Beneath the Same Heaven

by Anne Marie Ruff

  “We are with Calexico Equity, meeting with investors in Mexico. We have an interest in beach front real estate, and manufacturing capabilities along the border.”

  I hope I won’t need to repeat any of this.

  And before I can think about where I will go in America, we are in the queue of cars, making slow but steady progress toward the border. Abe rolls down the window and hands our documents to a fat woman with bleached blonde hair in a khaki uniform and military style boots. She runs a scanner over our documents, glances at her hand held screen and then at a monitor mounted on the gate above us. She leans in toward the car and looks at us—though not as far down as my feet in dark socks and shoes—and then into the empty back seat. Then she looks up in response to one of her colleagues. “What?” She holds up her hand, signaling for us to wait. Abe keeps his foot on the brake, his index finger taps out an almost imperceptible rhythm on the steering wheel. My breath seizes up in my lungs.

  She looks back inside the car and then turns back to her colleague, “Yeah, I brought my lunch, but ice cream, that’d be good.” And she hands back our documents and waves us through.

  We are in.

  I can only look straight ahead. America rolls out along a six-lane freeway. And so simply, I have returned to a country both familiar and foreign. I expect I should feel something, but numbness overwhelms me. I have accomplished the long journey, the series of forgeries and deceits. But just as when I returned to Pakistan after the bombing, no one will be ready to greet me, no one will open their arms with relief that I have arrived safely. As the adrenaline subsides, I realize the most difficult actions of this path are yet to come.

  After a few miles, Abe exhales loudly. “So where do you want to go in San Diego?”

  I look at him, surprised. “You don’t have directions about where to go?”

  “What do I look like? A tour guide? My instructions were to bring you into the U.S. Here we are.”

  “Could you just bring me to a hotel?”

  “Which one?”

  I shrug my shoulders.

  He looks at his watch. “I have to go downtown to drop this car, I’ll drop you someplace near downtown. It’ll be easier for you to walk places since you don’t have a car.”

  A sudden nostalgia for the car grips me. I don’t want to leave my seat, don’t want to be separated from the familiar smell of the leather and the dependable hum of the engine. Anxiety tightens my stomach just as when my parents dropped me off at a hill station boarding school for 10th standard, thinking the structure and discipline of the place would curb my problematic success winning girls’ affections. My parents did not relent, even when they saw me choking back tears on the drive into the mountains. The driver does not care for my emotional state either. Unceremoniously, he leaves me standing before the automatic glass doors of a Best Western.

  Chapter 23

  San Diego, California.

  Twenty years after the bombing

  * * *

  For three days I wait, tensed like a coiled spring in that hotel room. There will be no more introductions, no more men who will deliver me like some kind of dangerous package to another place. I am waiting only for myself. I need only find the directions to her home. The absurdly simple task inflates in my mind. I watch the television screen in the hotel room, trying, unsuccessfully, to lose myself in other peoples’ dramas. I order a pizza, and think about turning back. But I have no one waiting for me, no transport to the border. I have not planned for a return to Pakistan.

  Be a man, I tell myself. Finish this thing.

  But the days pass.

  The front desk calls, I must pay the bill, they do not allow guests to stay for more than a week without paying. I turn over several months’ worth of wages for my week-long stay.

  I brace myself to step into the hostile friendliness, the toxic cleanliness of America. I spend two hours walking to the address I have for the hawala. In a non-descript low-rise commercial strip, the shop offers both pre-paid phone plans and travel services beneath dusty posters of Dubai and Mecca.

  I request the funds that have been piling up since I cancelled the postal mailings to Kathryn. “I had expected you several days ago,” the hawala man says in Arabic-accented English. “I thought maybe something had happened to you.”

  “A whole lifetime has happened to me,” I respond somberly, taking the cash in an envelope and walking back out. I stand on the corner watching the traffic, hoping for a taxi to come by. After a half hour passes, the man from the shop comes out. “Do you need something?”

