THE ANCIENT GREEKS REALIZED THE EARTH WAS A sphere long before Galileo got all the credit—the summer solstice marked the first day of their new year. A time of beginnings. The day that Helios, the sun god, preened for endless hours, soaking up the adulation and fear of all the citizens and beaming back at them with his blinding hot light. But evening finally fell on Helios’s day in Greece—and here in northern Minnesota, it’s beginning to fall now.
As the shadows deepen, I retrace my steps through the woods behind my uncle’s house. This time, Izzy and Evelyn wait together for me to sneak back in. We’ll be upstairs, Izzy texted. Come figure out a plan. We haven’t told him you’re out.
The back of the King family house looms dark before me. Izzy’s light is on. I stop, gaze up at her room. Sure enough, there she is, illuminated, two floors up, chatting animatedly on the phone to someone, like a moving picture in a frame.
I pull out my phone to let her know I’m here—but I stop texting before I finish. Instead, I backspace out my message and return the phone to my bag.
No more crawling through windows. No more subversive gestures like those that secretly give my aunt and Izzy a little power of their own but don’t upset the structure of the universe as Christopher sees it. Pilfering money is the perfect Aunt Evelyn maneuver; sneaking in forbidden lovers and cousins gives Izzy the thrill she needs.
Today has had an effect on both of them, there’s no doubt. Probably a major effect. But here’s where our relationship has its limits. Their lives are still their lives, this house is their house, the past is their past. For me, and for Paul, although we called this place home for a time, we have so much left to find.
THE OUTER DOOR TO THE WEST WING IS BURNISHED BY the glow of the almost-setting sun. Touching the brass knob is like touching a fireball. It’s unlocked, so his business hours aren’t over yet. I enter the foyer—and immediately hear the murmur of voices. He’s with Harrison. I duck away from the inner window and press my ear to the door.
“ . . . too far this time,” my cousin says. “We can dial it back if you call and drop the charges against Toni now.”
“Antonia’s not thinking clearly. It’s for her own good. If I didn’t take this measure, she was going to make some serious mistakes.”
“The town doesn’t want to see her locked up. No matter whether she’s liked or not around here, throwing her in jail is a bad look.”
“You’re being dramatic. Everyone knows what that cell is for—it’s a drunk tank. Nothing real. If I excuse members of my own family for wrongdoing, how can I keep the respect of the people of Thebes?”
“Yes, the respect of Thebes! Dad, this is my point. I’m hearing sympathy for Toni through Facebook and Twitter. You don’t understand social media. Gossip travels fast, and lots of people saw her around town today. Someone posted a picture of her in handcuffs. This doesn’t benefit you or King Family Construction.”
For a moment, Christopher is silent on the other side of the door. When he does speak, his tone is measured. “Harrison, are you expecting me to take lessons in business management from my son, a boy barely out of school?”
“Dad, I’m trying to support you from a public relations perspective. And as your son, isn’t it useful for me to keep you in touch with what others are thinking? This isn’t just a family issue now,” Harrison continues to brave through. “Jail is public, and most people don’t agree with your assessment that Toni broke the law.”
“You’re on her side. And Paul’s.”
“No. I’m fighting for you and for this company. That’s why I tried to convince Toni to sign the papers. But she was upset. Understandably. However, there’s an opportunity here for good PR. You can show everyone that you own the high road by ending this standoff. That’s how to win now: drop the charges against Toni.”
“The two of them. They probably cooked this up together. Well, she can sit in that hole until she agrees to sign the statement. That will teach her a lesson about loyalty.”
“Dad. Let’s focus. We can’t let this derail the Dig. The sooner we resolve the situation, the sooner we can get back to work.”
“She’s tricky. Lied to me for three years, pretending she’d come back after law school.”
I never lied! I almost give away my hiding place with my instinctual need to correct him. But I stop. Wait.
My uncle is pacing. I can hear his footfall as his voice rises.
“I built this, all of this, for the family. All they had to do was be part of it. Is it so hard to toe that line? Look at what you and Isobel get, just for showing up each day.”
“I think I do more than just show up.” Do I hear a note of anger in my cousin’s voice?
“How can anyone doubt that I’m doing what’s right for Thebes?” My uncle isn’t even listening to Harrison. “I’ve created jobs here for twenty years. The money I brought back from the Balkans saved this town.” His voice grows even louder. “My brother couldn’t do that. My father couldn’t even do that. And Paul and Antonia: they became King family members. I rescued them.”
