by Sharon Heath
Fortunately, my testimony wasn’t required to resolve that one, since I’d only seen the tragic aftermath, but I left knowing that justice in this situation was more complex than this building was likely to offer. Whether or not the Kangs had controlled their dog, they were the ones who’d suffered the greater loss. Fidel Marquetti still had a butt to sit on, but they had no Chin-Hwa to fill their voids. If only the three of them had found a way to take on the problem as a team, who knows what the outcome might have been? What if Fidel hadn’t been so garden-proud or so uncontrollably angry? What if the Kangs has been a little less helplessly doting on their dog? What if poor Fidel hadn’t already been tormented by his inflammatory skin condition? And the Kangs—might they have taken a little pleasure in Chin-Hwa pooping in the garden of the man who’d put up such an offensive sign?
I must confess I didn’t linger overlong on my reflections. Once dismissed, I nearly skipped with Sammie out of the courthouse. It was then, and only then, with Moses staring down at me from the façade of the building, that I checked my iPhone and saw I’d missed six calls from Mother and at least as many from Gwen. My fingers couldn’t punch in Home fast enough. Gwennie’s voice sounded ghastly. Sammie managed to grab me before I went down.
Chapter Eighteen
Assefa
I DID NOT tell Abat. Nor did I tell Enat. I certainly could not tell my grandfather. While I hadn’t entirely created the catastrophe on my own, I was sufficiently responsible for it that I dared not share my shame.
I cannot say I was not angry with my father, though I was hardly the one to judge him for being untrue to one woman with another. I was also angry with my mother for keeping their secret from me and for the fact that it had happened in the first place. That one was just as irrational, but nonetheless true. What is it about a son that he blames his mother when life is terrible? I had no one to ask if that were true for daughters, too.
Nor did I need to ask myself if I was filled with rage toward Stanley H. Fiske. The man was a fraud. Oh, yes, he was undoubtedly as brilliant as my Fleur, but his pretensions to be a good man were as much of a lie as my family’s story of coming to America to avoid war. If they did, the war was personal and had nothing to do with Somalia or Eritrea.
I was a fraud myself, of course, and a fool for thinking of Fleur as “my” Fleur. I myself was a scoundrel, and she—well, the girl might as well have come from another universe. She would never understand the Hanging Man.
Makeda might, but she could not be bothered by him.
I awoke on this particular Monday morning determined to redeem myself by pouring my energies more conscientiously into my work. Showering, I resisted the temptation put forward by some demon to touch my washela. I turned off the hot water tap and laughed. The old saw was true. In the icy shower, my washela contracted like a withered old man.
I rubbed my body roughly with a bath towel, avoiding looking at myself in the mirror. There was no one there I wanted to see.
The street was still quiet as I walked out to my car, although the sun shone like a devil already. How could this be February? In Tikil Dingay, it would be hot, too. Had God decided to visit this heat wave upon Los Angeles to taunt me? I brushed the thought aside as soon as it arose, embarrassed that I would take the weather personally. You are not the center of the universe, Assefa Berhanu.
I was calm but also aware that I was driving faster than usual. Much faster. I should not have been surprised when the creature came out of nowhere to present itself to the front fender of my car. I felt the impact and saw it go flying. My heart racing, I pulled to the curb and ran back. A white cat with black markings and a red leather collar. Someone’s pet. Though its jaw was smashed, its pregnant belly was intact. But the babies would not survive.
And then I remembered. I had never asked. Surely she would have told me.
I shouted at the dead animal. “Why did you do that? You stupid creature! You did not have to die!”
I sensed people coming out of their houses. I lifted the still-warm carcass with my bare hands and laid it at the side of the road. Avoiding censorious stares, I returned to my car and drove off.
The animal’s blank eyes stayed with me. They merged with those of the young kudu I’d seen die as a boy. Struggling to clear my head, I found Bezaworqu Asfaw’s Tizita on my IPod and played it. I was rewarded with a greater clarity than I’d had for some time.
It was good I was going to a hospital.
