The Night Counter (29 page)

But the minister’s voice kept coming through the church’s powerful speakers.

“The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: He shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon.”

“What he say about a cedar tree in Lebanon?” Rock heard a confused Dawood ask Houda. “Is America going to invade Lebanon?”

Rock looked up at the minister. What had he just said about Lebanon?

“The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: He shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon,” the minister repeated.

Who was righteous?

He looked at the WWJD bracelet Brittney had made him and then couldn’t stop thinking about the cedars in Lebanon. Lebanon, whose food he had grown up eating, whose language came out of his mother’s and Houda’s mouths at unexpected times, where so many Marines had died when he was a little kid. How many Marines had died in Iraq? How many Iraqis had died in Iraq? This religion his daughter loved had always been a New Castle thing to Rock, but its roots were not in a former supermarket. Its principles came from where his grandparents had come from. It had come to New Castle from the Middle East with a stop in Europe, just as his grandparents had. Those thoughts ran through his head until Walt squeezed his hand hard enough to make him hear his ringing phone. This time he was thinking so hard that he answered it so that it would stop disturbing his thoughts.

“Oh, yes, yes, ma’am … I’ve been meaning to call you. Yes, I’ll go,” Rock whispered. “But I can’t talk now. I’m in church. … Bless you, too.”

Rock hung up and put the cell phone on vibrate. From afar, he saw Carla looking at him. Two people away, he felt Miriam doing the same thing.

“Who’s your call girl?” Dawood whispered.

“You don’t say ‘call girl,’ dude,” Rock whispered. “You say the girl
who called. Big difference, especially in a church. Besides, she wasn’t a girly girl.”

Houda gave them a warning look, shaking her shellacked ’fro. “
Bien
, what kind of girl was she?” Dawood said in a quieter whisper.

Rock hesitated and then motioned his distant cousin closer. He had to tell someone or he would start thinking about it too much.

“I’ve got a gig in Iraq,” Rock whispered.

“Gig?” Dawood asked.

“Shush,” Houda whispered.

“What does ‘gig in Iraq’ mean?” Dawood whispered to her.

“Gig?” Houda whispered. “Well, it means. … Oh, my God. Rock, what gig in Iraq? Are you back in the reserves?”

“What are you talking about?” Miriam said in a hush.

“Dude, I was whispering because it was a secret,” Rock groaned.

“When were you going to tell us?” Walt said.

“Iraq, no, no.” Miriam stood up, sobbed, and brought all the attention away from the sermon and those about to graduate. “My son cannot be sent to Iraq.”

The minister stopped preaching. Miriam’s outburst had taken many in the church back to the reality they escaped from at least once a week, surrounded for two hours in faith and hope and the promises of the power of prayer to bring their husbands, sons, brothers, and boyfriends home safely. Miriam no longer was crying alone. A less godly man than the boyish minister might have displayed more irritation at this intrusion on his sermon. “My brother is there, too, ma’am. He’s my best friend,” he told Miriam quietly, and then spread his arms out to encompass the congregation. “Let us pray for your son and all our soldiers in harm’s way.”

They all bowed their heads in unison. “You’ll just tell them you’re your widowed mother’s only son,” Walt whispered.

“No one is making me go, Mom,” Rock told her. “Stop crying and let the minister go on.”

“I’ve already given up so much for this county,” Miriam wailed. “But not you. Please, no.” The more reserved women of the congregation
covered their mouths to hold back their cries, and younger women clasped the hands of the plump older women who were frailer than they were, having known the losses of Vietnam as Miriam had, which had been numerous in this town. Rock wanted to tell them that their sons and brothers in Iraq and Afghanistan were much braver than they could imagine. He didn’t think he would be brave enough if he were still in.

Mike walked up the aisle and hugged Rock. “You kick some ass over there, buddy,” he said.

