by David Shafer
In the morning, sitting on the toilet, she looked between her knees and was comforted when her eye landed on the little hexagonal floor tile that had cracked to look like an old woman talking to a butterfly. Dylan had once said to her, No, not an old woman talking to a butterfly. That’s a fish about to eat a piece of fish food.
But, lifting her gaze from the cracked tile, Leila noticed that the bathroom wasn’t as clean as it should have been. This was strange. Mariam Majnoun considered herself the personal enemy of any scuzz, dust, film, fliff, grime, or splodge that tried to breach her walls.
After a long shower, she dressed and then knocked lightly at the door of the den. Then a little less lightly.
“Come,” said her father.
Leila had prepared herself—she thought—for the sight of her dad as a cardiac patient. But no, she hadn’t, it turned out. When she was home a year ago, he was just a guy nearing retirement—a bit stooped, and squinting at labels—but you could be that way for twenty good years. Whereas the Cyrus Majnoun in the hospital bed in the den looked to be near the lip of the canyon. The skin around his eyes. Leila must have displayed her shock, because her dad winced before he smiled. But his smile was a true thing and he said her name in a still-strong voice and as she ran toward him, he zizzed up his adjustable bed with dispatch.
She hugged him as best as you could hug someone who was sitting up in bed.
“So was it London or New York you were stuck in?” he asked her.
“New York,” she decided. “I had to debrief with Helping Hand.”
“Ah, yes, the employer with the dumb name. Are they going to straighten out your problems with the unreasonable Burmese?”
“It’s unclear.”
“Well, anyway, I get to see you, which brings me joy.”
There was a ten-second stretch of not saying anything, and then Leila thought she would cry, so instead she said, “This bed fits in the den just fine.”
“Yes, it does,” said her father, nodding and surveying the room, as if Leila had flown home from Burma to evaluate the feasibility of putting a hospital bed in the den. Another ten seconds or two weeks ticked by and then her father said, “Leila, I have not yet said to you that this thing they say I did…these charges. I want you to know—”
“Dad, I know.” Leila cut him off. “I know that. And not just because it’s you, but also…” She stopped. What would be gained by telling her dad about Dear Diary? Would it help in any way to say that she knew that he had been set up? Not by the maladjusted math teacher he’d fired two years ago (as Dylan reported he suspected) but by a cloaked and tentacular super-mafia? And that this had been done to him because of her nosiness and her whole pursuit-of-truth thing? And that she knew this because the nameless agency’s antagonist network had semi-abducted and mind-melded her?
“I just know it, Dad. Don’t ever have a sliver of doubt that I know that, okay?”
“Not a sliver,” he said, and then he looked like he might start to cry, but then he saw, through the large den window, that his wife had arrived home.
Mariam Majnoun was getting out of Peggy Pilkerson’s (actually, her ex-husband Pete Pilkerson’s) sparkly brown Corvette, which was of an era when Corvettes had ludicrously long and potent hoods. Wafting from the Corvette, across the tiny garden and through the window, came the tinkle of her mom’s pretty laugh, unrestrained, and a guffaw from Peggy, deep in the penile car. Mariam swung the big car door closed—she was almost unbalanced by the force she had to summon for the task—and crossed the lawn to the front door, with the extra-intentional gait of the still slightly drunk.
It wasn’t until her mother had come inside and click-click-clicked straight upstairs and Leila had turned to watch Peggy’s Corvette growl away that she noticed that her Dear Diary loaner car was gone.
“So, you left with the impression that these Dear Diary people could, like, unframe Dad?” said Dylan. He was skateboarding beside her as she ran. It was the second morning since she’d returned. She wanted to do at least five miles, but after two she was hurting and was considering a tighter loop; if she cut over behind the place that used to be the Noodle House but was now Cell Phone Depot, she could pick up Valley Drive and go back home that way. That might also be a way to lose Dylan, whose pointed questions over the first two miles had caused her to realize that she didn’t know enough about Dear Diary’s aims and methods.
