by Laila Lalami
“So Mr. Baker was angry.”
“I wouldn’t say angry,” she said, suddenly aware of what the word might imply. “Just—disappointed, I guess.”
I had the nagging feeling that I was missing something about the Guerraoui case, something I couldn’t see because I wasn’t familiar with this town and its people. At the end of my visit to the Pantry and Desert Arcade, I didn’t know which version of the past I could trust, which story was supported by the facts and which had been reshaped to fit them, whether out of grief or out of malice.
Gorecki topped off his coffee and took a long sip. “You don’t think it’s odd that Mr. Baker didn’t come forward before?”
“Not particularly.” When given the choice between claiming responsibility for what they had done or avoiding it as long as possible, most people chose Door Number Two. At least, that had been my experience. The problem was that I had no witnesses to the crime and nothing that could be used to prove intent. Besides, from the beginning, Baker had been fully cooperative, even if his wife had been a little strange. When I went to interview him at home, she’d opened the door and stared at me with her mouth agape. Having a police investigator show up on your doorstep is an unsettling experience, maybe even frightening for some people, but with her it was more like a visceral fear. I had to wait outside in the heat while she went to get her husband.
Somewhere in the office a phone rang, and a door slammed shut. “You know,” Gorecki said, “I went to school with the victim’s daughter.”
“Which one? The dentist?”
“The musician.”
“You never mentioned it,” I said. God, I hated small towns. I missed being at home, in D.C. “Does everyone know everyone else around here?”
“Pretty much.”
When I worked for Metro P.D., my morning routine was so different. I would go into a little café next to my train stop and sit at the window with my coffee, just watching people come and go, all of them strangers to me, as I was to them. I never thought it was anything special, or that I’d miss it someday, but I did. Now I couldn’t get to work without hearing town gossip.
Gorecki cleared his throat. “And Nora and I—we’re also seeing each other.”
“You what?” I didn’t need this, not with the dispute with Baker, and not with the daughter insisting it was murder. The more I tried to keep this case neat and clean, the messier it got. “For how long?”
“It just happened.”
“You have to disclose this to the sergeant.”
“I know,” he said, draining the last of his coffee. “That’s gonna be a fun conversation.”
“And quit asking me questions about the case. Did she tell you to ask me?”
“No.” A second too late.
“Then why are you asking?”
“I was just curious, that’s all.”
“You know I can’t say anything while the investigation is still open.”
“And you didn’t. So there’s no harm.” Then he tapped the folded newspaper on the counter, where images from the Bowden incident were splashed across the front page. “I better go. I have appearances to worry about, right?”
Nora
A couple of days after our argument at the restaurant, my mother asked me to go shopping with her in Palm Desert. We’d never performed the usual mother-daughter rituals together—no spa dates, no tea time, no rom-coms, no crafting or baking for us. Part of this was my fault, because when I was growing up I spent far too much time locked up in my room, listening to music, but the other part was that my sister genuinely enjoyed these outings with her and I never wanted to be a third wheel. My mother’s invitation was therefore highly unusual, and I took it to mean that she was calling a truce after our skirmish about the sale of the Pantry.
Mercifully, it was a weekday, and Macy’s was mostly empty. My mother seemed to be in good spirits, holding on to my arm as we walked around the department store. She bought a casserole dish and a set of stainless-steel measuring cups, but spent the better part of the morning helping me pick out some clothes. I had brought only a few things with me from Oakland, and needed a pair of pants, a few shirts, a couple of dresses. We were in the shoe section when it struck me that we were doing something completely ordinary, that we were returning to the mundane tasks that make up most of our existence. Standing in front of a display that advertised a 20 percent discount on summer shoes, I picked up a tan sandal with an ankle strap. “What do you think?” I asked.
“It won’t go with your new pants,” my mother said.
“No?” I put the sandal back on the table and held up a classic black pump with a high heel. “What about this?”
“That’s much better.”
A sales clerk who’d been watching from a few feet away came over, and I gave him both pairs of shoes. Then I sat down across from my mother. New strands of gray streaked through her hair and there were dark pools under her eyes. She was still in mourning, and would be for a long while yet. But how much did she really know about the man she was grieving? The question had been nagging at me ever since I’d received that phone call from the jewelry shop. “I’ve been wondering,” I said. “Why exactly did Dad buy that cabin?”
“You know why. So he could rent it out.”
“But he didn’t rent out to tourists that often, did he?”
“In the beginning, he did. But there was always trouble. Someone would plug the toilet or burn something in the toaster oven or break dishes and not replace them. I warned your father about this, but of course he never listened.”
Across the sales floor, a tall blonde was sipping an iced coffee as she went through the sales rack, methodically checking every pair in her size. What did my father’s mistress look like? Was she young and pretty, the way I had imagined at first, or was she someone with more substance to her? Some wit or personality. She had to be someone special if he was breaking up his marriage over her. In which case, how could my mother not know about it? “So if Dad didn’t rent out the cabin much, why did he keep it?” I asked.
