When the Lights Go Out(61)

I find myself on my hands and knees searching for Mom’s urn, knowing I left her here beside me last night. I comb through the planks of the hardwood floors, as if somehow or other she’s slipped through the millimeter gap between boards.

It’s a sinking feeling. A spreading, sinking feeling that comes to me at once.

I’ve lost Mom.

I don’t know who I am anymore. I can’t go on, I won’t go on without her here. I hold my breath and refuse to breathe. And just when I think I’m about to die, I see her. Just two feet away, on the other side of me, right where I left her. My panic comes to a halt.

Mom is still here. She’s not yet gone. I release my breath and, at the same time, somehow hear the labored sound of Mom breathing through the air return. Short, shallow breaths followed by no breaths at all.

Only in daylight do I give up my perch. I rise to my feet, arching my back from the stiff muscles that come with three or four hours of lying on the hardwood floors. I creep across the room slowly, deliberately, one step at a time, my legs half-asleep. And I’m jealous of them because at least some small part of me still knows how to sleep.

In the shower, I shampoo my hair. I reach for the conditioner and end up dumping another handful of shampoo on my scalp. I wash my body and then, because I can’t remember if I did, I wash it again. Though later, when my skin starts to secrete a sour smell, I wonder if I washed at all.

I head off for a cleaning assignment. As I scrub away on the homeowner’s porcelain floors, I notice that my fingernails are still intact. Not a single nail is torn. There’s no dried blood clinging to my fingertips because they haven’t been bleeding. Even now I feel the sharp edges of the screw head burrowing into my fingertips, and I’m not sure if that happened or if I only imagined it did.

I lock up before I leave. I load my paraphernalia onto the back end of Old Faithful. Mop, bucket, rubber gloves. The September day is sunny and warm. I ride in the street, on tapered one-way streets, which narrow with parked cars like the thickening of arteries with deposits of fat.

I stop for coffee and a donut, taking them to go. “Have a good one, Jenny,” the owner of the bakery says to me as I leave, and I think maybe she doesn’t have it wrong after all. Maybe she knows something I don’t know. Maybe I really am a Jenny, since I’m no longer Jessica Sloane.

I pedal past a police station. On the sidewalk before the brick building, I pause. I think about stepping inside, asking them to fingerprint me. Maybe they can look my prints up in their system and tell me who I am. But I’m not sure that’s how it works. I’m sure they’d need a reason to fingerprint me, and I’m not sure I have one to give. Not a good one anyway. Not one that wouldn’t raise red flags.

But then my mind drifts to the notion of DNA, one of those in-home kits that you mail away. Those that claim, with a simple swab of the cheek, to help you figure out your family tree, find distant relatives, discover unknown ethnicities. It’s just what I need. To figure out who I am.

I return to the coffee bar on Dearborn and sit there on the blue velvet sofa, waiting for the man from the garden. Hoping he’ll come today. I see orange everywhere I look. On a shirt, a shoelace, a flyer taped to a store window, in a flower bed. But none are the man.

I go to the garden, slipping back in between the honey locust trees and finding my way to Mom’s favorite spot. It’s empty, except for a bird, a little brown thing, a sparrow, pecking away in the dirt for food. I scare it away as I make my way to the edge of the raised bed, sitting on the marbled edge, my eyes circumspect but also tired. The twitch in my eye has yet to go away. If anything, it’s gotten worse. It twitches incessantly, only stopping when I dig the heels of my hands into it and press hard.

After an hour or two, I give up. I take the long way back to the carriage home because I’m in no hurry to return. I bike past the elementary school at the corner of Cornelia and Hoyne, a stately structure made almost entirely of red brick, four floors that are tall and thin and deep. Kids play outside, on a parking lot playground beside the school building. The flag is at half-staff; someone has died. The kids are rowdy, unruly, loud, like howler monkeys defending their territory. They scurry to the top of the jungle gym, laying claim to the swings and slides.

I round the corner at Cornelia. A bell rings, calling the kids inside from play. They’ll go home soon; it’s midafternoon. Once they’re gone, the world is suddenly silent. The trees stand tall and proud, the sun’s light getting scattered at random through their leaves, dusting the sidewalk.

As I near in on the greystone, I watch as, across the street from it, a little boy schlepps a bucket, waddling down to the sidewalk with his mother on his heels. He flips the bucket upside down and a stack of chalk falls to the concrete. It makes a racket. A single blue piece nearly rolls into the street but he stops it in time, running awkwardly after it. His mother asks him what he’s going to draw, waving her hand at me, calling out hello. He’s going to draw a hippopotamus.

Ms. Geissler is also outside. She’s bent at the waist, picking weeds from her flower bed, plucking and gathering them in her hands. She wears gaudy gardening gloves and, on her head, a wide-brimmed straw hat that keeps the sun from her skin.

I see her and feel a rush of anger well inside me. A rush of anger and unease, among other things. I think of Ms. Geissler there in the third-story window watching me at night. The third story, which is overrun with squirrels. The third story, where she claims she hasn’t been in months. I think of the eyes, of her eyes, pressed to the window like the eyes of an owl, big enough and bright enough to catch prey on even the darkest of nights.