All the Houses

by Karen Olsson

  And then there was the fact (alleged at least) that she’d received a text from Rob, which confirmed some fears I’d had but tried to not have when we were all at the restaurant.

  It took me a while, at least thirty minutes, to notice that the car key was missing. I’d put it with my own keys, in the middle of the table, and now only my keys were there. Maybe I was misremembering? Maybe, I said to myself, I’d set the car key someplace else, on the counter, in my purse, left it in the bathroom. But it wasn’t any of those places.

  I called Nina’s phone and she didn’t pick up. Then I called Daniel. “Is Nina there?”

  “Isn’t she with you?”

  “No. Are you at home?” He was. “I’m coming over, okay?”

  1987

  And then came another nighttime phone call from Courtney, this one later in the night and more desperate. I had a telephone in my room, a low-profile desk phone that I usually left in the middle of the floor. It didn’t reach all the way to the bed, and so most of my calls were spent lying on the carpet and staring at the ceiling. I liked how all the sound was right there in my ear and up above me was just light and shadow. But I was in bed, not on the floor, that night. The phone rang at around two or three in the morning. Shoved out of sleep, I kicked the phone by accident before I answered—a little brawl between me and nobody. A recording said it was a collect call. Then my sister’s first and last name: Courtney Atherton, calling from jail.

  For once my parents were home. I went to wake them up. I think that was the only time I ever saw them both asleep at the same time—they were on their backs, under a comforter. The phone had half-roused them, and as soon as I said “Mom, Dad” they sat up, my mother leaning against the headboard, my father planting his legs on the floor, and once he got on the line he told me to hang up my phone and go back to sleep. Here was another problem they wanted to pretend didn’t exist, but I couldn’t possibly pretend that. After Dad left to pick up Courtney, I went down to the kitchen, poured a glass of juice, and sat at the table and waited.

  Thirty minutes passed, then an hour, and I went back up to my room. I lay down on my bed with all the lights on. Just to rest, I vowed, but the next time I opened my eyes it was morning.

  I crept up to the third floor. Courtney’s door was shut. I went back down, back up, back down—she slept until noon, and when at last she appeared in the kitchen, still wearing her pajamas, she acted as though it were just a normal Sunday. I couldn’t get more than a single word at a time out of her. She brought the milk and a box of cereal to the table and ate two bowls in a row.

  Finally she said, “Surely you have better things to do than to stand there and watch me eat,” and I could have countered with the truth, which was that I did not have anything better to do, but instead I took a basketball outside and started shooting.

  What I didn’t learn that day but found out over the next couple of weeks: Courtney had gone to hear a band play, and then on the way home she was pulled over for driving with no headlights. The policeman smelled alcohol, according to his report, and he brought her in. By the time they tested her she was well under the limit, but she was underage, and they’d found prescription pills in her purse that had not been prescribed to her by a doctor. They charged her with possession of a controlled substance. My parents hired a lawyer (another lawyer!), who got the case transferred to juvenile court, the charge reduced to minor in possession.

  She told our parents that she’d just wanted to see what it was like to drive on Rock Creek Parkway without lights. They didn’t understand that, and neither did I. There were still streetlights on that road, other cars with lights on. It seemed to me that by switching off your own headlights you would not experience the dark but merely raise your odds of hitting something or being hit. The judge suspended her license and made her attend teen Narcotics Anonymous meetings and do community service. She wound up going two afternoons a week to a big downtown homeless shelter and got involved with some homeless activists for a while, who tried to make a radical out of her, unsuccessfully, though they did convince her not to go to prom.

  My parents were at a loss. In any other year, this would’ve been our crisis, but in ’87 it was another blip on the screen. Courtney had been accepted by Brown, and briefly they panicked about whether that offer would be revoked, but once they had been assured that she could still enroll there, and once she had made it through the court system, they just let it go.

