On the second Saturday of December, 1986, the fifth floor of Halloran Brothers on State Street was the loudest place in Chicago, and Regina Castellano walked into it like a woman walking into a fight she had already decided to win.
The toy floor had been dressed for the season by someone who believed that more was always more. Tinsel hung in silver curtains from the light fixtures and shivered every time the escalators breathed warm air up from below. Strings of colored bulbs, the fat old-fashioned kind, red and green and cobalt and a hot candy orange, ran along the tops of every display case. And from the high plaster ceiling, on wires so thin they were nearly invisible, hung giant glass ornaments, each one as big as a beach ball, gold and crimson and peacock blue, turning slowly in the drafts so that the whole floor seemed to be underwater in a sea of floating Christmas. Along the east wall, the tall arched windows let in a snowy gray daylight that made the bulbs glow brighter by comparison, and through the glass you could see the flakes coming down sideways over State Street, over the taxis and the bundled shoppers and the Salvation Army bell ringer on the corner of Washington.
None of this was what Gina was looking at.
She was looking at the end of aisle nine, top shelf, where a single pink-and-silver box sat alone in a space that had been built to hold sixty.
She had come straight from the escalator without slowing, and she was carrying three shopping bags in one gloved hand — a Halloran's bag, a bag from the perfume counter at Carson's, and a paper sack from the Italian bakery on Taylor Street that contained, at that moment, a dozen pizzelle she had promised her mother and had already eaten two of. Her burgundy faux-fur coat was open over a cream cable-knit sweater dress, and her gold hoops swung when she moved, which was constantly. Her hair, a glossy brunette blowout she had paid good money for that morning and had defended from the snow with an umbrella and a great deal of swearing, bounced against her shoulders. She had done her face for battle: arched brows, soft brown winged liner, fluttery lashes, a sweep of rosy blush high on each cheek, and lips glossed a mauve-pink that her cousin Donna had once described as "expensive, but like you're not trying." Gina was trying. She was always trying. She just knew how to make it look like she wasn't.
Between her and the shelf stood perhaps forty people, a double stroller, a man in a Bears jacket holding a remote-control truck over his head like a trophy, and a grandmother who had stopped dead in the middle of the aisle to read the back of a board game.
"Excuse me, coming through!"
She said it the way her father had taught her to say it in the crowds at Comiskey Park, with a smile in the voice and a shoulder already turning, so that by the time people heard the words she was past them. The grandmother looked up, startled. The man in the Bears jacket lifted his truck higher to keep it out of her way. Gina slipped between the double stroller and a display of plush reindeer, and there it was, eye level now, the last one: a Starlight Sweetheart doll, with yarn hair the color of butterscotch and a little felt star stitched over her heart that glowed in the dark, which the commercial said would "keep the bad dreams away." When you held her hand she sang the first verse of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" in a voice like a music box with a head cold. Every child in America wanted one. Every store in Chicago had been sold out since Thanksgiving. The Tribune had run a story about it on page three, under a photograph of a woman in Schaumburg weeping in a parking lot.
Gina reached up.