If I’d never had any children, if I’d married Christ like Grandma Epifania wanted me to, I could be washing the dying in India, or teaching children, or keeping silence. The peace silence implies has a lot of appeal right now, Lucy thought. Marta, why the hell do you have to be so much trouble? Isn’t it enough that I lost Elena? That Emmy’s dead?
     Lucy’s fear and anger slowly receded as she walked. On Fifth Avenue, she looked up and saw Chris Langford’s building and wondered if Chris was in her office. Nothing like someone else’s troubles to get your mind off your own, she thought. Poor Chris. Lucy knew firsthand the kind of anguish Chris was suffering with Madeline missing.
     Chris and Lucy had met in the furrows of the Willamette Valley among migrant workers in the rows of blackberries, the red juice staining their hands—stigma, not stigmata. Chris was defending workers and Lucy was helping them organize. Their friendship was immediate and lasting.
     It was a mutually exploitive friendship as well. Chris called on Lucy when she needed some press to help a case and Lucy tapped Chris for legal advice for people whom she met in the course of her work.
     Chris left legal aid and moved into the Public Defender’s office. Lucy always thought it was a strange move. The pay was better, but Chris was an heiress, she didn’t need the money. The stress level couldn’t be any better defending felony cases than it was defending workers and as far as Lucy was concerned, migrants were a better class of people on the whole. Chris said it gave her more time to spend with Maddy, but that wasn’t true, either.
     The receptionist recognized Lucy and rang for Chris before she had a chance to speak. “Have a seat, Lucy. She’ll be with you in a moment.”
     Lucy sat down and glanced through the magazines. Time, Newsweek, People. No Forbes or Inc. Indigents don’t tend to have any reason to follow the stock market.
     “Hi, Lucy,” Chris greeted her and bent over to embrace her. Lucy felt collapse reaching out to her. She pulled back and gave Chris a long searching look. Her friend’s gray hair had recently been cut to hug her scalp, not the most flattering hairstyle for Chris, but it was the look in her warm brown eyes that concerned Lucy. They looked injured. How do eyes do that, Lucy wondered? Give us away.
     “Come on back to my office. I’ve got just a few things to file away and we can go somewhere for a drink, or why don’t you come have dinner with us at our place?” Chris led her down the hallway, opened the door to her office. “Mind that stack of papers,” she said.
     Lucy stepped around the knee-high stack. Chris’s desk was fairly tidy, a few family photos, a daybook, and an open hard-shell, leather briefcase. Files and papers marched in amazingly neat stacks across a credenza and the floor. From experience, Lucy knew that Chris would know where everything was in those stacks. Chris had developed the filing system when she worked for legal aid. The office she had inherited had been a sea of paper, which she had sifted through and arranged until she brought order and sense to it. It was months before she realized that there was a filing cabinet hidden behind and beneath several bankers’ boxes full of domestic relations. By then she realized that she rather liked the open filing system she had created.
     Chris called home to let Teddy know that Lucy was having dinner with them. While they talked, Lucy thought about Teddy. The first thing she remembered observing about Theodore Milcheford was that he was astonishingly handsome. He was over thirty when Chris first introduced her husband to Lucy, but he had the appeal of a beautiful child. He seemed purely ingenuous, totally aware of his effect, but somehow as surprised by it as everyone else, as if it were some inexplicable gift that had just happened, that he was watching to see how it would turn out. Michelangelo’s David stepped off his pedestal and assumed flesh, black hair, gray at the temples, startling blue eyes and golden flawless skin.
     That was the first impression. Subsequent meetings had taken some of the shine off of him as far as Lucy was concerned. Though, in all fairness, she wasn’t sure if maybe her prejudice against “beautiful people” wasn’t part of it. The fact that he was unabashedly ambitious did not endear him to her, either. However, Lucy had to admit that she was right there with everyone else trying to use his ambition to serve her own causes. It was handy to have a friend on city council and now that the police department was in his oversight, he might be particularly useful.
     Chris hung up the phone and tossed a file into her briefcase, snapped it shut. “There. All done. Shall we go? You want to ride with me or do you have your car?” Chris said around the lipstick she was applying.
     “I’ll take my car.”
     Lucy always found the drive up to Chris’s home in the West Hills confusing. Streets wound and doubled back on themselves and were, in several places, too narrow for two cars to pass. How many times have I been here and I still get lost? It’s a conspiracy. I know there is a secret map to these hills and you can’t get the map unless you live here. Keeps out the riffraff, Lucy grumbled. She nearly passed the street, when she caught sight of the house nestled serenely on a level cutaway. Lucy rolled back down the nearly vertical street she was on, turned her wheel, and, giving what turned out to be the needed amount of pressure to the gas pedal, managed to turn onto Chris’s street without spinning her wheels.
