by Joshua Corin
“Help me now,” Sara called to them in a reedy voice. “I need you.”
At which point the purple curtain slid to the side and a silver-Afroed woman in a lab coat sauntered in.
“Oh, we really shouldn’t be standing up,” Dr. Pence said, and promptly escorted Sara back to her bed. Getting her in the bed required assistance. The doctor exited and then reentered with Von. Together, they maneuvered Sara from vertical to horizontal, which triggered something inside of her because that solitary candle flared back into a blue-hot conflagration and Sara dry-heaved for almost two minutes. Von rubbed circles on her back and held her hand. Dr. Pence waited patiently underneath the TV until finally Sara calmed, and only then did Dr. Pence approach.
“Thank you, Von,” she said.
Von left them alone.
“What’s…wrong with me…?”
“Let’s confirm my suspicions.” Dr. Pence donned some latex gloves and finger-tapped along the port side of Sara’s belly. Her fingers were very, very cold. “Any pain?”
“No.”
Dr. Pence tapped two fingers along the starboard side of Sara’s belly, and once she reached the lower right quadrant, just below her ribs, the subsequent firestorm inside her nearly caused a loss of consciousness. It turned out fire could have teeth and claws.
“As I suspected,” said Dr. Pence.
“Is it…the baby?”
“We ran an ultrasound and a blood test when you first arrived. Your white blood cell count is elevated, but that is to be expected with a pregnancy. We should now lie on our side.” Dr. Pence aided Sara in rolling over and then proceeded to pull on each of Sara’s ankles. “The baby is a healthy size, which is good for him but makes it difficult to detect inflammation in the mother. He is quite literally upstaging your organs.”
“Ow!” Sara cried. “Why are trying to take my legs off?”
Dr. Pence let go of Sara’s ankle. “Leg extensions. Face up again, please. We—”
A male voice piped in over the intercom: “Code Blue in the ER. Code Blue in the ER.”
Once he was through, Dr. Pence rolled Sara until her back was flush with the mattress.
“You said you have your suspicions,” said Sara.
“I do.”
“Do you plan on telling me what they are?”
“It could be counterproductive to speculate without all the data, but if I were to guess, you are presenting as a classic case of appendicitis.”
Sara blinked. Appendicitis? Seriously?
Now?
“Wait. That means surgery, right? What about Daniel?”
“Oh, there’s no question. If appendicitis is confirmed, Daniel is going to have to come out.”
As Dr. Pence moved on to her next test, which involved rotating Sara’s hip, Sara started to sob. She felt as if she were drifting alone in a vast lake. She needed Rayyan. She needed her parents. She needed her friends, her fans, her phone, her own bed. But she had none of those, so she hugged herself, and somewhere else in the ER, someone was dying.
“Inna lillahe wa inna ilaihe raajeoon,” whispered Sara.
Surely we belong to Allah, and to Him we return.
She shut her eyes and more tears squeezed down her cheeks.
Chapter 5
While Sara awaited the technician to come and wheel her off to her CT scan; while Malik Ali, two curtained rooms over from her, stared blankly at the ceiling; while hundreds of Muslim adults and children were being triaged in the city’s assorted emergency rooms and operating rooms and medical centers, Xanadu Marx sat with growing discomfort in a plastic chair in the crowded, dusty, and hot waiting area of the Atlanta Field Office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, District 8.
To be fair, this was not their normal field office. Their normal field office on Parklake Drive was undergoing asbestos removal. Again. Their normal field office was a bit more spacious. Back when she had been with the FBI, Xana had had to visit Parklake Drive on more than one occasion. This temporary office on Asher Road looked to be a deserted DMV. The people were packed in plastic chairs, such as hers, along a field of drab tile while cracked fluorescent bulbs buzzed like locusts overhead. And all along two of the walls, behind seven windowed counters, were the humorless employees. A digital counter on the wall ran through assigned numbers. Xana had A302. When she had arrived, sixty-five minutes ago, they were all the way up to A221.
A cop standing by the door both handed out the numbers to the newcomers and called out the numbers as they appeared on the digital counter. He appeared as happy to be here in the slimy, cotton-thick heat as everyone else. Oh yes, the heat. Because the air conditioner was busted. Because of course it was.
All races and nationalities were represented in these huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Xana, though born in northern India, had never had to deal with the obstacle course these folks currently had to navigate. Her mother had been an American citizen and ipso facto abracadabra she was an American citizen. Still, she hadn’t set foot in the New World until well into her teens. Her father’s archaeological obsessions had kept the family mostly in Asia, not that the old man ever acknowledged the modern borders. No, to him, they were never in Mongolia. They were in the Xiongnu steppes. So what if the Han Dynasty of China had eradicated the Xiongnu nearly two thousand years ago. Those two years they spent in the isolated hills of Afghanistan were really spent in Persia circa 300 BCE. On the plus side, Xana grew up learning dozens of languages; on the minus side, quite a few of those languages were extinct. Ah well. She proved too brash for the CIA’s psych evaluations, but the FBI had been glad to have her…until two years ago, when they’d tossed her away like the garbage she had become.
But that was another story.
