CHAPTER THREE

“HOW DO YOU do it?” I asked Ethan as we sat on the rickety sidewalk bench just outside of Abigail’s apartment complex. “How do you ever get used to people like her?”

“You never fully do,” Ethan said, interlocking his fingers as he stared down at the concrete. “You just have to find ways to separate yourself from them.”

I glanced across the street at the men and women navigating the walkways. Coming from work. Running late for work. Taking their children to the park, or picking them up from school. Living perfectly normal days, each of them. Any one of them could be next.

“Best not to dwell on it too much,” Ethan continued, leaning back in his seat to face the opposite sidewalk. I wondered if we were thinking the same thing.

I pulled down at the tail of my sundress as I scooched into the fold of the bench, eyeing each passerby and wondering what might kill each of them. I’d given at least four or five the bubonic plague before I realized what it was I was doing.

“So,” I started, deciding it best to strike up conversation with Ethan before I stuck the passing taxi driver with hypothetical diabetes. “How long have you—uh—been in the business?”

Ethan smiled, still focused on the sidewalk across the street.

“Long enough,” he said. Whatever the hell that meant.

“Ah.”

Ethan leaned forward, locking his wrinkled fingers again as bench creaked under his weight. “I was your age when I started. I’d just had my eighteenth birthday, and my father—he, um—he was in an accident.”

He paused, shuffling his fingers around a bit and lowering his head. I opened my mouth to say something, but Ethan pressed on.

“He was a construction worker on a project downtown. The Crain Communications building, if you know it. The big diamond-shaped one.”

I did know it. There was no way to miss it, if you lived in Chicago. To the conservative mind, it may very well look like a diamond. But to the rest of us, it was the Vagina Building, because, well—it looked like a vagina. Vertical slit and all. I always imagined the design was purposeful—a progressive alternative to an otherwise architecturally dick-riddled city. Or maybe it was just a fucking diamond. Were it any other conversation, I might have made an effort to find Ethan’s position on the matter. But while my subconscious had a knack for digging up all of the inappropriate shit from the back of my brain and throwing it up on display for the rest of my mind…I could read a room.

“Yea, I know it.”

Ethan nodded. “He was walking through some of the framework without a hardhat. And something fell. The funeral was a few days later.”

Ethan looked up again, furrowing his graying brow. “A man was there. A dark man. And the only dry eye in the room.”

“My mom died when I was little,” I said after a lengthy bout of silence. “I barely remember her. And my dad…I love him, but…he’s not all there. You know, up here.”

I tapped the side of my head with my finger.

“I suppose he wouldn’t be,” Ethan said.

“I mean, he’s not like…I wouldn’t send him to the funny farm or anything. He just kinda lives in his own world. I guess I do too, sometimes.”

I stared back to the people crossing the sidewalk, when the scent of Axe body spray overpowered the subtle aroma of cabbage and wet socks surrounding the bench. I flinched backward as a bicyclist sped past the two of us, nearly clipping the side of my face with his handlebar as the spokes of his tires clicked by. Unsurprisingly, Ethan didn’t move.

“Watch it, asswipe!” I yelled as he peddled away. “Can he see us? Did he see me?”

“Who knows,” Ethan laughed. “It’s hard to tell sometimes.”

“How do you not know?”

“There are more important things to worry about.”

Ethan checked his watch again. “And speaking of which…we’re up.”

He jumped to his feet and held out a hand for me to take. I checked my phone. Four twelve. Dad would be home soon. I sighed, grabbing Ethan’s hand, which swallowed my own. He lifted me to my feet, and I was suddenly standing in a narrow alleyway, in between two rusted rain gutters and a stammering window unit. I was all alone, the bottoms of my shoes soaking in a puddle of water which rippled with the passing wind. The adjacent buildings blocked most of the sun, and a light chill ran down my back.

“Ethan?” I called out, stepping across the cracked concrete, which looked a bit like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. Careful not to catch the back of my shoes in the broken drainage grate, I approached the obligatory alley dumpster, which echoed with the scurries of whatever lay trapped inside.

“Hello?” I said to the dumpster, pressing an ear lightly against the aluminum. Nothing.

I lifted the plastic lid and spoke into the dumpster, like an idiot. “Hello?”

And that’s when I heard the gunshot.