downtown.
You knew it was serious because Maria Cortez, known for her bubbly on-air persona, wore a suit and a frown. She still exuded her usual nonthreatening aura that lured American and Latino viewers in equal numbers.
In her manicured hands was a blue U.S. passport. Her tomato-red nails raked the pages. The hostess who had seated them lifted the remote control and raised the volume. She swung her blue-black hair over one shoulder, standing straighter.
“I think you would have enjoyed working with Felicia,” Dave Appel said. “She’s very motherly, very kind.”
“Shh,” Carey said, rude enough for her whole table to quiet and follow her eyes to the TV, where Maria Cortez held court.
“Fifteen U.S. passports were found inside an abandoned suitcase in the Phoenix airport,” she intoned. “But Indianapolis authorities weren’t prepared to discover one belonging to an area man.”
The news anchor opened the passport cover, revealing Ben’s full name in all caps. BENJAMIN CURTIS WILLIAMSON. Carey’s pulse and adrenaline surged, and she believed for just an instant that this had all been a mix-up. There was Ben’s passport, there was his name. The document proved his life.
She’d never seen his grave or headstone, but she knew they existed, his name there likely in all-caps, too. Every reminder of Ben’s life brought a reminder of his death.
Maria Cortez was here to remind her, too. “I’m holding the passport of a man whose senseless killing seven years ago remains a mystery to this day,” she said, eyes gone sad.
Her fingers, previously covering the passport photo, moved gracefully away. The photo showed a Mexican man with a thin face and rictus grin, perched atop Ben’s name. So clearly not Ben that Carey could see little else.
But Maria Cortez wasn’t done. Illegal, she spoke, and immigration, and murder, and Guanajuato, and unsolved, and 1996. She worked one sharp red nail beneath the photo, making eye contact with the camera. A sheriff’s deputy hovered at her shoulder, ready to grab the evidence she probably shouldn’t have been holding anyway. Maria Cortez turned her shoulder slightly to block the deputy from the shot.
She gave a solemn nod, lifted the small square photograph, and beneath was a picture of Ben, with short hair and a serious expression and something of a smirk in his eyes.
Next to her in the booth, Sue, mother of three teenage boys, crossed herself. The gesture reminded Carey of Lupe, her host mother, who was in near-constant conversation with God. “That boy’s poor mother,” Sue said. Carey gave her a withering glance. What about her? Carey Halpern, whose heart was stuck in her throat like a flapping bird, whose ears thrummed with pumping blood. The low din of the restaurant workers cut through her brain static.
“Yo lo conozco,” they whispered. “Es el fotografo.” The young woman told them all to shut up, and the bartender grabbed the remote control from her and clicked. Carey envied the ease with which he shut it off.
Dave Appel telegraphed an expression of concern, which Carey ignored.
“Change it back,” Carey said, once in English. And then again, in Spanish.
Nobody did.
She veered onto the exit ramp near the auction house, the I-65 stretch named after famous son Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, the musician. All of Indianapolis was in quotes, as if it could not decide what it was or wanted to be. It was not so hard to declare her old building an office, or herself an employee. Either one was or one wasn’t. The highway, “The Babyface,” ought to have had a bit more dignity.
She was not panicking. This was not hyperventilation.
It began raining; the April sky dropped low. Bad news on a clear, sunny day makes less sense. Almost two years ago, that September morning when the planes were launched into buildings like bombs, the blue sky was spotless, stretched tall as a movie backdrop. That had been a tragedy. And this? She did not know how to categorize what she’d learned at the restaurant.
She drove down College Avenue, where two Hispanic men loaded a brown plaid couch onto a pickup truck. She knew, instinctively, that they were Mexican. Most of the city’s new immigrants were. Four more men filed out of the row house with the cushions on their heads, like a line of ants with bits of leaves.
Her goodbye to Dave Appel, Sue and Bob was awkward, flailing, un-Felicia-esque. There was a form she was supposed to sign for her last paycheck and she had not signed it, did not want it. She’d barely eaten her enchiladas. The waiter asked if something was wrong with the food. She shook her head, trying to find answers in his eyes.
Driving the wobbly ring of I-465 could waste an hour or more, but she was low on fuel. The Circle City, they called it, for the brick road around downtown’s Soldiers and Sailors Monument. She had lived here all her life, not counting her abbreviated year in Mexico, or her Chicago experiment with Nicole. Here in the Circle City: a place that repeated itself. A car scene in a low-budget film, endlessly looping the same increasingly obvious background.
Driving distracted her. The glaring neon signs and the boom box of the Dancing Man at 38th and College, the jangle of his purple velvet Crown Royal tip bag. She locked her doors.
The radio played an old song, something by The Doors. She remembered all the words. She loved The Doors, so much that she could not listen to them. She pushed a button and a new song played.
Eventually she was heading north, the car pointing home. North always led to home. The guiding light of the north star. El Norte, the film about horrifying border crossings to the U.S. She had been so sure, all those years ago, that traveling south would lead her somewhere. Her compass was off.
Home. More specifically, Brian and Gwen Halpern’s home. Carey’s father planted himself in his study each night, legal briefs cluttering the desk, “catching up.” But Carey could see the computer screen reflected in the window behind him, the colorful pixilated cards of a solitaire game. Her mother frequently was out, as if “out” were a named location.
Many nights, most nights, Carey lurked in online chat rooms. Occasionally someone would see her screen name, “La mujer,” and try to start a conversation. Usually in Spanish. Her language had rusted over, clunking through her head. She watched the scrolling text of flirtations.
Benson689: Mujer, you there?
La mujer: Yep.
Benson689: How you feeling tonight?
In a matter of minutes, maybe two back-and-forths, she’d be propositioned, asked to join a private conversation. The Internet had rooms and rooms, dark corridors she could barely picture. Sometimes she went, knowing better. Sometimes she logged off, left them hanging in the middle of their fantasies.
Benson689: I’m in Tucson. So what do you do there in Indy?
La mujer: Office temp. For now. Not very exciting. You?
Benson689: Tell you what I’d like to do. Lick you raw til you scr—
A clean break, easy as clicking a button.
She anticipated as she arrived that her parents would be enmeshed in their private, individual cocoons, and she could retreat to her bedroom with a bag of chips. She rolled into the garage’s third bay, beside her mother’s Jetta and father’s Cherokee. She entered the house and walked into a steamy gust of air: broth and wine and chicken and herbs. On the rare occasions Gwen Halpern cooked, she cooked with wine.
Gwen and Brian sat across from each other at the table, chewing silently, politely. Her father, in jeans and a sweatshirt, must have gone running before dinner. Flushed cheeks, his mussed blond hair darkened by sweat, the slight gray prominent as tinsel. Her mother still wore work clothes: a long, flowing skirt of iridescent purple, a fitted black sweater, and looping silver chains from her store, Finer Things. Despite never exercising, Gwen Halpern remained naturally slim. Carey had gained a few pounds in the years since she stopped running. She had competed for years at cross country and track, and in college she ran almost