It All Falls Down

by Sheena Kamal

  I leave out my suspicions about her being pursued. Still, Lorelei refuses to believe any of it. She hangs up on me.

  I call again. She doesn’t answer. I wait another ten minutes until the next try. I’ve got nothing but time to kill. On my third attempt, she is so frustrated that she picks up. I suppose it hadn’t occurred to her to turn her phone off. “She was an Arab,” I say, when the line connects. “A Palestinian refugee who lived in Lebanon before she immigrated. You should add that to ‘mixed heritage’ on your website bio.”

  “You’re an asshole,” she says, to cover up her surprise that I have been on the website of the environmental nonprofit she runs. As though I’m not interested in antipipeline coalitions also. The mixed-heritage description is a new gem displayed on her public profile. Before this year, Lorelei hadn’t been comfortable speculating openly about our family’s background, especially when it comes to our father. Her private life was full of daydreams about where he might have belonged once upon a time, but in her public life she was less open about her confusion.

  I can’t give her what she wants to know about Sam Watts, but I’ve discovered who our mother is. We had given up on her a long time ago, but now we have some information. Maybe it will mean something to Lorelei. Maybe I’m hoping she can tell me what it means for me. “Her name was Sabrina Awad,” I continue. “Remember we used to wonder about where she came from? Before she married Dad she legally changed her name in court to Watts. That’s why she never had her maiden name on our birth papers. It’s the only way you can get away with not having a maiden name listed. But she was Palestinian.” I use the past tense because that’s what I know of her. Her past.

  “Palestinian?” Lorelei repeats slowly.

  “From Lebanon.”

  “But . . . why would she change her name before she got married?”

  Because she was running from something—or someone. I want to tell her this, but her skeptical tone puts my back up. I can feel, even separated by thousands of miles, that she doesn’t trust my information. If only because it’s coming from me. “Maybe she was testing the legal system here,” I say instead. “For fun.”

  “Huh,” is her reply to this.

  I can feel her thinking on the other end of the line. Softening, even. “She had a big belly laugh,” I say quietly. Remembering the love in Dania Nasri’s voice. “When she was going to say something outrageous she’d—”

  “I have to go, Nora.” Her voice is small. I can’t remember the last time I heard her so unsure of herself. Before I have time to adjust, however, she remembers herself, and that she is unsure of nothing. “I don’t have time for this right now.”

  “Wait. Remember that veteran you talked to? He’s dangerous. I mean it. If he ever approaches you again—”

  There’s a click as she disconnects the call.

  I must, for a moment, examine my motivations for telling Lorelei about our mother. They are not inspiring. I guess that I still, after all these years, want to keep her in the loop about what’s happening with me. If one day I, too, might be useful on her website bio, I’d like her to get the facts straight.

  I’m aware that this is mean-spirited, but I can’t help myself. Thinking about Lorelei has always brought out the worst in me. Perhaps because she is so obvious in her hunger for belonging, so shamelessly transparent in wanting to know what is in her blood and what it must say about her. I think I should feel that way, too. But I don’t. Wanting to know where you came from doesn’t make you weak . . . but it can make you vulnerable. It can make you crave answers about people you should belong to and places that call to your heart, answers that you’re never going to get, from questions you don’t have the courage to ask.

  This desire is buried so deep in me that I can only bring it out when I sing. Which I do now, softly and to myself, in a seat at the back of a mostly empty bus, on my way to meet a frightened woman who is not expecting me. Amy Winehouse is what I settle on, which speaks to what kind of mood I’m in. You can’t listen to Amy without a sense of terrible foreboding. I’ve decided to embrace it. Wallow in the sense of impending doom.

  From the bus station, I take a ride share using an app on my phone to the address in a wealthy suburb. The street is tree-lined, the homes stately and beautiful. The people who live here are clearly not aware that they live in a perpetual global recession, because they seem to be okay with spending vast amounts of money on gaudy Halloween decorations. I knock on the door of the corner house on the street and wait by a pair of devilish jack-o’-lanterns.

