The Moment Before Read online

  “I understand Miss Chicago is present?” asked Blake Andrews. “It’s Ms. Chicago, Blake,” corrected Heather. “This isn’t a beauty pageant.”

  Defender of women’s rights everywhere, Holly mumbled.

  “Would Ms. Chicago please identify herself?” Blake said, searching Holly out in the auditorium.

  From the stage, John beamed at Holly like she was his protégé, but not before he smiled at his wife. Kathy turned and scanned the room to locate the nominee, but Holly let a few seconds pass before she stood, hoping Veranda’s wife would turn back around. When she didn’t, Holly stood and kept her eyes focused on the council members on the stage.

  “I am Holly Chicago.”

  Kathy Veranda continued to stare.

  “Thank you for volunteering, Mizz Chicago.” Blake Andrews was apparently a jerk.

  John had told her she’d be a shoo in. At the very least, Holly figured she would get Heather’s vote—another woman, a compatriot, a posse of two. But if she was honest, she figured she’d get most of the men’s votes, too. She knew she was an attractive woman, and she knew she was the only citizen of Saluki who had stepped up to fill the vacant seat.

  But … all of this was just not quite right. It was, in fact all wrong. She cleared her throat, ready to say she’d changed her mind, that she wanted to withdraw her name.

  “Do we have a motion to bring the nomination to a vote?” Blake asked, and of course, John made the motion and some man at the end of the table seconded it.

  “All those in favor?’’ Blake said, his gavel already in the air.

  Ayes across the board.

  Damn.

  “Those opposed?”

  Not a soul.

  Kathy Veranda’s scowl didn’t have a vote.

  “The appointment is hereby approved,” Blake declared and brought down the gavel on the end of Holly Chicago’s politically apathetic life.

  There was no applause.

  Then and there, Holly realized she had violated an important edict. Crossed a line she swore never to cross. Leave politics to others. Leave men before they leave you. She should have left Saluki after she’d honored what she felt was her debt to John for his kindness two decades earlier.

  But she stayed. And now she knew this was going to end badly. Holly flipped down the wooden auditorium seat and sat back down. In her anxiety, she placed her thumb along her jawbone at the base of her ear while she traced the outline of her upper ear with her index finger, an instinctive motion that accompanied most thoughts of her father. He used to say the shape of her ear reminded him of the treble clef and would often trace it absent-mindedly when they listened to music together, or were returning home after a long night in his taxi. Tracing the perimeter of her ear was a long-ingrained habit that soothed her, as others might push their fingers through their hair or hum a favorite tune.

  New business concluded, Blake asked for a motion to end the meeting and again, John complied. Motion carried and wooden seats clacked back to their upright positions as the good citizens of Saluki, Illinois said their goodbyes and headed home.

  Holly hustled toward the exit without waiting for congratulations. She didn’t want to talk to anyone on the council, and she didn’t want to stand eye to eye with Kathy Veranda. She thought she heard John call to her, but she wasn’t about to turn around. She scurried down the long hallway lined with lockers and, for reasons she didn’t quite grasp, slammed a still-open locker door. The reverberation echoed throughout the building and rocked her to the core, not the sound, but the impetuousness of the stunt.

  When she approached the exit, she jammed both hands onto the chrome-handled door, and sent it sailing outward with a bang. She drew in a deep breath, glad for the rush of fresh air to replace the odor of high school kids and janitorial fluids.

  Near the doors at the other end of the hallway, she saw Veranda leave the building, walk his wife to her car, kiss her on the cheek, open a car door for her, close it, and watch her drive away. Then she watched him turn and walk straight towards her.

  Holly ignored him. Or pretended to ignore him. As she reached her car, she leaned against the back fender. She knew she should get in and leave, but the night air was invigorating, and she was feeling … something. She didn’t quite know what. As John walked toward her, she stretched her arms above her head, bent side to side as if she were doing Yoga, and arched her back. Her vertebrate popped and her chest expanded. After sitting so long, it felt good to stretch. Or maybe after watching John up on that stage, it felt good to entice him. She didn’t know which felt better.