“A-300,” barked the cop. “Window six.”
A pair of elderly Sri Lankan immigrants, obviously husband and wife, rose from their seats and slowly made their way to what had to be only one in a long, long series of destinations they had traversed in their life. Despite the heat, the old couple wore their traditional Sinhalese attire: she in a short-sleeved jacket with a turquoise wraparound and he in a long-sleeved silk shirt with a red sarong. Xana had fond memories of Sri Lanka, although part of that had to do with what’s-her-name, that gorgeous long-legged bartender in Colombo who had always wanted to visit Rome. How many years ago had that been? Had she ever made it to Rome? One memorable summer in her late teens, Xana had wined and dined down the Appian Way. The world had been so effortless back then.
“A-301. Window two.”
Xana had chosen today to come here because she had expected the crowd to be light. Eid was a major Islamic holiday. And true, there were not many Middle Easterners here and the Africans, though in abundance, were mostly darker skinned. This made sense. Muslim Africa trended toward the northern coast. And Atlanta, for whatever reason, had never been a big attraction for that most populous of Muslim countries, Indonesia. Nevertheless, seventy minutes of waiting and a standing-room-only glut of humanity had proved her wrong. Maybe she would keep this little mistake to herself. And besides…
“A-302. Window five.”
…it was time.
Xana had been hoping for window 6. That was where the short man worked, he of the subset of redheads who went bald but retained their freckles. The smooth slope of skin atop his head was reddish, but that had all to do with Georgia’s sun. He wore a white shirt with vertical blue stripes, perhaps to make him appear taller. His collar was open. His Adam’s apple was the size of a boxer’s fist. His name was Porter Latimore and he went by the name Skip, and he was the reason Xana, U.S. citizen since birth, had waited for seventy minutes in this uncooled chamber of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Window 5 was manned by a pasty, square-shaped woman with a rectangular smile and wide perfect circles for eyes.
“How many
I be of assistance?” she asked.
So Xana donned her best-worst Punjabi accent. “Hello, I was at this location several weeks ago and the gentleman at window six was very helpful, and I was hoping he could help me again, please and thank you, if it isn’t too much trouble?”
The woman maintained her geometric grin, told Xana that she would ask, and stepped to her left to do just that. If this didn’t work, Xana had several alternatives to choose from. But she hoped this plan worked. This plan was the cleanest and, frankly, the most fun. Well, not fun for Skip, but none of the plans would be fun for Skip.
Nope. No fun for Skip. Not today.
While the window 5 woman and Skip conversed, the elderly Sri Lankan immigrants he had been assisting looked to Xana for an explanation to which Xana shrugged. Some gestures were universal. Cluelessness crossed all boundaries. Skip gave Xana a once-over, probably trying to remember her from several weeks ago. This, of course, was one of the vulnerabilities in Xana’s plan. She hadn’t been here several weeks, had never, to the best of her knowledge, spoken to Skip Latimore, but the people who worked here saw so many people every day. Surely they couldn’t keep straight every single person who came to their window.
Right?
Skip gave Xana another look, and this time Xana knew she had succeeded. In the end, despite any possible sympathy he might have for her plight, despite the possibility that he had helped her before, Xana was a statuesque stunner and male behavior could be predictable, and so Skip traded places with the window 5 woman and leaned toward Xana and spoke with a gleam of ego.
“Hello again!”
“Hello, Skip!” Xana returned the friendliness, continuing her false accent for shits and giggles, and took out her cellphone. “I am so glad to see you!”
“It is a pleasure to see you, too. Now, how may I be of service?”
Xana already had the photo stream loaded on her phone. She showed him the first pic.
That ego gleam of his blinked away as if somebody had splashed it with a bucket of night.
She flicked on to the second pic. And then the third pic. And then the fourth pic.
He reached for the phone. She casually pocketed it.
“What is this?” he snarled at her.
“You have been a bad boy, Skip! You’ve been extorting immigrants. Showing up at the homes. Forcing them to pay you five thousand dollars or you’ll accidentally misplace their paperwork. Not cool, Skip!”
“What are you, a cop?”
“See, if I was a cop, you’d have options. You could hire a lawyer. It’s the word of a bunch of immigrants against you. But I’m not a cop, Skip. And you have no options at all.”
Skip glanced around. So far no one appeared to have overheard them. “Let’s talk outside.”
“Let’s talk here, Skip. I waited for over an hour.”
“You said it yourself. It’s their word against mine.”
“That’s so true. But you’re forgetting about these pictures I took. What’s your wife’s email address again?”
Xana took her phone out and started to type a message.
Again Skip reached for it. Again Xana deftly dodged him.
This attracted the attention of window 6, both Skip’s coworker and the Sri Lankan couple.
“Everything all right?” his square-shaped coworker inquired.
“Yeah, Margie. Everything’s cool.”
Margie and the Sri Lankans resumed their conversation.
So did Xana and Skip.
“What do you want?” he hissed.
“Fifty-five thousand dollars.”
“Are you insane! Where am I supposed to get fifty-five thousand dollars?”
“Well, you originally got it from the eleven families you extorted, Skip. Where you get it now is none of my business. But don’t worry. I’ll give you seven days.”
