American Heart

by Laura Moriarty

  Shame moved over me, like a wave of heat. I’d forgotten about him. I really had. It was just for a little bit, and I was tired, and still sweaty and scared. But even forgetting about him for a little bit, no matter what, was too long. I sat up, rubbing my palms against the thin bedspread like I was trying to wipe something off. Now that we’d turned off our television, we could hear another television through the wall again. I heard applause and laughter, the nice kind. They weren’t watching the news.

  “You would never do it,” she said. “I saw you with him. You love him.” She ducked her chin and looked at me over the top of her glasses. “And you said your mother is only a sort-of mother. Your brother needs you, I think.”

  I crossed my legs, as I still had to pee. I didn’t nod, or even say anything, but of course we both knew she was right. That was probably why a lot of people didn’t actually move to Canada, even the ones who would be allowed. I mean, not because of Caleb. But because of whoever it was they loved. No matter how mad they got, or how scared, the people they loved were all down here.

  “And that’s why you need to go home,” she said, in the same know-it-all voice. “You need to go be with your brother. And you need to be home, and safe. I’m so thankful for all you have done, Sarah-Mary. But in the morning, I will give you enough money for your bus ticket home. We will go separate ways.”

  I snapped my head up. She’d said it like it was a done deal, like the whole decision was hers. “I’m not going home tomorrow,” I said. “How would you get by without me?”

  “They shot that man,” she said, like that answered my question. “They shot him dead. I am putting you at risk. And you are a child. I cannot do this.”

  That was pretty irritating, having her call me a child. I mean technically, I was a minor, okay. But I didn’t feel like one. I didn’t think I’d been acting like one, either. I would think she’d give me credit for that.

  She frowned, shaking her head. “Do not take offense. What I mean is, if something happened to you, I wouldn’t forgive myself.” Her eyes went shiny, but she looked away. “I’ve hurt enough people already.”

  I stared at her, surprised.

  Chloe winced. “No. Not like that. Please.”

  “What do you mean, then? Who’d you hurt?” I leaned away from her, watching her face.

  “I meant my son. And my husband.”

  It took a second for her words to make sense. “You got a son?”

  She sniffed, smiling a little, though she started crying at the same time. “Jahan. He turned six in November. Would you like to see a picture?”

  I nodded. She got up and went over to one of the bureau drawers, where she’d put her bag. I was expecting her to show me a little picture, but she came back with a frame the size of a magazine.

  “This is at our house in Jonesboro,” she said. “My friend Yasmin took it. Jahan is very happy because the oven was not working and so we ordered pizza.”

  It was a picture of Chloe and a man and a little boy, the three of them leaning in together. The boy was in the middle, smiling, his chin in his hands, his elbows on the table. Chloe and the man were sort of leaned in on either side of him, their heads almost touching. They weren’t smiling as hard as the boy, but their eyes looked happy, like they’d both just gotten done laughing about something. Chloe wore a green headscarf with little white flowers on it. The man, her husband, had one of those little dimples in his chin, and he actually looked a whole lot like my old science teacher Mr. Borland, which was weird, because Mr. Borland wasn’t Iranian. I didn’t think so, at least.

  “That’s nice,” I said. The frame was white wood, smooth against my fingers. “Your son’s cute.” He was. He had the same greenish eyes as Chloe, and he had a little bump on the bridge of his nose. “Where are they now?”

  She put her hand flat against the front of her sweatshirt. “Toronto.”

  That was good. I was worried she’d say Nevada.

  “How’d you hurt them?”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it like she wanted to think some more. She still had the frame against her chest.