  2005

  Daniel met me at the door to his apartment, shoeless and stricken, intoning “come in, come in.” That was it for hospitality. Next came interrogation. Yes, I admitted, yes, Nina had mentioned somebody named Sam, and yes, I believed she might have seen him recently. In fact I believed she might have gone to look for him.

  He tore into me. The fact that his daughter had stolen a car, that I’d hardly condoned the mission—these things didn’t matter. He brought his hands up by his head and then slashed them through the air, drawing out the word irresponsible, the word negligent, and while I sensed that every accusation he leveled against me was in some measure a charge against himself, insights like that are not much comfort when you’re getting your ass chewed. He yelled until he was winded and his voice was breaking. He said he planned to call the police, as well as some of his daughter’s friends, and he said he wanted me to leave and to have no further contact with him or Nina ever again.

  * * *

  Back in my own building, I called my father and told him the entire story, not very coherently. His car was missing and a girl was missing along with it, I said, and we needed to locate an American University student from Turkey who went by Sam or Samed and lived in Wheaton. When I was done talking I expected him to tell me that it would be impossible to dig up that kind of information, at night especially, but instead he spoke in a voice that I hadn’t heard in years: his official voice. He said he’d see what he could do. His voice was responding to my voice, the undercurrent in it, the plea for help, more than the strange specifics.

  Less than an hour later he called back, already on the way to my apartment. He’d contacted his colleague Dr. Mohammad, who had in turn called the head of an international students association, who had happened to know the roommate of Sam/Samed and had offered up a phone number as well as the address where they lived. Nobody had answered at the number, and so, Dad thought, we should just head out there ourselves. He’d borrowed a car from Judge O’Neill. It was a far-fetched thing to do, going to Wheaton, but we had worked ourselves into a far-fetched state, without knowing whether this was a real emergency or an imaginary one—it didn’t matter, we’d found ourselves a crisis and were determined to act more effectively than we had in past crises.

  I suppose I ought to have contacted Daniel to tell him where we were going. I did not. I went off with my dad into the night.

  * * *

  Those were the last days of paper maps, and as Dad drove the judge’s black sedan I opened the glovebox and used the light from there to read the same Montgomery County map book my sisters and I had used to look for parties twenty years earlier, its pages faded and creased, a large rip jagging the middle of Bethesda. That book was another thing my Dad had kept in the house, in a drawer with old phone directories.

  I was unexpectedly happy to be driven by him, once again. Maybe I was more at home in a car driven by my dad than anyplace else.

  We were on the Beltway, and then we weren’t. The city’s false modesty was replaced by a suburb’s actual modesty: on either side of a plain avenue stood flat-roofed brick buildings, with shops at street level and awnings that bore the most straightforward of business names. The Lunch Box, Ace Cleaners, Atlantic Appliance. From there we turned onto a street of narrow wooden houses on narrow lots, their clapboard not recently painted, with chain-link fencing around the yards and trash barrels standing sentry.

  The sky was dark over the house in question, a house split in half, with two front doors, A and B. The right side of the porch was strewn wit
h random junk, some of which I could identify as, say, children’s toys, while much of the rest seemed to be parts of unknown wholes. My thoughts started to overheat. This could be a crack house, a whorehouse. Unlikely but possible.

  Dad and I went up to the door on the left side, and simultaneously I was reporting it all to some future listener, Courtney, I suppose. I imagined telling her that we’d knocked, heard a voice say something indistinct, then found the door unlatched. Dad pushed it halfway open, then fully open. I told her that the living room was sorrily lit by an overhead fixture and furnished with a shapeless couch of gray leather substitute and a maroon recliner, both angled toward a large television. A young guy with an earring and a soul patch and a face more consternated than friendly sat on the recliner, changing channels.

  “Is Sam around?” I said.

  “You his professors or something?”

  I said no just as Dad said yes.

  “Yes and no, okay. Why’re you looking for him?”

