by Laila Lalami
“Let’s see it, then.”
He went first, calling out any slippery spots when he came to them, but I matched his pace easily. Somehow my body had retained the memory of scaling these rocks dozens of times as a child. At the top we sat down, our legs stretched before us, and watched the valley beneath. The moonlight silvered the landscape, softening its features in places and in others casting them in harsh angles. It was peaceful, but beneath the silence, I knew, life still pulsed in all its beauty and violence. Bats fed, owls hunted, lizards crawled out of their holes. I wondered whether there would ever be a time when I would be at peace, when my heart would not feel as though lead had been cast inside it. In the past, I had found in music a refuge from my sorrows and disappointments, but now I wasn’t sure it could be, not when it could be reduced by a panel of judges to a few dismissive words. “Do you still play music?” I asked.
“No, not since high school. I don’t even know where my guitar is. Probably somewhere in my dad’s garage.”
“Remember when we went on a field trip to see the L.A. Phil?”
“Of course. Senior year.”
“It was the first time I’d seen a Frank Gehry building. First time I’d been in a concert hall, even. I sat next to a woman in a satin gown and gloves who kept pointing out to her husband all the people she knew in the audience. She said she was excited to hear Massenet. That the Philharmonic played him too rarely. But afterward she said she didn’t like the performance because the conducting had been rebarbative. Rebarbative! It was a word I’d only ever seen in books. I’d never heard anyone say it. I thought everyone in big cities talked like that. I couldn’t wait to go to college.”
“I remember that day,” he said softly. “We ate lunch together.”
“We did?” From the way he looked at me, it seemed the moment held some significance, but I couldn’t tell what it was. How strange the work of memory, I thought. What some people remembered and others forgot.
After a moment, he asked, “Was Stanford like you thought it would be?”
“Yes and no,” I said. Only the buildings were exactly as advertised in the brochure; everything else about the place was different, beginning with the people. I was the only Arab in my high school, but now there were people from many different backgrounds in my dorm, and that made me feel less alone. Still, whenever I opened my mouth, I singled myself out as a country bumpkin. Once, in freshman comp, I answered a question about architectural design by talking about the “bow arts.” Beaux Arts, my professor corrected with an amused laugh, the x is pronounced z, and the t and the s are silent. It seemed to me I would never wash off the trace of the countryside from my speech, my clothes, myself. But eventually I adjusted, and even learned to enjoy everything the city had to offer. “I’d dreamed about it for so long,” I said, “that it was bound not to be the way I imagined it.”
From a cluster of shrubs in the distance came the rat-a-tat of a cactus wren. I glanced over Jeremy’s shoulder in the direction of the sound and when it stopped I saw that his eyes were fixed on me. A flicker of desire in them. Without knowing why, I wanted to blow it out. Snuff it before it had a chance to start kindling. “Have you ever heard of Max Bloemhof?”
“No. Who’s he?”
“He wrote a great book about apartheid in South Africa, called Before Night Comes. Some people think of it as a modern classic. He also wrote We Ourselves, about Northern Ireland. Not as good, but it was a huge bestseller.”
“Wait, I think I know who you’re talking about. I saw him on The Daily Show once.”
“That’s him. I met him at an artists’ colony in upstate New York. I didn’t know anyone there, but he sat next to me one night and talked to me and made me feel at ease. He asked what I was working on, and then when he heard the chamber piece I’d just finished, he said I was the most talented musician he’d ever heard at the residency. I guess I was flattered by his attention. And later, he said I was the love of his life, that he couldn’t live without me.” I wrapped my arms around my knees and rested my chin on them. My throat felt dry.
“But…” Jeremy prompted.
“He was married. He said he was already separated, it was a matter of time before he divorced, he had to be careful because of his kids. But he never broke it off. Three weeks ago, I told him he had to choose. And I guess he did choose, because I haven’t heard from him since.”