  “For years, even when Jahan was just a baby, my husband wanted to leave, to find jobs in Canada. He was scared for Jahan, scared for all of us. I told him he was overreacting, though when the registry came, I was nervous as well. But even then, I was not so afraid. We had friends, colleagues who I knew would protect us.” She shrugged. “But in September, we heard rumors about the buses, the plans for them. I said we didn’t know if it was true or not. I still wasn’t ready to leave. I kept saying wait, it won’t get worse. It will get better. We have to make it better. Baraz said it was my choice, but he’d go without me, right away, and he’d take Jahan.” She started to raise her hand to her ear but then stopped and put it back in her lap. “My plan was to finish out the semester. I still believed I was in a position to help. I was writing, posting pictures of people I knew, friends who were suddenly gone.” She shook her head. “I didn’t want to just give up. I loved my job. I loved where we lived. I loved biking to campus. I loved our cats, two brothers. I loved our house.” She laughed like she was embarrassed to say she’d loved a house. “I loved this country. I thought of it as mine. I wanted to fight for it, for what it is supposed to be.” She shrugged. “And then they sealed the borders.”

  I wiped my forehead again. I could already feel the soreness in my legs settling in, my muscles tight and tired from running. I didn’t think of myself as a weak person, but here was Chloe talking about how she loved this country too much to leave, and too much to just give up on it. And here I was, born and raised here, and after one bad night—a really bad night—I’d wanted to get up and go.

  She winced again, tugging on her ear.

  “It’s not any better, is it? Those drops aren’t helping?”

  She shook her head. She got up and put the frame back in her bag. After she closed the drawer, she leaned against the wall, her arms crossed again.

  “I’m glad they’re safe. I’m so grateful for this. But I was foolish. And selfish. Not a good mother. And because of that, for the past four months, my son has been without me.” Pink splotches shaped like jigsaw pieces moved up from the collar of her sweatshirt to her chin. “I can’t imagine that he is not hurting, with me not being there to tuck him in, to kiss his forehead in the morning. And I don’t know how I will get to him again. But if I don’t find a way, I will have failed him. I already feel he shouldn’t forgive me. And I miss my husband so much.”

  The television in the next room had gone silent. I pointed at the wall to remind Chloe that even now, when she was crying, we had to be quiet.

  “You’ll get up there,” I whispered, like I knew all about it. But I sort of did. I mean, my God. She had to get there. “And your son’ll forgive you. He’ll just be happy you’re there, whenever you get there.”

  “You don’t know this.” She sniffed. “You don’t know any of this.”

  That was half true. I didn’t know how we’d get across the border. And I didn’t know her son. But I knew that if either Caleb or I had a mom who’d just made one mistake and then actually felt bad about it, we’d take her back in a second.

  “Well,” I said, “the only way for you to get there is if I stay with you. So that’s what I’m going to do. I mean, we’ve made it this far.”

  I got up to go to the bathroom, one, because I still had to go, and two, to show her that was the end of the conversation. She really should have understood at this point that she couldn’t tell me what to do.

  Before I closed the door, I thought of something. I took a few steps back toward her so I could keep my voice low. “Your real name’s Sadaf?”

  She nodded. She was still leaning against the wall.

  “I’m saying it right?”

  She nodded again.

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

  I’d still call her Chloe in my head, as I didn’t want to mess up in front of other people. But I would know her
real name later, when she was safe and gone, and just a memory in my head.

  13

  IN THE MORNING, I opened my eyes to see Chloe curled in a fetal position on top of her made-up bed. She had her hand pressed to her ear.

  “It’s worse?” I asked, sitting up. Both Tess’s watch and the clock on the nightstand agreed it was after nine. But the room had the look of early dawn, with only a strip of daylight glowing gray between the heavy curtains.

  She squinted at me like she didn’t hear. She was already dressed, even wearing her coat. I pointed at my own ear, and she nodded.

  I got up and went to the window to pull the curtains back. But there wasn’t a lot of light to let in—the sky over Sherburn was a white fog, as far as I could see. In the parking lot, just beneath our window, a man blew on his hands before lifting a suitcase into the trunk of a car.

  “You should let me look at it,” I said, turning back to Chloe. She didn’t move. I walked around my bed to hers and switched on the lamp above her pillow. I didn’t know when she’d gotten dressed, or how long she’d been awake. She looked like she’d combed her hair. But the coffee maker by the television still had its cord unplugged and tied in a neat bundle.

