“Right. I appreciate your coming down. Bad phone calls in the middle of the night probably aren’t a nice part of your job.”
“No.” She offered a weak smile. “But they are part of the job.”
“Want to come through?” The woman held back the door. It was steel with a frosted glass insert. On the other side, Naomi found herself in a chamber with a table and two wooden chairs. Hitchcock chairs, ironically enough. The far wall of the chamber had a curtained window. She supposed she knew what was on the other side of that.
“I’m thinking we should get the hard part over first? Then we can talk.”
“If it’s him,” Naomi said quickly, deploying the last of her magical thinking.
“I’m sorry?”
“If it’s him. It might not be him. And if it’s not him, there won’t be much to talk about, I’d imagine.”
Detective Miller was watching her thoughtfully. “Him being…?”
“Omar Khayal,” said Naomi. “I mean, that’s why I’m here, right? Because he…because this person had Omar’s college ID? But he could have found it. Or…stolen it?”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Miller said. She sounded very calm, and not unsympathetic. “We’ll talk afterward.”
Naomi felt herself nod. The detective gestured to the side of the room with the curtain. There was an intercom on the wall, and she pressed the button: “Louis, we’re ready.”
No, we’re not, Naomi thought.
Another button operated a pulley overhead. It made a gentle clicking sound.
In the next room, the bald man with the blond eyebrows—Louis, presumably—stood behind the steel table, and the person on the table (the body, she corrected herself), who was bare from the hips up, draped in a green cloth from the hips down. Narrow hips. A small tattoo on the right one; she couldn’t see what it was.
“Mrs. Roth?” said Detective Miller.
Ms., she almost said.
“Do you know this man?”
Did anyone know this man? He had arrived, emerged, and departed. His hair had always been long—well, always. For Naomi “always” had been from October of last year until two months ago, and that wasn’t much of an always. Now it was short, very short. Almost military, with a carefully etched shadow beard. His fragile frame seemed fuller, puffier, as if he’d been well fed, at last, and the eyes—she couldn’t see them. They were closed, on the other side of the visibly grimy glass, in another room. Were they the same dark, limitless eyes? She had been persuaded by those eyes, their ancient sadness. He had experienced so much of the awful world. Among his classmates, so tended and nurtured, so principled, so willing, he had worn his story like a magical cape. But Naomi couldn’t see his eyes from where she was looking. He was almost unrecognizable, but he was recognizable.
“Yes, that’s Omar,” she said.
“I’m very sorry,” the woman said perfunctorily.
“Yes, it’s terrible.”
“Could I just ask you to spell that name?”
Naomi looked at her. “Omar? O-M-A-R.”
“And the last name?” She was writing.
“K-H-A-Y-A-L.”
“Like the poet,” Detective Miller observed.
“What?”
She smiled, unaccountably. “‘A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou.’ You know, the Rubaiyat.”
“Omar Khayyam? No, that’s different.” But not so different. Now there was something she hadn’t thought of for months: the nearness of those names. That line about the jug of wine, it was a celebrated come-hither, almost a joke. But not to a Webster undergraduate. Nobody read Omar Khayyam today; if they knew his name at all it was because they mixed him up with Kahlil Gibran. For a while in the seventies, everybody quoted The Prophet in their wedding services.
“Did he have a middle name?”
She tried to remember. She was thinking about his application, which she’d read in her own bed at the Stone House. Sometimes people ask me what it was like to grow up in the middle of a war. Naomi closed her eyes. Had there been a middle name? Arabic names had multiple parts. They linked back to ancestors or places of origin, like South American names did, so even people from humble backgrounds sounded aristocratic. Not at all like American names. “I don’t remember a middle name. But I remember the town he came from. It was Bureij.” She spelled it. “In…” Gaza, she’d been about to say. But under the circumstances Omar deserved otherwise. “Palestine.”
“I see. Can we talk a bit?”
Mercifully, Detective Miller closed the curtain again. They sat in the chairs. The woman placed her clipboard on the table between them.