“Shut up, Mike,” Carla yelled at them from the stage. As she walked down to Rock, the cameraman followed her, not seeing the minister waving at him not to. Everyone watched on the TV monitors. This was proving to be her biggest performance to date.

“I have prayed every night that you would be called, and here you are in church being called,” Carla began. “But this isn’t the kind of calling I meant. You have a daughter to think about.”

“I’m not going to fight,” Rock explained. “I’m going to be building schools over there. Righteous stuff. Someone has to do the righteous stuff.”

“You build schools again you bombed,” Dawood hissed.

“What do you want America to say? The damage is already done,” Rock said. “All we can do now is fix it.”

“You can’t fix dead people,” Dawood snapped.

Rock heard the one cry he couldn’t bear to hear. He looked down at Brittney’s face, which had crinkled into thinking furrows, thoughts cruising through her head.

“You’re why I’m going,” Rock said, and picked her up. “I can pay for your college in two years with the money I’ll make.”

“I can pay for college,” Mike said. “Who knows where I’ll be in real estate by then.”

“I don’t want your help, Mike,” Rock answered. “She, at least, is still mine.”

Brittney’s forehead crinkled more as Carla’s face reddened.

“Let us pray for peace and freedom for all of God’s children,” the minister said. Despite his boyish face, the minister’s voice made it clear
that this was not a matter of choice. Most of the congregation prayed with their eyes open, looking at the Yusefs until the choir leader confiscated the cameraman’s equipment. Then the minister pounded his fist on the podium, commanding attention. “One man’s decision to go to Iraq reminds us of our own war efforts,” he told them. “The clothes drive we’re spearheading for Iraqi orphans, the funds being collected to help with college fees for U.S. soldiers’ children, in conjunction with the New Castle Widows’ Relief Fund.” That was an organization Miriam had started, an altruistic effort that forever reminded the community of her tragedy.

Rock did not hear any of this because he saw that the bounce in Brittney’s white gown was gone. Mike and Carla each held one of her hands. “This will probably save your dad’s soul from damnation,” Carla comforted her. Brittney’s forehead started uncrinkling.

“Really?” Brittney asked Rock.

“Listen to your mother,” Rock said by way of an answer. “Especially while I’m gone.”

Carla mouthed “thank you” but did not smile.

Two days later, Rock was at home alone packing. He had made Walt take Miriam to help organize his surprise going-away party at Smith’s. He’d gotten most of what he needed in a duffel bag. It would be 120 degrees there. He saw Brittney’s WWJD bracelet. He had meant to put it in his duffel bag. For now, he put it on his wrist.

Rock originally had downloaded the job application from an ad in the paper because it had given him somewhere to hide at lunch when Mike would talk about the minutia of his life with Carla with the other guys on the job. It was a long application, and it had forced Rock to do a lot of thinking. They were offering nearly $100,000 a year for contract workers, compared with the $1,500 he took home every month here. He’d even be able to pay back Walt for all of Joe’s debts.

The San Diego–based construction company warned him of the bombings, the kidnappings, the deadly spiders, and all the other things that were killing both Iraqis and Americans. He’d heard on CNN the other day that the death toll so far was 100,000 Iraqis and 759 U.S. soldiers. But
he was not going to be in theater. He was going to be building a school. Rock figured that despite all the deaths, the majority of men and women were coming back alive and uninjured. He was, in fact, looking forward to being the man—the only man—who took care of his daughter. She would go to college somewhere else, somewhere good.

There were more people in Smith’s waiting to tell Rock goodbye than had ever been there as customers in Rocks lifetime. Walt turned the Muzak down, and everyone clapped. Rock made his speech brief. “I wish you all safety and peace,” he said. “Now, party on.” Rock talked to several people before going to his mother. Miriam’s real tears and her crocodile tears had melded together over the years, but today the crocodile was missing.

“You’re all I have,” Miriam sobbed.

