The Girl at the Border

by Leslie Archer

  “That’s when I remembered the light I’d seen above Ali’s All-Night, and I began to wonder.”

  “Wonder what? Has this Ali been radicalized?”

  “Probably not. But I’ve seen some funny things around there at night.”

  “What kind of funny things?”

  “There are kids around here—kids like me. Only not at all like me.”

  “Radicalized, you mean?”

  He nodded. “Ali used to live in the apartment above his store, but when he moved out six months ago, after buying a small house, the rats moved in. Radicalized rats.”

  “And you told no one about this?” The moment she said it, Laurel knew she had made a mistake. Responding to the return of Gabriel’s stony expression, she said, “Of course. Not after the way you and your family have been treated. I’m sorry.” She pitched her voice low and soft, as Jimmy Self had told her to do when the end of the interrogation came into view. “So the apartment above Ali’s . . .”

  “I think that’s where Bella is hiding, waiting for her ISIS contact.”

  Laurel frowned. “But from all I’ve read, they fetch the recruit as soon as they deem she’s ripe; they don’t allow time for second thoughts. You’re saying Bella’s been up there for days.”

  “The FBI has had a local jihadi cell under surveillance. They picked them up in a sweep four days ago.”

  “So she was left on her own.”

  “They won’t do that,” Gabriel said. “They don’t want to let her go.” He took a breath, let it slowly out. “They’ve arranged for a backup to come and take her.”

  It was at this point that she showed him the text for help from Bella from earlier in the day. “This is Richard’s phone,” she said. “She’s had second thoughts. She wants out.”

  “Her new contact has told her he’s coming now.”

  They rounded a corner, and Gabriel stopped them, pulling her back into the shadow of a doorway catty-corner across the street from Ali’s All-Night. It inhabited the ground floor of a two-story yellow brick building on the corner. Plate glass windows at the front and around the side. To the left a narrow wooden door with a glass diamond at head height that presumably led to the living quarters on the floor above.

  “This is where the street fight happened,” Laurel said.

  “You should’ve seen what they did to Ali, an old man who never had a bad word to say about anyone. He used to give Bella candies when she came in with Elin or Umm.”

  She was just behind him, and when he twisted to check out the street, she saw the soft metallic glimmer just above his waistband.

  “Gabriel,” she said slowly and carefully, “what are you doing with a gun?”

  “It’s just an old Police .38 Special, easiest handgun to get here.” He turned back to her. “Don’t worry; it isn’t loaded. I got it from a friend after the street fight. I show it around so no one screws with me.” He shrugged. “It’s a fact of life now, Laurel.”

  She held out a hand. “Give it to me.”

  His brows drew together. “No. Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  Reluctantly, he handed it over. “I hate guns,” she said as she took from her pocket the bullets Jimmy Self had given her and, one by one, loaded them into the .38. “But there are times when it pays to protect yourself.” She glanced up at the second floor of Ali’s All-Night. “If, as you say, someone’s coming for her, this seems to be one of them.”

  There was a peculiar languidness to the late afternoon, the torpor of midsummer past that belied their heightened sense of urgency and danger.

  “The street’s all but empty,” he said. “We’ll never have a better chance.”

  “Wait,” Laurel called as he stepped out into the street. “Gabriel, come back.”

  There was some traffic, but he easily sidestepped the vehicles like a matador evading an oncoming bull. Except for one angry honk of an SUV horn, the cars passed him by without notice. He was on the opposite sidewalk. With a muttered curse, Laurel hurried across the street to join him. At that moment, a group of six boys appeared from around the far side of Ali’s All-Night, almost as if they had been lying in wait.

  They all had cuts, bruises, and abrasions. By this, Laurel intuited they were the ones on whom Gabriel and his friends had exacted revenge. Newton’s third law, she thought: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

  “Hey, raghead,” they called. “Fucking sand nigger.” They held open gravity knives, hammers, and crowbars. Weapons of the street.

  What Newton didn’t express was that each pair of action and reaction bred escalation.

