The Terrorist (5 page)

He was nobody.

The whole Williams family was nobody.

They were the dullest of Americans.

They had no money.

They had no power.

So what did it mean?

Who had done it?

Would they try it again?

And what child would they choose the second time?

O
NCE MORE, THE MAN
in the too-large suit told Laura his name. “Mr. Evans,” she repeated, trying to hold it. “I need facts.”

“Miss Williams, we don’t have facts yet. It’s a guessing game now. We will start by investigating terrorists whose style is that sort of bomb.”

“Style?” she said. “Terrorists have style?”

He began to discuss techniques of terrorism, but Laura couldn’t bear it. She didn’t want Billy to be part of a string of deaths; a mere entry in a series. She wanted a
reason.

“I want you to leave now, Mr. Evans,” she said in a high, thready voice she did not recognize as her own. “You’re done here,” she said shrilly. She tried to shoo the police out of the flat.

Their flat was on the second floor of a brick row house that looked like a Mary Poppins picture. The front of the block bowed and curved romantically. The roofs were orange tile and onion domes decorated the corners. Each house had its own tiny front garden, and when they said “garden” here, they meant it: roses were in bloom right now, in mid-November.

The flat had a living room and a dining room and a funny little kitchen with the smallest appliances in history—a refrigerator that a kid in a college dorm would laugh at, and a washing machine that barely held a pair of jeans. The three bedrooms had no closets.

You kept your clothes in a wardrobe.

Laura had wondered what a wardrobe was ever since she had read
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
It turned out to be a freestanding wooden closet, a huge piece of furniture. Laura didn’t know how they’d gotten the wardrobes into the flat Billy thought they must have used a derrick to bring them up through the windows. How Billy had grieved that he was too big to play hide-and-seek in the wardrobes. But then—oh joy!—Billy figured out how to dismantle them. Laura often came home to find her closet distributed throughout the flat.

The wonderful London flat was ruined now.

The flat had no Billy, but his traces remained, because Billy could not be in a room without leaving himself everywhere. The flat had the taste and feel of strangers with terrible messages. It had the media gathered on the street below, ruining Heathfold Gardens as well.

The rain came down harder. The temperature dropped, and the rain turned to sleet. When she went to bed, Laura listened to it beating on the roof tiles. She thought of Billy’s room.

Empty.

She thought of Billy’s bed.

Empty.

Laura’s eyes would not close. Her body felt as if sleep had departed permanently. She wasn’t going to do sleep again, any more than she would do first grade again.

The days went by.

The Williams family did not give interviews. They would not get in camera range. They did not discuss their grief. They did not offer up home movies or photographs of their dead little boy.

The funeral service was private, and the media never found out where or when it had taken place.

In a few days, the media gave up on Heathfold Gardens.

The Consul General of the U.S. Embassy handled the deaths of Americans abroad, including the undertaker, the coroner, and shipment of the body. In Billy’s case, it was pieces of body.

Laura knew that death was death, and so it didn’t matter how badly the body was torn, but it
did
matter. That Billy was not whole in death mattered terribly. She wanted a surgeon to put him back together.

She was even living in the land of nursery rhymes. The land of Humpty Dumpty. Indeed, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put Billy together again. Laura even had all the king’s men: Scotland Yard filled her flat and stood on her street and questioned Billy’s classmates.

And they put nothing back together.

And never would.

Terrorism, whether there is one victim or a hundred, earns its name. People are terrified.

London quaked.

People were frightened on the tube, nervous on buses, edgy at traffic circles, tense in crowds, uncertain on trains.

People just wanted it to go away, and not get close to them.

The victim was American. Maybe it was his own fault. If foreigners would just go home, maybe these things would not happen. London seemed more than usually full of foreigners: people you could not trust; people who would kill a stranger.

Eventually it was necessary to go to the grocery.

Laura and Nicole could not avoid the aisles that included Marmite and digestive biscuits, two disgusting foods that English people seemed genuinely fond of, and Billy had been determined to like also. (He failed.)

