Chapter 7 - The Architecture of Winter
Winter in Cook County does not arrive with snow.
It arrives with an iron freeze that turns the ruts in the construction sites along the Kennedy Expressway into stone, and makes the water in Lake Michigan look like gray, unpolished grease beneath a sky that hasn't seen the sun in fourteen days.
By mid-December, Claire had gained three pounds.
She was out of the incubator. She lay in a clear plastic bassinet in the step-down nursery at Prentice, wearing a white cotton onesie that Theo had washed four times in hypoallergenic flakes, her dark hair standing up in a soft, fine crest that smelled of coconut oil and clean human skin.
The subdural hematoma was gone.
Dr. Aris Thorne had signed the neurological discharge papers that morning, his thick signature looping across the blue form with that brisk, dismissive flourish surgeons use when they know they have beaten the odds by half an inch.
"She has normal tone in all four quadrants, Naomi," Thorne had said, sitting on the edge of the consultation desk with his glasses hanging from his fingers. "The bilateral tracking is ninety-eight percent. She’s small—she’s going to be in the tenth percentile for twelve months—but the engine is clean. She’s Julian’s girl."
We brought her home to Evanston on a Tuesday afternoon.
The house was not an eight-thousand-square-foot brick Georgian.
It was a three-story Victorian frame house on a street lined with Norway maples, four blocks from the lake. It had high, drafty ceilings, original leaded glass in the transoms that rattled slightly when the north wind came down from Wisconsin, and a wide front porch with gray-painted floorboards that Theo had scrubbed by hand with linseed oil in September.
The nursery was on the second floor.
The white crib with the hand-painted gold leaf was placed against the interior wall, away from the draft of the tall sash windows. On the dresser sat the small, cloth-bound notebook where Theo had recorded thirty-two weeks of belly measurements, its pages now filled with three-hour feeding intervals, weight curves, and the serial numbers of the pediatric vitamin drops.
At four o'clock, the doorbell rang.
It was not the brass chime of the Elm Street house; it was a simple, mechanical bell that operated on a pull-chain beside the oak screen door.
Theo went down the stairs.
I stood on the landing, holding Claire against my shoulder in a flannel swaddle, her small, warm head tucked into the hollow below my collarbone, her breath coming in tiny, rhythmic puffs that smelled of sweet formula.
Through the banister spindles, I could see the front hallway.
Standing on the gray floorboards of the porch was Mason Reed.
He was not wearing Tom Ford.
He wore a dark blue nylon parka from an outlet store, salt stains crusting the cuffs of his corduroy trousers, his face pale and thin beneath a two-week growth of patchy, unkempt beard. His hands were stuffed into his pockets, his shoulders hunched against the forty-mile-an-hour wind that was blowing dead oak leaves across the lawn.
Theo did not open the screen door.
He stood behind the glass, his hands resting loose at his sides, wearing an old gray wool sweater with the elbows darned with black thread.
"Mason," Theo said.
The word came through the weatherstripping with that flat, dead finality that made the younger man pull his hands from his pockets and hold them up, palms outward, as if he were approaching an unexploded shell in an open field.
"Theo," Mason said. His voice was hoarse, whipped away by the lake gale. "I... I was in the neighborhood. My father’s office... we had to surrender the keys to the Clark Street building this morning."
"I know," Theo said. "The receiver called me at eight."
Mason looked down at the gray porch boards. His boots were cheap; the synthetic leather was already cracking along the welt where the road salt had eaten through the finish.
"Bianca called me yesterday," Mason whispered. "From a payphone at the laundromat on 47th Street."
Theo didn't move.
"She asked me for five hundred dollars, Theo," Mason said, looking up with eyes that were bloodshot, watery, and completely hollowed out by two months of public financial execution. "She said the gas was turned off in the apartment. She said Renata was in bed with two coats on, and they didn't have enough quarters for the space heater."
Theo didn't blink.
"Did you give her the five hundred dollars, Mason?"
Mason gave a short, jagged, miserable laugh that had no teeth in it.
"I don't have five hundred dollars, Theo," he said. "The bank attached my personal checking account under the cross-guarantee on the bridge loan. I’m living in my uncle’s basement in Highland Park, driving a nineteen-ninety-nine Civic with a rusted rocker panel."
He leaned his forehead against the wooden frame of the screen door.
"She told me you did this," Mason whispered. "She told me you planned it from the night Julian died. She said you sat at that dining room table in Skokie and watched them spend the money because you knew the tax liens would trigger the forfeiture."
Theo reached out his right hand.
He didn't open the door. He turned the small brass deadbolt on the inside of the frame, the cylinder clicking into place with a dry, permanent thunk.
"Julian planned it, Mason," Theo said through the glass. "Julian spent forty years watching people who looked like you and Renata borrow money to buy cars they couldn't afford, while he worked sixty hours a week in fifty percent humidity to pay his real estate taxes."
He took half a step back into the warm hall.
"Tell Bianca that the utility allowance for the 47th Street building is six hundred dollars a quarter," Theo said. "It is disbursed on the first of January, provided the common hallway has been scrubbed twice a week with pine oil."
He turned his back on the door.
"Theo... please," Mason begged, his voice cracking against the glass. "She’s your sister-in-law. She’s... she’s Naomi’s sister."
Theo stopped at the bottom of the stairs.
He looked up at the landing, where I stood with our daughter sleeping against my breast, her tiny fingers twitching against the gray wool of my sweater, safe inside eighty years of heart-pine framing and an eight-hundred-dollar mortgage that was paid twenty years before she was born.
"No, Mason," Theo said, his voice dropping into the quiet of the house. "She’s not Naomi’s sister."
May you like
He climbed the stairs.
"She’s just someone who used to live in Julian’s house," he said, as the front door behind him rattled once in the rising wind, and then fell silent beneath the gathering snow.