Entering the elevator, I said hello to three nurses I recognized from cardiology. One of them made some private joke that only they understood, and the other two laughed, eyeing me nervously.
I got off before them and took the steps two at a time back down to the floor I wanted. I found my way to the physical therapy storage room. Pulleys of various sizes were leaning against the wall. I managed to cut the rope free from one of them and was gratified that it seemed long enough.
I held the nylon rope at arm’s length, letting it suspend itself, testing it. It wasn’t thick, but I knew it was strong. Removing papers to make room for it, I tucked it into my valise.
Finding a vacant room was difficult. One after another was occupied by staff. The patient rooms were all full of cotton-gowned men and women captive to the world of illness, in bed or out, some of them with their gowns untied and their back ends revealed.
My heart rate was elevated. A pressure was building inside me that I knew I must relieve. The inability to find a room filled me with outrage. Not one empty room in a hospital of over five hundred beds? Emergency Medicine, in particular, was like a scene from a battle zone. Had the town gone crazy with murders and accidents the night before?
I found a vacant room on the oncology ward. It suited my needs perfectly. The staff had tougher hides here, watching patients they’d grown fond of lose their wars.
Stretching the rope over the television support arm and locking it in place was easy, getting the rope adjusted properly a little harder. It took patience, and it was difficult to have patience now, with this wild buzzing in my ears and my fingers suddenly like rubber.
I prayed no one would enter before I was done.
The thought flashed by, what a strange thing to pray for, but the tension released itself in an instant. I had no more need of prayer.
Chapter Nineteen
Fleur
AS A CHILD I’d seen abusive welts and bruises on the skin of my ailing grandfather, been pinched to the point of fainting by a Father who hated having children underfoot, and heard the hollow sound of my own small fists banging on the locked door of my intoxicated mother’s bedroom. More recently I’d been flattened to the point of despair by photos of pelicans transformed by the Gulf oil spill into beasts slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. But this was an entirely new kind of horror.
Stanley H. Fiske was like a madman. In a living room crowded with leaden-limbed people who were mute with shock and sadness, he couldn’t stay still. Gwennie, Mother, Aadita, Sammie, Jacob, Amir, and I watched with red-rimmed eyes as he flitted like a firefly out of the room and back, stopping only to pound his head against a wall or cry out some version of, “God, it should have been me, instead!”
I had never seen anyone else cause themselves pain, but right now it struck me as something strange and awful for a human being to turn against himself as Stanley was doing. As I liked to do.
As Assefa had done.
At some point—I can’t tell when, it all blended into itself like a pulsing moiré—I slid down to the carpet from my perch on a sofa littered with crumpled tissues and sunflower seed shells. I wanted to scrape my fingernails across the insides of my arms, twist the skin of my inner thighs, hit my head against the floor, but I couldn’t.
Mother landed like a sack of coal beside me and pulled my head to her breast. Someone, I don’t know who, was at my other side, stroking my back. And still, I knew Stanley was flitting. I could hear him, an uncomforted ghost seeking penance for the unforgivable—and unforgiven—thing he’d
said.
I have no idea how I got through that day. How any of us did. Our own lives had been hijacked by Assefa’s attempt to leave this world. We’d heard nothing since Dr. Sitota’s call to Mother, so we sat together for comfort. Except for Stanley, who could not. At least some of us shared with him a similar torment. Assefa was in the ICU. Would he live or would he die? Would he suffer permanent paralysis or brain damage? What could we have done to prevent this? Was it our fault?
Make no mistake, John Donne was right. If I’d had any previous delusion that I was alone on this earth, I’d been wrong. As a physicist, I should have realized how much we matter to each other. Our deaths (or, please God, our near-deaths) don’t just ripple outward like stones thrown across a river; they shake and splinter the ground for those standing at the shore.
If Assefa had been seeking revenge, he’d gotten it. But somehow, I didn’t think he’d been seeking revenge. It was something far worse than that, but I didn’t know what. Even though I hated what he’d done to his family, to me, to Stanley H. Fiske, I ached for him. I knew his act spoke of an intolerable confrontation with the void. But still, why?
