It was the best they could hope for.
“She’s through there,” Brin said tenderly, from just outside Derek’s spare room.
“Miss Neva?” a small voice asked.
And then Dob came through the door.
He’d gone from skinny to starved, and his clothes had maybe three good stitches between them. But he was alive.
“Dob,” she breathed, setting the drawing aside and opening her arms.
He snuggled into them eagerly, desperately.
The Irishwoman stepped inside.
Neva stroked Dob’s hair. “You found him—thank you.”
Brin smiled. “Didn’t take much. Just checked at Hull House again, like you asked. The little squeaker turned up there the other day.”
“Was he with anyone?”
She shook her head—his aunt and cousins were out of the picture, then, scattered during the fighting at the Fair ... Or worse. “I’ll leave you two be.”
Dob stood up once they were alone. Neva tried to do the same, but a tremor in her stomach doubled her back over.
“Are you all right, Miss Neva?”
“I will be,” she said, pressing her hands against her hips to brace her torso.
Dob didn’t look convinced.
“I was sick,” she elaborated, trying not to think of her miscarriage and how its pain lingered—perhaps because of the corruption she’d carried within her. “And then I got sick again,” she added, her thoughts gliding over how the bolt of Derek’s lightning that had detonated the Ferris Wheel had also worsened her condition.
“But you’re getting better?” The need in Dob’s voice was heartrending to hear.
“I am. Little by little.” Augie might have been able to shapeshift away such internal damage, but she’d yet to learn the trick and could only wait for her body to repair itself naturally.
Slowly, she released her hips and picked up the drawing. “Can I show you something?”
“Yes.”
She tapped her mother’s side of the sketch. “This is my family: my father, my mother, me, Derek, Augie, and ... my sister.”
Dob raised his eyebrows. “It’s very good.”
“Thank you.” Neva pointed to the space between her image and Derek’s. “Dob, would it be all right if I drew you in here?”
She didn’t add, “You can stay with me if we can’t find your aunt,” or “Brin will make sure we always have enough to eat,” or “Please be my son.” But even young as he was, the boy seemed to understand. Nodding, he gave her another hug, long and tight.
When she could trust her voice again, Neva gently disengaged herself and crouched to his level, ignoring her stomach’s discomfort. “There’s only one condition: we have to tell each other the truth.”
He started to nod again, but she held up her hand—and in it was the last cowry. Miraculously, the only remaining piece of the necklace had survived Derek’s heavy use of it, both at the Ferris Wheel and in the little row house two streets over, where he’d relied on the shell to enhance his electrical affinity and accelerate Augie’s reformations.
She’d need its strength now.
“The Columbian Exposition was a marvel,” she said softly, “the greatest spectacle mankind’s ever seen. Its legacy will live on forever. Yet it was also a mirage, a temporary paradise built on a swamp and returned to it by fire. Chicago changed its spots for a time, but not for long.”
Pausing to swallow, Neva remembered how the Court of Honor had glittered in the sunlight while homeless lined the streets outside the gates. How mostly white visitors had toured the Fair while mostly colored custodians cleaned up after them. How the anarchists had schemed to inspire with violence when compassionate leadership might have been enough.
Then she thought of how Mr. DeBell had taken her and her siblings in under false pretenses. How Augie had concealed his full abilities and predilections. And how she’d pretended to be pregnant before him on the Ferris Wheel, when in fact she’d lost the child months ago, bleeding it out in the front of the storage room while he regenerated in the back.
“Lies don’t last,” she continued eventually, “and when the mask comes off, everyone is laid bare. I won’t have that with you. So now I need to show you something else. Please don’t be afraid.”
Squeezing her fingers tight around the shell—oh God, what if she couldn’t do this? She hadn’t tried since leaving the Fair. Hadn’t tried, and hadn’t wanted to—Neva breathed in, out ...
And changed her skin.
Afterword
FANS OF ERIK LARSON will have guessed that I’ve read (and revere) his incredible The Devil in the White City. An exemplary work of narrative nonfiction, the book recounts how Daniel Burnham, an architect and urban planner, oversaw the building of the 1893 World’s Fair while Henry H. Holmes, one of America’s first recognized serial killers, stalked its exhibits and preyed upon young women. But my interest in the Fair predates my experience of Larson’s masterpiece.
During the summer of 2006, when I should have been progressing my never-to-be-completed dissertation on the Long Civil Rights Movement, I served as an intern at the Chicago Field Museum, which was founded with artifacts from the Fair’s Anthropology Building. My job was to photograph a selection of those artifacts and research their provenance. (This rarely felt like work!) Near the end of my time at the museum, someone recommended The Devil in the White City. I tried it, loved it ... and started mulling a stranger, more-fantastical version of Holmes and the investigator who eventually caught him.
Should I admit that I first tested the story by running a Dungeons & Dragons session set in the Fair? Probably not—that’s embarrassing. Let’s call it hearsay. But Neva’s tale has been rattling around my head for a while now, in large part because the Fair just fascinates me. And it clearly captivated people at the time: I’ve seen historians describe its contemporary attraction as a Super Bowl crossed with an Olympics, except that the resulting mega-event lasted six months and was filled with inventions and aesthetics whose influence is felt to this day. The towering Ferris Wheel was merely the tip of the iceberg.
Of course, when it seemed necessary to do so, I
