The Moment Before

by Jason Makansi

  “That about sums it up,” Paula said. “What’s your solution?”

  “I have found another use for him. His father is gravely ill. He needs to go home to visit his family. While there, he can learn things my people here need to know.”

  Learn things my people here need to know. The memory of that conversation unnerved Paula. What things did Moody’s people need to know and how would a man like Elias find them out? She had no idea. But, she figured, she was about to find out.

  She paused under a streetlight to read the directions. A few more minutes and she found herself navigating through another maze of roads through light industrial sites, warehouses, trying to read her scribbled directions in the dark. Finally, she found the place and the car, as described to her by Father Moody. This time, she motioned to the man to sit in her car. She didn’t know this person and wanted the advantage of her weapons and her vehicle. She also motioned to him to drive towards a bright street light.

  “I’ll get right to the point,” the man said, when he got in. “I can solve two problems for you at once.”

  “Moody already clued me in about the first one, what’s the second?”

  “How would you like to never shell out for another house payment?”

  “I don’t make house payments,” she lied.

  “Your mother does.”

  “You better check your reliable sources, pal. It’s been paid off for years.”

  “Okay, how would you like to buy another house, or the one next door, so you and your daughter could live more independently, or renovate the one you’re in now, or send your kid to private school? Or a new luxury car, like mine here, maybe a hot sports car?”

  Now these were offers she could consider. She could make the place more comfortable. She wondered if putting a lot of money in a house in that neighborhood was a smart thing to do. She could buy a vacation house out in the country, maybe up in Wisconsin like other cops she knew. Pull Cheryl out of the public schools. Forced bussing was ruining them. She could have a nest egg, supplement her retirement. How much dough was he talking about, she wondered?

  “Can’t you give me a big shopping bag with the cash in it, like in the cartoons?” She looked up at the street lamp. If this was the summer, a thousand and one nasty insects would be buzzing around up there.

  “Cash is problematic. We can buy you a car. We can buy down a loan. We can pay contractors to work on your house. Want a credit card with a monthly limit and the bill never comes to your house? We can’t fork over cash, though.”

  Maybe I’ll go with expanding the house, Paula thought. Cheryl could have the space upstairs. She could use the outside stairway and second floor entrance when she was older. Teenagers need a little breathing room.

  Suddenly, Paula’s mood deflated completely. Her daughter was conceived in a car in a parking lot much like this one nine years ago. The poetry Elias had read to her was the most loving thing that had ever happened to her. Four older brothers, no father by the time she entered the picture, each exacting his version of playing dad to the only girl. Fact is, her brothers were bullies when she was a kid, protective of her in public, but in private occasionally crossing the line into abuse. Her moment of weakness with Elias started with vulnerability after that prank played on her and her partner by the other cops. She was vulnerable, susceptible to affection. The rest was unbridled passion, the type no one can say they for sure know how to control.. Hell, if she hadn’t had to deal with yet another fucking practical joke from her fellow officers the day she and Elias met, she might not have paid any attention to him at all. Just another dark stranger trying to catch her eye.

  Paula was visibly jolted back to the present by the voice of Father Moody’s guy sitting next to her.

  “So are you agreeable?” he asked.

  “What do you want with him, just out of curiosity?”

  “I’m afraid that is classified.”

  She looked at the man, and felt the disgust at making a pact with the devil, in the guise of the FBI, or whatever clandestine government agency this guy represented. What would she tell Cheryl? Children lose a parent all the time. They’d never even met a single member of his family.

  “Nothing awful’s going to happen to him, right? He’s going back where he came from.” Paula could only look at the man from the furthest corner of her eye. “Right?” she repeated, doubt thick in her voice. When the man still didn’t respond, she said it a different way. “I’m going to lose a husband, but my daughter isn’t going to lose her father. Right?”