My mother thought about this for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was hoarse. “I think your father really liked being a landlord. No one in his family owned a house before. The cabin made him feel, I don’t know, like he was successful.” She rubbed her eyes with the palm of her hand.
So she had no idea what had been going on, and all I had accomplished with my fact-finding mission that morning was to stir up her grief. I shouldn’t have asked, I thought. I looked away, desperate for another subject of conversation, and was relieved to see that the sales clerk was returning with the shoe boxes. I tried on the black pumps first.
“They look great on you,” my mother said.
“You like them?”
“Yes. Are they comfortable? Walk around, see how you feel.”
I took three hesitant steps; I wasn’t used to high heels. “They look, uh, professional.”
“Exactly,” my mother said, clasping her hands. She was gazing at me with an expression I couldn’t quite decipher and I looked at the shoes again, wondering if I’d missed something. “You know,” she said after a minute, “it’s not too late to go to law school.”
“What?”
“You’re young, Nora. Three years will go by quickly. And you can afford to go back to school now, with the life insurance money.”
“What are you talking about, Mom? Why are you bringing this up again?”
“Because you would be a great lawyer, I’m sure of it. The neighbors told me yesterday that their daughter Jessica passed the bar exam. Remember how she used to ask you for help with her math homework? She couldn’t finish it without you, and now look at her. A lawyer! She’s going to work for a big firm in San Diego.”
So this was why my mother had asked me to go shopping. Not because she wanted to spend time with me, but because she
wanted to convince me to start a proper career, be more like Salma, or more like Jessica, or more like someone else. This was not a new conversation. We’d been having it in one form or another since I’d given up on medical school and decided to study music instead. The thought of having this argument again, sitting here in the shoe section at Macy’s, was intolerable. She was intolerable.
Only a moment earlier, I’d been feeling sorry for my mother and betrayed by my father, but now everything shifted. Whatever else he did, he’d never wished me to be a different person. He wouldn’t have staged an ambush like this or tried to convince me to give up on the only thing that gave meaning to my life. His love was free. But my mother’s love was a war. It was fought every day for the sake of shaping me into somebody new, somebody better. Even if I had gone to medical school or law school or business school, she would have found something else in me that needed to be improved, and would have made it a point to tell me about it. What was even more infuriating was that my mother never behaved like this with my sister. Salma could do no wrong.
I kicked off the black pumps and tried on the tan sandals. They were comfortable, and would be perfect for summer. “I’m getting these,” I said.
We drove back from Palm Desert in silence. Whatever lightness the day held had been dimmed by our argument; I couldn’t wait to be alone again. I dropped my mother off at the house and with a quick goodbye wave headed back onto the highway. It was the middle of the afternoon now and the sidewalks were empty, but passing the party supply store where my father had bought me a piñata for my eighth birthday, I felt his absence anew. At the Stater Brothers, where I stopped for milk, the smell of his aftershave on a random customer nearly brought me to tears. Even when I walked into the cabin, the memory came back to me of a hike we had taken to Willow Hole together. I missed him.
Salma
The first thing you see when you wake up is the Pan Am bag hanging from your mother’s shoulder. It is blue and white and has a hole in one corner. You’re in your father’s arms, still groggy with sleep, and as he carries you off the plane, you ask, “Is this where I go to school?” School is all you’ve been talking about for weeks, the carrot your parents dangled to get you to leave home. All you had to do was take the plane, they said, school would be at the other end. “Yes, here,” your father says, but distractedly. At the gate, your uncle is waiting. He hoists you up, kisses you, rubs his unshaved chin against your cheek. He smells like cigarettes, and he laughs easily, like your father. Yet not like your father at all.
Your uncle and his wife live in Culver City. They have a foldout couch, a backyard with a lemon tree and a swing set, and two boys who pinch you when no one is looking. On their days off, the adults cook elaborate meals, drink mint tea, and talk for hours about the king and Ronald Reagan. They make the king sound like he’s in the next room, and Reagan like he’s in another house. The children are supposed to play outside, but most of the time you have no idea what your cousins are saying, so you mimic the way they walk, the way they laugh, and finally the way they talk. They dress you up in costumes and parade you around the yard. You become a perfect little ape.
In the spring, you move with your parents to a small town in the Mojave, where they buy a donut shop. The sun and the wind are impossible to escape. Within days, your skin burns, your lips chap, your hair grows two shades lighter. You ask about school again. “Maybe next year,” your father says, casually. “Right now, you’re too young.” Betrayal is still new to you, and hard to swallow. Leafing through the realtor magazines from the dispenser outside the shop, you pretend to read. Eventually you learn to recognize the letters that go with the pictures: h-o-m-e. You ask for more magazines. Your mother gets a library card, checks out five books at a time, and sticks you in a corner with them. She has a shop to run, trays to wash, floors to clean, and no time to play. But at night, when everything is quiet, she sings you lullabies in Arabic and lets you fall asleep with your head in her lap. You press your face against her belly, amazed at how warm it must have been inside. If only you could go back in there. One weekend, your uncle and his family come for a visit. When your cousins try to pinch you, you bite them.
