Chicago, 1966

The Blue Streak is the fastest roller coaster at Riverview. When you reach the top, your stomach tumbles. Beside the roller coaster, cream-colored parachutes plummet with hysterical passengers. Beyond that, Chicago.

I stand on cracked peanut shells, take a cigarette out of my white clutch purse. Before I have time to find a match, he takes the cigarette from my mouth, lights it, puts it between my lips.

My nails are freshly manicured. The color: Crazy for Pearls.

"I got wheels." He nods toward a black GTO parked in an illegal spot near a fire hydrant.

I look past him at the cream-colored parachutes plummeting to the ground with their hysterical passengers, stamp out my cigarette, and get in.

"You always go for rides with strange men?" He smiles.

"Born to Raise Hell." I laugh and he laughs too.

His teeth are crooked. I hadn't noticed that before. But the only way to get out of a place you don't want to be is to go someplace else. So, I go.

I take out a piece of Juicy Fruit gum, roll it up, and pop it in my mouth. It must be ninety-seven degrees on the South Side. His car smells of popcorn. My black slip peeks from beneath a white pique skirt.

A bottle of Canadian Club is nestled between his thighs. He takes little sips as we drive. Offers it to me. He takes off his leather jacket. It has zippers down the sleeves

My brother, Billy, was drafted when he was eighteen. Mom called it the second worst day in her life. We went to the airport to see him board the plane for Camp Lejeune. She planted big, sloppy kisses all over his face and cried.

In the last picture I have of us together, his freckled face smiles beside mine. We're blurry. Mom trembled as she held the camera. "I'll write you back if you write," she told him.

Mom was a large woman with smudged glasses. She never dated after my dad disappeared. She just kept eating. She grew like a huge helium balloon. I thought one day she'd drift up to the ceiling and never come down.

The DJ on WLS: "And at nine o'clock we're ninety-eight degrees—pushing toward that heaven in the sky: one hundred degrees."

On the South Side, Richard Speck had just murdered eight student nurses. Someone they questioned called him "mild-mannered." The only nurse who survived said he kept telling them he wasn't going to hurt them. Meanwhile, he took them into the adjoining room, raped them, and slit their throats one by one.

Billy had hair the color of a carrot. He was proud of his new uniform. In the photo, standing beside Mom, his eyes look eager and desperate to get away.

There's a plane on the runway behind them.

Afterward, Mom went to Our Lady of Angels and lit a candle. She prayed to Saint Jude, the saint of hopeless causes, and Saint Anthony, the saint for finding lost things, and Saint Joseph for protection and the Blessed Mother. She covered all the bases.

The upholstery in his car is black vinyl. There's a plastic nude hanging from his rearview mirror. When he pulls a string below it, the tits light up.

Mom's name is Gloria. Her friends called her Glory. After Billy left, I carved his name into the bark of a linden tree at the park down the street. I wrote his name once in lipstick on my mirror. He called me "Little Princess."

The day he flew off, I wore black nylons with seams going down the back. He traded his tattered baseball cap for an army cap. Time slowed down. I saw over and over Mom kissing his cheek. And then she dissolved like a huge helium balloon deflating. The stars were like faint sequins in the sky.

We stop at Joe's Tap, play pool. Born To Raise Hell breaks the balls with a swift stroke. I could walk away but I don't.

Stories have a way of writing themselves.

He keeps his eyes on me. I keep my eyes on the ball. I ask him where he grew up.

"What is it to you where I grew up?"

He grabs my waist as we walk back to the car. Martha and the Vandellas blare on the car radio. And on WLS: "Now we're dancing in the streets, folks, at a hundred degrees down here on Michigan Avenue."

"It was just a question."

"You ask too many," he says, barely moving his lips. His white hands grip the steering wheel.

When my dad went away, I was eleven. I was in Girl Scouts. We did a project for Father's Day—gluing wood ducks on pieces of driftwood.

"Now, girls, aren't they beautiful?" the troop leader, Mrs. Brownmiller, asked. "You can make one for your grandfather," she told me. "Or an uncle . . . or your brother. You must be so proud of him!"

Mrs. Brownmiller smoothed her pale blonde hair, plastered with Aqua Net, and gazed at her industrious troop of Scouts.

What a stupid thing to say. How could anyone come up with such stupid things?

I thought of Mom kneeling in church to light candles for Billy. I thought of my dad cutting himself while shaving one morning; tearing a piece of Kleenex to keep the cut from bleeding. He used a straight-edged razor. The kind Richard Speck probably used to slit the nurses' throats. The afternoon when my dad left, I came home and saw Mom's open-toed red shoes, each pointing in a different direction, by the stair landing. Billy came in, pounding his baseball mitt with his free hand. He screamed and cried when Mom told us Dad wasn't coming back. Ever. I hated that sound—Billy screaming: "Never, never? You don't mean never!" You probably could hear it all the way down the block.

I didn't scream. Once, Miss Lundell, the gym teacher at school, kept me after the bell. She wanted to know if anything was wrong. If anything was bothering me. She was full of nosy questions.

"No, nothing," I told her.

I remember Miss Lundell's hard, thick body. Her brow furrowed with concern. Her watery, kind eyes. One of her eyes looked off to the side. I had to pick which eye to focus on or else I got dizzy.

