by Jan Coffey
Elizabeth threw the covers aside and sat on the edge of the bed. She touched her cheek and then gazed at the wetness on her fingers. Damn the tears. She hated crying. She thought she had been done with them long ago. But the trouble was that she was in Turkey. Years ago, she’d sworn to herself she’d never come back here. To top it off, this was September, her nemesis of a month.
It was in September that her father hanged himself in the basement of their house in Northeast Philadelphia while her mother was making him lunch. Elizabeth was twenty-two and starting her last year of college. Years later, her mother told her that she ate the sandwich before she called for the ambulance. She couldn’t see it going to waste.
Another year, another September. Elizabeth was twenty-nine and working in London when she got the call that her mother had been hit by a cab and killed while crossing a street.
And Christina was born in September.
Her eyes burned. She impatiently grabbed a tissue from the box next to the bed and wiped her cheeks.
It was illogical to blame a single month for the rawness of her emotions. The fault belonged to the sleeping pill she’d taken last night. She was feeling the aftereffects of it.
In order to age well, one needed good, long-term self-care habits. And she had them. Exercise, a good diet, and sleep. Years ago, when she first started traveling for work, she’d learned that popping a pill helped her avoid jet lag.
She rolled her neck. Everything had aftereffects. Every action had a reaction.
Elizabeth reached for her cell phone. It wasn’t on the bedside table, but the charger wire dangled from the plug.
Strange, she thought, looking around the floor by the bed. There was no sign of it.
She tried to remember the last time that she used it. She called Christina last night from here. When the call went to voicemail, she’d gone up and found her on the rooftop terrace lounge. A few minutes later, each of them had gone to her own room.
She got out of bed, looked under the covers, and peered under the bed. Nothing.
Elizabeth was a creature of habit. Order was second nature to her because of her father and her military upbringing. She always plugged in her phone before she went to bed. She was certain she’d done it last night too.
She crossed the room to the desk. Her keycard was there, but no phone. She checked in her purse. Glancing around the suite, she felt a tingling sensation run down her spine. The door to the hallway was closed, but the metal bar of the security latch was unfastened. Something was definitely wrong. She’d fastened it. She always fastened it.
From where she was standing, it looked like the bathroom was empty, but the closet door was open. She knew she’d closed it last night. Her clothes hung like dutiful soldiers in a line. One of her empty suitcases lay on its side on the floor.
The sound of a door slamming somewhere close by sent a jolt through her. It came from down the hall. Suddenly, cold fear whispered across the nape of her neck. She glanced again at the security latch. Someone had been in here last night. But why steal her cell phone?
A hotel phone sat on the far side of the bed. There was another in the sitting area. But to get to one of them, she’d have to move. Her legs were stiff. She shuffled like a damaged robot to the phone by the bed.
She called her daughter’s room. Christina was holding on to a spare key to this room. Maybe she came in here for something during night. But that would mean Elizabeth had forgotten to latch the door. The room phone rang and rang. She hung up without leaving a message and tried her daughter’s cell phone next. Getting no answer, she called the front desk.
“Good morning, Mrs. Hall,” the hotel operator responded brightly. “How can I help you?”
Elizabeth struggled to find the right words.
Her gaze lit on the open closet. From this angle she could see the door of the small safe was open. She carried the phone across the room. The safe was empty.
Her wallet, passport, and jewelry—everything she’d locked in there last night—were gone.
“Is there something wrong, Mrs. Hall?” the woman persisted.
Her voice trembled. “Yes. Robbery. Soyuldum. Someone broke into my room last night.”
10
Christina
Now
A teenage girl bumps me and runs past the hijabi woman. A battered pickup truck loaded with vegetables is blaring out advertising through a speaker mounted on top. I’m not about to be distracted by anything though.
I am you. And you are me.
To go through life with the feeling of an inner isolation, to look around me and realize I don’t belong, has been part of my very existence. I was the child with my nose pressed against the window watching my classmates play outside. The one who didn’t look like her own mother. The one who asked a lot of questions but rarely believed the answers she was given.
“She has such exotic look. Where is she from?” I’d hear women ask Elizabeth in a whisper.
“Nowhere. Here. She’s mine.”
I grew up hating when people referred to me as exotic or different or unusual. Or ask, Where are you from? It all meant the same thing: you’re an outsider. I didn’t belong. All those moments were clues that the story I grew up believing about my life was a lie. I wasn’t me.
I am you. And you are me.
You’d think hearing something like those words would shake the ground under my feet, tilt the axis of my life.
I want to talk to her. I have questions to ask, but I don’t do it. Not yet. She isn’t looking at me. She isn’t saying anything more. She’s focusing on someone or something behind me.
I turn and see Elizabeth pushing through the crowd toward us. I glance back to make sure the other woman is still here. She hasn’t moved. Her eyes are glued to my mother. I feel like I’m part of an audience, watching a Greek tragedy unfold.
