“How do you scroll this?” I ask.
“Right here.”
His name was Andrew Li. He was twenty-three, born in the U.S., living in San Jose. He was a nobody. He was recruited. He put on the backpack and blew up the bus. No one knew who he was.
“It wasn’t Josh,” I whisper.
“What? Of course it wasn’t…It was that son of a bitch. He killed Josh. He almost killed you.” Joe takes the phone from me and snaps it shut, then he takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. “I gotta go,” he says. “I’m glad you’re okay.” And he walks off toward the cars.
It isn’t hard to find Gert towering over everyone else in the crowd, and when I move toward him, I see he’s talking to the two dark-complected men. They’re wearing suits, and they watch me as I approach.
“Who are you guys?” is the first thing I can think to say.
“Jess,” Gert says, “this is Christian, and his brother, Ramón.”
“From San Salvador?”
“Yes,” Ramón says. He has a narrow, handsome face. “We’re very sorry for you.” Christian says something to him in Spanish. “My brother is very sorry too.”
“You guys were always showing up…I thought you were…”
“Ramón and Christian did a lot of work with Josh,” Gert says.
“Josh told me something, you were…missing?”
Ramón rolls his dark eyes and makes a psh sound. “These guys,” he says, “Christian and Josh, they worry too much about me.” He doesn’t speak with much of an accent at all. “Like, they can’t call me for a couple days because I lose my phone charger, and they think I’m running away to Canada or something. I was in Oakland. Big brothers, man.”
Christian follows this, and then he looks at me. “Yosh is like, he is brother. He help us. You know? And my…my mama…”
“Our mother’s heart is broken,” Ramón says. “He lived with our family in San Salvador. She called herself Josh’s second mama.”
“I’m…I’m so sorry” is all I can say. They speak together in Spanish again.
“We go now, Gert,” Ramón says. “Good luck to you. Good luck, Jessica.” They walk off, and Christian claps his hand on his little brother’s shoulder as they go.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me who those guys were, Gert?”
“You never asked.”
We walk again, through fewer people now and the sounds of cars starting up and driving away. I see Tim and Emily and their children standing by their big wagon. Tim has his arms crossed, staring at me over the grassy lawn.
“Will you come to the reception?” Gert asks.
“I don’t think so. Gert, it wasn’t Josh.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t Josh. He didn’t blow up the bus.”
“Of course it wasn’t, Jess. The doc couldn’t do something like that.”
“Did you ever wonder, though? Even for a second?”
Gert tilts his head, but says nothing.
Dinner that night at Emily and Tim’s is a mostly silent affair, just like the entire day with them has been. Maybe the silence has something to do with the events of the morning, but I don’t really get the feeling this is much different than any other night here. Tim and Justin talk about peewee football, or something, and Emily sits next to Caleb in his booster chair and spends a lot of time helping him eat the leftovers she’s reheated for dinner.
Other than Justin’s girlfriend comment this morning, nothing has been said about Josh here all day, and it’s sort of unsettling. I want to say something, anything, find out what the hell is wrong with these people, but I’m too polite and I feel like saying anything would be like standing up and screaming or smashing a glass on the floor or something jarring like that. So I sit, and I watch Caleb struggle against the washcloth Emily wipes over his messy face.
“Come on, guys,” she says. “Let’s get ready for bed. Say good night to Daddy, Cale. You want to say good night to Jessica?” He shakes his head no and buries his face into Emily’s shoulder.
“I don’t want to say good night to her!” Justin shouts, and he runs off down the hall. Tim smirks at this.
“Okay,” Emily says. “I’ll be back after I get this little boy down to sleep.” I stand up and start to gather plates, but Emily shakes her head. “That’s alright. I can get all this later.”
I continue to get plates and load the dishwasher, and Tim sits and stares at me as I do it.
“Are you done?” I ask as I reach for his plate. He just shrugs. I get the casserole dish and start to scrub it out in the sink.
“Do you normally put this in the dishwasher?” I ask, but Tim just shrugs again. “I’m sorry,” I say. “Is something wrong?”
“Nope,” he says.
“I know you hated Josh. But he didn’t do it. Did you know that? It was on the news. It wasn’t him. So if that’s the reason you’re being so—”
He rises and walks away, and I hear a television turn on in some other room.
Is this man for real? I am furious, and barely keeping myself from following and telling him exactly what I think. I start to clean to calm myself down, just like my mother would do. I wipe down tables and countertops, and chip burnt-on cheese from Pyrex. I need to get out of here. There must be a hotel by the airport. I finish and wipe everything down again, and head to my room and wish I could call Katie right now to tell her everything, everything about Josh, and everything about these crazy people. Emily comes toward me down the hall from some other bedroom, and her face has the same sad, tired look it has had since I first saw her last night.
“Are they asleep?” I ask.
“Justin is fighting it, like he always does. Do you need anything? Towels are under the vanity, if you haven’t found them already.”
“I’m fine. Thanks for dinner. I wasn’t sure where to put the casserole dish.”
“You really didn’t need to clean up.”
“Well, your husband wasn’t doing anything.”
