Playing Dead (29 page)

I sat down at my laptop again and randomly typed “Gisella Russo” into a Google search. I found a thirty-year-old obituary notice within five minutes. Gisella was survived by her mother and two younger sisters. In lieu of flowers, the family had requested donations be made to a local Catholic church’s antidrug campaign. Rosalina’s friend had lived only one more year after Adriana’s kidnapping.

Still restless, I Googled “Ellis Island.” I clicked on the nonprofit website, created a password and username, and started a search for a passenger named Ingrid Margaret Ankrim, the great-grandmother of my mother’s legend. No matches. What a surprise.

On a whim, I typed in Ingrid Margaret Roth, the surname Jack dropped in the hotel room. To my surprise, I got a hit. I clicked on the manifest. There she was. Ingrid Roth, sixteen, left the German port of Bremen in 1892.

Something that was true.

I was overcome with a profound longing to talk to Sadie and Maddie, to connect with the people I loved. I still hadn’t heard from them, which worried me.

I glanced at my watch again. Two and a half hours to go. It seemed wrong to break my promise to Hudson. But I was packed. Agitated.

I needed to
do
something.

It didn’t take long to find the phone number the old-fashioned way, through telephone information.

Or to convince him to meet me.

He made a stark and poignant figure at the top of the hill, bent like a tree seedling fighting the wind. I spotted him immediately as the cabbie rounded the corner, eliminating the need for the cemetery map I picked up at the gate. The old man was my guidepost.

I slid up in the backseat and pointed. “Stop as close as you can to that gentleman.”

The cabbie pulled over next to a stone mausoleum with a rusty lock and a crumbling shepherd guarding the door to a family’s forgotten bones.

The old man was several plots away. He didn’t turn around, now kneeling and pulling away weeds creeping like spiders over a grave.

The sky seemed bigger here. The cemetery, dotted with trees and thousands of headstones, stretched out in all directions. Clouds swirled like black smoke in the eastern sky, and the cabbie told me to hurry, that the radio was predicting a nasty surprise storm.

I stepped awkwardly over the gravestones, thinking what a perfect target I’d make for a sniper, briefly but seriously considering throwing open my arms and screaming,
Shoot me now!

Get it the hell over with.

Instead, I slowed down, a perfectly respectful mourner carrying a semi-tasteful plastic wreath of white orchids that I’d picked up at one of the flower shops ubiquitous around Chicago cemeteries.

The wreath seemed silly now, fake in every possible way.

The saleswoman instantly made me as a novice, presenting me with a laminated card of “10 Flower Rules You Must Follow for Chicago Cemeteries” and leading me to a greenhouse of artificial
plants and buckets of tiny plastic Virgin Marys and Josephs and angels perched on top of sticks. I looked obediently through the buckets, thinking the plastic Christian icons were probably mass-produced in China by Buddha worshippers.

I skipped the Virgin Marys, who gazed at me reprovingly, and picked a gold plastic angel, wondering how many thousands of these were not decomposing in the ground at local cemeteries.

Now I wish I’d stuck to my original thought of a single rose, cliché as it would be, Chicago cemetery rules about live flowers be damned. My foot sank on top of a soft, grassy space where a head rested ten feet under. I shivered and silently apologized to Peter Theodore Ostrowski, who’d been camped out there since 1912.

By the time my shadow fell over her grave, the old man had yanked most of the grass and clover away from the tiny square marker lying flat in the ground.

“She loved to climb trees,” Susie’s father said. He was still kneeling, facing away as if he couldn’t bear to look at me. “If you didn’t watch, she’d go all the way to the top of the old oak in our backyard. I was supposed to watch. But I went inside, just for a second.”

Just for a second
.

I’d once counseled a grieving young girl whose one-year-old sister drowned at a backyard pool party while the adults stood around talking and drinking wine.

Six months ago, a Cheyenne first-grader chased his soccer ball into the path of a UPS truck when his mother stepped inside to
get her ringing cell phone off the front hall table. He insisted we lift him out of his wheelchair onto a horse his first day at the ranch.

Just for a second
, his mother told me, and now he’ll wear a prosthetic leg forever.

“She stayed in a coma for three months,” Mr. Adams said. “I think that made it worse. To have hope.”

He made the sign of the cross and then struggled to pull himself up with his cane. My arms instinctively reached out to help. Abruptly, I remembered he was only in his sixties. Not that old. Grief had chiseled away at him.

I don’t know who moved first.

We stood there, two strangers clasped in a tight embrace on a lonely hill, until a light rain began to fall.

I
promised the cabbie an extra fifty dollars to stop honking and for the use of a green-striped golf umbrella in his trunk that some passenger had left behind.

The rain pelted down insistently, but rather than tell our stories while an impatient cabdriver eavesdropped, Albert Adams and I walked toward a wrought-iron bench a few feet from his daughter’s grave.

It hadn’t been hard to convince him to show up, even though I was a stranger’s voice on the phone with an implausible story. I had given him a small truth and a small lie, saying that I’d recently found out that my Social Security number matched Susie’s in some kind of government screwup. I said I wondered if I’d been adopted and hoped he could help me find some answers.

He didn’t seem surprised. He said he’d been meaning to get up to the cemetery. He’d be happy to meet if he could be home by five for dinner with one of his daughters.