“Yeah. That’s what they said.” Leila was not a talk-while-you-run type, so she did not expand on the answer.
“But you didn’t get from the rehab guy what they wanted you to get from him, right?”
“I did not.” They were on a slight downhill incline here, so Dylan was cutting the pretty, slacker-y arcs of the expert skateboarder. Leila liked that part of skateboarding, but the noise of the wheels she found grating. “I’m just saying,” he said over the noise, “you got a big song and dance from these people who claim they can ignore borders and hack the state and rescue Dad”—he carved a lacy arc—“but that also just makes them hackers and human traffickers, and I haven’t seen any letup in the pressure on Dad. You say they whisked you around Dublin and lavished all this hot spy attention on you”—another lacy arc—“but they could have been guerrilla theater, for all you know. All you got out of it was a broken Nokia.” He terminated another lacy arc in front of his sister. She was retying her laces and shifting the Dear Diary phone, which was an annoying lump beneath her sweaty waistband.
The phone hadn’t pipped since Portland, since it told her to leave Leo behind. She had tried to send messages to Sarah asking for updates, instructions. But No secure path available was all that displayed on its little visage.
“Though I guess the fake-documents thing takes them out of the class of theater,” Dylan allowed. He did that scrape-kick-catch move that skateboarders do to come to an unbothered and indolent stop.
And the eye test, thought Leila. But she hadn’t told Dylan about the eye test. “You should take better care of your board,” she said.
Dylan looked at her like she was thick. “No, I shouldn’t. It’s a skateboard. You NGO people are such dorks.”
This would be a good time to ask him. She’d have the rest of the run to think on his answer.
“Hey, D, did you go with Kramer and his forensics guy when they examined Dad’s computer?” Kramer was one of the lawyers. Dylan said he seemed to be the one most behind them.
“Oh hell, yeah. We had to report to a creepy, bunkerized office building in Long Beach. The Regional Interagency Technical Services Facility. But those guys are so juiced on power, they insist on calling it the RITSerF. And I thought our forensics guy was going to be able to examine Dad’s computer. But he didn’t actually get to touch or even see the computer or the hard drive. They gave him access to what they call a mirror image of the hard drive. I know, right? In America. It’s like the state says to the defendant, No, you can’t see the evidence we have against you, but here, we’ll draw you a nice picture of it.”
“That sounds like bullshit.”
“Well, that’s how it is now. And yes, we sat there and looked at all this nasty porn that was allegedly on the so-called mirror image of Dad’s hard drive.”
“Was it that nasty?”
“You want to know this?”
Leila nodded.
Dylan shrugged. “I’ve seen worse. It was mainly pictures, static images. Nothing violent. But the girls were totally girls. I mean, they were young.” Dylan dropped his eyes to the ground. “And then there were also these PowerPoint presentations. Shitty porn, no alleged minors evident, but with heads cropped from pictures of students from the school. It was revolting, especially because whoever did it didn’t scale the heads right.”
Leila exhaled. “Students from the school?”
“Yeah. See, that’s why it’s so bad, Leila. If they have any chance to get this before a jury, you just know they could select the kind of jury that would take one look at Dad and see a principal cutting and
pasting their daughters’ faces into porn collages.”
Fuck. He was right, she thought. “But couldn’t they have shown you anything? Come on. I mean, the mirror image of the hard drive?”
“I agree with you, sister, but read your Patriot Act. I told you that you shoulda voted for Nader.”
“He was a spoiler.”
“Well. We’re supposed to accept this mirror-image business because all the metadata on all the images is consistent with their having been downloaded to that computer, that ISP, on dates between eighteen months ago and four weeks ago. You know what metadata is?”
“I think so. Time stamps and stuff.”
