by Laila Lalami
“Eleven.”
Just as I thought. So young, and yet so sure. I had been like that, once. I had recited the Qur’an at the msid, hardened my knees on the straw mats of our neighborhood mosque, kept the fast not just in Ramadan, but for a few days in Shawaal and Sha’baan as well. These rituals consoled me; they told me that the world was what it was because of sin, whether its manifestations were seductive or repellent, and all I needed to do was resist it. There was a mathematical elegance to faith like this: believe in God, follow His rules, and you will be rewarded; disbelieve, disobey, and you will be punished. But one day Mr. Fathi, my middle-school religion teacher, told the class about the seven stages of hell. I was familiar enough with the rivers of fire and fountains of pus and blood that awaited sinners, but that day the lesson was about how these people would find no respite even after their bodies burned—their skin would grow back only to burn anew. That made me think of Mr. Nguyen, who had a burn scar along his left arm, the result of a confrontation with French settlers during the war in his country. I loved Mr. Nguyen, as did the rest of the class, because he made algebra seem like child’s play. That was the closest thing to a miracle I had ever witnessed. So I asked Mr. Fathi whether his friend Mr. Nguyen would burn in hell, too, with all the other unbelievers. Instead of an answer, I was given a whack on the head and told not to interrupt the lesson again. I was only a couple of years older than this boy, Qasim. My doubts were born that day. Over the years they grew, until one day they were all I had.
“Do you think,” I asked the boy, “that maybe your faith has other things to worry about than my daughter’s legs?”
Qasim only gave me a sad look, as though I had personally disappointed him, and had failed in raising my daughter, somehow. Inside the mosque, the last call to prayer rose, and he turned to go, but I wouldn’t let him. “Tell me,” I said, holding him back by the wrist. He didn’t want to argue, and perhaps my hold on him was too strong, because he gave a whimper.
An old man I hadn’t noticed before appeared suddenly before me. It was the imam. He had dark hair, a carefully trimmed beard, the same green eyes as Qasim. He started quoting the Qur’an to me. (“Tell the believing women not to reveal their adornment except for that which is apparent.”) I counter-quoted. (“Tell the believing men to avert their gaze.”) He claimed veiling was required by tradition; I insisted that tradition tells us only the Prophet’s wives covered. He warned that women ought not to tempt men in the mosque; I mocked the men who would be so easily distracted from their worship. Finally, he said he had to go inside, that we could discuss this some other time, because right now he had a prayer to lead.
I lit a fresh cigarette and waited until Maryam and the girls came out. In the car on the way back, I told my wife what happened, but instead of taking my side, she complained that I had embarrassed her in front of the congregation. I was stunned. “But you don’t even know these people,” I said. “And I’m your husband.”
“I know Mrs. Hammadi, but you just had to start—”
“Okay, but that’s it. You don’t know anyone else.”
“—arguing with the imam like you know better than him.”
“Of course, I know better. I don’t need him to tell me right from wrong.”
“That skirt was too sheer, I told Nora before we—”
“Oh, no, no, no. Don’t make this to be her fault. You’re the one who—”
“—left the house. Why doesn’t she ever listen to me?”
“—dragged us all out here. And for what?”
In the backseat, Nora put on her headphones and stared out of the window. My wife and I continued bickering for a while, dredging up old arguments and using them against each other, but when I turned onto the 62, I was struck silent by the view. It was a cold, clear day in December, and there was snow on the peaks of the Little San Bernardino Mountains. The valley was a blanket of high grass and mesquite and yucca, slowly warming up under the morning sun, and after the road dipped and rose and turned, we reached the first grove of Joshua trees. How hard the believers make it to get into heaven, I thought, when they have all this right here.