“I’m sorry we don’t have coffee yet. Couple of hours they come in and make a pot. But I don’t think either of us know how the machine works.”
“It’s okay,” Naomi told her, though she would have liked a cup of coffee. The day, outside, was getting ready to begin.
“I’ll be honest with you,” the woman said. “To me, this young man is a bit of a mystery.”
Join the club, Naomi almost said. What she said instead was “We were looking for him. The Webster police couldn’t find him after he left campus. I never thought I’d see him again, and to tell you the truth, I wasn’t unhappy about that. But why he’s here, just an hour away…” She shook her head.
“Why were the Webster police trying to find him?” the detective asked.
She tried to keep it straightforward. Omar had been the leader of a student protest. It had been a peaceful protest, mainly. But there had been some incidents on campus that had not been peaceful. “Maybe you heard about it?”
Detective Miller had not heard about it. That was almost a relief, but it also meant she had to explain.
“My office, back in February, was bombed. Just a little bomb, the kind that starts a fire. Luckily the damage wasn’t bad, but Omar left town that day. So obviously they wanted to talk to him. I thought…well, I don’t know what I thought. He’d come to us from a town in Oklahoma. But he wasn’t there, and anyway that wasn’t his home. He’d just been staying with a foster family there when he applied to our college. I think home was probably Palestine, but he couldn’t go back there.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“Well, he was recruited by…I can’t remember if it was one of the groups we hear about. Hamas or Al-Qaeda. Or someone else. He was supposed to blow himself up on a bus or in a market. But he came to America instead. I think he felt he couldn’t go back. He would be killed. And his family were gone in any case.”
She nodded, but said nothing. She was waiting for more.
“His father and brother were killed by Israeli soldiers. There were photographs of them on the street, trapped in the crossfire. The father was trying to shield the little boy, but they were both shot. Do you remember those photos? I can’t remember exactly when it was.”
Detective Miller looked pensive. “I think I do.”
“Yes. And then his mother died. So he had no one.”
“I see.”
“No family. But he met some American NGO employee who helped him immigrate, and a couple of years later he came to Webster. He was…” She wanted to say something nice about Omar, something respectful. He had abandoned his academic work. He had refused to engage in consensus building, or to find common ground, or any of the euphemisms that had served so many other agitators so well. Instead, he and his baffling mentor had nearly destroyed the college. “He was a very good writer,” she said, thinking of that application essay.
“He wrote about his childhood, then?”
“Well, he didn’t like to speak about his childhood at all. Not in public. But he did write about what had happened to him in his application essay. I read that,” she said, a mite defensively.
“You read every application essay? There must be thousands.”
“No, our admissions department does that.” It struck her as odd that they were discussing college admissions. Even here? Even in a morgue? People were so fascinated. P
ossibly Detective Miller had a child in the zone. Was Naomi about to be told of some civic-minded high school junior, first in her class and bound for the heights? Likely to apply to Webster? “I asked to see it. I was curious about him.”
“Because of his story.”
Naomi frowned. She must have meant his history. It was only a subtle difference. “Yes.”
“And as far as you know, there is no reason why Omar should be here in Hartford, as opposed to somewhere else.”
There was no reason. There was, overall, an absence of reason.
“No. I’m completely at a loss.”
The woman nodded. She set down her pen. “Well, I want to thank you for coming here. I’m sure this wasn’t fun, getting called out of bed.”
Not technically bed, Naomi thought. But no, it had not been fun.
“I hope we can call you if we have more questions.”
“Of course,” Naomi said. She got to her feet. She was weary. She felt that now. “Was it a busy night here?” she asked, she didn’t know why.
“Quiet,” the woman said. “Just this one case. Usually, a Saturday night, it’s more, unfortunately. I don’t know how familiar you are with Hartford. The suburbs are quiet, but the city itself has some very serious issues, you know.”
