What We've Lost Is Nothing Read online

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  Andrea from Oak Park

  Posted: Wednesday, April 7, 2004 9:56 a.m.

  Candy . . . I feel your pain. I couldn’t sleep last night either! That’s what it means to be part of a community, part of a family, part of anything that is meaningful in our lives. I wish you courage AND a restful night tonight!

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  A Townshend

  Posted: Wednesday, April 7, 2004 10:04 a.m.

  To: Jon . . . I agree. Don’t give those damn criminals a split second of your brain power. But it’s also naive to think a crime of this scale, even without serious casualties, won’t leave us just feeling a little less secure in our lives. We need to find strength in ourselves, find the tools we each need to endure these kinds of events. I recently finished self-defense training certification and though I pray I’ll never need it, it sure makes me feel secure knowing I have it. (I highly recommend it, by the way!)

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  Smith from Oak Park

  Posted: Wednesday, April 7, 11:42 a.m.

  Come on, people! All this whining! It’s the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide in case anyone would like to ponder REAL problems in the world. Teddy Kennedy called the war in Iraq “Bush’s Vietnam” (an apt description in my view). U.S. casualties in Iraq are skyrocketing, and it appears that the potential medical miracle of stem cell research is about to be halted. Let’s just try to keep a little perspective while we ponder those burglaries over on Ilios Lane.

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  [email protected]

  Posted: Wednesday, April 7, 2:13 p.m.

  To: JSAlexander

  You’re a fucking blowhard. Bet you’d feel differently if your house were on Ilios Lane. Or your family’s. Why don’t you go bury yourself in some library somewhere . . . give the rest of us a break from your bleating sophistry! (Yeah. I can read a dictionary, too.)

  Chapter 27

  2:57 p.m.

  Susan had begun running east, but then, a block from Austin, on Humphrey she subconsciously veered north. It so startled her that she’d stopped running abruptly and looked around. She was still in Oak Park. East, she thought. I meant to run east. She stood just south of Iowa Street, on a road with budding oak trees and foursquare houses painted in gentle earth tones, a couple of brick two-flats, and Craftsman bungalows. A few pieces of litter skittered across the lawn in front of her. The afternoon traffic on Austin had begun to pick up and she heard an angry driver lay on his horn. A thick layer of gray enveloped the sun, and the days weren’t yet long enough to feel that summer was truly on its way. Susan bent down to double-tie her shoelaces. Why had she suddenly veered north?

  At Iowa she decided she would take a new route back east. She turned right and came abruptly to a dead end. She backtracked on Iowa, then to Humphrey, and left through the alley that ran east. She passed over Austin Boulevard, made her way to Chicago

  Avenue and then to Central Avenue, where the tidied lawns of Oak Park gave way to glass shards and weeds blooming on the cement, boarded-up windows, sagging porch roofs made of corrugated metal, and graffiti walls. She passed vacant lots and the Austin branch of the Chicago Public Library and the YMCA and could feel her heart at work, her legs and arms warmed up and energized. She passed a rusty bike rack lying on its side and Mt. Calvary Church and the Fraternité Notre Dame Soup Kitchen, which she hadn’t known existed until now. The space looked clean, and for a fraction of a second she even pictured herself volunteering there some weekend. Maybe with Mary. The next song came on her iPod just as ­traffic was changing, so she began to run faster, turning down Race Avenue, which seemed a ridiculous street name for the west side of ­Chicago, and she almost wanted to laugh. Then abruptly Race Avenue came to a dead end at North Pine, and she turned right and came to Levin Park, abutting the el tracks. Music streamed from rusting cars parked in a baseball diamond with no bases. Black boys in baggy pants and Starter jackets leaned against a few of the cars. One ­dribbled a basketball.

  Susan felt a rock form in her stomach, her fists beginning to clench. The boys were doing their thing, minding their business. Keep moving, she told herself. Ignore them. Pretend you belong. The boys spotted her and she heard their conversation go silent.

  The hoots and hollers built up slowly at first. The boys were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Keep going, she breathed. They began to move toward her, laughing, high-fiving each other, punching each other’s fists, feeding off her nervousness.

