Locust Lane(22)
Through the cracked-open window, she heard the sound of a car stopping out front. Thinking it was Jack and Hannah, she went to the window to check. It was just a neighbor, leaning in to speak with the car’s driver. Her obnoxious Boston terrier strained at the leash. Alice watched them chat for a half minute, until the car drove away and dog and woman strode off, disappearing from view a few seconds later.
A sluggish neural pathway in Alice’s brain fired. Of course. Now she remembered where she’d seen Eden Angela Perry. She was the redhead with the big black dog. Alice would see her walking by the house regularly, bouncing along without a care in the world, the girl who always seemed to have a smile for everyone.
MICHEL
When he was seven, Michel wandered unexpectedly into the aftermath of an explosion. He was walking from his father’s restaurant, the original Papillon, to his uncle’s, La Coupole. It was a journey he made often—the two families were completely intertwined; child-minding duties were shared. No one worried too much about his walking the streets of Beirut alone. The Mahouns, after all, considered themselves immune from the horrors so abundant around them. Though Maronite Catholics, they were not political. They had nothing to do with the Phalange, whom his father and uncle privately considered thugs. As for Hezbollah and the Druze and the Syrians and the Palestinians—they all had bigger fish to fry than a couple of urbane Francophile chefs, whose restaurants appeared to exist separately from the rest of the chaotic city.
On this particular day, however, Michel had deviated from the approved route to take the shortcut recently shown him by his older cousin Claude. This took him close to the Green Line that separated the eastern part of the city, where his family lived, from violent and chaotic West Beirut. He’d heard the blast, but it had seemed far away, and some acoustical oddity made it appear to be coming from a different direction. It may have been an errant shell or a prematurely detonated car bomb. It was the eighties, after all. A time of explosions. Israeli F-16s and Syrian artillery. The marine barracks and the U.S. embassy. Fadlallah’s shattered headquarters, draped in the MADE IN USA sign. A time of massacres, of roadblocks and retaliation. A time of bad-news phone calls followed by heavy silences. A time of funerals.
Whatever the bomb’s origin, it exacted a terrible toll, exploding right next to a café where a group of old men were drinking tea. The scene was one Michel would never forget. The stinging smoke suspended in the air; the small fires; the slowly spinning tire of an upended Citro?n. And the silence, so profound it was as if the explosion had sucked the possibility of sound from the air. Ambulances had yet to arrive, there were no police around. Just victims, including a few bodies that looked more like meat his father stored in Papillon’s freezer than anything human. Most of the living lay on the ground, their shattered limbs twitching. One man, miraculously, still sat in his chair. His body from the neck down was drenched in blood, but his face remained unblemished, and he still held his unshattered glass between his fingers. What Michel remembered most clearly was his expression. It didn’t show pain or sorrow or fear, but rather a sort of bewildered indignation, an anger aimed far beyond cordite and shrapnel. I don’t have anything to do with this, it said. This is a big mistake. Please, will someone explain what this madness has to do with me? Will someone take this nonsense away and pour me another glass of tea?
That was how Michel felt when the police on his porch asked to see his son. Their presence was a mistake. Shocking, certainly. But wrong. It might look bad, it might cause damage and pain, but it was still just a misfire that needed to be remedied before he could return to the normal business of his life.
“What is this about?” he asked from the bottom of the porch steps.
“This is about us needing to speak with him,” the woman said, her agreeable voice at odds with her insistent words. “Is he home?”
Michel did not want these people in his house. He did not want them speaking to his son.
“I believe he’s at school.”
“Actually, he isn’t,” the woman said.
“I’ll need to know what this is about.”
“Sir, there’s only so long we’re going to stand out here having a conversation with you,” the man said.
His voice was not like hers. There was a threat in it. Michel knew men like this. Arguing with him would be pointless.
“Let me see if he’s inside,” he said. “Wait here.”
The man started to say something but the woman stopped him.
“We’d appreciate that.”
They made way for him. Michel opened the door, his mind scrambling to figure out what he was going to do next. Whom to call, what to say. But the thinking stopped when he saw Christopher standing halfway down the hall, looking small and terrified. He wore sweatpants and a rumpled T-shirt. Last night’s torment had increased a thousandfold. He understood that the police were out there and he appeared to know why. Michel wanted to slam the door shut but the woman was already speaking.
“Christopher?” she asked.
Her voice was layered with friendliness and warmth. Michel gestured with his head for Christopher to return to his room, but the boy’s eyes were on the detectives. He started to approach slowly, like a sleepwalker.
“So it’s probably best if we do this inside,” the woman said through the still-open door as Christopher arrived.