“I’m coming back.” Rock hugged her. Whole, he told himself. Dying did not scare him, but he couldn’t bear the thought of Miriam having to care for him if he came back incapacitated.

Brittney snuck in between them and clung to Rock. “I’ll pray for you all the time, Daddy,” she said. “I always do.”

“Thank you, sweetie.”

“Did you know that I have heard the cedars of Lebanon mentioned thirty-five different times in the Bible so far?” she told him. “I’m always counting Bible things so I don’t fall asleep in church. Even while I’m praying for you, I’ll keep counting cedars and tell you how many more there are.”

“We’re going to go now, Rock,” Carla broke in.

“All right.” Rock nodded. When he was able to get out of Brittney’s hug, he looked at Carla, but he didn’t hug her. He couldn’t stand to touch her. He still saw her and only her when he masturbated, always had since he was sixteen, when she had replaced the black-and-white movie stars on Miriam’s living room wall as his inspiration.

Mike smothered Rock in a hug. “Don’t let them puck you around, man,” he said. “Or else I’m coming after them—you tell them that.” And then they were gone. Rock had planned to take Brittney’s bracelet off when she left, but he didn’t.

He watched them drive away and then took Miriam’s hand. “Mom, you are not alone,” he said. “You should marry Walt.”

“Where are all these crazy thoughts coming from?” Miriam said. “First Iraq, now Walt.”

“Say yes if he asks you is all I’m saying,” Rock replied.

“Why would he do that?”

“Because he loves you.”

“Fiddlesticks,” Miriam said. “Men have never loved me. And now, with all these wrinkles on top of it all.”

“So if you were young and beautiful, you’d marry him?” Rock asked.

“What would I want with an old man like that then?” Miriam retorted. “That’d be like marrying my dad. My dad didn’t even like having me around that much. Besides, Walt doesn’t think of me that way.”

“Maybe because you don’t let him,” Rock said.

“He’s just impressed with how I can do the books at the store,” Miriam said.

“He could have just bought a calculator,” Rock said.

“He’s always asking me to fix him up with a nice Jewish girl. He’s a Jew,” she added just when Rock thought she had run out of excuses. “You know how they are about us.”

“Have you ever seen Walt with another girl, Jewish or not, nice or not?” Rock asked. “Maybe if you’d stop talking to everyone in town about how great my dad was, he’d have a chance to ask you.”

An hour later, it was time for Rock to leave New Castle.

Miriam was too distraught to drive Rock to the airport, and so Walt gave her a sedative and laid her down to rest on the couch in his office. “I’d better stay with her,” Walt said. Rock really hoped Walt would come out of the closet about his feelings for Miriam.

Houda drove Rock’s pickup, and Dawood sat next to him as Rock watched New Castle sink into the hills. Dawood shook his hand once and then again.

“
Au revoir
,” he said. “Go and come back in peace,
inshallah.
”

“
Inshallah
,” Rock said back.

Houda cried as she hugged him, and he smelled the Fritos she’d snuck out of the supermarket.

From the airplane, Rock watched America shrink into cookie-cutter tracts he had helped build, growing patches where everything, at least on the outside, looked like everything else—where his work was indistinct. They were towns that rarely made it to maps—certainly, he was sure, not the maps of America studied in the Middle East.

Rock turned away from the person next to him, who looked like she wanted to start a conversation. He was the world’s best silent partner. He had never let his mom or his wife or his daughter or his best friend know his thoughts. He barely let himself know them. He was going where people would want only his thoughts on construction. He was going to a place everyone wanted to help, send aid to, invest in, unlike New Castle, which everyone wanted to leave.

He didn’t want to think of the people in New Castle, who would not go anywhere until he came back. He began squaring 7 for the number of years he had loved Carla before she had noticed him. Maybe he could keep squaring it until he got to Baghdad.

