Origin

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  He sighs and runs a hand over his bowed head, his scalp reddening. “You know I took a chance, right? Sending you there?”

  “Lab techs aren’t supposed to visit crime scenes.” I’m trying to agree with him, but I come off sounding like Peg instead. I sink into the couch across from him.

  He lifts his face to me so his lids lower. “Yeah, so—your conclusion is: the house felt ‘wrong’? That’s what you have for me?”

  “Smelled wrong. Really. I had to get out—it wasn’t—I couldn’t be in there.”

  “Ah, the house smelled funny.” He’s almost smiling, but it isn’t an ordinary sort of smile. More like he’s marveling. High sarcasm.

  “Frank, I think Alyce’s right—it’s a waste of time for me to be combing for prints. Did they run that toxicology screen on the toys? I swear there’s something there.”

  He sighs. “Yes, yes, the screen. And you know how the county loves running expensive tests based on evidence like bad smells. They’re slashing at my budget as we speak.” He runs his fingertips over his brow bone. “Lena, here’s another tidbit for you to chew over—that reporter friend of yours? Charlie says she’s going to be putting it out there that you think there’s a baby killer.”

  “I never told her that—I don’t think I did.” I touch my hair—it feels stiff, as if I’d failed to wash all the shampoo out. “But Frank . . .” I take a breath, place both hands flat on his desk. “I do think there’s a killer.”

  He pauses. Stares at me, his limestone gaze. “What evidence?”

  I drop my eyes. “That odor was so dissonant. It was completely out of place.”

  “How come no one else’s picked up on it?”

  “Most people don’t have enough sense of smell.” I open my hands. “Frank, you asked for what I got, and this is it.”

  He centers the folder on his desk. “I’m hearing that you’ve got suspicions. Which is different from hard evidence. There’s a whole bunch of emotions surrounding this case, and I think it’s easy to get caught up. Got to watch it, Lee.”

  “I am careful.”

  He’s shaking his head. “Not saying you’re not. But I am saying I don’t think the evidence is there. And one thing we do not need is a false panic. The cops are already agitated, saying that the bonehead detectives think there’s a bogeyman running around central New York. The conspiracy freaks’ll start clogging up the switchboard. Next we’ll be hearing that parents all over the county are pulling their kids out of school. People read stuff and then they’re out the door with torches and a hanging noose.”

  “I don’t want to start a panic,” I murmur.

  “Uh-huh.” He folds his arms over his chest. “Where is the evidence for a goddamn killer?” he says. “Show me the evidence and I’ll be the first one—” He breaks off. “You didn’t like the smell,” he says again, almost to himself. “What am I supposed to do with that? I don’t know if you’re losing your mind or I am.”

  There’s a mirrored placard on the wall behind his head—a special commendation from the city commissioner. In the mirrored surface, sliding like liquid into the engraved words, Citation for Excellence, I see Peg’s reflection, a bloated, fish-like profile, as she slowly passes his cracked-opened door. “You know what I’m really not interested in? I’m really not interested in hysterical parents all calling here looking for bodyguards because they think they heard something in the bushes. And I’m also not interested in getting a call from the FBI wanting to lend a friendly helping hand, sending over their boys in windbreakers to monkey around in my office!”

  “I’m not talking to anyone, Frank, I’m not. I never would discuss things like this outside the Lab.” I rub my arms, defensive.

  Frank sits back; his chair grunts, the wheels slip him backward an inch. “The rumors will start with or without your help, Lee,” he says. His voice is more neutral now; perhaps he’s tired out. His eyelids are swollen, his lower face pouched with shadows. “Fine. Look. Clean the other casework off your desk and focus on the Cogans for now. If reporters call you—be polite, but do not talk.” He relaxes his head, as if he’s thinking about something else. “Do you understand what I mean by that?”

  I look at my feet and realize I’m wearing outdoor boots—I’d forgotten to change into shoes. “Of course I understand, Frank,” I mutter. “I’m not a fool.”

