“How in the world do you know about that?” Of course, Ismail didn’t really have to ask. He guessed there was a complex and many-branched phone tree that connected Fatima’s parents to his brother.
“I do some work with Shelina’s cousin’s husband sometimes.”
So, Ismail surmised: Shelina had probably cried to her cousin, who pillow-talked the news to her husband, who then gossiped with Nabil. There were just three degrees of separation between the Khans and his brother, a proximity that, in hindsight, was not surprising.
“He was vague about why you were there, but I gathered that you were trying to interfere with a conflict they are having with their daughter. Is that true? How do you know her, anyway?” Nabil’s tone reminded Ismail of Hassan’s accusations, and had nearly the same effect.
“Well, I met her at a class I’m taking. A writing class, at the university. She and I often sit beside one another. Anyway, she told me that she needed my help,” Ismail explained, preparing to defend himself. What had Shelina confessed to her cousin? He assumed she’d want to keep the matter private.
“I don’t think you should get involved.”
“Nabil, you don’t even know the situation —”
“Listen, I know enough. I know that the girl is trouble.”
“Did Shelina tell her cousin that?”
“Of course not. She probably only mentioned you to her cousin so that she could find out more about you. But there have been rumours about the daughter for a long time.”
“Rumours?”
“She is a bad apple.”
Ismail felt his face growing hot. Although he didn’t know her well, he certainly didn’t think that Fatima deserved such a label. How often had he heard people describe him in similar terms?
“She’s not a bad apple. She’s a girl who has being thrown out of the house by her parents because she’s gay. I think what her parents are doing is shameful,” Ismail blurted at his brother.
“So the rumours are true, then? She’s a homosexual?”
“Yes. But please don’t share that with anyone. I think I’ve said too much already.”
“But what are you doing associating yourself with the girl? I’ve heard she was using drugs, and being promiscuous, and consorting with the wrong types of people. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that she is that way, too. I heard the National Post even published an article about her.” It was like a game of “broken telephone,” which his staff group played as a team-building exercise the week before. The sentence, “Our mayor is terribly competent at budget projections and almost ridiculously bad at forgetting figures” was whispered from ear to ear around the civil servant circle. The last person announced the statement as “The mayor is terrible at budgets and has a ridiculously bad figure.”
“Nabil, don’t fall for the rumour mill. What you heard is very much inaccurate, and exaggerated. Don’t believe it. There is another side to the story. She is young, in some difficulty, and her parents have rejected her.”
“I don’t know why you need to get yourself mixed up with this business. Do you know that it has only been the past few years that people have stopped gossiping about you? You want to have the whole community start talking about you again? How do you think this looks that you are vouching for a girl like her?”
“Nabil, do they treat you any differently based on what I do? Did they after Zubi died?”
“In what sense?”
“Did anyone shun you? Did they stop working with you? Did they gossip about you?”
“No, well, maybe behind my back. But —”
“Right, so you don’t know the first thing about this. I’m sorry, Bhai. I’m sorry that you don’t approve. But I have to do what is right. I am assisting a girl who needs some help. I am doing a good thing for her.” And then a sense of clarity accompanied his next statement: “And I will continue to do what I can for her. Perhaps people should be gossiping about her parents, and how heartless they are to kick out their own daughter.” It was as though he was standing up to his older brother for the very first time in his life, and the effort left him feeling strong, but winded. He was surprised that his shirt was not soaked with sweat.
“Well … you and I have a difference of opinion on this matter,” Nabil said, backing down more easily than Ismail would have imagined. “But please tread carefully with this girl.”
Ismail didn’t respond and a moment of silence crackled across the line before Nabil said, “So, I was also calling because we are hoping you can come over on Saturday for dinner. For Easter. Nabila is making biryani.”
“Next weekend?” Ismail asked, thumbing through his agenda book, knowing already that he would find a blank page. “Let me see. Um, I’ll have to let you know.”
