Any Minute (29 page)

Police no longer had the bridge cordoned off. They’d removed the vehicle barricades, rolled the plastic tape into monstrous wads, and extinguished flares that had been strewn like jeweled rubies across six lanes. Only a handful of divers still scoured the depths. The remaining rescue boats skimmed the surface, calm as swans.

Slowly the area was returning to normal. Most onlookers had given up and scurried away. Gapers still slowed the pace along the road overhead, but even passersby had speeded up considerably. Tires clicked over seams in the bridge. A golden retriever came bounding down the cement steps not too far from him, plunging in full-speed and sending a duck quacking in panic. Joe watched the dog’s masterful swimming as it made its way to shore. Before he could even think about getting out of the way, the dog climbed out of the water. As golden retrievers will do, it shook all over him.

“Oh, gee. Sorry.” A woman in a jogging suit came hurrying down the steps too and grabbed the dog’s collar. “He got off his leash.”

Any other day Joe might have warded off the spray with his hands and laughed.
No problem.
But today he wasn’t capable of speaking, much less making small talk with a stranger.

“What’s all the excitement about?” she asked innocently. “Do you know what happened here?”

With a perverse sense of satisfaction, he finally spoke. “Yeah. My wife drove off the bridge. They’re still searching for her body.”

“Oh my goodness.” The woman jerked the dog’s collar so hard the dog yelped. “Oh, I’m so sorry.” She practically skittered away, but not before the dog shook on him again.

If he’d eaten the sandwich, he shouldn’t have done it. His stomach churned in complaint as he listened to radio transmissions snapping with urgent voices. He watched the car being dragged up, water rushing from its open crevices, seaweed dangling from its appendages, the buckled metal and the undercarriage leering at him like something indecent—the thought left him feeling like he’d swallowed metal shavings. Joe already knew the worst. If Sarah hadn’t been in or near the car, chances were they’d never find her.

He had to get out of here.

Joe sprang from the curbstone and began to pace, his fingers closing over the cell phone in his pocket. Mitchell had called. Joe had seen the Cattalos’ number appear onscreen. He’d checked the message, listened to it twice, the brave, quavering voice of his son asking him to call back.

He couldn’t do it. Any good father ought to phone. A good father ought to get his son on the line and offer some comfort to a small boy who had lost his mother. But what was Joe supposed to say? “Everything’s going to be all right, son”? It wouldn’t be all right. Nothing would be all right ever again.

Then from the depths of his soul came
Oh, God. Would you comfort Mitchell? Would you be with him, even though I’m not?
Joe wondered why he was praying since it didn’t seem that God was listening to him. He felt so desperate that he didn’t know anything else to do.

“Here,” Pete said. “Drink this.” He handed Joe a cup of water from the medics’ truck. Joe stared into it, skeptical, before he downed it. He winced at the last swallow, handed back the cup.

“Thanks.”

“You need coffee or something? They’ve got that too. You’re looking a little green around the gills.”

“I’m fine, Pete,” he lied.

“At least go over there and let them check you out.”

Joe’s shoes squished as he walked.

“They can give you something to help you relax, or they might need to treat you for shock—”

“Do I look like I need treatment for shock?”

Pete surveyed Joe’s appearance as Joe realized he’d left himself open for rebuttal. “Never mind. Don’t answer that question. I’m sure I look like a total wreck.”

Pete signaled for Gail to bring a blanket anyway as he fell into step beside his friend. “I’m here for you, Joe, whatever you need and whenever you need it.”

As sun spilled through the clouds in a broader circle, downtown Chicago took on a green cast, the same sort of faint glow that came with oxidation of copper. Rows upon rows of office windows glinted, reminding Joe of vacant eyes. The skyscrapers protruding overhead seemed to lean in on each other.

Pete searched the ground at his feet.

“What are you looking for?”

“A skipping rock. Anything I can throw across the water.”

There weren’t many rocks for throwing in this high-rise district of the city. The river was bound on both sides by concrete walls and tour boats at their moorings, by colonnade arches and lines of lampposts marching farther than the eye could see. Pete’s hand darted inside a concrete planter, filled with small stones and dried remains of chrysanthemums, well past their prime.

Gail appeared with the requested blanket and stretched it across Joe’s shoulders. Joe humored her. He gripped the blanket around his arms and held it there for a good ten seconds. As soon as Gail turned away, he let it fall to the ground.

Pete sidearmed the stone across the river and counted. It skipped three times before it sank.

“Is that the only one?” Joe asked.

“There’s plenty. Help yourself.” Pete pointed toward the planter.

Side by side, they flung stones. Settling into the camaraderie that, for male members of the human species, doesn’t require speech. Joe didn’t know why throwing the rocks made him feel better, but somehow it did. At least it was something to do.

Joe pitched a rock, and Pete followed its arc with his eyes.

Pete launched one, and Joe shook his head, thinking he could do better.

Joe sorted through the stones remaining in the flowerpot, searching for the perfect shape.