  I SIT IN THE BREAK room with Alyce, Sylvie, and Margo. The room has a blistering whiteness that floats away from the walls. Olive tones emerge from beneath the skin of my hands and Alyce and Sylvie look washed out and purplish. Margo’s mahogany skin looks smudged. She, as usual, is telling us her problems. Her ex-husband, an occasionally recovering alcoholic with a decent job as an insurance actuary, is threatening to sue for custody of their two small children. She says he cries in front of Fareed and Amahl whenever it’s time to take them back to her on Sunday evening. Then he dumps the children—who’re now distraught and exhausted—back home.

  Last week, Margo confided to me that she was behind on her bills; she said she really needed her DNA certification for the pay raise. When I offered to lend her some money until her certification, she gave me a look that seemed to slip from hopeful incredulity to outrage. She said, “I don’t need your money.”

  Now Margo pushes the hair back from her face, tries to twist it around into a knot behind her head, but it comes undone. She straightens her hair so it looks shiny but brittle. There are black hairs curled all over her acrylic sweater. She’s chronically fatigued, her lower face draped down. She’s like Peg that way, though unlike Peg, she isn’t a collector of other people’s misfortunes. Margo’s just tired. It won’t stop snowing and it’s only January: and it takes her fifteen minutes in the freezing cold, revving and idling, to get her Hyundai warmed up. Amahl tears around, hyper—the school nurse thinks he’s ADD, wants to give him Ritalin, and she’s dating someone new, apparently—or trying to—some guy that her ex keeps threatening to “rearrange.”

  She speaks as if it costs her a huge effort to put it all into words, trying to remember what it is exactly that makes everything so hard. “He’s always saying he’s going to take Amahl out of school and move away. I just figure I’m safe ’cause as long as he keeps talking about anything means he won’t actually go and do it.”

  Alyce releases a low, impatient breath. She’s barely restraining herself from dispensing advice that will piss Margo off.

  I turn away for a moment, gazing at the wax paper that held my cheese sandwich. Looking through this to the lunch table, which seems to contain a vibration like a voice. I look up and say, “Alyce, do you know if they’re running that toxicology screen on the toys at the Cogan house?”

  Alyce puts down her salad fork and looks at me irritably. “Lena, for heaven’s sakes. We don’t need to run a tox on children’s toys. . . .”

  Margo surges at Alyce. “There you go again, there you go! I cannot believe you. Here our ‘big star examiner’”—she starts to roll her eyes, then stops—“thinks she’s got a lead on this killer and you want to sweep it under—”

  Alyce shouts over her, “That’s because there is no goddamn killer, Margo. Do you know why she wants the test? Because she thought something smelled funny.”

  “What is your big problem, Al? Are you afraid if Lena finds something, then you look bad, is that it?”

  “Oh my God, if anyone’s going to look bad around here—”

  Their voices clang together, Alyce jabbing at the table. Sylvie, who’s barely said a word during lunch, slides a single miserable glance at me over the table. We both retreat from the break room and walk down the corridor, Alyce and Margo’s voices ringing behind us.

  Sylvie looks anxious and startled. Even though she’s in her mid-thirties, she seems years younger. “What does it mean, Lena?” she asks. “I mean, the tox screen?”

  I shake my head. �
�That’s the weird thing about all this fighting.” I punch the elevator button. “If there’s a toxic chemical in the toy box, it’ll probably mean that there isn’t a killer. I mean, not the deliberate kind.”

  Sylvie smiles. “They’re both so obsessed with the whole idea of it, though—the killer thing—it almost doesn’t matter what we find, they’ll be unhappy.”

  THAT EVENING AFTER WORK, the moonlight is flat and silvery as fish bones; it floats in the darkness, a cage of ribs. There’s something weird in the air, in that bone of a moon. The wind flashes through the fabric of my coat, freezing me. At the door to my apartment, it feels as if something is standing just on the other side of the door. I put my hand out and watch it turn the knob. There’s nothing on the other side of the door, of course.

  I undress and go in to lie on the bed; something like illness seems to be moving through my body. If I had to explain this feeling, I’d call it uncertainty. Not such a crisis for anyone in another line of work. I stretch out on the bed reading the map of the universe written in the cracks spidering across the ceiling. I feel my fingers elongating, the knuckles bulging and the skin stretching, whitening like onionskin, my palms become soft, pliable. I turn my head and try losing myself to sleep, but something makes me open my eyes and that’s when I see it: drawn through the grime on the window, a giant cross.