“More reason to drop the charges. Bring her back to talk, at least.”
“She was disloyal. I’ve made my decision.”
“But your decision was wrong!”
Silence from inside the office. When my uncle speaks again, he’s once more standing close to my hiding place. Close to Harrison.
“Be careful, son,” says Christopher. His voice is thicker now, full of portent. “Do you intend to start down this road? Put it away.”
Put what away?
“You’re right about loyalty, Dad,” I hear my cousin say. “It is everything. I’ve been loyal to you every step of the way. I’ve worked hard every day to promote you and this company as a force for good to the people in this town, people my age, people who have come here to make a future. I’ve spent hours talking up the jobs that the Dig will create. And it was working. If you had just let me keep doing it, I would have moved everyone to a peaceful agreement. But you turned out to have no loyalty to me.”
“Harrison, you don’t want to do this.”
Has my cousin finally snapped?
“Family loyalty,” Harrison continues. “I supported you after Paul broke into your office on Friday and confronted you over dinner, because his actions put us at risk in front of a potential investor. But I never stopped negotiating with him and his friends, right up through last night. Even though I knew what you had planned. Don’t you see? I’ve been brokering the future of this company you built, for everyone. I’ve been the go-between, the compromiser, the one working behind the scenes to take our family and this company forward. I’ve given everything you’ve asked of me, no matter what I’ve had to sacrifice to keep the peace. But you couldn’t keep the faith long enough to let me see it through. You had to fall back on this.”
On what?
“I kept apologizing for your actions and trying to convince everyone to compromise. Until now. Until Izzy called me when I was at the television station—finalizing the deal that you asked me to make to ensure that WKNW would literally be part of the family—to tell me you had Toni arrested.”
“Stop overreacting. Listen, you know me, and we understand each other. But Toni, sometimes she doesn’t. She needed a little protection from her own worst impulses, that’s all.”
“No, Dad. Toni might be a pain in the ass, and a hothead, but she came back when you called, didn’t she? What you’ve done is a betrayal of us all. I stand with Toni.”
Harrison, who grabbed my hand and pulled me across enemy lines with him in our kindergarten game of Red Rover. Who initiated our pact for life, years ago, at Twin River Falls. How could I have doubted him for even a moment?
“Izzy was sobbing, Dad. She thought it was her fault Toni was in jail. And that’s when I saw it so clearly.”
“Saw what?” Christopher’s voice is wavering now. He’s nervous. Whatever Harrison is doing in there, combined with what he’s saying—it’s cracking something open in my uncle. A vulnerability I haven’t heard before. I lean closer.
“I saw that I had to take charge of this myself,” Harrison continues. In contrast to his father, Harry’s voice is strong and clear. “As an officer of this company, I have the power to speak on your behalf when it comes to King Family Construction. I told the police we were dropping the charges you levied against both Paul and his roommate.”
Of course! How could I have missed the obvious? My uncle orchestrated Bashiir’s arrest, and the warrant for Paul’s, as well as mine. I didn’t want it to be true, that’s how. And up till tonight, Harrison believed all of it was nothing but a show, like the sign-waving xenophobes downtown.
“That was just the start,” says Harrison. “My next call was to the television station. To let Matthew and Charlene know the truth about the injured police officer at last night’s protest. And that the evidence is here. What I’m holding in my hands right now. That’s the new story that they’re holding until the ten o’clock broadcast. That’s the new deal. And unless you free Toni, that story runs.”
“You. Will. NOT!” My uncle’s voice rises to a level of distress I’ve never heard before. Time to move.
“Harry!” I cry. “I’m here!” I push open the door to the inner office.
The shock that registers on both my uncle’s and my cousin’s faces, I expect to see.
Harrison standing in front of Christopher wielding a wooden baseball bat, I don’t.
A baseball bat. The weapon Officer Hansen told me was used last night to club the sergeant at the scene of Paul and Bashiir’s peaceful vigil. This is the evidence Harrison holds in his hands.
“Toni! How did you get out?”
I can’t reveal Evelyn’s secrets in front of my uncle. Either Evelyn or Izzy can tell Harrison if they want to. I look at Harrison, let him see fully the love and gratitude I feel for him. Then, now, always.
“I’m Batman, remember?”
