by Laila Lalami
Still, it was a good day’s work, and as I left the diner and locked the doors behind me, I was filled with hope about the future. I’m doing it, I thought, I’m finally doing it. Tonight, I would tell Maryam about Beatrice and me; I would delay it no longer. Jiggling my keys in my hand, I walked to my car.
Jeremy
I was walking down a hallway that had recently been sprayed with graffiti, blue and yellow scribblings whose shapes I couldn’t quite make out. A tall crate partly blocked my way and as I rounded it, three of them came upon me. I fired, killing one and injuring the other two. Then the doorbell rang. I pressed Pause, my rifle frozen in the center of the screen, and checked my score. Just four points behind Damien85, a Canadian gamer I’d been trying to beat for weeks. Taking out my wallet, I went to the front door, trying to remember whether the lamb masala was $14 or $16. But it wasn’t the delivery guy, it was Nora. My heart lurched.
I stuffed the money back into my wallet and stepped aside. She came in, a faint scent of perfume trailing behind her. No makeup on her face. That silver necklace around her neck. And in her hands, I noticed now, a brown shopping bag with my hiking shoes and hats and clothes poking out of it, all the little things I’d left at her cabin. So this was it, then. We’d arrived at the fork in the road, the place where love ends. For weeks, I’d braced myself for this moment, and yet it had come and found me unprepared. “You can just leave that right there,” I said, raising my chin toward the nearest corner.
But I wasn’t ready to return the dress that hung in my closet, the dress into which I’d buried my face until I could no longer detect her scent. I wanted to keep the enameled pillbox that held her vitamin supplements, and that still sat where she’d left it on the bathroom counter. I couldn’t give up her copy of The Fire Next Time on my bedside table, the margins filled with notes sometimes so long that they spilled out over the edges and onto the next page. Signs that she had been here. Signs that she’d shared her life with me for a little while. She put down the paper bag and took in the mess in my living room: a first-person shooter game on television, frozen at the moment when blood spattered the screen; the pile of clothes over the couch where I slept, or tried to sleep, most nights; the bottles of beer and whiskey; textbooks and notebooks tossed under the coffee table, gathering dust. Then she fixed her eyes on me. “How are you?” she asked.
“Never been better.”
I was trying to provoke her, but she ignored my sarcasm altogether. After a moment, she said, “I heard from Detective Coleman.”
So this was why she’d come. Just this, nothing else.
“I can’t believe A.J. killed my dad, then let his father take the fall for him.” She shook her head in disbelief. “And we would never have known if not for that traffic stop.”
“I had no idea it would lead to this,” I said with a shrug. It hadn’t occurred to me simply because I didn’t know what it was like to have a father like Anderson Baker, who would have sacrificed anything to keep his son safe.
“Either way, thank you, Jeremy.”
I gave a quick nod of acknowledgment. Still, the sound of my name on her lips brought fresh pain. Go, I thought. Go. Make it quick. The doorbell rang again. Relieved at the interruption, I went to answer. It was Joe, the delivery guy. I’d been ordering from the Indian place two or three times a week, and there were days when Joe was the only person I talked to that I wasn’t working with or trying to put in jail. “Hey, man,” he said cheerfully, handing me the paper bag with the receipt stapled to it, the total highlighted in yellow marker. “It’s $21 even. Samosas were half off tonight.”
I took the bills from my wallet again and quickly counted out $25.
“Is that your girlfriend?” he asked, glancing over my shoulder.
“What?”
Joe broke into a smile. “Your girlfriend? She’s cute.”
I handed him the money and took the brown bag, kicking the door closed with one leg. The smell of warm naan and garlic and lamb wafted from the bag, but I didn’t feel hungry anymore. I set the food on the kitchen counter, and when I turned around, I found Nora in the doorway. To be this close to her was unbearable. A knot formed in my throat and I had to swallow hard before I could speak. My words came out halfway between a cry and a question. “You just left.”
She came to stand against the counter, across from me. “I thought everything that happened before was going to happen again. Only with me, instead of my dad.”
“I told you, I would never let Fierro hurt you.”
“That’s not something you can promise.”
“So you leave? You don’t call, you don’t write, you just disappear. It’s like I meant nothing to you, like I was just a crutch you got rid of when you didn’t need it anymore. You just moved on.”
“I didn’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’m just as broken as before.”
