The Garden of Last Days (51 page)

His heart was bucking in his chest. Daniels laughed and there was the tap-tap of him making a move on the board. O’Brien was humming now. Some metal song AJ had always hated.
This one hates wife beaters
. Fucking Deena. The words were there inside him but there was very little anger behind it. It wasn’t her fault, was it? She didn’t backhand herself across the kitchen. She didn’t get her wrist broken for not letting go of some lying whore’s hand. Marianne could be blamed. She certainly could. But what sang through AJ’s blood right now aimed itself for him and him only, and it was like a gun going off inside him, the emptiness and ringing quiet.

Maybe a hurricane was coming, maybe just a storm. His family would be inside now. He saw them. Deena and Cole, Cole sitting on Deena’s lap on the couch watching a cartoon movie. Deena sharing her ice cream with him. And was she thinking about her husband? Did she even know where he was? Did she care? Oh man, was she
relieved
? Please don’t tell me she’s sitting there feeling that, the ice cream sweet in her mouth.

THE LAUNDROMAT SMELLED
like lint and fabric softener and bubble gum. Jean had never stepped foot in one before. Now she sat in a hard plastic seat across from a bank of front-loading washers watching the clothes of strangers turn round and round. She could clearly see bras and underwear and blouses tossed one over the other. Jean had insisted to April that she use her washer and dryer in the laundry room back home, but April had stood in a light rain in the garden holding her bundle of dirty clothes to her breasts, her pocketbook dangling from her shoulder, her long hair pulled back tightly, and said no, “Thank you. I just need things to be familiar right now. I need to do what I usually do.”

April pulled her wet clothes into a basket, then carried it over to the dryers. Two women sat beside each other over there thumbing through magazines. A young man with a goatee spoke on his cell phone, and he eyed April’s rear as she leaned over the dryer for the
settings. April was dressed in long khaki shorts and a blue top, nothing provocative. There was the feeling that Jean had somehow missed something all these years, had missed seeing something she should’ve seen, knowing something she should’ve known.

She had been feeling superior to April, smarter and more mature, but now, rain whipping onto the sidewalks and street outside, Jean felt pampered and naïve.

April dropped the empty clothes basket onto the stack of others just like it. “You think the car’s there yet?”

“It’s only been an hour. They said two, didn’t they?”

April nodded. “You hungry?” She pulled her pocketbook up over her shoulder.

“Yes, would you like me to go get us something?”

“We can both go.”

“What about your clothes?”

“I don’t care about them, Jean. I need to get out of here.” She looked away and started walking to the door.

The wind bent the palm trunks forward and back, the fronds snapping and rippling, the rain pricking dully against Jean’s face and arms as she hurried beside April. They walked into the first place there was, a burrito bar where young people sat laughing at two tables side by side and above them hung a widescreen television of skateboarders performing impossible stunts between curved concrete walls. There was rap music playing, the relentless staccato of the singer’s voice and words overwhelming whatever instruments there were. Jean hated it, but water dripped off her face, and her hair was ruined and her pantsuit would have to be cleaned and it was nice just to be indoors. She laughed. “Well this is better.”

April looked distracted and pale. Her hair and shoulders were wet, her nipples erect.

They sat in a booth under a glassed display of skateboards. There were no menus. The man behind the counter waved them over, and he asked what they wanted and he’d make it for them. Under the glass were stainless steel containers of chopped tomatoes and lettuce,
three kinds of shredded cheeses, four kinds of beans, and warmed pans of chicken, pork, and beef. They each ordered the same thing, a chicken burrito with lettuce, tomato, and pinto beans. Jean asked for bottled water and April iced tea. As he handed them their warm burritos wrapped in foil, the man’s eyes passed over April’s breasts and face, something she ignored completely as she unzipped her leather pocketbook.

Jean said, “I’ll get this.”

“No.” April raised her hand as if to stop more than what she’d just offered.

“Thank you.” Jean took her food. She glanced down at April’s small leather pocketbook split open with tightly packed bills. It was all that money from that night, the money she’d come home with instead of Franny, and now she wanted to get away quickly and drive April back to the police department for her impounded car, then drive home alone.

April sat down across from her. Rain blew against the door and windows. She lifted her burrito and kept looking over Jean’s shoulder at the buffeted glass. Her arms were brown from all her mornings in the sun but her face was blanched, her eyes shining under the electric light.

“Are you all right?”

“She’s afraid of storms, Jean.” April shook her head. She began to bounce her foot under the table. She held the wrapped burrito to her lips but didn’t eat.

“I know she is. But she’s with professionals. They’ll know how to distract her.”

“She’s in a fucking
foster
home.” A tear shot down her cheek.

Jean reached over, made herself touch her arm. “On Monday they’ll see a good home and bring her back right away. Why wouldn’t they?”
Franny’s disgusting room, your job
.

“You think I deserve this, don’t you?”

“Of course not. Why would you say that?”

“I don’t know, I know you don’t approve of me.”

I think you don’t know what you’ve got
. “No. No, I think you’re ambitious, April. And sometimes ambition’s a train that speeds right by other things. Other people.”

“You think I
like
what I do?”

“I have no idea. And it’s absolutely none of my business.”

“Because I
don’t
like it. But I have goals. I’m not one of those stupid bitches snorting all the money up her nose, you know. I’ve saved every penny I’ve ever made.”

