It All Falls Down

by Sheena Kamal

  I guess it’s enough for now that I know she’s okay and getting regular pelvic exams.

  I’m not sure how long I stay on the riverfront, but in Detroit time it’s about two dozen people on bicycles with speakers mounted on them, playing slow jams. It’s impossible to hate on cyclists blasting Luther Vandross and Aretha Franklin, no matter how close they are to running you over.

  Hearing Aretha reminds me of Nate’s aunt.

  It’s strange that a place like this could spawn one of the greatest soul legends alive today, but it makes a certain kind of sense. Music comes from shoving open the blinds and letting the sunshine or the darkness in. At least the blues does. Soul music is called that for a reason. If there was ever a place that stripped away the extraneous, it is Detroit. The only city where, after the population expanded to over a million, it has contracted again to far below it in what is America’s most famous case study in mass desertion. Detroit isn’t pretty, but the people left to pick up the pieces feel real to me. Which is more than I can say for beautiful but distant Vancouver, where there are no cyclists blasting love songs to cheer up the downtrodden. Maybe I’m falling for this city, even though someone here is trying to kill me.

  I’m in a stupendous funk, and it’s only getting worse.

  After my near-drowning last year, my instincts have been off. Though I’ve at times felt I’d been watched, it took me a long time to figure out that the surveillance was real—that the veteran had been keeping an eye on me and I wasn’t, as I thought, going crazy. This would not have happened if I’d been in my right mind, but Seb’s illness and the introduction of Bonnie to my life have set me off-kilter.

  My phone beeps as several emails from Simone come through. I’m lucky that free outdoor Wi-Fi hotspots exist so that I can be digitally harassed without being charged extra data fees. The first messages are dire warnings about being careful or else. But she never says what the “else” is.

  The second contains a list of names and images that she’s dug up of marines injured in Beirut during the time my father served. I wish I’d had enough presence of mind when Nate had been shot to recover my backpack from the scene so that I could look at this on a larger screen. I’m reluctant to go back, in case whoever is after me is still lurking around. And I don’t want to run into Kev. I’m not sure I can take any more questions from him at the moment. I am still without a change of clothes, my passport, and my laptop. At least I have my wallet and phone on me, but still. I could have been better prepared. Thinking like this is a waste of time, of course. At the bottom of a dark pit is where what-ifs belong. Where you can find Nate. It is also where I put the memory of the time when, as a child, I saw a man bleeding out on the floor in front of me, which is partially why I’m in this godforsaken city in the first place.

  I force myself to read through Simone’s emails on my phone. The veteran isn’t in there. If I’d been smarter I would have asked him his name when I confronted him in Vancouver, but I wasn’t so I didn’t. Because of this error, I’m here squinting at old records. Out of desperation I begin searching through images of American journalists in Lebanon during the 1970s, because Dania Nasri said that the man I now know as the veteran had posed as a journalist. Maybe there was some truth to that.

  My phone rings. It’s a blocked number. “Hello?”

  “It’s me,” says Simone. “Did you get my messages?”

  “Looking through them right now. Before you say anything about the attack . . .” God help me, but I had to tell her to get her to respond to me right away. And she did, as I knew she would.

  “Don’t talk to me about the attack, Nora. I’ve just about had it with you. It’s all over the local press that some famous singer is on his deathbed. You’re in the middle of a shitstorm. Again.”

  So she is upset. My strategy for getting her to respond quickly has achieved its aim, but not without some blowback. You can’t win them all. And I haven’t told her I’m the target. I may have insinuated that someone might be after my new friend Nate.

  “Simone—”

  “Don’t. Just don’t. I can’t even with you right now.”

  “Look, I promise that all I’ve done is gone around asking questions about my dad. That’s it.”

  She’s quiet for a moment. I think she believes me, but can’t be sure. I’m about to make another declaration of innocence when she speaks. “So you’re looking for information about Americans in Lebanon during a very, very difficult time in the history of that country. There’s a lot out there. And when hasn’t Lebanon had a difficult time of it?”

