“Okay.” She nodded. “Can I try it?”
She walked around and got in the driver’s seat, tried the key. Same result.
“Totally fine. It just needs a jump. I have cables in my car.”
She walked to her trunk, feet crunching over the grit of the road.
“You know how to jump a car?” Tina asked.
“Are you kidding? Do you even remember my dad? He practically made me take classes on jumper cables and changing tires before he’d let me get my license. Also, haven’t you ever seen SVU? There are pervs out there—you gotta know how to jump a car.”
She hefted her jumper cables.
“I’ve been running into everyone tonight! I thought you and your folks moved away.”
“We did.” Tina struggled for an explanation. “I was back in town running some errands.”
This sounded less than convincing, and it was impossible to tell how the woman took it. She popped the hood and came around, found the release, lifted.
“What are you up to now?” she asked.
“Not much. Nothing exciting. Live in Van Wert by the Indiana line. Work at Walmart.”
She wondered if the woman would remember the exact spot she’d helped Tina. If she’d remember it was by this gate and the road leading into the woods. Suddenly, she was sure the light of the fire must have been visible to the woman as she came up the road, but this was ridiculous. That was over an hour ago, and from Stillwater it would have been nothing but a dim ember in the deep. Now the woman was staring at her car, though. Studying it.
“You were just driving and the car died?”
“Yeah, well, I stopped. Just to, you know. Get out and look at the stars. This used to be one of my favorite places to come and think.”
Tina watched as she hooked the hungry jaws of the jumper cables up to her battery, then to Tina’s. She added another black cable, and attached the open clamp to a piece of metal near the Cobalt’s engine.
Only now did Tina smell herself and recall that she reeked of smoke. She’d seen the woman’s nose wonder at the stench, and the power of the smell returned to her anew. I built a fire in the woods. I took a walk and built a fire. So ridiculous.
The woman walked back to her car and started the engine.
“We gotta let it run for a couple minutes.”
Tina tried to imagine the forces that had brought the two of them here, what had bound them for each other on this same lonely stretch of Stillwater. God’s plan, always unavailable. But here they were in the cosmic shimmering.
The woman applied the gas, revving the engine so it growled like a suspicious dog.
Tina’s skin was clammy. Her shoulders and back throbbed from the pulling and the digging. The sprain in her wrist ached. She could feel the woman watching her through the windshield.
The woman came out. How ridiculous that she could not think of her name but could recall the dances and Vicky’s and sleepovers and her face beside the orange lockers and in the stadium bleachers.
“Did you pick up Todd Beaufort earlier? Outside the Lincoln?”
“Todd?” She heard her voice squeal, the tinny sound murder on the bones inside her ears. “No. No, I haven’t seen him in a while. A long time.”
The woman only nodded.
“Okay, let’s give it a try.”
She slipped into the driver’s seat of the Cobalt. The ignition turned over with a weak sputter on the first try.
“Ha ha! Success. I’m your hero, Ross.”
Without warning, a sob escaped her throat. The woman looked up.
“I’m sorry,” said Tina. “I’m so stupid—just. Thank you. I’m sorry.”
She got out of the Cobalt, and before Tina could stop her, the woman wrapped her arms around her. She was warm and strong.
“It’s okay, girl,” she said. “You’ll be on your way. No worries.”
When she let go, Tina wiped her eyes and thanked her again, but her face fluttered with unease. She smelled like a house fire. If she didn’t throw up, she’d pass out. The woman didn’t stop staring at her.
“I’m fine,” she mumbled. “I really need to go now.”
The woman said nothing and went to remove the jumper cables. Tina took the opportunity to amble back to her trunk. She found Cole’s windbreaker stuffed into the clutter in the back. She folded it over the tire iron and walked back around to the front of the car.
The woman was saying, “Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but if you want I can give you a ride back into—” when Tina dropped the windbreaker and swung the tire iron at her face as hard as she could.
