by Laila Lalami
My mom hovered about, saying things like Come on, honey, not now, and Why don’t we do this in the morning? But my dad waved her off and made me write down the numbers and add them. I wasn’t very good at math, and it took me a while to finish.
“How are you planning to pay for this?” he said.
I couldn’t understand why he was asking me these questions. I was thirteen years old, I didn’t handle the money. “Mom,” I said.
“Mom,” he mimicked. Then he turned on her. “All right, Mom. Do you have any idea how many shoe rentals and bowling games it takes to pay for the little weekend the two of you just had?”
“Come on, Anderson,” she said. “Not now. We’re tired.”
“Oh, you’re tired? How do you think I feel? I spent all day working, I couldn’t even take a break because Greg called in sick, while you two were out there in Fresno, having a good time. Do you know how much I made today? And how much you spent?”
When he got into one of his tempers, it was useless arguing with him because he could go on for hours. If he ran out of arguments, he would go back to the first one and start over. This wasn’t about the money. It wouldn’t have mattered if we had spent $50 or $5,000, he would have made a scene, because my mom and I had done something together that made us happy, and he felt left out. We went to bed and the next morning everything was back to normal—until a few weeks later, when my mom and I went to another dog show, in San Diego. He saw a picture of us riding a roller-coaster by the seaside, and he flew into another rage. After a while, my mom got tired of it. She sold the few dogs she’d bred, and we stopped going to shows. She kept just two, Royal and Loyal.
By the time I moved back home, those two were getting old. Royal was blind in one eye and Loyal had arthritis, and I kept telling my mom that sooner or later she would have to put them down. Gordon and Annie were collies, too, but Annie had the blood of a champion. At thirteen months old, she had better conformation than Royal did at his best. That’s what gave me the idea of entering her into dog shows. But I never got a chance to do that, on account of what happened that summer.
Jeremy
Nora had told me she was seriously considering taking over the Pantry from her mother, and even though I couldn’t imagine her as a restaurant owner, or any kind of a business owner, I encouraged it. I drove with her to the Costco in Palm Springs when she needed to buy supplies for the diner. I helped her install a wooden chandelier in the cabin, an antique she had found at a thrift store, and offered to repaint her kitchen. I did anything I could to tie her to this town, and to me. Something had shifted that night when we were in my house. Everything I had once feared about love—the risk it required, the pain it could cause—seemed insignificant to me now. From the moment I had seen her standing on her parents’ deck, lost like ten mislaid years, I had been willing to take the risk. And the pain that might still come my way was easy to push out of my mind when I took her in my arms.
Often, I reminded her about things she seemed to have forgotten: that she’d given a class presentation on heredity in Gregor Mendel’s pea plants, which was interrupted by an earthquake drill; that she’d built the campfire on the overnight field trip to Whitewater Preserve; that she’d lied about sleeping at a friend’s house the night a group of us had gone to Anaheim for a concert. But now I was also discovering new things about her: what she looked like at dawn, just before the light filtered through the window above us; how her voice softened when she talked to her mother on the phone, and hardened when she talked to her sister. She was smiling more easily, and more often, and for the first time in years I began to think about the future.
The only thing that could have made my life better would’ve been if my boss would stop being so difficult, and that, too, changed abruptly at the end of May. That morning, I hadn’t heard my alarm and was fifteen minutes late to the briefing, which earned me a sarcastic “Thank you for joining us,” from Vasco and three warrants to serve. The first two warrants were for drug possession and went without a hitch, but when I tried to serve the third, the perp took one look at me and went off through the back of the house. I chased after him, jumped over the wire fence, and ran into the desert for three hundred yards before I caught up to him. I slammed him to the ground and got on top of him. My knee was on his back as I cuffed him, my heart was racing, my gear felt like it had doubled in weight. It was high noon, a hundred and two degrees, and we were in a patch of empty land. How far did he think he could go? “Officer,” he said. “Listen, I wasn’t expecting a cop. I got spooked.”
