The Other Americans(17)

Now Stratton led Fierro to the holding cell and locked the doors. The metal bars had recently been painted a cheerful blue and I stood against them, watching him. I didn’t know how to help him, how to tidy up this mess he’d made. “Don’t worry, this’ll blow over soon,” he said with a grin. “And meantime I got to meet Deputy Gorecki, all official and shit.”

“Yeah, well. Take a good look, asshole. Make sure it’s the last time I see you here.”





Nora




Then it was my turn. I stepped into the gray light of the viewing room, but kept my gaze averted until the last moment. Once I looked at the coffin, my father’s death would become real and unalterable; I would have to accept it. The casket was made of varnished wood, but free of any designs or embellishments. Inside it, a white burial shroud cloaked my father’s body. His face was pale, his right cheek bruised, his lips tightly shut. “What did you want to tell me that day?” I whispered. It was rare for him to call in the middle of a workday, but not so rare as to have caused me any alarm. The extent of my loss was barely starting to reveal itself to me in that airless room, with the mortuary men behind me speaking in hushed voices. I stood beside the coffin with my heart aching inside my chest until it was time to leave.

Outside, the sun was so bright I had to shield my eyes with my hand. Sparrows came in a flutter of wings to settle on a eucalyptus tree at the edge of the parking lot. A man in a brown suit stood next to the hearse, its back doors gaping open like the maw of a hungry beast. My sister and her family were already in their Escalade, but my mother was waiting for me beside my car. When I put my key in the ignition, music from the classical station blared, replacing the silence with a crescendo of violins. I shut it off.

In the sudden silence, my mother said, “It’s not supposed to be like this.”

For my mother, things were forever not the way they were supposed to be. She had left her country with her family, but she still longed for everything else she hadn’t been able to bring with her. She missed her old house, her childhood friends, the call for prayers at dawn. No matter how extravagant a meal she cooked, she found it wanting—an ingredient was always missing or the flavor just wasn’t right. My sister’s wedding sent her into paroxysms of nostalgia that transformed our house into a bazaar filled with henna patterns, embroidered belts, brass trays, a litter to carry the bride and groom. My mother had to leave many traditions behind and the more time passed, the more they mattered to her.

Even in death. The way we were handling the funeral seemed wrong to her. She was aghast at the fact that my father’s body had lain in the morgue for four days before he was released to us. Make haste in taking the dead to the grave, she said, over and over, though there was nothing Salma or I could do about it; we had to wait for the autopsy to be done and for the paperwork to be completed. When we’d arrived at the mortuary that morning, my mother seemed surprised to find only three employees waiting for us.

“How is it supposed to be?” I asked.

“They should do the prayer here, at the mosque. Bring him inside and pray for him. And then your uncle and Tareq lead, how do you say, the walk to the cemetery?”

“The funeral procession?”

“Right. They lead the funeral procession, and we go the next day to visit the grave.” She gave me an accusing look, as if I had plotted this new affront to tradition. “But they don’t do it this way here.”

All of a sudden I realized I had never known anyone who died, had no experience whatsoever with death. I had nothing to compare it to, unlike her. Before she’d turned twenty, she’d lost both of her parents and an aunt. Their pictures sat on the dresser in her bedroom, along with photos of all the family in Casablanca. “I’m sorry, Mom.”

My phone buzzed with a text from my friend Elise. Thinking of you today, she said. None of my friends from the Bay Area were coming to the funeral. Elise was teaching and could not get away; Anissa was on a reporting trip to Texas and could not get away; and Margo was at a music festival in Pittsburgh and could not get away. I tried to swallow my disappointment, though it kept rising like bile. I think I was starting to apprehend how clarifying death could be: it made everyone around me disappear. Perhaps they were afraid of intruding on my grief or saying the wrong thing, so instead they sent brief notes of condolence and asked what they could do. A question I couldn’t answer.

In the rearview mirror, I noticed that the hearse had pulled out of its spot. I hadn’t seen the coffin being loaded, and the lapse gave me a strange feeling of guilt, as if I’d let my father down. “They should’ve given us some kind of signal,” I said as I eased out of my space and followed my sister’s Escalade. It barely cleared the metal gate of the mortuary of the Islamic Center before it sped toward the freeway entrance at Vermont Avenue. It was the first week of May and the jacaranda trees were starting to bloom, their sparse blossoms a bright shade of violet. The sidewalks were packed with vendors and pedestrians. At the on-ramp, a truck had just rear-ended a convertible in the right lane, and traffic was slowly merging left. “Your father hated freeways,” my mother said as she watched the commotion. “When we first moved to California, he wanted me to drive him everywhere. I worried all the time about the accidents.”

“Is that why he never wanted to move out of the desert?”