Harrison returns my look with one of his own: one that says all is forgiven between us. “Yes, you are.”
I look at Christopher, who stares in dismay at both of us.
“What did he do?” I ask my cousin.
“He had John Joseph hire a guy to sneak into the protest last night after dark and pretend to be part of the crowd defending the Somali neighborhood. Then he hit the officer so things would get violent, and the police could justify arresting Paul and his friends.”
“It was just theater!” Christopher says. “I made sure there would be no serious injuries. I had everything under control.” He sounds like the opposite of a man in control. Still working to spin things his way.
Harrison turns to me. “I’m trying to fix it,” he says quietly.
“I know,” I reply.
There’s a rustle from the back of the office, by the door to the house. It’s Evelyn and Izzy, standing arm in arm. Izzy’s eyes widen as she takes in the specter of her brother wielding a baseball bat in front of her father’s face.
“Evelyn,” Christopher extends his arm. “We need a united front.”
My aunt shakes her head.
“Evelyn . . .” A warning? An admission of fear?
“Harrison,” she says, “I think Antonia needs a moment alone with your father.” Now she looks straight at me. “I believe they have some old business to discuss.”
She’s giving me the opening. Permission to say whatever I need to say—ask him what I need to know about Eddie King.
“Evelyn!” A threat this time. Tinged with disbelief.
Whatever reasons she’s had to keep Christopher’s secret about Eddie—whether it was to protect him or to protect herself—it’s over. And for a second time today, she’s gifting me freedom at her own expense.
Slowly, Harrison lowers the bat and places it on his father’s desk. He walks across the office and stands beside them. Christopher, his face gone white, grips the back of his office chair so hard his fingers leave an indentation in the leather.
Before she leaves the room, Izzy gives me one quick look, a question with her eyes: Are you all right? I nod. She slides the door shut.
________
The bank of windows behind Christopher’s desk, framed by paisley damask curtains, reveals a bruised purple sky and a blazing orange and red sizzle of setting sun. Christopher himself is practically a shadow. Dusk makes his eyes appear to recede in their sockets. Slowly he sits down in his high-backed chair and spreads his large hands out, palms down on the wide polished wooden desk between us.
“Well,” he says, his voice heavy. “I’ve put this family first my entire adult life. And in a single day you’ve managed to turn every one of them away from me.”
The baseball bat lies crossways, at the center of the desk, over a pile of spreadsheets. So many invisible handprints on the neck of this bat, from Christopher to John Joseph to the thug they hired to take a single swipe at a cop that sent Bashiir to a cell and Paul on the run. Despite all that, it’s my peacemaking cousin Harrison who turned it into the most effective weapon of all. He’s beaten his father without taking a single blow.
I lean forward, press my own palms on the edge of the desk in a mirror image of my uncle.
“It’s the worst feeling in the world, isn’t it,” I say, “being an outsider in your own home.” My voice shakes with the truth of what I’m saying.
The lines across Christopher’s forehead seem etched more deeply than just this morning, when he was the passionate orator announcing his vision of a story I was expected to support. I’ve seen him woo a roomful of people to his causes. I’ve seen him dominate with his silences. And at his happiest, I’ve seen him glow in his achievements. But I’ve never seen him look so completely alone.
I remember sitting in the family pew each Sunday, back in the days when all of us still attended church. Pressed between Paul and Izzy, I would steal glances at my uncle’s profile where he sat, in the aisle seat, while the minister gave his sermon. Christopher in those moments seemed truly regal to me. Taller than anyone, back straighter, jaw firmer. Everyone wanted him to shake their hand, admire their children. I used to wonder, then, if he could ever love me like a father, despite my failings. If it was my own fatal flaw that I couldn’t find the means within to worship him, as Harrison did, or blithely and uncritically accept him, like Izzy. Wasn’t I just making my own life more difficult by resisting his dynamic pull?
Then I would shift my gaze to Paul, beside me, let his profile come into focus and my uncle’s blur into the background. Here was my unequivocal connection to the world. No matter how mad I made him, he was the only one who could keep me safe from my nightmares, the way a father could.
Was it too much pressure on my brother, only three years older, to feel it was up to him to protect me from everything, even my own dreams? I don’t know. But I do know, now, that I wasn’t imagining Uncle Christopher’s distance. He was keeping secrets. Moving his brother from institution to institution. I sensed that a chill ran through his heart, but I never could have guessed it was from fear we’d learn that Edward King was still alive.
