The Submission: A Novel

by Amy Waldman

  “I think it’s an excellent idea,” he said. “Ms. Fathi will answer all the questions for me.” She compressed her lips. Mo couldn’t tell if she was pleased.

  “The committee should be up there,” Imam Rashid said. “Issam?”

  The meeting broke up soon after, and Mo managed to walk out with Laila. “What was going on in there between you and them?” His much longer legs had to work to keep pace with hers.

  “Which of these things is not like the other.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You didn’t notice I was the only uncovered woman in there? It’s a big deal for me to even be in that room. Those other women fought for seats on the council, and they couldn’t have won if they weren’t wearing the hijab. I’m new. Malik got me in there because I’ve been getting high-profile cases involving Muslims. Because I’m good. But it’s tense, as you noticed.”

  “So why bother with them? They don’t seem focused—that guy droning on about the Iraqis.”

  “I’m a solo practitioner. They can send cases my way. They publicize what I do. They lobby for my issues. The law is political, especially right now. If the government wants to find a way to forget the Constitution and detain people without charges, it will. Just as they will deny your memorial if they want.”

  “Not with you on my side.”

  She ignored this. “As for Ansar, he’s annoying but he’s not wrong. Not about the history of our foreign policy, not about how many Muslim civilians we’ve killed since the attack because of what was done to us or what might be done to us. We barely even pretend anymore that we’re trying to spread good in the world; it’s only about protecting us because we are good.”

  “I guess I’ve stumbled into something bigger than I realized.”

  “You don’t strike me as a stumbler,” Laila said.

  Maybe it was a coincidence, but the week the jury learned Mohammad Khan’s name, Claire’s son, William, dreamed that his father couldn’t find his way home. The nightmare came night after night, in black harmony with Claire’s tension over the memorial. After soothing William to sleep yet again, she poured a glass of wine and tried to think how Cal would have comforted him.

  The air was sharp, the grass dew-beaded, when she took the children outside early the next morning. Collect the stones, she told them, pointing to the dozens that bordered the flower beds, spiraled in the close-cropped grass, edged the paths to the pool and tennis court. She and Cal had scavenged them on trips to beaches, woods, mountains. Lavender, pale mint, coal black, veined, smooth, striated, glitter-traced, dull as mud. River-polished, sandpaper-rough, dagger-sharp.

  “Do you remember what Daddy showed you when you went hiking?” she asked William. “About how to find your way home when you were lost?”

  William shook his head no, and she nearly screamed at the speed of his forgetting. But he hadn’t even been four when Cal took him to the Catskills. She crouched and stacked some stones into a little pile. “You put a pile on the trail so you remember which way you came. Then, a little farther on, you put another one, then another. Just like the bread crumbs in Hansel and Gretel, but no animals will eat them.”

  William nodded and repeated the explanation to Penelope. “Animals don’t like stones,” he said. “They don’t taste good.”

  Penelope put one in her mouth.

  “No school today!” Claire announced. “We’re going to make a trail for Daddy.”

  The idea was pure Cal—impulsive, creative. Before they set out, the word for the piles came to her, and she double-checked the dictionary. “Cairn: a heap of stones piled up as a memorial or as a landmark.” The memorial part she didn’t tell William. Let him pretend he was bringing his father home, just as she was pretending the whole city wasn’t consumed with another, more consequential memorial.

  She checked the news briefly before they left. On NY1 a reporter was interviewing, yet again, Sean Gallagher, founder of the Memorial Support Committee. His chin jutted out like an Indian arrowhead. “It’s like being stabbed in the heart to hear that a Muslim could build this, stabbed in the heart,” he said. “We want that message to go out to the jury loud and clear.”

  He thought he should have been on that jury, Claire knew—he had argued so to the governor herself. But he was volatile, even aggressive, and so it had been constituted without him. The families stood behind him because he promised to yell on their behalf. Yet for the same reason he would never reach the precincts of real power, whose denizens knew to whisper. They hadn’t spoken since the news of the Muslim winning. This made her nervous, but Paul had told her to hold off calling family members, Sean or others, until he came up with a plan.

