We Want What We Want

by Alix Ohlin

  “You’re pathetic,” Cyril says to Trisha.

  “You’re pathetic, you crystal meth–snorting piece of shit!”

  Not for the first time I hear Sid’s voice in my ear, calm and gentle. It’s okay to lose, he used to say, as long as you prepare for it.

  I look at Cyril. The room is swimming, the lights from the casino dancing unhappy steps. “She’s still alive, right?” I say. “She’s okay?”

  He doesn’t say anything. Those black eyes give nothing back. Trisha’s expensive rings have cut a line along his cheek. By the time the supervisor gets to us, I am crying.

  * * *

  —

  We sit in the car for a while, our breath clouding the interior.

  “God, I wish I had a cigarette.”

  “That was pretty Cops back there, Trish.”

  “What a punk. I used to think you were exaggerating, but now I know you weren’t.”

  “I’m too drunk to drive.”

  “Let’s just sit here for a while.”

  We turn on the radio. Trisha hums along off-key and if I were more myself I’d be irritated and tell her to shut up. I think of my daughter sleeping in a tunnel beneath New York City. I think of her in Canada, huddled in a snowstorm. I think of her with a strange man in a bad house in some dark city without a name.

  I don’t know how much time passes before I wake up. The radio is still playing and Trisha is still staring out the window at nothing, scratching shapes into the condensation. Suddenly the back door behind me opens and Cyril gets in the car. I don’t turn around, just look at him in the rearview mirror. It’s so dark that I can barely make out his face.

  “Last time I seen her, we was in Baltimore,” he says, speaking quickly and without any mumbling. “Staying with a guy named Hank. He was all on top of Rose and she left one morning, didn’t say where she was going or nothing. We didn’t get along too great by that point anyway.”

  I nod, though I’m not sure he can see me. “Was she still using?”

  In the shadows, I imagine him smirking the way kids do when adults try to talk about drugs like they know anything. Using. But when he answers, his voice sounds sincere.

  “Sometimes. She mostly stopped, though. After—”

  “After what?”

  He sighs, and then talks fast. “After one time in Newark when she OD’d and I had to take her to the hospital. She was fine, though,” he says. “They fixed her up real good.”

  I’m holding my breath. Trisha seems like she’s holding hers, too. Out of the corner of my eye I can sense her looking at me, and all I want is for her to shut up and keep out of it.

  “Cyril,” I say, and I try to pronounce it gently this time, as gently as if he were my own son, “do you think she’ll ever come home?”

  This time he doesn’t even pause. “No way she coming back. She hated it here.”

  I flinch, but I know he’s right.

  He opens the door and gets out of the car. The last I see him he’s running away across the parking lot, his white shirt ghostly in the headlights of my car. Jesus, I think, that idiot child didn’t even put on a coat to go outside in January. I hope Rose has more sense than that. I don’t know if she does or not.

  Trisha clears her throat. I wait for her to tell me the truth: that Rose is probably involved in some terrible situation. That I might never see her again. That I’m the one who drove her away. See, Sherri, see?

  Instead, she offers to drive home.

  “I’m not sober yet but I’m close,” she says.

  I shake my head and say, “Let’s just wait a bit.” We sit in the parking lot, watching people stream out of the casino and into the darkness, heading to their cars. They’re all bundled up against the cold, young people chattering, couples leaning against each other. It’s funny how they all seem thrilled and happy, their breath like flags in the dark. How you can’t even tell from looking at them whether they won or lost.

  The Universal Particular

  Of course she’ll never admit it to anybody but the first thing she feels, seeing the girl, is relief: how awkward and homely she is, acne splattered, not to mention overweight, bent under jet lag and luggage, coming down the escalator at the airport with a glazed look in her eyes. She might even be a little cross-eyed. Tamar’s holding a sign with her name—aziza—written in black marker, but the girl walks right past her. Maybe she’s not familiar with the convention of sign holding. Maybe she’s illiterate. That’s unkind, and also impossible. Aziza and Albert have been messaging for months; obviously she can read. Many’s the time, late at night, Tamar has watched her husband hunch over his phone, thumbing long responses to this girl who just marched by, a dirty green backpack strapped to her shoulders, like a soldier in a shabby army.