There, it was done. Now he would let go of the past, stop thinking of me as the girl at the ice-cream parlor, or the girl at the concert hall, or whatever other fiction he had spun about me. I stood up and rubbed my hands, dislodging specks of dirt from my palms. When I had climbed up the boulder, I hadn’t expected to be talking about Max, and now I suddenly wished I hadn’t. Something about Jeremy had made me want to open up—if only to push him away. Eager to put the moment behind me, I began to make my way down.
“Nora, wait.”
The sound of his voice made me turn, and I slid down the boulder, scraping my arm in all its length and landing on my knees in the dirt. He called my name again as he climbed down toward me. Holding my arm to the moonlight, he looked at the scrape. “We should go back,” he said.
“We’re more than halfway through.”
He ran his fingers along the scrape, but they came out dry.
“See,” I said, trying not to wince. I had come to do this hike and now I wanted to finish it. “Let’s just go.” Twenty minutes later, we came to the final bend in the loop. A desiccated tree with bone-colored branches sat in a cluster of chuparosa bushes. Instantly I was flooded with memories. “My dad used to bring my sister and me here when we were kids. We’d race to see who could make it to the highest branch.” The tree was just as tall as it had been when I was a child, but the desert had stripped its boughs of their moisture and color. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it at night, though. The branches look so gnarly. Terrifying, really.”
“What do you have to be so scared of?”
“Ghosts,” I said. “They won’t leave me alone.”
When I looked up, I found him watching me. He put his hand on my cheek, and after a moment his lips touched mine. How easy it was to lean into him. How good it felt to be wanted. He wrapped his arms around me and drew me so close that we almost lost our balance.
Jeremy
When we got back to the car, I held her arm to the moonlight, and saw that the skin was scraped all the way from her elbow to her wrist. I pulled out my first-aid kit from the trunk and sat on the bumper while I rummaged inside it for disinfectant wipes. The air had cooled; across the road a jackrabbit hopped out of the bushes. I cleaned the scrape quickly, so it wouldn’t sting too much, then spread antibiotic ointment on it before covering it with a bandage. “Do you always drive around with a medical kit, rescuing women?” she asked me teasingly.
“I had it here for my last camping trip,” I said. “Does it hurt still?”
She shook her head, and her earrings got tangled in her hair again, their silver catching the light. But I could do now what I had been too scared to do at seventeen—I brushed her hair away from her face and untangled the earrings one by one. She was watching me. Her eyes were so dark, her gaze so penetrating, that I felt as if all my secrets were bare to her. Because I had missed my mark in the past and because I wasn’t sure I would get another chance, I drew her to me, kissed her again, whispered in her ear. She hesitated, then gave a nod.
I drove out of the park with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on her knee. Moonlight across the windshield. Patsy Cline on the radio. By the time I got to the convenience store, the clerk was getting ready to lock up. “Come on, man,” I said. “It’ll just take a minute.” The clerk shook his head. He was a little man with yellow glasses and thin lips that wanted to yield nothing. I held the sliding door open with my hand and he narrowed his eyes at me. “Sir, step back,” he said. “We’re closing.” The secur
ity guard came over—a big guy with tattoos on his neck and scars on his arms. He took one look at me and told the clerk to let me in.
But when I got back to the car with the condoms, she wasn’t there. The air was knocked out of me. I really thought she was gone, until I stepped back up to the curb and saw her all the way on the other side of the parking lot. I walked over and stood next to her. “Look,” she said, and pointed across the highway at the open desert. A bighorn sheep. I had never seen one this close to town, this far from a herd. I took her hand in mine and waited. The bighorn was grazing in a patch of dry grass, and after a moment it stopped and stared at us. A ram with dark fur and a beautiful set of long, curly horns. Ears that twitched when a car drove past on the highway. Then it turned around and went away at a trot, its hindquarters white and soft like the inside of a cut pear.