     Once in Chris’s house, she could smell Teddy’s specialty emanating from the kitchen. Roast pork with plum sauce. No matter how many times they had eaten together over the years, Teddy could never remember that Lucy was vegetarian. She didn’t know if it was due to his self-absorption, or if he was just incapable of remembering, but Chris had always made sure that there was plenty for Lucy to eat.
     “Wine?” Chris was handing her a glass of white wine as she closed the door behind Lucy. “Come on in the kitchen. We have salad detail.”
     Teddy gave her a smile. He was hovering over his roast with a knife.
     “Just in time for the sacrifice, I see,” Lucy grinned.
     “What?”
     Poor Teddy, he didn’t have much of a sense of humor. “Never mind.” She went to work on a pile of carrots. When all the food was set on the table, it was apparent that Chris had let her down or thought Lucy could stand to lose some weight. The carrots, she had chopped, and a few tomatoes adorned a pile of romaine lettuce and that salad was the extent of meatless food on the table. Lucy didn’t say anything; she didn’t have much appetite, anyway. Chris appeared uncharacteristically oblivious to her dinner guest’s meager portion of the meal.
     They ate on the porch where they could enjoy the sun, which had broken out earlier in the day and pushed the clouds off to the east somewhere out of sight. It was a perfect, calm evening. The kind humans just can’t leave alone.
     The porch was just that, a porch, not a verandah, not a lanai or any of the other affected names which people less realistic than Chris Langford tended to employ. It ran along three sides of the house, which faced northeast and its easternmost side was enclosed in glass. The house was built in the 1930s in a style more suited to a farm than the city, on a level carved out of the hill, the house was an anomaly among its stylish, though generally understated, neighbors.
     Chris bought the house before she met Teddy, and they were married in it. Chris told Lucy how the wedding guests joked about “crossing fords” and creative ways of combining Langford and Milcheford. “I’m sure they didn’t mean for me to hear the other things they said. Not that I let it bother me.” Those were the references to Teddy’s ambition and how convenient Chris was for him. Teddy intended to be mayor someday and governor the next. Chris was the daughter of Cornelius Langford, who had never been mayor or governor only because he preferred to wield his power from behind the doors of private clubs and private homes. Chris was an attractive and useful ladder, that Teddy loved her was a bonus.
     As Lucy and her hosts ate, they talked about what each had been doing for the last couple of months, except that Lucy avoided mentioning Emmy and they avoided mentioning Maddy. Lucy filled the long silences by gazing out over the city. She counted bridges over the Willamette River, wished that there were a view of the St Johns instead of the Fremont. As far as Lucy was concerned the St Johns with its cathedral like piers was the only truly beautiful bridge in Portland. The newest bridge, the Fremont, was an enormous concrete arch. Its center span had been prefabricated and floated down the river then lifted into place–an engineering marvel, but it didn’t make her heart beat faster unless she was driving over the top deck on a windy day.
     The city beneath her rolled out over the river, wound around Rocky Butte, and the volcanic vent named Mount Tabor. The volcano in the north, St. Helens, opened her glistening throat to swallow the sky. Beneath her white snows, ash, powdery and deep, encased the silent dead. Lucy shivered. If a person were to believe Will, the New Englanders who founded this city were like St Helens, she thought. White and smooth, beautiful in their skins, and like the mountain, harbored an ominous burning core.
     Not included in the view from Chris Langford’s porch was Bartlett House.
     “I was sorry to hear about your young friend,” Teddy said. “Wasn’t she a cousin of Doug Bartlett’s?”
     “No one knew Doug had a cousin,” Chris commented. “I feel bad for Doug. You know he really doesn’t have anyone else. A stepmother somewhere–she hightailed it out of town when Doug’s father died. Probably wanted to put some distance between her and the whole Bartlett experience.”
     “What do you mean, Chris?” Lucy leaned toward her friend.
     “The Bartletts were not the traditional American family next door, if you know what I mean. And I’d know, I grew up next door. There was a lot of tragedy in that family and it goes way back. Poor Doug, his father was such a tyrant.”
     Lucy got up and went to the porch rail, “You should remember Emmy, Teddy. She’s the one who proposed that the Barlett House property be turned into a shelter for street kids at that council meeting in April.”
