BASHIIR STARES FROM HIS COT AS HANSEN ESCORTS ME, in handcuffs, to the area in front of the holding cell. I can’t bring myself to meet his gaze.
“If you asked me to bet on the odds of seeing you back here today,” Hansen says into my ear, “I’d have said: really high.” He’s so close I can smell the chemical stink of Fritos on his breath. “You had that rich-girl uppity attitude, like you were above me. Who’s above you now, huh?”
I cringe at his disgusting innuendoes. But I’m too weary to reply.
“Now you two criminals have given me a big problem to solve,” he sighs. “On top of the rest of my work. I only got one holding cell here and I can’t put boys and girls together. Normally we’d ship one of you over to Athens but it’s Sunday. Almost five o’clock. That’s the end of my shift. Can’t start the paperwork now, I won’t have time before clocking out.”
I feel him let go of my cuffed wrists with one of his meaty hands and hear the jingle of his key ring as he unclips it from his belt.
“What am I gonna do with you?” he mutters. “It’s turning into a freakin’ crime spree. I should get time and a half.”
“Don’t be concerned, Officer.” Bashiir’s voice is low and calm. “I will maintain respect for the rules and for the young woman.”
Hansen is still, contemplating his options. From the sound of their interaction, I get the sense that this isn’t the first of our jailor’s “problems” that Bashiir has handled since they brought him in last night. He has the practiced tone of a parent negotiating bedtime with his toddler.
No surprise, convenience wins the day. Hansen turns the key in my handcuffs, removing the metal rings brusquely so they scrape across my skin. I shake out my wrists, rub each one in turn as he unlocks the door to the holding cell and gestures me to the cot on the wall across from where Bashiir sits. I climb onto the bare mattress, lie down facing the wall, and curl into a fetal position, yanking Izzy’s skirt as far over my knees as it can go.
“I’ll be watching you over the monitor.” Hansen puts on his best man-in-charge voice, despite just taking what amounts to orders from one of his inmates. “Don’t try any funny business.”
“If you are watching,” says Bashiir, “then you can come back and escort Ms. King to a restroom should she indicate that she needs to use the facilities. I’m sure you would agree that we can’t risk the impropriety that might result from sharing this commode. If that’s viewed by anyone else through the tapes on the monitor, it could give the wrong impression. About how properly you’ve administered the rules.”
Even in my position facing the wall, I feel a wave of admiration for Bashiir. He has quietly and masterfully allowed me one less humiliation in this most humiliating of situations. And reminded me again that he knows how to access footage from these security cameras. No wonder he’s willing to wait out his time until the thirty-six-hour rule expires. Any abuse, any civil rights violation, will be on a hard drive somewhere that he knows how to access. Because he wrote the code.
“Rich girl!” Officer Hansen yells at me. I force myself to open my eyes, lift myself up on an elbow.
“Raise your hand and look into that camera if you need to use the . . . you know what.” He’s Thebesian through and through: he might denigrate and belittle me, but he’s too embarrassed to use a scary word like bathroom with a woman.
I turn back to the wall. A strip of little bubbles in the painted concrete greets me at eye level. I focus my attention on them, trying to block out the clang of the iron bars and the turn of the key.
I can’t. My head reverberates with the raw screeching sound of metal slamming into metal. The green bubbles on the wall bloat, like I’m looking at them through a fishbowl. What’s happening? My chest is tight, I can’t breathe.
The echo. The sound of bombs exploding in the streets of Sarajevo. The line between then and now has bled away. I blink, try to retrain my eyes on the paint bubbles, but they blur and re-form into the crisscross pattern of rusted bedsprings. The sleeve, the wrist . . . my mother, my majka.
I see it with a clarity like never before, as if it’s happening here.
Her dress isn’t just brown, it’s decorated at the collar with pink and red and blue flowers that I view up close when she holds me in one arm while stirring a pot of cabbage on the stove with the other. The flowers are ripped away from me when the first blast from the street shakes the apartment. She thrusts me into my brother’s arms and screams at us to get down, get down on the floor! We are all there together, all three of us, Mujo holding me and our majka covering us both, while dust blasts through the apartment windows and glass rains down around us.
“Mujo, Andela, hajmo pjevati. Let’s sing. All together, come now! The old-time song about Mujo and his horse, the one you love, my own Mujo.” She starts, loudly, trying to fight against the boom of cracking concrete outside us, all around:
Mujo kuje konja po mjesecu,
Mujo kuje, a majka ga kune
Mujo is shoeing his horse by the moonlight
while his mother scolds him
My brother’s high voice joins her. She’s singing louder now, and fast. I hear my own small voice humming, I know a few of the words too. Another blast from outside, closer now. I shriek.
“Keep singing, Andela, let’s sing the bad storm away,” Majka says.
Sine Mujo, živ ti bio majci,
Ne kuju se konji po mjesecu,
Već po danu i žarkome suncu!