  She and the children drove into the city and had the nanny wait nearby with the car. Their first stop was near the attack site but not within sight of it. The children she took there only on the anniversary, when people and pomp camouflaged the barrenness. Now, especially, William’s vividly imagined garden needed safeguarding.

  They placed three stones at the base of a lamppost and stepped back. William began to cry. Without knowing why, Penelope joined him.

  “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” Claire stooped to their level.

  “It’s too small,” William wept. “He won’t see it.”

  The hapless pile did look meager—disappointing—against the city’s vertical thrust. So did the three of them, for that matter.

  “Well then, we’ll make the pile bigger,” she said, balancing three more stones on top.

  She hustled them north: SoHo, Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, Madison Square Park, Times Square (William inexplicably insisted on the military recruiting station), Central Park (the Turtle Pond, the Sheep Meadow, Strawberry Fields). There was something enjoyably illicit in making these tiny, easily missed interventions in the city. The few people who slowed enough to notice them smiled at the children, thinking it a game. When William and Penelope began squabbling over which stones to use where, Claire started to say “It won’t work if you fight,” then caught herself.

  At lunch, William and Penelope giggled as they stacked their fries into cairns. Claire was, to her shame, bored of the game, and anxious. The nonstop calls on her phone had gone to voice mail like ballots into a box. The tally, she knew from checking her messages, was almost unanimous: the families were opposed to the Muslim, as they called him. When the phone rang again, on impulse she answered.

  “Claire, I just want to tell you, it’s like a stab to the heart,” a man’s voice said. They were all using Gallagher’s language; it was tiresome. She couldn’t quite place the caller’s name, but it didn’t matter. “Are you hearing us, Claire? Tell me you’re hearing us.”

  “I hear you,” she murmured; the children were in earshot. “I hear you.”

  Eager to get home, Claire spaced their stops farther apart to hurry the end. They arrived back in Chappaqua amid the long shadows and leaf glow of late afternoon, and began, with improvised ceremony, to place the last pile of stones beneath the gnarled copper beech by the house. At William’s dark look, Claire turned off her phone and knelt to bear witness. The children rearranged the stones as if they were perfecting a haiku.

  Sean was listing all of the relatives’ and first responders’ associations represented in the high-school auditorium when the families before him broke into outsize applause. Governor Bitman was striding across the stage toward him, her hair burnished by the theatrical lights. “This is a surprise” was all he had time to say before she had one manicured hand on his back and the other easing the microphone from his grip.

  “I’m here today so you know you have my support,” she said, speaking with practiced empathy. Her arm casually slid off of Sean so she could clutch the microphone with both hands. A tiny American flag pin glinted from the lapel of her forest-green pantsuit. “My goal is—has always been—a memorial the families, especially, can embrace. It’s all you have.”

  Sean knew that most of those present hadn’t voted for Bitman
, who was a Democrat. But their applause now promised they would. Having taken office less than a year before the attack, she’d been publicly stalwart in its wake, donning a mask to visit the site, air-kissing her way through hundreds of firefighters’ funerals. And now she was here, with them.

  “We can’t take this away from the jury,” she continued. “We have to respect the process. But the process includes public input, and that allows us to expand the jury to include all of you—to include all Americans, if necessary. We’re going to have a public hearing on this design, so if you don’t like it, go to the hearing and say so.”

  “What if we don’t like the designer?” Sean said. “I’m sorry to interrupt, Governor, but that’s why we’re all here today.”

  “Not liking the designer is not a legitimate objection, I’m afraid.” When he started to speak again she held up a “let me finish” hand. “But I think it’s safe to say that if you don’t like the designer, you’re probably not going to like his design.” She smiled. The crowd roared.

