A World I Never Made

by James Lepore

  After the boys left, Catherine went out to get food for dinner. While she was gone, Pat brought in more wood and used it to feed the stove in the living room and to build a fire in the large and deep fireplace in the kitchen. He tried to take a shower, but there was no hot water. He searched the house until he found the electric hot water heater in a back closet and saw that its temperature gauge was set too low and that its connections to the main circuit box were loose and covered with dust, mouse droppings, and spiderwebs. He cleaned and reconnected them and set the temperature to 110 degrees Fahrenheit. While waiting for the tank to heat, he poured himself a half glass of bourbon from a bottle he had found earlier and sat before the wide brick hearth in the kitchen to drink it. He gulped half of it down before permitting himself, for the first time since hearing the jarring news of her death, to recall the wrinkled, incongruously kind face of Annabella Jeritza, who had been so brutally killed because she had made room in her heart for Megan. He did not know just how anxious he had been until the whiskey, strong and hot in his throat and stomach, brought some relief. Death, dead bodies, and now a birth. A child of Megan’s. Blood of his blood. Thank God for Catherine, who had convinced him that, once he had seen his grandson tomorrow, it would be best to leave him with the nuns in Lisieux. He will be safe there, she said, until this danger you are in has passed and you, or Megan, can claim him. He had fought her, but she had been right. How could they track down Megan with an infant on their hands? It is likely that you will be dead soon in any event, that we both will. She had not said this, but it really didn’t need saying.

  He brought another half tumbler of bourbon upstairs with him and sipped from it before, during, and after his shower, which was hot and steamy and which, along with the whiskey, helped put him in a comfort zone that, though he knew to be temporary, was nevertheless very welcome. He had dressed and was standing at the railing of the loft bedroom, drying his hair, when Catherine, carrying two sacks of food, swung open the front door, bringing some of the rain and wind in with her. Her hair was in some kind of transparent kerchief that she must have bought when she was out. She stopped on her way to the kitchen as if she had been struck by a sudden thought or heard something that didn’t sound right. Rain water glistened on her kerchief and on the strands of hair around it.

  “I’m up here,” Pat said, not loudly, not wanting to frighten her. She turned and looked up and smiled.“I took a shower,” he said.

  Catherine took off her head cover before answering, shaking it out and throwing it on a nearby end table.“You have made hot water?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “It has not worked for months:”

  “American know-how.”

  “Come down. You can start dinner while I shower.”

  In the kitchen, Pat flipped on a small shortwave radio on a shelf above the sink and turned the dial through a lot of static until he heard a woman singing something operatic. He turned the volume up a notch and began cutting and chopping the vegetables that Catherine had bought. Peppers, eggplant, onions, carrots, and more from a pile she had made on the hardwood countertop after rinsing them thoroughly in the deep enameled sink. He chopped, sipping his bourbon and listening to the radio and to the thrum of the shower in the upstairs bathroom. When Catherine came down, she was wearing a pair of worn corduroy pants and an oversized denim shirt with its cuffs rolled up to her elbows. She poured herself a glass of wine from one of the two bottles she had bought and stood next to Pat, watching his hands as he finished the job of cutting up the vegetables.

  “Her lover will not return,” Catherine said.

  “Whose lover?” Pat asked, holding the fat old knife in midchop for a second, puzzled by this statement.

  “Madame Butterfly. Maria Callas. You have picked a very sad moment in her story for us to listen to. And very beautiful:”

  “I didn’t know what it was,” Pat answered,“but you’re right, it is very sad and very beautiful.” He had been absorbing the music without thinking too much about it while working. They listened for a moment, side by side, to Callas’s unbelievable voice, filled with the courage and pathos of every woman who refuses to believe that she has been wronged, that her heart will be broken. You can start dinner, Catherine had said. Such a simple, domestic, intimate thing to say, as if they had been friends or lovers or both for many years. The warmth of the fire spread over them, as if to confirm Pat’s thought, which didn’t need confirming. You look lovely, he wanted to say, but didn’t, remembering this morning and Catherine’s nonresponse, the odd look on her face, that sadness again when he told her she looked beautiful. Tonight, without makeup, her face flushed from the hot shower, her long brown hair still damp and glistening, she looked even more beautiful. I won’t say it, he thought, and then she touched his hand as it rested on the worn wooden counter and he smiled without looking up.

  They ate their ratatouille with French bread and drank the bottle of wine that Catherine had opened at the small kitchen table near the fireplace. Pat did not realize how hungry he was and thought the hole in his stomach could not be filled. The ratatouille with its al dente vegetables and savory sauce and the delicious hearth-made bread finally did the job. They brought the second bottle of wine into the living room, where they spread a blanket on the floor and sat in front of the stove, which was glowing and which by now had heated virtually the entire house. Pat could easily have slept, but there were questions on his mind and he could still feel the spot on the back of his hand that Catherine had touched in the kitchen.

  “I am not your enemy,” Catherine said, preempting him.

  “How can I be sure of that?”

