The Girl at the Border

by Leslie Archer

  “It was my doctor’s fault. I was only taking the medication he prescribed,” Maggie piped up in a weak attempt to exonerate herself.

  Lely took Richard aside. “She had swallowed so much they had to pump her stomach.”

  He regarded her levelly, kept his own counsel, which seemed to vex her.

  “Perhaps you should talk with your wife,” she said at length.

  Richard shook his head. “I’d prefer to speak with one of the doctors in the ER who worked on her.”

  Lely looked at him oddly, but he had no more time for her. The room was almost filled with water. If he stayed another second, he’d be swept completely under.

  He stood against the pale-green wall outside the ER, struggling to regain his equilibrium. Gurneys came and went, guided by harried nurses. Across from him an elderly man lay on a gurney, waiting to be seen by one of the overworked, overstressed doctors. Richard had tried to ask the doctor who had pumped Maggie’s stomach to take a look at the elderly man, but the doctor, having answered Richard’s questions in his terse, no-nonsense manner, had already turned on his heel, returning to the tumult of the ER. Richard crossed the hallway, dodging incoming gurneys traveling, it seemed to him, at terminal speed. He stood by the stationary gurney. The elderly man’s face was white, wrinkled, skin parchment thin. Age had robbed his eyes of color and depth. They looked like currants in an unbaked hot cross bun.

  “Are you all right?” Richard asked.

  “What d’you think?” There was something defiant in his demeanor.

  “Where is your family?” Richard asked.

  “Where is yours?”

  Unbidden, a chill snaked down Richard’s spine, like cold sweat. “I wish I could help you.”

  A tightness about the man’s liver-colored lips. “That’s all right,” he said. “You’ll be here one day.”

  Richard returned to his place by the wall. Uncomfortable as it was, he vastly preferred it to returning to Maggie’s room, to what awaited him there. Questions to which, if he were to be honest with himself, he did not want the answers. Unbidden, Lely’s words rose into his mind: “collapse,” “self-medicating,” “stomach pumped.” All true. According to the ER doctor, his wife was in a bad way mentally and emotionally. “Fragile as glass” had been his exact words. Richard did not want to hear that. He could not spare the time from his work to tend to a sick spouse.

  And what of Bella? He would see her in time, must see her before he returned to Turkey, although he was quite certain they would end up at each other’s throats; that was their pattern, and it was difficult, if not impossible, to break.

  What he wanted most was to get out of Dearborn as fast as he could; he wanted to return to the dig in Ephesus. Although—how could he know?—he would never get back to his beloved Ephesus but would be summoned to Kieros’s dig on Crete. He stared over at the elderly man; as yet, no one was attending to him. He turned, strode into the ER, and looked around. Finding a doctor who was stripping off his latex gloves, having just finished with a patient, he guided him gently but firmly out into the hallway and over to where the elderly man was lying.

  “Please,” he said. “My father has been lying here for hours, waiting.”

  The doctor eyed the elderly man, took his wrist, taking his pulse. “What seems to be the problem?” he asked.

  Richard was already too far away to hear the elderly man’s reply. Outside the hospital, away from the busy entrance, he called Lely. He would not, could not return to Maggie’s room. When she answered, he said, “You were right.” He repeated the phrase the ER doctor had used: “She’s in a fragile state. Fragile as glass. I don’t know what to do.”

  “You could stay home,” Lely suggested. “Spend time with her and Bella.”

  “I would if I could,” he lied. He was aces at that, having quickly learned what the jihadi wanted to hear and selling it back to them in a package swathed in sincerity. “Unfortunately, my job doesn’t allow it.”

  “Your bosses never heard of compassionate leave?”

  This reminded him that he wasn’t dealing with a simpleton, like the museum curators who took every word he said as gospel. “Of course, of course,” he responded, “but it’s, well, complicated.”

