It All Falls Down

by Sheena Kamal

  23

  I’m sitting at his kitchen table as Harvey makes pasta for the little girl opposite me. The girl, whose name is Darla, of all things, stares at me with frank interest as he slams things down on the counter, bangs cupboards closed, and makes all the noise that it is possible to make boiling water. I’m reminded of last year, when I sat at my sister’s kitchen table, trying to connect with her after I’d stolen her car and crashed it. After Bonnie had gone missing, I was desperate to find her. I sat at Lorelei’s table and tried to explain myself, for once.

  This moment is imprinted in my memory because it was also the time she called me a slut. Harvey couldn’t possibly have opinions on my sluttiness, but from the way he’s clanging the pots and pans, I have a feeling that he might harbor a few suspicions.

  Under the table Darla holds out a lollipop for me to unwrap, but I’m not falling for that one again. I ignore her and continue my observation of my father’s adoptive brother, imagining what it’s like to be the natural son of parents who preferred the boy that did not spring from their loins. The one they brought over from Canada. I’ve also been looked through enough in life to know how that eats away at you if you give a fuck. I try to put myself in his shoes, being passed over for a mere Canadian, and it’s a tough sell.

  I’m about to feel sympathetic until he starts speaking. Not to me, though, to the space somewhere around me.

  “You wanna know about your dad?” Then, without waiting for a response, he plows on. “They got him from Canada, when he was two years old. Paid the agency ten thousand dollars for him. My mom couldn’t have any kids after me, but they wanted me to have a brother that was about the same age. We grew up together, but he left as soon as he was eighteen for the marines and only came back after he was discharged. No money, no nothin’. Didn’t even know Moms and Pops were gone. It was just me here, doing everything in a house that I goddamn grew up in but belonged to him now.”

  “Why did they sign it over to him and not you?”

  He looks out the window. “I was . . . I had a habit,” he says, absently scratching the inside of his elbow. “Took me a long time to kick it, but I did. Stuck around while I got straight, too. I coulda left like everyone else. Coulda hightailed it outta here, but I didn’t.”

  “Where would you go?”

  “That’s the damn truth! Lived my whole life in this city; never wanted to be nowhere else. But he did. He didn’t want to live here anymore. Gave me the house for nothing. I offered to buy him out. I was working then—coulda done it but no. He met that Arab woman that lived in Montreal and took off to Canada to find his birth family. He’d found some work in Winnipeg and they moved there because that’s where he’d been born.”

  “Did he find them?” I ask. “His birth family.”

  “No. He only found out he was born to a single mother in Winnipeg, but he was never able to find her. Didn’t stop him from going, though. Last I heard he was still in Winnipeg, but he never returned my calls or replied to my letters. My own brother. We didn’t really have no one else besides each other. Was never good enough for him, was I?” He can’t keep the anger at bay anymore. His fingers clench into fists. Darla bursts into tears.

  “What Arab woman?” My voice is a little louder than I’d anticipated, and the question falls like a hammer on the table.

  “What?”

  “You said an Arab woman. What Arab woman?”

  He stares at me blankly for several long seconds, like he’s never truly seen me before this moment. “Your mother. Who did you think I was talking about?”

  Darla, her face streaked with tears, holds out the lollipop again and in my distraction I unwrap it for her and hand it back. What is building inside me isn’t excitement, per se. I am back under the water, feeling a weightlessness that isn’t at all unpleasant. When I built my bunker for my father, I hadn’t thought to include my mother in it. I have no memories of her to put in. I try for all the control that I can muster before I speak again. “He met my mother here?”

  “She was in Dearborn for a wedding but they met here in the city while she was visiting. Don’t you know any of this?”

  “No. She left after my sister was born. He died and then his sister—”

  “That woman was not his sister!” he says, jabbing a finger at the air in front of me. He has, for a moment, gone into his upper register and is not particularly comfortable there. “Goes and meets her at a friendship center where they connected. They were both adopted but wanted to find their other families. She was looking for her little brother and he was looking for anyone. But she wasn’t his sister. She was . . . he had a way with people, Sam did. People just wanted to be near him. He didn’t even have to try.”