  From under a baseball cap, shades flipped up on top of glasses, an expression as flat as the pavement they were parked on, came the words, “That’s accurate.” The phrase the man did not utter was, to the best of our knowledge.

  THE BEGINNING

  November 15, 2012

  Holly laughs as he pretzels his legs inside her Mustang, his knees pressing against the glove compartment. “You can push the seat back, you know,” she says as she adjusts the scarves wrapped tightly around her meticulously tended hair. Even though others have admired her smooth complexion, and her eyes, the color of green olives, she considers her hair her best asset. Before leaving home, she’d slipped on her father’s sweater and touched the folded piece of paper in the pocket, making sure it was still there. Today’s the day she will open it.

  She whips the car into traffic and thinks again of Penndel’s caution—make sure the next person who accompanies you to Joe can handle what spontaneously pours forth from your soul. Or something like that. She’s considered it. Over and over, she’s considered it. And she’s decided John Harold Veranda can handle it.

  John watches Holly shift into fourth and merge onto the highway. He is consumed by his feelings for the woman behind the wheel. His boyish grin feels as permanent as the landscape, and every half mile or so of traveled road, he tosses knowing grins at her. Today’s the day he’s going to tell her. Today’s the day he’s going to make her dream come true.

  “What?” Holly finally insists.

  “I have something to tell you.”

  “So, tell me, already. And wipe that shit-eating grin off your face.”

  John presses his lips together and pretends to zip them.

  “You are such a cornball, John Veranda.”

  She accelerates, changes lanes, and shifts into fifth. John raises his arms high in the air. It may be November, but the sun is shining and, even with the top down, it feels like September. “This is as wild as my first roller coaster ride!” He pauses a moment, then turns toward her, studying her profile. Holly glances sideways at him. His grin disappears and he turns back and stares straight ahead as if suddenly in a trance, mesmerized by the gray pavement and white lines disappearing beneath them. He has only examined the exposed part of his secret about Holly’s father, a majestic iceberg sticking up from the water’s surface. He has not fully considered the vast underbelly, the opaque world below, the mass of ice growing more solid, dense in its isolation. He knows her father is among the Gitmo detainees coming to Saluki, but he still doesn’t know whether he is coming as terrorist, an enemy combatant, criminal, or the most unfortunate victim ever of geopolitical machinations.

  As the Arch comes into view, John realizes—for the umpteenth time—that he never tires of seeing this monument. He’d tried to convince Stuart that the Arch is as iconic a national symbol as Manhattan’s skyline. Stuart’s look of disdain had been one for the record books.

  “You imply equivalency between the Gateway to the West and the skyline of the capital of the free world?” Stuart had retorted.

  “I’m saying New York isn’t the center of the freakin’ country, is what I’m saying.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s the center of the universe.”

  Now John asks Holly her opinion on the subject.

  “From the outside, I agree with you. From the top of that thing, I agree with Stuart. The view is beyond disappointing. There’s probably more to see from a grain elevator.”r />
  As they take the exit for the arts district, John remembers that, for a few days after 9/11, even the iconic Arch was thought to be a potential target of a terrorist attack. And that takes his thoughts back to that majestic iceberg and the opaque world below the water’s surface.

  Holly parks in the small lot behind the museum. As she peels the scarves from her head, she regards John as if re-evaluating Penndel’s admonition. Will he be ready for this experience, the spiritual moulting that occurs in her when she’s inside Joe?

  As they enter the lobby, Holly laces her arm through John’s and guides him to the outside gallery. “This place is one huge concrete vault,” he whispers. “It feels like a tomb.”

  She pushes through the glass doors to the enclosed outer exhibit area and stops him before descending the steps. “There it is!”

  He had been willing to take her word for Joe’s magnificence, but now…. “Hmm. I think need a boom box playing Metallica.”

  “Ever so clever. Come on!”

  Like always, a docent sits on a fold-up chair at the entrance. Another couple exits as they approach.

