Red, White & Dead. Laura Caldwell
spot the salespeople pulling product in small wheeled suitcases. When I’d been one of those dashing lawyers, I was always jealous of someone like me, someone dressed casually the way I was in flip-flops and a yellow cotton dress, someone who clearly didn’t have to rush anywhere. But being on the other side was starting to depress me—knowing that I wasn’t just playing hooky for the afternoon or taking a much-needed sabbatical, knowing that I was out of work and out of prospects and almost out of my twenties.
Plus, all those people on the street, and the fact that a crowd made it easy to tail someone, began to make me nervous, made me think about Dez and Michael, and wonder if they knew who I was, if they were looking for me. And of course, thinking about Dez and Michael made me think of that stranger in the stairwell.
It was one night, when I was about five years old, that my father had given me my nickname. I’d woken up crying after a sinister dream. He tried to console me, but nothing worked. In the span of six hours, I’d grown fearful of the dark. My dad told me then that if you were afraid of something, you should look it straight in the eye. I didn’t know what he meant, and he must have seen that.
“What are you afraid of in here?” He gestured around my bedroom, lit only by the tiny lamp in the shape of a shell that sat on my nightstand.
I looked around. Nothing appeared particularly scary. “I don’t know.”
“Ghosts? You’re scared that they’ll say, ‘Boo’?”
“I guess.”
“Well, there’s nothing scary about that. Nothing scary about ghosts, either. They’re just people who aren’t here anymore, stopping back in to say hi. Except they say boo.”
That sounded rather simple. And not at all terrifying.
“Okay?” Under his round copper glasses, my dad’s eyes sparkled, as though a laugh was just about to hit him. I loved when he looked like that. It made everything seem fine.
“I guess …” I said again, the fear still lingering a bit the way bad dreams do.
“You guess? What kind of answer is that?” My father looked at the ceiling and acted as if he was thinking hard. “I’ll tell you what. I’m going to call you Boo. Just for a little while, so that if you ever do see a ghost and they say that to you, you won’t be scared. You’ll have heard it before. Okay, Boo?”
I liked it. I’d never had a nickname before. “Okay.”
It had been a thing between the two of us, just my dad and me. After he died when I was eight years old, my mother picked up the nickname, as if by using it she could keep him a little bit alive. But I had never seen a ghost, never heard one. Until last night in the stairwell.
When I got to the Chicago River, I began to feel I was being watched. I swung my head around, but it didn’t appear as if anyone was following me. I kept walking, paying attention to everyone I passed, and it seemed as if a lot of people were looking right at me, expressions of recognition on their faces. It was hard to tell if any of the people were tailing me or if their expressions were simply the type I’d witnessed frequently over the last couple of months—looks that said, I saw her on the news, I think. Yeah, she did something wrong.
The fact was, I hadn’t done anything wrong, but after my friend died in the spring, the Chicago cops had suspected me of her murder. As a result, my image was flashed across the news stations for a week or so. Thankfully, mine was a flash-in-the-pan story, but I still got those looks with some regularity. I hoped Dez hadn’t seen the story, or hadn’t remembered it.
I dropped my gaze as I crossed the bridge in front of the Merchandise Mart, not wanting to meet anyone’s eyes for too long. I reached into my bag for my cell phone.
“Hey, Iz.” My brother answered on the first ring, which he almost always does. He’s one of the few people I know who actually answers their phone on a consistent basis.
“What are you doing? Want to take a walk in the park or something?”
“Yeah, meet me at Mom’s. I’m over here, using their printer.”
“Are they home?” “They” was my mother, Victoria McNeil Calloway, and her husband, Spence. The two were mostly joined at the hip, and mostly at home now that Spence had retired from his business—a real estate development company that provided consulting around the country.
I loved being with my mom and Spence, but I wasn’t ready to see them now. You couldn’t just waltz up to someone on a beautiful Monday afternoon and say, “Hey, any chance your husband, who died two decades ago, is alive?” I could barely ask myself that question. It was really too ridiculous. But Charlie was hard to fluster.
My mother lived on State Street in an elegant gray-stone house, a few blocks north of Division Street. Charlie was waiting for me on the steps, his tall frame leaning back casually on his elbows. His loose, curly brown hair glinted in the sun with a hint of red I’ve always told him he got from me.
He came down the steps and we hugged, then wordlessly started walking down State Street to Lincoln Park. We wandered behind the Chicago History Museum, crossing the street and passing by the entrance to the zoo.
When we reached Café Brauer, we went behind it to the small pond, where paddleboats were rented by tourists or families. Some of the boats were forest-green, others white and shaped like huge swans.
Charlie pointed. “Remember when Mom used to take us on those?”
I nodded. “Mom and I would paddle and let you think you were doing all the work.”
Charlie shook his head. “Yeah, and being the sucker I am, I believed it. Thought I was the man of the house.”
“You were the man of the house.”
We both laughed. Charlie has always possessed a lazy streak. It’s not that he’s stupid. Quite the contrary. Charlie is a reader of history, a lover of art and music. And trumping those things, Charlie is a lover of red wine and naps.
In fact, most of his friends—and sometimes even my mom and I—had taken to calling him “Sheets” because he spent much of his time in bed, a trait that had intensified after college. Charlie had graduated with a degree in English and a desire to do absolutely nothing. A friend’s father took pity on him and gave him a job driving a dump truck to and from work sites, which Charlie liked just fine because during down times, he was allowed to doze in the trailer. He might have gone on like that for decades, but one day the truck turned over on the Dan Ryan Expressway when a semi cut him off. He broke his femur, screwed up his back and ended up with a fairly hefty settlement from the semi’s insurance company. In his usual cheerful way, “Sheets” took it as a windfall and had spent the last few years sitting around, reading, getting the occasional physical-therapy session and, yes, drinking red wine.
“Let’s sit.” Charlie pointed to a bench at the side of the lagoon that was shaded by a patch of vibrantly green trees.
He took a seat, his long arm on the top of the bench. I arranged myself cross-legged and looked at him, trying to figure out how to tell Charlie what I’d heard, or thought I’d heard, last night. I stared across the pond at a bridge that spanned one edge of it, at the Hancock building and the skyline beyond that.
Ever since Charlie and I were little, I was the more serious, the one who worried enough for everyone, the one who analyzed a situation ten ways before deciding what to do, while Charlie mostly rolled along. I needed him to analyze this one with me, though. I wouldn’t tell him about working for Mayburn, but I had to tell Charlie that I thought I’d heard our father’s voice.
“So I was on Mom’s computer,” Charlie said, before I could form my words.
“Working on something for You Tube?” Charlie produced funny little movies filmed on the streets of Chicago. He shot them in black and white and set them to old-fashioned French music. It was kind of hard to explain, but they were really quite charming, and he had developed a coterie of people, mostly female college