  He grasps the edge of the kitchen table with both hands for support. Though he is looking through me, searching somewhere in his memory, in his own past, I see him now. What he’s been hiding. It isn’t a grudge that his parents loved my father more than they did their own flesh and blood. Not that they left their adopted son their house, that they yearned for him to come back home from military service. To use anything to get him to come back home to them. It’s that Harvey must have loved my father in the same way.

  “That’s why you sent the postcards. You wanted him to know that you were still there for him.”

  “He called me when your mother left him, you know. He’d been laid off at the factory he was working at. Wanted to borrow money.”

  “Did you lend it to him?”

  “No. I was between jobs back then. Still trying to kick my habit, too. I said he could come back here and live for free if he wanted. There was still work here at that time—and he needed it. My daughter was staying with me back then, she coulda used some cousins to grow up with. He said no. He said . . . he said his family was there. When he was with your ma, I could understand. That woman . . .” He shakes his head. “I never seen a good-looking woman like that before. But I never understood why he didn’t come back after.”

  All his earlier bluster seems to go out of him. I can see how tired he is as he puts a plate down in front of Darla. How old and alone. I wonder what happened to his daughter and why he’s raising his granddaughter by himself. I wonder if he always loved my father, even from the beginning, or if it took a while for that bond to form. One that was so unshakable for Harvey and so easily dismissed by the child his parents brought home one day. These thoughts flit through my head in an instant, but what I hold on to isn’t about him at all.

  “Do you have a picture of her?”

  He looks up from his studied observation of his granddaughter eating her dinner. “What?”

  “My mother. You said they met here? Did they leave behind any photos that weren’t in that briefcase?”

  “Hang on.” He leaves the kitchen and, moments later, I can hear him on the stairs.

  “Hi,” says Darla, waving her fork at me. A little bit of pasta sauce splashes on the table. Neither of us moves to clean it up. We stare at it for a moment, then she grins at me, the gap in her teeth a form of ice-melting kryptonite.

  “Hey,” I say, somewhat grudgingly.

  She reaches into her pocket and shows me the strip of blue ribbon. “Shh,” she says, her eyes comically wide, her finger to her lips.

  “Yeah, well, I’m not the one with the problem keeping my mouth shut, am I?”

  I absurdly hold on to her earlier lack of discretion. I’m tired and both thankful that there are so few windows in here to keep an eye on and exhausted by the energy that thinking like this takes up.

  Harvey reappears with an old newspaper clipping, kept in a clear plastic shield.

  “Lebanese Politician Involved in Hostage Crisis Has Roots in Dearborn” reads the headline of a large, national paper. I’m not sure what I expected. There are two photos in the article, one is a head shot that shows a tall, clean-shaven politician, Ali Nasri. Who, according to the article, still had a hand in Lebanon’s political scene during the hostage crisis in the eighties�
��even though his family mostly lived in Michigan by then. The other picture was taken at a wedding where Ali was standing next to his son Walid, Walid’s bride Dania, and about half a dozen assorted guests.

  “I saw this in the paper once, back in the eighties, and she’s there. That’s her,” says Harvey, pointing to a woman standing off to the side. “Sabrina Awad.”

  Her body is angled partially away, but her face is turned to the camera, her expression one of consternation mixed with surprise. Even though she is at the far edge of the photo, nowhere near the newlyweds, she draws the eye. Her beauty is so singular. In a room full of attractive women, made up as though glamour were going out of style the very next day, her simplicity stands out. In the photo, she has long dark hair, left loose over her shoulder, and a kind of symmetry of features that you can’t fake, even with makeup. The cut of her dress shows off slim arms that I recognize from another photograph from my past, one where she is holding me. It’s held up by delicate straps that are accented by little bows made of ribbon.

