Beneath the Same Heaven

by Anne Marie Ruff

  “What did you say to the FBI? What kinds of questions did they ask you?”

  For a moment I feel something like pride. “I didn’t tell them anything they couldn’t have found out from public records. I told them how we met, that I visited his family in Pakistan. I told them that we had a wedding in Lahore and that you and Mom and Ted were there. They insisted that…”

  “You told them I was in Pakistan?”

  “Yes. Why wouldn’t I?”

  He looks down and runs his fingers through his hair, letting out a long exhale. “People in certain policy circles might think it not so wise that I was in Pakistan at that time in our relationship with them.”

  “Dad,” my voice rises, suddenly defensive, “they would be able to see that in your passport. The American Chamber ran a little blurb in their newsletter. It was hardly confidential.”

  The baby’s swing has stilled.

  “All right, never mind about that. What about your finances, do you have enough to live on for a while?”

  “Rashid is always very careful about the money, so I think I have enough for about six months, longer if I keep working.”

  Michael returns with a big smile, my mother’s hand protectively on his shoulder. “Are you ready to take Michael to school?” she asks.

  “Yes, thanks for helping with his teeth.” I gather up the children’s bags, grateful for a mundane task.

  “I’ll go with you,” my father says decisively. “Margaret, you stay here.”

  “Can’t Grandma come with us too?” Michael complains.

  “No beta…no Michael,” I tell him, the Urdu word suddenly foreign in my mouth, “it will be too crowded with all of us in the car.”

  In the car, my father, eerily reserved, responds only occasionally to the questions Michael asks. We all walk together into the day care center, me, a woman sandwiched between two generations of family. Once I point down the hall to direct my father, he takes the lead, walking at a dignified pace, chin up, the hard leather of his heels clicking precisely on the linoleum floor. I don’t look at the other mother who passes me, she hardly notices me behind the unfamiliar man. He opens the door to the infant room for me, bright tissue paper flowers rustle against his shoulder as he makes way for me. The caregiver looks up, I see a smile flicker over her face before she recognizes me, and her expression goes cold. She makes no conversation as she takes the baby. I introduce the man behind me as my father. They nod at each other, but do not speak. She looks in the baby’s eyes so she need not face me again. She has seen the news. I am now the woman from the news, a woman to be feared or pitied, but not a woman to talk with or joke with, not the woman I was before.

  I walk back the way I came in, protected by my father. In the car my father still does not speak. I pretend again. I cheerfully walk Michael to the door of the school, kneel down to give him a hug. He smiles, turns to join his classmates. Will they know? Will his teachers know? Will they see him differently as well? I have to tell him something. What? By tonight.

  My father has moved to the drivers’ seat. He waits until he has pulled away from the school, the car seats both empty behind us, before he speaks. “You do understand how serious this is, don’t you?”

  I only nod.

  “The FBI may give you a day or so of freedom, may seem to be leaving you alone. But they will be watching your every move, they will tap every call, they will monitor every email. You are now a terrorist’s wife.”

  My throat constricts, my breathing nearly stops.

  He looks in the rearview mirror, quickly turns down a side street and pulls up alongside a bank with a courtyard. The fountain in the center perpetually spouts a great column of water that falls back on itself in predictably chaotic forms. He parks the car.

  “Come and sit with me.”

  I sit stunned, my father politely opens the door for me, helps me out. I am embarrassed by his chivalry. We walk and he motions for me to sit on a public bench with a view of the fountain.

  He smoothes his hair, then sits with his hands in his lap. “Perhaps they have already placed a microphone in your car. I want to be sure we won’t be overheard.”

  I look back at the car, pull my purse protectively onto my lap.

  “Listen Kathryn, you know how much we love you. I’ll do whatever’s in my power to help you. I’ll call in every favor, contact any person I know, go to any lengths to protect you. But I need to know exactly how you’re involved. I need to know exactly what you know. You need to tell me anything Rashid said to you in the last weeks and months.”

