Clint and Lila had gone out to the back porch, the overhead light turning them into actors on a stage. They were looking toward the pool where Anton Dubcek had been skimming for dead bugs less than twenty-four hours earlier. Clint wondered idly where Anton was now. Sleeping, likely as not. Dreaming of willing young women rather than preparing for an unpleasant conversation with his wife. If so, Clint envied him.
“Tell me about Sheila Norcross, honey. The girl you saw at the basketball game.”
Lila favored him with an ugly smile of which he would have thought her incapable. It showed all of her teeth. Above it, her eyes—deep in their sockets now, with dark brown circles beneath them—glittered. “As if you don’t know. Honey.”
Put on your therapist’s hat, he told himself. Remember that she’s high on dope and running on fumes. Exhausted people can slip very easily into paranoia. But it was hard. He saw the outline of it; she thought that some girl he’d never heard of was his daughter by Shan Parks. But it was impossible, and when your wife accused you of something impossible, and everything else in the world was, by any rational standard, more important and immediate, it was very, very hard to keep from losing your temper.
“Tell me what you know. Then I’ll tell you what I know. But let’s begin with one simple fact. That girl is not my daughter, whether she has my name or not, and I have never broken our marriage vows.” She turned as if to go back inside. He caught her by the arm. “Please. Tell me before—”
Before you go to sleep and we lose whatever chance we have to square this, he thought.
“Before it can fester any more than it already has.”
Lila shrugged. “Does it even matter, with everything else?”
His very thought a moment ago, but he could have said it matters to you. He kept his mouth closed instead. Because in spite of all that was happening in the wider world, it mattered to him, too.
“You know I never even wanted this pool, don’t you?” Lila asked.
“What?” Clint was baffled. What did the pool have to do with anything?
“Mom? Dad?” Jared was standing inside the screen door, listening.
“Jared, go back inside. This is between your mother and m—”
“No, let him listen,” Lila said. “If you insist on going through this, we will. Don’t you think he should know about his half-sister?” She turned to Jared. “She’s a year younger than you, she has blond hair, she’s a talented basketball player, and she’s as pretty as a picture. As you would be, if you were a girl. Because, see, she looks like you, Jere.”
“Dad?” His brow was furrowed. “What’s she talking about?”
Clint gave up. It was too late to do anything else. “Why don’t you tell us, Lila? Start from the beginning.”
Lila went through it, starting with the Curriculum Committee, and what Dorothy Harper had said to her afterward, how she hadn’t really thought much of it, but did an Internet search the next day. The search had brought her to the article, which included a mention of Shannon Parks, whom Clint had spoken of once before, and a striking photograph of Sheila Norcross. “She could almost be your twin, Jared.”
Jared slowly turned to his father.
The three of them now sat at the kitchen table.
Clint shook his head, but couldn’t help wondering what his face was showing. Because he felt guilty. As if there had really been something to feel guilty about. It was an interesting phenomenon. That night in 2002 what he’d whispered in Shannon’s ear was, “You know, I’ll always be there if you need me.” When she’d responded, “What if I needed you tonight?” Clint had said that was the one thing he couldn’t do. If he had slept with her, there would have been something to feel guilty about, but he’d refused her, so it was all good. Wasn’t it?
Maybe, but why had he never told Lila about the encounter? He couldn’t remember and he wasn’t required to defend what happened fifteen years before. She might as well demand that he explain why he’d knocked Jason down in the Burtells’ backyard for nothing more than a chocolate milkshake.
“Is that it?” Clint asked. He couldn’t resist adding, “Tell me that’s not all, Lila.”
“No, that’s not all,” she said. “Are you going to tell me that you didn’t know Shannon Parks?”
“You know I did,” Clint said. “I’m sure I’ve mentioned her name.”
“In passing,” Lila said. “But it was a little more than a passing acquaintance, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. It was. We were both caught in the foster system. For awhile we kept each other afloat. Otherwise one or both of us would have drowned. It was Shannon who got me to stop fighting. She said if I didn’t, I was apt to kill someone.” He took Lila’s hands across the table. “But that was years ago.”
Lila pulled her hands away. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“Fifteen years ago!” Clint cried. It was ridiculous.
“Sheila Norcross is fifteen.”
“A year younger than me…” Jared said. If she’d been older—eighteen or nineteen—her birth would have pre-dated his parents’ marriage. But younger…
“And her father’s name,” Lila said, breathing hard, “is Clinton Norcross. It says so right on her school enrollment.”
“How did you get her enrollment?” Clint asked. “I didn’t know those documents were available to the general public.”
For the first time his wife looked uncomfortable rather than angry… and thus somehow less like a stranger.
“You make it sound sleazy.” Lila’s cheeks had flushed. “Okay, maybe it was sleazy. But I had to know the father’s name. Your name, as it turns out. So then I went to see her play. That’s where I was last night, in the Coughlin High gym, at an AAU game, watching your daughter play hoops. And it’s not just your face and your name she has.”
The horn blasted and the Tri-Counties AAU team jogged over to the sideline. Lila broke away from searching the stands for a sign of Shannon.
She saw Sheila Norcross nod at one of her teammates, a taller girl. They did an elaborate handshake: bumped fists, locked thumbs, and clapped hands over their heads.
It was the Cool Shake.
That was it, that was when Lila’s heart broke. Her husband was a man in a beguiling mask. All her doubts and dissatisfactions suddenly made sense.
The Cool Shake. She had seen Clint and Jared do it a hundred times. A thousand times. Bump, lock, clap-clap. There was a precious slideshow in her head of Jared, growing taller with each click of the wheel, filling out, hair darkening, doing the Cool Shake with his father. Clint had taught it to all the boys on Jared’s Little League team.
He’d taught her, too.
CHAPTER 20
Around midnight central time, a fracas broke out between a small group of Crips and a much larger contingent of Bloods at a Chicago bar called Stoney’s Big Dipper. It spread from there, becoming a city-wide gang war that Internet news sites described variously as apocalyptic, unprecedented, and “fucking humungous.” No one would ever know which member of which gang actually lit the match that ignited what became known as the Second Great Chicago Fire, but it started in West Englewood and spread from there. By dawn, large parts of the city were in flames. Police and fire department response was nearly nonexistent. Most of the cops and hose-jockeys were at home, either trying to keep their wives and daughters awake, or watching over their cocooned bodies while they slept, hoping against hope.