The name came to her as she caught her long-ago friend on the skull with a sharp crack. A spackle of blood jettied from her scalp, and she fell onto her butt on the asphalt. With the name came a memory: how this friend used to crack her up by flipping up her eyelids so they stuck, like her face had turned inside out. She was still sitting up, clutching her jumper cables, gazing up at Tina, more bewildered than anything: Just, wait—why? when Tina cocked both arms, fire searing through her chest muscles. Tina pictured her head coming apart. She would hit until some unseen bone in her face gave way and her eye popped out. She would hit until the tire iron and the ground and the woman’s head of carefully combed blond was wet and black with blood. She would hit until she was sure this woman could never tell her story. She would hit until she could see Cole on the other side of this awful moment. She would hit while she wept, while she prayed, while realms of the watching dead pried her eyes open and made her see the endless answers to what her skull too would look like.
But Tina didn’t swing. So instead, the woman got to her feet. She actually took a moment to wipe dirt from her behind. The wound on her head bled down the side of her face; Tina had more raked her across the scalp than anything else. Her arms were exhausted from swinging, from digging, and Stacey was a foot taller, an athlete, a tough girl. She took a step and easily ripped the tire iron from Tina’s hand. She shoved her back against the car, pinning her arms.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Stacey hissed into her face. “What did you do that for?”
The panic, the sob, and the terror began all at once in her chest, and rose like a mushroom cloud up her throat. The sound she made was a child’s wail.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. I’m really so sorry.”
“Why did you do that, Tina?” Stacey relaxed her grip. “What is going on with you?”
Tina flapped her hands the way she had when she panicked as a little girl. The reality of what she’d done returned to her, a snaking desolation. Seeing this person from her past, from a separate, untroubled life, broke her away from what she’d seen in the woods. She was Lot’s wife peering over her shoulder. She saw the blisters forming on his skin. Another sob escaped.
“Todd was with you, wasn’t he?”
Tina began to weep in full.
“I don’t know,” she gasped. “I don’t know what I did what I did why I did.”
“Tina, easy. Easy.” Stacey took her chin. Blood continued to trickle down her blond. “What do you mean? What happened?” She hesitated. “Was Todd with you?”
“What I did,” she repeated. Then wailed. “Why I did what I did.” She crumpled to the ground, knees tucked under her. The surface of the road felt gritty and cool.
“What did you do? What happened?”
“I don’t know,” she sobbed. Snot bubbled in her nose, and she moaned. “I don’t know I didn’t know I didn’t know.”
Heaving in the dark, both cars’ engines a steady drone, Tina began to scream. She screamed until the screaming turned back to weeping, the weeping to whimpering. She was barely aware of Stacey scrambling in the car for her phone.
She left herself behind then. The first police car came. They put her in handcuffs and had her sit in the back of the patrol car while Stacey explained what had happened and what Tina had said. She thought of Cole back home in their bed, dead to the world, unaw
are of what his fiancée had done for a least a little while longer. Her head hurt from crying. She couldn’t wipe her nose or eyes, so the moisture just hung on her face. A female officer came into the car. She was old and wore her hair in a tight gray bun. She asked her who she’d been with that night, what had happened. Tina wasn’t sure she heard these words leave her mouth, but later they would tell her it’s what she said: “I left him in the woods.”
An ambulance took Stacey away, and more police began to arrive. Ryan Ostrowski was one of the officers who came next. He looked at her first with curiosity, and then with great fear. He wouldn’t go near her. She could hear the other officers asking him to go talk to her, but he refused. She could hear him saying it wasn’t appropriate, that he knew her (“It’s goddamn New Canaan, Strow, we all know someone!”). All the flashing lights were too much. They drove her brain crazy, and she closed her eyes.
When she opened them, Marty Brinklan was standing over her. He took off the handcuffs and sat with her in the back of another ambulance while a paramedic shone a light in her eyes. When the medic finished looking her over, Mr. Brinklan asked her if she was okay.
“My head hurts,” she said. He still had a thick white mustache and kind, silent eyes. His face was ancient and weary. Gray tufts of hair protruded from the wide nostrils of his battered nose.
“Tina, you need to tell me what happened here.”
She said nothing.
“I’m Marty. I know your folks from growing up. You knew my son.”
She sat silently, not knowing what to say. In the distance, she could hear the rumble of thunder. She wanted only to pass into an entombed, dreamless sleep.