“Where is Paul?” I ask him. “Where did he go to look for Eddie?”
The slice of sunset behind my uncle is thin as a thread. The office darkens even as I stand across the desk from him, watching him thinking through his next move. I reach over and switch on his desk lamp just as the horizon line disappears. The arc of light spills between us like a white-gold pool, illuminating the desktop.
“Pittsburgh. That’s his last address,” Christopher says at last. “But Paul won’t find him there. And don’t think you’ll find any more evidence about his whereabouts here either—your brother stole what little there was. But now it’s all useless, so no matter.”
I pause, take this in. Slowly I realize what Christopher has done.
“You moved him again.”
“It’s better for Paul if he never finds him, believe me. Eddie’s overdose left him hideously damaged. There’s nothing positive that can come of that reunion. Does he think Eddie’s the perfect American father you both should have had instead of terrible me?”
“But why did you move him so many times? Once we grew up, we could have . . .”
“I was hiding him, all right?” Christopher’s voice cracks. “It was tragic. Terrible. My own brother would never be fully functional again. I had to decide what to do with him. How would you feel if it was Paul?”
I don’t have to think. A loss that would cut to the bone.
“Evelyn was raising you now,” he continues. “She said: ‘Those poor children have been through too much.’ We agreed. You and your brother would be better off if you forgot about Eddie. You barely even knew him. I could support him financially, make sure he was comfortable. I made enough money from working in Sarajevo to care for him and to grow the business. Don’t you see? Eddie and I had a deal. One of us goes down, the other one takes care of the whole family. Forever. My brother . . . he’s been alive in name only the past twenty years. I freed you—what if you and Paul grew up with Eddie to take care of on top of everything? This was the best way.”
Seven-year-old Paul, trying with his tiny hands to pump life into Eddie’s chest as he slumped on the floor. Me, incapable of even picking up the phone. Paul would have kept vigil with Eddie to this very day. Would I?
“Now you know,” my uncle continues, his tone warming as he sees me hesitate. “Your aunt and I were doing the best we could. But your brother leapt to conclusions the other night. He didn’t give me the benefit of the explanation I’m giving you now. That’s why I had to try to stop him from making this terrible mistake, by any means I could. That warrant was just to keep him here in Thebes. I had to make certain he wouldn’t find Eddie. For his own sake. You too. You were about to follow in his path but thank goodness I stopped you before you could make the same error.”
My uncle’s methods are extreme, no doubt. But the memory of that terrible time with Eddie—has Christopher been trying through the only means he knows, money and power, to care for us after all?
He leans in. “You and I have the same goal. We want everyone to be safe. I guarantee that I’ll send no one after your brother on his futile quest if you convince Harrison to keep this petty, vindictive news story of his off the air. He trusts you. Then we can both get what we want.”
Quid pro quo. He always has one more, then one more, then just when you think he’s done, he twists you around in yet another direction—an endless maze with only one way out: his way. He’ll use my fears for Paul as a threat if it gets him what he needs.
He also strikes a chord. We are alike: we both want to protect the people we love.
“But why did you set Paul up for attacking a police officer? If jail was your only option, why not do what you did to me, arrest him for breaking and entering?”
Christopher shakes his head. “I thought about that. At first, I wanted to have him arrested for theft, so I had John pull up video from the security camera in my office. There was no footage. Paul must have rigged something. John said to add it to the list of offenses—but then I realized: given your brother’s history as a vagrant, it would be easier for anyone to believe he was running from the police. It would be my word against his. I’m not worried about who would prevail.”
Going up against Christopher King is like ramming your head into an invisible wall everywhere you turn. Paul’s confrontation with Christopher on Friday killed the business deal that would have postponed razing the Somali Community Center. Bashiir’s ability to disable the video cameras led to the warrant for Paul’s arrest. I could probably poke at Christopher’s infuriating self-assurance by revealing that his loyal henchman’s daughter is now married to his sworn enemy, but that would require betraying my brother’s secret. Not an option.
“Antonia, a deal is on the table. Tell your cousin he must stand down before they air the ten o’clock news. Let’s work together for the benefit of the whole family.”
Work together. His eternal siren call—show your loyalty to me by working together, in business or in blackmail. I’ll keep your brother safe, but only if you help me bend the truth, yet again.
