by Laila Lalami
“Come on, man,” I said. “Get yourself together. You need to go.”
But he was still sobbing. I’d never seen him like this. With the sleeve of his sweater, he wiped away tears and blood, streaking dirt across his eyes like camouflage. “Go where?” he said. “I got no one.”
Slowly the anger leaked out of me, and guilt took its place. Guilt at having survived when others in my platoon had died, having my health when others had lost theirs, having found someone to love when others were alone. “Give me your keys,” I said.
“Why?”
“Just give me your keys. And wait here.”
When I walked back in, I found Nora standing behind the door. She’d put on a cardigan and held one of her arms in the other, half-hugging herself. “You’re bleeding,” she said. “That’s it, I’m calling the cops.”
“I am a cop. And I’m fine, baby. It’s just a cut.” I put my shirt back on and looked around for my keys.
“Tell me what the hell’s going on.”
“Later. Lock the door behind me.”
I waited until I heard the deadbolt turn. Then I got Fierro into his old Chevy and took off with him. The windshield was covered with a layer of dust, and the smell of car exhaust drifted inside, mixing with the scent of our sweat and blood. How often had we ridden together, at night in the desert, scarred by fights we ourselves had started? And all the while thinking that it would be over once we returned home from the war.
When Fierro turned the light on in his apartment, a cockroach skittered across the white wall and disappeared behind the television. His packed ruck leaned against the wall. A tower of empty pizza boxes stood like an altar in one corner, surrounded by smashed beer cans. There was no furniture other than a futon and a coffee table. The whole apartment smelled like trash. “All right,” he said, turning to me. “We made it back. You can go now.”
“I’m not in a rush.”
“Give me back my keys.”
“Why don’t we order something? I could use a bite.”
“I’m not hungry.” He took out a Bud Light from the fridge. On the door, a magnet that said WALLACE INSURANCE held down a piece of paper with a phone number on it. In loopy letters next to it was a name. Samantha. A girl he’d met at my sister’s barbecue, taken on a date, and never heard from again. I scanned the kitchen counter. No glasses or knives in plain sight.
“Pizza or Chinese?” I asked.
“I don’t care.”
“Pizza it is.”
While I placed the order, he put a bunch of paper towels under the tap and wiped the dirt and blood from his face. His right eye was closing fast and his left was turning blue. “I think I have a Coke somewhere in the fridge,” he said. “Help yourself.”
I found a bag of hash browns in the freezer, stuck behind two empty vodka bottles, and gave it to him. He held it to his eyes, one after the other. I could already feel a massive headache settling in, and the cut on my eyebrow throbbed. What I wouldn’t do for a shower now. What I wouldn’t do to be back in bed, away from all this. While we waited for the pizza to arrive, he opened another beer. “Remember Rodriguez?” he asked.
“Rodriguez from Texas?” I said.
“No, Rodriguez from New Jersey. I’ve never seen anyone drink as much Coke in my life. Dude could down three cans in an hour, easy.”
“Well. Let me tell you a story about Rodriguez from New Jersey. He was driving us on a recon, and he’d had so much Coke he had to take a piss. But he couldn’t hold it. ‘I gotta go,’ he kept saying. ‘I gotta go.’ We found him a plastic bottle and he did his business, but when he tried to cap it he dropped it on the floor. We had to sit in a Humvee for three hours smelling his piss.”
“Dumb fuck.”
“I wonder what happened to him.”
“Back in New Jersey, last I heard. Delivers sodas.”
“No way.”
“Dude. I swear it’s true.”
When the pizza arrived, we ate quickly, stacking the slices one on top of the other like hamburger buns. Then Fierro wiped his mouth with a napkin. “This is good.”
“Yeah. Not bad for Domino’s.”
“No, I meant us. Here, like this.”
“I can’t be around all the time, man. I have my own life.”
