They were both good at ducking questions. Their father was in the Plymouth County Correctional Facility in Plymouth, Massachusetts, for the rest of his natural life and their mother was dead. That’s all she wrote.
Of course, Carl was a better person than Naomi was. He had a purpose in life, and he had a goal. Vision, values, mission, goals, even strategies and tactics. International development. The empowerment of the Third World. Hope and progress through local economic development. Democracy that would come through skills and tools and training. He went from place to place, looking for ways to set people free.
Naomi spent her life in hiding. She hid in the trees. She hid in the boxwoods and Japanese yews in front of the houses where they had cut the lawns and trimmed the edges and shoveled the snow. She hid in the sheets of water that ran down the street after a hard rain. She hid in the dead-end streets and the fences that marked the property lines of quarter-acre yards, in the baseball diamonds next to the schools, and in the school crossing guards who raised their hands to stop traffic for schoolchildren, even though Naomi herself never walked to school. She hid in the yellow school buses with the strange gates that swung open when the buses stopped, even though she was never allowed to take a bus to school.
The trees, the shrubs, the sheets of water in the streets, the bright yellow school buses with flashing red lights were the places she hid herself when he father touched her. She hid in the nooks and crannies where a bad little girl could hide and not be seen, places she could go in her imagination when she had been bad and her father took her to the truck for instruction and reeducation.
Carl didn’t know her places. He hated the trees and the lawns and the cul-de-sacs. He hated Lincoln and Pawtucket. He hated Rhode Island and everything that had happened to them here. The moment he came back, he wanted to run away again. Naomi was used to Carl’s comings and goings, of course. She was used to his calls at 3:00 in the morning because he couldn’t keep the time difference straight and to his sudden unannounced arrivals and similarly sudden departures.
Carl always warned her he was about to vanish. He disappeared when Lincoln got to him, when the streets empty of people and the perfectly manicured lawns and the perfectly square hedges made him remember too much of what he had suppressed.
Naomi lived in Rhode Island now. She would always live here, because her hiding places were here. She was safe here, in her unsafe way. She knew where to hide the next time she failed.
There were keys under a fake rock near the front door. Carl let himself in when he came home. He could come and go as he pleased. Naomi got him. She understood.
But this time was different. He disappeared with no warning whatsoever.
When Carl vanished, Naomi wondered for a day, and then suddenly she knew he had gone back to Liberia. He didn’t tell her, because he didn’t want her to stop him. Damn him. He didn’t know that she wanted to go. The hell with the chaos and the danger. She wanted to be like him. Carl had freedom. Carl had Africa. Naomi had an apartment in Lincoln in a gated community. She wanted him to take her along this time, to experience a life of no hiding places, so she could stop hiding once and for all.
Carl had set her free once. He had set them both free.
Naomi was in the trees, with her boxwoods, in the sheets of water that flowed over the windshield when Carl opened the door to the truck. It was winter and Carl had been shoveling. The sun had set, and the night was cold. The heavy snow made his gloves, hair, eyebrows, and neck wet. Carl had been working alone, shoveling. He was shivering, and he was desperate for a toilet. The truck’s engine was running, the heat was turned up, the windshield had fogged, and the windshield wipers were slapping from side to side. He didn’t knock and ask for permission the way he and she had been told, had been taught, had been instructed. He defied orders. He was cold and tired, and he had to pee, and he was only twelve. He just opened the door. And he saw.
DaddySir shouted, and Carl closed the door, and then DaddySir was outside. Pushups! DaddySir said! A hundred pushups! Naomi stayed in the truck. She was also shivering. She was in her hiding place, though she was crying because of what DaddySir would do to Carl now, because she had been bad, and because she always cried when DaddySir was angry, because she was afraid. Carl couldn’t do a hundred pushups. Carl wet his pants, and you could smell the pee. They were bad, bad people, Naomi and Carl. Bad things happen to bad people.
The next morning Carl had a fever of 103.
