by Sheena Kamal
It’s getting late, and the café is closing down for the evening. My phone rings and there is a moment of brief hope as I think of Seb, finally getting back to me, but it’s not him. The number has a Detroit area code, and isn’t Nate’s.
“Hello?”
The man on the other end of the line clears his throat. “Yeah, the boss is back,” the bartender says gruffly, and disconnects before I can thank him for the call. It’s just as well. My mouth is dry and I can feel a headache growing at my temples. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time at the bar since I got to Detroit, driving myself crazy watching people indulge in my favorite forbidden pastime and it’s time for it to pay off.
Before I go, though, I use the last few minutes before the café closes to do a quick search on the family that was featured in Harvey Watts’s newspaper clipping. The Nasris. There are no more pictures published publicly on that wedding, no more information on the bride or the groom, or the unnamed guests that were so prominently featured. No trace of the woman who gave birth to me.
26
The bar is lively tonight. There is some kind of televised sporting event happening and team pride is out in full force. People are wearing jerseys, some of them yellow and some red. I don’t know what it means and would ask the bartender, except he has been busy since I walked in here. I do manage to catch his eye and he nods to a hallway toward the back of the bar.
In the small office at the end of the hall, there is a man sitting at a desk going through a stack of papers. He’s well into his sixties, but looks healthier than everyone I’ve seen at this bar, including myself. “Low on whiskey. Next shipment won’t be in till tomorrow, so get ready for a riot,” he says, without glancing up.
“I’ll get my bear spray out,” I reply, standing just inside the doorway.
He peers at me over the rims of his glasses. “You’re Sam’s girl. Alastair told me that you’ve been looking for me.” Before I can wrap my head around the idea that the surly bartender is named something as whimsical as Alastair, he gestures to the chair across from him. “Sit down.”
I close the door behind me and take a seat. It’s only a fraction quieter in here. The office is clean but shabby in the way of dive bar offices around the world. I have a feeling that it’s worse than it looks, and that the most offensive parts are covered by god-awful red banners that seem to match some of the jerseys seen outside. Something about the logo on the red jersey makes me pause. It takes me a full minute to realize that it’s the Detroit Red Wings, and the sport in question is hockey. Suddenly I feel more comfortable. If there’s one thing all reasonable Canadians know, it’s how to handle a hockey enthusiast.
I nod to a photo on the wall, of a much younger Kovaks at a game. “What are the chances of the Red Wings making playoffs this year?”
He shakes his head. “Don’t even get me started. It’s game night and we got assholes to keep an eye on. What do you want to know about your dad?”
So much for that. “I want to know about Lebanon.”
I slide the old photo of my father with the other men across the desk. He stares at it for a long time. “I remember this. This was taken in North Carolina. That’s me, your dad, Cory Seaper, and Juan Gutierez. When we first started out we all rented a house together near Camp Lejeune. This was taken before we all got separate deployments and had to give up the house.” He sighs, and his voice turns wistful. “They’re all gone now. I think I’m the only one left.”
“Yeah?”
He’s still absorbed with the photo. After a moment, he rises and clears away a pennant hanging from a set of deer antlers on the wall. Underneath the pennant is a photo of my father and Kovaks clinking shot glasses together below the sign to the bar. Here they’re older than they were in the photo with Seaper and Gutierez, but not by much. “This was when we were both back to civilian life and I took over my dad’s bar. God, we were so young then. World was a scary place. Cold War was gearing up and there was so much fear.”
“Wonder what that’s like.” I’m still trying to absorb the picture of my dad in front of the bar. A few minutes before this I was at that same entrance, looking up at that same sign.
He glances at me. “Ha. You got that right. We don’t seem to get past fear, do we? Not much difference now than it was back then. Used to be the Nazis, then it was the Vietcong and the Russians. Now it’s coming at us from everywhere.” He looks away for a moment. “Got an old journalist friend who spent some time reporting in Lebanon. From what she’s said, information was the currency of the day. Doesn’t seem that much has changed, to be honest, but Beirut used to be a place it got disseminated before the civil war, maybe after, too. There were agents everywhere. Double agents.” He laughs. “Triple agents.”
“Quadruple agents?” I say, because when you take people back to the past, it’s best to sometimes remind them that you’re still in the room with them.
“Don’t be silly,” he says, frowning. Now I know that quadruple agents are where he draws his line. “If you want, I could get her to give you a call.”
“Sure.” Information never hurt anyone. But interesting as this all is, I don’t see what it has to do with my father. “You see much of him after he became a civilian?”
“Yeah, a bit. I left the service before he did. That wasn’t the career for me. I just thought it would be an opportunity to see the world. Was trying to run as far away from this place as I could, but my dad got sick. Needed help with the bar. It’s been in my family since my grandpa, so I didn’t have much of a choice back then. After he left, Sammy would come by every now and then. Then he said he was moving to Canada with that fox of his . . . sorry,” he says. “That was your ma?”
I shrug. Since I was shot last year, the one shoulder doesn’t go up so well, so it ends up looking like an awkward range of motion, with only one side of my body involved. “I guess so.”