  I clench my fists to hold the tears back. The water splashes, sounding like flesh hitting flesh. I let my breath out silently.

  “Now don’t cry, we’re just having a conversation here. Just look at the fountain if you need to, and tell me what you know.”

  “Rashid had talked about revenge,” I say slowly, wondering if I am betraying him. “He talked about the way a country takes revenge when its people are killed.”

  “When did he talk about that?”

  “After his father was killed. He’d been quiet for weeks, been visiting the mosque in the mornings. I thought it was his process of mourning.”

  “Which mosque?”

  “I didn’t ask. I assumed the Pakistani mosque in Artesia. Michael went with him once.”

  My father presses his palms together. He almost looks like he is going to pray. “Did he have any new friends he spoke of, any people he went to see in the mosque?”

  I feel my muscles tighten at this second interrogation.

  “I need to understand how they’ll accuse him, how you’ll be implicated.”

  “He never mentioned anyone. Only Michael told me he saw Rashid speaking angrily with another man when he went with his father.” I look at my father, alarmed. “Don’t let them question Michael. He doesn’t know anything. He’s just a child.”

  “Don’t worry. No one can talk to Michael without your permission. And how did Rashid treat you and the children? Did he act strangely? Was he gone at unusual times?”

  “He’s always gone at unusual times. That’s the nature of his job.” My voice grows shrill.

  “And how was he around you and the children?”

  I am silent remembering warmth, the feel of his skin, the heft of his limbs, the darkness of his hair. And then a stone cold numbness.

  My father holds my hand. “I’m so sorry,” he says offering me a handkerchief from his breast pocket.

  I can’t match my father’s stoicism. I bury my face against his chest. He places an arm around me in a rigid gesture of comfort. He smells like wool and starched cotton. “How could he do something like this?” I sob, then catch myself, pull away, smooth the handkerchief in my hands. “Perhaps he has done nothing.”

  “Kathryn, unfortunately, this is not an unusual story for a Pakistani man.”

  I look away.

  “I lived around these kinds of cultures long enough to know about revenge. When a man’s family member is killed, he’s obligated. The events that can unfold from that death are inexorable. What’s unusual, he was a Pakistani man in America, with an American wife. But he was Muslim, went to the mosque, it will be understood here as Islamic terrorism. Plays right into the story that we understand… Islamic cultures are barbaric. Muslims are heartless. They’re not like us, we’re justified in invading and bombing their countries.”

  I look at my watch. “I have to call my editor,” I’m suddenly rushing. “I have a meeting.” My father sits quietly while I dial the number. I fish a notebook and my pen out of my bag.

  “Hi Jerome, it’s Kathryn. Sorry I wasn’t able to make our call yesterday…Yes, I’m fine,” I say stiffly. “…But Rashid has no role with the journal. I work for the journal... What do you mean, problematic?... Administrative leave?”

  I let the phone drop to my lap. It remains illuminated for a few seconds before going dark.

  My father looks at me. “The journal is letting you go?”

>   I shake my head, looking down at my feet. Then slowly, queasily, I flip my notebook shut, slide my pen into the spiral binding and return it to my purse. “No one will assume I am innocent, will they, Dad?”

  “You don’t need me to tell you terrorism has united us as Americans.”

  Terrorism. The word. I hate it. I hear it come from my father’s mouth, I know it is somehow linked to my husband’s actions, I feel it beginning to shred the fibers of my heart.

  “And I’m afraid, Kathryn, you cannot expect that anyone will treat you generously in this situation.”

  I am sitting next to this man, but he is completely separate from me. I am alone, an island, no longer connected to the people and things that once held me in place. Only my children will anchor me now. What do I call them now? If I am widowed, are they orphaned? Half-orphaned?

  “What should I do? What about the children?” I ask.

  He looks past the fountain as if trying to divine a path to safety. Two starlings dive past each other, darting back up at the last minute, startling a few sparrows that have come to dip their beaks in the edge of the fountain.

