The Burgess Boys (13 page)

And he felt too old to learn English. Without that, he lived with the constancy of incomprehension. In the post office last month he had mimed and pointed to a square white box, the woman in her blue shirt repeating and repeating and he did not know and everyone in the post office knew and finally a man came to him and crossed his arms quickly toward the floor, saying, “Fini!” And so Abdikarim thought the post office was finished with him and he must go and he did go. Later he found out the post office was out of the boxes they had sitting on the shelf with price tags on them. Why did they show them if they did not have them to sell? Again, the incomprehension. He came to understand this had a danger altogether different from the dangers in the camp. Living in a world where constantly one turned and touched incomprehension—they did not comprehend, he did not comprehend—gave the air the lift of uncertainty and this seemed to wear away something in him, always he felt unsure of what he wanted, what he thought, even what he felt.

His phone vibrated, startling him. “Yes?” It was Nahadin Ahmed, Ayanna’s brother.

“Did you hear? A white supremacy group in Montana heard about the demonstration. They’re writing about it on their website.”

“What does Imam say?”

“He’s gone to the police and asked them not to have the demonstration. The police ignored him, the demonstration excites the police.”

Abdikarim unplugged the heater, closed up his café, locked the door, and hurried through the streets back to the apartment where he lived. No one was there. The children were in school, Haweeya was at work, assisting a social service group, Omad was at the hospital in his job as translator. Abdikarim stayed all morning in his room, missing prayers at the mosque, keeping the shades drawn as always. He lay on the bed, and there was darkness inside him and darkness in the room.

Susan drove to work wearing sunglasses even when the mornings were overcast. Right after Zachary’s picture appeared in the paper, she had pulled up at the traffic light by the overpass that would take her to the mall when a woman she had known casually for years pulled up in the lane beside her and—Susan was certain of this—pretended not to see her, fiddling with her radio until the light changed. Susan had the physical sensation of water draining straight down through her. It was not unlike the feeling she’d had when Steve came home and told her he was leaving.

Now, pulled up at the intersection, looking straight ahead through her sunglasses, thinking of her early morning dream of sleeping in the backyard of Charlie Tibbetts’s house, Susan suddenly remembered this: that in the weeks after Zach was born she’d secretly, briefly, fallen in love with her gynecologist. The doctor lived in the Oyster Point section of town in a big house with four children and a wife who didn’t work. They were not from Maine, Susan remembered that, and they had seemed—filing into a pew each Christmas Sunday service—as exquisite as a flock of foreign birds. With Zachary strapped into his safety seat, Susan would drive by their house slowly, that was how deep her longing had been for the man who had delivered her baby.

Remembering, Susan felt no embarrassment. It seemed long ago—it was; the doctor would be old by now—and as though it was the behavior of someone other than herself. Perhaps if she was still young she would be driving by the home of Charlie Tibbetts, but there was no sap left in her. The thick sugary pull of life had gone. And yet in her nighttime dream she had been camping out on Charlie Tibbetts’s back lawn, and this made sense to her, the desire to be near him. He was fighting for her son, which meant he was fighting for her. For Susan, this was a feeling altogether new, and it added to her respect for Jim. Wally Packer, it seemed to Susan, must have practically fallen in love with him. She had no idea if the two stayed in touch after all these years.

“No,” Bob said, when Susan called him from work. There were no customers in the store.

“But don’t you think Jim misses him?”

“I don’t think it’s like that,” Bob said. Susan felt ripples of humiliation spread through her. She didn’t want to think that she and Zach were just a job.

She said, “Jim hasn’t called me at all.”

“Ah, Susie, he’s tied up playing golf. You should see him at those places. One time Pam and I went with them to Aruba. Sheesh. Poor Helen sits there, soaking up melanomas, and Jim walks around with his mirrored sunglasses, standing by the pool like he’s Mr. Cool. He’s busy, is what I’m saying. Don’t you worry, Charlie Tibbetts is great. I talked to him yesterday. He’s asking for a gag order and a change in bail conditions—”

“I know. He told me.” But she felt a ridiculous stab of jealousy. “Before you switched to appeals, Bobby, when you were doing courtroom defense work down there, did you like your clients?”

