by Laila Lalami
But that was the trouble. I could never be sure he was serious. “Yeah, whatever.”
“And the group leader, what’s-his-name, he was nice.”
“Rossi.”
“Seems like a good guy.”
“He is. You’re really going to be back next week?”
“I said I would, and I will. Wanna go bowling?”
“It’s getting late.”
“Dude. It’s only nine.”
I thought for a minute. “Let’s go to Desert Arcade.”
“Nah. That place is lame.”
“You want to go bowling or not?”
I drove down the highway until I saw the bright new sign for the Pantry—so bright you could see it from a block away—but the restaurant was already closed by the time we pulled into the parking lot. Only the bowling alley next door was open. I didn’t know why I’d wanted to come here or what I was hoping for, exactly, but ever since I’d seen Nora at McLean’s, I’d been under the grip of nostalgia.
“It’s pretty empty,” Fierro said when we walked into the arcade.
And it wasn’t hard to see why: the carpet was threadbare, the lighting was bland, the video game consoles were old. But there were ten perfectly polished lanes and plenty of room to play. I went up to the counter, and old Mr. Baker put away his newspaper and stood up. I’d gone to high school with his son, A.J., but I could tell he didn’t recognize me; I looked different without all that weight I’d once carried.
Fierro and I ordered a couple of games and rental shoes, then walked across the concourse to lane 2. Three lanes down from us, a family of five was halfway through their game. They were in matching shirts—green jerseys with white trim on the side and a league name embroidered on the back. The Pin Pushers. They were laughing at some private joke, excited at the evening that lay ahead. We started bowling. It was ’80s night and I hummed along with songs I’d first heard when I was in grade school, but Fierro said he didn’t know half of them. He’d grown up in Havana, Texas, and only moved with his mother to Desert Hot Springs when his parents split up. “They didn’t have music in Havana?” I said. “I thought you guys liked to mambo.”
“We didn’t even have a radio,” he said. “My dad was looking for things to sell to pay for his heroin, and when he found out I was hiding the radio under my bed, he took it from me and beat me up. I was eight years old. First thing my mom did when we finally moved out to California was buy us a stereo.”
He told me stories like this all the time. At least I have some good memories of the old man, I thought. My father was a drunk now, and a belligerent one at that, but he’d once been a decent father and a good husband. Helping with homework, running to the store for milk, showing up at PTA meetings. On Saturdays, he would get up early and make breakfast for the whole family—not just pancakes, but eggs and bacon and potatoes and fresh orange juice—after which we would all gather in the living room in our pajamas to watch a movie. But that last weekend, in the middle of a repeat of Freaky Friday, my mother had started to cough and couldn’t stop. I said we should call the doctor, but my father thought she’d put too much hot sauce on her eggs; he patted her knee and told her to drink some water. Two days later she died, and our family fell apart like a house of cards.
Now my sister lived only five miles from me, but our encounters were uncomfortable, which was one reason I’d asked Fierro to come with me to her barbecue the previous weekend. We’d sat under string lights on her deck, enjoying our grilled chicken and potato salad, and then she’d asked me how I was sleeping. When I told her I might have to go back on Ambien again, she’d turned it into a recruiting opportunity. Gave me a diagnosis of what ailed me and how I could fix it. All of which led to an invitation to one of her Bible study groups. Meanwhile, my dad sat in the big lawn chair, drinking and holding forth on the war in Iraq. He’d served in the Army Reserve, did a brief stint as an equipment-repair technician in Kuwait during Desert Storm, and somehow that made him an expert. But he’d never had to see intestines hanging like garlands from a pomegranate tree, never had to break down someone’s door at three a.m., never had to hold a gun on a mother while the males of the household were rounded up, never had to put a tourniquet on what was left of Sanger’s arm, never had to walk past the bodies left behind on the street, their eyes and noses and mouths obliterated by militias from one faction or another. Talking about the fallen came more easily to those who hadn’t witnessed the falling. So we’d had another one of our arguments, him insisting that Saddam was a threat to our freedoms, that we’d liberated the country from a tyrant, that we’d helped the women, and me asking him what Saddam had to do with our freedoms, where those WMDs were, and how those bombs were working out for the women. These arguments had long ago become rehearsed. Circular, even. It didn’t matter what I said, my father would always return to the same point. Saddam was a bad guy, we’re the good guys. The two of us weren’t fighting about the war, we were fighting about something else, something that had lain unspoken between us for many years.