“Okay, call Nabila.”
“Fine,” he said, hanging up before his brother could utter the final word.
— 27 —
Google
“I Googled you.”
Ismail had just returned from another bridge inspection, one with some worrisome structural cracking all along its centre, when the phone rang. It was Tuesday afternoon, just two days since their doomed trip to Mississauga, and Fatima had caught up with him already. Ismail needn’t have worried that she would stay away. He pulled off his jacket and set his briefcase on the floor.
“Hi, Fatima,” he said, bracing himself.
“Hi. So, nothing really came up when I entered your name, except some stuff about your job. And other people with the same surname. There are actually a lot of people named Boxwala.” Where was she going with this? “Anyway, I was going to turn off the computer at that point and then I had a thought. I don’t know why I thought of it, but I did.” His heart began to race. Inhale one, exhale two, he instructed his lungs. He booted up his own computer.
“So then I remembered your daughter’s name. Zubeida, right? So I Googled ‘Zubeida Boxwala.’” Ismail inhaled two, exhaled four, and waited for the computer to load his settings. Come on! Hurry up, computer! He startled when the Microsoft chime bleated out its welcome and he rushed to turn down the speaker’s volume.
“At first, I thought the reason why you couldn’t write about her, why you didn’t want to talk about her, was because the two of you had some kind of falling out. I started to think that maybe you’re so nice to me was because you understood what it’s like for parents and kids to not get along. But then, I read through the hits.” Ismail gasped for three, his chest heaving for six, his eyes welling up. He guided his mouse to the Internet thumbnail on his desktop, double clicked.
“So … is it true? That she died when she was a baby?”
“Fatima, hold on a minute.” By then, his heart was racing. He managed to put down the receiver and blinking back tears, typed Zubeida’s name into the Google home page. Two hits. He picked up the phone again. “Listen, Fatima, I have to go.”
“Wait, are you coming to class tonight? Maybe we can talk —” Ismail hung up before she could finish her sentence.
He went back to his desktop and read each of the references, ignoring the phone when it rang again. He skipped over the first search item, a story about a Pakistani marathon runner. The second was an article about babies who had died after being left in hot cars. There were a list of names, and Ismail read through them one by one until he reached Zubi’s. He read that there were twelve reported cases of this kind in Canada in the past twenty-five years and dozens more in the United States, where summer temperatures were hotter.
He pressed print and hurried to the common office printer to collect the story. His colleague, David, was there, stapling stacks of paper together, when his pages pushed themselves into the printer tray. Closer to the printer, David reached for them and passed them to Ismail with a congenial smile. Ismail nodded to David, clasped the pages in his shaking hands, and practically jogged
back to his cubicle.
He read quickly, searching out the parts with Zubi’s name. The story detailed the justice system’s response to the deaths, and the journalist leaned toward a lenient approach in cases where parents appeared to be innocent. Zubi was listed as an example of such a situation. No foul play.
Ismail re-read the writer’s name and guessed she might have been the same reporter who called years ago to request his input on a story about infant deaths. Her tone had been formal and businesslike and at first Ismail assumed she was a telemarketer; by then, over ten years had passed since Zubi’s death and the reporters had long ago stopped phoning him. When she told him who she was and what she wanted, Ismail hung up in a panic, just like he’d done to Fatima minutes earlier.
He sent an email to his supervisor that he was going home sick, and hurriedly left the office. The drive home was a blur, his foot pressing down on the brake and accelerator, his hands turning the steering wheel, his mind elsewhere.
He raced upstairs to his spare bedroom and fumbled in a desk drawer, searching for his filing cabinet keys, jabbing and poking at the lock with a half dozen of them before he found the correct one. At the very back of the cabinet, almost hidden but never forgotten, was a worn manila folder. He lifted it from its place, held its weight in his hands, and in a moment of hesitation, almost put it back. He clasped the thin cardboard against his chest, guarding its contents, and made his way down to the kitchen.