Laura got milk, packaged in a container Billy insisted was a bleach bottle, and he was always telling his mother that he’d like another glass of Clorox, please.

There at the meat counter was hamburger, which British butchers ground too large for Billy; he said it looked like earthworms, so Nicole had to have the beef reground.

Today the butcher smiled. He’d seen Mrs. Williams coming, and had her meat ready. The butcher had not connected the bombing across town with the little American kid who was always demanding special attention. Any minute now, the butcher would ask where Billy was. Laura’s mother fled down the aisle before she had to hear the words, so Laura took the package and said, “Thank you,” and he said, “Where’s your brother?” and she couldn’t manage, “He’s dead,” so she said, “Not here today.”

Or any day.

She had to force her mother through the checkout.

They went home, and the mail had come, full of letters from home. Home meaning America.

Nicole and Laura had gotten few letters since they’d moved abroad. Everybody from home wanted to visit, but nobody wanted to write. “I don’t write letters,” they would say smugly, as if this made them better people. (I don’t chew tobacco, I don’t rip up the flag, I don’t write letters.)
Now,
when Billy wasn’t there to shout, “Mail! I get to open it!”—
now,
they wrote.

Laura’s mother put the condolence letters in a basket on the coffee table without opening them. “I don’t care how sorry people are,” she said raggedly. “I’m angry with them. Their sons are alive.”

Laura turned on the television for distraction and regretted it. Billy had liked English soap operas in which people swore at each other in Cockney. “Shuddup, guv, gimme ya bleedin’ quid er I’ll bleedin’ well knock ya head in.” But all three of them had become addicted to
Neighbors,
an Australian soap. Billy liked to mutter the actors’ lines as the show progressed so he could acquire a good Australian accent. “It’ll come in handy,” he explained, “for when I’m a spy.”

Neighbors
was on.

Laura and her mother cried in front of the television.

The family was flat and one-dimensional without Billy. Soda with the cap left off. The fizz was gone.

The British police kept suggesting that they should return to America. Thomas’s company wanted him home, too. They flew a couple of executives to London to coax. But neither parent was ready. They needed to be near Billy still. Being in London made them feel they were accomplishing something.

On Sunday, the Williams family went to church.

Church in England was so different from church at home. In a New England Congregational Church, the service was simple: three hymns and a sermon. In London, there were Episcopal services, where the choir wore astonishing robes with fur trim, and the priest intoned canticles, and the people stood and sat and knelt and rose all through the service, and you needed an entire separate book just to follow what you did during that hour.

The only part Laura was sure of was the Lord’s Prayer.

She said it by heart. How familiar were the gentle words. How welcome. Her mouth said a line she had always liked: “
Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us
.”

Laura had been brought up on this. Be nice. Forgive. Forget. Put aside the ugly things other people do to you, and in exchange, they will forget the ugly things you do to them.

Congregation, choir, and priests said it together, in soft private voices that turned into one public voice: “
Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us
.”

And suddenly Laura could not stand it. What a stupid wrong wrong sentence! Why were sensible people repeating that stupid sentence—week in and week out!—pretending it was correct? Pretending it was valuable? And worthy?

“
Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us
.”

Her parents stumbled on through the prayer. They were stumbling through their lives now, too, unable to pick up their feet or their hearts or their words. It seemed to Laura that her parents were living in rented bodies, whose parts didn’t work well, and whose speech was erratic.

Laura’s mother was spending hours each day on the phone with Grandma, desperate for the comfort of her own mother’s voice, but what could comfort her? No matter how dear Grandma’s voice, Billy remained where he was. Gone.

Nicole was crying again. Little drops of rain fell on the prayer book. Thomas did not see. He was blind inside his own grief.

Forgive Billy’s killer?

Laura Williams shuddered as if Billy’s heart and soul had moved through her.

And Laura Williams said out loud, “
Never
.”

O
NE WEEK AFTER THE
murder, Thomas went back to work.