His keen eyes skim over me, note the tenseness in the one shoulder. I’m pretty sure he’d also seen the slight hitch in my step when I walked into the room. I get the feeling there isn’t a lot that he doesn’t see, and that’s probably why my attempt at distraction with hockey small talk bombed.
“She left when I was a kid,” I explained again, to yet another stranger. You’d think that by now I would get the hang of it, but I haven’t.
“So you got mommy issues to go along with your daddy issues, do ya, darling?”
“My name is Nora.”
His expression softens. There is so much understanding in it that I’m once again reminded of Seb, even though I’ve been trying not to think about him lately. I realize that I don’t know what to do with kind men. Simone would say fuck them, but that’s out of the question. Leo might say feed them, but I wouldn’t know how to start with that. Instead I look at the hockey paraphernalia in the room while I try not to think about my mommy and my daddy issues. If I’m being honest with myself, I’ve got some sister issues, too, but I’m sure as hell not going to let him in on those.
“So, Nora,” he continues, this time a little gentler. “What can I do for you?”
I tell him about what the veteran said. About Lebanon and my father. When I finish, he taps the desk with the end of his pen and frowns at me. “There was trouble in Lebanon at that time, but that’s not very specific. Was your veteran talking about the civil war? The Syrian invasion? The Israeli invasion?”
“I don’t know what he was talking about. He left before I got any answers.”
Kovaks shakes his head. “I’m afraid I can’t really help you. Your dad never stepped foot in the country, far as I know. He would have told me, too, because we talked around the subject a few times in regards to your mother. He was stationed on a ship in the Mediterranean. Worked support in comms.”
I sit up straighter in my chair at this. “He stayed on a boat off the coast? He never went into the country?”
“Not when I knew him. I mean, one time his ship rescued some Palestinian refugees out of Lebanon when their
boat got in trouble. Syrians were shooting the shit out of them as they left the port in Sidon and the boat took on a lot of water in the middle of the journey to Cyprus. They would have died out there at sea if your father’s ship hadn’t found them. It stuck with him. Those poor people, starving, pissing themselves, crammed in tighter than Red Wings fans at the bar during the playoffs. Almost on top of one another. He talked about that a bit. Never seen anything like it. People so desperate to get away from home that they did anything they could for a better life.”
He notices my silence, my turning inward. “Look, I was born in Detroit. It’s as shitty a place to be from as anywhere else, and I’d never tell you otherwise. But at least I knew my family. I could point to this god-awful neighborhood and say, that’s where my granddad grew up. Then point to that ugly-ass strip of buildings and say, that’s where my mom got mugged one December and we couldn’t afford Christmas presents that year. But at least I have that. Your dad never knew his place of birth. He had a homeland and didn’t know a thing about it. Never been there as an adult. And there on that boat in the middle of the ocean were these people who could never go back to their homeland. He changed after that. Still a nice guy, just less . . . happy-go-lucky. Wasn’t surprised he went for a Lebanese girl, to be honest. Something about that experience on the water made a connection for him.”
Inside all of us is a little child who wants to hear the story of her parents’ romance, even when there are more important questions to be asked. I try to keep her at bay, but fail miserably. “Do you know how they met?”
“At a little falafel shop around the corner from here. Can you believe it?”
I shake my head. I just can’t. The thought is too ridiculous to stomach.
At the door, I hesitate for a moment. I get the sense that he’s held himself in check, that there is something still left unsaid. I can see by his expression that he won’t offer it up on his own, so I ask the question that has been on my mind. “What was he like?”
Kovaks pauses. He lifts his gaze from the window and stares at me. It’s the small kindnesses in the world that undo us. The kindness that is now in his voice. “He was a good guy, Nora. The best.” Then he pauses and looks away. “I never thought he would . . . it’s a shame that he did what he did. Lotta guys, they come back from war and they can’t adjust. You know, it’s hell out there and some people just can’t move past what they’ve seen. Your dad . . . I was shocked when I heard how he died. It still gets to me.”
Does he sense my confusion? All the things I’m trying to keep tamped down inside my gut? Of course he doesn’t, and this ability to exist like this, hidden in plain view, is not unique to me. Women do it every day. Keep things hidden not to relive pain, but in order to stay under the radar. With our aging, aching bodies, stuffed every which way into support garments, propped up on miniature stilts that make it impossible to walk and still maintain some equilibrium, we don’t want them to see the rage that simmers just beneath the surface.
Something occurs to me now, something that I hadn’t really thought of before. “How? How did you hear he was dead?” According to Harvey, my father had cut ties to this place. There was no record of a relationship with Kovaks in the stuff Lorelei had collected. He had left the photo of Kovaks at Harvey’s house when he moved to Winnipeg.
“Old friend of your mom’s came by looking for her. He saw a report in the paper on your dad’s . . . his death. He’d wanted to make sure she got the news from a friend because he’d heard your parents split up. He said you girls were with your aunt, but that your mother deserved to know. Sad thing, though, when a woman leaves her kids like that.”