We might be alike in some ways. But Christopher will lie, and pretend, and throw any amount of money behind that pretense, to maintain the illusion that he is the head of a perfect American family: an illusion that he believes will heal all wounds.
Nothing can fill those gaping holes for me now other than the truth. Nothing else can seal what’s been blown apart.
I’m running out of time. But I cannot let the most important piece of my history stay buried. Not when I have this opening. I take a deep breath.
“My mother. You never talked about her. You told me to forget about the past.”
“For your own best interests. You can’t say I was wrong about that. Harvard, Antonia. Would you have made it there if you were obsessed about the past, about things you couldn’t change? Your brother couldn’t let it go, and he dropped out of school.”
The same story of us, over and over. The myth he chose for us. The one that I see now I’d been perpetuating myself.
“You knew Vlado,” I continue. “Paul learned that he was a convicted war criminal.”
“I had nothing to do with Milošević or any of Vlado’s beliefs. I’m an American!”
I stand across from him, arms folded. I’m not going to back off.
“It was a different time,” Christopher says. He’s trying to modulate. “The Berlin Wall fell. Then the Prague Spring. We were democracy builders, helping spread a better way of life behind the Iron Curtain. That’s what the Barrington Company bosses told us we were signing on for when we agreed to help build that hotel. My town was dying. The money was good. And my brother . . .” His voice breaks on the word brother. My heart breaks a little too when I imagine my own.
He clears his throat. “I worshipped him as a kid. When he lost his leg in the Gulf, he lost everything. His visions of the future, his sense of purpose—gone. It was all up to me then. Our mother and Eddie, they were ready to sit in that farmhouse and rot away together. I single-handedly dragged him overseas to be on the crew with me. Johanna was on board. She saw it was the only way to save their relationship. And Evelyn too. I told her I’d be back before Isobel was born. She understood why I had to go.”
Did she? I add it to the list of questions I need to ask my aunt. Did she understand, or was that the time, pregnant, with a toddler and her mother-in-law to manage, that she began to think like a thief because she knew if she wanted anything to belong to her and her alone, she’d have to steal it?
“Sarajevo was supposed to snap my brother out of all his self-pity. But his damn funk just kept going. I worked twice as hard on the crew to cover for him while he moped around about the past.”
I’ve heard and dismissed versions of this story forever. But now that I know there’s a different ending on the way, one that leads to the reason he’s been hiding Eddie’s existence from all of us, I’m listening. And some of what I hear sounds more familiar than I want to admit. Why are you wasting your time in the dregs of Thebes, Paul? Come to Minneapolis and make a new life. I know better than you do.
I learned to drink away my feelings from my aunt. I guess I learned how to bully my family from my uncle. Now he sits alone on the other side of his enormous desk, as alone as I felt every minute in this house from the time Paul ran away.
“Eddie wasn’t the brother I knew anymore. He would just wander off, limping away on that prosthetic leg, in the middle of work. I could only prop him up with the bosses for so long before they fired him. There we were, on the other side of the earth, and I promised everyone we’d come home with enough money to take care of everything. I left my pregnant wife on that promise, Antonia. Do you see? Do you see now the bind I was in?”
I do, actually. Maybe for the first time.
He exhales, a sigh so full that his shoulders rise and drop from the effort.
“The black market was thriving. One meeting with the right person and I could make ten times the money. No questions asked.”
The skin prickles up and down the backs of my legs.
This is what he’s never told me before. A window that was sealed shut all of my years in Thebes has just cracked open.
“So much depended on me. Only me. I was responsible for Eddie there and everyone else back here. ‘Go to Vlado,’ the guys on the crew said. They all knew who he was—the key to the Serbian underground. That’s how it worked. The way an American could come home rich.”
And the pathway to me and Paul.
The dim room is my ally now; I stay in shadow to keep my face a blur while he continues.
“Vlado said, ‘Take your truck and your American passport back and forth to Serbia. Other people will load and unload. All you have to do is drive. You never touch the goods.’”
I’m light-headed, hearing this. “By goods you mean arms.” My voice is thin, barely familiar.
“The war was not my fault, Antonia.” His tone begins to rise again. “I thought it would all be different. Like the Gulf. You know who you are when you wear a uniform. In Sarajevo it was . . . messy. I was a civilian. It wasn’t my fight. I was sent to build a hotel, not choose a side. My side was my family and my community. Always. I did what was necessary and I used the proceeds to start this company. To save Thebes and save you and save everyone. Beginning with my own brother. You know how that feels. You know.”