  Laurel grabbed at Gabriel’s arm. “Come away. You don’t want this.” At the same time, she glimpsed one of the boys hanging back behind the others. He was neither timid nor afraid; he was using them as a screen. When she saw the gun in his hand, she stepped smartly in front of Gabriel, her gun hand coming up. But Gabriel was ready for her, ready for this moment. Later, she was to think that from the moment he had overhead her conversation with his sister, most everything that had come after had been part of his plan.

  He grabbed the .38 out of her hand, stepped forward, and straight-arm aimed at the gang. At once, they shouted, scattering. All except the other boy with the gun. He smiled at Gabriel. “What a disappointment you are. How America has subverted you, made you weak and lazy. Now you want all the comforts of this life. You have turned yourself from Allah’s will. I don’t know how you can buy into the falsity and materialism of this culture. Say goodbye to your luxuries, betrayer.”

  With the hyperreal clarity of extraordinary circumstances, Laurel could see his finger tighten on the trigger just as Gabriel took another step toward him and fired, another step, fired again, another step, fired again, though the boy was already down, jerking involuntarily.

  An instant later, Gabriel went down in a hail of crossfire. Immediately, men poured out of several SUVs. Laurel tried to run to him, but the feds and the local cops barked at her to step back, to keep quiet, that the area was not secured, though traffic in either direction had been stopped.

  They were right. Something—perhaps a homemade bomb—was thrown by one of the boys, who’d momentarily returned before racing off. It crashed through the side window of Ali’s All-Night. An explosion shattered glass. Flames shot out of the broken windows. The feds took off around the side of the building. The cops—those who hadn’t been close enough to be knocked down or injured—stood in shock. Had anyone called the fire department? No matter, not enough time. No one knew what was going on except Laurel. And at that moment no one besides Laurel knew that the boy Gabriel had shot was the local ISIS contact coming for Bella. But all that would become known soon enough.

  After the shots fired, after the dreadful explosion, smoke began to filter up through the old floorboards from below. Bella could feel the heat. Fists over her ears, she was screaming so loudly, so wildly, that her throat was already raw.

  Running to one window after another, she pushed aside the blinds, tried to open the windows, but they were locked. She might have swung her backpack at a pane of glass, but alas, panic had buried all rational thought. Instead, she collapsed against her backpack, all she had in the world, all she loved, reduced to this spot. But not for long. Heat and smoke drove her to her feet, but not before she snatched up her father’s copy of Moby-Dick. Some survival instinct deep in her lizard brain made her put the book up in front of her face like a shield as she ran to the door, but when she pulled it open, she was greeted by swirling clouds of smoke and a heat that might have singed her lashes and brows were it not for the thick book.

  She recoiled. She would have screamed more, but every time she opened her mouth, smoke billowed in. Involuntarily, she inhaled, choked, and coughed. She sank to her knees, the book held tightly to her breast. A terrible despair broke over her then, and she felt as if she were Ahab, tied to his terrible monster, drowning with each roll of the great beast’s body. Pulling her hands over her face
, she wept, sobs racking her thin shoulders.

  It was then she heard her name.

  “Bella.”

  Her name being called from someplace unknown to her.

  “Bella!”

  Hands falling away from her tear-streaked face, she saw her jinni emerging out of smoke and fire, ash and embers. “Are you here to take me away to your crystal palace?”

  Her jinni smiled a smile so beautiful Bella started to sob all over again. And she must be a jinni because she started to sing the song her father used to sing to her, which, unknown to him, she had memorized:

  “The Owl and the Rabbit went to sea

  In a beautiful pea-green boat,

  They took some honey, and plenty of money,

  Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

  The Owl looked up to the stars above,

  And sang to a small guitar,

  ‘O lovely Rabbit! O Rabbit, my love,

  What a beautiful Rabbit you are,

  You are,

  You are!

  What a beautiful Rabbit you are!’”