He watched me for a moment. “All right. Listen, I’m sorry I showed up at your girl’s place. I wasn’t trying to scare her, I really wasn’t. I didn’t know where you went, that’s all. It’s not like I’m some pervert or anything. Besides, you never talk about her. I didn’t even know you were still seeing her. You’ve been avoiding me, like you’re ashamed of me or something.”
But I wasn’t ashamed of Fierro, I was protective of Nora. That was why, from the beginning, I’d tried to keep the two of them apart. Maybe that had made things worse. “You need to get help. Medical help. I thought I could help you, but I can’t.”
“You don’t have to worry about me.”
“You’ve said that before, but here we are.”
He shook his head slowly, like I didn’t get it. “Sarge said I could stay with him for a while. Help him out with the bees.”
“Fletcher called you?”
“No, I called him.”
This felt like a punch in the gut. He knew how I felt about Fletcher, and yet he’d reached out to him, and brought it up at this particular moment. I was angry, but mostly I was tired, so very tired. I could see that he still wasn’t ready to face whatever troubled him, that he was only trying to run away to a different place. He’s made his choice, I thought. And I would make mine.
That was the last time I saw him, though I heard from him a few more times. The first time was about two months later, when I was working the Labor Day shift, and was alone at my desk. He told me he’d been learning a lot about bees, because Fletcher had 40,000 of them. Queens can lay as many as 1,500 eggs each day, drones are kicked out of the nest every fall, if a queen dies unexpectedly, worker bees can develop reproductive organs and lay a replacement queen. But he didn’t like the Waynesboro area very much and complained that people in the South weren’t as nice as he’d expected them to be. Another time, maybe eight months later, he called me in the middle of the night to ask if I wanted to meet him for drinks, he was only four hours away in Nevada. He was calling me from a pay phone near a freeway overpass, and the sound of traffic made it harder for him to hear me. I had to tell him twice that I couldn’t go anywhere, I had to work early the next morning. I didn’t ask what he was doing in Nevada.
The Marines had brought us together, two dumb kids from the desert, and although we’d fought side by side for years, in the end we’d come out just as we’d gone in: two different people. Now it was time for us to go our separate ways.
Nora
Somewhere on the Grapevine, a truck had crashed on the northbound side of the 5, spilling its cargo of toys and turning the freeway into an obstacle course of nerf guns, action figures, and assorted dolls. Traffic was blocked for miles. So it was almost midnight by the time I reached the 880 and glimpsed, with relief, the orange and green lights of Tribune Tower. I had worked there as an intern one summer, back when the Oakland Tribune still had its offices in the building. It was one of my favorite places in the city. My apartment was on the third floor of a pink Victorian house with no garage, no elevator, and no laundry room, and until recently I could afford it only because I had a roommate. That night when I came in, I found Margo in the hallway, still in her jacket, having just returned from a late dinner at her brother’s house. “How are you holding up?” she asked as we hugged. “Let me help you with your bags.”
“This is it,” I said, dropping my duffel bag on the wood floor.
“I wish I’d been able to come down for the funeral.” She hung her jacket in the coat closet. “I just couldn’t get away.”
“No, I understand.” I pu
t my keys in the bowl on the console and slipped off my shoes. Margo was studying my face, as if trying to decide whether to tell me something, and an uncomfortable silence fell between us. “All right,” I said. “I’m going to turn in for the night.”
Without switching on the light in my room, I took off my clothes and got into bed, covering myself with the blanket I had bought after Max complained that my apartment was too humid. The neon sign from the movie theater down the street lit the ceiling an intermittent red, and I turned to the wall, falling quickly into a heavy and dreamless sleep. I didn’t stir until almost noon, when the sun was bright against the window shades. I had spent only a couple of months in the desert, but I had already grown accustomed to its open space and uninterrupted silence: the moment I opened my eyes, my room seemed cluttered, my bed too narrow, the street too loud.
