MY UNCLE’S HOME AND THE HUNDREDS OF ACRES RULED over by the backhoe and the lion sit at the highest elevation of Thebes township. A couple of miles below, where the property line ends, the first houses begin to appear—old farmsteads, some abandoned and left with rotting barns and boarded-up houses, but a few restored and still active. June is mulching season. The tang of cow dung wafts through the air, signaling summer is about to begin. That restless ache we all had when school was almost done! Kids longing to bust out of hot, gluey classrooms; teachers showing us videos every period while they stage-whisper on their phones about plans to get out on the lake with a case of tall boys as soon as the brats go home.
That sulfurous stench is forever twinned with my itch to leave, to go, to get the hell out and be anywhere else. Our last day of high school, Harry and I drove with all our classmates down to Twin River Falls for Mt. O’s traditional senior class cannonball leap off Big Boulder into the deep rushing river. This was the one time all year when the cliques and hierarchies of high school lost their meaning. Everyone, no matter who we were, screamed with joy as we plunged into the freezing rapids. One day. The best day.
Everyone knew I was going to Harvard—their derisive, too-big-for-her-britches whispers followed me through the hallways at school. But at Twin River, I wasn’t scorned or mocked. Harry didn’t need to defend me. All I had to do, just this one day, was screw my eyes shut and jump off the rock like everyone else.
Later, as the sun crawled low and wide behind the stand of tamarack trees that dotted the basin and the water became too cold for even the most beer-soaked among our class to tolerate, Harrison pulled me aside. We were both shivering in our towels, dripping wet.
“Let’s make a pact of our own,” he said. “Just like my dad and Uncle Eddie did. Right here. Family forever, Toni. You and me.” This time I didn’t push my cousin away or roll my eyes. I wanted to believe Harrison that I was, and would be, his family forever. So I let go. Of Paul, of my guilt about Eddie. Of my nightmares from a dim past. Of the Bosnian family I was born into and survived out of. Instead, for that moment, I allowed myself to be nothing but a King.
Now, the stench of Thebesian summer mingles with the wind as I drive. Past familiar front porches, some of them dressed up with hanging baskets of begonias or wreaths on the doors. There’s Cathy Mason’s house. We took figure skating classes at the rink in Athens together when we were ten. Begonias and a wreath both bedeck her porch. Probably still smells like chocolate chip cookies in there.
Next, the tract-house communities built in the boom after World War II emerge. Split levels, aluminum siding, entire neighborhoods carved out of former farmlands, one after the other. Numerous FOR SALE signs line the street, pegged to clusters of mailboxes shaped like cows or painted with flowers. Even with the wind rushing in my ears, I can hear the whistle of spring peepers from the ponds that dot the landscape. The chorus of my past: thousands of tiny brown frogs hiding and singing. Little Izzy was obsessed with ferreting them out from under the slippery rocks and clusters of lily pads. She brought one home from day camp in her backpack to start her own terrarium—but there was chocolate mint ice cream waiting. Poor frog breathed its last breath smothered under a damp Minnie Mouse beach towel, found with a shriek by Aunt Evelyn when she emptied the pack to do Izzy’s laundry several hours later.
We could hear the peepers whistle during silent prayer on Sundays. I fly past the turnoff for Northern Baptist Conservative Church, up the hill to the left next to Upper North Pond. Services don’t start till eleven, but the conga line of cars is usually backed up to the road by ten. It always mattered who got there early enough to be inside first, to be in the position of greeter to the rest of the congregation. Closer to the minister, closer to the front—it all meant closer to absolution by the God worshipped here. Northern Baptist isn’t a fussy church. In fact, if you show up too fancy, you’re suspect. Worship must be modest, and clothing for worship shouldn’t cause excessive attention to your body, your face, anything. There are rules, and the people of Thebes love their rules.
When we were little, church was the place we could count on front-and-center placement from Uncle Christopher. You’d better believe he hustled all of us out the door so we could be the very first in the vestibule. And here, at services once a week, my brother and I were presented as living, breathing evidence of the King family’s Christian charity.