“Yeah. And then there’s this elaborately attested to chain-of-custody protocol—a big sheaf of papers tied in a folder, with affidavits and thumbprints that swear, Here are the technicians who handled the evidence; here is the date at which it was moved from the middle school to the RITSerF. You even get to see a little photograph of the computer itself, sitting on a shelf in a room in the building you are in. But you cannot go to that room.”
“Motherfuckers,” said Leila.
“Indeedium, sisbag.”
“I’m gonna cut up here,” said Leila, indicating a long flight of cracked steps. Dylan wouldn’t want to take her shortcut. It would mean scrabbling across a scrub lot, and unlike his skateboard, his sneakers were precious to him; his shoe-care regimen was a family joke. She started up the stairs at a rapid clip, with taut fists, like Rocky.
Dylan called after her. “I hope you didn’t give those Diary people anything. What if they were a cult? Or an Armenian ID thievery ring?” It was annoying that Dylan was getting to be the sensible one here, he who had once styled himself a didgeridoo musician.
But why had her phone gone comatose? And the way the Toyota had been repoed. That felt like evidence disappearing. She still had her Lola Montes papers. Was she supposed to destroy them? Or would they self-destruct? She moved them from beneath her mattress, lest she be engulfed in flames, and put them into a plastic envelope and then under the large pot of the struggling lemon tree on the tiny back patio.
That afternoon in Costco, Leila had a fight with her mom about the type of T-shirt they would buy for Cyrus. Mariam had selected for her husband another five-pack of white V-necks, the same shirt she had been buying for her husband for thirty years.
“How about some of these, Mom?” said Leila, holding a couple of alternatives above the rowboat-size shopping cart. Two crew necks, brown and light blue.
Mariam did not disguise her disdain for her daughter’s suggestion. She made a waving motion with her hand at the idea. In the back of her throat, Leila could feel a fight coming on.
“You think if you came home with shirts other than those broken-man shirts, he would somehow not be all right with it, right?” said Leila, a little too loudly. “You’re going to imply that he’s the one who has trouble with change. But that’s you, Ma. Just let the man try a blue shirt.” Leila thought she saw the surprise in her mom’s face; she thought she saw her almost engage on the point. Things had been brittle between them in the three days since Leila had returned. Her family was like the American Midwest—storms brewed for days before cracking open. But the middle of a Costco aisle was not the place, in Mariam’s view.
“Leila. Show a little respect.” She cast her own eyes down quickly, as if to teach her daughter how submission was properly expressed.
“Mom,” said Leila, trying a deep breath, “I do show you respect. But I’m a grown-up. Let’s try a little co-respect, can we?”
Mariam rolled her eyes in a brief and minuscule fashion. “Leila,” she said, “I really don’t know what you want from me. Your father likes these shirts. I should ignore what I know to be true? You say I make him into a broken man. Why would a daughter say that? It is not respectful. Your father needs routine right now. Those shirts you would bring to him…” She stopped and silently contemplated the medical risk posed by the T-shirts that Leila had chosen.
“They would cause his death. I know, Mom. That’s why I want to get them for him,” said Leila, fuming.
Mariam poked her chin high to avoid crying, and then she started crying and wheeled the cart away from her daughter. It was a grand wheeling-away, swift and dramatic. Leila looked like the asshole who had made her mom cry. She had swung too wildly, using that word death. What is it with the brutal lights in these hangar stores? she thought. It’s like living under a different sun.
A fat man in a Lakers jersey and cap, munching a sample burrito, stopped to stare.
“Fuck off, clown,” Leila said to him.
Leila bought the two T-shirts and met her mother at the car. Silently, they co-loaded the groceries into the Camry.
Only when they were both sitting in the still car did Leila say, “Mom, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you in there.”
Mariam was in the passenger seat; her eyes were smudgy with run makeup. But her voice was soft when she said, “Yes, you did, Leila. You are so good at it. But you should refrain from doing that, at least in public. There were people in there watching us.”
Leila pounced. “What do you mean?”
Her mother caught the pounce. “People. People who know your father, who are probably looking at us for some sign. What people did you think I meant?”