All I’d wanted was to take care of her, and somehow I had managed to do the opposite. “I fucked up,” I said. “I know I fucked up.”
She touched my arm, and in that instant the memories came back in a flood. How she’d leaned into me the first time I’d kissed her, out there in the desert. How she’d pressed her lips against my skin when I’d told her about Fletcher. The Neruda poem she’d slipped into the pocket of my jeans while I was in the shower one morning and that I’d found when I was fumbling for my keys later, in the parking lot of the Stater Brothers. I’d stood beside my car with the ten-pound ice bag I’d just bought melting in the sun, and read it again and again. I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries / the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself. It was the closest she’d ever come to telling me she loved me. The few weeks I’d had with her were the barometer against which the rest of my life was measured. A moment earlier, I’d been so angry with her I’d wanted her to leave, and now I felt light-headed with longing. “I miss you,” I whispered.
“I miss you, too,” she said.
Love was made of echoes like this, and now that I could hear them, I knew we could figure it out, find a way forward together. I opened my arms and she stepped into them, her body fitting so perfectly against mine it was as if she had never left. All we needed to do was to keep talking.
Nora
We left Oakland on a drizzly morning in September. The lock on the back of the U-Haul truck rattled as we drove down the narrow streets of my neighborhood, but the sound was drowned out once we reached the freeway. I had done this drive many times before, though never at the wheel of a truck and never with my mother, who had a mortal fear of accidents and frequently asked me to slow down. In the glove compartment, she found a map of California, candy wrappers, an old magazine—things left behind by strangers. She leafed idly through the magazine, then put it back and looked out of the window. We passed vineyards, citrus groves, industrial feedlots whose smell lasted for miles, signs that blamed Congress for the drought, billboards that advertised restaurants at the next exit. Sometime in the afternoon, my mother pulled out the magazine again and started reading me clues from the crossword puzzle in the back. Haunting spirit, five letters. Elephant’s strong suit, six letters.
Late at night, we finally reached the desert. As soon as we took the exit for the 62, my mother turned on the radio and looked for KDGL on the dial. “Claudia Corbett is about to start,” she said, raising the volume. An elderly man was calling to say that he was worried about his son, who had a well-paying job with a mortgage company in Denver, but was always struggling with money. “No matter how much he makes,” the caller said, “he always spends more. I don’t get it.” I expected Claudia to suggest that the son cut up his credit cards and go on a strict debt-payment plan, but instead she began to ask questions about his childhood and upbringing, confident that the root of his financial problems would be found there. My mother listened raptly. She loved this talk show, and it came to me that there was a voyeuristic element to it
: this show broke open the door between public and private, a door she kept scrupulously closed in her own life. I waited until the episode had ended before I turned off the radio. “I need to tell you something, Mom,” I said. “About Dad.”
“What is it?”
How to go about this, except bluntly? I had waited long enough, I needed to stop carrying my father’s secret. “He was having an affair,” I said.
I let out the breath I’d been holding and waited for the uncomfortable questions that I knew would follow—what was I talking about and it wasn’t possible and how would I know something like this anyway. It wasn’t easy to accept that the man we loved had done terrible things, because love itself is a singling out of one person over countless others. My mother turned away from me and stared at the road ahead. We were driving through a dark wilderness of creosote, mesquite, and yerba santa, guarded on all sides by mountains. It took another moment for the truth to dawn on me. My hands tightened on the steering wheel. “You knew?” I said. “You never said anything.”
“Why would I say? This was between us.”
So she had seen the ugly face my father kept hidden behind a mask, and yet she still loved him. All my life, I had found her to be uncompromising, sometimes even unforgiving, and it stunned me to discover this side of her now—in a moving truck. A brown, furtive shape crossed the road; I lifted my foot off the accelerator. “Who is she?” I asked.
I could see how difficult it was for her to say the name, but after a slow, uneasy moment, she did. “Beatrice Newland.” The name rang no bells for me, and held no meaning. But speaking it seemed to have released something in my mother, because her voice was deep with emotion now. “She’s so young. She looks about your age.”
How tawdry, I thought, until I remembered my time with Max. “Why did you stay with him, then?” I asked. I was still trying to reconcile the mother I had always known with the woman sitting beside me now.
