by Sheena Kamal
Her voice turns soft. Without intending to, I find that I’ve leaned in to hear her. She smiles the saddest smile I think I’ve ever seen.
“That time in college with your mother was the freest I’ve ever been. We would spend nights studying and giggling like we were schoolgirls. When she had something crazy to say, something outrageous, she would grab whatever was handy and hold it up to her ear. ‘Who’s listening?’—and then she’d laugh with her whole body, from deep inside her belly. In those moments, I loved her. She was my best friend back then. When she left your father, she left me, too.”
We don’t shake hands at the door because we’ve come too far for that. She moves in for a hug, but I step back to avoid any attempt at an embrace. I haven’t forgotten what happened to the last person I put my arms around. I have no desire to see anyone else lying broken in a hospital room.
“I didn’t know your father died when you were a child. I’m so sorry for you and your sister. For whatever role I played in your mother leaving you.” Dania Nasri reaches into her pocket and hands me something that she has been hiding there. It is an old, rusty house key from the previous century, warmed from her palm.
“I thought you said your mother threw her keys away.”
She shakes her head. “This is your mother’s key. We got drunk one night in her room off absinthe and cheap wine, and she showed it to me. Then she laughed and threw it out the window. I saw it on the ground when I left, so I picked it up. I meant to keep it for her if she was ever ready to have it back. She never brought it up again. I’ve been waiting for some kind of sign of what I should do with it but now you’re here and you know everything I know about your mother. So it’s only right you should have this, too.”
She looks at me expectantly, waiting for something. Understanding. Forgiveness, maybe. She may even settle for acknowledgment, but she’ll have to do without it because I leave without another word to her, feeling like I’m being watched. Well, that’s nothing new. Watched. Hunted. Just like my cold, distant mother, who I guess I really am like.
My mother’s old friend was wrong. I do know what it’s like to live with fear and suspicion hanging over my head. That it’s an inherited trait makes a kind of sense. My mother was a migrant, a refugee—one of the many. A sad song that would be played on repeat for years to come. A broken record that left a trail of despair that would see the migration from country to country, shore to shore. And the trail would keep moving, along with the bodies. As changeable as the political arguments for and against intervention, keeping in mind the protection of various economic interests in the region.
As fluid as the world’s capacity to give a fuck.
41
I sit in a café in Dearborn Heights, drinking Arabic coffee and thinking about what Dania had said. Maybe I’m here because I’m trying to connect with my heritage, but, as always, it’s an exercise in futility. My heart isn’t in it. I’m distracted. There are too many windows in this place, so I have chosen a seat at the back of the room and proceeded to glare at anyone who comes through the door. I have commandeered the single electrical outlet in the seating area to charge my phone. The staff is unhappy with my presence, but there are few customers this time of evening and they’re no doubt thinking about their day’s take.
Simone sends me an email. I open it up to find a Chicago police report from nearly forty years ago for one Ryan Russo, whose girlfriend had taken out a restraining order against him.
I think about asking Simone how she got access to this, but she has never spilled her secrets before and I’m betting this case will be no different. That she’s remarkably well connected in the hacker world isn’t exactly news to me.
There’s no other information in the email. Simone has signed off with “more soon” but soon isn’t specific enough for me. I order a second piece of baklava and let my mind wander while I wait for it to arrive. Seb’s phone is going straight to voice mail now, but his voice is still in my head. Still asking me to take a minute and try to sort through the threads. Dania had asked many rhetorical questions when discussing my mother, but the one that I focus on is this one: What beautiful woman doesn’t want to be photographed?
A woman on the run, obviously. From her past, from a man who had seen her photo in a newspaper and come looking for her. A man who has kept tabs on her daughters throughout the years. He’d followed me in Vancouver and set me on this course. Now I’m looking into my father’s history, looking into my mother’s life, and what do I find but this man who’d claimed to be a marine?
And who wants me dead, apparently.
Dania Nasri talked about coincidences. No matter how I turn it over in my mind, I can’t see it as a coincidence that my mother disappeared when that article on Dania’s father-in-law was printed. A photo of my mother emerges, right before Dania spoke with a man who might have been posing as a journalist and who would, many years later, pose as a veteran. And then a man shows up at the bar to spread the news of my father’s death to Kovaks, while also trying to find out more about my mother’s whereabouts. I’ve sent Russo’s picture to Kovaks, who confirmed this looked like the concerned friend, but he can’t be a hundred percent sure.
But it’s enough for me.
All roads lead back to Ryan Russo, a man of hidden motivations. Who lived through a car bombing—which had been common in Beirut at the time.
When I look at my phone again, I see multiple messages from Brazuca, asking me to call him. I’m about to do just that, when a text comes in from Leo. Leo hasn’t attempted to reach me since he thought I betrayed him by going to work with Seb after their breakup.
I open the message. He’s gone. I have Whisper.