He said, “You know they called me out here, Tina, because you said you hurt somebody. We found a little bit of blood in your car. How did it get there?”
She watched the leaves of a nearby sycamore turning over, blown by a furious wind.
“Who was with you? Stacey said she saw you leave a bar with someone.”
She said nothing. To even think his name spread inexhaustible dread through the veins of her arms.
“Where is this person? You said you left him in the woods? Is he hurt?”
She said nothing.
“Why were you out here?”
Stacey coming along when she did was her last necessary evidence for the presence of God in all things. He had seen Tina on this road tonight, and He had tested her, she was sure. She had failed the test.
“Tina, there’s a storm on the way. If there’s someone in the woods, and they’re hurt, we need to find them. Right away. Now.”
She looked over his shoulder and took in the view. This part of Stillwater rose along the crest of a hill before dropping back down into the woods. From this vantage point the lights of New Canaan glowed, the town nestled into a broad, shallow valley. The way the sky dropped down on the horizon made it feel like they were in one of those planetarium theaters. Not just stars overhead but almost a dome. From the west, the thunderclouds drifted steadily closer. She could see the glowing bursts of lightning in them. How unsettling it was that they all lived out their lives—every triumph and sorrow—confined to this same sliver of God’s creation. That they pinballed around one another until someone was dead or born.
“I left him in the woods,” she said. “We were in love.”
The wind blew harder, a staggering blast of air raking across the fields, shrieking like the sharpening of knives and scattering hair into her face. With it came the smell of fire, the acrid scent of char and carbon that tingles the nose. A thunderstorm swept in. Lightning split the night, and the downpour roared, accompanied by the frequent mortar fire of thunder. Rain like shards of glass streaking out of the sky. They took her away. Not that it mattered. Never again would she sleep through a night and not feel the sunburn heat of the fire. A recurring dream, month after month, year after year, always the same raging fire blasting through the fields and towns and forests, searing the night, swallowing the known world, as she struggled for a cool breath at the edge of the woods. The storm descended over the blue-black nighttime hills, threading through her, savage and beautiful, settling in her heart, her home.
CODA
LISA HAN AND THE VOID AT NIGHT’s END
ON A BLUSTERY AUTUMN DAY with leaves scraping across the parking lot of the Masjid Al-Amin Mosque in Columbus, just north of Ohio State University in the affluent suburb of Upper Arlington, two men sat parked in a 2003 Dodge RAM pickup. In the cab they had an AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle, a TEC-9 semiautomatic pistol, and a cheap CZ-82 handgun as well as roughly two hundred rounds of ammunition between the three weapons. Their compatriot, who’d arrived in another vehicle and parked at a nearby strip mall, had entered the mosque early Friday morning before worshipers arrived. He carried in a backpack an explosive device built around a block of Semtex-10, which he placed in the women’s bathroom. Though security cameras captured his image, this did not stop the device from detonating at ten to two, just as morning services were about to get under way.
The plan was for the explosion to send people running to the front exit where, as they spilled out, they would be caught in a pincer movement line of fire. In the minds of the perpetrators this would serve as a warning to the religious group they saw as most responsible for the troubles of their homeland. Like many young men convinced of their cause but with only vague notions of how the murder of innocent people will advance the interests of their tribe, they had no particular end game in mind, only to rack up as many kills as possible. In their fantasies, they saw it sparking the final crusade, the war for the heart of their nation, in which those with white skin would finally band together and push out all invading faiths and bloodlines.
Instead, when the man in the driver’s seat saw the first people pour out, he found he couldn’t leave the truck. He saw an old man, blood streaming down his head into a massive Rorschach inkblot on his cream shirt, carrying a young girl with most of her face gone. People and smoke followed behind him, including the girl’s father, who was stripping off his shirt to tear into a tourniquet, his shaky hands struggling with tough Brooks Brothers fabric. The driver, Amos Flood, had the assault rifle on his lap, but he never even picked it up. He started blubbering, tears pouring down his fleshy pink face. The little girl just looked too much like a little girl. After a moment, his brother said, “Let’s go,” and Amos started the car and drove them back home to their farm in New Canaan, Ohio, a little over an hour north.