“Bam!” Fierro said. He’d just scored his first strike of the game. “You’re going down, dude.” He sat in a swivel chair, spreading his legs in a self-satisfied way, and took a swig from his Coke.
“We’ll see about that,” I said with a laugh. I picked up a ball and, coming up to the foul line in stride, released it and hit eight pins.
“We should get us some of ’em bowling shirts,” Fierro said with a glance at the family in the lane nearby. “We could be The Deadly Pins. Wait, no. The Mortal Pins! How’s that?”
I picked up another ball and went back to the line. I knew before I threw it that I’d hit the last two pins and score a spare. The thing about Fierro was, he was a good player, but he was easily distracted. He missed two easy shots because he kept chattering. I beat him handily.
After the game, I drove him back to Desert Hot Springs. The moon had already risen and the streets were empty and quiet, but there was some kind of outdoor celebration in his apartment complex, with loud music playing and kids splashing in the pool. He eyed the partiers wearily, then got out of the car and reached through the open window to shake my hand. “See you next week, brother.”
I got back on the highway, taking my time going home. Under my headlights, the yellow lines that marked the edge of the lane passed ceaselessly. I’d turned in my final paper for the spring semester, and I had hours and hours to kill before I could hope to fall asleep. Dolly Parton’s “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind” came on the radio and, whether because of the mood it set or because of my bout of nostalgia, I found myself thinking again about that dinner with Nora, going over every detail as if to sear it in my mind.
Efraín
After the old man robbed me of the pleasure of watching my daughter’s performance in the school play, he invaded my dreams. Nearly every night, I returned to that little stretch of the 62, my hands covered with grease, and watched his body roll off the hood of the car and land on the pavement. I thought of him now as Guerrero. Merciless in his campaign against me. Early in the morning, when I shaved by the yellow light above the bathroom mirror, he bumped against me and made me cut myself. In the van, while Enrique read the map, Guerrero was in the back, sabotaging our equipment by poking a hole in the carpet-cleaning hose or raiding our food supplies. I couldn’t find my Inca Kola when I opened my lunchbox, even though I had put it there myself. “You can have some of mine,” Enrique said, handing me his can. A button was missing on his uniform shirt and I wondered if that, too, was Guerrero’s doing.
Part of me, the part that had coolly measured the cost of calling the police and decided it was too high, knew that this was all in my head. It wasn’t the first time I had nicked myself while shaving, the carpet-cleaning hose was very old, Marisela had replaced my soda with water when my back was turned. But another part of me scrupulously tracked all the mishaps and setbacks I had suffered since the night of
the accident and held up the tally to me at every opportunity. The longer I refused to come forward, the longer the list grew.
It surprised me that my memory of the accident did not dull with time, but became clearer instead. Now I was certain, or nearly certain, that the car that struck Guerrero was silver and that, whatever make or model it was, it had a long hood. And there was a sticker on the rear side window, round and red, an advertisement of some kind. Perhaps memory is not merely the preservation of a moment in the mind, but the process of repeatedly returning to it, carefully breaking it up in parts and assembling them again until we can make sense of what we remember. Several times a day, I returned to that moment on the highway, seeing it differently each time, as if it had been cast under a new light.
