American Heart

by Laura Moriarty

  “Those poor souls,” Val said. She touched her forehead, her chest, and then each of her shoulders. “Eternal rest grant unto them.”

  I lowered my head, as that seemed the right thing to do. So I don’t know if Val was looking in the mirror or not. But out of the corner of my eye, I saw Chloe’s right hand move in a quick cross, forehead to chest, shoulder to shoulder, as if she’d been making crosses her whole Portuguese life, and with enough clear sorrow in her face that you could tell she meant it too.

  12

  WHEN WE GOT to our hotel room in Sherburn, I shook off my backpack, left my coat on, and told Chloe I was going for a walk.

  Right away, the two lines between her eyebrows showed up. “So late?” she asked. “By yourself?”

  “Nope.” I turned around and looked at the wall behind me. I could hear the television in the next room. “I’m going with one of my many good friends here in Sherburn.”

  I hoped she got that I was being sarcastic. We’d only been in town for an hour. Val had dropped us off at a diner that was just over a bridge from the interstate exit and cheap hotels, and when our waitress came over to take our order, I told her I liked her Sketchy shirt. After that she was super friendly, coming over to our table when she wasn’t busy to tell me she’d seen Sketchy play in Iowa City, and how they sounded better live. She even brought over two free cookies when she was leaving the bill, though Chloe hadn’t wanted hers. But other than that, and my brief interaction with the desk clerk downstairs, I hadn’t talked to anyone.

  Chloe sat on one of the beds and tugged off her hat. Some of her hair stuck straight up from static electricity. “You are sure it is safe?”

  I lowered my voice. “Uh. Probably a lot safer than walking around with you.”

  I wasn’t trying to be mean, but that was the truth. Maybe in Iran a girl couldn’t go for a walk in the dark by herself, but I walked around after dark by myself all the time, hair showing and everything. I had the pepper spray. I had the disposable phone, too, already free from its plastic packaging and tucked in my pocket, ready to go. But I didn’t want to bring up the phone to Chloe, and stress her out even more. I just wanted to go call Tess.

  “Just be careful.” Chloe yawned, rubbing her neck. The skin beneath her eyes was thin and shadowy, and just then, even with her mostly hennaed hair curling to her shoulders, she looked older than she did in the picture on the billboards, where she didn’t have her glasses, and she’d been wearing the headscarf. I didn’t know how long ago that picture was taken, but maybe it wasn’t that long ago. She might just look older because she’d been hiding in her friends’ house in Arkansas, not able to go for any walks or even stand outside, day or night.

  She made a groaning sound and tugged on her ear.

  “Hey,” I said. “There was a CVS over by that diner. You want me to get you more drops? Maybe try a different brand?”

  “No,” she said. “Thank you. I’ll be fine.” She closed her eyes and nodded like she was trying to convince herself.

  I’d planned to call Tess from the hotel’s parking lot. But when I stepped outside, a couple of bundled-up smokers were over in their designated area by a bench and a little sign, and even with the low rumble of the interstate behind the hotel, I worried they’d overhear. I bowed my head to the cold and started walking toward the bridge we’d crossed to get home from the diner. It had a walled-off lane for pedestrians, and as no one else was walking on it, it seemed a good place to make the call.

  “She’ll answer,” I told myself, talking out loud like a crazy person. “She will.”

  The moon had come out, shining on the river below, which was wide and moving so slowly that the water looked still, like the water of a lake. Cars rolled by behind me, and I pressed the phone tight against my ear.

  The first ring. I crossed my fingers and closed my eyes.

  She might tell me to leave Chloe right where she was and come home. She might say I’d been doing something crazy. She might say I’d done enough, getting Chloe as far north as I had, and that Caleb would just have to get over the half-fulfilled promise, as he was eleven years old and maybe not clear on what would happen to me if we got caught.

  Another ring.

  She might even say that what I was doing was wrong. Tess had always been one to defend Muslims, the ones she’d known, at least. But she might remind me that I didn’t really know Chloe, or if she was an innocent one or not.

  Another ring. I didn’t know what time it was in Puerto Rico, if they had Daylight Savings or what.

