American Heart

by Laura Moriarty

  “That’s encouraging,” I said, my voice a little too chipper, like we were just a couple of ladies on a weekend trip and our biggest problem was that the heat wouldn’t work. I didn’t want to think about our actual situation, or how far away we were from anyone who could help us, even if they would.

  She went over to the dresser that didn’t have the television on it and tried to lift one side. “It is heavy,” she said. “You will help me move it to the door? We can put our things inside to make it more heavy?”

  I got on one side of the dresser, and we half-slid, half-carried it to the door. We pushed our bags in the drawers, hers on top of mine. I put the plastic bag with Tyler’s crackers and beef jerky in the third drawer.

  “That’s all we can do,” she said, turning on the overhead light. She moved around me to close both curtains before she pulled off her hat. Her hair was smashed flat where her hat had been, but still wavy on the bottom.

  “Maybe it will be fine,” she said, giving me a little nod like we were agreeing it was true. “Maybe there is no problem.”

  I looked at Tess’s watch. It was almost five. We’d have about sixteen hours, at the most, before we knew if there was a problem or not.

  I didn’t even check to see if we had hot water. It seemed to me that if I was stupid enough to take a shower in that place, I might as well find some ominous music to play and then go ahead and get a knife to stab myself with forty-five times so I could just get it over with. Chloe was apparently of the same mind: she took her bag with her into the bathroom, and I heard the sink running, but not the shower. She came out wearing her wide-legged pants, the white sweatshirt, and a yellow pair of socks.

  “You like Jeopardy!?” I asked, nodding at the television. There weren’t any chairs, so I was on the bed we’d made up, sitting under the mallard duck. “That big guy on the left is killing it, and they haven’t even hit the Daily Double.”

  She pushed her bag back into her drawer. “I do like it,” she said. “I play against my husband, and I often win.” She turned around, holding a rolled-up mat and a brown velvet bag that looked like something you’d keep jewelry in. “But now I need to pray.”

  “Oh.” I sat up, glancing back into the bathroom. It was the only place I could go to give her privacy.

  “Just do as you were. It will not take so long.” She tucked the mat under her arm, pulled a long white scarf out of her bag, and used one hand to drape the scarf over her hair, pushing the long end over her shoulder. It looked right the first time she did it, and she didn’t even have a mirror. She reached into the bag again and brought out something silver, small enough to fit in the palm of her hand. She squinted down at it, then turned, a little at a time, until she was nearly facing the wall opposite the window. She walked to the other side of the bed, still facing that same direction, and spread out a green-and-gold mat about the size of a bath towel.

  “You need me to turn off the television at least?”

  She shrugged, setting something small and circular on the mat. “No. I am fine.”

  That was nice of her. In my experience with religious people, when they tell you they’re getting ready to pray, that means they usually want you to be quiet, or they even say “let us pray,” like they just assume you’re in on it. Or they’re pretty much telling you you’re going to be in on it, so you might as well bow your head. That was certainly true at Berean Baptist, which I understand, as it was a religious school. But it was even true when I was in public school in Joplin. Right before our spring choir concert, our teacher was really nervous, and she had us all pray together that we would sing our best and bring glory to God through our voices. And of course, Aunt Jenny always said grace at the table. In all of those cases, it never killed me to just close my eyes and bow my head to be polite. But I didn’t know what to do around a praying Muslim.

  Whatever she said, it seemed kind of rude for me to leave the television on, with people calling out their question-answers and Alex Trebek saying “no” while someone was trying to pray. I picked up the remote, hit the power button, and lay on my side, facing away from Chloe. Her back was to me, but if she turned around, I didn’t want her to feel like she was being watched. And anyway, even with the locks, and the dresser we’d moved, it seemed like one of us should keep an eye on the door.

  Before we went to bed, she prayed again, even though she hadn’t done anything since the last time she prayed except eat beef jerky and crackers and watch television with me. She had to go through the whole deal of getting her mat out again and setting it up in the right spot—it seemed to me she could have just left it out from last time, but I guess not.