Brenda sat with Carl while DaddySir took Naomi out to plow with him. Carl told Brenda as soon as Naomi was out the door. Naomi never knew what words he used or what words he knew. But Brenda understood. Even Brenda. Somehow she had always known, the way their Mama had always known. DaddySir was out of the house, and even Brenda knew how to pick up the phone.
It was not until the trial that they learned that he had also killed their mother. But they both had always known. Even Brenda knew, someplace inside her.
When Carl disappeared Naomi called a woman she knew, a Liberian woman from the African Association of Rhode Island, and two friends from Princeton—one who worked in USAID and one who worked in the White House—but they didn’t know anything about Carl or what was happening in Liberia. They made a few phone calls for her. Not much information available. Sketchy situation on the ground. The State Department has travel restrictions in place. Hard to get in and out. Americans have been evacuated.
Then a letter, a good old-fashioned letter, handwritten on a plain sheet of paper, showed up two days after Carl disappeared. It was vague and clear at the same time, mailed to slow down the transmission of information, so it would get to her after he was clear. Carl’s handwriting was strong and precise. He printed, and his letters were straight, the lines square across the page, the pen strokes thick and deliberate.
Thanks for being his safe harbor one more time. Sorry he had to cut the visit short. He was headed back. He had found a way in. Yeah, Dr. Richmond. LIBERIA IS NO PLACE FOR YOU, NAOMI. YOU ARE THE BEST. He wasn’t going alone. Hoped to be back in a couple of weeks. Might be out of cell phone range for a while. I’LL CALL OR E-MAIL AS SOON AS I CAN. YOU KNOW HOW MUCH YOU MEAN TO ME. Hoped to be back soon.
And then it was back to the half-life Naomi had before. Drive to work. Wave at the guard in the guardhouse. Sit at a desk. Be pleasant at meetings. Give presentations. Wave at the guard in the guardhouse. Drive home. Go to the store. Wave at the guard in the guardhouse.
Not even half a life. Carl never knew that half-life she led was for him so he would have a safe place to come home to when he was ready to come home. So he would also have a place to hide.
Damn Dr. Richmond. Whoever this Dr. Richmond was.
Everyone at work thought she had another more glamorous life, but acting out the character she was supposed to be was as much as Naomi Goldman could manage. She was partial to a blazer, a silk top, and a string of pearls. Naomi wore her hair down, and she had it done every week. It was all smoke and mirrors, an illusion, a distraction that kept people from seeing the lonely and stunted human being inside.
One Monday morning at the office about ten days after Carl left, Naomi Goldman looked up from her computer and closed its case. She made three phone calls, one right after the other. She squared her shoulders, looked straight at the poster on the wall across from her, a reproduction of a quilt that depicted a family picnic, and then she sat completely still for three or four minutes. Then she opened her computer case again, waited for a moment until it came back to life, drove it, with a few clicks, to where she wanted it to go, typed for a moment, and then closed the case again. She turned her attention to the telephone on her desk. She worked its buttons for a moment, spoke into the receiver and worked a few more buttons to play back what she had just recorded, tapped a few more buttons yet, and replaced the receiver.
Then Naomi stood, gathered a few things—her keys, her glasses case, her cell phone, and the cell phone charger from her desk and put them into her slim brown leather poc
ketbook. She opened a drawer of her desk and extracted a few more items—a letter opener and two pens she had received as gifts—and put them in her pocketbook as well. There was a small three-part picture frame on her desk, which held pictures of two men and a man and a woman standing together on a rocky shore in front of an ocean with the sun setting and an island in the background. She started to reach for the picture frame, but then stopped her hand in midair. She looked around the room the way a traveler looks around a hotel room one last time to be certain nothing has been left behind.
And then she left.
Carl had chosen of his own free will. He had chosen where to go. How to live. What to live and what and who to die for.
There would be people coming from Liberia, fleeing the war, coming out through Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Ghana, and Nigeria.