Mujo, have a care for your poor mother,
Don’t shoe your horse by moonlight,
but when it’s day and in the hot sun!
We sing to each other in a three-person huddle, our mother almost yelling the lyrics when the boom-boom from all around us rises in pitch and frequency.
Then it’s only our voices. The blasting is gone. The glass and dust stop dancing around us. Majka says “shush,” holds up her finger. Her body softens over ours.
We’ve done it: we’ve outsung the wild storm.
Majka moves away. She leans on her side and looks back at the two of us, hugging each other still. She smiles.
“My good little children,” she says. “Dobra moja djeco—”
The loudest blast of all slams right into the room. Everything is flying bits of tile and glass. My brother’s arms tighten around me, he rolls us away under the cot, shoves me with him below the bedsprings, covers my ears.
“Let’s sing again, Andela,” he says. “Just like Majka. Come on.” His voice this time is muffled by his hands, but clear:
Ja ne gledam sunca nit’ mjeseca,
Nit’ moj đogo mraka nit’ oblaka,
Nit’ moj đogo Drine vode hladne.
I see neither sun nor moon,
And my horse ignores darkness and clouds,
And the cold water of the river Drina.
Where is her voice? Why can’t I hear her? I push his hands away and call “Majka? Majka!!” The booming noise is gone, the swirling dust settles around us on the floor.
Then a new sound: the rattle of our doorknob. Insistent, hard. A crash as the door slams open into the room, the clomp of heavy, running feet. Mujo covers my mouth. I turn my head. I see the hand. I see the sleeve. A giant boot steps between me and my majka, then another, and another. A blond, bearded man with startling blue eyes looks down at us . . .
“TONI! ARE YOU OKAY?” BASHIIR’S VOICE CALLS FROM across the cell.
My face is wet with tears. I’m sobbing, my chest heaving up and down.
Everything I’ve tried, everything I thought would work, has failed. Law school. Corporate job. Antonia King, attorney-at-law: this was my assurance that I’d always be the one either putting someone behind bars or freeing them from captivity. I’ve lost her. I don’t even have Toni King, angry and rebellious high school student, to hide behind anymore. Only Andela remains.
“Try to breathe,” Bashiir says. “I can’t come over, he’ll see me on the camera. Here, listen to me, listen to my voice.”
The walls are pulsing, coming closer; he sounds like he’s a thousand miles away. My sobs become rasps. I’m clawing for oxygen.
“What are you feeling?” his voice is faint in my ears. “Speak to me.”
“I . . . I feel like my heart is exploding,” I manage to say between gasps.
“You’re having a panic attack. My sister used to have them. You have to try to get more air. Put your hand on your chest and breathe into your palm.”
I do as he says. Lying on my back, I focus on the feel of my hand pressing against the rapid-fire beating of my out-of-control heart. The ceiling is high, at least—looking up helps quell the sensation that the walls are closing in around me.
“Let’s calm you down,” he says. “You were humming just now, before you got upset. Was that a memory?”
I nod.
“Can you tell me?”
Tell him what? That the sound of my mother’s voice, just before she was blown to bits, has returned to me after twenty years through my brother’s favorite childhood song?
I haven’t cried in front of anyone but Paul since we landed on U.S. soil.
“Toni, trying to speak will help you breathe,” he says. “Just inhale, then say anything, anything at all, on the exhale.”
I press my hand harder against my chest. I’m here, it reminds me. I take a ragged breath in. When I breathe out, I say, “What . . . what would . . . what would your sister do?”
“For her panic attacks?” His voice is back in the room again, just as steady and calm as it was when I first arrived. “Sometimes she would sing herself a lullaby called ‘Dhammow’ from our past that we loved. It means ‘Oh, Perfect Child.’ That’s why I asked what you were humming. But I think that was a mistake.”
I turn my head toward him. He’s sitting with his back against the wall, hugging his knees. His eyes are filled with concern. For me. I feel the pounding against my rib cage start to ease off.
“Sing it?” I ask.
“‘Dhammow’?” He shakes his head. “Toni, I have the world’s most terrible voice. You will definitely have another panic attack just from listening to me sing.”
He makes me smile, just a little.
“Okay, that’s better,” he says, smiling back. “My sister has two children now and she sings it to them. They’re growing up in Nairobi, and that song helps keep our childhood, the happy parts, in their lives too.”
“You miss them.”
“Of course. But everyone is alive and safe and healthy. I’ll see them again. My nieces are eight and ten. We video-chat a lot.” He touches the two braided string bracelets he wears on his left wrist. “They made me these for my birthday this year.”
I can sit up now. I lean my back against the wall on my side as Bashiir has on his. I can’t pull my knees up like his without Izzy’s skirt hitching all the way up my thighs, so I dangle my legs over the edge of the metal cot. My feet graze the floor. I swing my legs back and forth, listening to the sound that the rubber of my flip-flops makes as they scrape the colorless linoleum.
