All Our Names (26 page)

He began to dig with his other foot. I let him do so for several minutes before interrupting to ask him the same question again: “What happened?” Or maybe the second time I said, “Tell me what happened.” Either way, it wasn’t the right question. The “what” was obvious. What I didn’t know was what Isaac had done.

He kicked a mound of dirt into my hair without looking up at me. I took a few steps back, but that still didn’t feel far enough, so I walked around his left side until I was standing several feet directly behind him. I tried again.

“Did you kill anyone?” I asked him.

I watched his right leg take a long swing back and then abruptly stop just before it hit the ground.

“That’s a stupid question,” he said. “If you want to know, you should ask how many.”

“How many?”

“No. ‘How many people did you kill?’ ”

“How many people did you kill?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “More than I can count. Too many.”

I waited for him to turn around, but he didn’t. He kept his gaze firmly fixed on the tree in front of him as he made a few more stabs into the ground.

“Ask me how we killed them,” he said.

“How did you kill them?”

“We didn’t shoot them.”

“You cut them.”

“Yes. We beat them. We burned them. We had no bullets left. Ask me if we buried them.”

“Did you bury them?”

“No. We left them for the vultures and dogs. And then we ran back here so we wouldn’t have to look at what we had done.”

His right foot was buried past his ankle. I understood now why he was doing that.

“How deep is this hole?” he asked me.

“Not very deep,” I said.

He pulled his foot out of the ground and shook the dirt from his shoes.

“Good,” he said. “It’s already more than they deserve.”

We set our sights on the Hancock Center and aimed straight for it. Isaac watched the city through my window, while I found it hard not to stare at the lake out of his. This was still the Midwest, but it didn’t have the hard, firm earth that was supposed to come with it. The city ended abruptly, rather than trailing off into open fields like Laurel. This bothered me. I knew Isaac didn’t see it that way, so I kept silent as we traced our way along the shoreline, past the center of the city, and around a tight bend. I followed the heaviest traffic onto Michigan Avenue, where we met the Hancock Center head-on. Isaac leaned against the dashboard to get a better look. It was all wonderful to him. He saw the great possibilities buildings like that promised, especially to men like him, who had no idea what it meant to scale them.

We parked three blocks away from the tower he admired so much. Once we were out of the car, I told him to lead the way.

“This is your parade,” I said. He smiled. He had no idea what that meant. “It’s my turn to follow you now,” I explained.

Neither of us knew where we were. We had only the Hancock to orient us, and so of course Isaac retraced our route back to it. “I
want to touch it,” he said, as if this was a confession of a desire he was embarrassed about. I imagined a surface slick and oily against my hand, one that would linger for a long time.

“Then let’s touch it,” I said.

The distance on foot was greater than I thought. The blocks were long. The sidewalks were more like roads, wide and crowded; it felt dangerous to walk down them. While Isaac looked up, I watched the faces that passed us. We weren’t holding hands, but we were standing close to each other. When Isaac caught something that fascinated him, he turned to me so I could share it with him. There were gargoyles, moldings, spires, and strange etchings on the sides of buildings, all of which could be seen if you walked with your head turned up. It wasn’t just buildings, though. There was an antique red roadster parked across the street that he wanted me to see, and a fountain; every beggar we passed demanded his attention, but not his curiosity. I looked wherever he told me and just as quickly looked to see the reaction of whoever was near us. As far as I could tell, no one had noticed us. I thought this was what it felt like to be invisible, but when I subtracted Isaac I realized that, until he came along, this was how I had always felt. Not invisible, but a natural part of the background, entitled to all the privileges that came with ownership.

We stopped in front of the Hancock. Isaac wanted to see it from multiple angles, so we crossed the street, moved to various corners, and craned our necks to stare up the shiny black exterior.

“It is amazing,” he said.

The awe was genuine. I wanted to know how he sustained it. We stood near the main entrance and rubbed our hands against the exterior. It was warm, polished; I wanted to say it was softer than I expected.