I kept adding up everything I knew that might have led to him trying to take his own life. Gwennie had called what had happened between us “rape.” It had been awful, but the word still felt too strong. What about the vicious appellation, “black son of a bitch?” Words associated with humiliation, lynching, dehumanization. What Stanley had said was astonishingly ugly, but Assefa was not a weak man, nor a stupid one. Surely he wouldn’t have taken in what Stanley had said as true.
I’d heard that suicide attempts were often cries for help. Had he counted on being saved? I’d also heard that taking one’s life was a hostile act. If so, why take his rage out on his parents, who, as much as I ached all the way to my bones, would surely be destroyed if their only child died by his own hand? In my feeble attempts to understand, I was like a fish flapping frantically on the deck of a ship. And the ship was at risk of going down.
By midnight, there was still no word from the hospital, where Assefa’s family was keeping their own vigil. Dhani had brought over an aromatic array of paneer tikka masala, aloo gobi, mushroom mutter, and kerala shrimp curry. To avoid offending her, I’d pushed my food around my plate, but really, who among us had an appetite? Eventually, she and Ignacio, then Amir, Sammie, Jacob, and Aadita had peeled away with promises all around to call one another if we heard anything during the night. It was down to the Fiskes, Mother, and me. Stanley’s body finally registered the ten milligrams of Ativan Gwennie had made him swallow; we could hear him snoring like a bear from his bedroom. Mother offered to sleep with me in my bed, but I so visibly shuddered that Gwennie gave her an afghan to cover herself on the couch.
My body felt like a pincushion, with sharp little electric jabs pricking my skin. Thoughts paced my mind like pent-up animals. How could such a blissful connection between two people go so irreparably out of whack? Assefa had become a mystery to me as soon as I’d succeeded in cajoling the name “Makeda” from his lips.
I must have fallen asleep at some point, because I woke up crying. I ran out to the kitchen to be greeted by Gwennie shaking her head. “No word so far.” A spatula in one hand, she came over and pulled me to her bosom. Repositioning my head so that I could hear her heartbeat, I counted along with it.
A toilet flushed; I presumed it was Mother, since I’d seen through the arched doorway that the living room was empty, a bed pillow and Gwennie’s afghan flung carelessly on the floor.
I pulled away from Gwennie’s embrace and went out to the living room. I lifted the blanket from the floor and began to fold it. Stanley shuffled past like a blind man. He wore plaid blue and green pajama bottoms and, improbably, a red Caltech Beaver hoodie over his head. He was pacing again, albeit much slower this morning, as if some hyped up inner clock was winding down. Mother appeared, running a hand through her tousled, graying hair. We hugged, and then she and Gwennie and I struggled to do at least partial justice to Gwennie’s spinach and mushroom frittata.
After a few minutes, Gwennie called out, “Stan, come on and get some breakfast. It’ll help settle you,” but he kept moving. At one point, she had to physically restrain him from calling the Berhanus and “confessing.” She got him to sit at the table with us, though he pushed away his plate and tapped the edge of the table frenetically. “Stanley,” Gwennie said, “if you tell the Berhanus what you saw when you went into Fleur’s room, you’ll kill them. I want you to promise never to tell them. Ever.”
I saw Mother turn sheet-white, but Stanley merely looked bewildered. “But I—I have to make—how are they ever going to understand why he—”
“Stop it!” Gwennie abruptly pushed herself out of her chair and stood over Stanley like a storm cloud. “How dare you presume you’re important enough to make Assefa want to die!” I pinched my thigh to stop myself from fainting. I could barely see through my tears. “Yes, what you said was astoundingly disgusting. Someday, you’re going to have to figure that one out. But none of us know what was going on inside that poor boy. Right now, we have to focus all our energy on hoping he survives this thing. And helping Fleur get through it.”
Stanley stared up at her, open-mouthed. I think I did, too. I realized that Mother had taken my hand. She squeezed it unusually hard, and I felt a rush of gratitude toward her. But—I don’t know why, probably sheer habit—I loosened my hand from hers and reached for a napkin to blow my nose.