She didn’t know. She didn’t know much about Hartford, despite having spent the past twenty years living in its general proximity. Hartford was a place where highways intersected. You drove through it on the way to New York or New Haven or Amherst. Or Webster. It was known for insurance companies, and Wallace Stevens, and the Atheneum. She’d been to a play in Hartford once.
“Unfortunately, not a peaceful place. I grew up here, and I love it, but there are gangs. Gangs, plural. Drugs and gangs.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Naomi didn’t know what to say. She didn’t really want to say anything. She wanted to leave.
“The Latin Kings, and a new one, Los Solidos. It’s a plague.”
“Yes, it must be. Well, I’ll head back, then.” It sounded wrong, like she was personally trying to escape from warring thugs. “I mean, if it’s okay.”
Detective Miller held the door for her and Naomi returned to the corridor. Robbins was still on the bench, looking at something on his phone. She sat beside him and closed her eyes.
“It was him?” he asked quietly.
Naomi nodded.
“That’s so terribly sad. I’m sorry, Naomi. Are you all right?”
She nodded again.
“Did they tell you what happened to him? How he died?”
She turned to him, stunned. It had never occurred to her to ask. What was the matter with her? Wasn’t that why people came to a medical examiner in the first place? To find out exactly that? “Shit,” she said. “I can’t believe I just did that. I mean, I can’t believe I didn’t do that. She didn’t say a thing, just about how dangerous Hartford is. Drugs and gangs. But nothing about Omar.”
“Well, you’ll find out eventually, I’m sure,” Robbins said. “They’ll figure it out. I mean, I suppose they will.”
Naomi sighed.
Down at the end of the corridor, the woman stirred. The maintenance worker.
“Do you want to go?” said Robbins.
She wanted to go, more than anything. But she kept looking at the woman on the other bench, because she couldn’t figure out what was happening down there. The maintenance worker had sat up but then fallen back against the wall. She seemed to be shaking. She wasn’t shaking, Naomi realized. She was weeping. “Wait,” said Naomi.
She walked toward the woman, who was small and round and dark: Latina. Her gray hair was bobby-pinned flat against her head, and into a coil. The maintenance uniform she wore was dark green and had a red-and-white patch on the upper arm that said HARTFORD HOSPITAL. Naomi approached her.
“Can I help you?” Naomi said. A ridiculous question, but there was no one else here to ask it.
The woman turned to Naomi. Her face was wet but the expression blank. “Do I know you?” she asked. She had an accent: Spanish.
“No, no, I’m just here…for something. I just thought, do you need anything? Are you all right?”
“My son died,” the woman said.
“I’m so sorry.” Naomi sat beside her. Again, she didn’t know why, only that she couldn’t stop herself. “What a terrible thing.”
“They came to get me at my job. I work at the hospital. When they brought him in. But he was gone already.”
“Oh no.” She looked up. Robbins was standing in front of the other bench. He was watching. “Can we…are they taking care of you? Is there someone we can call?”
The woman shook her head, very slowly. “Just my nephew, but he’s at the hospital. They brought him in with my Eduardo, but he is going to be okay, the doctor said.”
“That’s good. That’s good.” She was afraid to touch the woman. She was afraid to say the wrong thing. As far as she could tell, anything was the wrong thing. “Were they in an accident together?”
“I told Eduardo not to go out with his cousin. I told him. Rafael was in some bad thing. He was always in some bad thing. I couldn’t stop him. But they were so close. Not like cousins. Like brothers.”
That didn’t sound like an accident. Gangs and drugs, the detective had said. It was terrible.
“But Eduardo. Eduardo was going to college.” The word college wrenched something deep inside of her. She wailed, bent forward, into her own hands. “He was a smart boy. He wanted to do good in life. He said, ‘Mama, I can study.’ He was a good boy.”
“Of course he was,” Naomi said. But really, was he? Maybe this woman didn’t know her son all that well. Maybe he’d been out there with his cousin, doing whatever bad thing his cousin was doing. Drugs and gangs. Gangs, plural. Just another Saturday night in Hartford.