  The vast majority of photographs are from the eighties onward, when the American Embassy and marine barracks in Beirut were bombed. There were also stories about the hostage crisis that held the country in grip for roughly a decade, when foreigners were fair game and would be kidnapped left, right, and center, for as many reasons as there were in the book. The true beginnings of the hostage crisis hit a few years after my father had left the military, after my mother had immigrated to Canada and went to the wedding in Dearborn, but there had been some signs that Beirut wasn’t a safe space for foreigners even before then.

  “Talk to me about this guy, this veteran. What was your impression of him?”

  “He was hard to pin down. His voice was strange and there was a scar on the side of his neck.”

  “So maybe there was some damage to his vocal cords, or throat, or something.”

  “That part felt true. When he said he’d been in an attack.”

  “Okay, this is what you’re good at, Nora. This is your strength. Take away all the bullshit, forget that he’d been following you. What else about what he said felt true?”

  “When he said there’d been trouble in Lebanon,” I said slowly. I’d been looking at my father’s life as a whole, looking into his childhood and his military life, but I’d learned nothing about his death from that line of inquiry. “He’d said it in reference to my father, but I can’t find anything to support that.”

  I can hear her drumming her fingers against a table in the background. “So an American who’d had trouble in Lebanon. You’re sure he’s not in any of the photos that I’ve dug up?”

  “I’m positive.”

  “Your dad was with the marines on a ship stationed in the Mediterranean, right? And came home in the seventies.”

  “Right.”

  “Your mom was a refugee, and had gone to a wedding in the late seventies.”

  “Yup.”

  “Sorry,” she says, after a moment of silence. “I’m having thoughts about hideous disco outfits. The body type that can pull off a pair of bell-bottoms is so rare . . . Where were we? Your mother goes to a wedding in Dearborn and meets your father—”

  “Not at the wedding. Somewhere in the city.”

  “Right, a few years after they meet, a newspaper article on the groom’s family comes out because his dad is some kind of bigwig in Beirut who played a role as a political negotiator for the hostage crisis. The national newspapers pick it up. They use some of the wedding photos to profile his American ties. A journalist shows up at the family’s house, asking questions.”

  “When my mom finds out about it, she leaves. About a year or so later, my dad dies.”

  “Right. So there’s a period after your mom leaves and your dad dies—”

  “If this veteran was after her, why did he wait?”

  “It doesn’t fit.” She pauses. Thinks about it for a moment. I hear her cover the phone and whisper something to someone in the background but she’s back with me quickly. “Let’s leave that alone for a minute. I’m sifting through some other things. I might have some more photos for you to look at, Nora. Hang on.”

  I am hanging on, alone and in plain sight, as dusk falls around me. A frayed thread is what’s keeping me from getting on the next plane back to Vancouver. Any sense of comfort I’d felt being in a crowded public place in daylight has now faded. There’s no way I can go back to the motel, or to Nate’s
place, or Harvey’s. But she doesn’t have to know that. I sit and people-watch, particularly taken with a man in navy pants, a tan blazer, pink shirt, purple tie, and black shoes who still manages to look more coordinated than me, even though both my jacket and sweatpants are the same shade of dark gray. Some people can pull off color. All sorts of them, and at once.

  My phone lights up. There is a photo waiting from Bonnie. Her feet are propped up on the dashboard of a car and, look, there’s her forearm at the edge of the shot. Beyond the front windshield is an expanse of water that I assume is Lake Ontario. The sky over the water is a delicate pink. I’m out of Whisper photos, so it takes me a minute to figure out how to respond. While I wait for Simone’s next set of emails, I go over to a nearby streetlight and take a photo of myself underneath it. In the picture, you can see my face and my upper body clearly. It would have been nice for the shot to have been more flattering, but that’s a losing battle. I send it off to her quickly, before I can stop myself.

  Every girl should have a photo of her mother.