  “A taxi.”

  “Well why didn’t you say so? You’ll wait all day here. In America everyone has their own car.” He waves me back inside while he requests a car for me.

  I gaze at the Mecca poster. I never made the Hajj, never suffered through the swirl of crowds and heat to throw stones at the devil and circle the Kabba as my father and grandfather did. But this pilgrimage to my past, I remind myself, is every bit as difficult, will also align my life with God.

  The car arrives, and the task I had procrastinated this last week, he accomplishes with a few words into his navigator screen. A red line on a map shows in stark clarity the final leg of my journey to Kathryn.

  The red line grows shorter and shorter until he pulls into the driveway of an apartment complex. My heart sinks. The units look small, the building shabbier than what I remember of our condo together in Los Angeles.

  The driver turns around. “What are you waiting for?” He points to the meter still running on his screen. “The fare will increase until you pay.”

  Still I sit, slowly pull out bills to pay the fare. He turns off the meter and still I sit.

  “That’s it, man. I’ve got another passenger waiting.”

  Then I am standing in the driveway. A bead of perspiration slides down my back. My heart pounds. Kathryn could be close enough to be in my arms within moments. I look down at my hands, the darkness of years of mechanics’ work lingers in the swirled lines of my fingertips. How could these hands possibly be worthy? A car pulls past me into a parking spot. The driver, a young Latino man gets out and looks at me briefly, his eyes passing over my turban with a momentary interest, but he says nothing as he ascends the stairs and disappears down a corridor. I step toward the bank of mailboxes, consider simply leaving the bills I have picked up at the hawala and leaving before I cause more damage in Kathryn’s life.

  I can barely focus my eyes to read the names on the individual boxes. I nearly jump at the sound of a woman’s voice. “Can I help you?”

  I recognize the voice, unchanged after all these years. I turn, take in her face in a moment before averting my eyes. She has aged. Of course I knew she would, but I hadn’t considered the ways the years would line her face.

  “I’m just looking for a mailbox.”

  “I can see that,” she says. “Whose mailbox are you looking for?”

  “Kathryn,” I pause, I want to call her by her name, I want to say Kathryn Siddique, but I catch myself. “Capen.”

  “That’s me,” a note of curiosity in her voice.

  Wordlessly, I offer the envelope bearing the words, To the Family of Rashid Siddique.”

  She sighs, does not reach to accept the envelope. “Are you the one who delivers these?”

  I shake my head. “This is the first time I’ve come in person.” I look up again, allowing myself to engage her eyes. Her pupils grow wide. Her smile of pleasant hospitality gives way to a series of expressions in quick succession, reflecting emotions I can only imagine.

  “Are you Rashid Siddique?” she asks, she nearly laughs at the absurdity of her own question.

  I inhale, bracing myself for the world of possibilities beyond this question. “I was.”

  Part Four

  The Book of After

  Chapter 1

  San Diego, California.

  Twenty years after the bombing

  * * *

  Kathryn’s eyelids close and h
er knees buckle. Rashid responds instantly, reaching out for her in a gesture part embrace part rescue. Rashid had not expected Kathryn in his arms so quickly, nor had he imagined that he would hold her unconscious. For a few moments he can feel her heat, smell her perfume, follow the graceful line of her hair. When she revives she does not react, simply allows herself to be lifted to her feet, only nods as Rashid motions toward the stairs. He supports her as they walk together toward her home. Inside, he sets her on the sofa. In the kitchen he opens all the cupboards until he finds a glass, then brings her water. She watches his movements. Even in his nervous unfamiliarity, she can see the elegant strength of the man she knew. As he offers her the glass she carefully avoids his fingers, as if he might be a mirage that could vanish with the slightest provocation.

  “You cannot be Rashid, he’s dead, he blew himself up in a terrorist bombing.”

  He closes his eyes, wondering how to navigate the wasteland of wounds between them. “I didn’t die in the bombing.”

