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player ready...The heat that seared the city left at least 23 people dead. Among them was a man whose body was found in a tiny, sweltering room he rented for roughly $18 a night in a dilapidated boardinghouse on the Near West Side.
Few at the Royalton Hotel knew much about Riley Kimble, 59. But when news of the death reached his stepdaughter, she wished she could turn back time.
“In my mind, I wish I could have done more or spent more time. If I could have made time go back, so many things would have been done differently,” said Nicole Hughes, 42.
Kimble — like many of the victims of this month’s heat wave — died alone.
But his stepdaughter remembered when Kimble was a promising college student surrounded by friends and in love with his high school sweetheart. In those happier moments, Kimble would take his stepdaughter to the park, where they would capture bugs and chase fireflies.
That was before the schizophrenia. Before Kimble began talking to himself in a language only he could understand and ranting against ghosts only he could see.
On July 5, the day he was found, the temperature outside reached 103 degrees. It wasn’t any cooler inside the boardinghouse, where the windows in the lobby were painted shut. Those lucky enough to own an air conditioner had to pay an extra $5 a week. Maybe that was too much for Kimble, a slightly built man with graying hair who lived on disability checks and needed a social worker to bring him groceries and help him do his laundry.
Across the city and beyond, there were others like Kimble — isolated people who were smothered by the heat. A 100-year-old South Side woman collapsed in her yard. A 78-year-old man in La Grange who was found in a sweltering home where the temperature had reached 95 degrees. Most were old and infirm. Almost all were weakened by illness.
Each had a complicated, heartbreaking story. For Kimble, so much would have been different, his stepdaughter said, if it weren’t for the shadow of schizophrenia. “If he was in his right mind and he hadn’t gotten sick, my mom and he would still (have been) together,” Hughes said.
Kimble was the third of five boys raised by a single mother in the Robert Taylor Homes complex. He was small with a thin, muscular build, and he played on the basketball and football teams. His neighbor was Debra Hughes, a girl with high cheekbones, a big smile and, like him, dreams of escaping the projects.
“Both had a passion for education,” Nicole Hughes said.
Debra Hughes got pregnant with Nicole when she was just 16. Kimble went off to Prairie View A&M; University in Texas. Still, they stayed together — bound by their love for each other and their little girl, Nicole.
Kimble was at college when he suffered his first breakdown. “When he first got sick, I remember my mom saying he was coming back home to stay with us and he may be a little different. She said, ‘Don’t be afraid.’ I remember thinking, ‘That’s my dad. I’d never be afraid.'”
Back in Chicago, Kimble walked Hughes to school every morning and, after the last bell rang, walked her home. He carried her book bag and raced her to their front door, always letting her win.
He made salmon sushi rolls and took her out for anchovy pizza. She doesn’t remember if she liked the sushi or the anchovies, or if the real treat was spending time with her dad.
“My mom said I loved to do whatever he did,” Hughes said.
On the days when Kimble felt the schizophrenia edging into the corners of his mind, he told his stepdaughter to run across the street to her auntie’s house. She remembers him speaking in a strange language.
“He would make noise, but it wouldn’t be words. It would be like he was having a conversation with you, but none of it made sense. Me being a kid, I thought it was our playtime and that he was just playing.”
As she got older, it became clear that something was wrong. He wore flip-flops in the snow. Her friends teased her: “Your dad is the crazy man.”
When she was 10 years old, Kimble moved out. After that, Hughes would see him once or twice a year. He didn’t have much money, but he always brought her a gift that he had carefully wrapped and decorated with dried flowers.
In return, she brought him warm sweaters, because she knew he liked to roam.
“Some people don’t understand. But he was always good to me, and he took care of me the best he could,” Hughes said.
When she was 16, she learned that another man was her biological father. That didn’t matter much to her, or to Kimble.
“He treated me like I was his own,” she said. “And he was the only dad that I ever really knew.”
Debra and Nicole Hughes eventually moved to Arizona. Debra married another man but continued to speak to Kimble about once a week.
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A few years ago, Hughes saw her mother laughing on the phone.
Who are you talking to?
“Riley,” Debra Hughes replied, with a smile. “He’s still my best friend.”
Debra Hughes died of breast cancer in 2009, and Nicole lost touch with Kimble. She moved back to Chicago and sometimes drove by his old address, hoping to spot the man with the thin build and the graying braids who had once helped her understand math concepts by lining up cherries on their kitchen table.
She often wondered how he was doing.
The answer came July 6, when her aunt called.
A social worker, who came to check on Kimble three times a week, had knocked on his door, but there was no answer.
His neighbors didn’t know much about him, except that he liked to drink coffee and to watch soap operas in the lobby. He seemed kindhearted and would sometimes give out cans of Coca-Cola. They knew he struggled with mental illness. When he stopped taking his medication and started cursing in the lobby, someone at the front desk would call the social workers. But mostly, he seemed like just another man, struggling to survive. When the social worker found him, the room was stifling. All the windows were shut.
At the news of his death, Hughes sat down on her bed and cried for the only father she had ever known.
“He should have been living with me, because I had promised my mom that I would look after him and keep him close,” she said. “Everyone gets caught up in their own personal lives. Every day we say we’re going to do this or that. But time waits for no one. It goes by so fast.”