  When this politician’s explanation was met with silence, Richard knew it was time to eat a slice of humble pie. Well, if that was what was needed to get what he wanted, so be it. He sighed, not too theatrically, which surely would have tainted what was coming next. “The truth is, Lely”—using her name for intimacy’s sake—“the truth is I’m no good at this kind of thing. I never was. If I stay home, I’ll only gum up the works.”

  “More than they already are?”

  “Sadly, yes.”

  A small pause before she ventured, “You have a solution, I take it.”

  “I do,” he said. “And it involves you.”

  “Me?”

  “I’d very much like your help.”

  “Why not hire a nurse if you’re too busy to be around for her?”

  “It comes back to Maggie’s fragile emotional state. She trusts your daughter. She trusts you. Plus I’m willing to pay—”

  “I don’t want your money, Dr. Mathis.”

  “This isn’t charity, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I want something far more valuable.”

  He recognized the poisoned-honey note of contempt he’d heard many times wherever he’d traveled in the Middle East and knew he had taken one step too far. He also knew there was only one way to apologize. “What can I do for you, Lely?”

  “You are a professor at Michigan, a prestigious university.”

  “I am,” he said, wondering where this was going.

  “You yourself are prestigious. You’re well regarded all around the world.”

  “I suppose you could say that.”

  “You have power.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “A power I don’t have and never will.”

  There was a small silence between them.

  “I have done my best, but I’m not in any position . . . my husband has been questioned—taken away in front of the family and detained. Because he is an importer, because he does business in the Middle East. Because we are Muslim.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t need your sorrow, Richard. My husband is entirely innocent. We are good people, loyal Americans. But no one from the government is listening. They have turned a deaf ear. And now he has high blood pressure. Last week a case of angina sent him to the ER. There was never anything wrong with his heart. He is a strong, vital man, but now I am worried about his health, Richard, and I shouldn’t be.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Then find out,” Lely said and severed the connection.

  Because of Lely’s request—at least that was how Richard preferred to term it—he stayed on for several days after Maggie came home. Whether Lely was telling the truth about believing it was his high academic standing that might give him the power to help her, or whether somehow she had found out about him, he left to others to sweat out of her. Another thing he did not want to know; he knew too much already, and it was slowly killing him. There were calls to be made, hasty meetings convened, contentious negotiations to hammer out, a gauntlet of hoops to jump through to get Lely’s husband off the government’s list of those suspected of aiding terrorist organizations. This tack made him no friends, but perhaps that would change. They had gotten nowhere with her husband, who seemed to be precisely what he claimed to be: a middle-management executive of an import-export firm that, to date at least, was on no one’s watch list. Combing through his financials revealed him to be of no more than middle-class means, although these days the middle class seemed to have evaporated, leaving an ever-widening gap between the 1 percent and everyone else.

  Whatever conscience hadn’t been extinguished in Sinai made it impossible for Richard to leave when he would have liked to. “No one fr
om the government is listening,” Lely had told him. “They have turned a deaf ear.” Wasn’t that what Maggie had accused him of doing to her?

  But those long, excruciating hours spent at home were a living nightmare. He was a stranger in his own house; it was no longer his home. He recognized none of the rooms, especially the bedroom he had once shared with his wife, though this fact seemed inconceivable to him now. Where was the full-length mirror he had installed for her? Photos of his wife and his younger self were unrecognizable, and the ones with a child might as well have been of an alien. Mementos—hand-thrown plates from Tourrettes-sur-Loup, Carlo Moretti glassware from Venice, vintage coffee cups from the Portobello Road flea market—must belong to someone else’s past. No sign of the carpet he had brought back from Istanbul, the zillij tiles from Marrakech, a wooden cross from Sinai. Photos he had taken himself of artifacts from his various digs, blown up, framed, and hung were his only solace, and he clung to them like a man drowning in someone else’s sea.