“Like them? Sure, some. A lot of them were dirtbags. And of course they’re all guilty, but—”

“What do you mean, they’re all guilty?”

“Well, they’re guilty of something, Susie. By the time they’ve come up through the system. Not always the first charge, so you do what you can to get it reduced. You know.”

“Did you ever defend a rapist?”

Bob didn’t answer right away, and Susan realized he’d probably been asked this question many times. She pictured him at cocktail parties in New York (she didn’t know what a cocktail party in New York could look like, so the image was vague and movieish), a skinny pretty woman asking him this same question confrontationally. On the phone Bob said, “I did.”

“Was he guilty?”

“I never asked. But he was convicted and I wasn’t sorry.”

“You weren’t sorry?” Susan felt tears inexplicably fill her eyes. She felt the way she had felt for years when she was premenstrual. Crazy.

“He got a fair trial.” Bob sounded patient and tired, and that was how Steve used to sound with her.

Susan looked around the store in a kind of panic, untethered. Zach was guilty. He could have a fair trial and go to jail for a year. And it was going to cost a lot of money before they were through. And nobody—maybe Bobby, a little—would
care
.

Bob was saying, “You need intestines of steel for courtroom work. Those of us in appeals here, we’re … Well, let’s just say Jim has insides made of steel.”

“Bobby, I’m hanging up.”

A group of Somali women had entered the store. In long draping cloaks, everything covered except their faces, they momentarily seemed to Susan to be one entity, a large foreign assault presenting itself to her, a blurry arrangement of dark reds and blues and green head coverings, a splotch of lively peach color; no arms, or even hands, to be seen. But there were the murmurings and sounds of different voices and then the subsequent separating off of one, an elderly woman, short and lame, seating herself in the corner chair, and this clarified to Susan’s eye what seemed to be the situation: which was that the youngest one, tall and bright-faced and (to Susan) surprisingly beautiful in a way that seemed almost American, with her dark eyes and high cheekbones, was holding forth a pair of glasses, broken at the hinge, and asking, in poor English, to have them fixed.

Beside the tall young girl stood a darker-faced woman, large and boxy in her robe, her face immobile, watchful, unreadable. She was holding plastic bags through which Susan could see cleaning materials.

Susan picked up the glasses. “Did you purchase these here?” Directing her question to the young girl, whose beauty felt aggressive to Susan. The tall girl turned to the boxy woman; they spoke back and forth quickly.

“Hey?” asked the girl, whose peach-colored headscarf seemed flamboyant, amazing.

“Did you purchase these here?” Susan repeated. She knew they had not, these were drugstore glasses she held in her hand.

“Yeah, yeah,” said the girl, and repeated her request to have them fixed.

“Okay,” said Susan. Her hands were not steady as she worked the tiny screw. “One minute,” she said, and took them in the back room, though it was store policy not to leave the front unattended. When she returned, the women were as she had left them; only the young one seemed to have the energy of youth, touching the frames that were arranged in a stand by the cash register. Susan put the glasses on the counter and pushed them forward. A commotion from the boxy woman made Susan look to her, and she was amazed to see a child’s foot exposed as the woman pulled her arm back to reach beneath her robe. The woman bent to put down, then pick up, the bags of cleaning materials, and another bulge on the other side of her was made visible; she had been standing here with two children strapped to her. Silent children. As silent as their mother.

“Do you want to try any of those on?” Susan asked. The tall young girl continued touching the frames without removing them from the stand. None of the women were looking at Susan. They were in the store, but they were far away.

“These are fixed now.” Susan’s voice sounded too loud to her. “No charge.”

The young girl reached beneath her robe, and Susan—as though all her fear had waited for this moment—had the sudden thought the girl was going to draw a gun on her. It was a small purse. “No,” said Susan, shaking her head. “Free.”

“Okay?” the girl asked, her large eyes looking quickly over Susan’s face.

“Okay.” Susan held up both her hands.

