After much deliberation, I put the battery back into my phone, turn it on and send an email I’ve been dreading since Nate was shot. Describing exactly what has been happening since I left Canada. Then I walk toward the riverfront. I can’t go back to the hospital, or the bar, or anyplace I’ve been since I got to this city, so I sit by the water and look toward Canada. Only a narrow stretch of water, the Detroit River, separates the two countries, linked by a bridge owned by some kind of industry tycoon. If I was to get on that bridge, clear customs, and drive a few hours, I would be just in time for a cup of tea with my teenage daughter. I could send her a photo of where I am but part of me doesn’t want her to know that I’m close.
I guess it’s enough for now that I know she’s okay and getting regular pelvic exams.
I’m not sure how long I stay on the riverfront, but in Detroit time it’s about two dozen people on bicycles with speakers mounted on them, playing slow jams. It’s impossible to hate on cyclists blasting Luther Vandross and Aretha Franklin, no matter how close they are to running you over.
Hearing Aretha reminds me of Nate’s aunt.
It’s strange that a place like this could spawn one of the greatest soul legends alive today, but it makes a certain kind of sense. Music comes from shoving open the blinds and letting the sunshine or the darkness in. At least the blues does. Soul music is called that for a reason. If there was ever a place that stripped away the extraneous, it is Detroit. The only city where, after the population expanded to over a million, it has contracted again to far below it in what is America’s most famous case study in mass desertion. Detroit isn’t pretty, but the people left to pick up the pieces feel real to me. Which is more than I can say for beautiful but distant Vancouver, where there are no cyclists blasting love songs to cheer up the downtrodden. Maybe I’m falling for this city, even though someone here is trying to kill me.
I’m in a stupendous funk, and it’s only getting worse.
After my near-drowning last year, my instincts have been off. Though I’ve at times felt I’d been watched, it took me a long time to figure out that the surveillance was real—that the veteran had been keeping an eye on me and I wasn’t, as I thought, going crazy. This would not have happened if I’d been in my right mind, but Seb’s illness and the introduction of Bonnie to my life have set me off-kilter.
My phone beeps as several emails from Simone come through. I’m lucky that free outdoor Wi-Fi hotspots exist so that I can be digitally harassed without being charged extra data fees. The first messages are dire warnings about being careful or else. But she never says what the “else” is.
The second contains a list of names and images that she’s dug up of marines injured in Beirut during the time my father served. I wish I’d had enough presence of mind when Nate had been shot to recover my backpack from the scene so that I could look at this on a larger screen. I’m reluctant to go back, in case whoever is after me is still lurking around. And I don’t want to run into Kev. I’m not sure I can take any more questions from him at the moment. I am still without a change of clothes, my passport, and my laptop. At least I have my wallet and phone on me, but still. I could have been better prepared. Thinking like this is a waste of time, of course. At the bottom of a dark pit is where what-ifs belong. Where you can find Nate. It is also where I put the memory of the time when, as a child, I saw a man bleeding out on the floor in front of me, which is partially why I’m in this godforsaken city in the first place.
I force myself to read through Simone’s emails on my phone. The veteran isn’t in there. If I’d been smarter I would have asked him his name when I confronted him in Vancouver, but I wasn’t so I didn’t. Because of this error, I’m here squinting at old records. Out of desperation I begin searching through images of American journalists in Lebanon during the 1970s, because Dania Nasri said that the man I now know as the veteran had posed as a journalist. Maybe there was some truth to that.
My phone rings. It’s a blocked number. “Hello?”
“It’s me,” says Simone. “Did you get my messages?”
“Looking through them right now. Before you say anything about the attack . . .” God help me, but I had to tell her to get her to respond to me right away. And she did, as I knew she would.
“Don’t talk to me about the attack, Nora. I’ve just about had it with you. It’s all over the local press that some famous singer is on his deathbed. You’re in the middle of a shitstorm. Again.”
So she is upset. My strategy for getting her to respond quickly has achieved its aim, but not without some blowback. You can’t win them all. And I haven’t told her I’m the target. I may have insinuated that someone might be after my new friend Nate.
“Simone—”
“Don’t. Just don’t. I can’t even with you right now.”
“Look, I promise that all I’ve done is gone around asking questions about my dad. That’s it.”
