The article in Dad’s old Bible is dated May 2, 1979. It explains a few things to me that his sermon doesn’t. Lebanon served five years in prison for manslaughter; he killed a boy named Syrus Myllstone. An officer named Holden Walters made the arrest but believed there may have been another assailant.
Another assailant. Dad.
His confession, that wrinkled piece of paper now carefully folded in my coat pocket, isn’t nearly as aged as the clipping. It was stuck between the pages of that old Bible for a while though. The lives it would destroy at this point wouldn’t just be his. It’d be Mom’s and J.P.’s and mine. Not to mention the church’s.
Now everything becomes clear. This is why Dad’s protected Lebanon all these years. You don’t leave behind the one person who can expose you. You can either keep him quiet when he leaves prison with a nice job and a sweet girl named Alice, or you can silence him. I guess my dad was only capable of murder once.
Tim’s truck rumbles north on the Dan Ryan Expressway. Every few minutes he glances over at me and I stare straight into the windshield.
“Pull over.”
“Layla, we’re in the middle of—”
“I’m gonna be sick! Pull the hell over!”
Tim turns on his blinker and then his hazards, slowly pulling onto the shoulder along the 63rd Street exit. The whir of passing cars is silenced only by my vomiting and dry heaving. Tim tries to approach me, but I wave him off. Constant bright yellow blinking of hazard lights assaults my peripheral vision. After I’ve given up anything I’ve eaten today or yesterday, I finally straighten up. Tim jogs to the truck, going into the glove compartment and retrieving napkins. When I don’t feel like I’m going to lose my guts again, we both head back to the truck.
“We’ll sit here as long as we need to until you figure out what you should do next,” counsels Tim.
Staring again at the windshield, past it, a few miles north of here, peaks of cosmopolitan towers seem like a living organism. Chicago ebbs and flows in architecture, white headlights and red taillights buzzing around its confines—a hive and fat bees attracted to its honey glow.
I rummage through my bag and finally recover my tin of mints and take two of them. The tick of the hazard lights gives me an audible reminder of the time slipping by and my limited options, and at this moment the only person who can help me.
“I need to see Christy.”
Tim flicks off the hazard lights, checks the rearview mirror and pulls back into traffic.
“You wanna let me in that head of yours?”
I can’t even begin to break down how fixing my father’s lies, this horrible act, will help me and Ruby, but I’m going to try to explain. Even if Tim doesn’t think it’ll work, even if he thinks my idea is stupid, I know he’ll help me. He loves me so he’ll help me.
“If I want to bring Ruby home, I have to break down this stronghold Lebanon has on my dad. The only way is by exposing Lebanon and my dad to the community. This means revealing secrets, including those of my family. These secrets are keeping me and Ruby from being safe.”
“So how does going to Christy help figure out what happened with your dad?”
“The only way I can see doing this is by getting answers from someone who isn’t Dad or Lebanon, someone who was there that night in January, but wouldn’t have a reason to lie about who else was there. Holden Walters. I don’t know who that is, but Christy’s dad probably has access to information about cops, past and present.”
“It makes sense, but it’s a long shot at best.”
“It’s the only plan I got right now unless you got something better.”
“So possibly revealing Reverend Potter killed someone is the way to do that?”
“If Ruby comes back and Lebanon tries to use Dad’s past as leverage, I need something, some nuclear option of getting him to leave Ruby alone. And the truth, the naked truth, is the only way I can do this—it’s the only way I can save Ruby and myself. If Lebanon sees I’m serious about outing my own dad, that might get him to leave Ruby alone for good.”
“If not, if it doesn’t stop him?”
“Then I’ll buy Ruby another ticket anywhere she wants and I’ll...let her go.”
Tears blur my vision passing Cermak-Chinatown toward the Circle Interchange. Barreling toward Lincoln Park, I think of what I’ll say to Christy, my friend who rarely goes south of 35th Street; my friend who lives in Lincoln Park, one of the richest neighborhoods in the city.
To be fair, I rarely go past the Loop onto the North Side, a part of the city where I feel I don’t belong. Rather I sense the whispers and stares of the white people who stroll up and down the blocks; the cute little shops and restaurants and other businesses that wouldn’t think of opening or investing in our communities, because, well, this is their community and south of 35th Street isn’t anything they really want to think about. And that is why I don’t come—it’s not that I don’t feel worthy, it’s because my self-esteem dictates I don’t go where I’m not wanted or appreciated. If they don’t want to deal with my neighborhood, then I won’t deal with theirs. They can have their artisan cupcakes and organic coffee and handmade gelato.
I’ll take the South Side with its jagged splendor and unrealized beauty, the tangled ways of survival and the underbelly of violence that seems to color every part of our lives and the community at large. It’s an honesty the North Side will never possess.
But right now, I need Christy’s help if I want to bring Ruby home.
My left arm is again broken into skinny bumps. I don’t want to call Mom or J.P.—not yet. If I must tear apart our lives, I need to make sure I have all the facts. When I was in college my journalism professors taught me many important things, one of them being how to pull apart a story piece by piece and compose the parts again into a narrative that makes sense and is believable.
One thing I know as a proud American is having a rich friend with a powerful father gets you answers quicker than trolling Google.