  I sit bolt upright, my skin electrified. I get up and walk, half crouched, around the window. The cross—about two feet long, one foot across—is drawn on the outside of the window. Visible only when the room light is out and the streetlight shines through the bars of the fire escape. As far as I know, Charlie is the only person who’s been in my apartment, and that was several months ago now. This happened recently. “Mr. Memdouah?” I call, my voice wobbling in the silence. I check all the closets and under the bed. Finally, I remove some dusting powders from my desk and dust the edges of the window, the sill, and the walls around the window. Usually I wear a mask when I work because the dusting powders are so toxic, but tonight I just try to hold my breath and move fast. By the time I’m done, it’s two-thirty, I’ve come up with zilch, and I have to get up for work in four hours. I decide not to think about it and climb into bed. The rest of the night I wake up every ten minutes and stare around the room, certain that I hear someone breathing.

  CHAPTER 16

  THERE ARE FLOWERS ON MY DESK AT WORK. A LOOSE BUNCH OF summer flowers, daisies and black-eyed Susans, in a glass mason jar with a white satin ribbon around the neck. Charlie is sitting in a chair beside my desk, staring at them.

  And Alyce is at her desk, watching Charlie over her half-glasses. When Charlie left me for his girlfriend, I logged hours of after-work conversations on the phone with Alyce. I poured out the details of his infidelities and then begged her not to tell anyone. She would say that this was what men were like—cops in particular. She also regaled me with stories of her own terrible old boyfriends, analyzed her disastrous divorce of eighteen years ago and her long-standing infatuation with Frank, whether or not it could ever be requited. About a year ago, she started saying that she’d “given up” on men.

  “Isn’t this sweet?” Charlie says as I walk in. “Look, a cozy note and everything.” He holds out a small card. “Didn’t even read it.”

  “You must be wanting a medal right now, hunh, Chuck?” Alyce asks.

  I hang up my coat and take the note from Charlie. I sit across from him at my desk. There’s a new file there, an inch thick. I place the card on the folder, where it pops open, and I make out the words: pleasure working with you. I pretend to yawn.

  “You’re not going to read it? You’re supposed to read mail as soon as you get it, Lena,” he says. He tugs on his leather belt, handcuffs knocking against the chair.

  Peg wafts into the room: she takes in Charlie, Alyce, and me. “Lena, you got flowers,” she tells me.

  “Guess what, Peg,” Alyce says. “She can see that.”

  Peg glances at Alyce, then back at me. “They’re from Keller Duseky.” She fingers the back of her hair, curling her knuckles through the strands. “Have you checked the evidence vault yet?”

  “No, Peg, I have not.” I rest my elbows on my desk.

  “You should,” she says. She gives Charlie a wave and goes out.

  Charlie says, “So they’re from Officer Friendly; that figures, doesn’t it? That’s cozy. Officer Friendly makes everyone’s day brighter, doesn’t he? Especially my wife’s.”

  “Charlie, you know we’re separated now. For over a year now,” I say. “Almost two, actually.” I say this calmly even though the air is buzzing, there’s a sound of something chittering or chirping, like geckos, in the radiators.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t recognize that separation.” He tugs at the radio snapped to his shoulder as if he’s about to bark something into it. He’s supposed to be out in his patrol car right now, and I’m sure he’s already behind on his reports. He rubs his eyes. I wonder if women still think that he’s handsome. Years ago when we were first dating, Rose, one of the police clerks, actually told me she thought Charlie was dreamy. “Whoever heard of posies in the middle of the winter?” he grouses.

  I take the arrangement and put it on the floor behind my desk. “Lay off, Charlie.” I put my hand on the card. “I like flowers.”

  Alyce raises her eyebrows but doesn’t say anything. She looks down at the page in front of her as if she were reading it.

