The Shining Girls

Kirby ^{13 JUNE 1993}

‘Oh hey,’ Chet says, looking up from Black Orchid, which has a purple girl on the front cover. ‘I found something really, really cool in line with your mystery baseball card. Have a look.’ He puts aside the comic book and produces a printout from a microfiche dated 1951.

‘This caused quite the scandal. A transsexual jumped off the roof of the Congress Hotel and no one knew she was a he until the post-mortem. But the best bit is what she’s holding.’ He points at the photograph of a limp woman’s hand, extending out from under a coat someone has thrown over her. There is a blurry plastic dial lying nearby. ‘Doesn’t that look exactly like a contraceptive pill packet from today?’

‘Or maybe a cute compact mirror with a beaded pattern,’ Dan dismisses it. The last thing he needs is Anwar encouraging Kirby’s madness. ‘Now, do something useful and find me any information you can on Hasbro and when they introduced their pony range and toy patenting in general.’

‘Well, somebody woke up on the wrong side of the futon.’

‘Wrong side of the timezone,’ Dan grumbles.

‘Please, Chet,’ Kirby intervenes. ‘From 1974 onwards. It’s really important.’

‘All right, all right. I’ll start with their advertising and take it from there. And oh, by the way, Kirby, you just missed a Grade-A crank who was in here looking for you.’

‘For me?’

‘Real intense. Didn’t bring cookies, though. Next time, can you ask him to bring cookies? I don’t like to put up with that level of insane unless there’s some kind of high-calorie compensation.’

‘What did he look like?’ Dan’s head comes up.

‘I don’t know. Generic crazy man. Well-dressed enough. Dark sports coat. Jeans. On the skinny side of built. Intense blue eyes. He wanted to know about the high-school best athlete stuff. He had a limp.’

‘Shit,’ Dan says, even though he is still processing this. Kirby is faster on the draw. After all, she’s been expecting him for the last four years.

‘When did he leave?’ She’s gone pale, her freckles standing out in sharp relief.

‘What’s with you two?’

‘When did he fucking leave, Chet?’

‘Five minutes ago.’

‘Kirby, wait,’ Dan grabs for her arm and misses. She’s already out the door and running. ‘Fuck!’

‘Whoa. Drama city. What’s going on?’ Chet says.

‘Call the cops, Anwar. Ask for Andy Diggs or, shit, whatsisname, Amato. The guy covering the Korean murder.’

‘And tell them what?’

‘Anything that will get them here!’

Kirby flies down the stairs and out the doors. She has to pick a direction, so she runs up North Wabash and stops in the middle of the bridge, scanning the crowds for him.

The river is a Mediterranean teal today, the exact same color as the roof of the sharp-prowed tourist boat passing below. A tinny voice through a megaphone points out the twin corncobs of Marina City.

There are more tourists wandering along the river walk, identifiable by their floppy sun hats and shorts as much by the cameras slung around their necks. An office worker with the sleeves of his suit pushed up is sitting on the red girder by the railing, eating a sandwich, waving his foot warningly at the scavenger seagull edging closer. People cross the street in tight-packed clusters to the tune of the pipping walk signal and lose cohesion as soon as they’re off the crosswalk. It makes it difficult to spot just one in the herd. She skips over them, micro-sorting by race and gender and build. Black guy. Woman. Woman. Fat guy. Man with headphones. Guy with long hair. Guy in suit. Guy in maroon T-shirt. Another suit. It must be getting to lunchtime. Brown leather jacket. Black button-up shirt. Blue jumpsuit. Green stripes. Black T-shirt. Black T-shirt. Wheelchair. Suit. None of them are him. He’s gone.

‘Fuuuuuuuck!’ she screams at the sky, startling the guy with the sandwich. The seagull lifts into the air, screeching admonishment.

The 124 bus drives across in front of her, obscuring her view. It’s like a reset on her brain. A second later, she spots him. The uneven motion of a baseball cap bobbing slightly as if the man had a limp. She’s off running again. She doesn’t hear Dan calling.

A tan-and-white taxi swerves to avoid her as she darts across Wacker without looking. The driver stops dead in the middle of the intersection, his hand still on the horn and rolls down his window to swear at her. Anxious hooting starts up on either side.

‘You crazy? You was nearly toast,’ a woman in shiny pants scolds her, grabbing her arm and pulling her out of the road.

‘Let go!’ Kirby shoves her away. She pushes through the lunchtime shopping crowd, trying to keep him in sight, breaking past a couple with a baby stoller into the shadow of the elevated tracks. The oppressive daytime darkness throws her. Her eyes don’t adjust immediately and in that split second, she loses him.

She looks around, desperate, mentally cataloging and dismissing people as she glances over them. And then the boldness of the red McDonald’s sign catches her eye, dragging her attention upwards, to the suspended stairs leading to the El on the other side. She can only see his jeans disappearing from sight, but his limp is more pronounced on the stairs.

‘Hey!’ she shouts, but her voice is lost in the noise of the traffic. A train is coming in above her. She sprints across and up the stairs, digging in her pocket for tokens. In the end she jumps the turnstiles, hurtles up another set of stairs to the platform and shoves between the closing doors of the train without even seeing which line it is.

She’s breathing hard. She stares at her boots, too scared to look up in case he’s right there. Come on, she thinks angrily to herself. Come fucking on. She raises her head defiantly and sweeps her gaze over the compartment. The other passengers are applying themselves to ignoring her, even the ones who were staring when she forced her way in through the doors. A little boy in a blue camouflage track top glares at her with a kid’s pure self-righteousness. GI Boy Blue, she thinks, nearly laughing in relief or shock.

He’s not here. Maybe she was mistaken. Or he’s on the other train, heading in the other direction. Her heart free-falls away. She edges through the rattling car, making for the interconnecting doors, catching herself as the train swings hard through the corners. The perspex is scratched, not even graffiti, but hatchmarks scoured into the surface, accomplished over hundreds of rides by different people taking up the call with pen knives or X-Acto blades.

She peeks cautiously through into the next car and immediately ducks back. He’s standing by the door, holding on to the handrail, his cap pulled down low. But she recognizes his build, the slope-shoulders, the angle of his jaw and his uneven profile, turned away from her, looking out over the rooftops swishing past.

She ducks back, her mind rocketing. She digs in her bag and shrugs into Dan’s jacket to obscure her profile. She ties the scarf from her throat over her hair, babushka-style. Not much of a disguise, but it’s all she’s got. She keeps her head turned, enough to see him in her peripheral vision, to watch when he gets off.