Stanley skewed in his chair to face me. “Sweetheart,” he pled, a thin gob of snot dangling from his left nostril. “I can’t bear that you had to go through what you did and now this.” I couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying, fascinated by how the snot ball trembled with each syllable. He continued, “Don’t you remember South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation do dahs? I just think—”
“Don’t think,” Gwennie horned in, and I nearly laughed. Telling a physicist not to think was pretty funny. Gwennie went on. “This is one case where less truth is best for those who are suffering the most.”
Me, I wasn’t so sure. Even debating the question felt a little like playing God. But if God in any of His, Her, or Its manifold incarnations hadn’t managed to stop Assefa from trying to kill himself, maybe it was foolish to think of God as a useful concept.
I escaped across the street to Sammie’s as soon as I could. Seeing Stanley struggle to inhabit his own body again was simply too much to bear. After offering to stay, Mother had seemed only too happy to accept my solemn vow to call her if I needed her.
But it was she who phoned me a little after 3:00. I discovered I’d missed her call when I checked my messages in the Schwartz’s bathroom. Mr. Heavyflow was rubbing it in that I wasn’t pregnant. I’d soaked through a tampon and a Maxi pad. I ran back to Sammie’s room, shouting to her and Jacob, “He’s alive! And awake! Dr. Sitota called Mother about five minutes ago. Of course, he’s in no end of pain. He’s been on transfusions of—hell, I can’t remember, something like vecuronium and midazolen. He’s got a cervical collar, but he’s not paralyzed. They managed to take a chest CT and a cervical spine X-ray with him in a seated position, and Dr. Sitota told her that the results look clear. He’s still kind of out of it, though. We won’t know for a while if he’s suffered brain damage.”
All three of us fell silent at that one, and I realized the enormity of what I’d said. Sammie and Jacob were sitting shoulder to shoulder on her bed with their backs pillowed against the wall. They’d grown closer over the past twenty-four hours, holding hands and exchanging meaningful looks. Would it last? Probably not, but I was awfully glad she had him right now.
I sat on the edge of the bed, realizing at some point that tears were rolling down my face. I’d never known before that you could weep without even knowing you were crying. As if sensing my distress, Midge waddled over and collapsed onto my lap. Actually, my lap was too small to contain him, but he did a good job of melting his large body across my folded l
egs, with his head dangling over one knee and his eyes heavy-lidded in ecstasy.
“Fleur Beurre,” Sammie said.
“Don’t,” I replied. “I really don’t have the strength to fall apart again.”
It was then that Jacob interjected, “Has anybody actually spoken to Assefa’s parents?”
“No,” I said. “I’m sure they’ve been by his side ever since they found out.”
“So we don’t know exactly how they heard? Or who found him?”
Sammie jumped in, shooting Jacob a warning look, “Do we really need to be talking about this right now?”
“No, no,” I said. “It’s okay. I’ve been wondering myself. Since it was a ... hanging, I’d presume someone cut him down almost immediately.”
The room went quiet enough to hear Sammie’s alarm clock ticking. The ghastly reality of what Assefa had done thrummed inside my head.
Sammie murmured, “It’s a blessing he’s been spared.”
“I hope so,” Jacob responded. “What if he’s brain damaged?” This time, Sammie looked as if she could hang him.
But Jacob seemed oblivious. “Do you think his folks know what he did to you? What Stanley said to him?”
“Oh, God, I hope not. Stanley actually wanted to tell them everything. To ‘confess.’ Gwennie convinced him not to, at least for now, but what if Assefa told them himself?” I could hear a gathering hysteria in my voice. “Will they even want to speak to us? What could we say that would possibly ...?” Howling, I flipped over onto my belly, displacing Midge, whose claws left a track of blood across my arm. I barely noticed. I wanted to join Assefa in whatever bottomless pit had claimed him.
As if she could read my mind, Sammie slid down and aligned her body next to mine, stroking my head and whispering comfortingly, “My poor Fleur Beurre. It’s too much, isn’t it, my darling dear?”