The Terrorist (13 page)

“It is interesting,” said Mohammed carefully, “that Laura and Jehran have become good friends.” He would not have expected Jehran to include Americans at her party, she would consider them a stain on the carpets. However, he, too, had been touched by Jehran’s concern for Laura.

Samira shrugged. “Laura is a fool and an American. I do not understand why Jehran is playing with her.”

Mohammed could not deny that Laura was a fool and an American, but he was very fond of her. “Have you been friends with Jehran long?” he asked. “Did you attend that party?”

“The slumber party was strange.”

“It sounds strange to me,” admitted Mohammed. He could not think of a circumstance in which he would invite eight boys to sleep on the floor of his bedroom. It was an American custom that somehow did not sound American. According to Andrew, who knew these things, it was a girl’s custom, not a boy’s.

“Jehran was catering to the Americans. It made me angry. You know as well as I do that Jehran despises Americans. The whole reason she’s in an international school is to get to know the enemy. I know she’s giving information to her family.”

Mohammed puzzled over this. What information? Con, whose father was important in the American Embassy, might have interesting information if her father were the type to talk at the dinner table. But Mohammed could not imagine Con telling anybody her father’s business.

Tiffany. Her parents were with an industrial carpet company, so what useful facts could Tiffany reveal to Jehran? Changes in industrial rug prices?

Samira didn’t know and didn’t care. She was just angry that an American was coming ahead of her in Jehran’s affections.

Affections, thought Mohammed. Jehran is not an affectionate person. Laura is affectionate. But Jehran is calculating. What calculations does Jehran have that include Laura Williams?

Jimmy was mostly surprised by how normal Laura looked, separating the chocolate sides of Oreo cookies Bethany had brought to share and eating the filling first.

Okay, said Jimmy to himself. So what do I do? Laura thinks she can go home with her dead brother. She bought him a seat. She’s planning to leave December twenty-eighth and stay for a week.

Okay. I could call her parents. So,
Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Williams, did you know that Laura has flipped?

In Jimmy’s opinion, Mrs. Williams was already over the edge. He hadn’t met Mr. Williams, so he didn’t know about the father, but Jimmy didn’t want to make that call.

He could tell the headmaster.
So, Mr. Frankel, guess
w
hat Laura thinks she can do over vacation? Transport her brother’s ghost to Kennedy.

He could tell his own parents.

But Jimmy felt a loyalty to Laura he could not define. Laura was nobody’s girlfriend, certainly not his, and yet he felt very close to her, as if they had shared something special.

He didn’t want to betray her.

Since Laura could
not
take Billy to New York on December twenty-eighth, the most likely thing to happen was that Laura would wake up realizing that, and come to her senses; and the worst thing that could happen was that Laura would fly to New York, and the seat beside her would be empty.

He shuddered, imagining Laura talking to the empty seat.

Mohammed took the unusual step of asking his father about Jehran.

“I do not want you involved with that family,” said his father sharply.

Mohammed protested that he was not involved, just curious.

“That family is very questionable. If they are a family. I have doubts. I have sent you to an international school so you will better know the customs of the world,” said his father. “You will go into business with me, and this knowledge will be helpful. But there are people with whom you will not associate.”

This made Mohammed more curious. “What do you know about Jehran’s family that—” His father simply looked at him, and Mohammed ceased to speak.

Mohammed was appalled by how American boys talked to their fathers. This was when he knew that he and they came from different worlds. When Mohammed’s father closed a subject, it stayed closed.

But he knew his father’s prejudices. He sorted through them, wondering which applied to Jehran’s family. If they were a family. What could that mean?

Drugs were the strongest possibility. The family, or group of criminals, could be a conduit for drugs from Afghanistan or Iraq or Iran or Syria.

Extreme fundamentalist religion was not likely. If the family was rigid in its Islamic beliefs, Jehran would not be in a school attended by boys and Americans.

Violence was possible. If the family gave money to, say, extremists in Syria who put bombs on Israeli buses, Mohammed’s father would never associate with them.

Mohammed did his schoolwork. He watched some television. During the evening news, it occurred to Mohammed that there was one violent act that had taken place near Jehran.