“The orphans,” I heard people murmur as they approached. At first, I was so young that I barely remember anything other than the whisper of skirt hems brushing against nylons as I stared at the knees of the ladies parading by. Paul and I clutched hands the entire time, standing arm to arm so I could lean against him for support when my small legs felt like buckling. He had told me how important it was to stand up during the meet and greet, not to give in to my desire to fold. “It was what our mother told me when you were just a baby,” he said. “Do everything they do in church but do it even better than the others.” That was how our parents tried to say alive in Sarajevo, converting to Christianity. Could our mother ever have imagined that Paul would be here, hewing tightly to her words, in a place so far away from where we began?
Christopher beamed with pride at Paul’s ramrod-straight back, his firm handshake. At the time I was too young to understand much, but I liked church. When Paul was showcased, I felt important too. He was so much a part of my being that I didn’t differentiate what happened to him from what happened to me. I willed myself to be strong and stay upright by his side as we greeted our neighbors, even while I sent longing glances to the back of Izzy’s stroller where Harrison sat comfortably at his mother’s feet.
Paul was Uncle Christopher’s superstar. Brilliant, obedient, a model of gratitude and politeness. And handsome too, in his little blue Oxford button-down shirt, dark hair combed and shining. Christopher would laugh and clap Paul on his narrow shoulders as the line of people coming to services invariably paused to pay respects to the most successful businessman in town.
“He’s smart enough to run the whole company someday,” our uncle would brag. “Can you believe that the boy I picked up from a bombed-out apartment in Sarajevo would turn out to have more potential than my own son?”
Harrison, blissfully unaware that he was being offered up to the masses as a failure, sang softly to himself and played with the bows on the front of his mother’s shoes.
Oh, the bitter disappointment that Christopher felt as Paul grew older and began to reject the role laid out for him!
At fourteen, my brother simply stopped going to church. Uncle Christopher threatened him. Cajoled him. Grounded him. Everything short of drawing a gun on him and forcing him into the Escalade with the rest of us, although I’m sure he considered it. Paul refused to engage, holing up in his bedroom whenever he was home.
Finally, after many muffled conferences with Evelyn behind closed doors, Christopher conceded defeat.
“Good to see you, good to see you.” My uncle would continue to glad-hand the community like every other Sunday morning, pretending nothing was different even though Paul was no longer by his side. I was eleven, and for the first time, I felt horribly exposed and alone. I didn’t realize until then how much I still leaned on my brother—perhaps not physically any longer, but in every other way. Even his silent anger was a shield for me. I could go about my business being a sass, whipping around and mouthing off because Uncle Christopher thought that only Paul mattered. Paul’s sullenness, Paul’s defiance. Paul’s sudden refusal to complete any homework and his resulting plummeting grades. Paul this, Paul that. I was free.
Until my brother became a pillar of stone, withdrawing into himself. Casting around for someone to blame, Uncle Christopher found me.
I doubled down at school, getting nothing but perfect grades so I could sit smugly across the table from my uncle at dinner, daring him to call me out as a failure at anything at all. Was I also trying to prove I was Paul’s worthy successor as the object of my uncle’s hopes? Yes, that too.
Late nights though, alone in my room, I missed my brother with a hard knot in my stomach that wouldn’t release. Why was he shutting me out along with the rest of them? Without Paul, I had no source of connection back to my mother and father. My nightmares flared. I took to creeping out of my bedroom at two or three in the morning, padding silently down the dark hallway, and curling up on the floor against Paul’s locked bedroom door. I tried to make myself imagine I could hear his even breaths through the wooden barrier, that it was the same as sleeping next to him to be this close. I leaned against his door until my body finally began to droop again, then tiptoed back to my own bed for a few more fitful hours before the morning came.
________
My phone rings.
Melanie.
9:09 a.m.
I pull over to the side of the road. I need to focus.
“Are you in the portal?” she asks. “Did you access the Olufsen files?”
Think fast.
“Perfect timing. I’m trying to log in, but my ID is giving me trouble.”
“First time using it to log in from offsite, right?”
“Yes, first time. I was going to reach out to the weekend IT emergency service, but with what you said about confidentiality . . .”