And all for petty theft. I did a full search, expecting to find pot or meth or even a weapon on this fool, but there was nothing. My uniform was covered in dirt and sand, and there was a big hole in the right leg of my pants. I wanted to book him and go back to the station to change, but there was a service call waiting for me nearby, a disturbance out in Joshua Tree, in that dusty section where old homesteader cabins sat next to trailers surrounded by chicken-wire fences and guarded by mean-looking mutts. When I pulled up to the address, I found an old man sitting on a porch chair, shirtless and with a Mountain Dew in hand. “Afternoon, Officer.” He walked up to the cruiser window and stood so close that I could see the white hairs on his chest. “I’m the one that called. Name’s Jim. Jim Novacek.”
“What’s the matter, Mr. Novacek?”
“Gorecki, huh,” he said, looking at the nametag on my uniform. “You Polish?”
It was a hot day in the valley, even for May, and the air was thick with dust and sand. This kind of weather made people cranky, especially old people with nothing better to do—they called the police over the smallest little thing and then they wanted to chat. “What’s the matter here, Mr. Novacek?”
“Like I told the lady on the phone, this neighborhood’s not what it used to be. All those Mexicans everywhere now.”
In the backseat, the suspect sucked his teeth in agreement.
This happened from time to time, people assuming things about me. Part of it was my last name, but the other part was my light skin. Once, in high school, Victor Alcala, a handsome kid who was popular with girls, started taunting me. Hey, Big Tits, he called across the hallway. What time is the concert tonight? I kept my eye on my locker, shuffled my notebooks, tried to ignore the laughter around me. Yet help came quickly, and from an unlikely source: Stacey Briggs hurled back a string of racist taunts so vicious that they left Victor speechless. He never bothered me again. And I never corrected Stacey, never told her I had more in common with Victor than she ever imagined.
“Mr. Novacek,” I said, trying hard to keep my voice from rising. “You called for a noise disturbance, and I don’t hear anything.”
“It’s coming from this dump over here.” The old man pointed to the house next door. It had a flat roof and boarded-up windows. Garbage in the yard. A clothesline with no pins. An empty doghouse. “The mewling won’t stop.”
“It’s a cat? You should’ve called animal control.”
“But I see Mexican kids coming in and out of that house all day. Drinking and doing drugs and God only knows what. They probably tortured that poor cat in there. That’s why I called the cops.”
I got out of the cruiser and stood with my hands on my belt. Under my uniform, beads of sweat traveled down my spine, landing in that space just below my bulletproof vest. When would this day be over?
Then a soft mewling sound rose.
“You hear that?” the old man said.
“Yeah, I hear it.”
I called it in. With one hand on my sidearm, I walked up to the house. There was no lock on the front door, just a bit of wire that looped through the knob hole and connected it to the doorframe. I unfastened the wire, but the door was heavy and I had to push hard until it gave in with a loud creak. The smell of dust, bird shit, and old newspaper made me want to gag. The house was so dark I felt as though I had fallen into an abyss. I tur
ned on my flashlight and aimed it straight ahead. A small living room appeared, with a low ceiling and a brick fireplace. On the far wall, someone had spray-painted GO HOME in red block letters. There were crushed beer cans all over the floor. Hypodermic needles. Cigarette butts. Playing cards. Except for an old couch with big holes where the seat cushions should’ve been, there was no furniture.
Then there was a movement, a faint rustling I might not have heard if I hadn’t been standing still. I turned my flashlight on the couch and moved closer, my pulse quickening with anticipation. Deep in the hole was a heap of blue blankets, from which arose a tiny little fist. The milky smell of the infant was so strong in my nostrils now that I wondered why I hadn’t noticed it sooner. I set the flashlight on the dirty wood floor and dropped to my knees. The baby’s eyes were wide open and as soon as they landed on me the crying started, this time with the full force of expectation. I slid both of my hands inside the hole and brought out the blue bundle. Cradling the infant in my arms, I parted the blanket and was relieved to see no obvious sign of injury. A soiled diaper, though. The crying intensified. “Shsh,” I whispered, “shsh, little buddy, it’s okay.” I gave him my index finger and immediately he grabbed it. Holding him close in my arms, I walked back out of the house, pushing the front door open wider with my leg. In the yard, the neighbor was waiting, squinting in the sunlight. “I’ll be darned,” he said.