The girl slipped the fixed glasses into her purse. “Okay. Okay. Thank you.”

There was commotion once more as they spoke in their language, hard and brisk to Susan’s ear. The babies stirred beneath the mother’s robe, and the old woman stood up slowly. As they moved toward the door, Susan realized that the old woman was not old. How she knew this she couldn’t have said, but the woman’s face had a fatigue so deep it seemed to have cleaned away whatever it was in a face that gave it life; her face, as she walked slowly without a glance at Susan, had left on it only a deep and haunting apathy.

From the doorway of the store Susan watched them walk slowly through the mall. Don’t make fun of them, she thought with alarm, because she saw two teenage girls stare at them as they went past. At the same time the absolute foreignness of these draped women gave Susan an inner shuddering sigh. She wished they had never heard of Shirley Falls, and it scared her to think they might never go away.

3

A wonderful thing about New York—if you have the means—is that if you don’t feel like preparing food, finding a fork, washing a plate, you certainly don’t have to. And if you live alone and don’t want to be alone you don’t have to be either. Bob often walked to the Ninth Street Bar and Grille, where he sat on a stool, drank beer, ate a cheeseburger, and spoke with the bartender or to a reddish-haired man who had lost his wife in a bicycle accident the year before, and sometimes this man spoke to Bob with tears in his eyes, or they might laugh about something, or the man might wave one hand and Bob understood that it was a night the man had to be left alone. An osmosis of understanding extended among the regulars; people revealed only what they wanted to and it was not much. Conversation was about political scandals, or sports, or sometimes—fleetingly—the deeply personal: Bob knew the details of the wife’s freak bicycle accident, but did not know the name of the reddish-haired widower. The fact that Sarah had not accompanied Bob to the place in months was never mentioned. The place was what it intended to be: safe.

Tonight the bar was almost full, though the bartender nodded toward one empty stool and Bob squeezed himself between two other customers. The reddish-haired man was farther away and nodded in greeting by way of the huge mirror they faced. A large television screen in the corner was silently showing the news, and Bob, waiting for his beer to be drawn, glanced up and felt a jolt at the sight of Gerry O’Hare’s face, broad, expressionless, next to the grinning photo shot of Zachary. The words at the bottom of the TV went by too fast for Bob to read, but he caught “hoping,” “isolated incident,” and then “looking,” “white supremacy group.”

“Crazy world,” said an older man seated next to Bob, his face aimed toward the television as well. “Everyone’s gone nuts.”

“Hey, knucklehead,” a voice called, and Bob turned and saw his brother and Helen. They had just entered the place and Helen was seating herself at one of the little tables by the window. Even in the low lighting Bob could see their tans. He got off his stool and went over to them.

“Did you see what was just on TV?” He pointed. “How are you guys? When did you get back? Did you have a nice time?”

“We had a lovely time, Bobby.” Helen was opening her menu. “What’s good here?”

“Everything’s good here.”

“You trust the fish?”

“I do, yeah.”

“I’m sticking with a burger.” Helen closed her menu, shivered, and rubbed her hands together. “I’ve been freezing ever since we got back.”

Bob pulled up a chair and sat down. “I’m not staying, don’t worry.”

“Good,” said Jim. “I’m trying to take my wife out to dinner.”

Bob thought their tans looked strange, off-season like this. He said, “Zach was just on TV.”

“Yeah, shit.” Jim shrugged. “But this Charlie Tibbetts, he’s terrific, Bob. Did you see what he did?” Jim opened his menu, glanced at it a few moments, then closed it. “Charlie sailed right in after that stupid press conference O’Hare gave, demanded a gag order and a change in the bail conditions. First he says his client’s being prosecuted aggressively and unfairly, that no other misdemeanor’s ever been given a press conference, but his greatest line—because the bail conditions say Zach has to stay away from any Somali person—the greatest line, Charlie says to the judge, what was it Helen? He says, ‘The bail commissioner made the unfortunate and naïve assumption that all Somalis dress, look, and act alike.’ Fabulous. How are you planning to get our car back?”