He fingered the cardboard folder tentatively and then opened it, placing the newest article on top of the dozens he’d collected since Zubi’s death. It shone white against the older, yellowing newsprint, reports and obituaries of other infants who had died in hot cars, freezing vans, forgotten and abandoned by some terrible mistake or parental oversight. Arranged chronologically, the stories about Zubi were at the bottom of the pile.
Ismail never bothered to archive cases ruled as homicides, just those where negligence was the cause of death. He also didn’t clip articles about the lucky kids found by kind strangers, the children who were plucked from death-trap vehicles, saved from freezing stairwells and whisked to the hospital in time. Those media “miracles” were reunited with grateful mothers or remorseful fathers. Sometimes, they inspired long adoption wait-lists with the Children’s Aid Society. Those children were lost and found, while the ones Ismail archived were not. It became a kind of obsession, saving them, remembering them.
He told Daphne about the folder one night after an AA meeting, a secret never before revealed, not even to Rehana. Daphne appraised him sympathetically, her eyes moistening and the loose skin under them crinkling. She offered to have a look at his collection, be a witness, if Ismail wanted one. He never took her up on the offer. Then, one day, shortly after his confession to her, something changed for him. He didn’t know why, but he stopped. He began to press mute when newscasters highlighted the newest abandoned toddler, turned the page when a journalist detailed another neglected baby. He shoved the manila folder as far back into the file cabinet as it could go and never looked back.
Now, with the addition of the online article, Ismail faced his grim archive once again. He spread the musty newsprint across the kitchen table’s surface, re-reading each of the clippings. He started with the children he never knew, strangers whose stories had grown familiar to him. When he finally got to Zubi’s stories, he barely scanned the typeset headlines for he knew all the words by heart already:
“Baby’s body temperature was 106.3 degrees when she was found.”
“It would appear that the father went to work and forgot his child in the back seat of the car.”
“Charges not filed. Prosecution unlikely unless there is evidence of intention to harm the child.”
“Car was in full sun most of day, and likely reached a temperature of 125 degrees.”
For Ismail, heat was an abyss of desolation. Zubi, at eighty-three degrees Fahrenheit, awoke, shocked to be alone in the stillness of the closed-up car. She shaded her eyes because the Baby on Board sign was useless against the rays streaming in against her face. At eighty-nine degrees, the heat prickled her skin, and she waited for a draft to cool her. But mostly, she waited for her mother, the one she falsely believed to have abandoned her. Ninety-four degrees, and the tears flowing down her cheeks and neck became indistinguishable from the sweat soaking her dress. Finally, at one hundred and two degrees, there was respite and she stopped flailing her arms to escape the straitjacket of her car seat. She slipped into a comforting unconsciousness. By one hundred and ten degrees, there was deliverance from her terror and her organs slowed, and they finally surrendered to the scorching temperature.
Ismail closed his eyes, blocking out the headlines, his own body replaying her story at his kitchen table. His already warm body grew hotter, humid skin drenched itself, and his overwhelmed head spun. He remembered, just before fainting, that he wished to die, to be delivered from the heat.
— * —
Celia was bent over barren flower beds in a fit of premature excavation. Lydia had suggested that she take over the garden that year, told her it might be therapeutic for her, and would help with her depression. Celia snorted at the rankling words: therapeutic, depression. What did her daughter know about the agonias? What right did she have to dispense any kind of advice?
It hadn’t been Lydia’s intention to enrage her mother out of her inertia.
Celia’s irritation with her daughter grew the way a minor rash turns into a skin-crawling hive. Eventually, she had no choice but to scratch. She replayed the conversation with Lydia in an endless loop, then inventoried each slight and insult her daughter had reaped upon her over the previous year. Finally, she reviewed every unacknowledged kindness she’d offered Lydia since her birth.