Bashiir’s quiet, his ease in our shared presence, begins to fill the room with something warm, a small but growing light. He makes me feel something no one else has since I set foot back in this town: safe. I take a deep breath, relieved to have the ability to do so again. Also thanks to him.
He’s rolling his right hand over the third bracelet he wears on his left wrist, the one strung with black stones, worrying the beads between his fingers.
“Is that from your nieces too?”
A dark look crosses his face. He’s struggling with something, some emotion I can’t read. He looks at the bracelet, then back over at me.
“It’s your brother’s, Toni. He asked me to wear it to remind me of a promise I made to him.”
He hesitates again, his mouth pressed into a straight line. Then he sighs.
“He asked me to promise that if you returned to Thebes after he left, I would make sure to protect you. He asked me not to tell you anything.”
“You do know where he is!”
“Not for sure.”
“But you know he’s left town. Where? Why?”
Bashiir puts his hand out in a warning.
“Don’t show anything over the camera. They might be separately recording our conversation in here too, so do nothing with your body language that would make them go through the audio.”
I jump up from my cot.
“Toni, did you hear me?”
I begin waving my hands at the video camera, crossing my legs as if I really have to pee. I even hop up and down on one foot, then the other, for good measure.
“Why are you doing this?” Bashiir asks. I point at the wall clock we can see from between the cell bars, just where the security camera hangs. Same clock from the kindergarten days, a big white face with black numbers and a long needle smoothly traveling around to mark the seconds as well as the minutes and hours. The clock that taught me how to tell time as I fixated on it each day, longing for the small hand on 3 and the big hand on 12 so I could leave.
“It’s seven minutes past five,” I say. “He said his shift ended at five. You think he stayed a minute longer than he needed to? On a Sunday? And when a new guard takes over a shift, protocol requires detainees to be informed.”
“Yes, when the overnight guard left, this one came in. How did you know?”
“When I was here earlier trying to convince him to let me in to see you, I read all of the posted regulations. It’s a lawyer thing.”
I continue my dance routine. As I suspect, nobody shows. Confident that at least for a few minutes no one is watching, I sit down on Bashiir’s cot, next to him. He smells riper than this morning, after more hours in a jail cell on a hot summer afternoon, but not repellent. Not at all.
I pull off a flip-flop and start slapping it against the metal edge of the cot.
“Tell me what you know,” I whisper close to his ear. “The audio won’t be detectable if I do this.” I smack my shoe more insistently to prove my point.
He lowers his head toward mine, so close that our foreheads almost touch.
“I promised to keep you out of it. He wanted you safe. He told me to push you away so you would be too angry to dig any further.”
Paul wanted me to stay in Minneapolis and live happily ever after. I was wrong about him. He wasn’t rejecting me—he thought making me mad would ensure that I’d keep out of whatever mess was happening here. Despite all our arguments about who is right and who is wrong, my brother, in his own way, is still trying to protect me.
What he doesn’t know is that all those years when he shut his bedroom door against me, I was pressed up against it, right on the other side. No matter how much he tries to make me hate him, I will always love him more.
“Does Paul’s wife know where he is?” I ask.
His eyes widen.
“You know about Celeste?”
Celeste. So this is the name of my sister-in-law.
“She answered Paul’s phone. She told me they were married. Why is it a secret?”
Bashiir hesitates again. I thwap my shoe several time against the metal cot to remind him we won’t be overheard.
“Okay,” he says at last. “But only because you keep figuring out so much on your own. Which, now that I’ve seen you in action a few times”—he gestures to my ridiculous but effective flip-flop anti-police-tracking device—“comes as no surprise.”
While I bang my shoe in percussive accompaniment, Bashiir begins.
________
“I met your brother a couple of years ago in St. Cloud when I was finishing my master’s degree. He was sleeping on the dorm room floor of someone he met at a protest against the American war in Afghanistan. We found common ground quickly. I told him about my prior life in Mogadishu, then in the refugee camps in Kenya, before coming to Minnesota. Paul could remember bits and pieces of the camp you and he lived in with your parents for a few months, before your father was taken away.
“I didn’t know where I wanted to go after graduation, but I told Paul that a big city wasn’t for me. And Paul said that as much as he hated living under your uncle’s roof, he liked the rhythm of small-town life in Thebes. He missed the library, and knowing who everyone was, who their parents were, who their grandparents were.”
The very place that repulsed me was beckoning to Paul in ways I never dreamed possible.
“The more your brother talked about Thebes, the more I wanted to move here. All of Minnesota was changing—more newcomers beyond the Cities. Why not Thebes? I applied for a computer engineering job with a video surveillance company in Athens. When it came through, Paul and I agreed to rent an apartment together downtown. Paul picked up odd jobs—I don’t have to tell you about his ability to fix almost anything—and I convinced more of my friends to relocate to Thebes. Most of them are like me, no blood relatives in the area but they want a Somali community. Some are married with young children. And most, like me, are no longer religious, not traditionally so. Starting a new community appealed to us. My friends and I have respect for the Somali elders, but their ways aren’t ours anymore. I envisioned a community center for all comers, religious or not. And in Thebes, your brother had the contacts and skills to help make it real. We took over the lease of an unused warehouse from an older man your brother knew. He told Paul if we could fix up the warehouse as well as he did the truck that he sold him ten years ago, it would be a blessing.”