I didn’t tell my wife about the new details that had come to me, and she didn’t mention the accident on Saturday night when, exhausted from work and lack of sleep, I lay down on the sofa with my head on her lap. All I wanted was to forget, and yet my mind was diligently working on the opposite, forcing me back to that night on the 62. It was as though I were stuck in time, forced to relive, again and again, what had happened that night. Marisela seemed to have made her peace with my silence, because she stroked my hair while she watched Don Francisco on Sábado Gigante, and didn’t ask me any questions.
Nor did she bring up the accident on Sunday morning when we took the children to church. From his pulpit beneath the stained-glass windows, the priest spoke of the sacrament of penance, quoting from the Book of Psalms: “Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity.” Oh, I knew what he meant. Confess, and your guilt will be forgiven.
But I had committed no crime, so why should I feel guilty?
And yet I did. It was guilt that weighed so heavily on me, and that made me revisit the accident so often over the past few days. I wanted desperately to be free of it, but walking back home, with Daniel’s hand in mine and Elena skipping over the lines on the sidewalk, I wondered whether forgiveness was worth all the things it could cost me. As we waited to cross the road, Marisela gave me a funny look. “What is it?” I asked.
“Your socks,” she said.
I looked down and saw that one sock was blue and the other was black.
“I noticed when we were in church,” she said with a little laugh. “But I couldn’t say anything then.”
My God, how I loved her smile. It was what had attracted my attention the first time I had seen her, on a crowded bus in Torreón, many years ago. She was smiling politely at something the conductor had said. In spite of the summer heat, she was in a long-sleeved black dress and shoes, and her hair was plaited in a severe braid on the side. It took a week before I ran into her again, and another before I caught on that she was a widow. But she barely acknowledged me, she was still wrapped up in memories of her dead husband, and I realized that I would have to compete with him for my happiness. My cousin Alonso, as usual, said there was no hope. “Nine months and she’s still wearing black,” he said. “He must have been some man.”
“Whose side are you on?” I asked.
It only made me more determined to talk to her. By asking around, I found out that she had two sisters who owned a hair salon in the neighborhood. Half sisters, I should say. They were much older, but neither of them was married or had a family. Instead, the two old crones had recast themselves as protectors of the beautiful Marisela. If I wanted a proper introduction, I would have to go through them. I was not rich or handsome, but I had been saving up for years to go north, and I suppose they saw this as a sign of ambition—something that Marisela’s first husband had apparently lacked. They made the introduction, and I was able to court Marisela. This is why I can never complain that we send them money every month, even though we have so little of it ourselves. But now another dead man was troubling my peace, and this time there were no magical stepsisters to save me.
Nora
A day passed, then another. I tried to go back to the routine of ordinary life, but I was unprepared for the brutality with which it greeted me. When I checked my email, I found two rejections, one from the Pacific Music Festival and the other from Banff. The PMF note was boilerplate, but the judges at Banff had written that my composition was “too cerebral” and “didn’t quite fit our aesthetic.” Every time I tried to parse what this meant, I came up with nothing. I had no idea what the judges were trying to say. What purpose did such criticism serve? I couldn’t do anything with it.
For several weeks before my father’s death, I had been working on a series of jazz pieces inspired by my first trip to Morocco, when my parents had taken my sister and me to meet their relatives. My great-grandmother was still alive at the time, and we had taken the train from Casablanca to Marrakesh to visit her. We arrived at dusk and, walking through the throngs of food vendors and snake charmers and fortune-tellers on the Jamaat el-Fna, we’d stopped to watch a troupe of acrobats performing. Some of them were teens roughly my age, but others were much younger. All were barefoot and moved with an agility I had never witnessed before. They jumped and cartwheeled and backflipped until, rolling in twos and threes, they landed in a perfect pyramid. We were jostled by the crowd, and my parents and sister moved on, heading toward the north side of the square, but I stayed where I was, transfixed by the pattern of the acrobats’ movements. Each boy performed alone, yet in community with the others. It was that moment I was trying to capture in music, years later.
