The Other Americans(12)
It was a junior officer from the San Bernardino County Fire Department who found the cause of the fire: a brick wrapped in a rag that had been doused in accelerant. “Homemade,” the officer said.
“I know,” my father replied. He had seen this kind of thing before, he said, in the Casablanca protests of 1981. He shook his head in disbelief. I think he was just realizing that he had moved six thousand miles for safety, only to find that he was not safe at all.
When we returned home, we found my mother where we had left her at six in the morning, sitting on the sofa with one foot tucked under her, watching CNN, where footage of the twin towers burning in New York still played in an endless loop. “What happened?” she asked, standing up.
My father told her.
I walked past them to my bedroom, where I peeled off the T-shirt and jeans that now reeked of smoke. But even after I showered, I couldn’t get rid of the smell of soot. My hair was redolent with it. From the living room came the soundtrack of my life—my parents arguing with each other. “We should go back,” my mother was saying.
“Go where?”
“Home. Casa.”
“We can’t go back, Maryam.”
“Of course, we can.” Morocco had changed, my mother insisted, things were different now. But my father didn’t think this was true. Besides, the Mojave had grown on him; he couldn’t imagine living in a big city like Casablanca anymore.
“We’ll move to Marrakesh, you’ve always liked it there.”
“But what about Nora? She’s still in school. No, no. We can’t move.”
Even after I walked back into the living room, they continued talking about me as if I weren’t there. They argued for days. And the more they argued, the more my mother turned to her Qur’an. She had found solace in it after the attacks, reading it to calm herself every morning after listening to the stream of tragedies on the news. At the dinner table, she would often quote from the holy book in her perfect Arabic enunciation, which none of us could ever hope to replicate. And she’d started praying again. She had never before shown much of an interest in religion so, even as he accommodated them, these changes took my father by surprise. But when he came home one evening to find all of his beer in the trash, he went to bed without speaking to her.
Thus began an eight-month period that I sometimes thought of as the Cold War. Every morning, my mother would take the beer out of the fridge, pour it down the sink, and toss the bottles into the trash bins, and every evening my father would bring home another six-pack. When he installed a separate fridge in the garage, she stuffed it with meat and vegetables. He complained he was not free in his own home; she said she did not feel safe in it. He went out more; she took up karate.
The fighting began to diffuse after the insurance settlement came in, and my father used the money to buy an old diner. It was called the Pantry. What could be more American than that? “Everything will be fine now,” he promised her. “You’ll see.” This was how the Cold War ended, and an uneasy peace returned to our home. But one blowback of the almost year-long conflict was that I couldn’t live in that home any longer; my parents’ endless fighting made it impossible. I thought of college as a safe haven; I was desperate to leave.
By the time I returned with the coffee tray, my mother had put the photograph back on the mantelpiece, wedging it between a color picture of Salma and Tareq at their wedding and framed handprints of the twins. A different portrait of my father had been taken out of its frame and now sat on the coffee table, in front of Coleman. “Do you have children, Detective?” my mother was asking.
“Yes,” Coleman said. “A boy. Miles.”
“Salma is a dentist. She’s great with kids.”
I poured a cup of coffee for the detective. “Miles, after Miles Davis?”
“No, Miles Aiken. My husband loves basketball.”
Coleman took a sip of her coffee and waited for me to sit down before she opened her notebook. “Mrs. Guerraoui, the autopsy confirmed that your husband was the victim of a hit-and-run motor vehicle accident. He suffered multiple injuries, both from the immediate impact to the right side of his body and from hitting the pavement afterward: a broken hip, five broken ribs, a punctured lung, bleeding in the head. It appears he was crossing Highway 62 at Chemehuevi, probably walking to where he was parked, when he was struck by a car or truck traveling east on the highway, landing him back on the north side of Chemehuevi. The medical examiner said that the extent of his injuries suggest that he died almost instantly. The time of death is estimated at about nine thirty p.m. on April 28th.”
The scene I had imagined, and which I was helpless to stop from unfolding every time I thought about the accident, came into sharper focus. Yet the new details only deepened my anguish. I didn’t know he had landed on his head or that his lung had been punctured. How long had it taken for him to die? Did he measure time breath by breath, waiting for someone to come help him? A fresh pain shot through me, so raw it made me want to scream.
Coleman grew quiet. She was giving us time to absorb the news, I think. At the other end of the sofa the cat raised its nose in the air, detected a scent, then trotted out of the living room after it.
“Ya lateef,” my mother whispered, “ya lateef.”
“I should also mention,” Coleman said, “that Highway Patrol would normally take over at this point, but I’m already three days into the investigation, and they asked if we could see it through.”