  A lovely gray-haired woman opens the door. She looks at me, at my outfit, then at my shoes. None seem to pass muster, but she is far too elegant a lady to comment. She and Dania Nasri have taught me that a classy woman should always be dressed nicely to answer the door. For some reason.

  “Yes?” the woman says. “If you’re here for the food drive, I left a shopping bag out this morning. I thought you’d already picked it up?”

  “I’m here about Ryan Russo, Gloria.”

  Her reaction is unmistakable. Gloria Tate sags against the doorway. A look of panic crosses her face. Her fear is a living, tangible thing. Even though her restraining order was dated almost forty years ago, she is still not over it. “What? What has he done? Is he back in Chicago?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” She holds the door open for me to enter. There is a room just off the entryway that she leads me to. A half a dozen bags of Halloween candy sit on the coffee table. “Sorry for the mess. I’m just getting organized here.”

  I perch on the edge of an ivory armchair, across from an ivory sofa, separated by an ivory rug. “Where’s your tower?” I say.

  “What?” Her fingers grip the edge of the sofa.

  I gesture to the room and am about to explain the joke when she gets up and closes the spotless white curtains. I have a sudden insight. Only a certain kind of woman has furniture this pristine. One who is, of course, hiding something behind the facade. My joke disintegrates.

  She looks at me. Clears her throat. “Ryan . . . has he hurt someone?”

  It’s not surprising that violence is what she thinks of first. A woman doesn’t take out a restraining order for nothing. “Not recently, that I know of.”

  “Is he in Chicago?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m here because I think he might have known my mother, Sabrina Awad. Back in Lebanon. I think she might have been running away from him, but I don’t know why.”

  Gloria Tate’s hand trembles. She disappears into the kitchen without a word to me and comes back about a minute later with two glasses of white wine. I accept the glass she holds out but am careful to set it on the table. A glass of wine for me isn’t the same thing as a puff of a joint. It is a slippery slope, at the bottom of which lies my self-respect. Gloria handles her wine differently. She finishes her glass in four long gulps. I push my own glass toward her and she accepts it with the grace of a lady who knows how to keep her habit under wraps. A functioning alcoholic. I know them well, mostly because I used to be one. She holds this glass in her hand, swirls it around. I get the sense that she’s deciding whether or not to confide in me. I see the moment when the fear wins out and she decides against it. It’s when she puts the glass back down and stands. “I’m really sorry, but my husband will be home soon. I have some errands to run before he gets here.”

  I stand, too. “I’ll come along.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “I could just follow you,” I say. “Like Russo did.”

  She clutches the neckline of her blouse, her fingers convulsively closing over the buttons. The signs of abuse are impossible to ignore. “Please don’t joke about that. He—he made my life a living hell! Even after I took out the restraining order, I used to feel like someone was watching me.”

  She goes quiet, but I can’t let her stop now. “Tell me about him,” I whisper, going to her. I don’t touch her, though, because you don’t dare touch a
woman in this state. It occurs to me that I should leave her alone to her fear, but I have come so far and am closing in on something. I can feel it. “Tell me and I’ll be gone.”

  Her eyes narrow and her voice hovers just barely above a whisper. “He was obsessive, alright? We dated for two and a half years. I was his physiotherapist. That’s how we met.”

  “Why was he in Lebanon?”

  “His family had some connections in the publishing world and he’d gotten a small advance to write a book about his hero, a friend of his father’s who was a French photojournalist who died in Lebanon. One day outside his apartment in West Beirut, two men shoved him into a car, attacked him, robbed him, and left him on a street a few blocks away. He was walking back to his apartment when, ten feet away from him, a car bomb went off. It was a Mercedes. He used to bring it up whenever we passed one together. He had second- and third-degree burns along the right side of his body. It was a long rehabilitation process for him.”