  I heard a click, an intake of breath, and I was so grateful I actually whimpered. But the joke was on me. It was just her outgoing message.

  “Don’t be difficult.” Her recorded voice sounded tinny. “If you didn’t catch me, send a text.”

  The beep was so loud it made me flinch, and I hit the wrong button before I ended the call. I didn’t want to leave a voice message, but it seemed even riskier to send a text, something her mom might see. I pulled up my coat sleeve and checked Tess’s watch. It was only eight thirty.

  I tapped in her number again. While I waited for the beep, I kept my gaze on the water, the strip of wavy moonlight shimmering in its center. The disposable phone didn’t have a camera, and I’d left my phone that wasn’t really a phone back at the hotel. So I did my trick from when I was little, pretending I could take a picture of something by just staring at it then blinking slowly.

  “Hey there. It’s me.” My voice came out wobbly, and I could feel ambush tears pressing up. “Uhhhh . . . sorry to be difficult with the voice mail. I’m in sort of an emergency. I’m out of town.” I bounced on my toes to stay warm. “Out of state, actually. I know you don’t get home until tomorrow, but don’t say anything to Aunt Jenny or anybody. Even your parents. Don’t tell anybody I called. I’m okay, but call back at this number as soon as you can. Okay. Hope Puerto Rico’s been fun.”

  I didn’t go back to the hotel. I wanted to answer and talk in private as soon as Tess called back, so I slipped in my earbuds and walked the rest of the way across the bridge, trying to look like I knew where I was headed.

  Sherburn didn’t seem much bigger than Hannibal. The downtown storefronts had striped awnings and names like Fabrics and More! and Shiffenburger’s Used Books and Novelties, and also a dessert shop with a hand-painted sign that said their ice cream was MADE FRESH WITH MILK FROM IOWA DAIRIES and DELICIOUS ANYTIME, but apparently not after eight thirty, as it was closed for the night, like almost everything else. The sidewalks were empty, and only the diner and the CVS were still open.

  Just as I was walking up to the door of the diner, the waitress who’d given me the free cookies pushed it open and almost bumped into me. She had a letter jacket on over the Sketchy shirt now—but her red hair, pulled back in a ponytail, made her easy to recognize.

  “Oh, hey there.” She jingled her keys. “Back again?”

  “I was just out for a walk, and I got cold,” I said. She didn’t look much older than I was. I would say seventeen at the most. When she was waiting on us, she’d asked if we were visiting from out of town, and I’d told her that Chloe and I were just passing through. I’d been careful not to lie to her about my age. She wouldn’t have believed for a second I was older than she was, fake ID or not.

  “Where’s your Portuguese aunt?” She tapped her glove to her head. It was yellow and black, like her jacket. “Or your cousin?”

  “My mom’s cousin. She’s back at the hotel.” Nosy Nelly, I thought. “She was tired.”

  “Yeah?” She half-smiled and shimmied her shoulders. “Well. If you’re out free for a while . . . you want to go on a Sherburn adventure?”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. We’d had a good discussion about Sketchy in the diner. But this girl didn’t know who I was. Maybe Sherburn, Iowa, was just a really friendly town. The whole time I’d been out walking, no one had honked or whistled or yelled anything gross at me. Still, this girl and I were pretty much strangers.
/>   “What kind of adventure?” I didn’t want to be rude.

  “There’s gonna be a raid.” As she passed by me, she tossed her keys up in the air, at least a foot, then caught them with the same glove. “Somebody’s been hiding Muslims, right here in town. There’s going to be some big action.”

  I clenched my teeth, working to make my face calm before I turned around. She’d said Muslims. Plural. Not just one. Chloe was fine. She was back at the hotel.

  “Where? Where’re they hiding them?”

  “Not even two miles away. I can’t believe it.” She was walking backward toward the parked cars. “But my boyfriend follows somebody who knows a hacker, and he says it looks for real. I got my manager to let me off early. My parents are headed down there, too.”