  He helps me stand, a protective arm around my shoulder. He has no answer.

  My father navigates through the thicket of reporters that have gathered outside the parking garage. My mother opens the door before we even reach it as if pulling us to safety. She has found the one apron I own—she must have looked through every cupboard. She looks up and down the hall.

  “I thought you might be Ted.” My mother smiles at me as if I were just coming home from school and she had been expecting me with an afternoon snack.

  “Ted?” I haven’t thought of my older brother since my world capsized.

  “I called him,” my mother says gathering three coffee cups. “I asked him to come up from San Diego, because I thought we should all be together.” She pours the coffee, the milk, and the sugar, remembering the exact proportions my father and I prefer.

  I wrap my hands around the mug, trying to absorb some comfort through the ceramic. She rests her hand on mine, looks into my eyes. “Michael needs to know, Kathy.”

  I nod, I know that this is as important as the legal and logistical questions my father has asked, maybe even more so. I swirl the coffee in the cup.

  “No good can come from keeping this from them.”

  “But what can I say? Michael won’t understand what’s happened, why his father’s done this. If he’s done this.”

  “You need to explain why his father’s not coming home. Better he hears something from you than something from his classmates or his teachers.”

  There is a knock on the door. My mother calmly moves to the door, and calls out before opening it. “Who’s there?” as if a neighbor might be coming asking to borrow a cup of sugar.

  “It’s Ted.”

  I exhale as the door opens.

  My brother now has a few grey hairs in his goatee, a few more pounds around his middle than when I last saw him. Why do I feel disappointed when others age? Why do I wish for some impossible immortal stability?

  He hugs my mother and then my father perfunctorily before taking three strides with his long legs and sitting down opposite me. “So…what kind of clusterfuck do we have going on here?”

  He is so without angst, so-matter-of-fact that I let out a guffaw, part laugh, part sob.

  “So, I know that Rashid went back to Pakistan to bury his old man. Thank you, American-military-industrial complex. And then, what, he decides to repay the favor? Avenging hero? And in the process my little sister and their kids are gonna get screwed.”

  My parents know Ted’s irreverence well enough not to contradict him. Our mother speaks first, “We were talking about what she should tell Michael.”

  “Oh man,” Ted says, accepting a cup of coffee from our mother. “I’m so sorry. This is such a shitty situation for you. Your husband tries to blow up a freeway—wouldn’t we all love to do that sometimes—but it’s not only really stupid, but by the way illegal and morally reprehensible, and now you get to figure out how to explain that to a kid.”

  He takes a sip of coffee and nods at our mother. “Where does Michael think he is now?”

  “Rashid told us he had a big offshore job inVentura. I expected he’d be gone about a week,” I say.

  “And Michael’s cool with that? He doesn’t think anything’s up?”

  I sip my coffee. “Maybe.”

  Ted pauses. “Just tell him there was an accident on the oil platform and his father’s been blasted to smithereens.” He narrates my situation as if it were a cartoon.

  I see my mother glance to my father for his reaction.

  “I can’t do that. I can’t make up such a lie,” I protest.

  “Why not? It’s not so far fetched, oil is dangerous business. Explosives, pressure, radioactive tools, poisonous sulfur gas in the wells. Tell the story so it has shades of truth. Maybe say he was coming back from a job and he made a mistake, got into a car accident and the explosives in the truck blew up and killed him and his co-worker.”

  I look from my brother to my parents—who taught me never to lie—to gauge their reaction.

  “That’s not such a bad idea,” my mother says.

  “Really?”

  “Think about how Michael will grow up,” she says. “It’ll be hard enough that his father’s been killed suddenly. But to grow up knowing that his father was a terrorist and killed other people.”

  Again, I flinch at the word. Terrorist. Hearing it from my mother feels like a betrayal.

  “And how can he possibly understand that some culture might think this logical, justified. Better to disconnect him from that, to protect the good memories he has of his father,” she says.

  “But even if I tell him that, the whole world knows a different story. How do I maintain my story in the face of that?” I gesture toward the news vans gathered outside.