  “I see your point. There could be double-dealing within double-dealing. I could be a master of deceit:”

  “You could be:”

  “My father used to tell me to listen to my heart.”It will not lie to you,” he said:”

  “Is that your husband’s shirt you have on?” Pat had not meant to ask this question, but there it was.

  “Yes, why?”

  “No reason. Tell me about him.”

  They were both sitting against the couch that faced the stove, their legs extended, the bottle of wine between them. Catherine drew her legs to her chest and rocked slowly for a moment or two on her haunches, looking away from Pat. Then she got to her knees and reached over to the woodpile Pat had made, picked out a small log, and put it into the stove, pushing the door shut with another log. Still kneeling, she faced Pat.

  “I hated him,” she said.

  Pat took this in, suspended in that place where there are no thoughts and certainly no spoken words.

  “I’m not in mourning,” Catherine continued.

  “Why did you hate him?” Pat asked, finding his tongue.

  “Because I didn’t love him and he refused to see it, refused to let me go. I hated his obtuseness, his incessant desire for me:”

  “And now you’re guilty?”

  “Yes.”

  “So this is really happening?”

  “Yes.”

  Outside, the rain was finally stopping, the patter on the tin roof slowing to a few isolated pings. The wind, which had been rushing against the house with force, was now only sighing. In the sudden quiet, Pat could hear his heart, his wordless inner voice. The course of his life, it told him, would turn, pivot on his decision to trust the handsome, despairing woman sitting next to him. Let it, he thought. If her vulnerability is false then she is the loser, not you. But it isn’t. Yes, this—and more—is really happening. Catherine had let go of her knees but not fully reextended her legs. He watched her, tracing her profile with his eyes as she leaned back against the sofa and stared at the fire burning in the stove, giving him space and time to think his thoughts, which now turned from the profound to the practical.

  “There must be someone you can go to,” Pat said. “Someone in law enforcement or the government that you can trust:”

  “That sounds logical, except that Charles Raimondi
is in the top echelon of our government, high in the Foreign Office and very close to the DST if not DST himself. And he is the one who brought a known terrorist, a beheader, down on you. No, we will go to Cap de la Hague tomorrow, after Lisieux. Uncle Daniel will advise us:” She had told him of Daniel Peletier over dinner, that he was the one who had run the prints taken from the Arabs in Volney Park. Uncle Daniel whom she loved and trusted.

  “I was jealous,” he said.

  “Jealous?”

  “Of your husband. That’s why I asked about the shirt.” Pat let his eyes drift over Catherine’s chest as he said this. Though the shirt was loose-fitting, he could easily see the outline of her large breasts and had no trouble imagining that they would be soft and touchable and perfectly formed. He had decided when he first met Catherine—he could not believe it was only two days ago—that he would not look too closely at or think too much about her beauty. But that decision was made long ago, by another Pat Nolan in another life, the Pat Nolan who thought his daughter had killed herself to spite him, who had looked into the face of despair and saw that it was his. That decision could now be rescinded. Looking up, he saw that Catherine was smiling.

  “Shall I take it off?” she said, and, after a slight pause, continued, “and put something else on?”

  “No,” Pat said, shaking his head and smiling in turn.“I’m not so jealous now that I know ...”

  “That I hated him?”

  “Yes.”

  “It sounds awful, doesn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “He was a quite ordinary man. A little arrogant, a little insecure, that’s all. Not someone to be hated. It was myself I hated.”

  “And you still do:”

  “Yes, at times I do:”

  “I hate myself, too:”

  “Why?”

  “For dragging my young wife to the jungles of South America where she died in childbirth:”

  Catherine remained silent, sipping her wine.

  “And for leaving Megan with my brother and sister-in-law while I traveled around the world working on project after project. Drinking too much, using my bitterness as an excuse for my bad behavior, for hurting people:”

  “Like Megan:”

  “Yes.”

  “You did not raise her?”

  “When she was six, I bought a house and stopped running away. But Frank had to shame me into it. a man; he said.‘Be a father. Raise your daughter.’”

  “So we have some things in common:”

  “What?”

  “I killed my husband by fantasizing about his death. We’re spouse killers. Outcasts:”

  Pat did not immediately respond. Behind him were a series of surface relationships that had failed because of his refusal to commit, a refusal born of loyalty to his dead wife, a proud, stubborn loyalty that quickly became a fetish. It was, he had told himself with deadly seriousness, the least he could do for the girl he had killed—and to punish himself—to never fall in love again. Ahead was a world he could never have imagined would exist up until a few days ago: Megan running, desperate, turning to Pat for help; a grandchild. And Catherine.

  “We can build on these things, I suppose,” he said finally, smiling, shaking off the somberness of his thoughts.

  Catherine smiled as well on hearing this, and Pat, seeing how beautiful her smile was, took her hand and held it in his. Her skin was soft, feminine, her fingers delicately tapered. Pat felt that Catherine’s hand, unadorned, the fingernails cut short and unpolished, like a young girl’s, contained the story of her whole life, that if he stared at it long enough he would see her future. And his. Smiling at this thought, he touched the same spot on the back of Catherine’s hand that she had touched on his earlier, then returned it to her lap.

  “You were very brave with Doro,” Catherine said.