  “Hang on,” John says. “I’m going in to get a brochure about this thing so my poor country bumpkin brain can understand it.”

  Holly hesitates, then hurries down to the docent. “Look, I know it’s your job to monitor us inside, but—” She presses a twenty dollar bill into the young man’s hand. “Could you just see your way to leave us alone in there?”

  The docent shakes his head and stands up. “Ma’am, I am sorry, but I could lose my job if I make an exception.” He shoves the money back at her, but slowly.

  Holly ignores it. “I know, but I think he’s going to propose once we’re inside,” she says in a low, pouty voice.

  The docent drops his head in exasperation. Holly presses another twenty into his hand. “Take someone special out for dinner … on me.” She grins. This time the docent relents, folds the money, and puts it in his pocket.

  “Okay, but I have to come at least part way in, so the guard over there doesn’t see me allowing patrons in unescorted.”

  John returns and Holly leads them past the docent and into the narrow passageway. As they walk the curved path toward the center of the enclosure, disorientation overtakes them both. The leaning, uneven steel plates throw Holly off balance and she bumps into John, who is stopped a step ahead of her, his nose shoved up close to the plates in the chamber, inspecting them as if they were made of an unknown element.

  They reach the center. John looks at her quizzically.

  “Look up!” Holly demands.

  John leans his head back as a large puff of cumulus clouds drifts over the observable part of the sky.

  “I see a cloud. Can’t tell if it’s a ducky or a horsey.”

  “Oh, c’mon, it’s not what you see. It’s what you can’t see. Is this enclosure a prison or a womb? I can never make up my mind. I seem to have just enough air to breathe in here. In summer, the heat radiates off the steel like a furnace. In the winter, it’s an icebox.” She pauses. “This is where I truly feel the absence of my father, like a missing limb.”

  John almost chokes as he turns toward her, his mind in overdrive, nearly hyperventilating at the prospect of telling her the truth and at the uncertainty of what lies ahead for her and her father when he returns.

  She points toward the opening above them. “But then I feel his presence out there, in the sky. This, this opening to everything out there, it makes something as infinite as the heavens comprehensible. You stand here, and you own the part of the sky you can see. It’s yours.”

  Holly leans her head back and begins to dance. She twirls round and round, her scarves trailing behind her, a dizzying array of colors streaming like undulating Northern Lights. Curls bounce around her face. Gravel crunches beneath her shoes. Her heart leaps skyward. Her father’s apparition is something she can now see only from this point on the face of the earth, and it never fails to fill her with the joy that has been missing from her life because her father has been missing from her life.

  “Holly, your father’s alive,” John blurts out.

  Holly doesn’t stop moving. She answers John as if he’s everywhere and nowhere. “I’ve never doubted my father is alive, John. I’ve doubted whether I’d ever see him again, but not that he’s alive.”

  “But surely … you must have doubted. It’s been so long. He’s almost seventy years old.”

  “If I’d ever imagined him dead, I wouldn’t have felt his presence when I gazed up at the sky, and I wouldn’t have returned here again and again to be with him.” Holly raises her arms toward the crystalline blue, where the infinite connects and covers all the countries on the face of the earth. “Besides,” she adds light-heartedly, “I didn’t fill dozens of journals writing to him over the years thinking he would never read them.”

  John remains anchored to the center of the graveled area, while Holly moves circles around him, filling the space between him and the steel walls with waves of color.

  “He’s not only alive, Holly. He’s coming home. To America. To Saluki.”

  Holly stops and turns toward him. “What? How? How do you know this?” The words erupt in labored fragments.

  “Stuart. After he tracked down Moody, he was able to put the pieces together. Or at least most of them. For years, your father has been at Guantanamo. He’s going to be among the first to arrive in Saluki.”

  Holly drops the scarves. “You mean, as a …?”