  Once he had loved his wife; he was certain of that. But in the shower the second morning, he began to wonder whether his memories of that time when they were newlyweds were at all reliable. Memories were infinitely fungible, changing like chimeras. I don’t recall, Mr. Smith; not to my knowledge, Your Honor; not as far as I know, Officer. Had he, in fact, ever loved Maggie? Water poured down his face as he contemplated this memory question without finding a satisfactory answer.

  He thought of Bella, wrapped in her unfathomable thoughts, doing whatever it was teenagers did in their rooms these days. Elin had dropped her off and then left without so much as a word to him. For her part, Bella had scarcely looked at him. She’d had no reaction, so far as he could tell, to her mother’s collapse, and she had flatly refused to visit the hospital. “Frankly,” she’d told him, “I don’t even know why I’m here.”

  “You live here,” he’d retorted, his blood rising at her hostile attitude.

  “I don’t,” she’d spat at him. “Not anymore. You’d know that if you were ever here. I’d rather be at the Shehadis. Hashim has been taken out of his house like a common criminal. They need me more than you do.”

  As a sickly infant she had never stopped crying; as a young child she had been a holy terror. Once, he had asked Elin why she couldn’t control Bella better. “I’m sorry, sir,” she’d said, “but she’s only like this when you’re home.” And now, with a teenager’s witchy skill, she knew how to press all his buttons. He didn’t even know who she was anymore. Now, as he wandered aimlessly from empty room to empty room, he wondered whether he ever had.

  The last night of his stay, Richard and Bella had dinner alone. Bella talked to him then, chattering incessantly of jinn, the mythical desert fairies spun of smoke and sand, an unreality no doubt promoted by Elin. But it was Richard himself who had met the real desert beings, and they were nothing like jinn. They were spun of hatred and metal. Their goal was death, for themselves as well as for their enemies. They were the human equivalent of antimatter.

  “You talk about these jinn as if they were real,” he said, unable to suppress his irritation at her naiveté. “There are no jinn. They’re part of Arabic fairy tales.” He shook his head. “Bella, these are childish fancies. You’re no longer a child; it’s time you grew up.” A man of pragmatism, he took no notice of her reaction. His world was built on reason. He saw no romance in unearthing ancient cultures. He was drawn to historical foundations, to understanding the practicalities and perhaps, with luck, the wisdom of their lives. He found no difficulty in penetrating to the core of societies; it was individuals that bewildered him.

  “And I think you’re spending too much time in your room,” he blundered on. “What do you do up there anyway?”

  Bella’s eyes glazed over. “Nothing.”

  The tines of Richard’s fork scraped the edge of his plate. “This is how you always are when I come home.” No reaction. He plowed on, even knowing this was all wrong, that it could not end well. He did not know how else to speak to her. He didn’t like what he saw. “Sullen and distant.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this,” Bella said, eyes on her plate.

  She was an enigma to him, as, he supposed, he was to her. But come on: What could he tell her about himself that wouldn’t jeopardize her, that wouldn’t make her see him in a different light? They might fight, it was true, but at least she didn’t hate him.

  They ate in silence. It might have been delicious; Richard had no appetite. He sighed and tried to start over. “Look at you. You’re pale. You have rings around your eyes. You need to get out in the sun, have some fun, play with your friends.”

  “I don’t have any friends.”

  “And that’s another thing.”

  Bella jumped up. “There was a time when I thought this was all my fault, that if I acted differently—if I did this, didn’t do that—then everything would right itself. But now I see the truth.” In the doorway, she turned back to him. “It’s you, Dad. Not me.” Tears sprang to her eyes.

  He stood up, suddenly appalled. He had no idea how this conversation had spiraled so out of control. He knew that with her he slewed like a skidding car between affection and tyranny. He knew he wasn’t a good father, was baffled by fatherhood. The only area of his life where he was in any way incompetent. Their relationship was fraught with all this. But it was freighted with something else entirely, something too immense to face. A silent room, and in it . . . “Bella—”

  “No!” She raised her hands defensively. “Stay away from me. That’s better for both of us, isn’t it? I mean, you hate it here; your home is Turkey or Sinai or Tuscany. Under the earth, not on it.” Her eyes overlarge and liquid, as if dipped in oil. She shook her head, and tears flung at him as if they were weapons. “And you know what? Between us nothing will ever be right. How sad is that?”