  “Hey,” I said. “Let me see.” Either she didn’t want to, or she was having trouble hearing—I had to touch her coat sleeve to get her to move her hand and pull back her hair. When she did, I gasped, which probably wasn’t the most tactful thing I could have done. But her whole ear was bright red, and so was the skin all around it, going down to her neck. I put the back of my hand to her forehead. Hot like a stove.

  “It feels as if . . .” Her voice was quiet. “It feels as if there was a sharpened pencil placed just in my ear, and then someone kicked it, as hard as they could, farther in.”

  I sat on the edge of my bed. I’d thought today would be like yesterday, in that we’d just keep getting rides, getting closer and closer to the border. That was all the plan I had. But that wouldn’t work now. She couldn’t stand out in the cold to wait for a ride, not with a fever. And definitely not with a pencil kicked in her ear.

  But it didn’t seem like the kind of thing we could just wait out, either. If she had some kind of infection, nothing we could buy at a drugstore would help, and it probably wouldn’t clear up on its own. It would just get worse. It seemed like Chloe probably knew all that. And she must know that there was no way for her to see a doctor, unless she turned herself in.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked.

  She sat up slowly, putting her feet on the carpet opposite mine. She was wearing her fluffy pink socks, and her big toe poked through one of them. She looked at the nightstand, where she’d left her book, her eyeglasses resting on top of it.

  “I want to keep going,” she said.

  When we got to the gas station, she picked out medicine with a box that said it was extra-strength for relieving pain and also fever. She took two before we went outside, and they did seem to help a little. She stopped holding her ear, and she sometimes smiled at people as they went by. But from the side, I could see her jaw was clenched.

  I was hopeful we wouldn’t be waiting for long. We’d found a little spot between the store’s front door and the propane tanks that was mostly out of the wind, and also hidden from the cashier’s view by a poster in the window advertising lottery tickets. It said YOUR LUCKY DAY? in big white letters, which seemed like it might be good advertising for us, but maybe also some kind of mean joke.

  We’d been outside for maybe an hour, cold and quiet, when it started to snow. Tiny flakes fell straight down, and they didn’t melt when they hit the pavement, or the sleeves of my coat, or Chloe’s hat, or my mittens on either side of our sign. And so after maybe twenty minutes, I knew we probably looked like those cows you see standing out in fields sometimes in winter, with whatever part of them facing the wind getting coated with snow, and still they just keep standing there, not even bothering to shake themselves off.

  But I didn’t know what else we could do. Most people didn’t even look at us, and the ones who did kept moving. I couldn’t blame the men, as the sign clearly stated we wanted a ride from a woman. But all the women kept walking by, too. Every time a woman walked by, I stared at her like I could use ESP to let her know that we were really having a hard time, and that the person beside me was in pain, and that neither of us was anyone to be afraid of. It didn’t work. Most of them kept their faces pushed down into their scarves, so all I saw was the tops of their snow-dusted hair or hats.

  Another hour went by. I say that like it was nothing, but it didn’t feel that way when it was happening. My nose started to run, and I could hear Chloe sniffing too. It got hard to keep trying to smile at people who weren’t even looking up, so after a while, I just watched the snow thicken on the oval roof over the pumps, and also along the cracks in the pavement. I kept thinking, okay, any minute now, somebody’ll stop, because that was what had happened the day before. But I knew that really, just because we’d gotten lucky yesterday didn’t mean there was any rule that said of course we’d be lucky again.

  “Tell me when you need to go in,” I said, my voice low, my lips barely moving. I was on the side of Chloe’s good ear, but I didn’t know if she’d heard me. I leaned in a little. “If you’re hungry or you just need a break.”