I turned my back to the sun, so the baby would be in the shade, and radioed dispatch again. I couldn’t remember what the procedure was in a case like this, I had to wait for instructions from the sergeant. But for once, Vasco was nice. “Stay put, Gorecki,” he said. “We’re sending help right away.”
The moment the paramedic put his stethoscope on the baby’s chest, he started to cry again, kicking his feet inside the blankets. “Heartbeat’s good,” the medic said with a smile. He was an older guy who dyed his hair and wore a thick layer of ChapStick, trying, I think, to hold on to what remained of his surfer looks. When he was finished taking the baby’s vitals, he brought out a bottle of water. “He’s got crystals in his diaper. He’s completely dehydrated.”
“How long do you think he’s been in there?” I asked.
“Hard to say. If I had to guess, twenty-four hours. Maybe thirty six.”
“Jesus.”
Behind us, the neighbor was giving a statement to the detective, spelling out his last name carefully. “N-o-v-a-c-e-k.” The suspect I’d almost forgotten about was still waiting in the back of the cruiser. Two deputies were checking the house one more time for evidence. And all the while, Sergeant Vasco was giving an interview to a reporter from the Hi-Desert Star. The next morning, his picture was on the front page of the newspaper, with the baby in his arms. “Police Rescue Abandoned Baby” the headline said.
He didn’t ride my ass so much after that.
Maryam
Memory is an unreliable visitor. For a long while, I couldn’t remember the name of the young man who had brought Nora to the cabin when her car key broke, although he looked familiar to me, and I knew I had seen him somewhere before. Then one day, while I was taking the recycling out to the garage, it all came back to me at once, not only his name, but his father’s name, too. The summer before Nora went to college, I needed an electrician to fix the wiring on the garage door, and one of the mothers at school said that she had hired this man, Mark Gorecki, so I called him. He didn’t just fix the garage door, he kept finding new things that needed to be done, like a three-way switch that didn’t work, or a broken light fixture on the deck. He repaired everything perfectly, but I could smell beer on him at noon, and I didn’t like that he had racked up a $300 bill by the time he was finished, so I never called him again, not even when the fan in the bedroom stopped working and we had to sleep with the windows open.
Coming back in from the garage, I went to the front hallway and stood looking at the framed photos on the wall, pictures from all the important moments in my family’s life, and especially my daughters’ lives, their birthdays and graduations and achievements. At length, I found the young man, standing in a suit that looked too small for him, in the middle of Nora’s jazz band. Running my finger over the list at the bottom, I found his name: Jeremy Gorecki. It was nice of him to drive her back that day, I thought; waiting for Triple A in the heat would’ve been tough, especially since she was by herself.
I hadn’t expected to see him again, but a few weeks later, while I was waiting in the express lane at the Stater Brothers, he came to stand behind me in line. At first, he didn’t see me, he was texting on his phone, smiling at whoever he was talking to, and only after he finished his conversation did he put down his items on the conveyor belt, a canister of coffee, a pack of sugar, a box of condoms, and a blue-and-white carryall with a zipper pocket on one side. It was my carryall, the one I had used to bring Tupperwares of food to the cabin, and I had left it hanging on a nail in the kitchen, in case Nora needed it for groceries, but now here it was, in the hands of Jeremy Gorecki. I reached for the plastic divider and put it down on the conveyor belt between us.
“Thank you,” he said, reflexively, but when he looked at me, I saw recognition come over him. I turned to look at the tabloids, their covers screaming about celebrities’ addictions to drugs or affairs with the nanny, then pulled out a copy of People, just to give myself something to do, and made a show of reading it. “Mrs. Guerraoui?” he asked.