  She remembered a story she’d read once. A young girl was running alongside the woods when two wolves emerged from the shadows. The girl ran as if their presence meant nothing, though she was scared out of her fucking mind. The wolves ran alongside her in a pack for a while, until finally one of the wolves peeled off, and then a few minutes later the other one, and the girl had come to see the ridiculousness of her fear, that nature would take care of you if you let it sometimes, the moment now seeming more of a miracle to her.

  So Susan ran, and a few of the boys, laughing and hollering, began to run alongside her, but she said nothing, just kept running, even though she was already past the distance and time she normally went, and she was breathing deep, filling her lungs, but never feeling she had quite enough air. And then she thought she felt something, the tiniest brush against her ass. A feather. A leaf. A hand.

  She nearly stopped.

  She should have stopped.

  Was it the wind? A piece of litter tossed around by a sudden gust? A shard of glass gone airborne under her feet? Was it the wing of a low-flying, lost bird? Or was it one of them? Those young boys, laughing, following? In the story, the wolves eventually grew bored and left, and she felt warm tears beginning to form in her eyes, but she would not cry. She would hold it all in, ask more of her heart than it had ever before given. The boys would go, eventually. They would tire. They would peel off, one at a time. She could outrun them. She would not respond, would not acknowledge, would not give them the satisfaction they craved.

  She ran.

  And they kept right up with her.

  Chapter 28

  3:40 p.m.

  Sofia’s report on palm trees wasn’t going well. Her parents were due home at any moment, and her cousins from Lawrence Avenue had shown up earlier than she expected. She liked her cousins, but she knew they were intimidating to look at, with their white tank tops, low-slung, ripped jeans, and folded bandannas that flopped over one eye. Imitation hoodlums. Their family carried scars of a recent past, expected more of their children because they’d come from so much less. She and her cousins hadn’t learned about the Cambodian genocide from their families or their textbooks; they carried it in their blood, from the genetic pain passed down to them, the aberration of a generation’s madness. She wore the uniform of this new world, too, just like her cousins, only hers was a short skirt and letter vest, roll-top white socks and pom-poms. She jumped, she cheered, she tumbled, while her cousins leered and loitered and lingered from gritty Chicago streets. Deep in their hearts, they—all four of them—carried the weight of history and expectation.

  Her three cousins—Sit, Lin, and Ken—rolled up in a rusting, white Pontiac, windows down, speakers pumping “We Don’t Give a Fuck” by Fabolous. In the front seat, Sit drove, with Lin beside him and Ken in the back, a ranking determined by age, and they bobbed their heads in time to the heavy beat.

  Sofia thought about the traveler’s palm, a tall, fan-shaped plant whose mythical reputation, like so many other myths, exaggerated the truth. Ravenala madagascariensis (country of origin: Madagascar; referred climate: tropical). Surprisingly, she’d learned it wasn’t technically a palm or a tree. Tall, elegant, and enough of a hard-ass to survive monsoons and hurricanes, the traveler’s palm was (like its distant cousin the banana tree, which also wasn’t a tree) an herb. To dendrophils such as Sofia who demanded exactitude: an erect herb. The mystery of it appealed to her, how it had managed to mask its tru
e identity, everyone assuming it was one thing when it had been something completely different all along.

  People believed, she typed for her research paper, that no matter which direction the palm was planted, the tree would orient itself so that its fan tips pointed east and west. It would twist and bend and do whatever it had to do to lead lost travelers back to where they’d come from, or farther toward where they wanted to go.

  The challenge of palm trees was learning their secrets. They needed little human intervention, and pruning commonly killed them. They weren’t good for climbing either, not like the whorish oak with its many branches. Sofia loved the Washingtonia, tall and erect, featured in so many Southern California television shows, but its coconuts, if dropped from high enough, became weapons.

  Sofia’s cousins always stopped by unannounced. There was never a reason for their drop-ins, not like with her American friends, who scheduled visits with aunts and uncles and cousins around holidays and birthdays, never arriving spontaneously. Something about the sophistication of having a schedule, an order to one’s calendar, appealed to Sofia. In her house, she’d often wake up on a Saturday morning and find her cousins in her living room, camped out in front of old reruns of Tom and Jerry. Sofia closed her notebook and went outside to greet them.