  “No, not really,” Pat answered.“He’s just a kid:”

  “Gypsy boys grow up very fast:”

  “Do you think he meant what he said?”

  “I do. If Megan is with gypsies, Doro will find her:”

  “And the revenge he’s seeking? Is he serious?”

  “I believe he is:”

  “The other two were mute:”

  “Yes, they were quiet. I believe all three of them know how to kill:”

  “So that’s our team. You and me and three gypsy boys:”

  “And Uncle Daniel:”

  “And Uncle Daniel:”

  “And tomorrow you will see what your future looks like:”

  “My future?”

  “Yes, your grandson. You must live for him, Patrick. No matter what, you must live for him.”

  And for Megan, Pat thought. And for you. Not least of all for you, Catherine.

  ~12~

  MOROCCO, APRIL 4, 2003

  Throughout the winter and early spring of 2003, Megan went back to Sidi Moumim, Casablanca’s vast slum, many times. At first Lahani accompanied her. When he wasn’t in town, he sent Mohammed. Sidi Moumim was not the place for a Western woman of a certain age, however modestly dressed, to be walking around alone. She discovered early on, however, that no one would engage in anything but polite and meaningless conversation with her in the presence of either man. So, despite the danger, in mid-March she started going on her own, primarily to the Carrières Thomas neighborhood, whose souk Lahani had introduced her to a week or so earlier. Her strategy was simple: go frequently to the open-air, and therefore safe, market square; befriend a respected, English-speaking merchant—preferably an older man—although respected was the operative word; be seen as being under his protection; use that friendship and the perception it generated to get the natives, preferably the angry young male natives, to open up. This strategy had worked before, in Muslim enclaves in London, Paris, Madrid, and Berlin. But here in Morocco it was different. Casablanca, Sidi Moumim, Carrières Thomas: these were Arab enclaves within Arab enclaves, concentric circles enclosing ever denser, more secretive, and more suspicious communities.

  Her break came one afternoon in early April. She had been to a dress-maker’s shop in the Carrières Thomas market to pick up the four djellabas, two silk and two spun cotton, that she had been fitted for a few weeks earlier. In the interim, she had dropped by several times to speak to the wife of the shop’s owner, Yasmine, a plain-looking but highly intelligent woman of Lebanese descent who was vastly curious about America and who stopped whatever she was doing whenever Megan arrived to sit, sip mint tea, and talk. Yasmine had not been in the shop when Megan picked up her djellabas, so she decided to have tea by herself in the café in the square, edged in between a dentist’s and a brass worker’s stall. She had been feeling nauseous on and off since the day before and thought the tea might settle her stomach. From where she was sitting, in the shade of a frayed but serviceable awning, she could see a snake charmer squatting before a cobra, playing hypnotically on his wooden flute, the crowd of natives looking on in hushed silence, as if the slightest noise would break the spell the snake had been put under. Megan was mesmerized as well, and was therefore startled when she felt someone insistently tugging on the sleeve of the cotton blouse she had put on that morning over a silk T-shirt to go with her jeans and sandals. Looking up, she saw that it was Hakim, Yasmine’s twelve-year-old son, who was pulling on her sleeve.

  “Miss America, Miss America,” he was saying, “you come for medicine, you come for medicine:”

  Megan followed Hakim back to the dressmaker’s, where Yasmine greeted her with a hug and immediately poured out the thick, sweet mint tea that would be among the few contenders to be named Morocco’s national drink.

  “You are ill,” Yasmine said.

  “Yes,” Megan replied, remembering that she had mentioned her upset stomach to Yasmine’s husband when she picked up her djellabas.

  “My brother-in-law Abdullah is a pbarmacien, a chemist. He has a shop in the souk. If you like, Hakim will take you there. Abdullah will prescribe something for your stomach:”

  �
��Thank you, yes,” Megan replied.“When I return we will talk:”

  Physically, the Carrières Thomas souk, though much smaller and not nearly as clean, was not unlike its more famous counterpart in Marrakech. Both were accessible from a public square, and both consisted of a rabbit-warren of winding streets and alleys—many of them dead-ends-and permanently tented minimarkets that were often as dark during the day as they were at night. In both souks, the street-front shops and the stalls in the markets sold everything from freshly slaughtered lamb to love potions. Unlike in Marrakech, however, in Carrières Thomas there were no tourists, but more to the point, no foreigners at all. Not the adventurer looking for sex or drugs; not even the stereotypical ex-pat—stoned or drunk or both—that Megan had spotted with depressing consistency slumped at a café table deep in the bowels of other Arab cities. Did they enter and disappear, or did they sense the hatred in the air and stay away? The same hatred, for example, that she saw on the faces of the small group of Arab men—all young, all bearded—standing in front of a coffee shop, who turned to stare at her as she and Hakim passed. Once, when she and Hakim stopped to let a man leading a basket-laden donkey pass, she looked back along the narrow alley they were in and realized that not only would she have a hard time getting back on her own, but that she would not want to try. She said as much to Hakim, who assured her that he was under strict instructions from his mother to wait in his uncle’s shop for Megan to make her purchase and then lead her back.