The cabin was blistering hot when we came back. Nora turned the swamp cooler back on, opened a window, and went to the kitchen for water. Leaning against the counter, I listened to the hum of the fridge, the ticking of the clock, the clinking of the ice in her glass of water. Wait, I told myself. Give her time. After the air had cooled, after she’d taken off her shoes, after she’d poured another glass of water, I put out my hand and she took it.
And then we were standing by her bed. It wasn’t my scars she touched first when I took off my shirt, or the tattoo I’d gotten just before I’d shipped out. It was my eyelids, my brows, my cheekbones, as though she were only seeing the old me. Her fingers were so light. When she slipped off her shirt, I noticed a beauty mark on the swell of her left breast, just above the scalloped line of her bra. It was one of those halter tops and I fumbled like a teenager trying to find the clasp. “It’s here,” she said and unhooked it from the front.
Whatever awkwardness I felt dissipated when she put her arms around me. My hands found the curves of her breasts, her hips, her thighs. What were ten years? Nothing. A heartbeat. The blink of an eye. We were still at the concert hall, the sunlight was still pouring in through the branches of the magnolia tree, she was still stirring the ice in her soda with a red straw, she was still smiling at me. She hadn’t yet been called away to see the show, hadn’t yet walked across the stage at graduation and continued walking—out of town, out of my life. That I lay in bed with her now seemed to me a small miracle. I kissed the base of her throat and slid down, taking her nipples one after the other into my mouth. On her navel was a piercing but no ring, and I kissed the tiny little dot, sliding slowly down. When I tasted her she coiled her fingers into my hair with an urgency that thrilled me. With my eyes closed, I could indulge in the fantasy that all this had happened before and that it would happen again and again. How easy it was to let myself believe this when she guided me into her.
Afterward, she lay in my arms, the heft of her body against mine a comfort I hadn’t known I needed. Immediately I felt myself drifting to sleep, but was brought back from the edge of slumber when she went into the bathroom. Minutes passed. From outside came the call of an animal in pain, perhaps a rabbit caught in the wire fence that bordered the backyard. But when I heard the sound again, I realized it was coming from the bathroom. I knocked on the door, but she wouldn’t answer. I called her name. Still she wouldn’t answer.
Nora
What was it about him that had tempted me? A friend from years ago, barely distinguishable in my memory from others in the high school band, yet so different now that he almost seemed like a new person. But he was a good listener, had sought me out, tried to console me, and perhaps that was all it took. Was this, too, a part of grief? Just as the question formed in my mind, something loosened in my heart, and the tears came. They flowed so fast it was as if a dam had been broken inside me. I muffled the sobs with my hand, but he must have heard me, because there was a knock on the door and a moment later the knob turned and he was inside the bathroom. I bit my lip, though it only made the tears come faster. “It’s okay,” I managed to say after a minute. “You can go now.”
“I’m not going to leave you like this.”
For a long while, he stood in the bathroom, holding me. When the tears finally stopped, he got a glass of water from the kitchen and waited for me to drink it. I felt relieved by my outburst, it had been a long time coming, yet embarrassed that it had happened in front of Jeremy. I looked around the bathroom for a shirt or a robe, but there was only a hand towel hanging from the bar on the wall. As if sensing this, he put his arms around me again.
“Why him?” I whispered. “Why?”
“There is no why,” he said softly. Then he took my hand and led me back through the mess of discarded clothes and rumpled sheets on the floor. “Come back to bed.”
My eyes were swollen, my nose was stuffy, my face flushed. How sexy, I thought. What am I doing here? What is he doing here? He should have left by now. But he lay beside me, his fingers tracing circles on my back. There is no why, he’d said. There was no reason, no explanation, no deeper meaning. Just bad luck. I listened to the beating of his heart in his chest. What a fragile thing a heart was. So easy to fool. To break. To stop on impact in a darkened intersection. “There has to be a why,” I said.