The day finally arrives: you start school at Yucca Mesa Elementary. You already know your alphabet and raise your hand and answer correctly every time Mrs. Hamilton calls on you. You are not an ape anymore. Now you are a circus seal. In your repertoire, there are many tricks: you sing “I’m a Little Teacup”; you spell girl and home and want; you get an A on your first test. Your mother starts taking you everywhere with her. You say words like semolina and delicatessen without stumbling, ask where the zucchini is without giggling. You take after the Amazigh side of the family and every spring your hair grows lighter. Grocery-store clerks ask if you’d like a sticker, young lady. Bank clerks ask if you’re excited about the Easter egg hunt. It will be years before you encounter the word passing.
Then all of a sudden, there is a crib in your parents’ room, a stroller in the hallway, a yellow activity mat you’re not allowed to touch. Your father coos over the new baby like she’s something special, even though she can’t add two and two, or tell the time, or win Scariest Pumpkin at the first-grade Halloween festival. She has dark skin and chubby legs and big eyes that seem to track you everywhere you go. When no one is looking, you pinch her. She cries inconsolably. Your mother wonders aloud what is wrong with that child.
You still speak Arabic, but you no longer dream in it.
You grow to be tall, almost six feet by the time you’re in the ninth grade. You play volleyball, compete in the science fair, collect box tops for the school’s fundraiser, correctly guess the number of jelly beans in the jar. You’re never late, never sick, never rude. All your friends’ parents love you. “Such a sensible girl,” they say. One afternoon, while your family is at the neighbors’ pool party, you run off with the other girls to try on makeup, and leave your sister behind. She falls into the deep end of the pool and nearly drowns. In that moment, you realize you’re not a sensible girl, and immediately hide this fact from everyone.
The summer you turn twenty, while you’re home from college, the king dies. His funeral is broadcast live on CNN and your parents watch in disbelief, as if they need proof that it really is happening. Two million people line up on the streets of the capital, hoping to catch a glimpse of the velvet-draped coffin as it makes its way from the royal palace to the mausoleum. Your father yells at the television: “Did you forget what he did?” Your mother shushes him and raises the volume on the set. Bill Clinton and Jacques Chirac are in attendance. So are Hosni Mubarak and Rifaat al-Assad. One by one, they praise the deceased monarch, call him a man of peace, a champion of tolerance. “Well,” your father says, in a small voice, “I guess I can go visit my mother now.”
A year later, when you finally travel to Casablanca with your family, you do not recognize your grandmother, nor does she recognize you. How is it possible to miss someone you don’t remember? And yet you do. For the duration of your visit, you sit side by side with her, in companionable silence. When you do venture out, tourist guides ask you in English if you’d like a tour of the medina and, if you ignore them, they try again, this time in German. Bazaar clerks call you Miss, offer you mint tea, and charge you four times the price for every trinket. Boys standing at street corners whistle when you pass, then openly touch their groins.
After college, you go to dentistry school at Loma Linda. There, you meet a clear-eyed man who is never late, never sick, never rude. When he speaks Arabic, it is as if music is streaming from his mouth. Words like zaytun and sukkar and habibet el-omr sound like they’re accompanied by a thirteen-string lute. You marry him, open a practice together, make your parents proud. “Why can’t you be more like Salma?” your mother tells your sister, and each time she says this, you feel a special thrill.
Day after day, you stare at open mouths, smell rancid breath, scrape rot from cavities.
Increasingly you have to spend your afternoons arguing with insurance companies about billing and payments. The whole thing gives you a headache. You take a Vicodin. You are no longer a trained seal. Now you are a bird. You float away, free. When your husband complains that the painkiller samples are disappearing fast, you say it’s not your fault you had three root canals in one week. You haven’t begun to order extra boxes of diazepam and he isn’t suspicious yet.
But someday he will be, and you will have to meet his eyes across the dinner table, answer his questions, and agree to let him take over your surgeries. He will ask that you see a substance abuse specialist, but you will say you’re fine. At least talk to someone, he will beg. Talk to your mother. The thought of your mother finding out about your habit is excruciating. Her approval is a prison you do not wish to escape. I’ll see a specialist, you say, and never make the appointment. After he goes to bed, you sit on a lounge chair on the deck, and watch the view that the realtor said was unparalleled anywhere in the valley. You take another pill.
This is where the plane took you.
Nora
I can see now that there was an element of stubbornness in what I did next. But at the time, I felt I had no choice but to help manage the restaurant, because my mother abruptly stopped showing up to work. This might have been her way of forcing my hand on the sale, though it had the reverse effect: I stepped in for her. And it surprised me, too, how quickly all the little habits I had learned years ago came back. I wore closed-toe shoes, even in the heat, a comfortable pair of washable pants, and a polo shirt with the diner’s name embroidered across the breast pocket. I folded silverware into napkins, refilled salt-and-pepper shakers, took over Veronica’s tables whenever she went on her cigarette break, made sure the wait station had plates and cups and bowls, talked to customers, and tried to be cheerful about it. How are you this fine morning? Would you like some ketchup or mustard? Careful, that plate is very hot. What a beautiful baby.