Mr. Hopper. Still supporting my brother’s dreams.
“We all spent nights and weekends cleaning up the community center, doing repairs. Then a notice comes from the landlord: ownership was transferred to King Construction Company. A day later, your uncle’s company announces that the center will be razed.”
“When was this?” I ask, resuming the banging of my rubber shoe on metal. I’m so wrapped up in Bashiir’s story that I’ve forgotten to keep up my flip-flop trick.
“Late May. An article in the Oracle came out that same day showing your family, everyone but Paul, standing in front of the very building that he had been restoring for months, cutting a giant ribbon to announce its demolition.”
“I saw.”
“Your brother was determined not to let it happen. I argued with him, I said we can find another building, maybe the location wouldn’t be as convenient, but it wasn’t worth fighting his own family to save it. ‘Those people are not my family,’ he said. ‘Only Toni. And she can’t get involved, not now when she’s about to start her job in Minneapolis.’”
“Now I’ve destroyed that too.”
Bashiir gives me a quizzical look. Right, he doesn’t know that I’ve been fired. He is still tugging absently at the black beads around his wrist. I reach out and touch the bracelet—our fingers brush lightly, accidentally for a second. Heat. I pull my hand back, but the electrical current of his skin against mine travels through my fingertips.
“Where did Paul get this bracelet?”
“He brought it back from one of his trips to the Bosnian Cultural Center in Minneapolis.”
“The what?” Paul never mentioned anything of the sort.
“He’s spent the last few years meeting other Bosnians. Looking for any information about your past. Chicago, Cleveland—lots of places with resettled communities. He says you were forbidden from connecting with your own heritage growing up because you were expected to assimilate.”
Paul’s internet research as a teenager had led to real-life research.
“Why didn’t he tell me about the people he met?” I ask.
“I think he didn’t want to get your hopes up without concrete information. He found survivors of the concentration camp, called Susica, where your father most likely was sent, but no one who knew him. Paul loved meeting other Bosnians though. They would dance and drink and argue about politics all night, there was always food and a bed. The bracelet was a good luck gift from a Bosnian woman he met in Minneapolis.”
“Celeste?”
Bashiir appears amused by my guess. “No, I think the woman was a grandmother. Celeste is from Thebes. She was a couple of years ahead of Paul at school, but they didn’t connect until he moved back here.”
I try to recall anyone named Celeste growing up, but I’m drawing a blank. She must have been too much older than me; we wouldn’t have overlapped.
“Why is he keeping their relationship a secret?”
“There’s some complicated background with her father. He’s worked for your uncle for years. John Joseph?”
Whoa. Not just anyone who worked for my uncle. His main henchman. Former tormentor of Harrison. And from the looks of him earlier today as he surveyed the Somali neighborhood, he’d have none of Paul and his activism, especially not when it came to his daughter.
“When did they get married?”
“Yesterday. The marriage was his promise to her that he’d come home. I was their witness at city hall in Athens, then we all came back here to execute the plan.”
“What plan?”
He gestures toward my flip-flop, which I’ve let go silent again. I resume.
“The vigil. Paul organized everything in just a day. We all went out at dark. We had candles, blankets, musical instruments.”
“A vigil? Not a protest?”
“Your brother wanted it to be a protest. He tried to make it happen weeks ago, during the ribbon cutting for the site. But your cousin convinced him to slow down. Harrison promised Paul that if each of them kept the peace from their respective sides, there’d be no need to go to war.”
Of course he did. Harrison being Harrison.
“I was glad that our focus was on positive action,” Bashiir continues. “Especially after the wedding. I felt happy, preparing. We were draping the backhoes with fabric, sitting on the front of the bulldozers. Those who pray were planning to roll out their mats. Paul drilled it into everyone: when the team comes, be welcoming. Educate them about everything that happens inside the community center they were about to take down. Invite them to join us for a meal.
“But then a line of police vehicles from both Thebes and Athens pulled up. They came out in riot gear. Paul kept telling everyone to stay calm, this was a scare tactic, and we all had the right to gather peacefully. It was so dark by then, and the streetlights on the block have been out for weeks. Then someone yelled: ‘Officer down! One of them has a baseball bat!’ The sirens started, and the line of police moved forward. ‘No violence! No violence!’ Paul was running among us, trying to find out what happened, but we couldn’t see. So I lit my candle. Someone from the police line saw the flame and pointed at me and called out: ‘He’s got a weapon!’