  Then I check into a cheap hotel, not far from the waterfront. It’s not much better than the motel, but at least the door locks. I pull the mini fridge away from the wall and set it in front of the door—for a sense of homely comfort—and then fall onto the bed with my clothes and shoes on.

  I’m asleep when Simone sends a zip file of information through to me.

  40

  Sometimes foreigners get hurt in Beirut.

  I’ve given the hotel clerk twenty dollars to let me use the computer in the back office and he has left me alone with the warning that my time will be up in an hour. It is in the third set of Simone’s articles that I find the veteran who, as it turns out, wasn’t a veteran at all. He wasn’t a journalist, either, though he wasn’t far off.

  He was a photographer who’d been injured in a car bomb blast.

  In the photo of the accident, Ryan Russo is on a stretcher, being pushed into an ambulance on the streets of West Beirut. His face is mostly covered by an outstretched arm, but his eyes are wide open and glaring at whoever is behind the camera. The bomb, said the article, had exploded from a parked car that Russo had just walked past.

  I skim past the warning of the danger of working in a foreign country until I get to the background information on Russo himself. His family had run a chain of small-town papers in California, and he’d gone to journalism school at Stanford. But photojournalism was his passion. He was working for his family’s paper when he’d heard one of his photography idols had been killed in Beirut. The article said he was hoping to write a book about his mentor’s work and death in Lebanon. He was a young man, yearning for adventure and was armed with a camera. He had fancied himself a man of the world, said his Beirut landlord. A bit of a daredevil who sometimes hired a “fixer” to help him navigate the city both geographically and politically, but had taken to going off on his own. The landlord suggested this was something of a mistake. According to the report, the blast caused severe burns to Russo’s neck, arm, and torso. He’d also fractured a rib and broken his collarbone. After some searching, I find that Russo took photos for the family business for about a decade after returning from Lebanon.

  The chain was sold and Ryan Russo dropped off the face of the earth.

  “That’s him,” says Dania Nasri, after I knock on her door a second time. We’re sitting in her living room and she is looking at the photo on my phone. It is a head shot taken before Beirut. Russo is looking directly at the camera, unsmiling. But even in this photograph his charisma shines through.

  “You’re sure?”

  She nods slowly, eyes skimming over the article. “But I don’t understand. It says right here that he’d been to Lebanon himself and was in an attack. He never said that when he came to see me—and I spent the whole afternoon talking to him.” She scrolls back up to the top of the page, looking at the date. “He was in Beirut the same time your mother was there. You don’t think that’s a coincidence, do you?”

  And then he saw her picture in the paper, came looking for her, and when she heard about it she abandoned her family and never looked back?

  “No,” I tell her. “I don’t.”

  Having five granddaughters must have tuned her to the changes in female posture. Or maybe it’s the sudden fear that I’m projecting. She places a hand over mine. “Are you in trouble, Nora?”

  “My mother,” I say, watching her carefully. “You said she wasn’t political in Montreal when you met her. Was she political in Lebanon? Could she have been in some kind of trouble?”

  She smiles and pats my hand. “No, I don’t think so.”

  It hurts when someone you trust lies to your face. Even elegant women who love their granddaughters aren’t exempt. Maybe that’s what makes me hold on to her hand, a little tighter than necessary. I squeeze, not enough to cause pain, but enough for her to know I’m not letting go. Her fingers feel brittle under my grip. She’s wearing a diamond engagement band along with her wedding ring. The diamond cuts into my skin, but I barely feel it. I’m so tired that I’m close to being numb. “Tell me the truth.”

  Dania is looking at me, shocked. She tries to move her hand away, but I don’t let her. “You don’t want to know the truth.”

  “Isn’t that for me to decide? I need to know.” I’ve come too far now. I sense her weakening, so I loosen my grip.

  She pulls her hand from mine and goes to the window. “I heard from a mutual friend who knew your mother’s brother from Lebanon . . . She lived on the outskirts of the Sabra refugee camp with some relatives who took her in after her brother was shot in the head. He had refused to provide ID at a checkpoint. He’d joined a Marxist group that fought for Palestine. They were a low-key bunch, but some were involved in petty acts of disturbance. Kidnappings, robberies. This friend said that Sabrina had hung around them for a while after her brother died, his friends were all she had left of him. It could have been something, or nothing. That’s all I know.” But I can see the wheels still churning in her brain.

