Look Closer(25)

“Okay,” she whines, “but when are you coming for good?”

Oh, that. “November,” I say. “Remember, I told you—”

“But November’s two months away!”

I take a breath. November’s two months away, but it feels like it’s coming quickly.

“Mariah, honey, I will be here anytime you want to call me between now and November. I’ll come see you this weekend. I’ll spend the whole weekend. We’ll get milkshakes at that place you like.”

“Barton’s.”

“Barton’s. It’ll be fun. Really,” I say, “November will be here before you know it.”

? ? ?

When I’m done with Mariah, I walk down the hallway to check on Simon. He’s peacefully asleep, having drunken dreams about grand juries and law school deans.

I’m leaving in November, no doubt. It’s best for everyone, Simon and me both, and those girls need me closer. But I can’t leave Simon like this. Not with his future at the law school twisting in the wind.

Because that’s exactly where things stand. If Simon lets the dean hold his past over him, he might as well pack up now and leave. And that would kill him. He could teach elsewhere, sure, but he loves Chicago, and he loves his law school.

He’ll always have that look he had on his face tonight. The look of defeat, resignation.

No. I won’t let that happen. I’m done asking for Simon’s permission.

This dean is mine.

I pick up my phone and dial Rambo’s number.

“Miss Vicky!” he calls out from his speakerphone. “Isn’t this past your bedtime?”

“I need your services again,” I say. “When can we meet?”





20

Simon

I don’t “obsess” about Mitchell Kitchens. I just think about him sometimes.

There was the “Mini-Me” nickname, of course. He’d pick the most embarrassing times to use it. Coming off the bus every morning in front of the others. In front of a hallway full of students. Sometimes he’d find me in the crowd at a school assembly. He even said it once in front of my mother, on a day she had to pick me up from the principal’s office because I was sick, and we passed through the gym while Mitchell was working out with the other wrestlers on a mat. (The gym teacher was the wrestling coach, so while everyone else had a regular phys-ed curriculum, the wrestlers all had the same gym class and they just used it as a regular wrestling practice in addition to the one after school.)

Anyway, my mother and I were passing through the gym, and there’s Mitchell calling out, “It’s Mini-Me! Hey, Mini-Me!” I didn’t respond. I knew what that usually meant—he’d yell louder and keep at it until I acknowledged him, until he’d thoroughly humiliated me. But I figured that with my mother standing there, he’d back down. He didn’t.

My mother stopped on a dime and turned in his direction. She didn’t speak. I didn’t even see the look on her face, but I could imagine it. Knowing my mother and her wicked intellect and verbal skills, she probably had a dozen comments at the ready that would have left a Neanderthal like Mitchell mute. But she just stared him down, and then we kept walking.

She never brought it up. She must have known how humiliating it was, and she probably decided that she would leave it to me to raise it. I never did.

I wish it had stopped at the nickname. That was bad enough. But it didn’t stop there.

Not pleasant memories. So it’s a good thing I don’t obsess about him.

? ? ?

Anshu is just arriving at his office down the hall from mine, just fitting his key into the door, when I’m heading to my eight o’clock class.

“Professor Bindra,” I say. “You’re in early.”

“Meetings, meetings, and more meetings,” he says. “The perks of being a full professor. Hey, you should apply to be one! It’s not too late!”

“Don’t start.”

Anshu doesn’t know the full story. He knows the dean asked me to hold off and let Reid Southern apply without opposition. He doesn’t know about my second visit from the dean and the not-so-veiled threats. And he never will. That’s the beauty of what the dean did to me—he knows I can’t reveal it without revealing the story behind it.

I’m lucky the story didn’t come out at the time up here in Chicago. It was the locale, I think, that kept it out of the Chicago media. By the time he was murdered, my father hadn’t been a lawyer in Chicago for several years; he was then practicing in downstate Madison County, where asbestos litigation made a lot of lawyers rich and a lot of companies bankrupt, and living across the border in St. Louis. So the murder, investigation, and court fight happened in a different state altogether.

When the police up here searched my house, I was sure everything would spill out to the newspapers. But it didn’t. What spared me, oddly enough, was road construction on my block. The two squad cars and the forensic team truck had to park in the alley behind my house instead of out front. Other than my neighbors the Dearborns, who weren’t in town at the time, nobody could see the cops coming and going into the back entrance of my house. The Grace Park Police assisted on the search, but they didn’t leak to the press. A few of my neighbors probably wondered what the hell was going on, but if they did, nobody said anything to me. I was hardly around, anyway, commuting every day to school.