  Tamar has to jog to catch up. The girl disappears into a restroom, and Tamar waits outside. She throws the sign in the trash. When Aziza comes out, Tamar, ready with a brilliant smile, calls her name.

  The girl startles. Her first reaction is a kind of horrified grimace, which she smooths away slowly, without complete success. Tamar leans in, offers a hug. Aziza is stiff and Tamar’s palms meet the backpack instead of her body.

  “Welcome,” she says. “Welcome.”

  “Where is Albert?” says the girl.

  “He had to work, he’s so sorry, his hours are super intense lately, he’ll tell you all about it,” Tamar prattles. She’s trying to tug the backpack off the girl’s shoulders but Aziza’s fingers are curled tight around the straps as if she fears being robbed. Giving up, Tamar grabs an elbow instead, guiding the girl outside to the parking lot while keeping up commentary on the weather, the traffic, the nuisances of travel.

  Aziza says nothing. She smells of sweat and plane air. There’s a scratch on her arm that looks infected. They find the Honda.

  Tamar says, “We’re going to take good care of you.”

  As they drive, Aziza stares out the window at the airport terminals, the planes lifting and landing. It’s a grubby airport, outdated and partially under renovation, and the car moves sluggishly past traffic cones and construction machines. On the steering wheel, Tamar’s nails gleam fluorescent orange, like a warning. Her black hair is streaked with blue; on her right biceps is a tattoo of a tomato plant, faded red circles with green tendrils that swirl toward her armpit. Aziza can’t imagine loving any vegetable enough to ink it on her arm. She wishes to be elsewhere, while knowing there is no elsewhere for her to be. Mainly what she feels is embarrassment. Why did she tell Albert so much, why did she beg for his help? In truth, a lot of the time she forgot she was writing to an actual person. She treated the messages like a diary, and into them she poured all her hatred of her mother, her anger, her fears. Her loneliness. She and her mother fought constantly, right up to the day of her death, and then all of a sudden Aziza realized that she had no one, no place to go. From a continent away, Albert’s words bobbed into her in-box like a life raft on a stormy sea. We’re your family, he wrote. Why don’t you come stay with us for a while? A change will do you good.

  A change will do you good. It seemed so optimistic, so North American. Aziza’s life has consisted of nothing but changes, of which her experience has been less good or bad than crushingly inevitable. First her childhood in Somalia, where her birth father vanished before she could even begin to remember him, and then her mother meeting Alvin, who worked for a technology company with interests in Africa, and latching on to him with a desperation that was transparent to Aziza even as a child. But not, apparently, to Alvin. Or maybe he didn’t care. In any case he took Aziza and her mother home with him to Stockholm and settled them in a quiet, boxy apartment in Djursholm. At the wedding she was introduced to Albert, her new father’s cousin, although the day was a blur to her now. She learned Swedish and English. When she was twelve Alvin died of heat exhaustion on a business trip to Uganda.
Abandoned, she and her mother turned on each other. Aziza stayed out late, got in trouble with boys. Her mother threatened to send her back to Somalia, which made Aziza laugh bitterly and say, “Go ahead.” Her mother was a terrible liar. She lied the day she told Aziza she was sick but it wasn’t serious, that everything would be fine. She lied when she said, at the very end, trying to make up for all their fights, that Aziza had made her proud. She wanted to stage some scene of kindness that would linger in Aziza’s memory, even if it was a fiction. Then she died.

  Aziza, eighteen years old, three times orphaned, responded to Albert’s gentle inquiries with messages she spent hours composing. He told her about himself and Tamar, how they had longed for children of their own but weren’t able to have any. Then: the invitation. Now: a car speeding along the highway as fat raindrops splash against the windows and Tamar hums a tuneless song.