AS SCHEHERAZADE LEFT
New Castle, she thought that its first immigrants must have been blessed with a very good sense of humor. Not one castle, old or new. In fact, New Castle reminded her of the quiet that filled the villages back home after a battle had been lost on home soil.

Back in Los Angeles, Scheherazade climbed up the eucalyptus tree and inhaled the scents of hope and life she had lost in Miriam’s presence. From there, Fatima appeared most at peace as a result of the satchel of chamomile and special herbs she had given her. The embroidered dress from Lebanon still lay across her lap.

It took Scheherazade only a moment to notice that a new petrol caravan was parked below her tree.

“I checked with this Amir Abdullah’s agent,” Sherri Hazad said from inside the petrol caravan. “She says he’s not scheduled for any auditions tomorrow, so maybe that wasn’t just wardrobe he was wearing the other day.”

“Hmm,” replied a man wearing an identical severe blue costume.

“I’m the new kid on the block,” Sherri Hazad told her partner. “I got a tap on the phones, but other than that I’ll defer to you on how to proceed.”

“First, remember that if there isn’t anything here, we can look into the possibility of recruiting him to help us better infiltrate the community,” he told her. “So we have to keep it civil. By the way, there is entirely too much interference on the phone tap. When the call came in from Detroit, no one could make out what the guy was saying, so he never got to
finish—and Detroit’s an Arab hotbed. All we’re getting are calls between people not understanding the other, and that’s not helping anyone.”

Scheherazade refused to let them annoy her further. She climbed from the tree into Fatima’s room. Decimal’s letter was still on the floor, and she placed it on the nightstand next to Fatima.
Miskinni
, poor thing. It would be unbearable to know that the longest branch on one’s family tree had grown so fast because of what Scheherazade used to tell her beloved sister Dunyazad was loose behavior. But loose did not mean unloved.

Fatima’s chest moved up and down heavily, and her forehead was coated with a cold mist of sweat. “My potions have always worked exceptionally well,
y
d
seiti.
” Scheherazade shook her gently. “
Yallah
, wake up.”

Fatima gave her an unconscious swat but did not respond beyond that. Scheherazade gently patted her cheeks. Nothing. She picked up the embroidered dress and hung it up by the windowsill. Then she massaged Fatima’s swollen pink and purple hands. She gracefully waved her wrists across Fatima’s face so that the aroma of eucalyptus would wake her. She whistled gently, letting her breath course between Fatima’s purple stubs. Nothing.

Scheherazade snuck away from the old woman to Amir’s mosaic bathroom, the one place in the house that justified turning the care of the house in Lebanon over to him. She turned on the water and looked for the rosewater and lavender oil. None of the odors from the many bottles lining the bathtub’s edges were familiar to her: lavender shampoo that barely smelled like lavender and lemon soap that smelled of pine, all with price labels higher than coveted frankincense.

This indoor plumbing of today did cut down on the number of servants needed to run a house, but people no longer knew how to bathe. They actually stood up most of the time and let the water fall on them. Where was the comfort in standing under a waterfall that was not real when the world was filled with real ones?

She stepped out to the garden, which was fragrant with jasmine in the dusk breeze. She picked open flower buds, grabbed a handful of mint
and tucked it in her silk corset, and plucked some rose petals. She floated the clippings from the garden in the tub and went to wake Fatima.

“I made you a
hammam
” Scheherazade cooed. “
Yallah
, don’t waste it.”

No response. “Hey, as a mortal princess I never once drew my own bath,” Scheherazade said a little less tenderly. “I’m treating you like royalty, as I think every woman should experience that once in her life. Get up, by God, and enjoy it,
ya
, Queen of America. Now. We can even go back to talking of your death if you wish.”

With that, Scheherazade shook Fatima until she sat up. “Don’t cry,
ya awladi
, my kids, I’m coming,” Fatima mumbled. Then she buried her head back in the pillow as if needing to hide in her dreams again.

“You’ve been sleeping for eighteen and a half hours,” Scheherazade announced with a jingle of the gold coins on her belt.

