He carried also a disquieting idea, which was that he was a stranger now to the place that had been for so long his home. He was not a visitor; neither did he feel himself to be a New Yorker. New York, he thought, had been, for him, like an amiable and complex hotel that housed him with benign indifference, and his gratitude was immeasurable. New York had also shown him things; one of the biggest was how much people talked. People talked about anything. The Burgesses did not. It had taken Bob a long time to understand that this was a cultural difference, and certainly after half a lifetime in New York he talked more than he used to. But not about the accident. Which in Bob’s mind did not even have a name. It was just that thing that sat beneath the Burgess family, murmured of briefly, long ago, in the office of the kindhearted Elaine. To have Jim raise it after all these years (to claim it as his own!) was disorienting in its awkwardness, impossible to comprehend. Walking through the park, he felt he’d been asleep for years and had now wakened to a different place and time. The city seemed rich and clean and filled with young people, who thundered past him in their running tights as he strolled around the reservoir.
What he faced was this: He didn’t know what to do.
Flying back from Shirley Falls two months ago, he and Jim had spoken of Zach and his father, and what would happen if Zach did not return when the Feds came forward with their charges; they spoke of the misdemeanor trial now scheduled for June, how the jury selection would matter the most. It wasn’t until they were in the taxi on the way back to Brooklyn that Bob finally said, “So, Jim—all that stuff you said. You were just upset, right? Like saying that crap about Pam last fall. Just being weird, fooling around.”
Jim turned and looked out the window as they sped down the expressway. Lightly he touched Bob’s hand, then took his hand away. He said quietly, “You didn’t do it, Bobby.”
They were silent after that. The taxi went to Bob’s place first. As Bob got out, he said, “Jimmy, don’t worry about it. None of it matters now.”
And yet he had moved as though in a trance up the tilting staircase in the narrow hallway, past the door to where his neighbors had once carried out their altercations. His own place appeared slightly unbelievable to him. But there were his books, his shirts in the closet, a rumpled towel by the bathroom sink. Bob Burgess lived there, of course he did. Still, the sense that it was unreal was frightening.
As those first days went by, anguish came to meet him. His mind, jumpy and distracted, told him, It’s not true, and if it is, it doesn’t matter. But this gave him no relief because the constant repetition of these thoughts told him otherwise. One night, smoking out his window, he drank far too much wine far too quickly—glass after glass—and it came to him with clarity: It was true, and it mattered. Jim, knowingly and deliberately, had wrongly incarcerated Bob in a life that wasn’t his. And the memories came spilling in: Jimmy, as a young boy, saying as Bob ran up to him, “The sight of you makes me sick. Go away.” Their mother’s soft chastisement, “Now, Jimmy, you be good to him.” His mother, with almost no money, taking Bob to sit in the office of the psychiatrist, who offered him candy from a bowl that sat on his desk. Back home, outside their mother’s hearing, Jimmy’s taunts, “Bobby the baby, slob-dog-animal-burper-pig.”
In his state of drunken clarity, Bob saw his brother as someone unconscionable enough to be almost evil. Bob’s heart beat fast, pulling on his jacket. At his brother’s house Bob would yell with open-throttled rage, right in front of Helen if he had to; he did not even take the time now to lock his own door behind him. On the bottom step in the narrow hallway of his building, Bob fell, and, lying there, a vast puzzlement came to him. He said quietly, “Come on, Bob, stand up.” And yet he could not seem to do that. He wondered if one of the tenants—they were all so young in this building—might come out and find him like this. Only by turning his shoulders repeatedly and pushing hard against the gritty carpet of the stair was Bob finally able to stand. He returned to his apartment, pulling on the railing.
He stopped drinking after that.
Days later, when his telephone rang and his brother’s name appeared—then, like that, the world became right. What was more natural than JIM appearing on his phone?
“Hey, listen,” Bob started to say. “Listen, Jim—”
“You won’t believe this,” Jim interrupted. “Are you ready? The U.S. Attorney’s Office just told Charlie his client was no longer under investigation. Amazing! I guess all that mad cow disease shit gave them pause and they can’t establish intent. Or they got tired. Isn’t that great?” Jim’s voice was loud with gladness.