There’s no answer when I try to reach him. I know he’s in Vancouver, staring at his phone, because a few minutes later he sends another text.
I’ve read the book.
Which means he knows everything now. I can feel his pain palpitating over the miles separating us. There’s nothing more to be said than what’s in Seb’s memoirs. There’s only forgiveness to be granted, if Leo can find it in himself to give it.
Harvey Watts told me that my aunt wasn’t my father’s birth sister, said it like it was something that I didn’t already know. When I tried to run away from foster care the first time, this was made perfectly clear to me. She wasn’t kin to me, was too sick to raise us alone, but she loved my father. It didn’t matter to either of them that they weren’t blood relations. What those made-for-TV movies that come around at Christmastime to bludgeon you with the restorative power of family reconciliation don’t want you to know is that there are connections stronger than blood.
Sebastian Crow needed help with some research once and he took a chance on me. I helped find him a handful of interviews some years ago.
After that, we never looked back.
I may not have much to call my own in this life. I live in a city I can’t afford. Close by is a sister who is embarrassed by me and an ex-sponsor who has betrayed me. My mentor has just stepped off death’s doorstep and his lover may never forgive me for my silence on the subject. There’s a town house I have no right to stay in now that Seb is gone and a dog who will punish me for my absence.
It may not be much, but what I do have I owe to Mike Starling and Seb Crow, who are both gone now. Both lost to me, and the fragile world I’d built for myself around them.
Dope and bodies.
Dope and I haven’t had a relationship since high school, but I can’t deny that I’ve got a line on bodies. And they seem to be piling up.
There’s no point in calling Brazuca, because I already have the news. Besides, I don’t want to bring him into whatever it is that I’m facing now. The men around me have a short life expectancy and, even though I haven’t forgiven him for his past betrayal, Brazuca deserves a bullet-free life filled with a healthful smoothie on the side. Also, a life free of mysterious figures from my mother’s past who have been showing up periodically throughout the years, search
ing for her. I don’t know what she did to bring this upon herself, upon us, but I wouldn’t ever underestimate the hatred that someone can hold tight for years. Decades, even.
In Detroit there’s a man who bought the house next door to his ex-wife’s and erected a giant statue of a middle finger in the yard. He made sure it was positioned front and center and lit up at night. It was a visual monstrosity, designed to scandalize the entire neighborhood. An expensive representation of his outrage, mild compared with what I seem to be dealing with now.
They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Yeah? Try a man.
Part Five
42
“So you want to hear about that old boys’ club, do you?” says the woman on the bench.
This morning I had still been in bed when a woman named Jules Dubois called me, told me that Mark Kovaks had cashed in a favor on my behalf, and if I wanted to talk to her about what it was like in Lebanon some thirty years ago, I’d better not waste any time getting to Forest Park. Which is where she spends her midmornings. I thought she chose the location because it’s a place where little old ladies can take their daily constitutional and watch over the kickball field, but Jules Dubois is a little old lady who has something different in mind when it comes to her constitution.
We’re on a bench and she’s rolling a joint with meticulous precision. She lights it, lingers over a long pull, and offers it to me. I take a small puff and hand it back to her. I’m not above peer pressure when my defenses are down.
“I have cancer,” she says. She watches me as I close my eyes briefly against the instant high. “When was the last time you smoked a joint?”
“Maybe twenty years.” I think. The pistons aren’t all firing this morning, even without the weed factored in. I’ve spent another night at a cheap hotel in downtown Detroit—a different one this time. I slept for more than eight hours, too, but it’s hard to feel rested when you’re on the run.
“It’s good, isn’t it? Get sick and they give you a prescription. I’ve got it in the tits.”
“Excuse me?”
“The cancer,” she says, as though I’m slow. “It’s in my tits. Man, I thought I was so lucky with these things.” She adjusts her bra, heaving it up by the straps. “You shoulda seen me in my heyday. Small everywhere but the chest. It was like I won the genetic lottery. Now look at me. It’s the opposite.”
“You look fine to me,” I say, determined not to give her what she wants, which is for me to look at her breasts and offer up an opinion for the sole purpose of her knocking it down. Living with Seb these last months has been an exercise in sidestepping these kinds of subjects with the terminally ill. Their bodies have changed with the illness, noticeably so. They know it, but they want their body image reaffirmed. Problem is, they can’t accept this kind of affirmation. They know it’s a lie. And it makes them angry, bitter, or worse. Sad.
“It’s because I’m wearing a prosthetic. Ever seen one?” With her free hand she plucks at the opening of her flowered blouse. Over the blouse and a pair of dark sweatpants, she wears a long pink trench coat. She reminds me of the man on the waterfront, except he was more coordinated. Jules Dubois looks like she threw on whatever happened to be on her floor before coming to meet me. This is probably why I liked her immediately. She seems like my kind of woman.