I didn't do a good job of gluing the wooden ducks to the driftwood. Mrs. Brownmiller probably took a long time collecting that driftwood, and I fucked up the whole project. The glue got all over my duck. When Mrs. Brownmiller looked at my duck, she said nothing. Just tilted her head, piled high with those blonde curls that resembled the hornet's nest Dad had swatted from the rafters with a broom. Then, in her cheeriest voice, she said, "I hope all your daddies, or whomever you give your gifts to, will cherish them."

Mrs. Brownmiller's daughter, Paula, had blonde curls too. Hers bounced. They looked like wieners stuck all over her head. I liked to tell her stories to scare her about the man in the forest preserve who made lampshades from human skin. "Just like the Nazis," I said.

After Billy left, Mom started to forget things. She would just stand in the kitchen, holding a spatula in midair, looking out our back window. She had to start taking medicine for high blood pressure and pills for heartburn. I imagined her heart charred and smoldering.

Sometimes, she looked at me and started. As if suddenly remembering who I was. As if she'd forgotten she even had another child. Other times, I saw a look of horror spread over her face. Like in the midst of Leave It to Beaver, a monster had loped across the screen.

Life was like that. You went along with canned laughter, and suddenly there was something terrifying or someone sobbing, someone breaking down, someone losing it completely. Then the laughter resumed.

I saw my dad in my memory as if in a movie without sound. Like a mime who came and performed the same series of motions over and over.

When he left, he took something of me with him. A stiff shadow beneath his arm. Over and over, he turned to wave goodbye.

Afterward, I acted as if everything was normal, but I knew it was all a big fake.

Why didn't Billy realize his hysterics just made things worse? The nurses must have felt that, if they cried out, Speck would have killed them instantly. So, they all obeyed. They all went into the room hoping they would come out alive.

I read about people with split personalities and wondered if my dad had one. If he would ever come back and rejoin our family. That man who showed me how to dance and showed Billy how to throw a baseball. I started to do that myself. Pretend I was two people. Double-minded. Then three. Then I lost track. It made everything easier having another person to become. I could be the happy one. I could be the smart one. I could be anyone. I just slipped them on like a different coat.

I found out one of Miss Lundell's eyes was made of glass. Once she let me tap it gently. I wondered what it was like to see the world one-sighted. The iris was aqua smoke; the glass blue slightly more vivid than her real iris.

Mom collected thimbles. She had one with a cardinal painted on top. I wanted to tell her she could only protect herself from the small pricks. That nothing could protect her from disasters.

I didn't know which one I was that night when I got into his car.

My father was a jeweler. He often brought home stones in a little black pouch. Some were rare and precious. He shook them out across the kitchen table. I still have some of those stones in my music box. The one that plays "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." It makes me remember the little green chameleon he bought me at Wrigley Field. Billy and I woke up one morning, and it had shriveled like a brown leaf.

My brother's hands were short and stubby. I imagined him holding a machine gun and walking through the jungle. He was clumsy. "He's going to die," Mom wailed. "He always mistakes his Bs for Ps and writes threes backward. How could they draft him?"

We sat cutting pieces of Sara Lee Pecan Coffee Cake. Mom thought if she cut it into small pieces, she wouldn't eat as much. She spread her small sliver with a huge pat of butter.

We went to his friend's on Paulina. There were gates on the windows. There was nobody else in the apartment. I wondered if it was really his friend's. I'm not sure why I wondered.

Billy could play in the snow for hours. He made snow animals—a bunny, a turtle, a dog. It didn't seem fair to put him in a jungle.

After Dad left, our dog was lost. We put up signs and asked everyone, but it never showed up. Billy stopped riding his bike. Sometimes the dog's face turned into our dad's.

The baskets on my pink wallpaper blurred together. Until it was all a pink blur.

Once, I threw a Spam and Velveeta sandwich that Mom called dinner out the window. "It's all your fault," I yelled at her. But I knew it wasn't.

Billy came home from Vietnam. In a ceremony in Washington, the President pinned a medal on his coat. He was never the same. Like Miss Lundell's glass eye, one of his eyes looked cockeyed.

I told him I wanted to go home. By then he was lying on top of me. I realized my words might be too late. He grunted but didn't roll off me.

The nurses waited patiently to be called to the next room. Speck had a tattoo in blue-and-black ink: Born to Raise Hell.

If I screamed, he might clamp his hand over my mouth.

A garbage truck was grinding and straining to lift a dumpster below in the alley. A basketball dribbled faster and faster. People have ended up in dumpsters like that.

Who was I when I got myself into this? I didn't remember which girl.

Only one escaped. The others would have their pantyhose pulled down, a necklace of blood seeping into the carpet. No one came when they finally did scream. They screamed anyhow.

I laid myself down on the hot, sticky sheets. The cracked orange transistor beside the bed was playing. He was quick, brutal. I screamed inside like all those voices on The Blue Streak—the fastest roller coaster at Riverview. One of them was really crying for help, but nobody could hear. In the wild chaos of excitement, the one cry disappears. The cry is like a shooting star. You have to be just in the right place at the right time to see it fall.