Whatever my expectations are of what’s about to happen between these two, they don’t happen. There’s something wrong with Elizabeth. She looks pale. Her classic bob hairstyle is mussed, as if she forgot to look in the mirror before she ran out the door. Dark glasses cover her eyes. No lipstick. No earrings. She’s wearing workout clothes. One of the laces on her trainers isn’t tied. She never goes out in public looking like this. She wouldn’t go to her Pilates class looking this messy. Out and about in the heart of Istanbul? No. Never.
“What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
The day Jax had his stroke, Kyle and I went to the hospital as soon as Elizabeth called. She met us in the waiting room. She looked more put together that day.
“I’m fine. Fine.” She pushes the glasses on top of her head. “Let me catch my breath.”
“Take your time.”
She clutches my arm and holds tight.
“Take your time.”
For my entire life, I’m used to seeing her composed and in complete control. But something is up right now.
“Can I get you something? Do you want to sit down?”
She shakes her head. “Who were you just talking to?”
I’m guessing the woman behind me is gone. I look around and she has disappeared. Before I get to explain anything though, Elizabeth cries out and pulls me sharply toward her as a man on a motorcycle buzzes past us on the sidewalk.
He zips back onto the road and disappears between the line of cars and vans. Rush hour has started. He hadn’t slowed down at all.
The pedestrian traffic is picking up. People bump us as they go by. Elizabeth tugs on my arm and moves us back near a wall topped with a wrought iron fence.
“What are you doing out here on your own?” she asks.
“I need to get something at the store.” Her face has taken on an ashen hue. “What’s wrong, Mother?”
“The woman you were speaking to. What did she want?”
A car or truck backfires somewhere close by, and she flattens her back against the wall. This is not like her at all.
“Talk to me. You’re getting me worried. I’ve never
seen you like this.”
“Did you get her name?”
“No.”
“What does she want?” she asks again. She still has a white-knuckled grip on my arm.
“Nothing.”
“What did she say?”
I am you. And you are me. I’m not about to say those words. Not now. Not when my mother is so wound up. So I lie. “She spoke Turkish. I didn’t understand her.”
“You don’t know your way around. You shouldn’t be—”
“Stop worrying about me. Tell me what happened? What’s wrong? What happened to you?”
She searches the faces around us. “I was robbed. My passport. My jewelry. My wallet. All of it is gone.”
My heart sinks. It’s a horrible feeling knowing someone was in your space, touching your things, taking what’s yours.
“How? When?”
“Last night, I think. I put everything in the room safe. They might have broken in when I came up to the rooftop lounge to check on you.”
The familiar old door of resentment slides open between us. Her words hurt more than she realizes.
She didn’t come up there to check on me. She was up there because she was bored. Right now, I’m wondering if she’s blaming me for getting robbed. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“How could you not see that car coming?”
“If you’d stayed at the funeral parlor, like I told you, instead of running out…”
“You should have had yourself and the baby transferred to UCLA Hospital as soon as Autumn was born.”
Elizabeth has always been big on playing the blame game, regardless of how old I was, no matter the circumstances.
Blinking back the unpleasant thoughts, I focus on what happened to her last night. “When did you realize your stuff was gone?”
“This morning. I woke up and the safe was empty. My social security card, my license, my credit cards. The money I left in there. They even took my phone.”
“Did you call the front desk?” They must love us. A missing baby yesterday, and today a robbery.
“Of course. They’re being extremely helpful. I also talked to hotel security, and they wrote up a report. They’ll file it with the police.”
“You need to call to cancel your credit cards.”
“I’ve already done it.”
I search for the right thing to say. As a programmer, I know identities get stolen by the minute, and the hackers don’t need the physical credit cards. She has travel insurance. The loss of money and jewelry won’t break her.
“Everything is replaceable. You’re safe, that’s all that matters.”
“The passport is the problem.”
“How do you replace it?”
“I have to go to the police station and get a physical copy of the report. Then I take it to the American Consulate. With any luck, they’ll issue me a temporary ID right away. That’ll be good enough to travel with until I get back to California.”
“Do you want me come with you to the police station?”
She looks around us again. “What are you doing now?”
“I want to go to a store for something. After that, I was planning to go back to the hotel and work. Kyle sent me a bunch of documents I need to go through before the first meeting. Still, I can come with you.”
She thinks for a second and then shakes her head. “You don’t speak Turkish. You’ll be no help to me at the police station. I’ll handle it.”
Her words and her tone clearly convey that I’m a disappointment because I don’t speak Turkish. Nonetheless, I feel bad for her, and I stop my defensiveness from ramping up.
I reach inside my bag, take out an envelope with a stack of liras, and hand it to her. “You said your money was stolen too. I’ll get more at an ATM.”
She slips the envelope into her pocket. “Go right back to the hotel after running your errand. I don’t want to worry about you.”