The rejection from Banff wasn’t unusual and, in any case, it was for a piece that was still under consideration by several other festivals, but it had found me in a state of such intense grief that it shattered me. All of my insecurities seeped out at once. I hadn’t trained at a conservatory, hadn’t apprenticed with a renowned soloist, hadn’t attracted the attention of a good mentor, hadn’t played gigs at the Fillmore or the Blue Note. In the jazz bands or chamber orchestras I’d performed with over the years, I was often the only woman, the odd one out. And I liked to write in different traditions, jazz and classical, which meant that my place in the music world was not quite settled. Perhaps it would never be.
That evening, alone in the cabin, I opened Sibelius on my laptop, and it was as if I were looking at someone else’s notations. I couldn’t get the judges’ words out of my head. My work was too cerebral. Too out there. Too something or other. I don’t know how long I sat on that old sofa, an hour or two or three, but the composition stopped exciting me or inspiring me or even making any sense to me. Maybe I needed to get rid of it. Erase it and start over. My cursor was poised over the Delete button when I heard a car pull up the driveway. A moment later, there was a knock at the door.
The sun was setting, and in its orange glow Jeremy’s eyes looked green rather than blue. He was in hiking pants and boots, and he jingled his keys nervously. “I was on my way to Hidden Valley,” he said, “and I wondered if you wanted to come.”
“Now? It’s past seven.”
“The heat’s finally breaking. And there’s a full moon tonight.”
The sky was the color of a ripe apricot. Soon it would be night, the cabin would be cast in even deeper silence, and I would be alone again, facing my score. Above the swamp cooler the turtledove cooed. We both turned to look. “She’s got eggs in there,” I said.
“Or he does.”
“How can you tell it’s a male?”
“I can’t, I just know they take turns incubating.”
So that was why the nest was never empty. I had begun to wonder how the poor dove fed itself if it was sitting in there all the time. Now it tilted its head sideways and stared at us with curiosity. “Come inside while I get my shoes,” I said.
The cabin was barely furnished. The sofa, the chair, the coffee table—these were solid and comfortable, but they held no history and revealed nothing about me. There were no mementoes on the shelves, no family pictures on the wall. I closed Sibelius before Jerem
y could ask about my music. “My mom made that,” I said when I saw him looking at the ridiculous arrangement of dried flowers above the fireplace. I finished tying my shoelaces and stood up. “I don’t know if I have a water bottle,” I said, walking to the kitchenette and opening and closing cabinets at random.
“I have one in the car.”
“Flashlight?”
“I have that, too.”
In the car, I lowered my window and let the wind whip through, its hum a stand-in for conversation. The town lights sparkled in the desert, but once we drove into the national park, darkness wrapped itself around us. In the distance were giant boulders and, everywhere on the plain beneath them, Joshua trees. I had always loved the oaks and pines and redwoods of the Bay Area, with their long and leafy limbs, but I had missed the desert trees: stout, prickly, wild-armed, and yet utterly fragile. It was only after I had left my hometown that I had really taken the full measure of how rare they were.
When we got to Hidden Valley, we found the metal gate locked. A sign said that the trail was closed after sunset. But Jeremy parked the car on the side of the road, got out, and hopped easily over the gate. “You coming?” he called. We started walking. Though the moon was still low in the sky, it was bright enough that there was no need for a flashlight. An owl flew overhead, its wings so quiet that we didn’t see the bird until it was ten feet past us.
“It’s nice that the park is so quiet,” I said.
“That’s why I prefer summers here. No tourists, just locals.”
“Like me?” I asked with a chuckle.
“Like you.”
For a while, we walked in silence, the only sound the crunching of the dirt underneath our shoes. The rhythm of it was calming, and I took a deep breath. The air smelled faintly of sage.
Half a mile down the trail, Jeremy pointed to a boulder formation. “There’s a good view from up there.”