If there was a report in the paper about my father’s suicide, it’s news to me. Lorelei had looked for any information she could possibly find on the subject and had not come up with anything in the paper. Even though, by all accounts, he deserved some space. He was a good guy. A good guy whom I never knew past childhood. A good guy who’d had no reason to kill himself. Because I can see now, there had been trouble in Lebanon but not with him. Which begs the question. Why, exactly, did he die?
If there was no trouble in Lebanon before he left the marines, then what the hell was that veteran talking about? It has come upon me slowly, this realization that I’m in over my head here. I’d come to Detroit to find out why my father took his own life, expecting some kind of tragic story of something he’d seen in combat, in a place that was oceans away. But the more I dig, the more people I talk to who used to know him, the more it seems that he didn’t. Take his own life, that is.
And if he didn’t take his own life, well . . . then someone else must have put a gun to his head that day.
27
Bonnie hasn’t forgotten the tattoo.
She’d been drugged. Her blood was taken and sent off for testing to see if she was a possible match for her dying half-brother. She hadn’t been in her right mind then, but things have been coming back in flashes of blurred memories. She hadn’t been meant to see the tattoo at all. They had kept her drugged, mostly, but every now and then she’d rouse and see the man who said he was her father and the bald man, both hovering over her. The bald man wasn’t old, but his entire head had been shaved for some reason. He had been furious at her father for the tattoo, because her father hadn’t understood it, didn’t deserve it. They spoke in a language that she didn’t know, but matters were made perfectly clear when the bald man yanked up the sleeve on her birth father’s shirt and pointed at the tattoo.
She had been frightened of the bald man. Sometimes she’d wakened from a deep fog to find him watching her with cold eyes. Her supposed father was quick to laugh and become angry, from what she’d observed, but the bald man had not showed any sign of excitability until the tattoo incident. When the bald man noticed she was awake, he’d left the room, her father following after him. The door slammed shut and Bonnie was alone again. Scared. Weak. Passive. She swore then that she’d never be in that position again. She would find out everything she could about her father’s family and the people who’d taken her as if she meant nothing.
She has been thinking about this a lot. In a way, she is nothing. Not this or that or the other. She has realized that her birth mom, Nora, has no clue, either. They’re both confused and in the dark, so what does it really matter the history that brought her here. Over time—not much, she’s still a teenager, after all—she felt less and less like nothing and more and more like part of everything. Nothing was hers, so everything was hers. It made no sense, not really, so she’s never mentioned this to her mother Lynn or her other mother Nora, or her father Everett or to Tom. She doesn’t really have friends in Toronto yet and she doesn’t talk to her best friend from Vancouver much anymore, so there’s no need to worry about keeping things from them, thank God. She just has to keep it to herself because it sounds crazy even to her.
She is her own.
Just like Nora, she doesn’t belong to anyone. Thinking about Nora, she experiences a pang of regret—or something like it. She’d sent the photo at the clinic, with her feet in stirrups, because she’d wanted to share that moment. It was just like last year, when she went to see Nora at the hospital. She had wanted her birth mother to know what she went through to find her. The pain, the fear, and everything else that had happened. But Nora hadn’t even recognized her then.
Thinking about that time only gives her nightmares, but she can’t help herself. She hasn’t slept through until the morning in . . . well, since forever, it seems. Drawing is the only thing that helps get her through the night. She gets out her sketchpad and pencil. After the incident last year, her therapist encouraged her to use art as therapy. Her sketches and paintings were almost always of shadow faces hidden in landscapes. Hidden so deep that it became a game to set scenes that were not obvious at first glance, but once you saw them you could not forget. It added an energy to the pieces that could not be explained unless you could see what was underneath. Every now and then she’d draw a symb
ol that she’d seen inked on her father’s arm. The symbol was dripping with blood. She mostly drew the blood.
28
They’ve been watching the Burnaby house that the GPS tracker led to for the past day and a half, and Brazuca can’t remember a time when he’s been this bored. Picturing the loads of cash he’ll make when he closes this case for Lam helps, but only if he conveniently forgets about Warsame’s fees. Which hasn’t been easy, since Warsame can’t seem to drop the subject.
“So . . . ,” Warsame begins, yet again, over the phone. “How does this work? Do I invoice you or Krushnik? He knows I’m on this, right?”
“Yeah, I told him. He’s just working on a background check, and wrapping up an insurance fraud case. We’re good for a bit.”
“So I invoice you, then?”
Brazuca remembers now why he hates teamwork. He sighs. “You invoice me. Any sign of the mother?”
“Nah,” says Warsame.
Brazuca turns onto the street and pulls into a spot a few cars down from Warsame’s sedan. Property records show that the house they’ve been watching belongs to a retired schoolteacher named Greta Parnell, who doesn’t seem to actually live there.
But her son Curtis does. Curtis Parnell, the bearded man that Brazuca had followed to the port, who also happens to be a card-carrying member of the longshoremen’s union.
“But,” Warsame continues, “I have seen two idiots coming in and out since this morning.”
Brazuca frowns. This is the first time anyone else has been spotted at the house. “What kind of idiots?”
Warsame’s sigh comes through loud and clear on the line. “The most basic kind. Young. Jacked. Bad haircuts. Pretty sure they’re carrying. You know, assholes.”