Coleman
I remember this case well. It was the first homicide I investigated after I transferred here from Washington, D.C., in the spring of 2014. I’m from New York, originally, but D.C. is where I grew up, where I went to school, and where I worked for fifteen years, so it was a difficult move for me. Even more so for Miles. I could see it in his eyes when we asked him about his day while we ate dinner. He’d jab at his potatoes with a fork, answer our questions with yes or no, or sometimes just a shrug, then lock himself in his room to play video games. Miles used to be a sweet kid, you could even say a mama’s boy, but he wouldn’t let me kiss him good night anymore. Moving away from home is hard on a kid, I knew that, but it’s not as if it didn’t happen every day in this country. Hell, in the world. How did other people do it? That’s what I wanted to know.
It wasn’t even my idea to move out here, to the middle of the desert. It was Ray’s, after he was offered district manager at Enterprise in Palm Springs. He’d waited so long for a promotion, watched so many others with less experience get ahead, that he knew if he didn’t take this offer, another one might not come along. And it worked out well for him—he made more money, we could afford a bigger house, there was no snow to shovel in the winter, he could root for the Lakers. You would think he would’ve taken it a little easy, being manager and all, but he worked even harder. Every night, he studied his sales statements, going down each column with a little ruler so he wouldn’t miss a zero or a comma. Ray has always been comfortable with numbers; they’ve never disappointed him, never held any mystery or complication. Sometimes, going through his sales, he talked to himself.
Meanwhile, Miles was in his room, sulking.
So my work came as a relief to me. I don’t mean that it was pleasant. Having to witness a family’s grief is never pleasant, but I had some experience with it. I could compartmentalize it. I could try to solve the case, give the family some closure, even if I didn’t have much to work with at first. No usable tire marks. No debris from the vehicle. No surveillance cameras anywhere near that intersection. The only witness a jogger who found the body after the impact. Autopsy didn’t turn up any drugs or alcohol. The victim had no money troubles or history of gambling, so he seemed like a pretty boring guy—at least, until I went through some of the texts on his cell phone, but even those didn’t add up to a lead. My hopes were pinned on three microscopic paint chips that CSU recovered from the victim’s clothing. That’s it. That’s all I had.
Which meant I had to talk to Murphy. I didn’t have any complaints about his work, not exactly, it’s just that the way he went about it made me a little uncomfortable. He was used to doing things a certain way. He’d been in the Crime Lab for something like forty years. He could’ve retired if he wanted to, but instead there he was, week in, week out, in a white lab coat with his name embroidered on the breast pocket like a real doctor. And I couldn’t say anything about it because I knew how it would play with the sergeant—like I couldn’t take the heat or like I was asking for special treatment. I was still new at the station. Murphy’s been here since Noah built his ark.
Anyway, I went to see Murphy about the paint chips. His office had a huge window, so he got a lot of natural light for his cactuses. Or cacti, Murphy called them. The potted plants sat on opposite ends of a polished wood shelf, and in between there was a stereo system that played classical music at low volume. Framed art posters hung on the far wall. In the corner, he had a little coffee station, with an espresso machine, cups, saucers, napkins. And he also had a hot plate, which of course was a fire hazard, but, like I said, he’s been here forty years. Really, he treated the place more like a living room than an office. The door was open, but I gave a little knock. “Murphy. You got an update for me?”
“Erica!” he said with a smil
e. He always called me by my first name, which I wasn’t used to, and which made me pause.
“Anything on those paint chips you sent out to San Bernardino?”
“They usually take a few days. Would you like some coffee?”
“I just had some, thanks. Can you just check if they’re back?”
“Red is a great color on you,” he said with a glance at my chest. Immediately, I regretted leaving my jacket at my desk.
“Can you check?”
“Remind me the name?”
“Guerraoui. Hit-and-run on April 28.”
He finally turned back to his computer and looked for the report. “You’re in luck,” he said. “They just posted it in this morning. FTIR says the paint is actually silver.”
“Silver?”
“Silver. Looks like it came from a vehicle manufactured by Ford between 1992 and 1998.”
“Any idea on the model?”
“Taurus, Crown Vic, Mustang, Explorer. Take your pick.” The printer on his desk whirred as the report came out. He handed it to me. “They used it all over the place.”
