which was why, ever since he’d noticed the “For Sale” sign out front, he’d been entertaining the wild question of whether he and Charlie might be able to afford it. Who on earth ever bought a house? But maybe they could. To own a piece of the city, to have something that was theirs, that no one could kick them out of on any pretext—that would be something. It might start a trend! If Charlie did it, other guys who could afford to would follow.
He looked back up the block. No Charlie, no crowd of drunken revelers. This was as good a place as any to wait. Better than the empty apartment. He stepped closer to the sign, so he wouldn’t look like a creep.
They could have parties where people gathered on the porch to smoke and talk, where they’d grab more beer from the kitchen and bring it out and sit right there on a big wooden swing.
He wanted, suddenly, to scream for Charlie, to call into the city so loudly they’d all hear. He pushed his foot hard against the sidewalk and breathed through his nose. He looked at the beautiful house.
Yale could memorize the real estate agent’s number—the last three digits were all twos—and call this week. And then this wouldn’t just be the night they didn’t go to Nico’s funeral, the night Yale felt so horrifically alone; it would be the night he found their house.
He was getting cold. He walked back up Briar and up to the apartment. Everything was dark and still, but he checked the bed. Empty, the blue comforter still bunched on Charlie’s side. He wrote down the agent’s number before it fled his mind.
It was seven o’clock, which explained his growling stomach. He should have filled up on abandoned hors d’oeuvres before he left.
And suddenly he had a new theory: food poisoning. He’d been a little sick, hadn’t he? It could have hit everyone else harder, sent them carpooling to the hospital. It was the first reasonable story he’d come up with. He congratulated himself for not taking a deviled egg when they came by.
He made a double cheese sandwich—three slices of provolone and three of cheddar, brown mustard, lettuce, onion, tomato, rye bread—and sat on the couch and bit in. This was a better version of what he’d lived on at Michigan, at the campus snack bar where burger toppings—including cheese—had been free. He’d stick two slices of bread in his backpack in the morning, then load them up at noon.
He dialed Charlie’s mother. Teresa was from London—Charlie’s slightly faded accent magnified, in her, into something glorious—but she lived in San Diego now, drinking chardonnay and dating aging surfers.
She said, “How are you!” And he knew from her lightness, her surprise, that Charlie hadn’t called her from a hospital or prison cell tonight.
“Good, good. The new job is perfect.” It wasn’t unusual for Yale to call Teresa independent of Charlie. She was, as she knew, his only mother in any real sense of the word. Yale’s own mother was a former child actress who’d tried to settle down in small-town Michigan, then ran off when Yale was three to act again. He grew up watching her on the sly, first on The Guiding Light and then on The Young and the Restless, on which she still made rare appearances. Her character, it seemed, was too old for regular storylines now, but her character’s son, who actually looked a bit like Yale, was still central; so she’d come back to weep whenever the son was kidnapped or had cancer.
Yale had seen his mother exactly five times after the day she left, always when she swept through town with belated presents for the holidays she’d missed. She was a lot like her soap characters: aloof, mannered. Her last visit was Yale’s fourteenth birthday. She took him out for lunch and insisted he have a milkshake for dessert. Yale was full, but she was so vehement that he gave in and then spent weeks wondering if she thought he was too thin, or if it really meant something to her, giving her son something sweet, something that ought to make him happy. It hadn’t made him happy, and Yale still couldn’t see a milkshake without also seeing his mother’s red fingernails tapping anxiously on the table, the only part of her body that wasn’t completely controlled. “It’s going to be so interesting,” she’d said to him that day, “to see what you become.” When he turned twenty, she sent him a check for three thousand dollars. Nothing when he turned thirty. Teresa, on the other hand, had flown into town and taken him to Le Francais, which she couldn’t afford. Teresa would send him clippings from magazines, articles about art or swimming or asthma or the Cubs or anything else that made her think of Yale.
“Tell me all about it,” Teresa said. “You’re wooing the rich folks, is it?”
“Partly. We’re trying to build the collection.”
“You know you have a gift for charm. Mind, I’m not calling you slick. You’re charming like a puppy.”
“Huh,” he said and laughed.