Mr. Evans took Laura to school. Laura did not ask why. She had become fond of Mr. Evans, glad when he dropped in every day. Going to school with him seemed quite natural.

It was ugly out. Raw and rainy. Ordinary London weather.

Laura wore a long crimson wool skirt, black boots, and a high-necked black sweater. Over this, she wore her flannel-lined denim jacket. Laura rarely used a purse, but stuffed bus pass, snack money, and pencils into her jacket pockets.

Denim was so American.

Even though American blue jeans were very popular abroad, Laura could always tell who was American and who was foreign but wearing American jeans. Sometimes she mixed up Australians or Canadians, until they talked, and she got the accent, but she never mixed up English or Europeans. They just didn’t wear denim the same way.

Laura had considered wearing the no-color raincoat that was a London specialty. Indeed, Americans came to London just to purchase such a raincoat. Raincoats blended into the crowds.

When you lived abroad, you found out that some stereotypes were true. Americans did talk louder, laugh harder, and swing their bodies more than the British. British posture was condensed. American posture, in comparison, was a swagger. Americans took up more space on the sidewalk than the English did.

Laura was surprised at her own fashion statement, wearing that denim jacket, unwilling to blend. Surprised that she was going out of her way to walk American, as if she owned the sidewalk.
Yes. I’m an American. Wanna make something of it? Wanna kill me, too?

Laura made conversation—loud, like American tourists, using the vowel-switch Boston accent she did not really possess.

Mr. Evans went with her into the high school building. Billy had not had classes there. Middle school rooms were separated by the cafeteria, and sixth graders had lunch at a different hour. But Billy had been too boisterous to go unnoticed, and everybody in high school had known him, anyway. You couldn’t help knowing him. His presence was noisy and full of energy, and people smiled when they heard him, even when he was being his most annoying.

Laura and Mr. Evans were met by the headmaster, Mr. Frankel. Mr. Frankel was beyond flustered. He was scared.

One of his students had been slain. Within hours, dozens of his students had bailed out, quitting to attend another school or leaving the country entirely. Was Mr. Frankel going to be stranded here with a building and no students? Of course it had to be
other
families with enough sense to go home. The Williams family, the dangerous ones, were staying.

“Laura, are you sure you’re ready?” said Mr. Frankel, who was not ready. Mr. Frankel had moved to London the same year that thirty people had been incinerated in King’s Cross Underground Station. Terrorism. The thought of terrorism in his very own school turned him into a Ping-Ping ball, bouncing on the table of his fears. He was responsible for so many children.

Yes, the school had bomb drills, but nobody expected to
find
bombs! Yes, the school had locks, television monitors, and armed patrols, but nobody expected to
need
this stuff. And what blockade would that be to a terrorist, anyhow? Obviously, none.

“Your brother’s death, I’m sure,” said Mr. Frankel, hoping even now that Laura Williams would just go home, “is very, very difficult to face, and—”

“I’m ready,” said Laura.

Nicole Williams watched her daughter dress, and then watched from the window as Mr. Evans and Laura went up Heathfold Gardens toward the bus stop on Finchley Road.

Nicole had always been able to believe that she was Billy’s mother. Billy coming home from school was an event. He never walked in: he sprang or raced or vaulted. He never had time to sit down for milk and cookies, but had to snack standing up because he had so much to tell, so many bartered treasures to show off, and a desperate need for cash, to buy something that couldn’t wait another half hour.

Nicole had never quite believed, however, that she was Laura’s mother. Back when Laura was short and scrawny with braces on her teeth and hair falling out of a ponytail, yes. But this tall, slender young woman with the romantic eyes and the sense of fashion from Paris? Nicole could never believe it was school Laura had been attending. Laura must have been at Cinderella’s ball.

Nicole finished her coffee. She stared into the open kitchen cabinet where the coffee can belonged. Next to it sat cans of SpaghettiOs. Nicole made a superior tomato sauce; it took four hours and would make an Italian weep. Billy preferred SpaghettiOs.