Three people were seriously injured in the blast and one killed. The injured included the old man, Ali Usman, who lost part of his left hand and received treatment for second-degree burns. He’d run into the fire to pull out the child. The girl, who’d been in the bathroom at the time eating a chocolate bar stolen from her mother’s purse, died in the parking lot. Her name was Maisha Rizvi. She was ten years old and a star student in Mrs. Paul-Heen’s fifth-grade class at Barrington Road Elementary School in Upper Arlington. Her father was the head of the multimedia department for the Triple-A minor league baseball team the Columbus Clippers. Because they had season tickets, Maisha was a die-hard Clippers fan, knew the names of every player and their stat lines as far into the weeds as on-base percentage. She developed fierce crushes, depending on who was playing well, and if those crushes moved up to the major leagues, she would follow their careers with fervent, desperate hope. A highlight of her short life came when her father arranged a pregame tour of the clubhouse where she met all the players and gathered each of their signatures on a baseball. Dante Orillio, a stout first baseman from the Bronx, carrying a not-unwarranted grudge that the Indians had sent him back down, took the ball from her, and noted the headscarf she’d taken to wearing (as if it could more quickly usher in puberty and therefore adulthood and therefore independence). As he signed his name, he said, “Assalamu alaikum, sister.”
She could barely breathe back “Wa alaikum salaam,” and after the game, she used an advance on her allowance, begged and pleaded from
her father, to buy an Orillio poster, which she kissed on the mouth each night before she went to sleep. Her mother objected to the poster, and they fought bitterly over its appropriateness. This was seven weeks before she saw the chocolate in her mom’s purse and—a streak of preteen rebelliousness already blooming—decided she’d rather eat it in the bathroom than sit through the first part of services.
The men who orchestrated the attack were quickly found. The security cameras caught the truck and its license plate, as well as an image of the man who’d left the bomb. It took police only fifteen hours to make an arrest, the FBI joining with local law enforcement to descend on a sad farm in Northeast Ohio to take into custody Amos Andrew Flood, Francis David Flood, and Kirk Radville Strothers. Upon returning home, the three men had had a heated argument about what went wrong, Kirk having successfully planted the bomb while his cousins “pussed out.” Then they sat down to drink and smoke marijuana until the authorities arrived. They were so inebriated when they were taken into custody that the police had to put them in the drunk tank and wait to book them. All three would make plea deals to avoid the death penalty. Kirk was sentenced to life in prison, Francis and Amos to twenty years each. There was some outrage at the latter sentences and even more so at the popular narrative that accompanied the attack. The media tended to shy away from the word terrorism in this case, which many found indefensible. The incident certainly vanished from the national outlets quickly, buried under the news cycle’s accelerated avalanche. Even the hometown paper The Columbus Dispatch found that reporting on the subject had an adverse effect. Daily circulation and website traffic declined noticeably whenever they ran front-page news about the case, and editors learned to keep any updates relegated to the interior of the paper.
After the arrests, Martin Brinklan, chief investigator for the New Canaan Police Department, put in his retirement papers—three years later than he’d planned. He’d always been one to stay busy, to stay working long after everyone else had shut off their lights and returned home to their televisions, but there comes a point when a man can no longer spend all his waking hours looking at the stupid cruelty people regularly visit upon one another. In his consultations with the FBI, he’d grown frustrated by their disinterest in following all the tributaries of the case. For instance, how had the three men financed the operation? They had a small marijuana farm on their property, ran a little methamphetamine, and salvaged spare parts from old cars, but this was dumb chump change. He’d known about these boys when his son was in school, and they were always a few fries short of a Happy Meal. Certainly not criminal masterminds of any kind. He was convinced someone had given them a good chunk of cash for this, but he could never prove it. Additionally, the brothers gave up their connection in Louisiana, an ex-navy guy who’d sold them the explosive, but that man claimed he’d never met Strothers or either of the Floods. He claimed he’d made a deal with a woman and made the exchange with yet another party: an unidentified twentysomething white male. Prosecutors found the scope of this plot unrealistic. They thought the seller was trying to get himself a deal to reduce his time by implicating imaginary co-conspirators. Marty suspected other players. Individuals who had melted away.
Ohio Page 44