  I watched her put her prayer things away before I took out my earbuds. I was ready for bed, the blankets pulled up to my armpits, though I was still wearing my sweater and jeans. I’d already decided to sleep in my clothes. If somebody tried to bust through the door chain in the middle of the night, I wanted to be ready. My boots were next to the bed.

  “Hey,” I said. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “You just did.” She looked at me over her shoulder and smiled.

  Ho ho ho, I thought. Chloe made a joke. It was sort of a lame one. But still. Good effort.

  “I’m sorry.” She turned around, still smiling. “What is the question?”

  “You ever get tired of having to pray so much?”

  She frowned. I frowned back. I hadn’t meant it the way it came out, like I was pretending to just ask a question but really trying to convince her of something. I sounded as bad as Patty Charlson from seventh grade, who once asked me, with a really nice and caring look on her face, why I wasn’t more worried about spending eternity in hell, as I had not accepted Jesus as my personal savior and could not be convinced by Patty to do so, or even come with her to church. That always got on my nerves, when people acted like I was a sad story because I didn’t believe what they did.

  But I wasn’t trying to talk Chloe into or out of anything. I really just wanted to know.

  “Sorry.” I waited to let the word settle in. “What I mean is, is it like something bad will happen to you if you don’t pray? Like you’ll go to hell if you don’t do it enough?”

  She leaned on the dresser, tilting her head back and forth like she had a marble rolling around inside. “No. It is not that. I want to do it.”

  I nodded. It didn’t seem like there was much more I could ask without feeling like I was cross-examining her, like I was the atheist version of Patty Charlson. Also, with religious people, you have to be careful because sometimes if you ask too many questions they start to think it’s the green light to start trying to convert you when really you’re just curious.

  She walked around to the other side of the bed, setting her ear drops on the night stand. “It’s a time for me to remember God, and to remind myself to be and do good.” She got in bed slowly, careful not to tug on the cover or the sheets. I could smell her lotion, or her soap, whatever she put on that was minty. “I do it because it is pleasing to God, but it’s pleasing to God because it is good for my soul, just as the movement is good for my body.” She put her head on the pillow, looking up at the ceiling. “And to answer your first question, no, I do not get tired of it. Some days I think I am too tired, or too busy. But it is when I am tired that I need prayer the most. It restores me.”

  “Okay,” I said. I wasn’t going to argue with her about it. But she’d just prayed, and she still looked pretty tired.

  She smiled like she guessed what I was thinking. “It is not exactly what I mean. It would be better to say that when I pray, I’m reminded that God does not want me to be sad or afraid.” She shrugged. “And that I don’t need to be.”

  “You’re not afraid now?” I tried not to say it like I didn’t believe her. But I myself wasn’t looking forward to her turning off the lamp. We hadn’t heard Tyler’s door, or anything from his room, for a while, and I told myself that was a good sign. For all we knew, he was already asleep, getting rested
up for tomorrow’s drive.

  “I’m less afraid than I would be.” She pulled her hair back and lay her head back on the pillow. “I might even be able to sleep.”

  Maybe it was the God thing that was the difference. Or maybe I was just more jittery by nature. But long after I heard Chloe snoring—nothing loud, just a whistle between her teeth when she exhaled—I was still lying there in the dark with my eyes open and my head buzzing like I’d just slammed an energy drink. I could hear the trickle of water from the bathroom sink. My feet were cold, but I already had on both pairs of my socks. So there was nothing to do but lie there with cold toes and try to keep reminding myself that Chloe was right—there might not be any problem with Tyler. It was entirely possible, maybe, that he had really just been worried about the weather.

  I turned on my side, facing the dark outline of the closed curtain. Chloe’s breath kept whistling, and the water kept trickling from the sink. I thought I heard something outside, some kind of cracking sound, but then I didn’t hear it again. When I closed my eyes, I saw the old man who’d gotten shot in Sherburn, and I heard the thuds of the body, hitting the door and then the ground. The people he’d been hiding were probably in Nevada now. I hoped the one who needed medicine could get it.