“Nah, I’m good. Thanks.”
“Just as well,” she says, sighing heavily, before going back to her spliff. “You should really look into getting a prescription. This stuff does wonders. I waited until I had cancer before I partook, but you don’t have to.”
She offers me the joint again, but I shake my head. The first toke was enough for me to question my reasons for being here, suffer the longing to be with Whisper since I’m enjoying the outdoors, and consider the purpose of my existence in general. I’m not sure I can handle what a second will bring. “I live in Vancouver. You can get a prescription off the streets there.” You can walk into any cannabis clinic, fill out some paperwork saying you get panic attacks, and boom: access to reasonably priced marijuana and its various derivative products. I know this because Seb had one for his condition and I often went with him for his refills.
“Lucky you. So what do you want to know? As I said on the phone, I might not have much time left. Got rid of the tits, but not the cancer. Ain’t that something. It’s metastasized—what a word. Metastasis. You heard the phrase ‘spread like cancer’? Well, what happens when it’s your cancer that’s spreading? You lose more than your tits.”
I’m once again under that microscopic stare as she waits for me to explain myself.
“When you were in Beirut, did you know an American photographer named Ryan Russo?”
Her response is almost instantaneous. Whatever is happening to her body, and even on what I personally know to be some very potent bud, her mind is razor-sharp. “Never heard of him. When was he there?”
“Seventies. He was there to work on a book, but he might have been a freelancer also.”
She shakes her head. “I was there as an AP correspondent in eighty-two, right before the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, the Palestinian camps. Most awful thing I ever saw, those bodies on the streets. Right now we’ve got a global refugee crisis happening with Syria, Jordan, Somalia. I’ve visited a lot of camps in my time, but walking through Shatila after all those people were butchered . . .” She shrugs. “Probably the worst day of my life.”
Dubois takes another long pull of her joint and stares through a couple walking their massive pit bull. They give her the stink eye as they pass but she is beyond their censure.
I’ve been told that some things actually do improve with age, and one of them is the ability to communicate to people that you give no fucks without fear of reprisal. Dubois has embraced this fully as she extends her middle finger to the couple.
When they’re out of earshot, she turns back to me. “First of all, let me tell you I left Beirut more confused than I’d been before I got there. I was asked to write a tell-all book about my experience after the hostage crisis became a hot thing in the eighties, but the truth is that I left because I could no longer write dispassionately about human suffering. To continue to live in Beirut I would have had to do like the Lebanese and keep adapting. Play psychological games with myself so that all of the death and destruction didn’t really matter. Keep moving forward and never look back, or even look around too much. I’m not ashamed to say I didn’t want to do it any longer. Maybe your Ryan Russo couldn’t either, because I was there for two years living in West Beirut where all the foreign correspondents lived and I’ve never heard of him. And I would have, if he was anybody. We all hung out at the Commodore Hotel. Heard of it?”
I shake my head, which sends it spinning.
“No? It was a very famous watering hole for journalists and spies. Some decent businesspeople, too, though I can’t imagine how they stayed among all the ruckus in Beirut.”
“Spies?” Something about what Kovaks said back at the bar hits me. Some people were obsessed with conspiracy theories, but this is the second time it’s crossed my mind in relation to Beirut.
She looks at me sideways and stubs out her joint. “It was the Cold War. Besides that, there was a civil war and the Syrian invasion. Also the Israeli invasion. There was so much intrigue that people blamed every little thing on some plot or the other. That’s the story of Beirut. There were plots and counterplots everywhere. In every group of people, there were a hundred different stories used to describe the same event. It was madness. It was the national pastime.”
“Right.” This had seemed to be relevant to Kovaks, too, but Dania Nasri never bothered to talk espionage. Maybe she no longer indulged in the national pastime. Clearly, though, it had made an impression on Dubois.
“Sorry I couldn’t be of more help, but I wish you luck with your search.” She smiles over at me and communicates silently that I’m the one expected to get up and leave. I do, glad that she didn’t give me the look t
hat she’d given the couple with the pit bull.
It should be no surprise to me that she’s talking intrigue and espionage. I come from people who attract secrets. The silky wings of a moth ensnaring them, holding them, daring them closer to the light. That part of me comes from a place like that . . . well, it explains a lot.
43
The bus to Chicago takes four hours, maybe five. I should be counting, but I’ve effectively been on autopilot for the last four hours. Maybe five. What matters is the woman I find at the end of this road. But I still need to keep myself occupied somehow. I’ve tried to read Catch-22, which I picked up at a secondhand bookstore by the bus station, but I can’t seem to make heads or tails of it.
I call Lorelei and tell her what I think happened some forty years ago. Our mother moved to Montreal and went buck wild. At university she made friends, let down her guard. Went to an American wedding and met a man in Detroit. Fell in love, legally changed her name to Sabrina Watts, got married, had kids . . . and eventually took off again.