“Not necessarily.” He’d been raised Catholic, he said, and was taught that sin was punished and virtue rewarded. Good things happened to good people, bad things to bad people. Even when his mother died, he’d continued to believe this because another thing he’d been taught was that adversity was a test. But then he went to war, and lost all belief. One minute this guy Sanger was telling him about the kind of roof shingles he wanted for his house back in Jackson Hole and the next he had no hands to wave in the air anymore. “I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t figure out why he’d been maimed and I still had my hands, even though I was standing right next to him. That’s when I started to realize that some things couldn’t be explained. It was just chance. It couldn’t be argued with. There’s no reason or order to it.”
This wasn’t enough for me. To believe that my father’s death was just an unfortunate accident meant that I would have to forget everything else I knew about my hometown. Discount the arson, erase the small insults, untether the hit-and-run from the time and place in which it happened. I couldn’t.
Outside, a mockingbird trilled. “It’s getting late,” he said. “Try to get some sleep.”
But I couldn’t sleep, and he held me until the curtain grayed with dawn and the roosters in the neighbor’s yard began calling to one another. Then he got up and got dressed and came to say goodbye to me, kneeling by the side of the bed like a man at prayer.
Efraín
I was leaving Kasa Market the following week, my arms weighed down by groceries and my thoughts on the game I wanted to watch once I got home, when Guerrero stuck his foot out and made me trip. I landed in front of the notice board, limes and lemons rolling all around me, chips crumbling to pieces in their bag. I pushed myself up, and there was his picture, on a poster. We stood together, he and I, staring at his likeness and at the number beneath it, so big I didn’t need my glasses to read it. Twenty-five thousand dollars. Imagine what you could do with that much money. All you have to do is call. “I’m not going to call,” I said, bending down to pick up two limes from beneath the candy rack. By some miracle, the carton of eggs looked undisturbed, but when I opened it to check, I found that one was broken. “See what you made me do?” I asked.
This is nothing, he said with a laugh.
I didn’t know if he meant that an egg was nothing or that he could do a lot more to me than make me trip and fall at the grocery store. I thought of asking him bluntly whether he was threatening me, but I was afraid of what he might say in return. I wasn’t prepared for a fight. In the end, I ignored him, and continued picking up my groceries from the floor. I had to pull myself together. This was all in my head anyway. I needed to get home to my wife and children, try to go to bed early, get some rest for a change.
Lo
ok. This is the detective’s name. Write it down.
There was an uneasy stillness in the air. Somewhere in the store, a baby began to wail and could not be comforted by its mother. I gathered all my items and stood up, rubbing soreness from my knees. I was trying to decide if I should go back and tell the cashier that I needed a new carton, or just go home and have Marisela ask me why I couldn’t be trusted to bring home six unbroken eggs, when a teenage girl walked past me, giving me a wary look as she stepped out of the store. I had seen that look before, cast on misfits, maniacs, and madmen, warning them to stay away, as if what troubled them was a leprosy, contagious and incurable. Listen, I wanted to tell the girl, I’m not crazy. But the door had already closed behind her.
Write down the detective’s name. You can decide later what you want to do.
I put the carton with the broken egg in my grocery bag and left the market. In the parking lot, I noticed a car with a long hood, just like the one that had struck Guerrero—a Ford, it turned out, only this one was blue, instead of silver—and this fresh detail, especially at this particular moment, added to my anger and frustration. I was starting to realize that the more I tried to forget what happened that night on the highway, the more I came across reminders of it.
At home, I didn’t eat dinner, ignored the children’s pleas to join them in a game, lay on the sofa all evening, watching but not following the fútbol match on the screen. I feared what Marisela would say if I told her what had been happening to me, and yet I was not sure I could keep it to myself, either.
Tell her about the reward. Tell her.
I shook my head no. I had a good notion what my wife would say if I told her about the money. “See?” she would say. “It’s a sign that you should call. Tell the police what happened.” I had enough voices swirling around in my head as it was.