How strange it was to hear my husband’s name in this stranger’s mouth. What did he know about us, and why did he want to talk to me, here at the grocery store, with that box on the conveyor belt between us? To my relief, the line moved forward, and I stuffed the magazine back on the rack and pulled a few bills out of my wallet to pay for my groceries. I was planning to make stuffed bell peppers with lamb for my son-in-law—that was his favorite dish, he and Salma were coming to have dinner with me—but the thought of cooking an elaborate meal was far from my mind now. All I wanted was to get out of this place.
“Eleven eighty is your change,” the cashier said. She took out two bills from the register, then stopped. “The change machine is broken, and I’m low on quarters and dimes.”
“It’s okay.”
“You don’t mind so many pennies?”
“No.” I wanted her to hurry, but she counted the pennies slowly and carefully, whispering to herself so she wouldn’t lose track.
Jeremy tried again. “Mrs. Guerraoui,” he said. “Hello there.” His voice was deep and clear, and I couldn’t pretend any longer that I hadn’t heard him.
“Oh,” I said, feigning surprise, “hello.” He was very tall, and I had to look up to meet his eyes, which were very blue against his tanned face, it was not an unpleasant face, though his lips had a purple tint that came from smoking, a terrible habit. On his upper arm was a tattoo, which is common enough in this town, you see them everywhere, especially on low-class people and criminals, although nowadays artists get them, too. My daughter has one, it’s very tiny, it’s usually hidden by her bracelets, but a tattoo on the arm is different, it makes a statement, it wants to be seen, perhaps that was what this young man wanted.
The cashier was still counting my change, while the store bagger, a teenage boy with braces on his teeth, finished putting away my groceries.
“Do you need help with that?” Jeremy asked, coming closer to me.
“I’m fine,” I said, and quickly reached for the fabric tote and hoisted it up, but I had misjudged how heavy it was, and had trouble lifting it up over my shoulder.
“Here,” he said, taking it off my hands easily. “Let me help you.”
“Ma’am,” the cashier said, “your change.”
I took the two bills and the handful of pennies from her, and while I put them away in my wallet, she started scanning Jeremy’s items, so that I had no choice but to wait for him to pay.
Afterward, we stepped out of the stor
e together. It was a sunny morning in June, the heat was rising fast, and on the sidewalk two children ate ice creams, the chocolate melting and running down their shirts, not caring about the mess they were making, they were enjoying their cones. I started across the parking lot to my car, Jeremy walking beside me with my groceries, and the silence between us grew so long that I felt compelled to make polite chatter. “How is your father?” I asked. “Mark, right?”
“My father?” he said, glancing at me with surprise. “He’s fine—I guess. I haven’t seen him in a while.”
“He fixed my garage door. A long time ago.”
“Ah. He doesn’t work much these days, though; he’s getting old.”
I didn’t expect the rush of sadness that came over me when I heard this, perhaps it was the familiarity of it—after all I know something about how families can grow apart, and how hard it is to bring them together again. We made it to my car, and after Jeremy handed me my bag of groceries, I stood in the sun and watched him walk away, thinking we were no longer strangers, he and I.
Nora
A couple of weeks later, Salma invited me to her house for Father’s Day. I didn’t particularly want to see her, but she said that brunch would be followed by a visit to our father’s grave at Rose Hills, which made it impossible for me to come up with a valid reason to skip one and not the other. With a mix of dread and resignation, I drove down Old Woman Springs Road, heading toward Landers, the little town where my sister and brother-in-law had moved a few years earlier. Their home was a 2,800-square-foot house with a transom on the front door and huge windows that faced east. Everything about it screamed money—the landscaping, the custom mailbox, the sign that warned SIMPSON SECURITY: ARMED RESPONSE. As it happened, the door had been left ajar, and I was halfway across the living room before I saw my brother-in-law. “It was open,” I said.