  “God, you look sexy when you do that.” John’s voice cracked.

  “None of your goofball humor, John. Just go away.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a cigarette.

  “Would you believe in a million years your appointment is in the best interests of this town?

  She flipped open the lighter, and let the cigarette dangle from her bottom lip. “It’s your town, Veranda. If you can’t save it, who can? Certainly not me. Cupping her hands around the cigarette, she lit it and took one, long inhale and blew the smoke toward John.

  “Whether you realize it or not, Holly, you are now Saluki’s beacon of hope. Not a lightning rod for discontent.” He threw his arms out as to embrace the whole town. “You’ll break the long-standing—and frustrating—ties that come with every vote this council has faced.”

  “Why don’t they just make the council an odd number?”

  “Oh, now you’re talking logic. Not a good way to start your tenure.”

  “I’m just sorry I even agreed to this whole damn thing.” She leaned against her Mustang and crossed her arms, flicking her cigarette with her thumb. She could stay in this spot all night. Or at least until her cigarette burned down. Or John left. Whichever came first.

  John reached for her arm, but Holly pulled away and watched as he made the internal calculation: try to kiss her or walk away. “You’ll see,” he said finally, and then, dutifully, he turned and headed toward his truck at the other end of the lot.

  A quick note of remorse rang through her. She did want him to go away. Just not go away hurt. Well, if truth be told, she didn’t know what she wanted.

  She took a long drag of her cigarette and blew smoke towards the evening sky, towards the apparition she always saw there. the vague outline of her father that appeared regardless of the hour. His, always the face that could not reply. The one that never let her forget he had left her. The one that reminded her that, no, that was wrong. He loved her too much to leave. The one she always asked, why did you never come home?

  John stared at Holly in his rear-view mirror as he drove out of the lot. Still leaning against her car with her one arm crossed beneath her breasts, and her elbow perched on her hand holding her waist, he couldn’t decide if it was in defiance, or if it was her vulnerability surfacing. But in that moment, he didn’t give a damn. The woman, was hot. He wanted her. And seeing the swell of her breasts protruding from beneath her top, goosed his imagination. As he pulled away, he saw her reach a finger up to trace the edge of her ear, a nervous tic he found extremely sexy. And, for some reason, he felt as if watching this was déjà vu. Like he had known someone with the same tic, but he couldn’t place it. He stopped his truck. He didn’t want to go home. He wanted to talk to her. Stay with her.

  Then as if she knew his intentions, he saw Holly raise her arm, wave him on, and then get into her own car and drive out of the far entrance away from him.

  John waited for her car to disappear around the high school before he headed out of the parking lot, bouncing in and out of the numerous cracks and divots. The street lamps lining the schoolyard illuminated the uneven sidewalks and overgrown bushes. The school he’d attended as a teen was in sore need of repair. Year after year, as a Saluki council member, he sat in the same auditorium he’d sat in as a high school student, parked his truck in the same school lot, drove daily on the same roads he drag raced his friends as an adolescent.
He’d spun out the back of his bicycle tire some forty years ago in the gravel that now crunched under his tires. He loved this place. But now, the whole town of Saluki resembled a barren field after the harvest. Picked over. Stripped of value. Depleted. But unlike crops, he knew an entire town couldn’t be replanted each season. And now, he wasn’t sure if Saluki would ever thrive again.

  It seemed like every day, The Washington Post or The New York Times featured stories on the demise of small-town America. Variations of the headline “Wall Street’s Gutting of Main Street” circled each other in his head: My streets, John thought. These are my damn streets. And what he couldn’t stop thinking about was what the gutting would do to his dream. His cherished medical center. With a modern medical facility in town, Saluki residents wouldn’t have to drive to St. Louis for everything beyond a hammer to the knee or a popsicle-stick to the tongue. That was the original premise anyway. He managed to finagle assurances from the developers that they’d include a brand new community center as part of the tax abatement and permitting package. The facility would put Saluki on the map and become a regional engine for economic growth.