“Everything from there happened so fast. I was in handcuffs. My head was against a police car. There was crying, screaming, the police all mixed in with us. Then I was placed in the back seat. They took me here.”
Bashiir stops, swallows hard. When he speaks again after a long moment, his voice is wobbly. “None of that was supposed to happen. And I don’t know where Paul is now. I don’t know what Celeste knows either. I haven’t seen my phone in eighteen hours.”
Finally, his calm exterior has cracked. I can feel his exhaustion, his frustration, his worry. His shoulders slump. Hansen be damned, I reach out and thread my fingers through Bashiir’s, hold his hand in mine. Not for the heat this time. For the warmth. He doesn’t let go.
Everything I don’t know about Bashiir wells up in the silence between us. All I don’t understand about his history, his life in Thebes, the shit he faces here. And yet his hand . . . holding it feels like the most familiar sensation in the world. All I want to do is sit this way: in the stillness we create for each other. The only moment of peace I’ve had in as long as I can remember.
But the questions press on me.
“If Paul married Celeste as a promise he’d return,” I whisper, “he knew he would leave that same night? Why?”
Bashiir drops his chin to his chest for a moment. I wait, let him feel whatever it is he needs to feel. After a bit, he looks at me again.
“I have to tell you what your brother knows. At this point it’s wrong if I don’t. The old woman who gave Paul this bracelet. She told him that he should be seeking out Serbian contacts to find what happened to your parents, not Bosnian. ‘History remembers the perpetrators,’ she said. That’s when he started looking online for information about the one man whose name he knew. Someone called Vlado.”
Vlado. The man we lived with in Sarajevo. Who slept in our mother’s bed.
“He found him. Vlado Jovanović. He was a foot soldier for Milošević. He was tried for crimes against humanity after the siege and found guilty. Paul discovered that he was arrested just weeks after you came to the United States.”
I shake my head. “No, that doesn’t make sense. Vlado was our mother’s boyfriend.”
He looks me in the eyes again, with that same intense concern he had when I couldn’t breathe. Our hands are still intertwined.
Not my mother’s boyfriend. Then what?
Her captor?
Her rapist.
Screens and screens of research from Paul’s high school days flicker across my mind’s eye. Rape as a weapon of genocide. Bosnian women.
My mother. My majka. Was she protecting us by submitting to him? Was her compliance keeping her out of the camps and us alive?
I’m going to vomit. I’m going to combust into a billion pieces. I’m going to scream until my lungs explode.
But I can’t move. I can’t let go of Bashiir’s hand. He’s holding mine tighter now; I can feel his pulse beating between his thumb and his forefinger. Reminding me that I’m here.
I feel something slide over my hand. I look down—Bashiir has slipped Paul’s black beads on their elastic string from his wrist to mine.
“It belongs to you,” he says. “Your brother was wrong about one very important thing. You don’t need him, or anyone, to protect you. You’re strong, Toni. I saw it the second you walked in here this morning. You are whole. I can see that having this knowledge will not break you.”
I find his gaze again.
“How do you know?”
“My father. Sliced open with a machete. I tried to stop it, but I couldn’t. I was eight years old.”
The long scar on his forearm. Tentatively, I reach over with my other hand and touch its striations, like branches of a winding river. He doesn’t brush me away. Instead, he presses his forehead against mine for a long minute, letting his thoughts be my thoughts. Letting me hear his life. Hearing mine. I close my eyes and rest right here. Both broken and whole.
“Toni . . . There’s more . . .”
Bashiir’s voice is asking if I can handle more. Forehead to forehead, I nod.
“This Vlado . . . Your brother figured that your uncle had to have more information than he’d been sharing all these years. He became obsessed, he had to find out. When Harrison mentioned in passing some dinner meeting on Friday, Paul knew your uncle wouldn’t be in the office. He snuck in and went through his paperwork. Apparently, your uncle still doesn’t use a computer. Paul found a file, buried deep in some back drawer, filled with documents of wire transfers. Lots of money. And the most recent payment was only a few months ago. The location on the transfers kept changing—Tucson, Sacramento, Houston. But the payments—twice a year for twenty years.”
I move back so I can look right in his eyes.
“Payments? My uncle was paying off Vlado?”
Bashiir shakes his head. “Vlado died in a German prison years ago.”
“Then where was he sending money?”
He pauses. Slowly, quietly, he says: “To his brother.”
Eddie?
Edward King?
The man who was supposed to be our new American father. The phone call I was too frightened to make. The delay that caused his death.
He isn’t dead.
This is what Paul found. Why he ran screaming into Christopher’s dinner meeting.
He discovered that our uncle has been lying to us, and lying to the entire town of Thebes, Minnesota, for twenty years. About his own brother’s death.
“Paul ran away to look for him, didn’t he? That’s why he can’t tell anyone. He’s afraid Christopher will do something if he knows. He’s gone underground.”
