The Move

They moved to Chicago because of their son and what their son did to that girl. Their new house looked like anybody else's, only it was emptier, and without family photographs, because Alice threw out their pictures before the move. Alice's friend Judy said the Midwest was supposed to have big and honest people in it who didn't go nosing around in others' lives. Judy said, "You have moved to a place that has a large and healing heart." Has she ever been here? Michael asked. Does she even know where Chicago is? Neither Alice nor Michael needed jobs right away. Their savings would be enough for a while, based on their inexpensive tastes and also on the lack of Jake, who was their only son. Without a child, life was a bargain. Everything seemed on sale. Michael said other people dreamed of living like this.

A month after the move, Alice signed up to be a role model to an inner-city youth. "Since when do you care about black kids?" Michael asked. But she needed something to do with her time, something more than gardening, and she had seen the advertisement in the paper, a woman of Alice's age looking satisfied as she clutched a dark-skinned girl to her, while the girl looked up at the woman with an enormous love. Alice remembered Jake, too young to speak, looking at her like that—his clear eyes speaking to her. "I believe in your love," his eyes said. Her hand cupped his head. A tired caseworker sat in their kitchen and passed Alice a picture of a skinny twelve-year-old in tight braids, laughing at something outside of the photograph. "She's too old," Alice said. The caseworker said everybody wanted a younger child so they were all taken. "Her name is Alissa and she needs you," the caseworker said. Alice pictured the girl with the eyes of an infant. She pictured the girl looking up with love in her eyes. It was August by this point, the sky hard and blue, and squirrels had begun chewing through the wood of their garage. "Let them," Alice told Michael, feeling kind-hearted, saving this, saving that, until she spotted Michael, in the backyard, chasing down the squirrels with a fierce and focused intensity, an iron rod in his hands.

In this new life, Alice thought her son would become an afterthought, hardly worth the mention, but even on the drives away from the city, where the landscape became obvious, a flat obvious surface, with nothing to hide and nowhere to hide things, there Jake was, hiding. His hands over his eyes. "Can you find me?" he said. "Find me, find me!" They were driving west to someplace, the sun in their eyes, and Michael was talking to her again. Alice, listen, he said. Michael was saying shit happened to everybody. And did she think everybody walked around like she was, like a sad clown with shit all over her face? "People are more than their tragedies," Michael said. He was full of big talk that year.

Michael said all along he would not set a foot in jail to visit their son, so, in their old life, Alice had gone alone three weeks after the arrest. Jake already looked different, paler, and his hands—had they always been like that? How they appeared stronger than necessary now. She asked what he ate for breakfast. How he slept. "How do you think I sleep?" Jake said. The new and sterilized smell of him, the smell of disinfectant covering a gray and possibly rotting thing underneath. "Are you all right?" she asked. According to police reports, Jake had done what he did, and then he packed his linen shirts and swimming trunks and joined Alice and Michael in the Caribbean, their first family vacation in years, to celebrate the new year, where they all had a fine time, eating bowls of shellfish in the sun. Things had been more beautiful there. Everything. Paradise? Alice asked, and Jake leaned over to place a shrill red flower in her hair...