The murder of Billy Williams.

For Laura’s parents to believe she was going to Edinburgh, she would have to get a permission slip from Mr. Hollober.

L.I.A. believed in detail. The permission slip would include the hotel in Edinburgh, its phone number, the names and phone numbers of chaperones, suggested clothing and spending money, instructions for meeting the return train.

Laura tried to believe that her mother and father would not call her up in Edinburgh to see if she was having fun.

After class, Jimmy Hopkins got his permission slip. “Jimmy, this is great!” said Mr. Hollober. “I’m so glad you’re coming. Your parents can sign this and fax it.”

Laura took Jehran’s arm and walked out of the room. In the hallway, she said, “Jehran, my mother will help me pack, she’ll drive me to the station, she’ll stay on the platform to wave good-bye. Mr. Hollober is sure to mention that I didn’t pay for it and he isn’t expecting me.”

“Laura, don’t be frantic. This will work. Now, distract Jimmy.”

Laura did not know how to distract Jimmy Hopkins. Or anybody else. And even if she did distract Jimmy, he would just be distracted and still holding his permission slip.

Jimmy came out of Mr. Hollober’s room slowly, because he had such an armload of books, and he was trying to slide the permission slip into his notebook without bothering to open the notebook

Jehran said, “Jimmy, may I borrow your notes? I want to photocopy them. I drifted off during the lecture.”

“He didn’t say anything important,” said Jimmy, not handing her his notebook.

“Jehran likes unimportant details,” said Laura. “She’s the kind who studies during vacation. Let her have them, Jimmy.”

Jimmy laughed. “Okay, Jehran. All two lines of notes. They’re yours.” He handed over the notebook. His permission slip lay crookedly inside the cover.

“Whoa-eeee!” shouted the Americans when school was over. “Not only is the sky blue—the sun is shining!” In London, this was to celebrate.

A softball game began on one of the school diamonds. Laura got that dizzy time-slip feeling when she couldn’t quite tell if she were in Boston or London. Baseball made her happy, though. She loved the sound of ball against bat.

Mohammed stood next to Laura. She wanted to say,
So Mohammed, if you were a teenage Muslim girl, and your family was marrying you to the man they chose, and you hated him, and you ran away
—
what would they do to you if they caught you?

Actually, from Mr. Hollober’s class and Samira, she knew the answer: you wouldn’t run away. You would be delighted that your parents had chosen a sensible nice man from a good family.

And Mohammed wasn’t dumb. He knew the only Muslim girl with whom Laura was friends was Jehran.

So she could not ask Mohammed anything.

She wanted advice.

But there was nobody to ask.

“I gave up understanding Thanksgiving,” said Mohammed, “but that’s history. Now we approach Christmas. Tell me about Christmas.”

She knew he didn’t mean religious Christmas: any Muslim understood sacred days. He meant American Christmas. The month of December.

At Christmas, people were leaving London. Many Americans were Going Home. This was said reverently, as if speaking of a shrine. But just as many were going to ski in Switzerland or safari in Kenya. Laura dreaded Christmas. How were the Williamses going to celebrate?

Samira joined Jehran on the far side of the diamond, and the two laughed in that Euro-smile way. Laura remembered how anti-American Samira and Jehran usually were in Mr. Hollober’s class. How Jehran thought so poorly of American families.

But in the end, thought Laura, she knows we’re the only place to go. If you need a sanctuary, it’s us.

“Once,” said Laura to Mohammed, because she could not talk of light and life and Christmas, “Mom and Dad and Billy and I went to the London Dungeon. They had some really good ways to kill people back then.”

“
Good
ways to kill?” asked Mohammed.

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t. I don’t think there are good ways to kill. I think there are only good ways to live.”

“Oh Mo, don’t be so perfect.”

The nickname popped out. Americans liked nicknames. The shortening of a name was a sort of gift. She wondered, since he bore a sacred name, if changing Mohammed to Mo was like having a son named Jesus and calling him Jeez.