  “Before I go I just want to thank Sean Gallagher for leading the fight for this memorial,” the governor said. “He’s showing the same bravery as those who gave their lives that fateful day.”

  Sean reddened. He didn’t need to see his parents’ faces to read their scorn. He couldn’t even pretend that he would have been as brave as Patrick if given the chance: faced with a building pouring fire and smoke, he would have run away as fast as he could. Nor was he sure this would have been wrong. Patrick had charged into a building that pancaked almost immediately on top of him, and he’d left three sad-eyed children behind.

  The governor took Sean’s hand and raised it high and from somewhere a rock ’n’ roll version of “America the Beautiful” began to play. Then, with the air seeming to slosh like water in her wake, she was gone.

  With his microphone back, Sean tried to reclaim his audience’s attention. He began to pace. “You know, the night they picked the memorial, the jurors were up at Gracie Mansion, drinking Dom Pérignon. And they find out they picked a Muslim, and they say, ‘Wow, that’s terrific, what a message that will send to Muslims, that we’re their friend, that we have nothing against Islam, because what did Islam ever do to us?’” Knowing, bitter laughter rose from the seats. “And the families? They need to just get over it. Even our supposed family member on the jury—Claire Burwell—hasn’t reached out to us.”

  That this was particularly bitter for him, he didn’t say. Knowing that Sean’s support would be crucial for whatever memorial they picked, Claire had cultivated him. His awareness of this only partly diminished its effect. After one of the meetings between the jury and various family members, she invited Sean, who had been outspoken as usual, for a beer. When he said he didn’t drink, she seemed slightly thrown, as if she had counted on booze to bond them. She ordered a beer anyway, sipped it as if it was wine, and plied Sean with questions. He was awed by her beauty, her wealth, her intelligence; he’d never met a woman with so many advantages. At the end of the night—two beers for her, three jittery-making Cokes for him—he leaned and planted a kiss on her just to prove he could. She didn’t resist, simply withstood it, taut, even then wanting to keep his goodwill. His self-respect would have done better with being shoved. She had a decade on him, she said; his youth was better spent elsewhere. He’d spend it where he wanted, he told her.

  That had been the end of any actual physical contact, but only the beginning of the pretend kind. Over the succeeding months he projected Claire like a movie onto the ceiling of his bedroom, where he’d once tacked posters of Victoria’s Secret models on the fifty-fifty bet his mother wouldn’t look up. He undressed her like his nieces’ paper dolls, took her every way he could think of. Her flirting when she did see him couldn’t keep up with this fantasy life and so always read like a rebuff. This history—real, imagined—rumbled beneath her failure to call.

  “I’m here.” A voice sailed from the back of the room. “It’s me, Claire Burwell.” He located her at the entrance to the auditorium. Another woman stealing his thunder. Claire, clearly maneuvering for the advantage of surprise, hadn’t replied to the message he left about the meeting. With resentment he watched her move down the aisle at a deliberate pace.

  “Tell us it’s not true!” caromed a voice from the dark. Then dozens, shrapnel shredding her: “Is it true? Is it true? Tell us!”

  “What happened, Claire?”

  “Tell us you’ll stop it!”

  Half of what she heard had nothing to do with the memorial, as if two years of frustration and grief and anger had found their proper vent.

  “Three weeks, the Red Cross said—”

  “What they did to us—”

  “A Muslim—”

  “Protect the airlines who didn’t protect us—”

  “Counseling every goddamn Friday—”

  “They hate us—”

  “A big phony—”

  “A violent religion—”

  Claire, trying to speak, kept getting shouted down and so stopped trying. Her underarms prickled, but she worked at projecting serenity. Sean was prowling the stage with the bounding walk that always made her think of a young man trying to look older, a short one trying to look taller, maybe a poor one trying to look richer. From a distance his eyes looked sleepy, as if they had bedded down on the pillowy pouches beneath, but up close they were quick. Quick to suspect. Which was why, ever since she was picked for the jury, she had tried to be kind to him, if only to appease him. The solicitous phone updates. The regretfully flirtatious smiles (too flirtatious, per that uninvited kiss), suggesting that, if things had been different, if they hadn’t met under these circumstances, if, if, if … It had been a mistake not to call him once the news broke. She saw that now. She shot him a baiting look as she ascended the stage, suggesting he couldn’t control the crowd. As she had hoped, it provoked him into proving he could.