“I thought you said I was in luck.”
“Could be worse.”
I didn’t see how. The day before, I’d asked Sergeant Vasco for a recanvass, but he said he couldn’t spare any deputies at the moment. This isn’t Metro P.D., he said, we don’t have the same resources here. It was like he was testing me, trying to see if I could close this case without help from his uniforms, and the strange thing is that the hurdles he put up made me even more committed. I didn’t have to prove myself to someone like him, not with my record at Metro, and yet that’s exactly what I found myself doing.
“You sure you don’t want coffee?” Murphy asked. “I just got a new batch of Ethiopian.”
“Is this your family?” I said, raising my chin toward the framed photo of a blonde woman and a blue-eyed kid with their arms around each other. I was trying to shame Murphy a little bit, point out that a sixty-some-year-old married guy shouldn’t be acting like this.
“Yes, that’s my son. And that’s my sister,” he said. “My ex moved to Seattle four years ago, so my sister is helping me raise him.”
Well. I stuffed my hands in my pocket, did a little math in my head. “He looks about the same age as my son,” I said, careful to leave the surprise out of my voice.
“How old is yours?”
“He just turned thirteen. He’s in the seventh grade.”
“What school?”
“La Contenta. Yours?”
“Same.” He looked me in the eye for the first time, and smiled. He had a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, a bit on the long side, but combed back neatly behind his ears. “Maybe they know each other,” he said.
“I doubt it.” Miles hadn’t made any friends; that was part of why he resented us for moving out here. “It’s a big school.”
“That it is,” he said. “Does your son like baseball? We have a standing game on Saturdays in the community park. He’d be welcome anytime.”
“Oh,” I said, a little taken aback. I had tried to strike up a conversation with the moms at Miles’s school, and they’d seemed friendly enough, but their interest had cooled when they found out I couldn’t chaperone the seventh-grade field trip or volunteer at the spring book fair or cover a table at the fundraising picnic. Several of them were stay-at-home moms and the rest had nine-to-five jobs, so they could arrange these activities around their schedules. But I couldn’t, not with my line of work. When I suggested Ray could take my place, they looked baffled. Why would a man want to do the bake sale? Of course, they didn’t come out and say it like that; they just went ahead and did the bake sale without telling him about it. “Thanks, Murphy. I’ll tell Miles about the game.”
“Okay. And I’ll let you know if we find anything more on that paint. Sometimes it takes them a few days to narrow it down to a specific model.”
Leaving Murphy’s office that morning, I took the long way back to my desk. I didn’t want to run into the sergeant and have him ask me for an update unless I had something solid to give him. All I had were three paint chips, one of which the forensics lab in San Bernardino had already dissolved into gas. Nothing more than thin air.
Jeremy
It was a pretty little house with two Adirondack chairs out front, a wind chime hanging from the eaves, and a wooden rail fence surrounding the yard. Fierro used to call it The Ranch. Time to go back to The Ranch, he’d say when we went bowling. He’d make it sound like he was sorry to have to go so soon, even though his eyes smiled with anticipation at being with his new wife, in their new house. In the driveway now was a silver Mustang coupe, every inch of it smashed, dented, or scratched. A side mirror sat in a pool of shattered glass, reflecting the moonlight. The name FIERRO had been recently peeled off the mailbox, leaving its ghost outlined in gray tracks. I walked up the little concrete path and knocked on the front door.
From the other side came the sound of someone flipping up the peephole, looking, hesitating. Finally, the door opened. “What’re you doing here?” Mary asked. Under her red hair, her eyes were red. She was in a white tank top that showed the tattoo on her upper arm. Death before dishonor. She’d gotten it as a welcome-home surprise for Fierro, a celebration of his Bronze Star, but he’d hated it. Asked her why she’d ruin her beautiful skin like that.
“You okay?”
“No, I’m not okay.” Her voice cut like glass.
“Sorry. That was a stupid thing to say.”