“I haven’t been here in years,” he confessed, wiping off the bench for me with a handkerchief. “It’s different. But just as painful. I think this will be my last trip.”

I sat down beside him, the wet wind tossing the pieces of hair
coming loose around my face, briefly grateful that I’d taken the time to twist my hair into a long braid and wrap it around my head. Hudson had always said that this prairie-girl look of mine reminded him of his Catholic middle-school days. In other words, kind of hot.

Susie’s father introduced himself with a firm grip of bony hand and paper-thin skin. “Please call me Al,” he said.

He insisted on putting his old brown sweater around my bare shoulders, holding the umbrella over our heads.

“I’ve been waiting for this phone call for years,” he said.

“You knew about me?”

“I knew someone in witness protection had been given Susie’s number. But I always wanted confirmation, with my own eyes, that Susie’s life had gone on in someone else.”

“Well, here I am,” I said awkwardly. I didn’t pretend surprise when he mentioned witness protection and he didn’t seem to notice.

“Yes, here you are.” Al’s eyes were shining. “I like to think I can see people’s souls through their eyes. You’ve got a good one.”

The rain let up and he rested the umbrella on the ground. He opened up his wallet, bulging with bright-eyed school pictures of his thirteen grandchildren, so I could admire them. His faux Hush Puppies, probably from Walmart and not in the greatest shape to begin with, were soaked. He’d have to hurry, he said. He didn’t want to miss the 4:13 bus at Addison and Narragansett.

He appeared to be shrinking before my eyes. The rain was spitting again, and I didn’t want him to catch pneumonia. I insisted on taking a turn with the umbrella, worried that I’d waited too late for my questions.

Then the girl with the good soul pushed for just a little more.

“Before you go, can you tell me if you know … why I had to disappear?”

Al closed his eyes, transporting himself back to the freezing January day that he buried his daughter.

A man showed up a couple of hours after Susie’s funeral, he said. Slipping in among the neighbors loading up the kitchen table with chicken casseroles and red velvet cakes.

“He was a big man. Powerful-looking. He didn’t appear comfortable in his suit. I guess he wore it out of respect for Susie. I went over to introduce myself, to thank him for coming. I thought he was one of my wife’s co-workers.”

“But he wasn’t.”

“He asked if there was somewhere we could speak privately. It was a small house. We’ve built on since. Anyway, we put on our coats and stood on the back porch and he offered me a smoke. He told me he was working in witness protection. He said he was very sorry about Susie and the timing of all of this but that the government needed to take her Social Security number. It was going to be used for another child. His team didn’t want to go through formal government channels for a clean number. He didn’t say it, but I knew it had to be Mafia. He seemed real worried that government clerks could be bribed.”

The thunder was like bass rumbling through a loudspeaker, making it hard to hear. The rain shot needles at us sideways. I tilted the umbrella for more protection and leaned in.

“… he told me he was trying to save a little baby who wasn’t even born yet. That only a handful of people knew about you. It felt desperate to me, and also believable. You couldn’t pick up the paper back then without reading about a politician who’d been bribed or an unidentified body in the water. I’ll never forget Daniel Seifert, that fiberglass dealer in Bensenville ready to testify
against the mob. They shot him right in front of his wife and kid. They didn’t get Joey the Clown for it until five years ago. Remember that trial?”

I nodded, but he didn’t seem to notice.

His face turned a shade paler. The small voice in my head urged me to stop, for decency’s sake, to let him go on to a cozy dinner with his daughter.

“I asked him, ‘Why did you come to me?’ He said that I was the right person at the right time. He said I was an honorable man. He knew I was a Vietnam vet.”

He cleared his throat. “I wanted to believe him. As angry as I was at his intrusion … our Susie was barely in the ground … I needed to do something to redeem myself. I had just killed my daughter.”

“You can’t blame yourself …” I began, a meaningless platitude, one I hardly ever used with patients.

But Mr. Adams was lost in his past, not even hearing.

“I didn’t want to hand over my daughter’s life but he was a hammer going at me. I had the feeling it was going to happen no matter what and if I didn’t cooperate I’d put everyone in more danger, including my wife.”

“So you agreed?”

“I would be lying if I didn’t say he clinched it when he held out an envelope with ten thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills. He knew we were struggling. I’d gotten laid off from my job. My wife was six months pregnant. She started bleeding three days after Susie died. So much stress. The doctor told her to quit work or she could lose this baby, too.”

His daughter. Maybe the one who was making him supper. The one who would hang his wet clothes to dry when he got there, who would chide him for sitting in the cemetery in the rain with a strange woman. But, then, he would probably not tell her that part.

“He said we’d only get the money if we gave our complete cooperation. We needed to turn over a few things. He told me to talk to my wife. That night,
she’s
the one who convinced
me
. It was the lowest point in our marriage. We were fighting over whether we could afford four extra words on Susie’s gravestone. She told me, ‘We have to move on for this baby,’ and put my hand on her belly. Mary Elizabeth kicked. I’ll never forget that moment.”

“So the man came again? With the money?”

“Two days later. I called the number on his card. He showed up in an hour and we exchanged envelopes. I gave him everything he wanted. Susie’s birth certificate, Social Security card, anything official with her name on it. For the next fifteen years, a certified letter came to the house on the day she died with more cash. At least five thousand, sometimes more. No note. No explanation. More money wasn’t part of the deal. But we knew it was from him.”