The immigrants would need clothing and a place to stay, and they would know more about Liberia than any reporter for the New York Times and the Washington Post or Time Magazine knows. Naomi knew the pastors of three Liberian Churches. She had worked with the International Institute, where refugees came. The refugees would be coming from where Carl was. They would be bringing news. News about Liberia. News about the part of the country where Carl was. Maybe even news about Carl. When they came out, they would be bringing Carl out with them.
Doesn’t matter where you sit if all you are going to do is go to meetings and give presentations. You might as well sit among people who want to learn. You might as well teach and see what you can learn from people who know how to be together and find freedom together despite their fears. You might as well sit among people you love.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
William Levin, MD. Providence, Rhode Island. March 15, 2006
GEORGE W. BUSH WAS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES IN 2003, WHEN LEVIN AND Carl and Terrance set out for Liberia, and he was still president of the United States when Levin returned home alone.
Bush stayed president. Then there was an election that Levin barely noticed, because he submerged himself in work.
Levin didn’t do anything to get home. It just happened. MODEL found a dazed white man digging in the rubble. He was digging with his fingertips, desperate to get the crushed cinderblock wall off Carl and Terrance, as the light was just starting to show over the eastern hills, digging frantically until the skin came off his fingertips and his hands were covered with his own blood.
Levin couldn’t remember what language they spoke, thinking back on it, when they told him to stand and put his hands on his head, or at least that’s what he remembered them saying, later. First put your hands over your head. At least they didn’t shoot him on sight. Perhaps it was better. Perhaps they spoke Kreyol, and he understood them because he had learned some Kreyol by living for three weeks with Terrance, but perhaps they spoke English. They would have asked him for papers and looked for a dog tag. Someone hit him about the head when he didn’t respond. He was just at the beginning of his submerging, the long period in which he wasn’t able to respond to that or too much else, the period of living in a mist, in the shadow of a life.
They took him to Buchanan first. He must have said something in American English. They must have recognized from that and from his name that he was an American citizen.
In Buchanan there were State Department types and military who didn’t believe him at first. The whole story was just too incredible, just too incredibly naive and stupid to be true. But then a guy talked to another guy who talked to another guy, and someone turned up the marines they had met that night at the hotel restaurant in Monrovia, who told them, yes, there were a couple of dimwits who tried driving through Monrovia in the days just after Taylor blew town, and we told them they were going to get themselves killed, and we told them they were proceeding at their own risk. There were some raised voices on the phone, something about you can’t just let Americans wander about a war zone on their own without passing it up the chain and something else about letters to go in someone’s file. It didn’t matter. They had come and gone on their own. Now Carl and Terrance were dead. It wasn’t anybody’s fault but their own. They still didn’t have Julia back yet.
The embassy people looked him up on the internet. They called the hospital and Judy, who had not reported him missing, according to the precise instructions he had given her the night they left, and who confirmed that yes, Dr. William Levin was who he said he was. But they kept going around and around, because they couldn’t believe it was just as he said it was—three unarmed men in a used Toyota RAV on their own in Liberia in the middle of a war.
But despite their going round and round, that’s all there was. Nothing about his travel history raised any red flags other than Nicaragua in the 1980s, but that was old news, and no one took Nicaragua seriously anymore, not even the good old CIA.
Yes, there was the Cuba trip in the late ’60s, and they knew all about that, but even that didn’t really excite them. The Russians weren’t players in 2003. The international Marxist conspiracy had proven to be nothing more than a false start, nothing anyone had to take seriously anymore, communism having come apart fifteen years before. Al-Qaeda was where the action was in 2003. Not world socialist revolution.
So they bundled him up and sent him home. They flew him through Accra. They put him up at a cheap airport hotel, and then charged his credit card for the flight home through London. Judy met him at the airport.
And then Levin disappeared.