The woman wept on. Naomi felt useless. Finally, she placed a hand on the woman’s shaking shoulder. There was no reaction. Robbins had moved a step closer.
Parents knew so little, even when they’d hovered over their kids, every second of their lives. Even when they’d ferried them from swimming to Brownies to the SAT tutor, monitored their homework and overseen their college applications. They dropped off their sons and daughters that first day of freshman year, hauling massive Bed Bath & Beyond bags and laptops and duffels full of clothing, and then they left these perfect strangers behind and drove home to their depopulated houses. Parents never believed their kids were capable of such subterfuge. If something went wrong, if the student was caught selling a joint or buying a term paper off the internet, they thought it was something Webster had done, some metamorphosis brought on by the college’s famously permissive mores. Naomi had sat with parents after disciplinary hearings, listening to them explain that Fiona or Dashiell could not possibly have done what they’d been accused of doing, what they had been found guilty of doing. Not my child, they said, even after the student had admitted an infraction or there was clear proof. Not my child. These perfect girls and boys, the curious scholars and open-hearted citizens of their college essays—they had gone off to a place like Webster and become changelings, new and strange, made-up people who could barely look their parents in the eye.
And this one, Eduardo, who would never look his parent, his mother, in the eye again. What had he hidden from her?
The door to the viewing room was opening again. Naomi looked up to see Detective Miller step out into the corridor. She felt embarrassed to be seen this way, giving comfort, or trying to give comfort, to a stranger. She was supposed to have left by now. She was supposed to be on her way back to her own life, duty discharged, and not so very touched by the death of a college student, a former college student, one of thousands enrolled at Webster. And yet here she still was, inserting herself into the worst night of this poor destroyed mother’s life. Who does that? Naomi thought.
A human person does that. Another mother does that.
“I see you two have met,” said Detective Miller, unacco
untably.
Naomi looked up at her.
“Oh,” said Robbins. He had his hand against his forehead, pressing it, as if he had the most terrible headache. “Oh, no. Oh, Naomi. We should leave.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. But she took her hand from the shoulder of the mother of the boy named Eduardo, who was the only case at the Hartford morgue on that atypically quiet Saturday night in April.
Chapter Nineteen
Veritas
Over the next week, as the Webster lawns began to give up their daffodils and hyacinths, Naomi watched the Omar story hatch and bloom. She had informed the people she had to inform—the trustees, the Webster police, and Dean Stacek—but otherwise she intended to say nothing to anyone. The truth about Omar was as incendiary as any bomb he might or might not have set, and when it emerged, as it obviously would, she wanted it not to come from her. At any rate, it didn’t take long.
A week after the night drive to Hartford, Mrs. Bradford took a call from Laurence McAfee in the press office. A reporter from the AP was asking for an interview related to the death of Omar Khayal. Did the president know anything about this?
Naomi asked them to decline the request. Decline all requests.
Then there was a grace period of three days, and then the thing exploded.
Out on the Quad they gathered in a kind of mourning scrum, first distraught and then, when the rest of it emerged, stupefied and paranoid. It was some kind of frame-up. It was some kind of besmirchment. The fate of their brave and beautiful Palestinian boy was so unexpected, so appalling, that it could only point to some far-reaching conspiracy—and yet, the other part of the conundrum kept tripping them up. Omar had been eliminated! Omar had been silenced! But…well…he hadn’t been Omar, he’d been someone else. Some other person, who had made an entire life for himself, and offered it to the world in a bouquet of all the right things: loneliness and war and loss and exile and wandering and the power of those simple ideas, fairness and justice and peace.
But, at the same time, Omar had been gotten rid of!
They ricocheted back and forth, roiling and arguing and holding one another in their honest grief. Naomi didn’t blame them. She’d spent days doing a version of the same, and nights unable to sleep as she braided together and pulled apart the two boys, Omar and Eduardo, Eduardo and Omar. They had had nothing to do with each other, those two, apart from being the same person.
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