“Your brother is my best friend. I had to help, even though it could cost me my job, or worse,” he continues, his low voice in my ear. “The day of Christopher’s dinner meeting, I disabled all of the video cameras I programmed for his security company so Paul could sneak in and go through his papers without the guards finding out.”
Despite my shock about Eddie, despite the dark stories we’ve just shared, I can’t help smiling.
“Bashiir Abdi!” I whisper. “I thought you didn’t have an unethical bone in your body.”
I feel him smile back. “Are you disappointed?”
“Oh, no. I’m impressed. I guess it takes a master manipulator to know one when you see one.”
“Toni . . . about that, saying that to you before. I’m sorry. After today, I would never—”
I stop him. “Don’t apologize. You’re right about how I acted.”
“But how you acted isn’t the sum of who you are. Now I know.”
A buzzer blares over the intercom. We both jump. I scramble back to my cot on the other side. The thick metal door outside of the cell area scrapes open.
________
“New guard, new guard, coming through,” a gravelly female voice announces just as a uniformed officer strides into the room. It’s Brandi Schmidt. Of course. Somehow, she manages to look exactly the same as she did ten years ago, half naked and wasted atop a sewing table, despite being fully dressed in police blues.
“Hey, Toni! What’s up! I was just talking with my mother about you. She says you’re a lawyer now. From Harvard. Wowie zowie! Aren’t you impressive!” Oh, this crab apple didn’t fall far from the tree. I refuse to meet her eyes because I will not give her the satisfaction of imagining for one hot second that the tears on my cheeks have anything to do with her power over my situation or the same mean-girl goading tone she perfected back in high school and uses professionally today. She will not have access to anything real, about me or about Bashiir. I feel his words: you are whole.
“Well, your little visit to our happy place is over. Your family posted bail, you lucky kid! All cash, hand delivered. Time to check out of this Marriott.” I look over at Bashiir with surprise. Why would Christopher bail me out less than an hour after he had me dragged in?
“Is my uncle here?” I ask Brandi, careful to modulate my voice so she can’t hear anything of the roil of emotions I’m experiencing.
“Oh, it’s not your uncle,” she says as she opens the bars. “It’s your aunt.”
Evelyn! Here she is, half obscured behind the doorway, in her pink dress and kitten-heel pumps.
Why is she letting me out when Christopher locked me in? Does he know?
Eddie . . . does she know?
Brandi turns the key in the lock and slides back the metal bolt with a flourish. The vicious clang this time is to let me go, not keep me in. Yet I won’t move. I can’t.
“Toni King, you’re free to go. Get out of here, what’s your problem?” Brandi looks at me like I have six heads.
“I’m fine,” I say.
Even Bashiir shakes his head. “Toni, don’t be foolish.”
Brandi waves the receipt from Evelyn for the bail money right in front of me. “This is more than I make in a freaking year. And you’re sitting on your ass.”
Fifty thousand dollars.
An insane amount. Absolutely bonkers. This is the price Christopher put on my head to keep me from stirring up more trouble. Only he could wield the influence to set such a price for the crime of crawling up the wall of my own childhood house.
“I can’t take his money,” I say. “I can’t.”
“It isn’t his.” Aunt Evelyn’s soft voice calls from the doorway. “It’s mine.”
Brandi moves aside and I can fully see Evelyn, clutching her oversized pink purse with both hands in front of her body like a suit of armor.
“How?” I ask. Aunt Evelyn has no money of her own. Never has. Uncle Christopher gave her an allowance—left a check in an envelope on the kitchen counter every Friday morning before he went into the office. He required a full accounting from her of the past week’s spending by Thursday night. He tracks every penny.
Evelyn’s delicate heels click across the linoleum as she walks toward me, all the way past the bars and into the cell. The incongruity of Evelyn King, first lady of Thebes, Minnesota, still dressed for church, rounding out our little band of cellmates is eyebrow-raising, to say the least. She places her bag on the third cot, carefully lining it up along the edge of the metal frame, and sits, folding her hands on her lap.
“I’ve been stealing money from King Family Construction for thirty years,” she says quietly. “I suppose that means I belong behind bars too.” Evelyn looks back at Brandi Schmidt, at her desk, out of earshot. “Oh, dear,” she continues. “Did I just confess to a crime at the police station?”
Bashiir starts to laugh, then quickly pretends to cough.
“Hello, we haven’t been formally introduced,” Aunt Evelyn says. “I’m Mrs. King. What is your name?”
“Bashiir Abdi. I’m one of your nephew’s roommates. And pardon the circumstances of our introduction. Other than the location, it’s very nice to meet you.”
“Aunt Evelyn,” I say, interrupting what threatens to become the oddest tea party in history, “please tell me what’s going on.”
She turns toward me. Even with her expert makeup application I can tell that her eyes are puffy beneath her shadow and liner. But they’re clear. Sober. Filled with purpose.
“Isobel ran crying into my room once she learned what her father had done,” she says. “She’s waiting in the car outside. Oh, and your uncle has no idea we are here bailing you out.”