  I have a feeling that if this photograph were in color, the dress would match the blue ribbon that Darla has hidden back in her pocket. “Can I keep this?” I say to Harvey.

  He nods. “Yeah.” It isn’t until I reach the door that he speaks again, almost as an afterthought. “You know, you don’t seem nothing like him, but your voice. Something about it. Sam . . . he sounded a bit like you, I guess.”

  Maybe there’s something in the wistfulness of his tone that makes me ask my next question. “Did my father . . . did he seem like the type to take his life?”

  “God, no. But I didn’t know him very well, toward the end. I thought we were close when we were growing up, but I guess that was a lie, too. You hear stories about people coming back from war, about how it changes them. Being in the military changed him, too, I guess, but the Sam I used to know wouldn’t have done that . . . What the hell do I know, anyway? My own daughter died of an oxy overdose a couple years ago. I thought I knew her, too. Started to believe becoming a mother had turned her life around.” He looks at Darla as she slips from her chair and puts her plate in the sink. The anger in him seems to deflate. “You can . . . I mean, if you’re thinking . . . You can come back, if you want.”

  My grunt could be taken as confirmation, I suppose, but I leave the kitchen knowing that I’ll probably never come back here. That a little girl who has no connection to me or my mother has this tiny piece of her. And that somehow, I don’t mind at all. Some little girl should have something of my mother’s. One who is not either of her daughters, both of whom hate her for leaving them and not coming back. Never. Not once. Not even when their father died.

  As I walk away from my father’s childhood home I realize that I’m hungry. My first thought is of a falafel. But that’s inappropriate. I bury the desire to send a message to Bonnie. Heads up. It is more complicated than you thought. Do you love falafel and have you been wondering why?

  I look over my shoulder as I walk away from my father’s childhood home, because something inside me tells me that my departure is being tracked. Harvey is at his window and his nosy neighbor is at hers. Darla wanders out to the yard, under the watchful eyes of them both. She waves at me as I look back at her over my shoulder, but I ruthlessly suppress the instinct to wave back.

  We could have been family once, maybe, but it’s too late for that. Harvey Watts just confirmed what I’ve always believed. My father went to Canada searching for his roots. He never found them. He was just as lost as I used to be until a few minutes ago when, for the first time in my life, I saw a photograph of my mother’s face.

  24

  Stevie Warsame eases his large body into the car without speaking. He pours himself some coffee from a thermos and grimaces at the first sip. “You make shit coffee, Bazooka,” he says to Brazuca, who’s staring at him from the driver’s seat.

  “You’re breaking my heart.” Brazuca starts the engine and pulls away from the line of parked cars on the road. He glances back for one last look at the unassuming two-story house that the BMW’s tracker led him to. It’s on a quiet, tree-lined street, with plenty of yard space. Which means that, though it doesn’t really look like much, the Burnaby neighborhood they’ve been watching must be an expensive one. He’d even caught a glimpse of a pool in one of the backyards. A backyard pool. In Vancouver, a place where it was a luxury to have anything better than a shitty, overchlorinated indoor pool—the kind that Brazuca swims in every morning.

  Warsame, who has just walked by the house for a closer look, is unruffled, as always. “You want to hear the good news or not? Seems like your average private residence but there’s a camera above the door and in the driveway. TV’s on inside, so someone’s home. What’s the deal with this case, anyway? Cheater?”

  “Just some surveillance for now,” Brazuca says, not wanting to get into it just yet.

  Warsame doesn’t like this. “What exactly are we surveilling? Way I see it, I’m doing you a favor.”

  “I’m paying you!” Lam’s pockets are deep to support hiring outside help, but Brazuca hasn’t yet told Warsame who the client is. To get the Somali ex-cop to do anything, however, you need to make it worth his while.

  “Yeah, so what? I don’t have to be here, bro.”