  “We’re actually looking for someone else, someone he knows.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  His shoulders bounced, a snort or maybe a hiccup, and he said he didn’t.

  “Could I leave a message?”

  “You could,” he said.

  In my line of sight was a shelf with books and a small carved pipe and a plastic miniature of some ancient Egyptian deity. I was ready to walk away, but my father stepped into the space between chair and television and then introduced himself.

  “Tim Atherton.”

  “I’m Nando,” he said.

  “You’re what?”

  “My name is Nando.”

  “We’re looking for a girl, a young girl named Nina.”

  “Sam’s little friend? She was here.”

  “They were here together?” I asked.

  “Naw, she was looking for him too. But he—”

  “What?”

  “I don’t think he’d like me telling people.”

  “We really need to find her.”

  “I guess it’s public record, though.”

  “What is?”

  Nando shifted in his chair, and he seemed to listen to something we couldn’t hear. He took a breath, fidgeted more, and then began.

  “He got arrested like a week ago. It was bullshit. This bitch came over here and said she was supposed to buy from me. I wasn’t here, so he told her to come back later. But she was all, I need it now. He knows where my stash is. And he’s not a very sophisticated person, he doesn’t realize, he never thinks for a second about maybe it’s a setup. The narc, she looked maybe twenty years old, that’s what he told me. He was just trying to be nice, he brings it out to her. So then he gets arrested.”

  “And they’re still holding him?”

  “He’s not a citizen or anything. Student visa, man. They’re going to send his ass back to Turkey, is what they told him.”

  “Did you tell all this to Nina?” I asked.

  “Not all of it. She was already upset so I didn’t say about how they want to deport him.”

  “Do you know where she went from here?”

  “I don’t.” He stood up and looked through a pile of papers on a side table, then left the room. We could hear him opening drawers. He returned and handed my dad a used envelope with something written on it. “This is the place where he is. It’s out toward Frederick. I don’t know who you people are, but if you have any way to help him—”

  He paused, and I saw that he was worked up. “He’s such an innocent guy, you know? I mean, he’s from a village. His dad is, like, a fisherman. He didn’t have any idea.”

  * * *

  Then we were in the car again, headed back to D.C. We wanted to keep looking for Nina but had nowhere to look. It was too late at night to try to go to the jail that Nando had named. I wondered if Nina had tried to go there, wherever it was. I pictured her in some painted-cinder-block lobby, backpack still over her shoulder, pleading with a night guard.

  My dad was pissed. “What is wrong with these people?” he was saying, and at first I didn’t know who he meant. “They just pick these guys up, I don’t know if they have quotas to meet or what, but why they’re bothering with some college kid…” I wouldn’t have expected him to take up so strongly for someone he’d never met, based on a tale told by a dude with a soul patch, but he’d had his own experience with threatened prosecution, I remembered. “If they deport that kid, and he doesn’t get his degree and he’s on some list of people who can never come back here…”

  “It’s fucked up,” I said, though normally I wouldn’t have used those words around my dad.

  “It is,” he said. “Can you think of anywhere else she might’ve gone?” He didn’t want to end the search, and neither did I.

  “Not really.”

  “Her poor father. Remember that night you and Courtney came home so late?”

  “Which night was that?” I pretended I didn’t know which night he meant.

  And then he told me the whole story. Or no, not the whole story, but this much:

  * * *

  “Your mother was on a business trip,” he began, “and I was downtown until late, at the lawyer’s office. There were weeks when I had to go every night. I would stay for hours in one of the conference rooms, this little conference room with no windows and shelves of law books on all sides. Every night I would go through documents. There were tons of them, boxes and boxes. I hadn’t been charged, but I was being investigated, and so I had to try to get ready for anything and everything, whatever they might bring against me. The kitchen sink. There were thousands of pages to be read, and the minicassettes I’d used in my Dictaphone, I listened to all of those, I went over it all. It was—it was tiresome. Awful, really.