  Behind me, the engine of a car moved fast and loud down the otherwise quiet street. By the time I turned, I only saw taillights. They were probably racing to the raid as well, trying to get there before the police. That’s how it worked—one of Aunt Jenny’s news shows did an episode about it. People kept hacking in on the police and then blabbing about it so much that by the time the police got anywhere, they had an audience waiting. The police didn’t like it one bit. They kept switching their software and their codes and their passwords, everything, but the hackers kept getting through. Tess said her mom thought it was actually the news stations, and that they were lying whenever they said they’d gotten an anonymous tip. She thought the news stations had spies on the police force, and that the law should come down on this anonymous-tip business hard.

  But Aunt Jenny said regular people showing up for arrests was just democracy in action, and if the people weren’t listening in and personally showing up to make sure justice was getting served, the police might not do their jobs as well as they should. Aunt Jenny had been disappointed that there’d never been a Muslim raid in Hannibal, but there’d been one for a couple of Mexican families on one side of a duplex. With just a half hour of lead time, something like two hundred people showed up to watch. I guess Aunt Jenny knew about it, but she didn’t go. She didn’t really have it in for illegal Mexicans as much as the Muslims because she’d once gone to Mexico on a church thing. But her friend Tracy went, and she told Aunt Jenny that somebody had brought a tuba, of all things, to serenade the illegals as they were being led out.

  “Want to come? Last chance.” The red-haired girl was already getting into the driver’s seat of a little black car. “I promise I’ll bring you right back. I’m Sophie, by the way.”

  Like she knew me. Because we were about the same age and because we both liked Sketchy, and because I more or less looked and sounded like her. She didn’t wonder for a second if I was someone she should trust.

  Sherburn didn’t seem to have a lot of stop signs or stoplights, which was good, as whenever we came to one, the girl, Sophie, just slowed and looked to see if anyone was coming—if not, she rolled on through. She drove over a set of railroad tracks without braking, and the car went airborne for a second. She laughed when we hit the ground.

  “Sorry,” she said, like she didn’t mean it. “I do that every morning when I’m late for school. I have to be there at seven when there’s track practice.”

  I held tight to the handle above my door. “So how many Muslims are these people hiding?”

  “My boyfriend heard this guy’s got like seven of them, right in his house.” She turned to me, her blue eyes wide. “Sounds crazy, I know, but they just caught a woman in Ames with ten in her basement, though I think some of them were Guatemalans.” She let go of the steering wheel long enough to tug up her ponytail with both hands. “It’s like my nutty aunt Kate with her cats. We’re looking for Quaker Road, by the way. Oh! There it is.” She slowed the car, barely, and cranked the wheel to the right. “That was all just the other night. There were two more raids in Iowa City today, and something like four in Minneapolis. Cause of Detroit, you know. Everybody’s motivated.”

  “Uh-huh.” I kept my face turned toward the window so she wouldn’t see that I had my hand pressed tight over my mouth. She was talking about these raids like there was nothing sad about them, like they weren’t the end of the road for some people. It would be the end for someone tonight. Someone like Chloe. I hoped the hackers were wrong about the raid that was coming, and really, it seemed like they might be. Quaker Road was lined by flat-roofed, one-story houses. None of them looked big enough to hide seven people, at least not comfortably, for very long.

  “Did they say who was hiding them?”

  “Some weird old guy. One of his neighbors noticed he was all of a sudden carrying in way more groceries than usual, bags and bags every few days. She asked him what he was up to, since he’d lived alone after his wife died. He said he’d been having company, relatives visiting. But she lived across the street from him, and she never saw anybody coming or going except for him. That’s what tipped her off.”

  I rolled my lips in. He should have brought in the bags at night, maybe. That’s what I would have done. But that might have been even more suspicious. Really, there was no way to convince myself that I’d been too careful to be in his shoes. Whatever he’d done, it wasn’t as risky as hitching through two different states with Chloe and telling everyone she was Portuguese. We’d just been lucky. So far.

  We crested a hill, and Sophie squinted. “Okay. Here we go. This is it.”