He’s trying to keep me with him. But he can’t anymore. Not even by invoking Paul again. I’m falling away from his story, backward through the darkness he’s thrown into the room.
He ran arms for Vlado.
Vlado raped my mother.
I feel the tears on my face, but I don’t care anymore what he sees. I lean out of the shadow slicing through the room, into the artificial light thrown across his desk. Let him know me. Let him know he can’t bury Andela by calling me a different name.
“My mother,” I whisper. It’s a question without asking a question.
He shakes his head. “No. Your mother isn’t my fault. You’re acting just like Eddie! If only he had just kept his mouth shut . . .”
What?
Christopher’s eyes widen as he realizes he’s tipped into territory he hadn’t intended. Then they narrow, quickly.
“Fine, okay, it wasn’t a coincidence we came to your apartment. The siege had worsened, construction on the hotel shut down because of the bombings, and Eddie and I were heading back to the States with everyone else from Barrington. But the guns I pulled in on my last run, they were still hidden in Vlado’s apartment. One last job, he said. Destroy the stash.”
“Eddie was in on it?”
“No. Never. I did what I had to do to protect him and my family. To keep my promise. Eddie was begging me to get us on the next transport to Germany. I had to tell him why we needed to wait, just a few more hours. We fought; he said ‘forget about it, don’t you have enough money,’ but it was more than the money this time. I knew if I didn’t take care of business what could happen. The UN was moving in. There had to be no evidence, no link between me and Vlado.
“Eddie followed me out to the apartment, wouldn’t let off telling me to quit. That day—there were bombs going off everywhere. The debris from all the shelling blocked our entrance to the building. Vlado gave me the cash and a grenade, then he ran. Eddie said ‘don’t do it,’ but I had to get in to destroy those guns. I knew from my last tour in Baghdad that no one would know how anything happened in the fog of war.”
The sound of bombs. My heart is pounding, like it did when I heard the slam of metal lock me into the cell this afternoon. The embroidered flowers. My mother singing. The fragments fly apart.
Breathe.
Bashiir’s kind voice.
You are whole.
The beaded bracelet knocks gently against my chest as I breathe into my hand.
Christopher sits up straighter, tents his fingers together in front of him, elbows on the desk. He wants out of this conversation.
“We rescued you and gave you everything. Now this family is a success. Thebes can be successful too. I’m making it happen. I understand how. After two wars, I know how to keep the peace! We close ranks, Antonia. Newcomers, renters, these people from countries like yours, they come here with the stench of what they left behind. Our obligation is to the living, not the dead.”
He never knew Andela and Mujo, only Antonia and Paul.
He will never understand that our dead live on inside us.
“Look at all I’ve given you, Antonia. Why can’t you and your brother just be grateful?”
It’s a rhetorical question, the same question he’s asked me all of my life. But now I have an answer that I understand in my gut. He let me believe my whole life that the curse befalling Edward King was Paul’s and my fault.
“We knew you were keeping secrets from us,” I say. “Kids know. I didn’t know what, though, until today. We have nothing from our life before you, Uncle Christopher. Nothing but each other and a few of Paul’s memories. You hid a piece of our history from us, and demanded we stop trying to be who we were. The secret you kept never belonged to you. I don’t know what you promised Eddie down at Twin River. But it can’t be this. You should have told us he was alive.”
Christopher lowers his gaze. The dark room is soundless but for the hum of central air that cushions us, ensuring the extremes of Minnesota summers won’t touch this house, just like multiple backup generators ensure the extremes of the winters won’t either. He’s built his home into a fortress against all the elements: weather, strangers, children, change. Could my words have finally cracked through the fortress he’s built against the truth?
But when he looks up at me again from across the desk, it’s with a level of fury I’ve never seen before.
“I was protecting you,” he says, his blue eyes inscrutable. “I have always protected you and your brother. I brought you here to be Americans. To be Kings. But you never understood what I’ve given you. First Paul abandoned me, then you. And now you’ve poisoned Harrison against me, forcing him to use the media to take me down. I don’t know who you bewitched into paying your way out of that cell, but no doubt you’ll thank him for that favor by turning on him too before long. Just like you turned on James Hollings and his family—whoring yourself out to him when you knew he was going to be married.”