“What did Izzy tell you about why he put me here?”
She looks away. Some emotion is trying to fight its way to the surface. She hesitates. She’s about to speak—but stops. She blinks, then looks back at me again with the same sad, resigned look I remember from sophomore year of high school when she buried her longing to talk with me about My Ántonia as soon as she saw my pain.
“It doesn’t matter,” says Evelyn, her voice soft. “No child of mine belongs behind bars.”
Child of mine. My heart rises at the sound of her words.
But wait. Has she known about Eddie all these years as well? Was Evelyn lying to me and Paul along with Christopher? Was she even lying to Harrison and Izzy?
At what price am I a child of hers? Fifty thousand dollars. Does that pay for an hour of jail and twenty years of deceit? Okay then—how much more will it take for her to absolve her own guilt?
“Aunt Evelyn,” I ask. “Did you spend all your money to bail me out?”
She pats her purse. “Not even close,” she says.
She’s proud of her thievery. There is more I can do here.
“Bashiir doesn’t belong in jail any more than I do,” I say. “Paul is his roommate, so that makes him family.”
“No, oh, no,” Bashiir is frowning. “Please don’t even think about it.”
I put up my hand to stop him. “I’m not going anywhere unless you get out too. Nonnegotiable.”
He looks at me for a long moment.
“Mrs. King, will you excuse us please? I need to speak with your niece in private.”
Aunt Evelyn nods, polite as always. “I’ll be outside as soon as you’re ready, Antonia.”
Bashiir keeps staring at me as the sound of Evelyn’s heels recedes.
“Toni, do you truly understand why I’m in jail?” he asks. He’s direct, serious, but the coldness he expressed to me earlier today is gone. We’ve come too far for that.
“For no good reason,” I reply. “You’re innocent.”
“Innocence and guilt are immaterial to them. They’re trying to make an example of me to my community. Threatening all of us that if we step out of line, out of ‘our place,’ we’ll be punished. The last thing I need, or want, is some white savior coming around to bail me out. Not your aunt. Not you either.”
“That’s not what I’m trying to do.”
“You don’t have to try. That’s just how it is. Your brother gets it. That’s why he took off. He’s trying to fix his own mess, not mine.”
He’s right. I’ve been calling Paul out for years on what I thought was his big savior complex. But now I see that Paul found a family here. A true family. What he always wanted. Even if he believes he has to push me away to keep it.
“They can’t hold me longer than tomorrow at noon,” Bashiir continues. “I’m not afraid of staying here. I’m enraged about staying here. But I can stick it out another day if it means representing who I am, and who my people are.”
________
Evelyn and I don’t embrace. We don’t even touch. But between us now, as we stand side by side to complete the paperwork Brandi hands us, is the invisible pulsing of liquid steel. She showed up for me. Even if I can’t ever fully give myself over to her, like Izzy or Harrison, I can’t fully leave her either. She’s part of all that I am.
Her texts this morning, the ones I ignored—they were warnings. My own inability to slow down and listen to her landed me in this cell, every bit as much as Christopher’s actions. Harrison was right about me: I dismiss people too readily, lump them all in with my uncle when it suits my story. And Bashiir is right too: I can’t stick myself into other people’s business and fix them with my fancy law degree or my family’s money.
Who is my aunt, really, behind the façade?
When Brandi is out of hearing range again, I ask her, gently: “Why have you been taking money from the company all these years?”
Evelyn looks at me with her full sad eyes, mascara spikes on every lash. Shakes her head.
“I was fourteen when I started dating your uncle. All I knew outside of Thebes was from books I borrowed from the library. Before you know it, you’re in so deep, in a marriage. You turn around and . . . what else is there? I had four children to raise.”
She turns back to the forms in front of her. Grips the police-issue ballpoint pen so tightly she scratches the paper.
“But sometimes you feel . . . you just . . . wonder. One morning when I was tallying my expenses—a morning your uncle was distracted, very distracted with other business—I just . . . added a zero to the household bill. And he didn’t say a word, he simply reimbursed me from the cash stored in his office safe. No questions. Well, it was a rush, I must say. Legally, what’s his is mine. I mean, not what belongs to the business, but technically . . .”
“What did you plan to do with all that cash?”
“I don’t know. Nothing, I guess. But when I had it, I could dream. Before, what did I have to dream about?”
She can’t look at me directly, just keeps doodling in the margin on the page of legalese.
“I kept upping the ante to see how much I could get away with. I invented a personal assistant who helped me out all day when your uncle was working, and you children were at school.”
“You made up an entire person?”
In profile, I see Evelyn’s mouth twitch into a smile.
“Poor Lucille. She had a terribly sad situation—a dear girl from Athens whose parents were desperately addicted to heroin and would take her salary to fuel their addiction if they knew how much she made. It was a kindness to her for the company to make her checks out to me and for me to deposit them and pay her in cash so she could save as much as she could from them. I’ve grown quite fond of Lucille over time. I even paid her tuition to Athens Community College. It was the least I could do.”