  We are all silent.

  Ted slides his hand across the table, as if turning the page in an imaginary comic book. “A whole new life for you,” he concentrates, teasing out each word, each new thought as he goes. “You should move, leave your job, go back to your maiden name, for the children also. They can’t stay at their school, the day care. You’ll need to start fresh.”

  “How do I do that? You mean like a witness protection plan?”

  My father raises an eyebrow, “Maybe the FBI would be willing to help you make those kinds of arrangements. I could call some friends at the Bureau.”

  “Fuck the FBI, Dad. Sorry, I just mean Kathy doesn’t need the government to give her permission to start over. She can just do what she needs to do. She can move with the boys to San Diego, they can even crash in our guest house until she finds a place. She can find a new job, using her references that knew her with her maiden name. When people try to talk to the boys about Rashid Siddique, you can all just say he was not their father, they’ll have different last names.”

  I turn his words over in my mind, feeling the hope they offer, a path forward out of this morass. I simply shed this life, like a snake shedding its skin, there is no shame in that change for the snake, it is simply growth, regeneration. I look up at Ted, who sits almost smugly waiting for an answer from me. All I want is to be alone, to sit with myself, with this absence, examine the gaping wound I feel. I leave the table and lock myself in the bathroom.

  I use the toilet, wash my hands, look at myself in the mirror. I see the woman reflected there, and wonder who she is. I remember the younger me, the woman laughing and dancing in the nightclub, the woman who fell in love, the woman who went to Pakistan, who embraced, trusted, loved. I see myself rounded, glowing with the prospect of a new baby. I see the woman at a desk, making calls, questioning intellectuals, politicians, businessmen. What other woman is waiting inside this body? I run my fingers through my long hair. What is it worth to me now? I follow the lines of my eyebrows, the wrinkles that spread out from the corners of my eyes, proof of abundant past
happiness in my life. I watch my lips, draw them up in a smile, down in a frown. I run my hand down my chin, and over my neck, my sternum. I slide my fingers down between my breasts, over the softness of my belly and continuing past my pelvis, to my pubis. I pause, almost holding myself up, supporting this place, the locus of my family. Rashid entered me here and from here the boys emerged into the world. Who will know it now? What will it mean? How could the man who knew this place have abandoned this marriage, his children, me? I open my mouth and scream. I draw my hands up to cover my face. I feel a void spreading out from my center and then everything goes dark and silent.

  “Mommy?” I hear a tiny voice, sad, frightened. “Mommy?” I feel a tiny hand stroke my forehead.

  I open my eyes to silhouettes. Michael stands beside my bed, his little shoulders so straight, so perfectly proportioned. Behind him my mother, light suffusing through the grey hairs coiffed above her head. She holds Andrew in her arms.

  I am disoriented. The room seems too dark. A line of pale light seeps in at the edge of the drawn curtains. I reach out for Michael’s shoulder and draw him to me. He comes closer and rests his head on my chest, while I stroke his hair. My head throbs dully with every beat of my heart.

  “What happened?” I question my mother over his head.

  “You fainted in the bathroom.” She sits on the edge of my bed. “Ted managed to walk you in here, we figured if you could sleep…”

  Michael climbs to the inside of the bed, holding my hand. “Are you feeling better, Mommy? Grandma said you were sick, that’s why you couldn’t come to pick me up from school.”

  I push myself up to sitting, feeling the milk pressing in my breasts. “Mom, give me the baby, he must be hungry.”

  “I gave him a bottle about a half hour ago,” she says.

  Guilt. I have failed both of my children.

  “Mommy, where is Daddyji? Grandma said I should talk to you about it.”

  I look from my mother to my father to Ted. I draw in a deep breath. And I lie. “Your father was in a terrible accident,” I repeat the story my brother has told me. “He had been offshore on a job and there was a terrible explosion in the vehicle he was driving.” A small lie, a sin of omission really, I did not actually utter any false statements.