  Sit had jumped up onto the roof of the car and was lying back, watching the gray clouds lumber across the sky. No trees were in front of Sofia’s house. Lin and Ken leaned against the car; Ken was tossing a bottle of Coke into the air, then catching it, preparing to see how far the fizz might fly if it burst open. They snacked on gas-station cupcakes.

  “There is nothing, not one damn thing, that tops the Sno Ball,” Lin said. The most verbal of the three, he’d argue a point he didn’t believe in just to see if he could win.

  The same lone reporter Sofia had seen camped out earlier ran over to them and began to bombard her with questions.

  “Yo, you don’t want to talk to her.” Sit lifted just his head from the roof of the car to speak.

  The reporter introduced himself as Paul Patterson. He didn’t look much older than Sit.

  Sit propped himself up on his elbows. “Yo, I said, you do not want to talk to her. You hearing me?”

  “Just one question?” Paul Patterson asked. His hair was tousled, and his nose had a smattering of pimples, but Sofia thought he was just the tiniest bit cute.

  She shrugged. “I’m a minor. You don’t want to talk to me.”

  Paul Patterson wandered back to his Volvo station wagon, dejected.

  Lin turned to Sofia. “What do you think, Fee, Sno Balls or HoHos?”

  “I don’t know, Lin. Who cares?” Her parents never let her eat the kind of food available for purchase in gas stations.

  “But just say,” Ken said, as the Coke bottle landed squarely in his palm with a thwack. “One or the other.”

  “I have a lot of work to do.”

  “You always have a lot of work to do,” Lin teased, but she knew he worked just as hard. He’d won a partial merit scholarship to the University of Virginia next fall, where he was hoping to be premed. In his freshman year of high school, he’d won an essay competition through the Cambodian Cultural Organization of Chicago that earned him a free trip to Cambodia, where he met distant relatives for the first time. He was shocked that the capital still had unpaved roads.

  Of the three brothers, he was the only one fluent in Khmer. He had always been the one closest to Sofia, more like a brother than a cousin, and though he didn’t know it, she hoped to follow in his footsteps someday, premed maybe, or some sort of conservation work. She didn’t know the particulars yet, but she knew it would involve the salvation of man or nature.

  “I’ve got a paper due at the end of the week,” she said.

  Sit jumped down from the roof of the car, from his cloud meditation, and leaned down to give her a hug. “You okay, Fee? You freaked-out?”

  “I’m fine, Sit.” She pushed him away. “They only took Mom’s cell phone.”

  “It’s not the shit, Fee. I’m saying, you need our help? You need us to do anything?”

  She laughed then. “What are you going to do? Go find the burglars yourselves? Go hunt them down and, what? Make them choose between HoHos and Sno Balls?”

  The four of them turned to see Michael McPherson emerge, determined, from his front door, pursed lips, eyes like rockets. He held a cell phone in one hand, keys in the other. Paul Patterson ran toward him. When Michael saw Sofia and her cousins, he had a small hiccup in his stride. He shot them the slightest of glances and turned toward Paul Patterson. Sofia cringed, wondered if Mary had confessed to her father about their afternoon cutting school. It seemed impossible that it had only been a day earlier. When she’d left school to walk home, Mary was still there, standing in the ­parking lot, waiting for Caz. She’d rushed on the off chance Mary Elizabeth and Caz wanted to catch up with her.

  “We’re here to protect you,” Ken said to Sofia. He was still so small, about five foot two, that the thought of him protecting her made her laugh out loud. Ken was like Lin, had a mind eternally awake, questioning, reasoning, expanding, but a posture at odds with how he lived. She knew he’d gotten one B in his life, and his parents grounded him for half a summer. Two kids on bicycles rode past the entrance to Ilios Lane, slowly down Taylor Street, to look in. Sofia thought she recognized them from school. Across from the McPherson house, Arthur Gardenia emerged in dark glasses from his front door, flanked by Sofia’s neighbors above and beside her house. Sofia wondered if Mary Elizabeth and Caz had managed to miss her father; she couldn’t quite imagine how such an introduction might go, and she hoped for Mary’s sake she’d dawdled long enough on the walk home to avoid such a scene. But Mary must have timed it right, Sofia realized. Mr. McPherson would never leave his daughter at home alone with a boy who looked like Caz.

