Set the Night on Fire by Libby Fischer Hellmann Page A

Her heart pounded. She smelled the fear on herself.
    She tore the door open and went out to the porch. Below, at street level, a dog whimpered and trotted away from the garbage cans.
     
    * *
     
    Lila was being chased by a large dog that turned into a snake and slithered faster than she could run. The snake was almost on top of her when she came awake. It wasn’t quite dawn, but the blackness outside had thinned, leaving a fog of gray.
    She ran a bath, threw in a handful of bubble bath she’d bought at Walgreens, and soaked for half an hour. Afterwards, she flitted restlessly from room to room again, like a fly landing on objects only for brief moments. By the fifth circuit, she realized she was being compulsive and made herself stop.
    She thought about calling Rich, her ex-boyfriend. A stockbroker in New York, he would be up by now, maybe on his way to the floor. No. They’d broken up three months ago. What if another woman answered the phone? Or she heard a quiet female murmur in the background? Bad idea.
    Maybe she’d call a girlfriend instead. But who? There were women she worked out with, colleagues at Peabody Stern she collaborated with, even women in her building with whom she traded elevator pleasantries. But Lila didn’t make friends easily. She wasn’t comfortable with “girl talk.”  She thought about calling Annie Gossage, but pushed away the idea. With her three kids and husband, Annie’s life was too busy already. If Lila called, Annie would make time for her, but she’d feel sorry for Lila, and Lila couldn’t tolerate the humiliation of being pitied.
    She decided to check her email. Back in Danny’s office, she sat at his desk and booted up the computer. She clicked on her email program and waded through the spam cluttering her in-box. After deleting them, only three messages remained.
    One was from a grassroots political organization to which she’d pledged twenty-five dollars for Internet neutrality. Not only did the initiative fail, but she was now on every mailing list of activists ever known to man or beast. The second was from her “team leader” at Peabody Stern about an upcoming departmental staff meeting, which she would be missing. The third was a message about a genealogy website. It promised to locate ancestors, make contact with long lost cousins, even run background checks. Lila moved it to her deleted items folder. She was about to erase the folder altogether when something made her pause. She retrieved the message, and read it again.
    Death had tagged her and run away, snatching everything she cherished. Her father and Danny were gone. But they were only half of her family. Her mother’s family was out there somewhere. If she could find them, connect with them, maybe she could find comfort, even a sense of belonging.
    She clicked on the genealogy website.

 

NINE
     
     
    “ T ake these.” Val opened her palm. In it were eight or nine little white pills.
    “What’s that?” Lila asked.
    “Ambien. To help you sleep.” Her aunt slipped them back into a small brown plastic vial and set it on the table. They were having lunch at Milano’s, a white-tablecloth Italian café in downtown Evanston.
    Lila held up her palm. Unlike Danny, she was reluctant to take any drug if she didn’t have to. “Thanks, Val, but they’d be wasted on me.” She smiled weakly and looked out the window. A few snowflakes drifted down, dissolving on contact with the sidewalk, uncertain whether they wanted to be there at all. Chicago winters were like that, she recalled. Furious blizzards followed by periods of apologetic calm.
    Her aunt shrugged and dumped the vial back in her bag. Val was as different from Casey as Lila was—had been—from Danny. Tall and statuesque, her aunt cut a dramatic figure, and she usually milked it. She could be amusing, even exciting, but she was often like Auntie Mame on steroids.
    Today she was trying for a vintage look, but her shawl was too large, her blouse too