“Should we go inside?”

He shook his head.

“We can’t appreciate it from in there,” he said.

Isaac took my hand.

“Let’s walk,” he said.

We hesitated, looking at our hands, not each other, then gathered our strength and moved forward. We walked. It didn’t feel like a victory over anything, but I was proud and, to an equal degree, scared. After walking one block like that, I was grateful for the feeling of his hand in mine, and even for the anxiety that came with it. After two more blocks, the gratitude had turned to sorrow that we hadn’t had this sooner. All this time, I thought, we’ve been at best only half of what was possible.

I wished my mother could have seen us. I wished David were watching from around the corner.

“Are you okay?”

I wasn’t crying, but the view ahead was blurred.

“I’m great. Wonderful,” I said.

I squeezed his hand hard. He locked his fingers around mine. As long as we continued walking, I was certain that nothing could break us.

The light ahead turned red just as we reached the intersection. We slowed, and as soon as we came to a stop, a crowd formed around us. We were at the front of the pack, which was better than being in the middle, but still we were exposed. I noticed right away that the man next to Isaac and the woman standing closest to me were staring at us, and of course they weren’t alone. I kept my head up without looking at anyone long enough to read their expressions. I knew what was there—anger, pity, contempt, maybe even envy—but I was convinced that there must have also been a touch of wonder, maybe even awe at the sight of us.

When the light turned green, Isaac held me back so we were the last to cross.

“Where should we go next?” he asked me.

It was obvious. He had his tower; I had my lake. I pointed straight ahead to it. The city masked its size with trees, and an expressway and more buildings, so that from where we stood the lake looked kiddie-sized in comparison with what we had seen in the car.

“I should tell you now, I don’t know how to swim,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” I told him, “part of my job is to save you from drowning.”

We followed a party of young couples to the end of Michigan Avenue. They were carrying blankets and a picnic basket, and were dressed in sandals, shorts, and lightly patterned summer dresses.

“They’re just like us,” I said, “except we’re better dressed.”

I said it out loud, but I wasn’t speaking to Isaac. I was testing out certain truths and seeing how they held up when they were no longer private.

We descended into the foot tunnel that led underneath Lakeshore Drive and onto the waterfront. There must have been at least three dozen of us in the tunnel—a two-way parade, with the overwhelming majority heading away from the lake. One of the pastel-clad men in front of us roared to hear his echo, and, for no reason other than that we could, we all began to join him, his friends first, until everyone in front of me and behind me, including Isaac, was roaring as we walked. We turned toward each other and roared. We looked up to the ceiling and roared at the cars passing over us. We roared at the people walking back to the city, and they roared back; then, as we neared the end of the tunnel, I roared at the distance opening up before me, at the trees, and
then at the beach and lake. I could hear my voice—distinct and, according to Isaac, much more ferocious than all the rest.

“Another thing I love about you,” he said once we were out, “your voice.”

We walked down the tree-lined path that curved back toward the road before abruptly turning straight to the beach and lake. I had seen the beach from the car, but this was going to be the first time I actually stepped foot on one, and I wanted to make the most of the seconds leading up to it. When the view cleared and the sidewalk ended in a burst of sand, I realized I was wrong to have been so anxious in the car. There was nothing to be afraid of. The city simply paused at the water’s edge. It ran alongside the lake for many more miles.

I tried to find a way to say that to Isaac, stopping him just before we reached the sand.

“It doesn’t end as abruptly as I thought,” I said.

I pointed north, to the buildings that continued along the shore. Isaac humored me. He took in the view and pretended that we were talking about architecture.

“Yes,” he said. “The city is much larger than it appears.”

He put his arm around me and tried to lead me onto the sand.

“I read somewhere it’s bad luck to walk on a beach with your shoes on.”

I made that up, but I had every right to: the common sayings and kitchen wisdom I had grown up with weren’t enough. We sat down and pulled off our shoes and socks and buried our feet in the sand, which was harder and colder than I had expected.