  There’s something she’s still not saying. I wait quietly for her to continue. To realize that she can’t fool me.

  She turns away from the window and looks at me. I wish at this moment I looked like my mother because maybe it would spark something in this woman. Maybe make her tell me what she’s too afraid to say.

  I think, at the end of it, it’s my stubbornness that wins out.

  She sighs heavily. “Your mother lived alone in Montreal. Her aunt who sponsored her . . . she didn’t live with her. Never really spoke about her. I just couldn’t figure out how Sabrina could afford it all. I always got the sense that she was holding something back. I liked her, loved her at times, even. But I couldn’t trust her. It was like she always kept something hidden. You know what her favorite book was? Catch-22. She saw herself not as a part of a revolutionary people. In all the time I knew her, there was no struggle in her. She saw herself as a person sick of the world who gets in a rowboat and paddles away. She could be . . . she could be cold. Not always, but every now and then I would see a little glimmer of it. When she didn’t want to talk about her new baby, your sister, I felt that coldness again.”

  I backtrack. I don’t want to think about how my mother could look at Lorelei and feel anything other than love. If I do I’ll have to confront the fact that, to make up for it, I spent my childhood looking at my sister with nothing but love. Even when it hurt so much I could barely speak to her. “She never said how she supported herself?”

  “I asked a few times, but she would just change the subject. She was an expert at avoiding conversations she didn’t want to have.”

  A short silence follows. Then something in her breaks. “I always thought there was a man involved, to be honest. We would talk about boyfriends, of course, but she was very cynical. She said there’d been someone, back in Beirut, but she’d seen another side to him. She said he’d just been using her. Something about the way she said it frightened me, I supp
ose. She was not a forgiving person.”

  Dania Nasri turns away from me. She looks like she’s aged ten years since we began this conversation. I guess that’s the effect I have on people.

  “Thanks for your time,” I say, getting up so that I can put some distance between us. I pause for a moment at the entrance to the room. “How can you remember all of this?”

  She hesitates. Looks through me. “My family, when they left Jaffa in Palestine it was supposed to be for a few days. Maybe a month. We had orange groves there, the best oranges in the whole world came from our land. There was an olive grove, too. We had family in Lebanon whom we visited many times in the past, so it was just like another family holiday. And then . . . and then we weren’t allowed back. Other people lived in our house. As the years went past, my mother and father used to talk about the house, until they couldn’t remember it properly anymore. Then they would argue about what had been on the shelves and the color of this rug or that curtain. Eventually my mother threw the house keys away because what was the point of keeping them anymore? That part of our history was lost to us, and we will never get it back.”

  She goes to a bookshelf filled with large albums. Her fingers skip over them and land on one. She opens it up and shows me a certain page. It is the article that I first showed her, the one with the photo of my mother at the wedding. “Everything about us goes into one of these,” she explains. “My granddaughters, they think I’m silly for doing this, but it’s our history, you know?”

  “They’ll always know what color the curtains are.”

  “No, they can forget the curtains, but nobody will throw away any more keys to who we are. The keys are more important. They can look in here if they want to find one. I don’t want my family to lose another memory.” She pauses here and something like regret crosses her face. It’s the first time I’ve seen her lose her composure. “Like, for example, one of a close friend who has left her family shortly after a conversation with you. I’ve replayed that phone call in my mind over and over for years and thought about what I said to that man who came to our house. I know I had something to do with her leaving, you understand? I just didn’t know what. At the time I was pregnant and preoccupied, but I never forgot and I’ve thought about it often. I even wrote it down, but destroyed the note afterward. It was so silly of me, giving out her information! When I came to America, I wanted a new life, too. I didn’t want to live in fear and suspicion. You have no idea what that does to a person after a while.”