“He scared the shit out of me, trashed my car, and the whole time he was laughing about it. He couldn’t even let me have this one thing, this one little thing. Fucking asshole.”
I’d never heard her curse. She was one of those girls who said fudge and shoot and darnit, and whenever anyone around her cussed, she’d blush for them. Fierro had been so charmed by this, he’d proposed to her on the last day of his second R&R. Wait until you get back, Sergeant Fletcher told him when he heard about it, don’t make the same mistake I did. But Fierro wouldn’t listen, he was crazy about her. She was nineteen, enrolled in cosmetology school, dreaming of working on a Hollywood set someday. This is the girl I’m gonna marry, he said. And he did.
“I’m sorry, Mary.” I was trying to think of a graceful way to ask her to drop her complaint, see if she could accept some kind of payment for the car, but when I touched her arm, she pulled back from me with fear in her eyes. I was startled, and took a step back from the threshold myself. Something about the way she looked at me made me feel tainted, as if Fierro’s crime said something about me, too. But just because we’d been in the Marines together didn’t mean we were the same. Whatever troubled Fierro had started long before he’d gone to war. Surely she knew that. Still, the look in her eyes stopped me from bringing this up. “Listen,” I said after a minute. “Change the locks.”
“Yeah, I know. Locksmith left an hour ago.”
“And get a dog.”
“That’s it? That’s your advice? Why don’t you tell him to leave me the hell alone? If you really wanted to help, that’s what you’d do. Keep him away from me.”
“I already told him this, Mary. He wouldn’t listen.” Again, I felt the heat of her rage. I saw how badly I had miscalculated, coming here to try to fix things. I was only making them worse.
A gust of dry wind blew across the street and a piece of glass fell from a window of the Mustang and crashed on the driveway. Mary glanced at it, then fixed her green eyes on me again. “You know, if someone had told me five years ago that you’d be the one with a steady job and going to college, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
I wanted to tell her that I wouldn’t have believed it, either. Five years ago, Fierro had landed a job in security at the Indian casino in Morongo, while I had to get by on roofing work whenever I could find it. Five years ago, I’d gotten so drunk at the
ir wedding that I’d thrown up in the water fountain where rose petals had been set to float. Five years ago, I couldn’t have put a name to the bridesmaid I woke up with the next day at the Travelodge, her blond hair a tangle of ornate pins and glitter against my chest. I lost a year, maybe a year and a half, like that, just drifting, trying to fill the hole in me that I thought the war had left, until I realized it was the same hole I had gone into the Marines to fill in the first place. I was living with my sister at the time, and she kept telling me to go to church and stop drinking so much. Promise me, she begged, promise me. I’d kept half of that promise. Some weeks later, I was driving back from a roofing job when I noticed a billboard advertisement for the police academy in San Bernardino.
Maybe that feeling of being out of place would eventually clear up for Fierro, just as it had for me. But he needed to work at it. “He can get better,” I said.
“Yeah, well. Good luck with that. I tried. I’m done trying.”
And with this, she pushed the door closed.
Nora
In my memory, the cafeteria at Yucca Mesa Elementary was immense, but that evening it seemed small and cramped. This was an illusion, of course, because the cafeteria hadn’t changed; I had. Folding chairs had been set up in a dozen neat rows, but nearly half the seats were already taken, and sweaters and scarves marked the spaces that were being saved. In the center aisle, an old man in a Dodgers cap was mounting his camera on a tripod. I followed my mother down to the front row, where Salma sat alone, staring at her cell phone. We kissed each other on the cheeks. “Where’s Tareq?” my mother asked Salma.
“Emergency tooth repair.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “It’s too bad he’ll miss the play.”
“That’s how it is when you run a practice,” my sister said coolly.
I turned my attention to the program booklet. Sleeping Beauty, the title said in gold lettering. I skipped past the director’s introduction, the donors’ list, the appeals for fundraising for next year’s performance, and looked for the twins’ names on the cast list. Aida and Zaid were to play night watchmen. “Do they have any lines?” I asked.