Beyond the country club Lake Michigan springs into view. You might pull off at La Rabida children’s hospital half a mile up the road to climb the rocks overlooking the lake. From this vantage point, looking south you can see the industrial quag you just visited. To the north the skyline made famous by Skidmore, Edward Durrel Stone, Bud Goldberg, and their friends is silhouetted against the sky.
Back in your car return to US 41. Soon it becomes an eight-lane highway that takes you the quick way to the Loop. Lake Michigan will be your companion the rest of your journey, spewing foam against the rocks-a barricade put up by men hoping to tame the water. It is not a tame lake, though. Underneath the asphalt lies the marsh, home to herons for twenty-five thousand years. The lake may yet reclaim it.
GRACE NOTES
I
GABRIELLA SESTIERI OF PITIGLIANO.
Anyone with knowledge of her whereabouts should contact the office of Malcolm Ranier.
I WAS READING the Herald-Star at breakfast when the notice jumped out at me from the personal section. I put my coffee down with extreme care, as if I were in a dream and all my actions moved with the slowness of dream time. I shut the paper with the same slow motion, then opened it again. The notice was still there. I spelled out the headline letter by letter, in case my unconscious mind had substituted one name for another, but the text remained the same. There could not be more than one Gabriella Sestieri from Pitigliano. My mother, who died of cancer in 1968 at the age of forty-six.
“Who could want her all these years later?” I said aloud.
Peppy, the golden retriever I share with my downstairs neighbor, raised a sympathetic eyebrow. We had just come back from a run on a dreary November morning and she was waiting hopefully for toast.