  “All right, all right,” he said, holding up a hand until he heard silence. “Claire’s here, we need to let her talk.”

  “Thank you, Sean; I’m sorry to be late—I didn’t have much notice,” she said. I’d just returned home from laying a trail for my dead husband; I had to leave my children, get into decent clothes, drive like a madwoman all the way back down through the city, only to be screamed at by all of you: this she didn’t say. “Thank you all for coming today. Your concern for this memorial is very powerful and reinforces what a sacred trust we, as the jury, have. I can’t go into much detail, but let me ask: How many of you like gardens?”

  Perplexed looks skittered across the audience. “Don’t worry, it’s not a trick question. Raise your hand if you like gardens. And yes, men, too. My husband wasn’t afraid to admit that he loved them.”

  Slowly hands rose, from the women first, then a good number of the men. When Claire was satisfied by the show of hands, she said, “That’s what the memorial is going to be. A garden. It’s perfect. A garden.”

  “What about the Muslim?” Sean said belligerently.

  “I can’t discuss rumors, and to be honest, I know almost nothing about the designer, since this competition was anonymous. What I do know is the beauty, the power of this design, the way it evokes all of our loved ones, and the buildings, too, so I hope you’ll keep an open mind.”

  “My mind closed toward Muslims the day they killed my brother,” Sean said.

  “I understand,” said Claire. “We’ve all struggled with that. But if you let them change you, they’ve won.”

  “The restrooms—do you know where … ?” Claire asked the first person she saw when she got backstage, a woman with short, severe gray hair who seemed to be awaiting her. Her mood was slightly giddy, thanks to the applause when she left the stage. She had made them love the idea of a garden memorial as much as she did.

  “I hope you’re not trying to fool us,” the woman said. A chill ran through Claire.

  She mustered a neutral look and said, “Of course not. I want you to know about
the memorial. I assume you lost—”

  “My son,” the woman said. “My firstborn.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Claire said, as if she hadn’t lost her own husband.

  “I don’t want your sympathy”—Claire blanched—“I want your vigilance. We don’t want a Muslim’s memorial, but I think you know that.”

  “If he won fairly, we can’t take it away,” Claire said, then instantly regretted it. She had just confirmed Khan’s selection when Paul had told her not to. There was something about the woman—a moral astringency—that begged both confession and challenge.

  “So he did win.”

  “The Garden won,” Claire said. “That’s what matters. What the memorial will be. That’s what matters.”

  A muscle memory of a smile moved the woman’s lips. “Sometimes I wish Patrick had died in a regular fire. No firefighter dies a private death, not if he dies on the job. But to have all these politics mixed in—I don’t like it, all … the noise. Grief should be quiet. A memorial should have the silence of the convent. Maybe it’s different losing a husband—”

  “I loved my husband,” Claire said, with deliberate hauteur.

  “I didn’t say otherwise.” That mirthless, mechanical smile again.

  Before Claire could respond, Sean came backstage. The meeting had ended.

  “Ma,” he said, to the woman with Claire.

  “It’s fine,” Mrs. Gallagher said. Her eyes didn’t leave Claire, who hadn’t thought, in her moment of candor, that she might be speaking to Sean’s mother. This magnified, considerably, the import of her mistake. She hadn’t lied onstage, exactly, but Mrs. Gallagher would likely hold her to account, just as she must hold Sean. Pleasing his implacable mother, filling the too-big shoes of his dead brother: these were dangerous, impossible goals. The fearsome pressure on him made him more worthy of fear. Her dread built, crows landing one by one in a field.