  And in this blissful state, she was scooped up in strong, feminine arms. In this state Laurel, her jinni, singing to her, brought her out of the furnace and into the cool twilight of Dearborn. Into salvation.

  THE WATERY PART OF THE WORLD

  Gael Luzon took care of everything, including clearing the misdeeds of Laurel’s past. How he managed it Laurel was never to know. Perhaps he used his DOD contacts; perhaps he had called upon others. Some things, as she had come to learn, did not bear knowing. But certainly what greased the wheels was the FBI rounding up a large ISIS sleeper cell using the identity of the boy Gabriel had shot and the contacts on his cell phone.

  Gabriel was a hero, though Laurel could not help but think of what Gael had told her: “It’s the innocent who get caught in the crossfire. The innocents always pay for the sinners’ transgressions; the sinners see to that.”

  It seemed half of Dearborn attended Gabriel’s funeral, the mosque filled with Muslim mourners, the Christians on the sidewalk and street. Laurel and Bella, who in her heart of hearts had never converted, were the only two non-Muslims allowed inside.

  Gabriel’s body lay washed and wrapped in a clean winding cloth. The three eldest Shehadis rose, one by one: Hashim spoke of fear, ignorance, and the courage to do the right thing under adverse conditions. Umm spoke of devotion to one’s faith, to one’s family, to one’s country. Elin spoke of friendship and childhood’s end.

  To everyone’s surprise, save Laurel’s, Bella spoke next. As she stepped to the podium, she clutched her father’s copy of Moby-Dick, the smell of ash and smoke now forever a part of it. She did not speak at length; she allowed Melville to speak for her.

  In a voice clotted with emotion, she opened the book and read from the beginning of chapter 37. “I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks; where’er I sail. The envious sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.”

  That was it; that was all she said. Laurel knew that she was speaking as much about her father as she was about Gabriel.

  Outside, a man on the street was selling miniature American flags made of stiff paper attached to minuscule wooden staffs. Everyone, it seemed, bought one. As the body was carried out, they laid them upon it until Gabriel was covered, like a war hero, in American bunting. He was laid to rest on his side, his head pointed toward Mecca. Laurel looked for Rosie Menkins but in the swarm of people couldn’t find her. Perhaps she hadn’t come.

  On another day, Laurel asked Bella if she wanted to see where her father was buried. She shook her head. “He’s not there. I know it.”

  On another day, forty-eight hours after the Shehadis’ lawyer filed suit against the Dearborn Police Department and the state of Michigan for defamation and wrongful arrest and imprisonment, a Town Car drew up to the Shehadi residence. A man in a charcoal-gray tweed overcoat stepped out. Laurel knew him as the man with poached-egg eyes. Richard had known him as Perry White. He introduced himself to the Shehadis and their lawyer by another pseudonym. He stayed with them for just under an hour, at the end of which a settlement, including an ironclad gag order, was agreed to and signed.

  On yet another day that heralded the coming of autumn, after Gael the brujo, the sorcerer, had worked his magic; after all the requisite official forms had been signed, stamped, and filed away in the bowels of the vast federal bureaucracy, Laurel took Bella to Chicago, where she could finish high school, start therapy, and also be close to Elin. The first time Laurel met with the therapist on her own, the therapist said, “Bella needs three things from you, Laurel: unconditional love, understanding, patience.” The second time she said, “Think of Bella’s recovery as a pendulum. She’s been given a mighty push, so the pendulum swings wildly from one side to another, but the anchor you provide works like gravity, slowing those swings back and forth until, finally, the pendulum reaches equilibrium and ceases to swing altogether.”