When I walked out of my bedroom, I found Margo at the dining table with her laptop. She worked as a math tutor for a test-preparation company, and often her mornings were spent answering rescheduling requests from difficult parents. These requests she met with a midwesterner’s patience, coupled with a freelancer’s anxiety to get paid. Dvořák was on the stereo, a piano and violin piece that mercifully drowned out the hum of the street. After pouring myself a cup of coffee, I came to sit across from her at the table.
“How was it?” she asked. “Tell me everything.”
In the texts and calls we’d exchanged since I’d left, I’d only shared with her the broadest outline of what had happened, but now I began filling in the picture, telling her about my mother’s refusal to keep the restaurant, my attempt to run it even while the Bakers stayed next door, what had started with Jeremy and how it had ended. As I spoke, I felt something shifting, as if a spell I had been under for several weeks was finally broken. I had tried to fill the hole my father had left in my life by holding on to his things—his cabin, his diner, his secrets—and I saw clearly now that none of these could be a bulwark against death. Grief demanded surrender. I had to let go. I had to learn how to live with just the memories, nothing else.
But either I’d chattered for too long or Margo’s capacity to console hadn’t been deepened by the experience of death, because her eyes kept shifting. “I’m sorry,” she said. After a suitable pause, she asked, “So you’re back here for good?”
“That’s the plan.” The pile of mail she had saved was waiting for me, and I started idly sifting through it. A lot had accumulated in just nine weeks: bills, credit-card offers, magazines, mailers from art or music organizations.
“Because there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
I looked up from the junk mail. “What is it?”
“I’m moving out.”
“What? Where to?”
“Fremont. Claire put a deposit on a place.”
“You’re moving in together?”
“Yeah,” she said with a grin.
“Congrats.” Margo and Claire had been together for nearly three years, and I really should’ve been happy for them, but sitting at the table that Sunday morning, all I could find when I searched my heart was the feeling of being unmoored. Lost. I had come back to Oakland thinking that I could live as I had before, but that was no longer possible. “When are you moving out?” I asked, unable to keep the note of desperation out of my voice.
“In ten days.”
“That soon? You’re not giving me much notice.”
“But you’ve been gone so long, Nora. Claire and I expected to look for a while, but we just got lucky with this apartment. You should see it. Built-in bookshelves, crown molding, a backyard view. We knew lightning wasn’t going to strike twice.”
“That’s great,” I said. Quickly and savagely, I tore up credit-card offers, realtor mailers, a reminder for a doctor’s appointment I’d already missed, a subscription renewal for the New Yorker, a sympathy card from the headmaster at Bay Prep, an invitation to my friend Anissa’s housewarming party. And then, beneath the detritus of the life I wished I could have again, I found an envelope from Silverwood Music Center, with a note informing me that I’d been accepted for their summer festival. The curators wanted to include one of my pieces in an evening program featuring younger composers. “I just got into Silverwood,” I said, my voice rising with excitement.
“Mazel tov!” Margo said. “Congratulations to us both, then. We’re moving on to bigger and better things.”
It was the kind of break I would read about in the trades every fall, a gushing article celebrating the arrival of a fresh new talent in American music, but that’s all it ever was to me—a story, not something that actually happened, least of all to people like me. I wished I could’ve called my father to tell him the news—Can you believe it? I would’ve said. And I almost didn’t apply!—and now I was seized with pain at the thought that he hadn’t lived long enough to hear about this. I could have called my mother instead, but I knew that she was still upset with me. For years, we had been operating under a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy about my sex life, and our mutual violation of that agreement while I was home—she asked, I told—had given her yet another reason to be disappointed in me. Why couldn’t I be more like Salma, she moaned, find myself a nice Muslim doctor or engineer and marry him? Two days before, when I told her I was leaving town, she’d seemed relieved.
