Infinite(79)
The boy looked nervous as he came up to the fence, but his grip was strong as he reached up to shake my hand. “My name’s Bill,” he said.
“Nice to meet you, Bill. I’m Dylan.”
The woman approached the fence, too. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
I began to apologize, but she waved it away.
“No, no, don’t you worry about that. With all the people you meet every day, I’m not surprised at all. I’m Cora-Lee Hobart. You helped my son Lionel last year. Saved him is what you did. You saved all of us, including me and my grandson here. Lionel fell behind on our rent when he was out of work for a couple of months. I needed looking after when I had my heart attack, but do you think the landlord cared about that? He was going to kick us out on the street. You wouldn’t let that happen. You made calls and wrote letters and got lawyers and people from the city on our side, and the landlord, he backed right down. Let Lionel catch up on the rent again when he went back to work. Without you, heaven only knows where we would be right now. God bless you, Mr. Moran.”
I smiled at her, but I felt envy again.
Envy that no one had ever spoken to me with that kind of gratitude in their voice. Envy that I’d never changed someone’s life like that.
“Well, it’s good to know you’re all doing so well,” I told her.
“That we are.” Cora-Lee looked around the parking lot and lowered her voice. “I’m not sure if you realize this, Mr. Moran, but people around here know your story. You made mistakes, and I’m sure you feel bad about what you did, and I know you paid a price for it. All I can tell you is, I thank God for your mistakes. They’re what brought you to us. Ain’t no accident, that’s for sure. You’re here for a reason.”
I shook my head with a kind of wonder. “That’s very nice of you to say.”
“It’s the truth.”
Her grandson shook my hand again. The two of them got into her Camry, and Cora-Lee waved at me as she pulled out of the parking lot. They drove down Foster toward the river, and I was alone again. When they were gone, I crossed the street to stand outside the offices of Chicago Housing Solutions. I hoped the darkness would keep me invisible on the other side of the windows. I needed to see this Dylan Moran up close—not just his face, but who he really was inside.
It wasn’t a big-budget operation. All the furniture looked secondhand. The yellow paint was dirty, with posters that read “Housing Is a Human Right” stuck crookedly on the walls with masking tape. The gray industrial carpet was worn and stained. Despite the late hour, almost a dozen people worked the phones and computers as if it were the middle of the day. A couple of them wore business clothes, but most wore blue T-shirts with the CHS logo, identifying them as volunteers. I saw two Lou Malnati’s pizza boxes on one desk, several liters of Mountain Dew, and a beat-up coffee machine with an oversize red tub of Folgers next to it.
My stare went from face to face. Then I saw him.
With his feet up on a desk and a phone propped on his shoulder, Dylan Moran drank Folgers from a paper cup.
He looked just like me. He hadn’t cut his hair or shaved. His clothes were similar to mine, a dark slim-fit button-down shirt and khakis, and leather shoes that had been through a war. As he talked on the phone, I saw a range of expressions that I regularly saw on my own face in the mirror and in photographs. We smiled alike; we frowned alike. Our blue eyes had the same heat. If you stood the two of us next to each other, we’d look like twins you couldn’t tell apart. Even Karly had accepted me as him. We were the same person.
But to my eyes, he was a completely different man. Our similarities were skin deep, and underneath all of that, we were strangers. Even the killer wearing my father’s leather jacket resembled me more than this Dylan Moran did. I couldn’t decide what it was that made him so foreign to me. I tried to unlock the riddle in his face, but I found myself unable to decipher it.
As I watched, he hung up the phone. I could see that it had been an intense, difficult call. I knew those calls—when I dealt with suppliers who were bucking deadlines, or with clients who kept changing their minds about their events. Those calls kept me up at night. But as soon as this Dylan put down the phone, a relaxed smile returned to his face. He called out something I couldn’t hear to two of the volunteers, and one of them tossed a foam football his way. They passed it back and forth for almost a minute. Then he got out of his chair, clapping his hands like a coach. He went from desk to desk, checking in on each of his volunteers. They joked. They argued. An old man showed him something on a computer screen that obviously made him happy, and Dylan kissed the top of his head. He finished his coffee, poured a little more from the pot, and drank it all. He found part of a doughnut in a pink box, and as he took bites of it, he sat on the edge of a desk and checked messages on his phone.
There was nothing special or unusual about any of it. It all looked so casual. So normal. This day, this evening, must have been like any other day for the man who worked inside these walls. That was when it hit me. That was when I understood what made him so different from me.
This Dylan Moran wasn’t running.
All my life, I’d been hurrying to get somewhere, without the slightest idea where that was. But this Dylan was already there. He looked at peace with the ground he was standing on. He would go home to his family tonight, and wake up tomorrow, and his life wouldn’t have changed at all. That was just the way he wanted it.