  John, along with the help of a wealthy Saluki buddy, had worked in tandem with John’s old college contacts and put together a package financed by one of the same elite Wall Street banks mentioned in the newspaper articles. He’d involved the state energy office to create a tax-abated energy independence zone so the utilities complex serving the facility would employ the latest technologies for energy efficiency and clean energy. The higher upfront costs would be paid to the lenders through innovative bonds, taking advantage of the lower operating costs over the life of the facility. Across the Midwest, Saluki’s proposed facility had been hailed as a model of sustainability in a region where citizens normally equated global climate change with next year’s Farmer’s Almanac forecast. It was a win-win all around.

  Then, everything ground to a halt. The headlines hailed the worsening economy with each passing day. The misery of the global financial collapse penetrated towns like Saluki, and the ones needing financial assistance the most suffered the greatest. Then, it got personal. He received the dreaded call. The one from the bank that had signed on to back the medical center. The financing package would have to undergo a reassessment, the bankers said. Which actually meant, John and his partners could kiss the money—and his medical center—goodbye. Meanwhile, the property for the center sat destitute of trees, their stumps revealing sinister, dangling roots with clods of dirt and sod still clinging to them. Work, which had started only a few months eaerlier, ended abruptly. The earth moving equipment, abandoned in place, perched like dinosaurs in the desolate field.

  As he pulled into his driveway, his thoughts returned to the town meeting, and to Holly Chicago. Her presence in his town was no less a mystery now than it had been three years ago when she showed up out of nowhere to volunteer for his failed campaign for state representative. And then she’d stayed, even after the election was over.

  An hour ago, Holly’s participation on the council seemed like the smartest idea in the world. Now, he wasn’t so sure. And he wasn’t sure his misgivings had anything to do with Saluki at all.

  He pulled his car into the garage, turned off the ignition, and sat in the dark. How different would his life have been if the impact of events swirling around the globe hadn’t led to a tragedy on his own doorstep? How different would his life have been had he made a life with Jami?

  He was sure that working in a senator’s office on Capitol Hill, his first job out of law school, was the start of something big. The only truly big thing, though, was meeting Jami. He fell hard for her, and after a five-minute encounter at her office, had mapped out their life together. He leaned back against the headrest and flicked off the truck’s lights.

  It had been such a cliché moment: Love at first sight. The thunderbolt. He wouldn’t have even met her if it hadn’t been for the girl and her teacher who came to the senator’s office that day looking for help to find her missing father. Funny how things happen. If it hadn’t been for that job and that girl walking into his office, he’d have never met Jami.

  In crazier moments, John nearly convinced himself that Holly was connected to those events so long ago, a time when he thought his ticket out of Saluki had been punched for good. But he knew his mind played tricks on him when the dark memory of finding Jami—and losing her—surfaced.

  He shook off thoughts of what could have been, got out of the truck, and headed inside. Best not to dwell on the days before he returned to Saluki, fell back into old routines, and married his high school sweetheart. As he headed upstairs, he thought of the woman waiting for him and wondered if he’d ever really loved Kathy or if she just the means to an end, a futile attempt to forget the loss of the soul mate that was never meant to be. He didn’t have a good answer. Light beams don’t penetrate dense fog, they just bounce off.

  Interlude

  Ya abi,

  Why didn’t I tell Veranda no? I am now officially a member of the Saluki Town Council. The exact kind of participation in organized living I have studiously avoided. And I fear I am encouraging the man I should keep at bay.

  This seed I have planted with Veranda is in danger of coalescing into something I cannot—should not—reap. I paid my debt for his help many years ago. Yet, I stay here, too close for comfort, too scared, too stubborn this time to simply ignore or abandon what I feel.