  Up ahead, a floodlight was mounted to the top of a lime-green van with NEWS YOU CAN USE and CHANNEL 4 in black on the side door. The van was parked in the middle of the street, and the curb on either side was lined with cars and trucks. Sophie pulled in behind a powder-blue SUV with a bumper sticker that read PROUD PARENT OF AN SMS HONOR STUDENT and a license plate that read #BLESSED.

  I took out the phone and checked the screen. No calls. Tess would call back, though. Any minute. Of course she would.

  “You okay?” Sophie asked. Her door was already open, and she looked at me over her shoulder. “Sorry I was driving so fast. I don’t want to miss it.”

  I took that as a cue that I should put away the phone and hustle out. It would look pretty strange, even suspicious, if I said now that I just wanted to stay in the car. But I wasn’t sure why I’d come along, what it was I wanted to see. It felt like the time my mom woke me and Caleb up in the middle of the night because the house down the street was on fire. All the people had already gotten out, and even their dog was safe, but everything they owned was burning up or getting soaked by the hoses, and it was awful to stand out there in humid dark, breathing in the smoke, the flames popping and cracking while the family stayed over by the fire trucks breathing through oxygen masks and probably hating all of us for standing around and watching like their misery was a movie. Nothing in me had wanted to stop watching, though. Even Caleb had just stood there, openmouthed in his pajamas. It was like our eyes and ears and noses needed to take it in, maybe to prove to our brains that something like that could happen to a house, any house, including ours.

  I hurried over to the sidewalk, falling in next to Sophie. We jogged past parked cars, and also a woman on her front porch across the street, talking on her phone. When she saw us, she gave us a dirty look, so I guessed she wasn’t the neighbor who turned the man in. I don’t like this either, I wanted to say, and I wished there was some way she could know it, like I could shine some secret light at her so she would know I was on her side. If she was on my side. All she did was go back in her house.

  As we got closer, I could see that the news van’s floodlight was focused on a red-brick house’s front door, so bright it made a circle of daylight. Whoever was inside had turned out all the lights except for a line of red and green Christmas lights blinking along the front gutter. An upright wagon wheel, surrounded by white rocks, had been put in the middle of the front yard for decoration, and maybe thirty people stood between it and the van—not as many as I thought there would be—though I could hear the slamming of more car doors behind me. The people already on the lawn were m
ostly silhouettes, some of them shining flashlights into the house’s dark windows.

  I slowed my steps, holding my breath. I knew the people inside, whoever they were, must be scared out of their minds, watching the flashlights shine through the curtains. If Caleb were here, he’d run up and tell everyone to stop. He’d tell them all to get away, and to take their flashlights with them.

  And I’d have to drag him away, with maybe my hand over his mouth. Because we would be very much outnumbered.

  One flashlight started moving toward us, bouncing along, and then I could see it was held by a tall, lean boy in a denim jacket. When he got to Sophie, he put his arm around her and kissed the top of her red hair.

  “We didn’t miss it?” she asked. “They’re not here?”

  “No. But what took you so long?” He gave me a friendly nod. “Who’s this?”

  “A stray I picked up.” She winked, half-nuzzled into the armpit of his jean jacket. “Amy, this is Jayden. Jayden, this is Amy. She’s just tagging along.”

  I couldn’t quite pull off a smile. I didn’t belong here. I tried to think of myself as some kind of spy. But a spy for who? Who would I report to? Caleb? Chloe? The lady who’d been on the phone?

  “Cool,” Jayden said, like he really meant it, though he turned back to Sophie fast. “Listen. Your parents are over there, sort of close to the driveway. They got interviewed, so they’ll probably be on TV.” He turned and waved behind him. “I’ll just wait to let you see their set-up.”

  “Oh God.” Sophie winced, her hand over her eyes. “I don’t even want to know.”

  “No, you don’t. But you will soon.” He took hold of the sleeve of her letter jacket and tugged her toward the cluster of people in front of the house. She turned around and grabbed the sleeve of my coat, so we were a little chain as we moved through. I kept my head down and said “excuse me” a lot, and everybody was polite about stepping back so we could pass. A woman holding a little boy on her hip told me she liked my flag pin.