  * * *

  —

  Albert hits the garage opener with one hand while turning the steering wheel with the other. He has it down to a science, knowing exactly how close he has to be to the house for the opener to work, how much he has to slow down to bring the car in. It’s dumb but it makes him feel a little like Batman, driving his car into the bat cave. Also a perfectly coordinated docking in the garage, with zero lag time, saves him from conversation with his next-door neighbor, Oszkar, an underemployed “consultant” who seems to spend all day in his “home office,” watching out the window for Albert to come home. Any time he catches Albert lingering in the driveway he’s there instantly, with a hearty handshake and some pronounced opinions about the news of the day. Oszkar thinks we need to hit back hard against the terrorists. He thinks climate change is a myth—“The weather’s always been changing, since the dinosaurs, no?”—and that immigration needs to be curtailed. “It’s too much!” he says, clapping Albert on the back. “There are no more jobs!”

  Albert usually nods and smiles, mumbles something about dinner. But every once in a while he has to disagree, for his own moral peace of mind or whatever, and then there goes half an hour, as they stand in the driveway and hash it out, knowing neither of them will change his mind. Oszkar loves to argue. “Good talk!” he always says at the end, after having yelled explosively at Albert for a while.

  “Why do you even engage with him?” Tamar wants to know when he finally comes inside, and Albert says, “Some statements you can’t let pass,” and Tamar says, “The curry is cold,” and Albert sighs and says, “We do have a microwave,” and then they both start drinking.

  Tonight’s evasive maneuvers are successful, but still he sits for a minute in the darkened garage, door closed, before he goes in. He’s nervous to meet Aziza. The last time he saw her she was a bright-eyed child of—what, seven? Now, he knows from Facebook, she’s a young woman with long dark hair and her mother’s scowl. It’s possible he wrote her too much, and too often. It’s certain he did. And he had a few too many the night he invited her to stay—we’ll get you a student visa, you can take classes for a while, have a great time!—and when he woke up the next morning, furry tongued and regretful, she’d already begun making plans. Tamar was not pleased; but Tamar is rarely pleased.

  Inside, he smells the tofu lasagna she always makes for guests. Aziza is asleep on the couch in front of the TV, which is showing news about a bombing in Europe. He frowns and turns it off, and the silence wakes her; she moves upright, wiping drool from her mouth, and sees him. She’s both younger than he thought, and older.

  “Hello, hello,” he says.

  Aziza struggles to get up off the couch, which appears to fight to keep her down. The couch wins. He sits down beside her instead and gives her a semi-hug, trying not to make contact with her surprisingly large breasts. What does he know of teenagers, especially girls? Not a thing. He’d been writing to an illusion, and part of the illusion was himself as a father figure, dispensing wisdom and care. “How are you?”

  “Tired,” she says. Her accent is straight-up British, as his cousin’s had been.

  “Did Tamar show you your room?”

  “It’s very nice, thank you.” In truth the room intimidated her; it was enormous and carpeted in white, with a bed twice the size of the one she had at home. The posters on the walls were of rock bands she didn’t recognize. She’d placed her suitcase against the wall and fled.

  Tamar enters clapping her hands, saying, “Dinner’s ready,” then frowns as they both flinch at the sound. She is irritated by social awkwardness, despite often being the cause of it. They eat quickly and with little conversation, and then Aziza is released to the big white room.

  * * *

  —

  Several days later, Tamar and Albert host a party and invite the neighbors. Cindy and Mike, from down the block, bring their two kids, who are close to Aziza’s age. Linda and Rafael bring their rambunctious ten-year-old twin boys, who will go through the bedroom, ransacking closets and medicine cabinets if given the chance (Tamar has learned this the hard way). And Oszkar—you might as well invite him, because he’ll come over either way—brings his girlfriend, Tilda, who is from the Philippines and never says anything, though she seems to understand English just fine. They carry a platter of beautifully arranged tropical fruit and a large bouquet, presenting it to Aziza with ceremony.