She’s quiet for a moment. I think she believes me, but can’t be sure. I’m about to make another declaration of innocence when she speaks. “So you’re looking for information about Americans in Lebanon during a very, very difficult time in the history of that country. There’s a lot out there. And when hasn’t Lebanon had a difficult time of it?”
The vast majority of photographs are from the eighties onward, when the American Embassy and marine barracks in Beirut were bombed. There were also stories about the hostage crisis that held the country in grip for roughly a decade, when foreigners were fair game and would be kidnapped left, right, and center, for as many reasons as there were in the book. The true beginnings of the hostage crisis hit a few years after my father had left the military, after my mother had immigrated to Canada and went to the wedding in Dearborn, but there had been some signs that Beirut wasn’t a safe space for foreigners even before then.
“Talk to me about this guy, this veteran. What was your impression of him?”
“He was hard to pin down. His voice was strange and there was a scar on the side of his neck.”
“So maybe there was some damage to his vocal cords, or throat, or something.”
“That part felt true. When he said he’d been in an attack.”
“Okay, this is what you’re good at, Nora. This is your strength. Take away all the bullshit, forget that he’d been following you. What else about what he said felt true?”
“When he said there’d been trouble in Lebanon,” I said slowly. I’d been looking at my father’s life as a whole, looking into his childhood and his military life, but I’d learned nothing about his death from that line of inquiry. “He’d said it in reference to my father, but I can’t find anything to support that.”
I can hear her drumming her fingers against a table in the background. “So an American who’d had trouble in Lebanon. You’re sure he’s not in any of the photos that I’ve dug up?”
“I’m positive.”
“Your dad was with the marines on a ship stationed in the Mediterranean, right? And came home in the seventies.”
“Right.”
“Your mom was a refugee, and had gone to a wedding in the late seventies.”
“Yup.”
“Sorry,” she says, after a moment of silence. “I’m having thoughts about hideous disco outfits. The body type that can pull off a pair of bell-bottoms is so rare . . . Where were we? Your mother goes to a wedding in Dearborn and meets your father—”
“Not at the wedding. Somewhere in the city.”
“Right, a few years after they meet, a newspaper article on the groom’s family comes out because his dad is some kind of bigwig in Beirut who played a role as a political negotiator for the hostage crisis. The national newspapers pick it up. They use some of the wedding photos to profile his American ties. A journalist shows up at the family’s house, asking questions.”
“When my mom finds out about it, she leaves. About a year or so later, my dad dies.”
“Right. So there’s a period after your mom leaves and your dad dies—”
“If this veteran was after her, why did he wait?”
“It doesn’t fit.” She pauses. Thinks about it for a moment. I hear her cover the phone and whisper something to someone in the background but she’s back with me quickly. “Let’s leave that alone for a minute. I’m sifting through some other things. I might have some more photos for you to look at, Nora. Hang on.”
I am hanging on, alone and in plain sight, as dusk falls around me. A frayed thread is what’s keeping me from getting on the next plane back to Vancouver. Any sense of comfort I’d felt being in a crowded public place in daylight has now faded. There’s no way I can go back to the motel, or to Nate’s place, or Harvey’s. But she doesn’t have to know that. I sit and people-watch, particularly taken with a man in navy pants, a tan blazer, pink shirt, purple tie, and black shoes who still manages to look more coordinated than me, even though both my jacket and sweatpants are the same shade of dark gray. Some people can pull off color. All sorts of them, and at once.
My phone lights up. There is a photo waiting from Bonnie. Her feet are propped up on the dashboard of a car and, look, there’s her forearm at the edge of the shot. Beyond the front windshield is an expanse of water that I assume is Lake Ontario. The sky over the water is a delicate pink. I’m out of Whisper photos, so it takes me a minute to figure out how to respond. While I wait for Simone’s next set of emails, I go over to a nearby streetlight and take a photo of myself underneath it. In the picture, you can see my face and my upper body clearly. It would have been nice for the shot to have been more flattering, but that’s a losing battle. I send it off to her quickly, before I can stop myself.
Every girl should have a photo of her mother.
Then I check into a cheap hotel, not far from the waterfront. It’s not much better than the motel, but at least the door locks. I pull the mini fridge away from the wall and set it in front of the door—for a sense of homely comfort—and then fall onto the bed with my clothes and shoes on.
I’m asleep when Simone sends a zip file of information through to me.