“I believe you.” Jean put her burrito down. She pulled a napkin from the steel dispenser against the wall and wiped her fingers. How strange to have known someone and not known her. Jean’s friends, how after Harold’s death they treated her differently and she saw them differently, as if she had always driven up to her own house from the south, then one afternoon came from the north, how much smaller it looked from here. The spruce obscured the elm and the clapboards were curling.

And now Franny gone, God help us, for only the weekend and perhaps Monday, but without her between Jean and April as a constant physical presence, the two women were different with each other; they could actually talk to one another now.

She looked past April to the table of laughing young people, teenagers, three of them sitting right beside each other talking on cell phones. She drank more water. The rap music was quieter now, though the reciter’s voice still sounded angry, rain whipping against the glass like a spray of bullets.

APRIL COULDN’T EAT
anymore. She pushed her burrito to the side and sucked her iced tea through her straw. Wind gusts kept hurling sheets of rain unfolding against the window and it began to sound like part of the music, the drums of some angry, deaf drummer locked out of the show. She could feel Jean watching her and for the first time she wanted to tell her things. She wanted to tell her about McGuiness. She wanted to tell her it was a game and she’d learned how to play it so she came out ahead. She wanted to tell her about the real estate she would own, not just one house but two, three, more. She wanted to tell her how close she was to quitting, six more months through the high season of winter, maybe just a few more after that. But she kept seeing Franny outside, curled up on the sidewalk in just her pink pajamas, the rain pelting her narrow back, her bare feet and hair, her hands over her face, calling for her.

“It’s okay, honey. It’s okay.” Jean put a napkin in her hand. April nodded and stood and wiped at her eyes. “I need to go.”

The rain and wind had eased up as they pulled off Ringling Boulevard and into the lot behind the police station. There were five or six parked cruisers, a K-9 van, and a tow truck, its orange roof lights flashing as the driver lowered the front end of April’s car to the puddled asphalt. A section of yellow police tape hung wetly from the driver’s door and in this gray light her Sable was a dull maroon she’d never quite noticed before, a pitiful color really, the color you choose that you think is cheery when it’s really more brooding and unlucky.

“Would you like me to go in with you?”

“No thank you. I’ll see you at home.” That last word rippled through her. April felt shy and glanced back at her laundry—clean, folded, and rain-damp on the backseat.

“Leave it, April. We’ll bring it in later.” Jean’s hair was wet, her pantsuit wrinkled.

“Thank you for all your help.”

“You’re welcome. Let me know what I can do about tomorrow. Getting ready, I mean.”

April closed the door of the Cadillac. She hooked the strap of her pocketbook over her shoulder and hurried through the light rain into the police station. If she saw the directory on the wall, she didn’t take it in, that the upper floors of this building were cells and in one of them sat A.J. Carey, lying on his bunk and trying not to think of all the judge had denied him, all he’d taken away.

SUNDAY

BASSAM SITS AT
the outdoor table beside Tariq. The morning is warming, the sky clear above the buildings of Harvard University across the street. The high brick walls and black iron gates of this place everyone in the world knows of, even him, even a boy from the province of Asir. This best school for the unbelievers. This best school.

It is the morning of their day of worship. Bells ring in the air for the polytheists, and the shops and cafés are open for business as usual. The square is crowded with students and tourists. There is traffic in the street beyond the full tables of this Au Bon Pain and its umbrellas and young trees shading the tables. At many of them men and women sit together in twos.

They have as many years as he does, and they smoke cigarettes and drink coffee and laugh or lean close to one another and speak quietly. One girl has hair the color of copper wires. It falls in long curls
down her back, and she smiles at her boyfriend with her eyes only. She wears tight blue jeans and boots for cowboys, her legs crossed at the knee, her nuhood behind a white T-shirt so rounded and soft-looking. But it is her face Bassam watches. How happy and satisfied she looks sitting at the table of this thin boy with his books and his dark hair and his eyeglasses, a Jew—she looks like the animal who has eaten well and knows she will again. And she loves the boy for this, doesn’t she? She loves this boy for giving that to her. And today they woke together in a warm bed in a room in a building on the other side of the wall of this best school.

She is beautiful, yes, but this is not why Bassam cannot stop watching her. It is her love for the boy. It is her love for her youth and her health and her freedom and her life in this world, and Bassam is stronger now than he was even one day before for he is not weakened witnessing this love; this
is
how Shaytan works among the kufar. He seduces you to love this life they love too well. The whore April, Bassam had felt alone with her, by himself while being with her. The same aloneness that had infected him back home before he’d been guided back to Allah. As if he were not loved. As if he were not protected. As if he would not continue to live after his own death. How could he have felt these things? Him, a
shahid
, Insha’Allah.

Again, it was the yielding, the yielding to the mushrikoon. And it was Khalid who, through the Creator, saved him. It was the body of his brother lowered into the grave that brought him back to the Judge and the Sustainer.

When Bassam left home Khalid’s possessions were still in the room they shared. His Saudi clothes and the clothes of the kufar, Levi’s blue jeans and shirts made by the Gap, his Nike shoes and hat like Karim’s. Above both their beds, their mother had hung woven tapestries, and behind Khalid’s, pinned to the back, was a carton of Marlboros.