“Overly cautious is the correct way to be. Stay on the line.”
When she puts me on hold, I grab the law firm laptop out of my bag and quickly plug my Wi-Fi device into the charger in my car. Please have a signal, I pray. Please, please, please.
The bars light up in the right-hand corner of my computer just as Melanie comes back on the line.
“Okay, Toni, are you at your computer?”
“Yes, of course,” I say in my most professional-sounding voice.
“I just got you level-two clearance, the problem might have been that level one wasn’t working remotely. Try now.”
I tap in the ID number and password that I’ve been pretending didn’t work. Oh, what a surprise, I’m in.
“That did the trick, thank you!”
“All right. As soon as you have anything we can use, call my cell. Don’t send it through email because Jackie picks that up. And don’t forget—follow the money. Everything costs something. There’s no reason I shouldn’t hear from you by this afternoon, right?”
Ugh. I have to give Melanie a bit of information about my whereabouts, just enough to offset anything weird happening, like finding myself in a zone with no cell phone service.
“Yes, you’ll definitely hear from me today. This is my number-one priority. But just so you know, I’m working from pretty far outside the city right now. Everything’s fine, just a small family situation I needed to head up north to manage. I’m taking care of Per’s thing first and then I’m here so I can do what I need.”
Melanie’s silence communicates her displeasure. She can’t tell me I shouldn’t have gone—it is Sunday, so technically my lawyer boss knows I’m not required to be within some local radius of her person—but we both know I’m in new associate purgatory these first few months. It’s an unspoken rule that first-year associates should avoid family situations.
“I promised you earlier, you have my guarantee that I’ll get this right,” I remind her in the silence she’s created. “There’s no way I’m going to let the first job I do for you and for Per be anything but stellar.”
I hear her sigh.
“Just stay hungry for it, Toni.”
“Melanie, I’m fucking starving.”
This makes her laugh. “Okay, that’s the woman I hired.”
I’ve bought myself a couple of hours. Hours I need to find this guy Bashiir, grill him about my brother, learn the truth. And make it right.
THE CURVES OF ROUTE 35 DOWN TO THE CENTER OF town are as familiar as my own body. Past the Erikson farm on the left, around the hairpin turn, and down the straightaway till Hopper’s Hardware appears on the right, the first business on the stretch before the intersection that marks the commercial zone. Paul bought a beat-up truck for $300 of his salary at Hopper’s the summer before he left. Christopher had cut him off for his shitty grades and general refusal to behave as planned, thinking that money would bring him back around. But Paul turned out to be as clever at mechanics as he had been at philosophy. He tinkered with the engine of Mr. Hopper’s rusty 1953 Ford when his shifts at the store were over until the truck roared to life. Mr. Hopper, an excessively whiskered man with a beach-ball belly and yellow tobacco stains on his beard and fingers, was delighted at Paul’s ability and sold him the truck on the spot.
Paul adored that vehicle. He spent the last few months that we lived under the same roof restoring the rotted parts, oiling the dry parts, taking care of the truck like he used to take care of me. I came out to the garage to sit cross-legged on the drop cloth he spread on the ground by his truck and handed him tools while he worked, peppering him with questions about the mechanics of the thing just to hear him talk again about something he loved. It was the only time he didn’t chase me away.
One day, just before he took off for good, my brother let me drive. I was thirteen, almost fourteen, and small. Because the bench seat still couldn’t move forward or back due to excessive rust, I had to stand up to put enough weight on the brake to slow the truck on the downhill curves so the bumps wouldn’t pitch us off the pavement. Paul held on to the back of my jeans to keep me steady while I stood on the pedal and steered the behemoth like I was riding the back of a monster in an arcade game. It was pure joy, whooping my way down the road with my brother by my side.
I TURN THE CORNER ONTO ASHFIELD AVENUE. A STOPLIGHT now hangs above the intersection, new since the last time I was in this part of town. It’s blinking yellow, which as far as I can tell means “ignore me” in street sign, so I decide to drive faster. The houses are close together here, with blinds drawn over the windows.