  There is a directness to Warsame that comes with his easy smile. He’d lived through a war in Somalia, had his childhood upended to move from a Kenyan refugee camp to Canada, learned a new language in order to enforce the laws of his new country. He had seen more than any person ought to have, all before he grew out of childhood. You could not dissuade him when he wanted something—or convince him that your needs were greater than his. His unwillingness to let anything slip past was what made him such a good investigator.

  Brazuca sighs. “Friend of mine asked me to look into an OD. Dealer’s connected to the Triple 9s. A lead set me up on this house.”

  Warsame’s incredulous look mirrors Lee’s when Brazuca told him the same thing. “You’re digging up a supply chain for an OD? What the fuck for?” It was dangerous work, best left to the police—as Warsame well knows.

  “Favor, mostly. Just seeing where it goes.” Brazuca isn’t fooling anyone with his feigned casual tone, especially not Stevie Warsame, but he’s still glad when Warsame decides this is enough information for now.

  But by his look, he’s not going to be put off for much longer. “I’m gonna grab some food. You need me later?” Warsame asks, when Brazuca drops him back at his car a few blocks away.

  “Yeah, stick around if you can.”

  Warsame nods. “Your dime. Let me know if you want me to bring some more guys on for the job.”

  “Yeah, thanks, man. I want to see how this plays out a little first.”

  Warsame doesn’t come cheap and Brazuca has a feeling that his guys wouldn’t be, either. He’s not ready yet to start contracting more work without a better idea of what he’s dealing with. He waits until Warsame pulls away in his two-door sedan with tinted windows before mixing a protein shake from a container that he now stashes in his glove compartment. In this moment, drinking his healthy shake and thinking about his muscle mass, he is not aware of just how much he resembles another field operative, one who had surveilled Nora’s daughter, Bonnie, last year. A gun for hire.

  He circles the neighborhood and is about to pull into a free space with a decent view of the house he’s been watching when the garage door opens. A brand-new Toyota pickup truck backs out onto the road. As it passes, giving him a honk to get out of the way, he catches a glimpse of a bearded man with a baseball cap pulled low. Brazuca waits in his MINI Cooper until the pickup turns the corner. Before he follows the truck, he sends a text to Warsame: On the move.

  In separate cars, they tail the truck to the bearded man’s place of work. Watch him park his car in the employee lot.

  “Surprise, surprise. Looks like you found your Triple 9 link to the Vancouver port,” says Warsame, over the phone.

  Brazuca
grins. Maybe this will be easier than he thought. He ignores the nagging suspicion that nothing ever is, certainly not for him. But maybe, just for once in his goddamn life, his luck has changed for good.

  25

  It’s still light outside when I hit up the hipster café located inside a general store and run by a young man I assume is Amish. That, or he’s trying to bring back long sideburns and vests, which, given the neighborhood, isn’t completely unthinkable. I open the MacBook Pro that had been a gift from Leo before he and Seb split up. The exterior of it is a little worse for the wear, but it works just fine as I boot it up and continue my search from the last few days.

  There’s a new message from the veterans group, but it’s from an administrator outlining the process of retrieving my father’s military records. I’m tempted to do it, but being driven to madness by bureaucracy isn’t my idea of fun, so I nix the suggestion almost immediately. I keep looking until I come across an odd story archived in the forum. Someone was joking about a piece of radio equipment falling overboard while stationed in the Mediterranean in ’77, and how the marine responsible for it got reamed out. Another commenter asked if he got brig time for losing cryptographic material, but the response was negative. Doesn’t seem like enough to make a man want to kill himself, but I still file it away for later.

  In my search I make another unhelpful discovery. Hideous neck tattoos are surprisingly popular in criminal circles. Back at the motel, I didn’t see much of my would-be robber, but I saw enough to note that his skin color wasn’t dark. But it’s not a lot to go on, since “not dark” is a pretty broad category. I debate asking Simone to look into it, that maybe some obscure database or the other has a breakdown of gang tattoos and why someone would possibly want one creeping into their hairline—but if I did that I would have to tell her about the robbery attempt at my motel. And, too chickenshit to face her disapproval, I stop myself before I send the message.