“Where did you hide it all of these years? We roamed every inch of that house.”
Her little Lucille smile grows stronger.
“In the upstairs hall bathroom. There’s a secret compartment. You children were so distracted by the bottle of vodka I planted there, you never thought to look behind it to see if there was anything else.”
Well. At least some of those daily cocktails were self-congratulatory, not just self-immolating. Evelyn might have been drinking away her feelings of sorrow and loneliness. But part of her was waiting for the opportunity to break free. That part of her squired away money for years without knowing why. That part tried to signal me through poetry and books.
Mrs. Schmidt drops the plastic bin with my belongings on the reception desk before us.
I retrieve my bag and immediately check my phone.
No additional messages.
Why would there be? I’ve not merely burned all my bridges in the past day—I’ve destroyed them beyond recognition. The only thing my phone flashes is that still from the video. Per, Michelle, the other Mt. O high school kids—they stare at me like an image from ancient history.
And no surprise, nothing from my brother’s number either. Celeste knows that Paul has gone in search of Eddie King.
Does my aunt?
“Aunt Evelyn, can I ask you just one more thing before we leave?”
“Of course.”
I take a deep breath. “Please tell me.” I’m shivering with the effort it takes to ask the question out loud. “Have I been spending the past day trying to dig up information about the wrong brother?”
At first, she just looks at me with her usual controlled and careful mien. But then the color begins to drain from her face.
She knows Eddie is alive. She’s always known.
“Toni!”
It’s Bashiir. His voice is jubilant.
I turn around to see him, accompanied by Brandi but without cuffs or restraints of any kind.
“You’re out!”
“All the charges were dropped. Officer Schmidt just got the call.”
“Really? Who? How?”
Brandi shrugs. “Don’t look at me, I just work here. In, out—I do what they say.”
Evelyn touches me on the elbow. “Isobel is waiting for us in the car.” My aunt has reorganized her expression to mask the revelation of a moment ago. But I have what I need. Years ago, she wrote a note telling me I’d never need to depend on a man to make my way in the world. As a heartbroken teen, I thought it was all about me and my situation. Now I know she was sharing something fundamental about herself. Something she could only articulate through the novel that inspired her to name me Antonia. Was she angry at Christopher for the secret he kept? Was she part of his decision to do so?
It could be guilt that compelled her to dig up $50,000 of pilfered cash and fork it over to get me out.
No child of mine . . .
Evelyn sees me as hers.
It might be out of guilt. But it might be out of love, too.
________
While Bashiir gathers his belongings and cleans himself up, Evelyn and I meet Izzy in the parking lot. After much fuss and more tears and apologies and clinging hugs, my cousin settles her mother in the passenger seat of her Jeep. I promise I’ll meet up with her back in her room later, that I won’t run off without seeing her again.
As they pull out, Bashiir emerges, his backpack slung over one shoulder.
“Celeste left a message,” he says as soon as he’s near. His eyes are energized by his news about Paul.
I catch a soft whiff of his newly soaped face and hands. Without thinking, I touch the band of beads around my wrist.
“She said that the chaos ended up being to their advantage—they slipped away and hid until the police shut down the neighborhood. Then they walked most of the night till they got to Athens. She’s staying there with friends for a while. Paul took an early morning bus to Indianapolis, but that’s just a way station. He left her his phone, his ID. He’s on the move, under a false name.”
“What’s his plan? Where is he ultimately going?”
“He’s heading to the last known address on those receipts. He refused to tell us where, or what name he’ll be traveling under. He knows it’s a risk for any of us to have information about him as long as your uncle wants to stop him from finding Eddie. He’ll call Celeste from different numbers, just to say he’s safe. But more than that, none of us will know for a while.”
“Shouldn’t we try to help him? What if he doesn’t call her? What if . . .”
“Toni, Paul knows how to lay low and move quickly. He wants to do it this way. I have faith in him and I’m not going to interfere.” Bashiir stretches his arms overhead, then turns his face up to the sky.
“But . . .” I stop myself.
This is reality, whether you like it or not.
The lines from My Ántonia that Evelyn shared the night I learned that James was engaged come back to me, unbidden.
All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath.
I watch him allow the warmth and the quiet of late afternoon seep into his skin. He’s been in a jail cell for almost a full day. His community, the one he’s building with such love, is under attack. I can’t pepper him with questions that are, ultimately, about me.
This is the truth.
Bashiir needs to catch his breath. I need to catch mine. I have so much to figure out, so many pieces to put together about my past. He’s got to be thinking about his future, and the future of the Community Center. Yet right now, the simple act of standing in the afternoon heat on an empty street next to this man, seeing the way he squints at the sun’s brilliance—it’s enough. It makes me feel like a person. A regular person.
I didn’t know it was possible to crave something so calm.