I gasp.
“Oh, you think I didn’t know? You think you managed to keep that under wraps all by yourself? Your aunt might have romanticized your behavior and made excuses. She spends too much time reading poetry to know what’s real. But I wasn’t about to let you ruin our family’s reputation. I’m the one who buried your reprehensible actions so Denise Hollings would never find out. You’ve always been a taker, Antonia—you’ve taken my shelter and protection and now you dare to fling it in my face. Go tell Harrison to kill the story. Then get out of my house.”
Slowly I begin to back away. I will not let him see that I’m as furious as he is. I’m expanding in the dark, filling the room with my anger. He will not twist my history into vicious, small-minded smears.
I squeeze my hands into fists and the smooth black beads slide up my left wrist. Bashiir’s gift—a symbol of his belief in me. Paul’s gift to Bashiir—a promise not broken but recast. And a Bosnian grandmother’s gift to Paul—solidarity, faith, and a wish for luck in our shared quest to find any part of the ruined worlds we all left behind.
Why would he throw James in my face now, after all this time pretending not to know, protecting me, as he said? Why is he riling me up like this?
He wants me angry, wants me to storm out and slam the door.
There’s something more. Something he’s still hiding from me. That’s why he changed direction. He knows my temper is my weakest point. I get illogical. Stupid.
Not this time.
Think, Toni. Finish the puzzle.
Eddie. Vlado. Paul on a wild goose chase. Christopher brokering my brother’s safety to hide . . . what?
There’s no way Christopher is putting Paul’s best interests first. Just like there’s no way he put me in jail to keep me in Thebes for the night because I was safer locked up than running after my brother.
Fifty thousand dollars. He paid a pretty penny to keep me away from something.
Follow the money, Melanie told me. Always follow the money.
Christopher has been paying institution after institution to keep Eddie away from Thebes for twenty years. But why would he need to keep him hundreds of miles away from us and his entire family? Eddie was no threat.
You’re acting just like Eddie! If only he had just kept his mouth shut . . .
Wait. What if Christopher isn’t paying just for Eddie’s medical care . . . what if he’s afraid that Eddie has something to tell us? What if his brother isn’t as damaged as he claims?
Vlado didn’t say there were kids . . .
Christopher said he was surprised to see us in the apartment that day. But he didn’t even mention my mother. Why didn’t he mention finding a dead woman?
What happened to your mother wasn’t my fault.
After the bombing stopped that day, she was still singing.
Then there was another blast, a different one, straight through the window.
Christopher threw a grenade.
“You,” I whisper.
The world has gone black.
“You killed her. And Eddie knows.”
His eyes narrow again.
“Antonia, now you’re jumping to conclusions . . .”
“When did he start threatening to talk?” My mind races. “Was it when you came into the apartment and saw my mother dead on the floor? Or was it later, once you were back here? Was it after Vlado was arrested for war crimes that Eddie put two and two together? Did he threaten to reveal your own war crimes, promises about family be damned?”
Christopher’s face is completely ashen. He sinks into his chair. But the light inside of me grows stronger, my back straighter. Everything is clicking into place.
My mother, my mother.
“Was Eddie even addicted to Oxy, Uncle Christopher, before you started ‘protecting’ everyone from what he knew? Or did he need those pills for more than the pain from his leg? Did he need them so he could blind himself to the truth about his own brother?”
“No!” Christopher’s hands are flailing in the air. “All I’ve done is for you and this entire family. Eddie didn’t understand what was best. He was grieving when Johanna left him. He made a mistake bringing two orphans back to raise. And she left. That’s what happened!”
“Then why can’t you let Paul find him?”
“He’ll rant. That’s what he does, even from his hospital beds. That’s what all the nurses say, everywhere he’s been! He spews crazy stories from his drug-addled brain about Sarajevo. Lies! Surely you understand how the ravings of a madman could confuse your brother.”
I look at him. I’m filled with calm, with purpose. “All day I’ve been chasing the wrong man, Uncle Christopher. I should have been looking for your brother, not mine.”
“Antonia, what did I tell you . . .” his threat sounds hollow now. Negligible in the face of my discoveries.
“Sending me to the town jail, that price on my head,” I continue, “that wasn’t to keep me safe. It was to keep me from figuring out your real secret until you had time to get Eddie on the move again. No one else knows, do they? Paul? Izzy? Harrison? Your own wife? They have no idea that your hands stink of my mother’s blood!”