“What?” Fatima said, and shook her head until she was wide awake. “Why did you let me?
Ya Allah
, I only have one day left to get Amir the key. And I still need to call Ibrahim about the papers.”

She seemed to have forgotten about the letter,
al-hamdulilah
. Scheherazade followed Fatima and her cane to the bathroom, nearly skipping to keep up with her sudden energy. The aroma rising from the bathtub quickly calmed Fatima. Her hurry drowned in the scent of the water.

“I don’t want to get my cane wet,” Fatima said. “My grandfather made it—”

“Yes, yes,” Scheherazade interrupted, and took the cane from her. She slid the pink robe off Fatima.

“Did Tiffany come again?” Fatima asked.

“I wouldn’t know,” she said. “I was visiting Miriam.”

As she carefully helped Fatima, practically a twisted skeleton of brittle bones, into the bathtub, the old lady turned to her.

“You didn’t like her, did you?” she said.

As the warm water quickly enveloped Fatima, her face fell into the same look of paradise she’d seen for the first time on Millie’s face when she had bitten into that tube of cookie dough forty-three years ago.

“Without your cane, you have the same limp as your daughter,” Scheherazade remarked.

“I didn’t ask you to visit her because I knew you wouldn’t like her,” Fatima complained.

In response, Scheherazade forced open the jasmine buds so that Fatima could breathe them in.

“
Ma’leesh
, it’s okay,” Fatima said. “No one likes her, but that is my fault.”

Scheherazade gently sprinkled the bathwater on Fatima, but Fatima did not relax completely. “When I found out I was pregnant with Miriam, I thought it was the perfect time for Ibrahim to have his first child,” she remembered. “Mr. Ford had finally allowed the union to come in after Ibrahim and fifty thousand other workers went on another strike. The strikes were the talk of the town, but Ibrahim was never hurt like Marwan.”

“
Al-hamdulilah
,” Scheherazade replied. “Thanks be to God.”

“Then Miriam was born two weeks early,” Fatima went on. “With the twisted foot. On the day Pearl Harbor was attacked. Her birth was the only thing she ever did prematurely. Everything else, she was last to do.”

“Like marrying?” Scheherazade asked.

“Way before that,” Fatima replied. “I first noticed it with those silly physical education classes they make the girls take in this country, as if life isn’t a physical education. She always insisted on taking part, even though I could have gotten her a doctor’s excuse. I told her, ‘Why do you want to do something that you already know you will finish last in?’ But I think she thought she might not be last. Always with the fantasies, that one. She used to hang up pictures of movie actors on her wall—Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart—men old enough to be her father, like she might one day marry a star. But she did not marry until she was thirty-six, and then her time with Joseph Yusef was so short,
Allah yirhamu.
”

“Sometimes a few days of happiness can sustain a lifetime,” Scheherazade remarked.

“At least she no longer had to listen to people talk about her not being married,” Fatima said.

“How do you know people talked of her?”

“Wouldn’t you have?” Fatima said. “I know what Nabila, Hikmat, Aida, and the rest of the Arab Ladies Society, all full of their married daughters, were always saying, I’m glad those gossips, may they all rest in peace, died before they could whisper about Lena.”

“They criticized the rose,” Scheherazade said, quoting a favorite proverb and reprimanding Fatima by splashing her with water. “They said its cheek was red.”

Fatima splashed her back. “Miriam didn’t help matters, always frowning,” she said. “She started saying the house was too crowded. Lena and Bassam were the only other children still at home, but they were only eleven and fourteen; then Soraya moved in with Amir. Soraya was seven years and seven months younger than Miriam and already had a miracle child. I saw the anguish on Miriam’s face. She started talking about moving to an apartment and living alone. A girl living on her own like her parents didn’t want her?
Aabe
, shame. Millie said it was okay, but Millie was American, so she didn’t understand. I even asked Millie if she knew any American boys, but she said all the young men she knew were either already married or divorced. I told her that divorced was okay, but Millie was Catholic and wanted no part in that. I may have never divorced Ibrahim if she were still alive next door to shun me.”