  It was a hard thing to consider that a lot of the people put in the safety zones might not have done anything wrong, except share a religion, at least in name, with people who were crazy. If I put myself in their shoes, I could understand the bad spot a lot of Muslims were in. I mean, if some atheists started going around killing people, which I knew some of them already did, but I mean if they started saying, We’re killing all these innocent people in the name of atheism!, I’d be horrified just like everybody else, but it’s not like I’d change my mind and not be an atheist anymore, or start going to church of my own free will so no one would think I was a killer. I’d think, That’s messed up. But that’s not me. I wouldn’t just stop thinking what I think. I wouldn’t want to pretend, either. But I’d hate to be lumped in with killers when I myself hadn’t done anything wrong and had no intention of killing anybody, just cause of what I did or didn’t believe about God.

  I turned over again, trying to find a softer spot on my pillow. The edge of the blanket we’d gotten down from the closet felt scratchy against my chin, and it seemed like it might be the main source of the room’s musty smell. I was hungry, but not for beef jerky, which was all that was left in the plastic bag. I was wondering when and where we might stop for breakfast in the morning when I heard the muffled slam of a car door.

  I sat up in the darkness. Silence. Chloe breathing. And then, so quiet I almost didn’t hear it, the outer edges of someone’s voice in the parking lot.

  I slid out of bed and felt my way across the room. I told myself it would be okay. Someone was just out in the lot. Maybe Tyler had left something in his truck. Everything was probably fine.

  I pulled the curtain back slowly, just a few inches. The sky had cleared, just as Tyler had said it would, and the moon was so bright against the snow on the ground I had to squint. Even without any lights in the parking lot, it was easy to see a two-door car idling at an angle next to Tyler’s truck. A man with a blond ponytail was lifting the trunk door of the car and talking to Tyler, who used one arm to push snow off the plastic cover over the bed of his truck. The man helped him move the cover to the side, and Tyler reached in the truck bed and lifted what looked like a twenty-pound bag of dog food—I could see a picture of a dog on the side of the bag. He handed the bag to the other man, who put it in the trunk of his car.

  “Sarah-Mary? What is it?”

  I jumped back from the curtain, my hand on my throat. I couldn’t see anything but dark.

  “Why are you by the window?” Chloe’s whisper was low and gravelly. “What do you see?”

  “Hold on. Don’t turn on the light.” I turned back to the window and moved the edge of the curtain again. The trunk of the car was closed now, and both the ponytail man and Tyler were putting the plastic cover back over the bed of Tyler’s truck. When they finished, the man got in his car.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered. I didn’t want Chloe to think there was an emergency. There wasn’t. The truck that I’d assumed was Dale’s, the one with the plow on the front that had been here when we’d pulled up, was still parked in the lot, the windshield covered in snow. So Dale was still here. And Tyler was still here. All that had happened was that Tyler had moved some things out of his truck to a third party. That didn’t have to be any business of ours.

  “Please tell me what it is you see.”

  “Just wait.” Even with two pairs of socks, the floor felt cold on my toes.

  When I looked back out, the car was rolling away. Tyler hurried up the shoveled path to the office, blowing into his hands. When I couldn’t see him anymore, I stepped away from the window and told Chloe she could turn on the lamp.

  She stayed quiet, sitting up in bed, her head just under the mallard duck, as I told her what I’d seen. I was trying to convey to her that everything was fine, but I couldn’t get my knees to stop wobbling, which made no sense, because really, nothing I’d witnessed was particularly worrisome. But I had to sit on the edge of the bed and press down on my knees to still them.

  “I don’t think it was dog food,” I said. I wasn’t sure she understood. The lamp by the bed gave off a dim yellow glow that cast half of her face in shadow. At first, she didn’t say anything, and I thought I’d have to spell it out.

  But then she said, “I see.”

  “I wondered if he was moving something. I should have told you.”

  She nodded like she wasn’t mad. Or she was thinking about something else.