Fine, Celia fumed silently. No problem, she’d take over the garden. One less thing for you to bother yourself with, heh? And she’d cook dinner and take care of Marco, as usual. Shall I do the laundry and scrub your dirty floors, too?
What does one do with a surplus of energy that hasn’t been experienced in a very long time? Celia had no idea. By the time she picked up Marco and then dropped him off at the neighbours for a play date, she’d scrubbed the house from top to bottom, done three loads of laundry, and put a roast in the oven. She had no choice but to head out to the yard and do the gardening, too.
She wrenched out last year’s stalks and stems from the earth, clearing away the old growth, all the way down to the dead roots. Long-browned vines and shrivelled flower heads went to compost to make room for new plantings. Densely packed thawing soil got turned over in fist-sized clumps. It was still March, and the soil probably wasn’t ready for all this activity, but she hacked away at it, nonetheless, swinging the hoe high above her head.
She rested a moment, fantasizing about warmer weather, a delusional pastime for northerners suffering through March’s tail end. Ah, spring! Ah, summer! she said to herself, filling her lungs with air. The weak sunshine brightened her face, and she visualized the beautiful annuals she’d plant in May. Ah, May, I’d skip right past April for you.
She wanted only the gaudiest combinations of purples, yellows, reds, and oranges for the garden that year; she admired their brashness. Her daughter preferred a selection of one or two colours, perhaps lavender and yellow, what she called a more sophisticated look. Lydia had shown her photos from Better Homes and Gardens, and Celia had smiled and nodded, complimenting the magazine’s spread. It was pretty, but she knew she would end up buying marigolds, a rainbow of pansies, the loudest begonias she could find. She scanned the yard, considering where she might dig up grass for a new bed. She envisioned a narrow strip near the sidewalk, just deep enough for a few rows of snapdragons.
Although she’d never been one to wait until Victoria Day, when the weathermen said it was safe, she reckoned she’d have to put off the planting until at least mid-May. But perhaps she’d go earli
er, and plant on May 2, her fifty-first birthday. It would be a small gamble, and more than that, a gift to herself for surviving the agonias.
So consumed in her mourning, she didn’t celebrate her fiftieth last year. Lydia made a nice dinner, complete with streamers and balloons, and baked a sponge cake, but she refused to come out of her room. Celia knew she couldn’t face any false cheer that day. Not even little Marco scratching at her door like a kitten could make a difference. She put a pillow over her head, laid flat on her aching back, and considered what it would be like to not be able to breathe through down filling.
Maybe this year would be different and she’d partake in a little cake and celebration. Why not? She looked at the dark, naked earth, and then, scanning the clear sky above, she wished for it — one full happy day. But only that. She didn’t want to hope for much more.
She looked over Ismail’s way, a stray, cheeky notion entering her mind: would he like to eat a slice of my birthday cake? She surveyed his abandoned-looking house and then shook the thought away. Silly. Why think about that? He likely had enough friends of his own, and many birthdays to attend. She recalled seeing him speaking with the young woman two days ago. Their body language conveyed an intimacy she couldn’t identify.
She worked a while longer, until the cold reached under her sweater, brushed past her thermal undershirt, and settled against her chest. She pulled off her muddy gloves, dusted her skirt, and gathered together her tools. Just as she was retrieving her hoe, a squirrel scampered close, chirping frenetically. She guessed she was being scolded for disturbing his winter hiding places. She smiled as he danced in a chaotic circle, twittering away, looking like madness broken loose. Then, he ran down the sidewalk, disappearing behind some bushes.
She followed the noisy rodent’s movements down Lochrie and noticed that the street’s composition had shifted while she had been working. Ismail’s small blue car had appeared, filling a previously vacant space a few metres away. Celia checked her watch and wondered why he was home so early; she’d been at her window perch enough to know that he always left and returned at about the same time each day and Lydia had told her that he had some kind of employment with the government. A good position, with office hours that seemed to bring him home on time for dinner each day, not like her own late husband’s job.
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