  “He was kidnapped and robbed? Are you sure?” Because none of those details had been in the article on him after the blast.

  “I heard that story so many times while we were together. Yes, I think I’d remember that.”

  “Did he ever talk about another woman? Someone who stood out.”

  She blinks at me. Her eyelashes are long and thick, with a delicate coating of mascara sweeping them upward, giving her a startled appearance. “Well . . . yes. Now that you mention it. During therapy he told me about a woman he’d met in Lebanon when he was reporting there. They were together for a while, then she somehow got the wrong idea about him and ran off one day.”

  “What wrong idea?”

  “I don’t know. He never said. Maybe she thought he was cheating. He said he just wanted to clear the air. To let her know that he only wished her well. She was a Palestinian woman and he wanted to make sure that she didn’t face any repercussions from being with him because he was a white man. He wanted to help sponsor her to come to the States. I thought . . . I thought it was considerate. He was so worldly and charming at first. I’d never been out of the country at that time so his adventures were quite fascinating to me.”

  She pauses here and drinks some more wine to steady her nerves. The effect is one of total relaxation. She is so calm now that she loses the trail of the conversation.

  “And then?” I say.

  “And then he wasn’t charming. He was hooked on morphine after it was prescribed to him for the pain management. It messed with his head when he tried to keep off it. He would follow me if I forgot to tell him where I’d be going. He was violent sometimes. I don’t know what his trigger was, but every now and then we would just be having a regular conversation and I’d say something to upset him. Then I’d be on the floor, bleeding. I’d wake up in bed an hour later with him holding my hand and pouring me tea . . . Please can you go? I can’t talk about this anymore.”

  “Okay, I understand. I have one more question, though. Did he ever seem like he had anything to hide?” I say, on a hunch.

  She frowns at me. “Other than his temper and his habit? I don’t know. I heard from a friend of a friend that he might have had a gambling problem after we broke up. I think she mentioned that he filed for bankruptcy. I wasn’t surprised that he played cards, but I was surprised he lost. He was a really good liar.”

  “No kidding.” He sure fooled me back in Vancouver.

  “Ryan had a way of telling you a lie that was so close to the truth that you wondered if you were crazy. About conversations or events that you were present for. Sometimes I got the feeling that he enjoyed it. He liked the idea that he was making me crazy. He was a political junkie and we’d have these bizarre debates. Whatever my position was on this event or the other, he’d spin it around later and make me think I said something else. He thought it was fun. I don’t know. Does that help? Can you leave now?”

  There is no excuse for frightening a woman like this, not really. In my defense, there’s a man lying in a hospital bed because of the danger I’m in. I’m about to thank Gloria for her time, maybe even apologize, when the front door opens and a man walks in. He looks to be in his seventies, but his age does nothing to detract from the vitality he projects into the room. Vitality and something else, something that I can’t quite put my finger on.

  “Honey?” he says, looking from Gloria to me.

  I give him a crisp nod and move to the door. “Sorry to interrupt your evening, I was just going. I’m from the food bank. Your wife donated to our Halloween food drive and I came to personally thank her.”

  “Gloria is wonderful that way, isn’t she?” He beams and grabs my hand, giving it a firm shake. “I’m Frederick Halpern. Please let us know if you need any more help this year. I could probably organize something with my club.” He smiles at Gloria until he notices the two wineglasses on her side of the coffee table. His smile takes on a tense edge. Gloria’s brightens in response. It is so awkward in the room that there’s only one thing to do now.

  “Have a nice evening,” I say to them both. On my way out, I pass a set of family photographs in the hallway. They are mostly of Gloria and Frederick holding hands in various vacation destinations, but one above the potted palm in the entranceway stands out. It is of Frederick alone at work. I see now what I had tried to understand back there in the living room about Gloria Tate’s husband. It was the sense of authority that he embodied.