     “Now there was an idea out of left field,” Teddy said.
     Lucy turned around and looked at her friend’s handsome husband lounging there in the dying rays of the sun. “That’s ironic. I thought you forgot where left field was,” Lucy couldn’t help the sarcasm. “You seem to have thrown your weight into the developer’s camp on this one.”
     Chris watched them like a nervous bird. Her eyes flitting from one to the other.
     “You can’t hold progress back forever, Lucy,” Teddy said. “You have to be realistic. Bartlett House has been abandoned for years. No one tried to save it or do anything with it, until Connie Crage and Urban Vision wanted to develop it.” Teddy sounded irritated and petulant.
     “But a high-rise apartment complex, Teddy? It’ll look ridiculous in that neighborhood.” She took a sip of her wine. “Not that Portland couldn’t use a few sore thumbs to alleviate the look it has going.”
     She set her wine glass on top of the porch rail and leaned against a pillar. From here, in this light, the city looked like a drawing on a graphic artist’s board. It had that clean, contrived look. Emmy used to claim that most of downtown Portland looked as if it had burst full-grown from the forehead of a city planner like Athena from the head of Zeus.
     But she didn’t want to think about Emmy just now. She faced her friends, “Have you heard from Maddy?” Lucy asked.
      “No,” Chris answered. “It’s been more than a month. If only she would call or write. Let us know she’s safe.”
     “We’ll find her. We’ll bring her home,” Teddy said reaching for Chris hand across the table.
     Chris drew back. “What good will that do? She’d run again–we don’t even know why she left. What good would it do to drag her home?”
     “We could change,” Teddy said.
     “Change? You’re good at that. You’ve got a skin for every occasion.”
     Teddy persisted, “You could be home more for her, where she needs you. You are so busy working off your upper class guilt that you don’t have time for your own daughter.”
     Chris pushed away from the table. “Perhaps we should go inside now, it’s getting chilly.”
     Lucy helped carry dishes back into the kitchen in the icy silence that had descended. “I think I’ll go on home now,” she said.
     Chris walked her out to the car. “Have you made arrangements for Emmy, yet?”
     “Not yet. The police have to release her body. She always said cremation, if she couldn’t die in the wilderness and give her body to the earth. She was so idealistic,” Lucy laughed and wiped her cheek with her hand.
     “I’m so sorry,” Chris said reaching for her.
     “No, please,” Lucy held up a hand. “I don’t want to blubber.”
     “Let me know. I’d like to come to the services, okay?” Chris said.
     “Of course.”
     “Lucy.” Chris put her hand on Lucy’s arm, and Lucy turned to face her friend. “I’m sorry about that, in there.” She tipped her head back toward the house.
     “I should apologize to you, Chris. I shouldn’t have brought up Maddy. I know its hard and…”
     “Teddy’s right, you know,” Chris sighed. “I haven’t been available for Maddy. Maybe, I have been compensating for my class. And what’s so shitty about that, is how shallow it all is. I won’t give up a month in Italy, or my Mercedes, and God knows what other unnecessary comforts that seem so essential to my happiness. A little time for my daughter doesn’t seem like so much. Especially,” she gave a brittle laugh, ” considering that my inheritance is busily making money for me in the market and here I am defending the indigent and being all PC, and I don’t even know for sure where my money is invested. Oh, my stock broker tells me that I have a socially responsible portfolio.” Chris gave a half shrug. “Whatever.”
     Lucy had no immediate response. The flow of words and the depth of cynicism that Chris was expressing stunned her.
     A neighbor arriving home waved at them before going inside. Chris waved back, then turned to Lucy. “I don’t really see how giving it all away and being poor is going to do anything more than add another miserable person to the deficit side of the economic class issue.”
     “You’re right, of course,” Lucy said. “You do what you can. Sometimes one person at a time. Sometimes you make a difference. Every now and then we have to stop and ask ourselves what we are doing and why, and if we’re helping or doing damage.” Lucy put her arm around Chris’s shoulders. “There isn’t anything more important that we can give our children than ourselves. Nothing. I don’t know why Maddy left and neither do you, but when she comes back, make sure she knows she can count on you.” Lucy dropped her arm.
     Chris nodded, but she avoided Lucy’s eyes.
     “Goodbye, Chris. You’re a good friend.” Lucy got her car and pulled away. She felt Chris watching her and wondered what kind of an evening her good friend had in store. I really didn’t help much, Lucy thought.