They kept this up for a while. Until Pete finally voiced the question Joe had also been thinking, the one Joe hadn’t been brave enough to even ask himself.

“Joe? You don’t think she would have meant to do it, do you?”

Joe’s arm froze in mid-windup. His arm lowered to his side.

“I hate to bring it up. But you told me the two of you were not getting along. I just want you to get it out in the open if you’re thinking that maybe she did it on purpose.”

Not until Pete turned did he read Joe’s face—haunted, sick, breathing fast with unspent anger. The stone fell at Joe’s feet. He locked his fists on his friend’s collar and his voice bit: “Don’t say it. Don’t say that. How dare you?”

There was a crack of static as a nearby officer saw the fight and radioed for backup. He charged in to make a tackle, the badge catching the light on his chest. With legs broad as clubs, with cuffs and nightstick swinging from his belt, he tried to grapple them apart but didn’t stand a chance. Joe, every movement magnified by frustration, ground out to Pete, “Go home. Take Gail with you and go. Who said I want you down here? Not if you say things like that. How
dare
you say that?”

Just as the fight grew intense enough for them to start throwing punches, Joe yanked Pete forward by the shirt and began sobbing against Pete’s neck with pent-up grief, his tears racked with hopelessness. And there was nothing Pete could do to take it back. Nothing.

Pete clamped his huge forearms around Joe’s midsection. He hung on to his buddy and wouldn’t let go, as if he could save Joe from drowning, as if he could keep his friend from being tugged into a bottomless place.

By noon, Nona said, coworkers from Lathrop would be bringing casseroles.

Mitchell had heard her on the phone first thing, calling the big steel-pipes company where she’d worked since before he was born, trying to explain that she had to take care of him and that’s why she wouldn’t be working today. Nona had one of those big phones for the hard of hearing—Harold said it was because he was deafer than a doorpost—and when Nona talked on that thing, it looked like she had a sea creature from
Pirates of the Caribbean
suctioned to her head.

“Jane? Isn’t your grandson school-aged? Why isn’t he in class? Is he sick today?”

“No. He isn’t sick.”

“Well then. Why?”

Nona issued a long weary sigh that sounded like air being let out of a tire. “My daughter’s been in a car accident.”

“Goodness, Jane. You should have said something at the beginning. That’s horrible. Is she hurt?”

“We believe so. She’s driven off a bridge.”

“Oh my.”

“And actually, they can’t find her…”

“Jane.”

“… but there’s no need for everyone to be worrying about me.”

“Of course we’re worrying about you, Jane. What can we do to help?”

“Casseroles would help. I don’t feel like cooking. And I know I said Mitchell isn’t sick, but actually he
is
.”

“I’ll let everyone know. Don’t worry about anything.”

“Actually, we are
all
sick. We’re sick at heart.”

“Understandable.”

“I have to go because I don’t want Mitchell to overhear this. We’re trying not to upset him.” Even though he could have overheard this particular conversation clear over in Wheeling.

Nona had never been one to offer up much in the way of entertainment or juvenile handicrafts. Which is the reason Mitchell was surprised when she pulled apples from the pantry and told him she’d come up with an idea—they would make sour-faced dolls.

“Dolls?” he asked, wrinkling his nose. Mitchell didn’t quite know what had inspired Nona’s burst of inventiveness.

“Like this.” She pushed cloves into the apple skin, one after another. By the time she finished, the apple had a face. “Next, we set them in the window and forget about them. After about three weeks, they get all shriveled up like mean people.”

With a hollow feeling in his stomach, Mitchell obeyed her. Nothing could replace his ache to speak to his dad or his distress that something had happened to his mom. And any mention of dolls made a boy Mitchell’s age want to run in the opposite direction. Still, Nona offered a diversion that included poking sharp objects into fruit and leaving it to rot. Mitchell straightened his crooked glasses and proceeded to impale the McIntosh, leaving numerous holes.

Not until he carried his creation to the sill and set it beside Nona’s did he glance out the window. Mitchell stared, pressed a hand to the glass. On the other side of the pane, there was a sight he’d thought he’d never see again, something that made him realize he wasn’t alone.

Nona didn’t miss him until the screen door slammed behind him. By the time she turned, Mitchell had already bolted outside.

When it rang, the phone’s screen lit up Joe’s pocket. He stood leaning against Patterson’s cruiser, finally letting the chaplain corral him and offer encouraging words. Beneath the blanket, which someone had managed to wrangle over his shoulders again, Joe slipped his fingers inside his jeans and played them over his vibrating mobile. Didn’t people know they shouldn’t call at a time like this?

When the shrill signal ended, Joe breathed a sigh of relief. Only to be interrupted by it starting all over again. In desperation he yanked it out and stared it down. Not until the third call did Joe recognize that, each time, it was the same number.

He didn’t even have to ask. He rocked forward, stood straight. “It’s my son,” he said. “It’s… it’s difficult. Will you stay while I talk to him?”

“I’m right here.”

Joe triggered the button. “Mitchell. Hello, son. It’s good to—”