The Moment Before
Page 33
Darker thoughts infiltrate. Was he a terrorist? She couldn’t imagine. And what did her mother mean about her complicity in her father’s absence? And what horrible thing happened to make her send him away? Then even darker thoughts. Can he even function normally? She’d heard horror stories of soldiers and prisoners with post-traumatic stress. What of his health? Had he been well taken care of? She couldn’t put her father in the same context with what she’d read about the Gitmo detainees over the years, the torture the US decided was appropriate for enemy combatants.
Nothing could displace her longing to have her father trace the outline of her ear, feel the roughness of his beard when he had kissed her goodnight. But she was no longer a little girl. She was a grown woman, and her father was an old man.
John breaks her long period of reflection. “Holly?” She continues staring out the window. “I’d be glad to serve as your father’s attorney. I’ll do everything I can to unravel the paper trail, fight for restitution.” When she doesn’t say anything, he continues. “Stuart has pledged to do what he can to help, too. He’s taking early retirement. If the case of Elias Haddad is as complicated as he suspects, no amount of government resources will right this wrong. But together, we can try. We both want to try.”
“I believe you, John, but fortune doesn’t change at a moment’s notice.”
“No, Holly. It can, and it does.”
She turns toward him, leaning against the door. “I’ve spent most of my adult life making sure my emotions never get ahead of the significance of an event. And now is no time to start.”
“I guess I’m the opposite.” He laughs, weakly. “I should warn you, I don’t have a great track record.”
“What does that mean?”
“Years ago I tried to change the world, but was dissuaded by a bomb that blew up a building in DC along with the girl I was to have a first date with the next day.”
“John, that’s horrible! I had no idea.”
“You’re not the only one with secrets.”
“No, and I admit I often act like I am.”
“I lost my job when Wamsler lost his election. I came home and eventually ran for state-wide office. I lost. Then I tried to save Saluki with my medical center. I failed at that, too.”
“No, you didn’t fail to save Saluki, John. You succeeded, only in a way different from your original intentions.”
John looks over at her. He wants to smile in agreement, but can’t. “I’m going to put everything I have left towards freeing your father.”
“I appreciate that, but tell me about the bombing, about the girl—”
“Long story.”
“We still have an hour in the car.”
John turns back to face the road. “Her name was Jami.” He takes a deep breath and begins again. “I met a young woman. I fell in love, love at first sight. It really does happen, you know. She worked in the offices of this Arab-American civil rights organization. We’d been introduced briefly by the director that afternoon when I had a meeting representing the senator.” John laughs bitterly. “No sooner had I left the office than I called her and asked her for a date. From the corner phone booth. That’s how smitten I was. We were to have lunch the next day.” He hesitates. “That night, she was murdered. A pipe bomb. Set by a group of domestic Jewish extremists. Back then the word ‘terrorist’ hadn’t even entered the popular lexicon, unless you were Palestinian.” John grips the steering wheel until his knuckles turn white. “The fucking assholes were never brought to justice, never apprehended.”
Holly instinctively grasps John’s arm and squeezes. “I’m sorry, John. So sorry.” All those meetings with the Chicago chapter of that group blur together in her memory, her impatience with them, her singular focus on her father’s disappearance, the years living with Dalton.
They ride in silence, content to let the miles roll by. Finally, John speaks up again. “I remember that series of attempted bombings and arsons on AAAI offices around the country. The volunteers in the Chicago office, when I met with them in DC, wondered when it would be their turn.” He turns to look at her. “You know I contacted that teacher, Dalton, about you connecting with the Chicago office. This was before the bombing. I thought maybe someone in the community there would know something about your father. Did he ever tell you?”
“Yeah. I volunteered for a while. But it wasn’t for me. And no one knew anything. It was like my father just poof, disappeared.”
“Until now.”
Approaching Saluki, Holly watches from her window as John maneuvers onto the interstate heading south. They overtake an old school bus painted blue. The vehicle’s windows are painted black, like the non-descript vehicles used to move prisoners from one place to another. Is that the kind of bus they’d transport her father in? She remembers riding the lumbering yellow bus to school, all the kids loud, talking over one another. Girls scheming about what they’d do at recess. Boys horsing around or teasing girls. Every day, for so many years, she missed her father. The not knowing was torture. Yet, even then, somehow, despite the phantom sense of his presence, or because of it, she woke each day thinking it’s another day in paradise because that’s what her father would have wanted.
“There,” Holly points out the window. “That’s where I want to put the sign. The Halfway House.”
“A sign as bright as your Holly Chicago sign in Cairo?”
“Well, more in keeping with federal highway standards,” she says with a laugh.
“You know, you don’t just plop a sign on a federal highway.”
“Oh? How come those memorials for people killed in car wrecks are never taken away?”
“The woman has an answer for everything,” John mutters.
Holly points at the detention facility in the distance. “I still can’t get used to seeing it from the highway,”
John sighs. “One day, I’ll be responsible for something in this town besides a prison.”