  “Man, what is that guy’s problem?” Sit said, gesturing with his head toward Michael. No one answered him. No one knew what Michael’s problem was, but it didn’t matter; Sit hadn’t expected an answer. Michael McPherson’s gaze did not move from them. Nor did Sit’s, from Michael.

  “So, Sofia, what palm tree are you writing about this time?” Lin poked her in the ribs.

  She rolled her eyes.

  She’d been the object of ridicule on more than one occasion for her interest in palm trees. “Why not a tree you can actually see around here?” Lin had once asked her. “A tree you can climb? Fuck, we’ll even build you a little tree house if you want. An oak. A chestnut. A maple.”

  But she couldn’t explain that the not seeing them was part of the appeal. It was the only plant she knew that had to kill itself to survive, that had, at its core, perfect balance, darkness and light. “Every new leaf that grows on a mature palm,” she’d once explained, “comes from the death of another.”

  Chapter 29

  3:40 p.m.

  Dara and Sary stopped at the hardware store on the way home. Dara held a crumpled list in his hand, written on the back of a receipt: planks of wood, a saw, maroon and ocher paint, a hammer, and nails. He had no idea how to go about building a spirit house. The ones from Phnom Penh were mostly made of molded cement. He knew he’d never be able to shape the curved horns of the roof, and he hoped Sary would be happy with whatever his effort eventually looked like. Sary had told him Sofia would help, would look on the computer for designs. There was nothing that couldn’t be found on the computer these days, Sary assured him.

  At Home Depot, he and Sary wandered under the fluorescent lights, not knowing where to look. The light strained his eyes, his lower back aching from standing and lifting and bending all day and from walking on hard cement floors. His feet had never gotten used to anything but flip-flops. His toes were crammed into black-soled dress shoes that tapered at the front, but only cost $5 from the Oak Park Economy Shop. Sary walked behind him a step or two, soundl
essly.

  They passed a display of outdoor furniture and barbecue grills the size of love seats, then a wall of wrapped-up hoses and garden tools. They turned down an aisle that was largely aluminum pipes with tiny drawers of unfamiliar gadgets. They wandered the aisle of sinks and toilets, on towering displays as if poised for invasion, and went through the paint displays. Finally they walked down an aisle where Dara spotted a self-assembly birdhouse. It was bare wood, intricate, with several notches and levels, and immediate relief spread over him. It was small for a spirit house, but would Sary notice? Even the biggest spirit houses in Cambodia tended not to be more than a square yard. The one they’d had in their living room in Phnom Penh had sat on the floor in the corner, just over a foot tall, with an altar just big enough to burn a few incense sticks and offer a little fruit. Dara looked at Sary and raised his eyebrows, gestured toward the birdhouse with a look he hoped said compromise.

  “No,” Sary said.

  “Be reasonable.” The kit weighed less than three pounds, and Dara held it in a blue box before her. “I can paint it so it’s beautiful. We’ll keep the front panel off so Neaktu will have a wider berth.” Dara liked the price tag, too: $16. But he didn’t mention this to Sary.

  “It’s too small.” Less than half a meter. “Neaktu would be insulted by something so small.”

  Dara put the kit back on the shelf. A woman with a ponytail and fraying, paint-splattered jeans skirted past them, narrowly missing Dara’s head with a garden hoe protruding from her shopping cart. Even she, it seemed to him, was probably more capable than he of building something.

  Sary stepped closer to him so that they were almost touching. He could see something in her eyes, a panic that he hadn’t noticed before. “We have upset the ancestors, Dara. That’s why this happened. They are angry with us for ignoring them once we came to America. So angry they have made everyone around us pay.”