  “The irony was, about a year, maybe a year and a half earlier, I’d done something very similar at work, at the White House, in terms of looking through documents, looking for something incriminating. A report in the media had made some hay about Oliver North and the Contras, and some members of Congress got mad about it and were wanting to look at all our files. I was asked to review the files ahead of time. I went through stacks of memos, looking for ones that might have reflected badly on what North was up to, and I’d pulled about six of them and handed them over to my boss. I never asked what he planned to do about them, but still, if anything, that was the most—the most iffy thing I’d done, I thought I could get nailed on that. In other words, not for whatever was in the record, but for my part in removing something from the record. Even though I had not personally done anything more than locate and hand over the memos.

  “Still, I went on reading through all that material. Night after night. I felt I had to do whatever I could. I was no big shot, but I could’ve gone to jail. There was that chance. It was a dark time. I would come home and I would peek into each of your bedrooms, yours and Maggie’s and Courtney’s. I would look at you guys sleeping and—

  “Well. In other words it would be late, ten or eleven, by the time I left the law firm. More than once, a few times I think, I drove by Dick’s house before I went home. It wasn’t on the way, not at all, but sometimes I would just drive for a while, drive and think. I couldn’t talk to Dick about what was happening, we weren’t supposed to communicate with other people who were potential subjects of investigation. He was living in Bethesda with his wife and his stepson, who I guess you know. It was a big house they bought after he got married to her. A fine house.

  “So that one night I turned onto his street and slowed down, and I go by the place, and I’m just speeding up again when I see Dick walking down the street. There’s no sidewalk, he’s just walking a little ways ahead of me on the left side of the road. I can see his light-colored hair. I pull up beside him and roll down the window, and that spooks him, like it would anybody at that time of night. At first he starts to walk faster. Then I say, can I give you a lift? He turns and blinks and says, As if I did
n’t have enough people on my tail.

  “He was still walking, and I was inching the car forward. He told me that this was the only time he could be out in public without feeling like everyone was watching him. They all think they know, he said. Yes they do, I said.

  “Then he stopped and said, let me ask you something. Do you believe that ethics are universal? He asked me that, which was strange. It’s not a question that people, the people I know, typically ask each other, much less in the middle of the night, through a car window. And I’d never took Dick to be someone with a strong interest in ethics, but now all of a sudden he’s wanting to know did we do anything unethical. Congress can go screw themselves, he was saying, but in that case who do we answer to?

  “Finally he walks around to the passenger side and gets in the car. I guess that would’ve been the Pontiac? No, I take that back. It was the VW. I drove us around the block and Dick took a flask out of his coat and offered it to me. I said something like, but don’t you think it was worth it? He gives me this look like I’m speaking gibberish and asks me, what are your antecedents? What was worth what?

  “The experience, I said. The chance to serve.

  “He wasn’t having any of that. You don’t really believe that, he said, do you? I realized he’d probably been sipping out of that flask for a while. We lost, he said.

  “I wasn’t inclined to start an argument, and so I asked him how his wife was doing, and he laughed and said she was as good as could be expected. And then he asked about you girls, wanted to know how my three girls were holding up.

  “So here we are driving around at about ten miles per hour and flouting the open container law of the state of Maryland, and for a little while we say nothing, and then Dick out and asks me what did I want. I said I wanted it all to be over as soon as possible. No, he says, what did I want, what had I wanted, before? In my career, what had I wanted? As long as we’d been friends, that subject had always been off-limits, we never said it directly. I don’t know why. I knew Dick was very ambitious, but we’d never said to each other, I ultimately want to be this or I want to be that. That night, though, I realized he’d had it all mapped out for himself. He told me that before the scandal he’d figured that if Bush senior won in ’88 then he would’ve had a good shot at OMB director. And that was one difference between us. I had goals and ambitions, but at that moment, with everything falling apart around us, that was the last thing I thought about—you know, now I’ll never get to be director of the Office of Management and Budget? The last thing.