  “Thank you,” she says woodenly, and stands there with the flowers gripped in her hands, clearly not knowing what to do with them. So far, saying “thank you” and standing still is how she handles most situations.

  “Let’s put those in water!” Tamar says cheerily, guiding her to the kitchen. Under Tamar’s care, Aziza already looks better than when she arrived. She’s wearing a well-cut sundress that flatters her hourglass figure, and the salicylic acid face wash is clearing up her skin. On their trips to the mall, the drugstore, the spa where Tamar works as a massage therapist and where she gets her friend Miriam to give Aziza a facial, Aziza has said next to nothing. She keeps her eyes down, though more than once Tamar has caught the girl studying her, her gaze fixed on Tamar’s tattoos, her nose piercing, her hair. Surely they have piercings and tattoos in Sweden; for God’s sake, she and Albert live in the suburbs and people here don’t look twice.

  Tamar is losing patience. Albert was the one who invited her, and of course Albert is now busy at work, monetizing his inexplicably successful blog, and the only time Aziza perks up is when he comes home. Sometimes they sit on the couch together late at night, whispering, looking up guiltily if Tamar comes in.

  Albert, at her direction, is grilling veggie kabobs in the backyard. He knows nothing about grilling and doesn’t care about it either, just turns the things over and over until Tamar tells him they’re done. Mike lingers near him, drinking beer after beer.

  “So she’s, what, a refugee?”

  “No, not at all. She’s my cousin.”

  Mike belches discreetly. “But she’s like African?”

  “Somalian.” Albert has to go through the whole thing, how his father moved here from Sweden, but Alvin was his Swedish cousin, who married Aziza’s mother, and even though the story is clear and succinct he can tell he has lost Mike’s attention, that all he heard was Somalian.

  “She must be psyched to be here,” Mike says, “after Africa.”

  Albert sighs. All the neighbors are idiots. He and Tamar bought this house years ago, for almost nothing, at a foreclosure sale. The schools were good and they were planning a family that never came. It had seemed like a joke, a role-playing exercise. We’re moving to the suburbs! Albert at the time was still playing with his band and had started his website, Beards of North America, as a pastime during long bus rides. When he was on tour he would interview men about their soul patches and Vandykes and take their pictures, and he’d post the interviews in a serious, white-paletted layout, as if these dudes were talking about national security or famine or something. Then all of a sudden he had thousands of clicks a day
and advertisers were all over him. He had meetings with venture capitalists. Boxes of sample grooming products kept showing up at the house. Now he has an office and contracted photographers who sell him images for the subsidiary sites—Beards of Japan, Beards of New Zealand, Beards of Scandinavia—and a twenty-four-year-old assistant who handles the social media accounts and flirts with him aggressively, enjoying how it makes him uncomfortable, which he actually finds pretty insulting. He and Tamar should have moved away a long time ago, but instead they slid into a static, low-grade misery that made planning for a different future impossible. Now somehow all he can do is keep rushing headlong into the days, no matter how stupid the days are.

  He should slow down and focus, though, on Aziza. She’s standing across the yard getting harangued by Oszkar about God only knows what, and he lifts a hand in her direction, then turns it on himself and pretends to shoot himself in the head. She looks alarmed, then laughs. When she laughs she’s beautiful, with a wide, gorgeous smile that makes you wish it didn’t disappear so quickly. She is a girl whose life has offered her almost no reason to smile like that, and still it’s the moment when she seems most herself.

  Tamar is dragging Tim, Cindy and Mike’s son, across the yard by force. He’s nineteen and shy, with shaggy dark hair. From what Mike says, Tim spends all his time in the basement, obsessed with some online multiplayer game set in apocalyptic New Mexico. It’s based on an ancient civilization with its own language, in which Tim, though he barely graduated high school, is fluent. Aziza nods at Tim, and he nods back. Tamar abandons them, a look of satisfaction on her face. Then she scowls at Albert and makes a gesture he understands too late. He has burned the kabobs.