     Why is Teddy Milcheford so protective of Urban Vision? She thought back to the city council meeting. Emmy was great at that meeting. When the girl gets passionate, Lucy thought, when she got passionate, she could light a room on fire. And she was passionate about street kids. Lucy remembered how surprised she, Emmy, and the other members of ROOF had been at the number of people already in the Council Chamber when they arrived. Will was there before them, and had managed to save enough space on his bench for Lucy and Emmy to sit with him.
     It was a hearing to gather citizen input, as part of the building permit process for a high-rise apartment building that Urban Vision intended to build on the Bartlett House site.
     Among the crowd, Lucy had recognized Anne Locke from Preserve Our Social History. What’s POSH doing here? she had wondered. It soon become apparent–Bartlett House was “an integral element in the social history of Portland, Oregon. We must not let this fine old home, built by one of our great citizens, be lost. At the very least, I must plead that Bartlett House not be demolished, but moved and restored. Perhaps Urban Vision Development could take this opportunity to provide a site?” Anne Locke smiled sweetly as if she had only just then thought of the solution. Then she sighed and frowned. “Of course it wouldn’t have the same value, taking it out of context like that, but it would be better than destroying a piece of our heritage forever.”
     “Thank you, Mrs. Locke,” Mayor Caliquo said to her friend giving her an encouraging nod. A couple members of the Council appeared to be thoughtfully considering Locke’s position.
     Then a few neighbors of the proposed development rose to question it, on the grounds that the increased level of traffic and higher population density would compromise their quality of life. Worst of all, their properties would be seriously devalued when the building came between them and their —if not God-given, then most certainly purchased-at-a-dear-cost— view of the city and the mountains that they loved.
     Lucy could almost feel Emmy rolling her eyes. After the last neighbor retreated to his seat, Emmy stepped up to the mike. “Mayor Caliquo, members of the council,” She began, her voice low. She drew a visible deep breath as if gathering strength from her belly. Then she launched. “The question here is, do we need another home for creatively-challenged young, wealthy, urban professionals, complete with a basement garage to park their urban assault vehicles in, conveniently located next to the antiseptic shops of upper Burnside and Northwest Portland, which they’ve already ruined for everyone else? Not that I’m bitter,” Emmy broke off with a smile and was rewarded with a spattering of nervous laughter. “Isn’t there any part of us that cries out for a just and equitable world? We could do something good. There are a lot of homeless kids in our city. What has the city done so far? Put cyclone fencing around bridge piers, divided park benches with armrests so you can’t lie down, put the police on harassment duty, and the list goes on. Instead of providing an alternative to the streets, the city has decided to just make it more uncomfortable—maybe they’ll go home. You don’t understand about their homes. Those aren’t places you return to.
     “Then there is Bartlett House. It’s empty. It has eight bedrooms, a parlor, a dining hall, a library room, a huge kitchen, and four bathrooms. And all these rooms are empty. What is so impossible about making it into a shelter for homeless kids? Take a chance and do the right thing. Thank you.”
     Lucy expected Teddy Milcheford to speak up. Everyone knew that his constituency was liberal and progressive. But Teddy didn’t speak up. In fact, he looked uncomfortable sitting there with his expensive tan and good looks, not meeting anyone’s eyes. It was the newest member of the council who spoke up and moved that the issue be continued to another meeting to allow for more information-gathering regarding impact and best use of the property in question. On the whole the council had seemed relieved to avoid making any kind of position statement. The only one to dissent was Teddy Milcheford and he didn’t put up a big fight. The meeting was adjourned and the council chamber began to empty out.
     Will led them out. Lucy was behind Emmy as they neared the exit. Suddenly Malcolm “Connie” Crage stepped between Will and Emmy, blocking her way, his face livid, his muscular arms outspread like wings.
     “Who the hell do you think you are,” Crage folded one of his arms in and pointed a finger at Emmy, holding the tip little more than an inch away from her chest. “You stupid bitch. If you and your lousy street scum get in my way, you’ll wish you’d never heard of Barlett House. I’ll tear you apart.”
     Someone called out, “Hey, Connie, lighten up.” And Crage turned stiffly. He walked out ahead of them, his back straight, and his broad shoulders plowing a pathway through the stunned citizens in front of him. Lucy and Emmy followed in his wake, until they were out of the crowd.
     The suddenness and force of Crage’s rage had shaken them all. Was it possible, Lucy thought, that Connie Crage had something to do with what happened to Emmy?