  “I don’t believe you’re him.” Her rational mind will not allow her to accept what she knew the moment she saw his eyes. “The Rashid I knew would never have stayed away for so long. But I didn’t think the Rashid I knew would blow up a freeway either.” Quietly, as if to herself, “Maybe I never knew who Rashid was.” More forcefully she looks again at him, “But I don’t believe you are Rashid Siddique.”

  “The hotel room where we spent our first night together was the Grace Hotel. The chunni you wore when you first met my family was a sapphire blue. When your mother came to Pakistan for our wedding, she could eat the spicy food, but hated the sweet ladoos.” He recounts these intimate memories—which had sustained him during his exile—as evidence of his identity.

  She holds up her hand, closes her eyes to stop the assault of details from a past she has long since buried. “Then how…why,” she opens her eyes lowering her upturned palms to encompass the entire image of the man standing miraculously before her.

  He sits in a chair before her, clasps and unclasps his hands. How many times had he rehearsed this explanation? He thinks of Noor’s warning not to talk too much, her counsel to listen.

  “You owe me an explanation, everything,” Kathryn says with steely resolve.

  He hesitates.

  “I’m waiting.” She flares her nostrils in anger.

  “Let me start at the beginning, when I returned to Pakistan for my father’s funeral.”

  She nods, prepared to listen.

  “My mother was waiting for me. She had already planned that I would be the one to take revenge for his death. She couldn’t live with the idea that the injustice of his death wouldn’t be answered.” He continued in this way, explaining his protests, his brother’s challenge to his honor. When the story moved back to America, to the times when Kathryn would have figured into the story, she looks at her hands or closes her eyes. She wills herself to listen to the whole story, the whole absurd distortion he details, before she questions any specific part of it. His description of Ali, the bombing, his flight and his exile are cursory, just a few sentences. He just wants to finish. Her expression is inscrutable.

  “And today, I finally took the last step, I came to see you. When you saw me, I was thinking to turn back, to just leave the money and go.” He falls silent, his whole story unwound.

  She looks down at her hands again, running her eyes across the lines in her hands as if she were trying to read a book in a foreign language. “So why come back? Why now?”

  He also looks down, sees the outline of his father’s hands in his long fingers. “Because I didn’t want to die in that little courtyard in Peshawar like a coward, I didn’t want to die without speaking to you one more time, before I had seen my sons as men.” His chin trembles, his breathing grows shallow as he realizes the alternative ending, a quiet extinguishing of his life in Peshawar, will not happen.

  Kathryn rises, moves to stand in front of him. She lifts his head with a hand under his bearded chin. She brings her face close enough that he can imagine her kiss. A great sense of relief fills him, how easily they are reunited. He closes his eyes, waiting for the warmth of her lips. When he hears the crack of her palm against his cheek he is unguarded, bewildered. But when her blows come again and again, he starts to fathom her silence during his monologue was a deep gathering of rage.

  “You have no idea what you’ve done to me,” she delivers another blow, “what you’ve done to my sons,” he turns his cheek and accepts another blow. “And now you come back because you’re afraid of your own death as a lonely old man.” Another blow. “Some kind of withered terrorist.”

  He raises his arms to protect his face, so she directs her anger at his chest, pummeling against the cloth of his occupied shirt as she did so long ago against his empty shirts.

  “You son of a bitch. You’re still dead to me,” she gasps, choking back tears, “and the woman who was your wife, that Kathryn, you killed her too when that bomb exploded on the freeway!”

  He has no words to respond to her force. He stands, backs toward the door. He steps outside, but holds her gaze. “I still want to see our sons. I’ll come back when…when you’ve had some time.”

  He closes the door behind him, hears her bang her fists against the inside of the door. “They’re not your sons,” she screams.

  She resists the impulse to open the door and continue her invective.

  Both alone now, on either side of the door, they each carry the image, the undeniable reality of the other with them.