  What are these bonds that form and break apart between men and women? Am I part of anything now that I feel you slipping away? Am I becoming part of something larger than us? I gaze too long and think too hard. The image in the mirror has separated from the person I am. One half of me does not understand how I relate to men; the other struggles with my connection to you, as memories of you grow more frail and distant.

  When I step away from the mirror, I am one again with me, one again with you. When I leave this room, exponential complications, entanglements with others abound! Out there, in the world, we are exaggerated by others, diminished by others, changed by others.

  You and I are separated, but still part of each other. Not just in memory. That I know. This I feel. I am over there, in there, under here. You are in another place, but we mingle in the sky. Words prove less helpful in sustaining me with you. I say your name over and over, and suddenly, like there is no resistance between a falling body and the ground, the word dissociates from its meaning.

  What I remember of you, Papa, continues to slip away. Now the letters of our name are slipping away, too. There’s too much space between the ‘d’s in our name; the ‘H’ is lying on its side disentangled from the a’s. The fissures are deep inside me. The only connection we have, is slipping away. Too much space lies between our molecules, our genes, what I know about you, and you about me. Is there only space now?

  Where are you?

  Words are nothing without their meaning. If the notes disappear from the music, what you heard still lives. If the letters separate, what they stood for remains. What we have moment to moment is real. Even if not one particle of your physical being still exists in this world, we move toward each other on the waves of those particles left behind.

  —Yom tani fil jannah bin tak

  2

  October, 2008

  John came in from an afternoon deposition, picked up the message his assistant had left on his desk, and saw that his old law school buddy, Stuart Eisenstat, had called and would call back before the end of the day. The last time he’d heard from Stuart was about two years after 9/11, when he visited the area evaluating sites for new federal facilities. After dinner in St. Louis, the two of them got drunk, did an old-fashioned club crawl on Washington Avenue, the latest in St. Louis’s attempt to revitalize the decaying downtown, and finally closed down a Euro-beat dance club with a bunch of Bosnian twenty-somethings who wanted to go out to breakfast with them until Stuart began talking about 9/11, being Jewish, and working for the federal government. The mood soured aft
er that.

  Back then, President Bush was focused on making sure a terrorist attack of similar scope could never happen again, and part of the plan included establishing the Office of Homeland Security, later renamed, the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS. When John and Stuart had graduated from law school, energy had been the moral equivalent of war, and Stuart had ridden that wave through government service and corporate plenitude. In 2002, war became the moral equivalent of combating global terrorism. Stuart rode that wave, too.

  Stuart had started his career at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. With an undergraduate degree in engineering and a graduate degree in law, he was in high demand, and after the second Arab oil embargo, funding allocations shifted to the DOE, so he transferred there. Follow the money. That’s what everyone in DC said. John had heard it a million times. But, as Stuart teased, as an idealistic rube, John just couldn’t bring himself to heed the advice.

  After Stuart’s stint in government, he took a position with one of the elite regulatory law firms specializing in energy and environmental issues. He went from the equivalent of a fifty-dollar-an-hour salary, to a billing rate of $350 per hour. His kids entered private school, and he moved his family to the northwest side of the district.

  John pushed some papers around his desk, pulled out his notes from a deposition, then closed the file. He swiveled his chair around, put his feet up on his desk, looked out the office window facing the old county courthouse, and thought about how much he envied Stuart’s career. How much he envied his Stuart’s life. John certainly hadn’t been groomed to be a small town lawyer, marry his high school sweetheart, and remain a Saluki resident for the rest of his life. He was supposed to have the life Stuart had. Even though he knew that after 9/11, Stuart had begun questioning that life. Around Hanukkah that year, Stuart had woken up one morning and wondered why he needed to make more money to acquire more stuff. The answer was, he didn’t. What he wanted, he’d realized, was to serve his country. So he “enlisted” in the government’s War on Terror as a civilian bureaucrat, and accepted a leadership position at DHS.