LITMIR.BIZ

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      But he dropped the rationalizations quickly. He had been telling himself these things for years, especially about this killing, planned meticulously. And still he had done nothing to change it.

      He kept walking. In his mind, his feet sounded like drums on the hard floor—bang, bang, bang—heralding something momentous, something terrible.

      He had wanted people killed before this, had told others to kill. But he had never been there for the act.

      Now, back in the present, that house a mere memory, he shook his head, tried to shake away the memories. It did no good for him to remember, no good at all. He told himself this all the time, and yet he kept slipping into these thoughts of the past. They sucked him in whole, so that he was entirely removed from today.

      He sat up straighter in his chair now and shook his head again. In the back of his brain he heard a low bang, bang, bang—the drums still in the distance.

      “Go away,” he said softly.

      He had been trying to make retributions. But it hadn’t made a difference. He kept hearing the sounds, kept trying to wrench himself from that memory. But there was one thing in particular that wouldn’t leave him—the words the man had said in the minutes before he died. The feel of those words hitting his ear as he bent over him.

      He sat even straighter now. Once again, he shook his head, trying to jar loose the recollection, wondering if the man had known his utterances would stick with him all these years. Was that what he intended? Or were they just more lies falling from the lips of someone who had already caused so much pain?

      He tried to believe the latter. He had gone about his business after that day, although he became curious as to whether people saw it in him, whether they saw what he had done. All those years, he walked the streets of Chicago, a city as human as those living inside its borders, and he had wondered.

      13

       W hen my mother opened her front door, I saw again the change in her.

      To say our family had gone through a lot in the past year was an understatement. My mom’s first husband—my father, long-presumed dead—had returned to this world and to our city. I had expected this to flatten my mother, as it surely would have in the past. But instead, she was stronger, more self-assured, her eyes more vivid than I had seen since I was eight years old.

      But as I stood on her stoop with Theo, I was struck by a void—an empty space of words. I didn’t know what to say to her these days. This woman, so alive, didn’t seem to be the mom I had always known. So I stepped up and hugged her, wordless. Then I waved a hand behind me and introduced Theo, reminding her she’d met him briefly a few months ago, and she led us through the big front door and into the cool of her home.

      The living room was a large space with ivory couches, ivory walls and gentle golden lighting. Soft Oriental rugs guarded over wide-planked, honey-colored wood floors, glossed to a high sheen. By this time of the night, my mother and anyone with her would usually be at the back of the house. The living room faced east and when it got dark in the afternoons, it increased my mother’s “melancholy,” as I usually called it in my head. But today, the room’s lighting blazed brighter. Charlie, my younger brother by a few years, and Spence, my mother’s husband, sat at a grouping of couches and chairs around a fireplace tiled in white marble. Inside the fireplace, my mother had placed a flickering candelabra.

      I blinked a few times, unused to the sight. I glanced at Charlie, with his brown curly hair that had tinges of red. He gave me a shrug, as if to say, Don’t ask me.

      Spence was a pleasant-looking man with brown hair now streaked with white. It fell longer on the sides to compensate for the balding top. He had on a blue button-down shirt rolled up at the sleeves and sharply pressed khakis.

      “Hello, darling girl,” he said, standing and giving me a firm embrace. He pulled back and looked at me with his powder-blue eyes, his most striking feature. He appraised my face, and then moved to Theo. “Spencer Calloway,” he said, shaking Theo’s hand. “What can I find you to drink, son?”

      Theo glanced at the coffee table where there was a plethora of food—artisanal cheeses surrounded by grapes and water crackers, prosciutto and paper-thin slices of melon, little croquettes that I knew likely held chicken and sun-dried tomatoes. Next to the food was my mom’s glass of white wine, my brother’s glass of red wine and a cocktail glass with clear liquid and a large chunk of lime in it.

      “What are you having?” Theo asked Spence.

      “Helmsley gin with a splash of tonic.”

      “I’ll join you in that.”

      I smiled, pleased. The truth was, I’d never known Theo to drink gin, but I loved that he was making an effort with my family. I squeezed his hand. When I had dated Sam he’d never joined Spence in a cocktail, and this fact, although meaningless, made me beam at Theo more.

      “Good man!” Spence pounded Theo on the back and went toward the kitchen, calling over his shoulder, “Isabel, I’ll get you a glass of wine.”

      Theo looked at my brother, who had stepped up to us. “Good to see you,” Theo said.

      “Yeah, hey,” Charlie said pleasantly. They shook hands and started chatting about Poi Dog Pondering, a local band we’d seen a few months ago when Charlie and Theo first met. Charlie saw live music frequently, and he started rattling off other band names, then Theo told him about a bunch of British bands he followed.

      Soon, Spence was back with our drinks, and we were all seated around the fireplace without even one second of that awkward, So, Theo, tell us what you do for a living kind of conversation. Instead, it flowed from one thing to another, from Theo’s company to Charlie’s job as a radio producer—after years of living happily off a worker’s comp settlement—to the trial with Maggie. At some point, my mom asked Theo where he was from.

      “We moved around a lot for my dad’s work,” he answered. “California, Oklahoma, New York. Then we moved to Chicago when I was in high school.”

      “Brothers and sister?” my mom asked.

      “Just me.”

      “And if I could ask, Theo, how old are you?”

      I shot my mom a glance. She already knew the answer to that question.

      “Twenty-two,” Theo said unapologetically.

      I’d wondered if my mother would think Theo too young for my thirty years. Sam had been a perfect age, she’d told me once while we were engaged. But now she only said, “So young to own a business.”

      “Yeah, I went to Stanford for a year,” Theo said. “I met my partner, Eric, who was a senior, and we started working on this software. By the end of that year, we were selling it. My dad helped us form the company, and we’ve been growing strong ever since.”

      “Where exactly is your office, son?” Spence asked, loving anything that had to do with commercial real estate. That drew Theo and Spence into a new conversation.

      We listened for a while, then my mother stood and gestured at me to follow her to the kitchen.

      When we were there, she pulled me toward a counter and put her hand on my shoulder. Her blue eyes, more fair than Spence’s, were clear and striking. “I like him,” she said.

      “You do? I’m glad.”

      She nodded. “For many reasons. And my God, he is gorgeous.”

      My mother rarely, if ever, commented on men’s looks, but I wasn’t surprised because nearly everyone mentioned Theo’s. When I’d introduced Theo to my former assistant, Q, short for Quentin, he’d commented—crudely, yes, but accurately—that every person in the room, male or female, gay or straight, young or old, wanted to fuck him. Everyone lit up for Theo, got a little red in the face, a little flustered. And the adoration only grew when people realized that he didn’t notice those reactions.

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