  She walks to the kitchen for water, to the bathroom to use the toilet. Back and forth through the rooms she walks, not knowing what to do next, what to think, what to fear.

  He walks down the stairs and out to the street, not recognizing anything around him from what he had seen on the way in. He walks for nearly a mile before reaching a restaurant where he asks a waitress to request a car. Despite the welts he can feel burning on his cheeks, he feels a glimmer of calm. He has done it.

  Chapter 2

  * * *

  Kathryn watches the sun set over the ocean, a second glass of scotch in her hand. She thinks back over a thousand moments, a thousand events that would have been easier with a husband, with a father for her children. She tries to square her memories of the weeks between her father-in-law’s death and the freeway bombing, with what Rashid told her today. She has barricaded that time so angrily, that she shakes at the effort required to reach those memories. As the earth swallows the last of the day’s light she walks through the darkness of her bedroom into the closet. She turns on the light and reaches into the back of a shelf for a manila envelope. The return address displays the name of the journal where she used to work. They had sent her some of the personal papers from her desk when they finally terminated her employment. She had never bothered to open it, so she pulls at the seal grown brittle from age. Inside, a copy of her university diploma, a photo of her drinking tea with a group of influential Gulf Arab men, a few printouts of personal emails and a few photos. The faces of her sons—Andrew almost unrecognizable as an infant—peer at her from the past. At the bottom of the pile, the photo she thought she might find; an image of Kathryn and Rashid, a man and a woman who no longer exist, arm in arm, smiling and sweaty, pausing mid-dance in a nightclub in Dubai.

  Did they really look like that? Who would that woman be now if not for the bombing? Who would that man be if not for the drone attack? She picks up the photos of the boys again. Who would they be if they had not been abandoned? What kind of men would they be now if they had been raised by both their parents, if they had had a man in the house? She thinks of Rashid’s parents, imagines his mother demanding Rashid take revenge. What kind of woman does that? What kind of woman condemns her own son for the sake of her honor? No, she thinks, better the boys were raised without that kind of poisonous culture. Whatever could have been doesn’t matter now. But how dare he deceive her all these years, as if those weeks before the bombing were not deception enoug
h?

  She throws the photos. They flutter with an infuriating grace. She bangs her fist into the wall only to recoil at the pain in her knuckles. “God damn you!” she screams at the man who is once again absent. She goes to the kitchen and retrieves all of the glass bottles she can find and one by one throws them into the bathtub, listening with satisfaction to the shattering crash they make as the glass hits the porcelain. She wishes Rashid would come back so she could direct her anger again at its source. With the bottles exhausted, she storms back to the kitchen, makes fists, looks for something that will assuage the wave of emotions she cannot contain. She pours herself another glass of scotch and throws it back in a single gulp. The alcohol burns. She sits on the couch, as the world seems to tilt. She reaches for the phone and calls Michael.

  “Mom?” he answers, “it’s late. Are you all right?”

  “No. I’m not all right,” she says.

  He hears her as if from a great distance. “Mom, what is it? Are you sick? Do you have a fever?”

  “No…something terrible has happened.”

  “What? What is it? Should I call 911?”When she doesn’t answer he speaks urgently, “I’m coming, stay there, stay on the line with me…OK…OK?”

  “OK,” she finally says closing her eyes.

  Michael rushes to his car, the phone still to his ear. Every few minutes, as he speeds toward her, he asks her if she is still there. She responds with a word or two. He does not turn off the phone even as he bounds up the stairs to her door, to the place where he spent so many years with her as the man of the house. He uses his key to open the door, calls into the darkness of the room. He hears her call his name from the direction of the couch. He turns on a lamp beside her, touches her forehead, sits down and holds her hands. “What is it?”

  She opens her eyes, smiles weakly at the sight of her son, now almost as old as Rashid was in the photo on the bedroom floor. “He’s such a bastard,” she says shaking her head.