  “It’s probably got nothing to do with us,” I added. I couldn’t figure out how it would. And he hadn’t bothered us yet. He’d just given us crackers and beef jerky and gone back to his room. Still, I had a bad feeling there was something I wasn’t putting together, a riddle I hadn’t figured out.

  Chloe reached over to the nightstand for her glasses. She kept looking all around the room, and she seemed distracted, or like she was thinking something but not saying it.

  “Well,” she said finally, glancing at her watch. “It is only a little after ten. And I won’t be able to go back to sleep for a while.” She tucked her hair behind her ears and gave me a smile that didn’t look happy. “We can watch television?”

  I was fine with that, but I thought it was weird how she asked in such a nice way, her voice gentle, like I was a little kid who’d had a nightmare and needed to be consoled. She used the remote to click through channels until she got to the news out of Grand Forks, which didn’t seem like the most exciting choice to me. But I got back on my side of the bed, folding my pillow under my head.

  “Maybe there’s a movie or something,” I said. “You could cruise the channels.”

  She nodded, still looking at the screen. “This first,” she said. “Just to see.”

  I didn’t want to be rude, but I was thinking, see what? I mean, local news shows always looked pretty low-rent compared to Aunt Jenny’s cable shows, and Grand Forks’s news was no different. The anchor had a flag pin just like ours, and she had a nice speaking voice, but she was just a regular-looking woman who never would have made it on the cable shows, and anyway, there wasn’t a lot anyone could have done to jazz up the long opening piece about a meeting on municipal waste. After staying on that topic way too long, she moved on to a story about a fire at an Indian restaurant that was still being investigated, meaning nobody knew anything yet. I sighed to show I was bored, but Chloe either didn’t notice or she ignored me.

  She didn’t even change channels during the commercials, which were local as well, so we both just sat there and watched as a Grand Forks car dealer wearing a spandex suit and eye goggles ran between two lines of parked cars with a chainsaw, saying he was going crazy cutting down prices. The next commercial was for a pizza place that delivered, the number flashing at the
bottom of the screen, and they were mean enough to show a slice of thick-crusted pizza being raised up out of a pie, strands of melted cheese hanging down.

  “Oh my God,” I moaned, cradling my belly. “I could very much go for some of that right now. You think they deliver out here?”

  It was just a joke. I mean, obviously. We didn’t even have a phone that would make the call, and we were probably twenty miles outside of any delivery range, even in regular weather. But Chloe didn’t smile or even acknowledge that I’d said anything, and it occurred to me that maybe she was mad at me after all. I supposed she had a right to be. If I’d told her my theory about Tyler when we were back in Fargo, she could have decided we were done with him, and we could have hitched with someone else. She would probably have been in Canada by now. Or at least a normal hotel room.

  “Hey.” I nudged her elbow. “I feel bad about not telling you I thought Tyler might—”

  She held up her hand. The news had come back on, but instead of the anchor, SPECIAL SECURITY REPORT was written in black against white, and there was a picture of the flag underneath. There was different music, too, something exciting, with more drums. But when the anchor came back on, she didn’t seem any more pumped than she’d been when talking about the municipal waste.

  “We’re breaking in to our scheduled reports to tell our viewers that during the last commercial break, our Channel 5 Nightwatch Team passed on an unconfirmed report that police in Northwestern Minnesota are currently en route to apprehend a Muslim fugitive in a remote location about fifty-five miles northeast of Grand Forks.”

  I turned to Chloe. She looked back at me, and the expression on her face made me feel like maybe I’d heard wrong, and everything was still okay. She didn’t seem scared, or even surprised. She had the face of someone hearing a sad story about something bad that had happened a long time ago, something already done and over. She put her hand on the sleeve of my sweater.

  “Sarah-Mary,” she said, using the same gentle voice she’d used earlier. “You understand? That is us. They are coming for us already.” She didn’t even seem surprised. And it was only then that I got it—this was why she’d wanted to watch television in the first place. She’d known. Or she’d suspected. She’d just been checking to make sure.