“Seven days!”
“Okay, six days. You drive a hard bargain, Skip. And if you even think of extorting eleven more innocent families to raise the cash, I will not only send these pictures to your wife and your boss and your coworkers, but I will also post them to your Facebook account so that all your friends can see just what an upstanding citizen you really aren’t. I’ll contact you in six days. Do the right thing, Skip. You know, for a change.”
Chapter 6
It was only after Xana left the jungle-thick humidity of the government building and entered the jungle-thick humidity of Atlanta in June that she allowed herself a moment of celebration. And it was only a moment, because as she fished in her pocketbook for a Cigaronne, she overheard the gossiping bystanders who were gathered together, as smokers were wont to do, a few yards away from the main door.
“Over a hundred dead.”
“I heard it was a suicide bomb.”
“Like one of their own?”
“I used to drive past that place on the way to work. It’s right by that shopping center, the one with the Steak ’n Shake and the Kroger and the Publix.”
“Kroger and Publix in the same shopping center?”
“They’re at opposite ends. And this place, this mosque or whatever, it’s right across the street.”
“Used to be right across the street.”
Xana looked down at her hands. They were frozen in time. One held her lighter. One held her pack of cigarettes. She had to will them into action. Then she had to will her legs to march her body toward the bystanders. They were two white men and one white woman. Employees on a break.
“Excuse me?” she asked them, her ridiculous accent from earlier now discarded. “What are you talking about?”
So they told her, taking turns.
It took one-and-a-half slow-burning Cigaronnes.
Then they returned to their jobs, snuffing out their own tobacco sticks, and Xana finished the rest of her second cigarette staring north, past the gravel lot and the assorted pine trees, past the hot blue sky, north to Fulton County. Was that gray curlicue in the far distance just a cloud or was it a finger of smoke?
She checked the news on her phone to verify the details.
5 dead. 127 wounded. The North Buckhead Islamic Center. 6:27 A.M. An explosion.
And then the speculation: KKK. Car bomb. Israelis. Suicide vest. Grenades. Missiles.
Xana felt a compulsion, and it wasn’t to mourn the victims. It was to avenge them. Drive north to Fulton County and walk the crime scene. Speak to the witnesses. There had to be footage, be it satellite or some civilian with a cellphone. Start with the footage. Then speak to the survivors. Piece together a timeline. Consult with forensics. The type of explosive deployed and the manner in which the deployment had occurred would narrow down the list of suspects.
Could be it was some fanatic with a dozen pipe bombs. The citizenry was loath to admit it, but one angry man could often do a lot more damage than any organized force. Or it could be an organized force. Georgia certainly had its share of militias.
To call Xana’s compulsion a feeling did not do it justice. This was no feeling. This was visceral. This was physical. Its intensity throbbed in the veins of her eyes and in the long, curled fingers of her hands. It caused her heart to squeeze. Her brain ignited from excess oxygen.
It was good. It was right.
And it was futile.
It had to be. She wasn’t that person anymore. How many people had had to suffer for her to realize she wasn’t that person anymore? Sure, she still did penny-ante stuff for friends of friends of friends, like this business with Skip Latimore, but she hadn’t been in the FBI now for almost two years, and the last time she had tried to turn back the clock, where had that gotten her? She still remembered the sight of Em, lying there on the filthy floor in the church basement, lifeless Em who had been so full of life, so full of love but now bleeding out like a spilled bottle of wine.
“It
wasn’t your fault,” Hayley had said.
Hayley, another of Xana’s casualties. The girl had terminal cancer and still Xana had pushed her and pushed her and now she was living, if that was even the correct word, in a clean room at Piedmont Hospital. She had days left. If Xana had not shown up in her life, maybe Hayley would have made it another year. Or two. Xana was certain Hayley’s parents believed this to be true.
The worries of the world would continue, and Xana would watch them from the sidelines like everyone else.
5 dead. 127 wounded.
It had to be someone else’s mess to clean up.
The compulsion tasted like copper. Of course it did. It was adrenaline and blood and metal. If not dealt with, it would not go away but instead wither inside her, rust. Xana put a third cigarette between her lips, changed her mind, slid it back into its pack, and walked off her excess energy with a brisk perambulation of the big-shouldered brick building. Her underarms and back became riverbeds of sweat.
Once she finished her 360, she proceeded across the hot black tar of the parking lot. Her ’57 silver Rambler Rebel lay unmolested between a fat white Chrysler and a fat brown Lincoln. Xana sometimes forgot to shower in the morning and sometimes forgot to eat lunch in the afternoon, but she never forgot to take care of her Rambler.
Her former car had been totaled in the accident.
What accident? Oh, she only drove into a house.
In her defense, she had swerved off the road to dodge a dog.
Then again, she still managed to clip the dog and, as stated, plow into a house.
In her defense, she had been drunk.
Then again, she had been drunk most of thirty years.
The Rambler was a gift from someone Xana knew in the program—or, rather, The Program. As in AA. As in where Xana was very much inclined to drive to right now. She knew of a late-morning meeting that took place in a Knights of Columbus hall by the airport. She could be there in ten minutes.