  She nodded once, but that was all. I guessed she was thinking the same thing I was—that if we went inside for even ten minutes, that might be the exact time when the one person who would give us a ride walked by. We couldn’t afford to be babies. I couldn’t even let Chloe go sit inside while I stayed out with the sign, as somebody might come up and try to talk with her, or they might look at her more carefully if she was on her own. When we’d been inside buying the medicine, we’d both seen the front page of the local paper, with its picture of the dead man lying in the doorway of his house. There was also a picture of one of the Muslim women being led out in handcuffs with the two kids holding on to her coat. You could see the face of one of the kids, and how scared he looked, so maybe the photographer was trying to shame people. Then again, Chloe had said this was the woman someone had thrown something at, so at least one person wasn’t shamed at all.

  “I’m still doing okay,” I said, as if Chloe, or anyone, had asked me. I dusted snow from my hood and locked eyes with an Asian woman hurrying into the store with her little boy. The boy had on a red snowsuit, but the woman just wore leggings and a sweatshirt that said Gimme a slice! Big Al’s Pizza. She gave me a tight-lipped smile, but that was all.

  I shook my head, watching the vapor of my breath float up into the gray air. It seemed to me a body could only take so much, whatever the mind was telling it. I mean, there was no guarantee we’d get a ride at all, not even if we stayed out here until dark. And that wasn’t the worst of it. The police could come by for gas at any time. Or somebody might get weirded out by us and call them. I didn’t even know if it was legal to hitchhike in Iowa.

  We had to do something, and I didn’t mean just hoping or praying. It seemed to me we had to start acting like this was the emergency that it was.

  I looked down at our sign. It was holding up in the snow okay, as I’d gone over it with the clear tape again, and the ink hadn’t run at all. I tugged off one of my mittens, so I could crease the poster straight across the middle. Then I held up the sign so the part about wanting a ride with a woman was upside down and facing me.

  Chloe looked at me from the corner of her eye. I shrugged and turned away. We’d be okay. It seemed pretty clear to me, standing out there in the cold and sniffing my nose every five seconds, that you couldn’t just rule out a whole group of people, even if they made up the overwhelming majority of killers and rapists. All I’d done just now was double our chances for a ride. I’d also at least quadrupled them for getting us chopped up in little pieces. I tried not to think about that.

  And for a while, it seemed like I hadn’t done anything. It turned out that men, at least the ones stopping for gas
or snacks in Sherburn, Iowa, that day, weren’t that excited about being included in our invitation or my hopeful smiles. In fact, most of them just seemed more likely not to look at either one of us after they’d read our sign. One man paused to cough something serious up from his throat so he could spit it on the curb, not that far from my feet. He didn’t look at us either.

  “I hate this town,” I whispered. I didn’t know if Chloe heard me or not.

  But maybe ten minutes later, she nudged me and nodded over to one of the pumps. I followed her gaze to a tall, slender man leaning against an SUV, squinting at us, or maybe at our sign. He wore a dark peacoat with a red wool scarf knotted at the collar. Nothing about him seemed particularly worrisome. But he was a white man, and he looked like he got regular haircuts and shaved his face every morning. So as far as being a serial killer, he checked all the boxes.

  I smiled at him. That felt weird, trying to give a smile that would win him over at the very time when I was trying to figure out if he looked like bad news himself.

  He started to walk over. I turned to Chloe. “Nudge me if you get a bad feeling,” I murmured. “If you don’t like him, we won’t get in.”

  “Hi,” he said, his chin raised, though he was a good foot taller than I was. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and the snowflakes rested unmelted on top of his curly dark hair. “Let’s hear your sales pitch.” He glanced over my shoulder. “Make it snappy.”

  Kind of rude, I thought. But I launched into the story of how Chloe was my mother’s cousin visiting from Portugal, and how we were headed up to see my mom in Minneapolis. I did my best to be as snappy as possible, all the while trying to be charming and just pathetic enough, too. I thought I did pretty well, especially considering my nose was running and I couldn’t feel my toes anymore. He looked like he was listening close, and his eyes moved over both of us. But he didn’t seem to be doing it in a creeper way. Whatever Chloe thought of him, she didn’t give me a nudge.