Elizabeth walks away and crosses the street. As I watch her go, I spot the hijabi woman. I wonder if we’re going to have the conversation that was interrupted. But she’s not interested in me right now. She’s crossed the street too, and is walking in the same direction as my mother.
11
Elizabeth
Now
Elizabeth stopped to look back at her daughter. Christina had already disappeared into the throng of pedestrians.
She tried to decide if she’d been short with her. Since the loss of the baby, she’d consciously tried to be more sensitive, more patient. Even before the accident, Christina had become fragile, prone to bouts of being argumentative, disagreeable. In many ways, she’d regressed to the difficult child and teenager she used to be.
Elizabeth knew they were both at fault for those problem years. The downside of being a single parent was that it was way too easy to take your frustration out on your child. She’d done that too often. The one closest to you, the one you loved most, was always the target. Go home and kick the dog.
Christina had dished out plenty of attitude at times, but for the most part she took the criticism because Elizabeth wanted to be a good mother. Besides, what other choice did she have? What choice had Elizabeth had before she left her parent’s home?
Growing up, she’d changed schools eight times by the time she graduated from high school. Every one or two years, her father was moved to another military base, uprooting the family. Leaving neighbors and familiar places behind was part of the routine. Her mother didn’t bother to make friends. She didn’t join clubs. As a result, no one invited them over. Neighbors’ kids didn’t come to play.
Elizabeth learned early in life that there was no point in forming close connections. Caring for someone only brought hurt. At least, that’s what her mother told her.
As she got older, she decided that boys were good for sex and fun, and that was enough for her. She wasn’t interested in emotional attachments. More importantly, she wouldn’t allow any man to raise a hand against her.
Her father was a hard man with a violent temper. A volatile undercurrent of anger seethed right beneath the surface, and it was always there. Like lightning, he could change, lash out. He could go from good-natured teasing to clutching her mother by the throat in a heart beat.
His baiting and his badgering extended to Elizabeth as she got older.
“Where the hell were you? What were you doing? Who were those boys?”
It didn’t matter what she said. He wasn’t looking for the truth or for any real answers. He already knew what he planned to do before the stream of questions began.
“You’re a whore, just like your mother.” Then the belt would come out.
A child is a liability for an abused spouse. After rushing her out of the room or out of the house, Elizabeth’s mother took beatings for her, time after time.
No wonder she ate that sandwich after he finally hanged himself in the basement. If Elizabeth had been home, she would have poured her mother a glass of sherry to go with it.
Because of that upbringing, she never relied on a man. She could take care of herself. She controlled her own life.
Still, since discovering the theft this morning, a twinge of worry kept poking at her that perhaps what happened was somehow related to the years she’d lived in Turkey. Those were the most vulnerable years of her life.
She tried to dismiss the possibility. The theft in her room was a nuisance, she told herself. That was all it was.
But the thought kept nagging at her.
A hotel manager and the head of security had showed up at her door this morning after she called the front desk. Her answers to their questions were brief and to the point.
The security director would make certain a police report was filed, and the manager had been sincerely apologetic.
“We’ll move you to another room without delay, ma’am.”
She felt for the money Christina had given her, and then signaled for a taxi. Immediately, one pulled to the curb.
“Nereye
gidiyorsun?” Where was she going?
Elizabeth took the piece of paper with the address that hotel security had given her for the police station out of her pocket. He’d said it might take a few hours at least before the police could have an official report of the theft ready for her to pick up. But she knew there was paperwork she needed from the embassy.
“Amerikan Konsolosluğu.” She started to give the address of the consulate, but he cut her off.
“O kapalı. Yeni bir konsolosluk var.”
A new consulate? Elizabeth didn’t know they’d closed the old one.
Out of habit, she reached for her cell phone and remembered that it had been stolen too. The man rattled off the location of the new one. It was in a northern suburb of the city.
The car jerked forward and moved into the crawling morning traffic. This would take forever, she thought. They were going to pass by the Grand Bazaar on the way out of the neighborhood, and she searched for Christina. There was no sign of her, but all the faces Elizabeth looked at on the sidewalk appeared hostile. They were not just people rushing to work or tourists trying to find some old monument to photograph. From every direction, hard gazes were fixed on her window.
The men had her father’s look. His eyes before the storm was unleashed. This was what happened when she thought of her upbringing. Some memories never went away. A chill slid upward along her spine, prickling between her shoulder blades. She willed the past away and tried to focus on today.
Her head was clear now. Regardless of what she’d said to Christina, her things must have been taken while she slept. She specifically remembered closing the safe before crawling into bed and turning off the lights.
The security director had suggested that someone might have crawled in through the bathroom window and left through the door. Her cell phone had definitely been next to the bed. That meant that the intruder stood next to the bed. He could have hurt her.
Once again, the past edged into her thoughts. This time, it wasn’t her father that scared her. It was someone she’d wronged. A man.