“Pardon me?”
“Is he always like that?” I ask.
“What are you saying?” Emily’s lips go down to a thin line and her cheeks turn red and she almost shakes for a moment. “Just what exactly are you saying to me?” She grabs me by the elbow and pulls me into the guest room and shuts the door.
I have touched, I think, the proverbial nerve.
“How dare you,” she says. “How dare you talk to me in my house like this.”
“Emily, it was your brother’s funeral this morning. Hello? Don’t you get a break?”
Now she really is shaking, and her whole face is red. “How we conduct ourselves in our own home is none of your business. None.” Emily keeps glancing at the door. She isn’t quite whispering, but she never really raises her voice.
“Look, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I really appreciate you letting me stay here, but I think I’m going to get a hotel or something for tomorrow night. Maybe it’s the best.”
“Yes. Maybe.”
“I’m sorry.”
Emily looks like she’s going to walk away for a moment, then she turns back to me.
“You do realize why my mother had you stay here, don’t you? She was afraid I wouldn’t go. That we wouldn’t go. She knew if you stayed here and we had to take you, we wouldn’t have any excuse not to go.”
“You didn’t want to go? Did you think he did it too? Blew up the bus? He didn’t, you know.”
“I never, ever thought that.”
“So you wouldn’t have gone to your own brother’s funeral?”
“Basically my mother used you—”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“—just like my brother probably used you. They’re a lot alike that way.”
Ouch. “Emily, you don’t know anything about Josh and me.”
“I know just as much as you know about him and me. So nothing, really.”
“But I know everything,” I say, for no reason other than to be spiteful. But this has t
ouched something too; Emily looks very startled. Almost afraid.
“What?” she says.
“Nothing. Really.” And suddenly I’m very curious about whatever it is she doesn’t want me to know. Probably as curious as she is about finding out if I really know it. Neither of us asks, though. We stand in silence.
“I’m sorry,” Emily finally says.
“No, really, I’m sorry. I’ll find a hotel in the morning.”
“You’re welcome to stay here. Please stay.”
“About Tim,” I start, “I didn’t mean to—”
“He’s…just don’t. Ignore him. You can stay. Please.”
“Can I use your phone? For a long-distance call?” I think of Josh asking me the same question and almost laugh.
“Of course you can use the phone.” She points at an old corded phone next to the computer monitor, and I see a little picture of that suspension bridge, framed on the desk behind it.
“Is that the bridge in Michigan? The picture?”
“Yes.”
“With the weird name.”
“The Mackinac Bridge.”
“Can we go there?”
“What?”
“We could drive there tomorrow.”
Emily laughs at this. “No, we can’t,” she says.
“Why not?”
“For starters, it’s like eight hours away, or more. That would be a two-day trip, at least. We have church tomorrow, and then I have to watch the kids Monday, and take you to the airport. If you stay.”
“I’ll stay. But we should go see the bridge.”
“It’s too far to just pop up there. There’s no way.”
“Could your mom watch the kids?”
“I think my mom is a little busy with other things right now. You could go there. Rent a car or something.”
“If I went, I’d want to go with you.”
Emily gives me a funny look. “Why would you want to do that?”
“To talk about your brother, maybe?”
Emily gives me a long look, then a little boy call of “Mommy!” comes from down the hall. “Oh, Justin,” she says under her breath.
She nods toward the door. “Sorry, I have to—”
“I understand.”
Emily leaves the room, and I grab my bag to hunt for the scrap of paper with the Haddens’ number on it. I grab the atlas too; Michigan, like California, takes up two pages and I have to turn the book sideways to look at it. The Mackinac Bridge, connecting the Upper and Lower Peninsula of the state, is up at the top.
The phone seems clunky and brittle and old, and I punch in the numbers and feel the odd tug of the cord as I hold it up to my ear with my shoulder. The phone rings and rings, and I’m so prepared to get an answering machine that I don’t even think to just hang up. By the time the notion of just putting the thing back on the cradle hits me, Mrs. Hadden picks up.
“Jessica,” she says. “Is everything alright? Thank you again for coming today.”
“Everything is fine,” I say. It’s not at all, but why bother her with that? “How is Mr. Hadden doing?”
“He’s much better. Some times are better than others.”
This I understand completely.
“I wanted to ask, would it be a big problem for me to go back home on a different day? With the flights?”
“Probably not, it’s all standby anyway. Why do you ask?”
“I want…I want to go up to see that big bridge. In Michigan.”
“You what?”
“Josh had told me about it. The bridge. So I want to see it.”
“My husband’s family had a cabin up there—”
“Josh told me about it.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. Our family spent, oh, he just loved it up there. But it’s quite a drive.”
“I know. I want to see it. I have another thing to ask.”
“Yes?”
“I want Emily to come with me. Can you watch her kids?”
Josh’s mother doesn’t say anything.
“Mrs. Hadden?”
“You really want to do this? You are serious?”
“I do. I am. Can you watch them while we do it?”
“Of course I can watch the boys. I would love to have the boys. This wasn’t her idea, was it?”