  The night he returned from the dig on Crete and from Angela, he lay again on the sofa in the den. The house was unnaturally silent. Bella was gone, who knew where, and Maggie was in a facility. He had just come back from the police station, but the detectives there had been of no help whatsoever. They had no idea whether Bella had gone off on her own or been abducted. On his way out, he overheard one of them say to the other, “What’s the use? With abductions you only wind up chasing your own tail. I’d rather be chasing tail down in the Meatpacking District.” He stopped in his tracks, even turned around, steeling himself to attack the detective who had said that while he could still hear it. But then his better nature slowed everything down, allowed him the time to think of the consequences. He couldn’t help Bella if he was in jail. Instead, he resolved to call the people in DC he more or less worked for and get them involved in the search for his daughter. It was the least they could do for him.

  He returned directly home, bypassing the facility in which Maggie lay. Merely coming near her felt repellent, as if by a reverse magnetic force. They no longer had use for one another. He had long ago ceased to feel sorry for her, ceased to feel anything about her, about anyone, really. Except Bella. And he was no good with her. It was sad. Damn sad.

  Between us nothing will ever be right.

  How right she was, though she must never fathom why. As he stood amid walls hung with his framed honorary doctorates from universities in Munich, Athens, Cairo, and Casablanca, staring up at a ceiling lit by an antique Moorish brass lamp, the one gift his wife had not put away, he turned his mind away from his only child—the phrase made him writhe as if in agony. She wasn’t his only child, and yet she was. That thought wouldn’t do; it wouldn’t do at all. It was so inadequate to the situation. But this was the prison he found himself in, one for which there was no key.

  Instead, he contemplated the elderly man on the gurney outside the hospital ER he had encountered on his last unhappy trip home. Replaying, as if on a tape loop, their conversation:

  Where is your family?

  Where is yours?

  I wish I could help you.

  That’s
all right. You’ll be here one day.

  The power and concision of haiku. Not so very far from the song that had been his touchstone since adolescence, the Who’s “My Generation.” He shuddered, sweating. Wishing he were anywhere but here. Wishing it were morning and he could leave. Wishing there were a jinn in the brass lamp who owed him a favor in exchange for his release. I want to die before I get that old and infirm, he’d tell his jinn.

  It was at that moment that the phone rang, and his heart turned over, as if he already knew bad news was on its way. For a moment, he considered letting the call go, as if that denial might serve the larger denial, whose truth had already taken root inside him.

  “Yes?” His voice thick, barely recognizable.

  “Mr. Mathis?”

  “This is he.”

  “Sir, I regret to inform you that your presence is required back in DC.”

  For a moment Richard was bewildered by the message, so crass, so emotionless, as if the facility had directed a robot to call him.

  “Do you have any idea what’s going on here?” Richard shouted into his phone.

  His voice was greeted by silence. Which finally provoked him to explain: “My wife is in the hospital. She collapsed. The situation is not hopeful.”

  More silence. And then: “Nevertheless.” That single word, the voice of death announcing itself in the most banal fashion, as if death were nothing more than a functionary in an immense bureaucracy.

  And that was it. The call ended, Richard’s lifeline to another human being, or what passed for human these days, severed. He sat for a moment, motionless save for the pulse of his blood. Bella gone, his wife gravely ill, and he ordered away. It was all too much. The phone was in his hand. Useless thing—he threw it across the room.

  Rage and sorrow swirled inside him like a wizard’s brew. And there was something else, something shameful buried deeply inside him: an unequivocal sense of relief, an insupportable burden lifted. With an animal cry, he buried his face in his hands, and despite all that had happened, despite the width and depth of the chasm that had opened up between him and Maggie, he wept bitter tears for everything that might have been and never would be.