A Dangerous Game

Chapter 3-1

Chapter 3

Wren shook a Marlboro Light out of the box and lit it. Mournfully he looked inside the cigarette pack and saw there were only half a dozen left. Now, with the combination of being unemployed and cigarette prices rising up to over ten dollars a pack, Wren realized he might finally have the impetus he needed to quit once and for all. But now he craved the solace the nicotine and tobacco would provide. He dragged deeply on the smoke, plopping down on the front stoop of the apartment building where he and his mother, Linda, lived.

He watched his exhaled smoke as the wind carried it upward, listening to the rustling sound that same wind initiated in the leaves of the big maple tree in front of the three-flat redbrick building he called home. This part of the Far North Side neighborhood, Rogers Park, was pretty quiet. Wren’s building was about eight blocks west of the lake, where traffic, both automobile and pedestrian, was much heavier. But out here on West Lunt, the apartment buildings and homes were modest and the neighborhood less transient than those closer in to the water.

It was also cheaper, which was a big factor for Wren and his mom, who had seldom had more than the two proverbial nickels to rub together. Wren had grown up with his mom and with her had traveled around the city’s North Side, living in a dozen or more different apartments. When they were flush and Linda could hold down a good waitressing or bartending job, they lived large in a two-bedroom, splurging on luxuries like cable TV and, if they were lucky, an outdoor space like a balcony or patio. In leaner times, though, Wren could recall having to share a tiny cockroach-infested studio with his mother on Devon Avenue—and even then it had been hard for his mother to meet the rent.

Currently Linda tended bar downtown at a very small, very chic boutique hotel on Oak Street. It was sort of a career high for her, and the salary and tips she brought in allowed Wren to live comfortably with his mother and to have his own room.

The pair had grown close over the years, in a much different way than the usual parent/child relationship. As Wren grew into puberty and young manhood, he had become more of a friend and confidante to the woman he called his mother. Little wonder, since his mother was only sixteen years older than her son and the two of them had been mistaken more than once for siblings or, worse, boyfriend and older girlfriend. Linda had given Wren his ginger hair and slight frame, and these attributes, along with a constellation of freckles across her button nose, kept Wren’s mother looking even more youthful than her forty years.

Their unique closeness was also bolstered by the mystery of Wren’s paternity. Wren had tried without success, especially when he was a little boy, to discover who his absent father was. If he was still alive, if he still lived in Chicago, what prevented him from seeing his son? But Linda was always evasive, never really revealing any information to her son about the man who had fathered him.

Into puberty, Wren had assumed his mother had slept around as a teenager, the same as he slept around. He didn’t hold it against her and could see how she simply didn’t know who the father was. She might have been embarrassed, but Wren couldn’t have cared less if his mother had plenty of lovers and one-nighters. The randy Wren even admired her a little for it.

That was until he discovered, snooping among the personal papers she kept in one of her dresser drawers, a yellowing newspaper clipping from the Chicago Sun-Times that detailed a rape case that had gone to trial just a couple of months before Wren was born. The “unidentified and underage” victim had been abducted and raped on her way home from Senn High School on Chicago’s Far North Side.

Linda had gone to Senn. And the dates were right.

Wren recalled how he had sat down, weak in the knees, on Linda’s chenille-covered bed with the clipping in his hands. Why else would she have kept this if she was not, in fact, the rapist’s victim?

Wren had looked at the picture of the man accused of the crime, a guy named William Sanders, who had worked as a janitor at the same high school Linda attended. He was an older, doughy-faced man who looked harmless enough, with his shock of unkempt salt-and-pepper hair and unremarkable features. But there was an intensity in his brown eyes that Wren thought looked familiar, because he had noticed that same intensity when he looked in the medicine cabinet mirror.

Wren had folded the clipping back up, being careful to return it to approximately the same place he had found it in a stack of papers that included old bills, their current lease, some tax returns, and his birth certificate. His heart had ached for his mother, and he had experienced a pang of profound guilt as he thought of the countless times he had asked her about who his father was.

How painful it must have been for her!

Wren had closed the drawer and hurried out of his mother’s bedroom, never mentioning to her what he had found out. He didn’t want to hurt her, and he knew it would hurt, reliving the crime, what she had endured. It must hurt, actually, every time she looked at him, the memory fresh in the eyes of his father.

Yet she hadn’t aborted him or given him up for adoption. Wren assumed that’s what many other women would have done, especially when they were high-school-age girls. She had kept him close to her through the years, raising him with love, nurturing, and protectiveness, often going without nice things for herself so Wren could have things like new winter coats, new shoes, school supplies, and medical care.

Like his father, his grandparents had been conspicuously absent from his life. A gut-wrenching thought occurred to him—had Linda’s parents thrown her out because of her pregnancy? Even though it was the result of a rape? That was almost too cruel for Wren to comprehend.

It made him love his mother that much more that she had kept him, despite what must have been his horrifying origins and the cost to her.

And now, as he took a last drag on his cigarette, his heart ached a bit at the prospect of going inside and telling Linda he had not only lost his wallet but his job. His customer service gig helped pay the rent on this, their nicest-ever home, and he wasn’t sure how they’d make do without his biweekly paycheck.

He flicked the butt into the gutter and went inside.