“I should have left you behind in that scourge of a country twenty years ago,” he shouts. “Eddie made us take you both, out of his sick need to keep punishing me for what I did to preserve our family! I rescued you twice! And you repay me by turning everyone against me.”
“Well, guess what?” I say from my side of the room. I’m a hundred feet tall now, grown vast with the truth. “I am very much alive. And I have resources Eddie never had. How long do you think it will take me, with my legal training, to find enough evidence to link the beginnings of your family fortune to conspiracy with a convicted war criminal? And throwing a grenade to cover your crimes and killing my mother as a result? That’s manslaughter.”
“No, that’s not what . . .”
“You do know that statutes of limitations have no bearing on crimes against humanity, right? I will go to the state police, the U.S. military tribunal, the CIA, the FBI, and all the way to The Hague myself with what I know. You’d have been far better off had the accusations come from either your brother or mine instead of me. A drug-addled institutionalized coma survivor? A vagrant high-school dropout on the lam? You might have had a fighting chance. But me? Never.”
He’s shrinking. A withered tangle, engulfed in his massive chair.
“Please.” His voice cracks. “Don’t. I . . . I did what I had to do. One moment . . . so long ago . . .”
“You killed her,” I say again quietly. More for myself than for him.
And that’s when he crumbles. It’s the quiet that does it—he disintegrates before me. He puts his head down on the desk, and he weeps.
I see us both as if I’m hovering, floating. My uncle’s bowed head, centered in the spreading pool of yellow lamplight. Me, standing in darkness, witness and interlocutor. His pain, mine.
Christopher is trapped in that harsh light his desk lamp throws. Drowning in it. Is it up to me now to rescue him?
Rescue. It’s more complicated than that. Yes, Christopher King took us from the rubble of our first life. Fed us, clothed us. Protected us from so much harm. Lived up to the word of the pact he made with Eddie at Twin River.
But rescue us?
No.
Paul and I had to rescue ourselves.
Something diamond-sharp and piercing lodges itself in my chest. An understanding. My history isn’t a blight I must deny. It’s a truth I must live. Paul ripped one secret out of the past and set me on a course to discover the rest. It doesn’t belong to my uncle anymore. It belongs to us.
I won’t use blackmail, I told James this afternoon. I meant it. I won’t use blackmail to protect my career by threatening his marriage. I won’t use it to bring Per Olufsen to his knees to gain his political support. But this isn’t about personal gain. I have ancestors to defend. Murdered, raped, left unburied, left to rot.
This shrunken man in front of me—I longed for his approval so many years. And now: if I want to, I could make him beg. I could grab that baseball bat and smash this office and the machinations of a generation to smithereens. Who would blame me if I did?
Destruction. Obliteration. It’s my history.
He picks up his head to look at me.
“Antonia . . .”
It’s my history, but it won’t be my life.
“Okay, Uncle Christopher.” I’m calm now. Steady. “I will convince Harrison to pull the story from tonight’s news. But in return, I need your guarantee that the Somali Community Center remains untouched. The Big Dig is off.”
He nods.
“And I’m not going to tell the authorities, or Aunt Evelyn, what you really did in Sarajevo,” I continue. “At least not right now. You can’t pretend, though, not anymore, not to me. So, here’s what happens next. You’ll text me Eddie’s new location. And promise me he stays there. And you won’t make any effort to track my brother. No eyes on the ground, no attempts to stop him, no claims that he broke into your office and stole papers. He’s protected. Indefinitely.”
My uncle is only an outline now, but he manages to nod again.
I begin to walk out, then stop. Turn around as if I’ve just thought of something out of thin air.
“Oh, and one more thing. You will keep your promise to Harrison and announce that he’s the next CEO of King Family Construction. But no conditions. No fake marriage. You can’t choose which secrets to keep about any of us anymore. Living or dead.”
He starts to rise out of his chair, but I stop him with a wave of my hand. “No negotiations. It happens tonight. What’s the breaking local news story on WKNW going to be? A new generation of leadership brings fresh energy to the future of Thebes? Or will it be the start of an investigation into twenty years of lies? From that baseball bat to your brother to your black-market arms deals. To my mother. The decision is yours.”
This time when I turn to leave, I don’t look back. I don’t have to.
At last, I know exactly where I stand with Christopher King.