He didn’t disappear by running away. He didn’t drop out of sight or move to the mountains of Mexico to live with the rebels in Chiapas. He didn’t try to go to Syria or Jordan to work with the Iraqi refugees. No, Levin disappeared by going back to work every day. He showed up for his shift whenever he was on the schedule. He volunteered for double shifts. He worked holidays. He went back to teaching the same classes he had always taught. He even went back to going to meetings of the same organizations that had failed to achieve anything in forty years, meetings he knew were pointless, that he had always known were pointless but could never admit that to himself.
But his hope and his energy were gone. He walked through his life like a zombie, like a man who had already died but hadn’t been told that it was time to lie down in his grave. Levin even went back to running, or at least his body did. Same house. Same car. Same wife. Same job. Nothing but a ghost in the machine. He disappeared back into the life into which he had submerged himself in the first place. In Liberia, he had a brief moment of real life when he drove though the streets of Monrovia with those two crazy-crazy motherfuckers while Liberia was trembling with war. Now he was alone. The Levin who had lived for one brief instant was gone.
George W. Bush was still president of the United States of America.
When the first e-mail came from Julia, Levin got stirred up for a few days, but when weeks went by and he didn’t hear anything else, he submerged again. The same thing happened when the second e-mail came. The third e-mail barely roused him. He was in a permanent vegetative state. There was no evidence of cognition, of brain function, of feeling. I should go back to Liberia, he thought, and try to find Julia on my own. But Julia doesn’t want to be found. So just let me go back into my little spider hole. I’m an old guy, Levin thought, full of stupid impossible ideas. Time to give it a rest.
But then the e-mail came about Carl’s sister. A sister. Carl had a sister. In Lincoln, Rhode Island, maybe six miles away. How could he not have known, not have remembered? All that time he had been thinking only about himself. How could have he failed to think about Carl’s family?
He had called Yvonne, of course, the moment he landed. She was the first person he saw after Judy. The drive to Yvonne’s house in Pawtucket was one of the hardest things he ever had to do. But he did it right away, because he felt that he was responsible, and he needed to own up He had told people about losing a loved one a hundred times. Telling Yvonne was different. This was family. Who knew? Family is funny, Levin thought. It chooses you. It
’s not a genealogical chart. It’s an emotional landscape.
Carl had a sister.
Levin went for a run.
Levin changed his route after he came home. He didn’t want to run in the cemetery anymore. Couldn’t. Just couldn’t. Only the living now. Too many dead.
It was March again. It had been March after the Station fire when Terrance broke into Levin’s car, when he had chased Terrance down Chestnut Street, yelling, “Car thief! Car thief!” at the top of his lungs. The light was back in the early mornings and late afternoons—clean, strong, beautiful light. The snow had melted from the sidewalks and streets, but the pavement was still wet and ice-encrusted in the mornings, and you could still see your breath if you ran early.
Now Levin ran in neighborhoods and in mill villages, among the bars and the bodegas and the fast-food joints so he could be with people and always see signs of life. He ran in Pawtucket, in Fairlawn and in Woodlawn, and to North Providence. He ran in Central Falls, where the triple-deckers were packed like cards, and there weren’t any lawns, let alone trees, but there was still life everywhere—strange little businesses, little upholstery shops, auto glass shops, barbershops and hairdressers. Levin remembered when Central Falls had the most bars per square mile of any place in the U.S. Now it had the most culture of any place in the U.S. Columbians, Guatemalans, Liberians, Syrians, Poles, Irish, Ukrainians, English, and Swedish, all living together in this tiny little place without trees.
Some days Levin ran down Smith Street, past the General Assembly—the great marble monument to the people’s voice sitting there on Smith Hill, corrupt and manipulated, a lonely place, crying out for the people’s attention. Then he’d run through Capitol Hill to LaSalle and Rhode Island College, the streets leafy in the spring and summer, the houses well-kept and unpretentious, and the bakeries so inviting. Some days he ran to Olneyville, which was all Spanish-speaking now, past an old lumberyard where he could smell the sawdust of fresh cut boards of oak, pine, and cherry.
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