“I was sure it would pass, I just had to wait. We spent thirty-seven years together, you know, and to throw all that away for that woman—I couldn’t do it.”
“What about after he died?” I asked. “Why didn’t you say something then?”
“Talking about it wasn’t going to change what already happened. It wasn’t going to turn him into someone different.”
“I see.” And I did. But even though my mind agreed, my heart rebelled. She had never been this gentle or patient or understanding with me. If she was capable of this kind of love, why not with me? Why did she fight so hard to mold me into someone else? All I ever wanted was for her to take me as I was. By then, we were coming out of the valley, and the road narrowed as it rose through the canyon. One of my ears popped. An irksome feeling. “Mom,” I said after a moment, “you never even asked me about Silverwood.”
“I did. You said it was a big festival.”
“And you weren’t curious to find out more? Or ask me what piece I played or anything?”
She turned to look at me. “I don’t understand that stuff.”
“It’s music. It’s not supposed to be understood. It’s supposed to be enjoyed.”
“Oh, Nora,” she said, and reached across the seat divider to touch my arm. “That’s not what I meant. I like your music. I just meant, I don’t understand festivals and competitions and grants and things like that. That’s all.” The road dipped and flattened, and after a little while we reached the first grove of Joshua trees. “So what was Silverwood like?” she asked.
Maybe something had finally shifted between us. By talking to her about the secret she had kept hidden for so long, I had begun to chip away at her other defenses. She had to let go of her fantasies about me, and accept the fact that I was only a musician, I would always be just that, and nothing more. Now that she seemed willing to listen, I began to tell her about my time in Boston, the drummer and bass player I had met, the plans we had made, the good things I had learned, and the bad ones, too.
Afterward, I lowered the window and rested my elbow on the sill. The air was warm and dry. Soon, the Santa Ana winds would begin to blow through the passes, bringing with them fury and fire. How often had I lain in bed, dreaming of leaving the desert someday? This place had been filled with quarrels and recriminations, and it would be a while yet before they ended. I still had to face A.J. in a courtroom. Three days from now, when the time came for his preliminary hearing, I would watch in disgust as he walked out, a free man on bail. But there would be other times, over the next few months, and one day I would finally have a chance to speak, tell the judge and the jury about my father, and honor his memory in this small way. At every court date, A.J.’s lawyer, an attorney from Orange County who specialized in hit-and-run cases, would file motions or ask for continuances, and it would not be until three and a half years later, when I was pregnant with my first child, that A.J. would finally be convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to five years in prison.
And I would still be here. The desert was home, however much I had tried to run away from it. Home was wide-open spaces, pristine light, silence that wasn’t quite silence. Home, above all, was the family who loved me. Only now, after my father’s death, did I come to understand that love was not a tame or passive creature, but a rebellious beast, messy and unpredictable, capacious and forgiving, and that it would deliver me from grief and carry me out of the darkness.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to many people and organizations for their support during the writing of this book. I would like to acknowledge, in particular, the City of Santa Monica for an artist grant; the Yaddo Corporation for a stay at its colony; and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for a fellowship. Thank you to my editor, Erroll McDonald, who gave me astute comments and patient encouragement. Thank you to my agent, Ellen Levine, who offered early notes and unstinting support. Josefine Kals, Michiko Clark, and Kimberly Burns, my publicists, make miracles happen. Nicholas Thomson at Pantheon Books and Martha Wydysh at Trident Media worked very hard on this project at every stage. Miriam Feuerle, Hannah Scott, and Andrew Wetzel at Lyceum Agency have been steadfast advocates of my work. Special thanks to Alexis Kirschbaum, Rachel Wilkie, and Ros Ellis at Bloomsbury UK. I am indebted to the park rangers at the Joshua Tree National Park for their expertise on fauna and flora in the Mojave and to the officers of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department for answering my many queries. Thank you to Dana Boldt and Gavin Huntley-Fenner for help with legal and logistical questions. Thank you to my early readers: Scott Martelle, Maaza Mengiste, Souad Sedlik, and Jane Smiley. Thank you, most of all, to Alexander Yera.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laila Lalami is the author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits; Secret Son; and The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The Moor’s Account was also on the Man Booker Prize longlist and on several best books of the year lists, including The Wall Street Journal, Kirkus Reviews, and NPR. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, The Guardian, and The New York Times. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles.
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.
-o-filter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share