“I mean,” said Laura, “when I catch the person who killed Billy, I’m not going to settle for a jail cell. I want that person stoned or squashed to death, the way they show you at the Dungeon.”

“Don’t say that,” said Mohammed. “I’ve seen a woman stoned and it isn’t something you could do, Laura, or that you’d want to witness.”

But he was wrong. Laura could do it easily to the man who had killed her brother.

“I didn’t know Billy except by sight,” said Mohammed, “but I admired him. I liked his energy. He wouldn’t want you to be thinking of these things. Not at the time of your Christmas.”

A minute ago she had wanted Mohammed’s advice; now that Mohammed was giving her advice, she hated him.

“Laura,” said Mohammed, almost fiercely, “be careful in your friendships. Don’t be such an American.”

She was furious with him. “What business is it of yours?” she demanded. “And what’s wrong with being such an American?”

He spread his hands between them to filter her anger. “There’s nothing wrong with being an American. But you lack suspicion.”

“
What are you talking about, Mohammed?
All I do now is suspect people! I spend all day and night making lists! Lists of people who thought Billy was unsupervised! Lists of people who thought Billy was a nuisance! Lists of people who might know how to make bombs! I suspect sixth graders who bought Ritz crackers from Billy. I suspect neighbors, Mohammed. I suspect teachers. I suspect
you.
”

Con Vikary watched her former best friend stomp away, having yelled at the last person willing to cool her off.

Mohammed was expressionless, which Middle Eastern kids did very well.

Con felt cut up inside, as if Laura had yelled at her, instead of at Mohammed.

Laura got on a 113, Eddie having left the school before the ball game started. The bus pulled away from the curb before the last passenger was fully on. It seemed to rocket away from L.I.A.

Con had a sense of time running out, of a clock ticking, of an ending rushing toward her.

But other things ticked besides clocks.

Bombs ticked.

L
AURA WILLIAMS STOOD IN
her own flat and tried to talk herself into stealing her own brother’s passport.

It isn’t stealing. It belongs to us.

Daddy has never forbidden me to go into his desk.

But it was stealing. It didn’t belong to Jehran. Although Daddy had never expressly said
Don’t open that drawer
—it was certainly understood that his desk was not for his children to paw through.

Child, Laura reminded herself. He doesn’t have children anymore. He has a child.

At night her parents tucked themselves into the envelope of each other. They went to bed together, safe under the same covers, while Laura was alone. She could not summon Billy. He had fully departed.

She was the only child.

She opened the drawer casually and pressed the bulging files together. At the back lay a zippered leather envelope. The passports were wrapped in a fat rubber band wound around twice. When that rubber band had been spread to go around the passports, Billy had been alive.

She took the rubber band off. She separated the passports. On the front of each tiny book was a golden eagle, USA, and a perforated passport number, but on the outside, no name and no photograph. On the outside, a passport was anonymous.

She opened the first.

It was Nicole’s. Not new. Nicole had her old haircut and a shirt she didn’t wear anymore.

Laura shuffled it to the bottom of the pack and opened the next.

Hers. Yucky, yucky hair, she looked as if she had the IQ of Cool Whip.

She kept it.

And the third was William Wardlaw Williams.

He was so little! He was so young.

Oh God! So young and so little and so dead.

Laura had to open her father’s, to reassure herself that Thomas Williams was still himself. And he was. She put Nicole’s and Thomas’s back.

Billy,
she told his picture,
I’ll have a son someday. I can’t name him William Wardlaw Williams, because I’ll be married and I’ll have a different last name. But I’ll name him William.

And she knew that she would not: there could never be another Billy.

Somehow Nicole figured out how to cook something and even put it on the table.

Life goes on, she reminded herself, but she did not want it to go on. She caught herself taking a strange, high step across the dining room floor, as if she thought she could step back to when Billy was alive.

She had signed the permission slip to go to Edinburgh.

It was sensible. Laura needed to put her life together. But Nicole could barely stand the thought of life coming together, closing without a gap where there ought to be Billy.

Thomas sat in front of the television, watching a British quiz show. It was the sort where there would suddenly be gales of laughter from the audience and no American viewer would know why. Thomas could not answer a single question.