  On the porch I pass the two jack-o’-lanterns. Maybe it’s just my imagination but they seem to be judging me for pushing an obviously distraught woman past her limits. Well, I’m not proud of it, either. As I walk away, I mull over what I’ve learned. Gloria Tate kept her maiden name even though that had made her easy for Simone to track down—but she was a lot more clever than I had initially given her credit for. For a woman who lived in fear of an ex, she managed to find a way to put herself squarely out of his reach. She married a man whose station in life was so high and mighty that it was enough to keep her safe as long as he was alive. Frederick Halpern isn’t just above the law. He is the law.

  Gloria Tate married a judge.

  44

  The car follows me down the street.

  I turn the block.

  It also turns.

  I stop to tie my boot laces.

  It slows to a halt.

  I take off running, and reach a crescent at the end of the road. A god-awful semicircle of death, lined with picture-perfect brick houses and white picket fences. Who are these people and don’t they realize that the 1950s are over?

  The car that has been following me idles nearby. Frederick Halpern rolls down the window on the driver’s side. “Get in,” he says.

  I weigh my options. A car from a private home security company pulls up behind us. Halpern sticks his head out the window and waves at the driver. “Hey, Joe. No worries. She’s with me.”

  The car flashes its high beams in response and waits for me to get in Halpern’s car. I do. The other car pulls off. Halpern smiles at me. “Gloria has her problems, I’ll give you that. But deception isn’t one of them, at least with me. You want to know about Ryan Russo?”

  I nod, speechless for the moment.

  “You came to the right place, then. I’ve got something I want to show you.”

  We drive for about twenty minutes. I’m not familiar with Chicago, so I can’t tell from our surroundings where we’re going. I’m just grateful for the heated seats and dual climate control. Halpern’s BMW is a lot nicer than Sanchez’s Taurus, that’s for sure. Finally, Halpern pulls into an apartment complex across the road from a strip mall. I have no idea where we are, but it looks like the suburbs. He hands me a set of keys. “Big key is for the front door and the little one is for 309. I’ll wait for you here.”

  I look at the keys. “Whose apartment is it?”

  “Russo’s. About ten years ago Gloria thought she saw him at a coffee shop, but chalked it up to her imagination. I had a PI I know look into it. Russo sold his family
paper years ago and invested in real estate. He’s got a few investment properties in California where he lives mostly, but I found out that he keeps a little place here. So I had my guy make keys. I’ve never been able to catch him checking up on her so I can’t prove it, but I know he does from time to time. I’ve taken the liberty of informing my PI that you’ll be here. Happy hunting.”

  I get out of the car without another word. I’m still confused as I head into the sleepy little building. Nobody stops me on my way in. The elevator is broken so I take the stairs up. Apartment 309 is just off the stairwell, perfect for someone who doesn’t want to be friendly with neighbors in elevators.

  I hesitate at the door.

  What if Russo is in here? But if I don’t go in, I’ll have to face Halpern and tell him I was too scared. This is not an option. Unless he has planned some kind of ambush. But deep down inside I know that he hasn’t. He had no idea I was coming to visit his wife, nor time to formulate an organized response even if he were so inclined. I don’t question a possible motive for this to be a setup because, truly, I am beyond understanding human beings at this point. Why they do what they do is as much of a mystery to me as anyone else.

  I enter the apartment as quietly as I can and wait in the dark while I listen for sounds or movement. Nothing. So I turn on the light and see some more nothing, but in a lit space. I walk through the tiny apartment, which is empty but for a few dishes and utensils in the kitchen cabinet and a single bed underneath a window in the bedroom. There’s a small bedside table with a lamp next to it. I open the drawer of the table, but find it empty. When I slide the whole thing out I see there’s nothing taped to the underside, either. I walk through the apartment again. It’s sparsely furnished, but doesn’t feel abandoned. I wonder when Russo was last here. If he’s been hanging around Chicago, then it would make sense he might have some connections to Detroit, which is not far at all. And could he have resisted having a peek at Gloria while he’s been trying to get me killed?