“It’s nothing like the Hancock,” I said.

I pointed to the ground so he would know what I was talking about.

I wanted to say something about finding the opposite of what you expected.

“You mean the sand?”

“I thought it would be soft, and gold, maybe white. I thought you could sleep on it, but you can’t. It’s too hard. It’s not the right color.”

“Are you disappointed?”

“No. More like deceived.”

It was a poor choice of words, given our history.

“I am sorry to hear you say that.”

“Not all deceptions are bad,” I added.

He gave a weak half-smile and turned his attention to the sand. He scooped up a handful and rolled it around on his palm.

“What was in your suitcase?” he asked me.

I remembered that he had carried it to the car and must have known as soon as he lifted it that it was almost empty. It was time now to explain why I wanted us to come here.

“You know why I wanted to come to Chicago with you?”

“I can guess.”

“I thought I had a plan. I thought if I was the one who took you away from Laurel you would see there was no point in going back. You’d want to stay here, and I would help you do that.”

“And then what?”

“And then I would promise to come back and visit, but eventually you wouldn’t need me to. You’d make a life on your own here, which was what I was supposed to help you do in the first place.”

“You did more than that.”

“I don’t know if that’s true. There’s only so much room in a town like ours. Helping you leave seemed better than watching us fall apart inside it.”

“I would not let that happen.”

“But maybe I would. Or maybe I’m afraid there is nothing we could do to stop it.”

He placed his foot over mine and pressed them both into the sand.

“I am afraid for us all the time,” he said. “I see the men at the other end of the beach and I worry that soon they will start to walk toward us. I worry—when you leave my house, when you come to it—that someone you know will see you. Until very recently, I worried about what you thought when you woke up. I worried about what I would think when you were asleep. I imagine things much worse than I would want to live with. That is why I packed everything, like you told me to.”

“Because you wanted to leave.”

“No. Not because I wanted to. When Henry taught me how to drive, he said it was so I could leave Laurel when I was ready to. On the day my visa expired, he said, I could drive myself to the airport, park the car, and disappear, or I could keep the car for as long as I needed, and leave when I was ready. ‘I don’t want you to feel trapped there,’ he said. ‘That might be just as bad as anything you’ve gone through.’ That was when I told him I had met you. He was careful. All he said was to be honest with you, and to keep myself grounded, which I didn’t understand. I thought he meant I should not leave the country with you, and so I promised him I would stay grounded. I thought, ‘Why would we leave America when there is so much to see here?’ which was when I decided to buy you those souvenirs. I showed them to Henry before I mailed them. He said, ‘God bless you if you make it to one of those places.’

“I understood then what he meant by grounded. I sent the package anyway. I hoped to tell him someday he was wrong—that we had made it further than he expected—but it’s okay if that never happens. We are here. We have gone far.”

“That’s what I tell my clients in counseling. I tell them, as long
as they’ve done the best they can, they have nothing to apologize for. I say that when they feel guilty or they’re grieving.”

“You don’t have to feel either.”

“Right now I feel both.”

Isaac stood. He took my hands and pulled me up.

“We haven’t walked on the beach yet,” he said. “We came this far. It would be a shame not to.”

The view from the beach was a smaller deception. When I imagined my first walk on one, I pictured a sun setting in the water, but it was the opposite. The sun had already disappeared directly behind us, and we were left with its remains—purple clouds and streaks of orphaned light that did nothing for the water, which looked cold and gray, but made the sky a beautiful place to want to linger in.

We walked to the edge of the sand. There was a soft, shy quality in the way the water barely touched the shore before retreating.

“Is this a better view for you?”

“This is closer to home,” I said. “I’m used to flat. I like to know what’s in front of me.”

Isaac laughed, a genuine, full-bodied one that had him throwing his head back.

“You speak in circles,” he said. It was my turn now to be confused. I assumed that was part of the pleasure for him.