My Brother's Keeper by Keith Gilman Page B

it.’
    â€˜I’ll look for it.’
    â€˜Why don’t we visit her in the hospital?’
    â€˜I was thinking the same thing.’
    They weren’t far from home and they drove the short distance in silence, Lou lost in his thoughts and Maggie lost in hers, both thinking about Catherine Waites: if she’d live or die and if they were the only two people in the world that cared. She was in a coma, the officer said. Maybe the first good night’s sleep Catherine Waites ever had. And if she never woke up, at least the pain that seemed to stalk her from childhood would finally be over. There was physical pain and then there was emotional pain. Was one worse than the other, Lou wondered? Catherine Waites could answer that question better than he could. Perhaps he’d ask her if she ever woke up.
    Maggie was thinking the same thing. Lou could sense her thoughts. There had always been that connection between them. They’d even made a game into it, trying to guess what the other was thinking.
    Catherine Waites had become a sort of conduit for them, a passageway back to a time when everything had changed for both of them, a time when he first discovered that everything he’d believed in was false, that there was nothing for him to return to: no job, no family and no home. And just as Lou’s life was in turmoil, so too was his daughter’s. It was a time of great confusion and sadness, a time when Maggie spent her nights awake in bed wondering where her father had gone and if he would ever return.
    So, while Lou had been answering his last call as a policeman, responding to the screams of a child and saving this girl who a moment before was a stranger to him, his own daughter was on the brink of losing the innocence of her own childhood, losing the permanence that came with a marriage and a family and a home, finding out that it was all just a bus ticket away from a long, empty ride to nowhere, finding out that it was all just an illusion. And finding it out the hard way.
    They interlocked their fingers on the seat between them. He wished he could give her back the time she’d lost, restore all those wasted years. He wished he could have collected her tears in a great round barrel, all of them running together like some secluded reservoir brimming with rainwater, and return them to her one fragile cup at a time.

NINE
    T hey turned onto Meridian Avenue. A light sprinkling of snow swirled around the street light at the corner, the first few flakes confirming the arrival of winter. His headlights caught the dusting of white on the cars parked up and down the block. It had only been a few months earlier he’d seen moths circling in the light, their small white wings as light as rice paper and coated with a fine layer of white powder like dust on the tattered sheaf of a forgotten book. They were attracted by the light and danced in the night sky as if they were celebrating their last night on earth. And for most of them it was, the hordes of black bats circling nearby, picking them off one by one, drawn to the movement and to the smell of blood.
    Meridian Avenue was quickly becoming another link in a chain of forgotten neighborhoods throughout Philadelphia. Every time Lou pulled up in front of his house he saw the subtle changes; the way people kept up their properties or didn’t keep them up. Overbrook, Germantown, Kensington, Logan and a dozen other neighborhoods just like them could all be stricken from the map of the city and nobody would notice. They had become like little cities unto themselves, isolated even from each other. They could be written out of the history books and the only people who would know or care would be the ones still living there, the ones too poor or too stubborn or too stupid to get out.
    Even Lou was finding it difficult to care what the hell happened here anymore. What did it matter? All the old neighborhoods were disappearing. They were being transformed