Snapshots flew by-a pretty girl in a bright pink sports bra bounced by an emaciated homeless man wearing three baseball caps and hoisting a bulging plastic bag. A cyclist knelt with a bloody knee to examine a flat tire on the concrete bike trail. A mother shouted into the wind as her toddler unexpectedly ran toward the waves. Lives that would never touch mine again.
Lake Shore Drive turned into Sheridan Road, connecting the city’s busy ant farm with a life of stratospheric privilege. We passed lush, rolling lawns, every blade of grass the same color and height, as if a band of Oompa Loompas used a paintbrush and manicure scissors each morning to maintain perfection. And the houses-if they could be called that-stood against the clouds as stunning specimens of architecture: Spanish-style villas, colonials, and modern geometric shapes that took cues from Frank Lloyd Wright, a hometown boy.
The cabbie turned off Sheridan Road and wound his way around, toward the lake, eventually pulling up to a massive black iron gate. He pressed the speaker button.
“What’s your name?” he asked over his shoulder.
“Tommie. Just say Tommie.”
“You don’t look like a Tommy,” he said, turning around. “You sure?”
“Just say it, please.”
He pressed the button again impatiently. “I got Tommy here. You going to let me in?”
“We’d prefer that you drop off Miss McCloud at the gate. She can walk up.”
The voice was male and stern, like a former military man. Or a Texas football coach. The cabbie shrugged and asked me for eighty dollars. Not knowing whether I was being ripped off, I gave him five crisp twenties and told him to keep the change. Then I hesitated, holding out a bill. “There’s another hundred if you wait. And another hundred when you deliver me to the hotel. It will be at least an hour.”
He weighed the possibility, running a mental cash register.
“OK.” He shrugged. “I’ll circle. But I leave after an hour and fifteen minutes.”
He left me standing alone in front of the monstrous twelve-foot-tall concrete wall that curved like a snake around a large property, its look somewhat softened by branches with tiny pink flowers that dripped over the side.
A security camera on top of the wall adjusted robot arms to direct its lens on me. I considered my tangled hair, perspiring face, green dress clinging in places it shouldn’t be clinging for tea of any kind with an elderly socialite. Nervously, I rubbed the key around my neck, which the hospital wouldn’t let Mama wear when I tried to give it back. I glanced right and then left. No sign anywhere of thugs in cowboy hats.
A small metal door to the left of the main gate, practically hidden by foliage, swung open because someone, somewhere, punched a button. I walked cautiously through, into the land of Rosalina’s paranoia, my body on high alert. I found myself in a narrow, arched tunnel of vines. The end was not in sight. I jumped as the gate snapped shut behind me.
I walked steadily for about three minutes as the path inclined toward what I assumed was Rosalina’s house. Five times I considered turning around. Twice, the heel of my brand-new metallic copper sandals got caught in the dirt until I finally yanked them off and trod onward barefoot.
Occasionally, the vines parted a little above me to let in more light. I could see they covered a continuous metal arbor that acted as a cage; plant life covered it so densely I could not see out on either side, and I assumed no one but the cameras I occasionally spotted could see in. By the time I arrived at a stone staircase embedded into the earth, I was trembling.
I counted twenty steps before reaching the landing. It took me a second to get my bearings once I reached open sunlight. I stood on the second-level terrace of an impressive replica of an Italian villa. On one side I faced floor-to-ceiling windows that framed a ballroom hung with three massive crystal chandeliers. The room was designed so that on special nights guests would spill out onto this balcony.
When I turned around, Lake Michigan slapped me in the face with an unexpectedly cool breeze. In Texas, you only caught one of those in summer by standing near an air-conditioning vent. I couldn’t see water, but I knew it was close.
I knocked the bottoms of the two-inch heels on the tiled ground to get off the dirt and strapped them back on before peering over the balcony into the most elaborate garden I’d ever seen, a maze of arbors and stone pathways and fountains. Someone could get lost in there. Which was probably the point.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” asked a slightly accented voice behind me, and just like that, I was face-to-face with Rosalina Marchetti. The first thing I noticed was that she’d had her cheekbones “done,” pulled higher and sharper, making her look more Italian than Mexican.
Few vestiges of the Rosie from that faded newspaper picture remained. Her silvery white hair was orchestrated into an elegant bun almost as twisted as her garden. Her pale green pantsuit flowed from her slender body like a loose skin, a subtle background to the diamonds glinting on her fingers, in her ears, at her neck.
Rosalina was more beautiful than ever. And I looked nothing like her.
“Oh, my God,” she said, a mist over her blue eyes, which I knew were really plain, ordinary brown. And then she swept me into what seemed to be a very genuine hug.
I felt absolutely nothing. Shouldn’t I feel something?
“Shhh,” she warned, as I opened my mouth to speak. “Not here.”
She tucked her arm through the crook of mine, and led me down two more flights of rocky stairs that spiraled their way into the garden. The paving stones looked ancient enough for Michelangelo himself to have picked over them.
In the center of the garden’s opening courtyard, a life-sized copper statue of a small child with angel wings tilted her head to the sky, her arms open with glee as water spilled over her. “That’s Adriana,” she said. It took me several seconds to figure out who Rosalina was talking about. “I put the fountain in on the three-year anniversary of her kidnapping.”
Please, God, don’t let that girl be me.
Four other garden paths led off the courtyard into a dense, tamed jungle, and Rosalina tugged me along on one rampant with honeysuckle, oblivious to the effect of her words on me. From above, the garden gave the appearance of well-groomed symmetry, but once inside I gave up trying to keep track of all of the turns. I was hot, tired, and pretty certain Rosalina wasn’t much of a physical threat. Besides, I had always cheated with a pencil and eraser at childhood maze games.
“I feel safest in here,” Rosalina said, pulling a branch aside for me to step through. “This garden was designed for me many years ago by a University of Chicago math professor. He’s dead now. I’m the only other one besides my security guards and a gardener who knows every way in and out, and it’s locked without a key inside my head.” As she tapped her forehead, I prayed that the math professor died of natural causes.
She glanced at my dress, and my fingers awkwardly adjusted the neckline. “Thank you for wearing green,” she said. “It’s better camouflage.”
This was beyond bizarre. Had Rosalina lived her entire life in fear, grieving for a stolen daughter, a recluse trying to disappear into her landscape?
“Don’t feel pity for me,” she said, as if reading my mind. “I made my deal with the devil. Your father, that is. I was still young, but I knew what lay ahead for me if I didn’t marry him. Venereal disease, abusive men, an overdose. In some ways, your father saved me, although, of course, it was for his own selfish reasons.” Her voice trailed into bitterness. “I’m assuming you know the story, at least that part of it.”