It was a long ride, and I could watch all the changing characters who got on and off. By the time we reached the Evanston border, I was reasonably confident that I was clear. I changed to the Evanston train and rode it three stops. No one was with me when I got off. No bicycles circled around me, no cars passed and then repassed me.

Morrell and I had broken up in Italy, but I still had the keys to his condo. And I knew where he had hung the spare key to his Honda Civic. I couldn’t afford to use the phone to call anyone I knew, but I could spend the night, drive the city, even change my underwear. When I let myself in, I found my favorite rose-stenciled bra still hanging in his bathroom. I thought I’d lost it in Italy.

40 - THE SHOEMAKER’S TALE

40

THE SHOEMAKER’S TALE

MORRELL’S HONDA STARTED ON THE FIRST TRY, WHICH was a relief. I’d worried that the battery might have run down after sitting in the garage for three months.

Going to Morrell’s place had left me melancholy. Little traces of my life surfaced wherever I looked—a pot of my moisturizer in the bathroom; Sleeping Arrangements, which I’d read aloud to him when he was recuperating from his bullet wounds, next to the bed. When I put away the juice I’d bought, I found a container of Mr. Contreras’s homemade tomato sauce in the freezer.

Morrell and I had spent two years together. He had put me back together when I’d been tortured and left for dead on the Kennedy Expressway, I’d helped him when he’d been left for dead in Afghanistan. Maybe that was the only time we could really help each other, when we were near death. When we were near life, we couldn’t sustain the relationship.

The tomato sauce made me realize I needed to notify Mr. Contreras, as well as Lotty and Max, about where I’d vanished to. The easiest person to tell would be Max because I could slip into Beth Israel through a side door and get to his office. If anyone was tracking me, they’d be keeping an eye on Lotty’s clinic, on Damen Avenue, as well as her condo on Lake Shore Drive. Since Max lived in Evanston, if my friends wanted to reach me Max could slip a note under Morrell’s door on his way home.

It felt queer to be alone in an apartment and to know I couldn’t use the phone. It was like being in an isolation tank. I quickly wrote a note to Max, telling him where I was, how to reach me in this age of the Internet, and asking him to get word to Lotty and Mr. Contreras.