“No. I asked her about it. She didn’t seem to think it was possible. Can you make her do it?”
“She’s an adult, it’s her decision.”
“But you’re her mom.”
There’s a pause, and then Mrs. Hadden draws a quick breath. “Are you doing this because of Tim? Are you going to talk to her about him? Do you think you can talk to her? I can’t get anywhere with her. You could be the one to finally talk some sense, if you think—”
“I just want to go see the bridge, Mrs. Hadden. Maybe we’ll talk about other things too.”
There’s a pause. “Is she there right now?”
“She’s getting one of the kids back to sleep. Maybe call here in ten minutes.”
“I will.”
“Make her go with me.”
“We’ll see what she says.”
I hang up the phone and sit on the bed, and as I sit I look at the computer and think maybe I should check my mail and see if Katie has sent anything yet. So I get up and power on the computer and it’s old and slow and takes forever to boot up, just like my own back home. I don’t even know if they have Net access, but the home page—something about daily prayer for sports fans—loads right up. I don’t really look at it, but when I start to type in the address for my e-mail, I think well, what could it hurt, and I peek in the browser history in hopes that maybe I’ll see something I can tell Emily about. But there’s nothing but prayer and faith and football, the weather, and home-schooling resource sites. Nothing. This lack of dirt makes me hate Tim even more, and I continue on to my e-mail.
There isn’t much in my mailbox when it finally opens up. Gretchen writes: “Hi, are you okay are you okay are you okay??!!” She misses me and she’s crying every night like a dork, she writes, because she’s worried about me and she wants me to come back. She wants everything to be normal and she wants us to go to lunch at the Gram and laugh about stuff. She tells me the golf people wanted to send me flowers so she gave them my address. She really hopes I’m okay. I almost smile when I read it.
There’s an e-mail from Patrick that says—a little more subtly—the same, he hopes I’m doing alright, he’s thinking of me, and he doesn’t even know if I’ll be checking e-mail. I respond and write: “Am checking e-mail. May stay a couple extra days. I’ll keep you posted.”
Just as I hit send, the phone rings, and the harsh mechanical bell sound makes me jump. I can actually see the telephone shake on the desk with each ring. Emily picks up and I can hear her talking down the hall.
“Hi, Mom,” she says. “Hi. Yes. Is Dad doing…I was going to call, I just got Justin back down…” A door closes, and I can’t hear her voice anymore, just the constant mumble of the television in the living room.
The only other e-mail I have is from Cooper & Greaves, announcing some “Get Ready for Fall Fashion” promotion. No matter how many times I unsubscribe, their mails keep coming, and typically, the copy is atrocious. I read, and mentally edit, and think how I’d never let myself write such awful copy as this, ever.
Thinking this, thinking of work, thinking of writing even about things I hate like tops and jackets and closeout bathing suits, makes me feel very, very good. It’s like fog breaking to blue sky.
A door opens, and I hear quick footsteps, and Emily is suddenly in my room, steaming.
“What did you say to her?” she asks, shutting the door behind her.
“Who? What did I say, what?”
“My mother, you called my mother. Don’t do this stupid act with me. What did you say to her?”
“I asked about going home on a different day.”
“And you talked about Mackinac.”
“Are we going?”
“What did you say to her?”
“Are we going up there together?”
Emily crosses her arms, not looking so angry now. “You aren’t telling me what you said.” She sees the atlas on the bed, and picks it up. “How old is this? This is…that road isn’t even there anymore, it’s the interstate now.”
“You’re not telling me if we’re going.”
“Yes. Yes. Okay? Yes. We’re going. Alright? Now what did you say to her?”
“Seriously? When?”
“Tomorrow. After church. We’ll drop the boys off at my parents’ house, then we’ll go. We’ll stay the night somewhere, and get to Mackinac on Monday.”
“Do I need to rent a car?”
“We’ll take Tim’s car.”
“Will he be okay with that?”
“It doesn’t matter what he thinks. It’s my car too.” She looks to the door and seems a little embarrassed that she’s saying something assertive. “I’m going to talk to him right now. What did you say to my mother?”
“I said I wanted to go up to see the bridge, and I told her I wanted you to come with me. That was it.”
“You are just like them. You’re manipulative.”
“That’s funny, your brother actually said I was just like you.”
“He said what?”
“He said you and I were a lot alike. He said we were naïve. Well, he sort of said that. More or less.”
“So typical!” Emily opens the door. “I’ll be right back.” She goes down the hall, and I go to the doorway in an attempt to hear her conversation with her husband. There are no raised voices, though, just the television. And in a few minutes, she’s back.
“Alright,” she says. “We’re taking Tim’s car. It gets better mileage.”
“I can pay for gas.”
“Fine, you can pay for gas.” She almost looks like she might smile. Maybe. And in this almost-breaking smile, I see her brother’s face.
“We’re really going?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Can I do anything to help you get ready?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe just help me with the kids tomorrow while I pack.”
“I can do that,” I say. “I’ll see you in the morning, then.”
She looks at me, still on the edge of a smile, and starts to back out of the door. “Good night,” she says. And she pulls the door shut as she goes.
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