She reaches out and touches his arm again. “If you had built the medical center, my father would be lost to me forever.”
What does one say to that? he wonders. He puts on the blinker and takes the first exit. “Almost home.”
“I could use a pick-me-up,” Holly says.
“There’s a tricked out Mayan Mocha at Egyptian Grounds with my name written all over the cup.”
“Don’t you have to get back to your wife, your family obligations?”
John winces. “I told you. She practically lives at her parents now.”
“That’s not what I asked. You know it’s not what I meant.”
“I told her we were going to the arts district to see some economic development ideas in St. Louis that might work for Saluki.”
“We, as in me and you? How honest of you.”
“If I was trying to hide something, would I show up at Egyptian Grounds, of all places, with another woman?”
“OK, you can buy me a coffee. But then I want to stop by the Halfway House. Penndel is supposed to be there today.
After they order their coffees to go, John cuts through the grid of streets to the south end of town. Across from the park, the tall fence of the detention center looms next to the road. Holly looks over at the federal facility trying to imagine her father there, waiting for her. And she thinks of her mother and the confession tucked in her pocket. A lone bus is parked in the facility’s parking lot. It’s blue. Identical to the bus they passed on the interstate. Even from here, Holly sees men lined up along one side of it. Trembling, she grabs John’s arm and points.
“John … do you think—?”
He slows down and squints. “Could be. Stuart said they might start arriving as early as this week. He said he would notify me the minute your father arrives, but no word yet.”
They park behind Penndel’s van, as close to the Halfway House as they can, and walk along boards resting on top of ground muddied by recent November rains.
Penndel greets them at the door. “Heard you guys
drive up. So, John, what did you think of Joe?”
“Actually, I’m still digesting it all.”
“What the hell?” Holly says suddenly, turning to Penndel as she becomes aware of the music filling the space.
“You like it?”
“How did you get a recording of my music?”
“Remember when I asked you to play one of your compositions on that electronic keyboard?”
“You didn’t.”
“I did. You’d be amazed by what you can do with software today. I used a program that essentially writes out the notes on staff paper, then I had a keyboardist friend play it and record it in his studio.
Holly was dumbfounded.
Penndel winks at John. “What better background music for The Halfway House than a composition from the founder, right?”
Holly wants to rush Penndel and pummel him, but she doesn’t. Besides, you can’t beat up someone in a wheelchair. Instead, she makes her way over to the window with the view through the trees to the detention facility. In the distance, she can make out a man in an overcoat standing off to the side, away from the guards, and a line of men marching slowly towards the building. She wants to run out the door toward the barbed fencing. Maybe, if she gets closer, she just might see him.
My father is alive!
A smile spreads across her face. A smile just like the irrepressible one she knows he has on his face at this moment.
He is home.
She knows that no matter how old he is now, there is a bounce to his step, he is weightless at this moment, the moment at which all the other moments of his life no longer matter. And soon, all those past moments will cease even to exist. And that moment will be the only moment that counts. Because that will be the moment they hold each other again. The moment before the rest of their lives.
Acknowledgments
Authors say many things about debut novels, critics and readers many more. One I’ve not heard: Everyone you encounter in life is a muse for your first novel.
True mentors, though, are rare. I gratefully acknowledge the one for this novel in the manner requested, anonymously.
Muses and mentors are less helpful in dragging the manuscript and its author kicking and screaming to a finished product. For that, I thank the pre-beta and beta readers, too numerous to name, patient souls willing to invest their time at the “hot mess” and “slightly less than hot mess” stages, when the author thinks he’s close and everyone else knows he isn’t; immediate family members (several who are authors in the own right and/or the most avid of readers), friends, and colleagues; and most of all, the editors and interns at Amphorae Publishing, one in particular who plays so many roles in my life.
Finally, I need to acknowledge the hundreds of novelists I’ve read since I was a young boy (and all the editors, proofreaders, and production people who supported them). They were the source of my ambition. After this effort, I have so much more respect and gratitude for each and every one of them each and every day.
About the Author
Jason Makansi has published short stories in a variety of literary journals and collections. He is a 2009 alumnus of the Sewanee Writers Conference. He reviewed short story collections for The Short Review for many years, is currently a contributing editor for River Styx literary journal and Associate Editor for December literary magazine.
By day, Mr. Makansi is a technology deployment consultant in the electricity industry and has also published four books of non-fiction, the most recent (December 2016, Layla Dog Press) Painting By Numbers: How to Sharpen Your BS Detector and Smoke Out the Experts, which won an Independent Publisher’s 2017 IPPY Gold and an 2016 Foreword Reviews Indie Silver.
He is an avid bicyclist, enjoys tennis and squash, plays the viola in community orchestras and chamber groups, plays piano for fun, gives tours at the Titan Missile Museum, and plans for his extended sojourn in St. Petersburg, Russia.
The Moment Before is his first novel. He lives in Tucson, AZ, with his wife and three dogs. Connect with him at www.jasonmakansi.com.