  Charlie pushes his face forward, not quite frowning. I’m almost certain that he’s trying to remember if I like flowers. But now he’s pulled his lips in, and he’s affronted and dignified again. “Fine by me,” he says. He glances at Alyce, who looks back, quickly, to her papers. “Fine and dandy. Did I ever say you didn’t like flowers?” He stands, hitches his belt once more, tries to straighten his back—which I know aches—the heavy leather holster and club and Taser and Glock clanking, and he goes to the door. “So, see ya later, Len,” he says.

  I say, “Okay, Charlie.”

  Charlie’s lips part. “Right,” he says, his voice papery.

  After Charlie goes, Alyce tilts her head up at me. The lens of her half-glasses magnify the opaque turquoise of her eyes. They look clear as filtered water. The skin around her eyes is soft and folds when she smiles. But now she just studies me.

  MARGO ARRIVES LATE for work; Amahl runs in ahead of her. She holds Fareed tipped against a diaper-draped shoulder. He gurgles, eyes half shut, leaving a trail of drool. Her hair seems to be melting out of her ponytail. “The idiot never showed up this morning.” She pushes her fingers into her hair, scrubbing it back, her raw black hair tangling in all directions, spikes of bangs falling into her eyes, long blades falling down her neck. Amahl has preschool three days a week; the rest of the time Margo relies on a sitter for both kids. “What’m I supposed to do?” she asks, one palm up, as if someone were arguing with her. Someone is always invisibly arguing with Margo.

  Amahl runs to my desk, leans against my leg, rests his elbows on my thigh. His hair is a wiry halo ending in corkscrews. His eyes light up with expectation. “Leeeena!” He jumps up and down, then butts my leg with his springy head. “Tell me about the Rainies!”

  I lift my eyes to see if Margo heard that, but she’s half sitting on Alyce’s desk, rubbing the back of her hand against her brow, her voice a low, ebbing current.

  Amahl drums his small hands on my leg: “Rainies! Rainies!”

  He’s talking about the Rain People, a tribe of tiny beings that I invented years ago to entertain him on the days that the ex or the sitter didn’t show up or the preschool nurse sent him home or there was another of the many mishaps that seem to plague Margo. The story of these creatures is that they live in the rain forest, sleeping in the trees, living in cooperation with the animals. They invented the rain and the snow, and when they’re happy it rains, when they’re sad it snows. I told Amahl that if he
climbed the trees he’d see them, and if he whispered special words they would hear him.

  But I noticed that, after several afternoons of these stories, Margo was watching us. Smiling in a deliberate way. Instinctively, I started to lower my voice when I talked to Amahl. Then one day at work, Amahl was sprawled on Margo’s lap as she tried to read police reports, and he said, “Mommy, what do you think the Rainies eat for dinner?”

  She put Amahl on the floor with a toy and came to my desk. “Lena,” she said quietly, “I’d rather you stop talking about those things to my son. He’s too young to get what’s reality and what isn’t.”

  I looked across the room where Amahl was sitting on the floor, pushing a truck under the desk. Beneath my sternum, I felt a blunt upwelling, something like sediment in the blood. I stared at the papers in my hand.

  “I know it’s hard to know how to talk a four-year-old,” she said. “But no more stories, ’kay?”

  NOW MARGO IS SAYING, “No, sweetheart.” She hoists her son up under his arms and carries him back to her desk. “Lena has to work. Let’s leave her alone.”

  “He’s no bother,” I say. I can tell my smile is flattened out.

  She looks at me for a moment. “No, really, I don’t feel—” she says, so slowly she almost sounds ironic.

  Alyce cuts in, “Lena, you know what, there’s something you need to see in Evidence. I don’t think you’ve had a chance to check it out yet, have you?” She hands me a case assignment sheet. “As Peg generously reminded us.”

  I take the paper without looking at it and as I leave the office, I overhear Amahl saying, “Mommy, Lena is hiding flowers.”

  Through the big corridor windows, the snow is hissing and turning around the Lab grounds. It twists in the wind like snakes. I watch the snow for a moment. Then I take the assignment sheet to Darren, the young evidence tech, and we stand together under the closed-circuit cameras as he unlocks the room and opens the door.