A door opens to one of the houses on the right side of the street—a thin middle-aged white woman dumps a plastic grocery bag on her front porch. The clank of glass on the floorboards gives away its contents. Post-Saturday-night clear-out time. The woman catches sight of me driving by and gives me and my convertible a once-over. Apparently satisfied that I’m not an immediate threat, she turns back inside and lets me pass.
If only I still wore my borrowed Nordstrom outfit—I need that suit of armor back to shield me from the feeling that this place, this tiny world, isn’t as far in the rear view as I need it to be.
Down the block, two pale, freckled boys are sitting on a dried-out patch of front lawn with an overturned bicycle between them. One of them is fiddling with the chain. The other sees me and yells, “Hey lady, I’m gonna steal your car!” Because they’re kids, I don’t give them the finger. But I think about it.
The scent of dung. The itch to bolt.
I swallow hard and keep on driving.
Accompanied by the sound of a dog barking from somewhere nearby, a church bell begins to ring. First Methodist, which tends to the downtown worshippers as opposed to Northern Baptist, where those who live in the outskirts and in the bigger houses, like my family, go. I turn left onto Main, ready to see the throng of churchgoers pressing up the stairs. But it’s surprisingly unpopulated. A few older couples slowly make their way to the entry; parents here and there urge their foot-dragging offspring.
Town hall, however, looks to be overflowing. Here are the hordes, or what passes for hordes, I was expecting to see at both of the churches. Why is it even open on a Sunday? I slow down to see what gives. A sign made out of a bedsheet hanging between a streetlamp and a tree announces in red spray paint: END THE INVASION! SAVE OUR TOWN!
Invasion?
Everyone amassing in front of the building is white. I’m sure I went to high school with all of their children—who are probably in the growing crowd before me too. I pull my baseball cap low around my face. Now I wish I had raised the top of my convertible before I came through. From under the brim of my cap I take in the handmade placards bobbing over the heads of the growing crowd: Somalis, Go Home. Keep Thebes Thebes. Only English Spoken Here. We Built America, You Can’t Have It.
I don’t study the faces of the people holding the signs out of fear that I’ll know them. How can Paul believe he could do anything meaningful here? The minds are too small and the hatred too big. When I find out where he disappeared to, and how to get back in touch with him, I have to convince him and his wife to leave. What I’m seeing here right now can’t be fixed.
Still low in my seat, I take a right onto Oak Street, even though it’s the opposite direction from where I’m going. I can’t look at the scene unfolding on the town hall green for another second without screaming, and I don’t want to be any more noticeable than I already am. Eyes on the prize, Toni. Find Paul and get out.
My detour takes me right past the Law Office of Roberts and Associates—the one building I’m least excited to see right now after my unexpected morning reunion with James Hollings—but I can’t avoid it without doubling back past the gathering at town hall. The office appears on my left, and to my surprise, it’s the one location in downtown Thebes I’ve passed so far that looks almost nothing like it did seven years ago. Pickle’s Sandwich Shoppe and the Wash-o-Mat still flank it, each with the same peeling signs and tired façades I remember. The law office, however, now rises twice as high as it used to between them. Shining brass raised letters across the top show that it’s now ROBERTS, HOLLINGS, AND ASSOCIATES. The scrubbed exterior has Corinthian columns—clearly meant to evoke the Supreme Court—two on each side of the large marble-plated door. The faux grandeur of it jars against its neighbors’ workaday entrances.
Once upon a time I saw James Hollings as the pinnacle of city sophistication. He was the future of Thebes, and the man who would change the world. I wonder what he thought when he realized I was gone, just minutes ago, leaving him and his fountain pen and his paperwork in Uncle Christopher’s office. I wonder what he thinks about this mob of philistines. I wonder what he’d do if I came back to the house, sneaking through the same window I used to escape, tiptoed into the office, shutting the heavy door behind me to keep them all out, and straddled him in that swivel chair.
I should be disgusted at myself for even having the fantasy. But I can’t help wondering what it would be like now, so many years later. And I can’t help the flood of memories that pours back over me—the memories I’ve tried to avoid by staying out of Thebes.