Leila ignored the question. “Mom, you’ve been totally oppositional since I got back. You’re finding every fault in me.”
Mariam came right back. “You are always mocking me. The others don’t make fun of me or of how I’ve spent my life. Then you get home and I am the big joke.”
There was some truth in that—Leila was the lead plaintiff in the family. “Yeah. Maybe a little. I’m sorry. But you know what, Mom? You can’t very well tell me I’m letting down the side by causing a scene in Costco when you’re out whoring around with Peggy Pilkerson every night.” Mariam pretended to be offended by the verb. “Oh, come on. You know what I mean. Gallivanting. Whatever.”
“For years now you have been saying I should loosen up and get my own life. Now I should stop having a little fun in the midst of a dark time. Which is it?”
“How about you can take up gambling and gin but only after Dad’s out of these woods?”
“So we’re negotiating now? How long are you home for this time?”
“That’s not what we’re talking about here.”
“Certainly not. We’re never allowed to talk about that.”
Deep breath. “Mom, it’s not that we’re not allowed to talk about it. It’s just that that’s not what we’re talking about right now.”
“Then what are we talking about right now?”
That could have been a rhetorical maneuver—put the agenda-making on the other guy’s shoulders—but here it seemed a sincere offer of armistice, like when you admit that you are adrift on the sea of your argument. Leila tried to see her mom in full. Not just as her mom but as all the things she was: a woman who had given up a career, an exile who had never stopped missing home.
“I guess we’re talking about why we’ve been so mad at each other since I got back. I think our sniping at each other is making it harder for everyone else, you know?” Leila started the car and eased out of the spot.
“Okay,” said Mariam. “I’ll tell you why I’m mad. You always treat your father more kindly than you treat me.” That was all she said, and she even said it without rancor.
Leila was pierced with contrition. Of course, now, with his being laid up in that bed, marooned in the den, Leila was being extra kind to him. But her mom was right: Leila had always been a little nicer to her dad. That’s just the thing she had with him: more distance, more kindness. “I’m sorry,” she said. They were waiting to take a right.
“Now, you go,” said her mom.
“What?”
“Why you’re mad.”
Fine. “Because I’m doing what you told me to do. You said I should be independent. You gave me all those lady-doctor coloring books
and you said study study study. I am really good at my job,” Leila said. She didn’t want to go into the situation with Helping Hand, about how maybe she hadn’t been as good at that job. Point was that she was accomplished and well thought of in her field. “You never ever say anything about that. And now you just want me to make babies.” She joined a slow chute of traffic and was looking to get three lanes left in a block and a half.
“Leila, you will want children. Please don’t wait too late. The study study study was just so that you would have your pick of men. I wanted you to have the smartest and kindest and handsomest.”
Of course. Mariam was mad at the NGO sector for making her marriageable daughter into a global houseguest, willing to live in a second-tier megalopolis for eight months in aid of toilets or something, but unwilling to do the work that leads to a family. Now Leila had waited too long, turned down too many good men; she would end an unclaimed treasure, a clog-shod saddo, a terminated branch of the Majnoun tree.
But for Leila, her mom’s endorsement of marriage and children had come too late. Mariam had done a fine job raising her children, but she’d looked mildly aggrieved throughout. Little Dylan once asked her, “Mommy, are your shoes too tight?” It was not recorded as a funny family anecdote.
“Well, also so that you would be smart,” Mariam hastened to add. “So that no one would be able to fool you. But it was not so that you could be alone, giving all your youth to these…bureaucracies.”
How Leila wished to refute the charge. But lately it did feel as though her impressive career was adding up to nothing behind her. Allie, her best friend growing up, had two children and a successful bakery business, with a fleet of vans and a twenty-foot-wide oven. Leila had lots of good stories, and was prized at dinner parties. But the stories people wanted to hear were not the ones she wanted to tell. She still carried school debt and still had cardboard boxes in her parents’ tiny attic.