  “We don’t know, Holly. We just don’t know. That’s why I’ve been reluctant to tell you. Since I figured out who you really were, I’ve had Stuart trying to do what I couldn’t all those years ago. He’s been combing through classified files and calling in favors, and yet he hasn’t been able to find any evidence that your father is—or ever was—a terrorist, or even a criminal. He says the paper trail on your father stretches from the first to the ninth level of geopolitical hell.”

  Holly looks up, chest heaving, trying take in John’s words, trying to imagine her father here with her now. The cloud passes. The November sun is bright, imparting light and warmth to the space. Her cheeks glow from the dancing. She continues to survey the muted, rusted carbon steel, shrinking and swelling, absorbing and emitting warmth and cold, whatever has been made available to it. She steps forward and focuses on one particular spot where the seams gently curve and the plates meet and occasional streaks of silvery gray shine. Prison and womb. Womb and prison. The infinite sky above both.

  Then she remembers the note.

  “Excuse me, John. I wanted to introduce you to Joe, but there’s something else I came here to do.” Her voice is unsure and John takes a step toward her, but she turns away. She faces the wall, then takes the note out of her pocket and slits the faded tape with her fingernail. She’d waited until she was safe inside Joe to face whatever is written on the paper. She unfolds it slowly.

  Womb or prison. Prison or womb. There’s no escaping this moment.

  Cheryl,

  I could not confess this to you in person, so I wrote it down. I am to blame for your father’s return to Syria. I had no idea how permanent his absence would become. It was the only way out that I could see at the time. I was assured that I may be losing a husband, but that you would not be losing your father. I never thought through the effect on you, I didn’t understand how close you were to him. It was the most selfish thing a person could ever do. But one thing I must tell you. There are two sides to this story—our story; your father’s and mine. You have to know that something horrible happened which caused me to take the action I did. It doesn’t justify what I did, but I hope knowing that helps explain it.

  Your mother

  Holly’s hand falls to her side. No wonder her mother never looked for her father. She knew he wasn’t coming back because she’s the one who sent him away. Holly desperately wants to run into John’s arms. Bury her face. Let him soothe her. Take away her pain. But, her feet won’t move. When
she looks up, he takes three steps towards her, and with his fists still inside his pockets, he raises his jacket and envelopes her fully in his arms, holding her close against his chest.

  She does not want to cry. She refuses to cry. She will not cry.

  “It’s okay, Holly … if there ever was an okay time to cry, it’s now.” How long they spend in one another’s arms, she doesn’t know. Eventually, she pulls away from him and wraps her arms around herself. Then she leans her head back and cries out to the opening above her. Minutes later they walk slowly through the passageway towards the exit, leaning into one another, the docent still guarding the entrance. A smile lights up his face.

  “Congratulations! When’s the wedding?”

  On their way back to Saluki, John drives and Holly stares out the window and talks. She needs to fill the time and space with anything but thoughts of her father. Or her mother.

  “Did I tell you Penndel is moving to Saluki?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “He’s been known to say such things before. But, this time I think he’ll do it. He’ll says he’ll keep his place in the city, but now that he’s supervised the construction of The Halfway House, he’s attached to it.

  He’s grown fonder of your town than he ever thought possible. I told him he could be the chief operating officer.”

  “Holly, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. I mean, you don’t have permits, easements, electricity, running water. All you have is my permission. It’s a small piece of land with disputed ownership.”

  “Facts on the ground, John, we have facts on the ground. It already exists. The chances are lower that someone’s going to ask us to remove it.”

  “It’s beginning to make me nervous. I’m not sure I can explain it away if someone asks.”

  “Then don’t.”

  Holly grows quiet. The golden brown of the corn fields remind her of the surface of the baklava and of Maya’s paintings. Her father is alive. Her father is coming home. They’ll have so much to catch up on. Music. Her journal writings. Her piano. What will he look like? She knows, even though her memory of him hasn’t changed since he left, he will look different. Be different. Perhaps unrecognizably different.