“But Miriam’s life turned out so lovely,” Scheherazade said a little too effusively.

“Miriam was the first sign that our marriage was to be dark,” Fatima remembered. “Ibrahim blamed himself for her being a girl, for her foot, for not being as pretty as Marwan’s Laila. I used to tell Miriam not to feel bad about how Ibrahim always looked away from her because he didn’t want her to see his pity, especially after we took her to surgeons who only did more damage and she had to be content with their ‘We’re sorry’ I told her we were just lucky she wasn’t born with polio or something like
smallpox because the doctors would have probably killed her. And Hala told her it wasn’t her fault, and she was going to become a doctor and fix the mess the other doctors made.”

“Sometimes just the implication that there is fault to be had makes one feel fault,” said Scheherazade, who was beginning to sympathize with Miriam despite herself.

“
Yallah
, she survived.” Fatima sighed.

“Survived what?” Scheherazade said.

“Life, which is all I hoped for all my kids after—” Fatima stopped herself.

“After what?” Scheherazade prodded. But Fatima only looked straight ahead.

“Ah, so now you have learned my trick of stopping at the most tantalizing part,” Scheherazade said. “Come now, do not save all the good stories for the last night. After what?”

Scheherazade dipped her hands into the scented bathwater and massaged Fatima’s temples and neck to relax her into continuing.

“When I was a mother with Lena, people used to say I was too old to know what was going on with her,” Fatima said. “When I was with Laila and Miriam and Hala, everyone said I was too young to know what I was doing. I was not the right mother at any age for any of my children.”

Fatima dunked her head under the water and cupped her shriveled breasts.

“Maybe if Miriam had drunk from me.” Fatima sighed. “She and Hala are the only ones I did not breast-feed because of the war—I had to work. All the factories were in need of women. But Ibrahim didn’t want me doing disrespectful work for a woman. So I started at the White Castle. I was one of the first women ever to work there. I’d make hamburgers, two up and six across.”

“Was White Castle nicer than New Castle?” Scheherazade asked.

“There was a man in New Castle willing to marry Miriam, and I think she was grateful for that,” Fatima said.

“Gratitude is a huge part of love,” Scheherazade agreed.

“I was half Miriam’s age when I married the first time, so she was probably doubly grateful,” Fatima said. “She wasn’t like Lena with a big job to give her status. Just a secretary at Ford. I’m sure people thought she would be able to marry an older man, like I had the first time. But I told Ibrahim whatever man he could get for her, please don’t let him be too old. So she married someone ten years younger.”

“
Smallah, smallah.
” Scheherazade winked.

“Ibrahim told Joseph Yusef that after he finished with Vietnam he would get him a good job at Ford,” Fatima continued, ignoring Scheherazade’s wink. “But he didn’t live, and Detroit was all strikes and layoffs in any case. Still, I told her to come home. Amir and Rock were close in age. But she said Joseph Yusef was too important to her to leave the town where he had planned on growing old.”

Scheherazade crushed the lavender leaves in her hands to release their oil and then massaged the oil into Fatima’s scalp, in between the stubs of purple hair.

“That son of Miriam’s is
azeem
, an amazing house fixer,” Scheherazade noted. “Perhaps you should give Miriam the house. Her son is a hundred percent of Deir Zeitoon, the only grandchild you have like that.”

“A Jewish man really actually does like Miriam, Soraya told me, and
inshallah
Miriam will marry him,” Fatima replied.

“
Inshallah?
” Scheherazade said, massaging Fatima’s neck.

“She has spent almost her whole life without a man. Alone is not good,” Fatima said. “But she can’t go to Lebanon with a Jew for a husband.”