said, as if it were obvious. “No Cubs in Paris. You staying Left Bank or Right?”
“Oh. Between them, I guess? My friend has a place on Île Saint-Louis.” She liked how it made the trip sound glamorous rather than desperate.
The man whistled. “Nice friend.”
Maybe she shouldn’t have said it, shouldn’t have made herself sound moneyed and scammable. But because it felt so lovely and warm inside this version of the story, she went on. “He’s actually—have you heard of the photographer Richard Campo?”
“Yeah, of course.” He looked at her, waited for the rest. “What, that’s your friend?”
She nodded. “We go way back.”
“Holy,” the man said. “You serious? I’m a big art freak. I get him mixed up with Richard Avedon. But Campo did those deathbed shots?”
“He’s the one. Grittier than Avedon.”
“I didn’t know he was still alive. Wow. Wow.”
“I won’t tell him you said that.” Really, she had no idea what shape Richard was in. He was still working at eighty, and when he passed through Chicago a few years ago for his show at the MCA, he was stooped but energetic, gushing about the twenty-nine-year-old French publicist who was apparently the love of his life.
They waited a long time to approach the gate. He asked if she planned to hit the museums with Richard Campo, and Fiona told him she was really there to visit her daughter. It was true, in the most optimistic sense. “And her daughter too,” she said. “My granddaughter.”
He laughed and then realized she was serious. “You don’t look—”
“Thanks,” she said.
To her relief, the seatbelt light dinged off. No time for the guy to ask questions she didn’t have answers to. (What arrondissement? How old is the grandkid? What’s her name?)
She waited for room to stand. “Your wallet couldn’t be in your suitcase, could it?” She gestured at the overhead bins.
“Checked my bag at O’Hare.”
She believed him more now, but not enough to offer money. She said, “I’ll share my cab, if that would help.”
He grinned, and his teeth were nice. Square and white. “A ride’s the one thing I got.”
There was space for her finally, and she stood, knees popping. She said, “Good luck.” And although he couldn’t have known how much she needed it, he said, “Same to you.”
She hefted down her carry-on. Out the pill-shaped windows, a pink sun was rising.
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