  When they had first arrived in Chicago, Laurel had given Bella her father’s cell phone, and for a while the girl had been obsessed with reading their texts, though of course she had them on her own phone. The therapist told Laurel this was a normal part of the healing process, and she was right. The therapist was a specialist in deprogramming, and she turned out to be excellent. One day, Bella put her father’s phone away, and Laurel knew that she was reaching for equilibrium. Evenings were spent at home—a small but comfortable two-bedroom apartment overlooking the lake—and weekends walking lakeside. Always they spoke of Richard, sharing memories, each one filling in blanks for the other. There were so many blanks! Many of them, mysterious to both, never got filled in. But gradually, Richard rose to walk and sit beside them, doubtless a different Richard than the living one but Richard all the same. Their Richard. And in the end, that was comfort enough. His temporary resurrection was another rite they both had to pass through, and it made them even closer. Not surprisingly, Bella had an intense interest in everything Laurel, but what did astonish Laurel was Bella’s curiosity about Laurel’s father. Mourning was a lonely business at best, and Laurel found comfort in talking to Bella about Eddie Springfield. Of their mothers not much was said, but perhaps that was to be expected. Laurel did not know whether Bella knew the origin of her mother’s enmity toward her, and she was very much inclined to let that particular sleeping dog lie.

  Bella was now Laurel’s daughter, by way of adoption, a situation that, as time went on, suited them both more and more. Two years after Bella was freed, on the day of her eighteenth birthday, Laurel took her to see Gael in Manhattan, where Bella, breathless, goggled at the view and traded jokes with one of Gael’s young male workers. Gael took them out to the finest restaurants, but Bella loved the pizza parlors, of which there seemed to be an endless supply, best. After a week, they flew to Washington, DC. At Bella’s request, they went to the White House, the Capitol, the monuments, and spent an entire afternoon on a private tour of the Smithsonian that Laurel had arranged. More than once, Bella wept bitter tears. Laurel wisely kept her own counsel. Then it was on to San Diego, where, Gael had informed her, Orfeo had retired with his family. Nonna was gone, and the kids were all grown up; she scarcely recognized them. But curiously, Orfeo seemed much the same. Perhaps a bit older, definitely wiser. He greeted them both with open arms and a full heart. There was no tension between him and Laurel. Whatever black mark had been on their books had been expunged with extreme prejudice. It was not only time that healed all wounds; it was the people who suffered them.

  She watched him teach Bella how to play chess, and Bella stared spellbound as she and Orfeo played Concierto de Aranjuez on guitars—he had kept hers all these years. Laurel had forgotten nothing, her fingers as nimble as ever. Orfeo beamed like a proud papa.

  Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, the two women tacitly accepted the startling fact of their parallel lives. It was too obvious to speak of—or too intimate. Possibly both.

  Then, b
ecause Bella had chosen it as her birthday gift, they flew back to New York, and some days later—after evenings at the theater, the ballet, and one glorious night at the Museum of Modern Art—they set off for Crete, not the fastest way by jet but by boat. They both were desirous to see the watery part of the world, as Melville put it, and, further, experience it together. Upon their return, whenever that might be, Bella had expressed the desire to follow in her father’s footsteps, to learn to uncover the truth about ancient civilizations.

  They had long since discovered their shared love of Moby-Dick, although, as Bella remarked at the outset of the voyage, “I’ve always been afraid of whales, and Moby-Dick made me terrified of them.”

  “And yet?” Laurel prompted, because she knew there was more and because she was thinking how different this was from Richard’s last anxiety-laden trip home.

  “And yet my fascination with them, with the book, with Melville’s point of view only intensified. I was repulsed and drawn at the same time.”

  “That much size,” Laurel said, “signaling that much anger and rage. I think we both understand, don’t we?”

  “We do,” Bella said, soberly. “I thought about this while I was alone, waiting for . . .” Her voice shut down for a moment, then started up again with a lighter tone. “But at some point you have to let it go or be caught up in it till you drown.”

  Laurel put her arm around the girl, fast becoming a young woman. She felt the salt wind in her face, watched the gray-green water ahead, aware of the land falling away behind them, Manhattan as miniature as if it were inside a snow globe. A fierce elation gripped her, as if she were running as fast as she could toward a horizon already visible, rising up from unknown waters, its contours, its beautiful features familiar to her. Her heart thrumming in her chest, her hair flying free behind her. The world before her, expanding. No, she thought with the shock of revelation, not me—us.