And I was, too. I was tired of fighting with my mother and fearful of where things were going with Jeremy. I had found solace with him, even moments of joy I hadn’t known before, but we were so different that it was bound not to last, and the incident with Fierro had clarified for me just how much separated us. I couldn’t get the fixed stare at the cabin window out of my mind. Whenever I tried to interpret the expression in Fierro’s eyes, I couldn’t decide whether it was disgust or desire, but both made me feel like I was nothing more than a body, or even a commodity. And trailing the memory of Fierro’s stare was always another one: the way Jeremy had stood over his friend’s beaten body, his chest heaving, his knuckles red with blood, the hint of a smile on his lips. It was the first time I had seen that side of him. “I’m sorry,” he said when he came to see me the next day at the restaurant. “I’m sorry about what happened.”
He leaned in to kiss me, but I pulled away from him. “Your friend was staring right at me,” I said, my voice shaking.
“Don’t be scared. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
Such bravado, I thought. A promise that could never be made, much less kept. We were standing under the awning of the Pantry. The busboy came out of the side door with a trash bag, which he swung into the dumpster. I waited until he had gone back inside before I spoke again. “I feel so violated.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
“Why did he follow you to the cabin?”
“I don’t know.” He leaned against the stucco wall, thinking for a long moment about the question. On his right eyebrow was a cut that was partially covered by a Band-Aid and along his left jaw was a bruise that was still raw and pink. “I think maybe he feels like I’ve moved on, or past him, somehow.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”
All at once the story poured out of him. Fierro had been going through a nasty divorce, he’d threatened his wife, smashed up her car, and got arrested. But Jeremy had bailed him out of the West Valley Detention Center and found him an anger-management group, which had helped—until it didn’t.
“My God,” I said. “And you go shooting guns with him. Guns, Jeremy. Guns. What will he do next?”
A white-haired woman with a cane walked out of the Pantry and we both moved aside to let her pass, but she must have heard the word guns because she continued staring at us as she crossed the parking lot. What a picture we must make, I thought, me in the dress I’d worn for my father’s funeral and him in a police uniform and wit
h his face beaten up. As I pushed a strand of hair away from my face, he suddenly noticed the bruise on my wrist.
“I didn’t realize I’d grabbed you so hard.” He put his hand on my waist, trying again to draw me closer, but I resisted. “I’m sorry, baby. I was just trying to protect you.”
“I never asked you to protect me. I never asked for any of this.”
The sun was high in the sky and, though we stood in the shade of the awning, the heat reached us, making us both uncomfortable. The radio transmitter on Jeremy’s uniform buzzed and he listened to the dispatcher for a minute before turning down the volume and looking at me again. “I know you’re scared, Nora, and I know you’re upset. But don’t do this. Don’t blame me for something I didn’t do. I have no control over him. I couldn’t have known he’d show up at your place.”
“You think ignorance and innocence are the same thing? You say you didn’t know this would happen, but you’re the one who bailed him out. He would never have shown up at my house if it weren’t for you. You can’t bring this violence all the way to my doorstep and not expect me to be repulsed.”
The word made him flinch. He was quiet, his eyes hardening. “All this talk of innocence,” he said. “And you messed around with a married guy for months. What does that make you?”
I couldn’t believe he was using this against me. I should never have opened up to him, I thought, I had been a fool to make myself vulnerable like this. Anger brimmed inside me, threatening to spill at any moment. “This isn’t really working,” I said, trying hard to keep my voice even.
“Don’t say that,” he said, his tone different now. “We’re good together. Let’s talk about it tonight. I have to go back to work now.”
But I didn’t want to talk anymore. It seemed to me then that my relationship with Jeremy had been part of the impulse, born out of grief, to hold on to the past at all cost. A week after my father’s death, a well-intentioned friend had posted on my Facebook page an article filled with advice for mourners: don’t drink too much, don’t make big financial decisions, don’t jump into a relationship. As if grief were a business deal that could be successfully negotiated if one followed a few simple rules. I hadn’t been able to do it, clearly.