“Ah, yeah, it’s great.”
“Susan’s hoping he’ll come home right away, but I guess he doesn’t feel like it. Likes being over there with his father. He’d better get back in time for his little misdemeanor trial, which Charlie keeps getting postponed. He’s good, Charlie. Man, is he good. Bozo, you still there?”
“I’m here.”
“You’re not saying anything.”
Bob glanced around his apartment. His couch looked small. The rug in front of the couch looked small. That Jim should speak with such familiarity, as though nothing had changed between them—it confused Bob. “Jim. You know. You got me kind of weirded out. Up there. The things you said. I still don’t know if you were kidding.”
“Ah, Bob.” Spoken as though Bob were a small child. “I’m calling with good news. Let’s not spoil this moment with all that.”
“All that? But that is my life.”
“Come on, Bobby.”
“Look, Jim. I’m just saying I wish you hadn’t shoved that crap on me when it isn’t true. Why would you do that?”
“Bob. Jesus Christ almighty.”
Bob closed his phone; Jim did not call back.
A month passed without the brothers speaking. Then one sunny, windy day, when bits of trash whipped along the sidewalk and people clutched their coats, Bob, returning to his office after lunch, felt relief come to him with a thought he’d had before but that only now seemed clear. He telephoned Jim at work. “You’re older, but it doesn’t mean you remember, Jim. It doesn’t mean you’re right. One thing criminal lawyers know is how unreliable memory is.”
Jim sighed loudly. “I wish I hadn’t told you.”
“But you did tell me.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“But you could be wrong. I mean, you have to be. Mom knew it was me.”
A silence. Then quietly, “I do remember, Bob. And Mom thought it was you because I made it that way. I explained that to you.”
A chill went through Bob, a dropping of his stomach.
Jim said, “I was thinking. Maybe you should see someone. When you first moved here you had that therapist, Elaine. You liked her. She helped you.”
“She helped me with my past.”
“You should find another one. Someone who could help you again.”
“What about you?” Bob asked. “Are you seeing someone? You were a mess up there. You don’t need help with your past?”
“I don’t, really, Bob. It’s the past. It’s not getting redone. We’ve lived our lives— And honestly, Bobby? In a way, and I don’t mean to be callous here, but in a way, what difference does it make what happened? You said that yourself. We’ve all arrived at this point, so, you know, we go on.”
Bob didn’t answer.
“Well, Helen misses you,” Jim finally said. “You should stop by the house sometime.”
Bob didn’t stop by. Without telling Jim, he packed his few things and moved to an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
An uneasiness was following Helen, as though a shadow walked behind her, and if Helen stopped moving, the shadow just waited. The source of this, she could only think, tracing it back repeatedly, was Zach’s abandonment of his mother. Why this should affect her so much or, more accurately, why it should be affecting Jim so much, she did not understand. “It’s good he’s with his father, don’t you think?”
; Jim said, “Of course. Everyone should have a father.” It was unpleasant, how he said it.
“And those federal charges weren’t brought. I should think you’d be really happy.”
“Who’s not happy, Helen?”
“Where’s Bobby these days?” Helen asked. “I called him at work, and he got all vague the way he does, and said he’s busy.”
“He’s hung up over some stupid girl.”
“That’s never stopped him from coming here.” Helen added, “You were wrong to say he didn’t have to give up Pam. It’s perfectly reasonable Sarah wanted him to stop that. I wouldn’t want to marry a man who was always talking to his ex-wife.”
“Well, you don’t have to, do you?”
“Jimmy, why are you in such a bad mood all the time?” Helen was plumping up a pillow on the bed. “Ana has her sloppy days.”
Jim moved past her into his study. “Work’s getting to me.”
She followed him. “How, Jim? You don’t have to stay at that firm. We have plenty of money. Except if you listen to the news it sounds like this country’s in for some trouble.”
“We have three kids in college, Helen. And there may be graduate school.”
“We have the money.”
“You have the money. You’ve kept it separate from the day we met, and I don’t blame you one bit. But don’t say we have the money. Even though we do because of what I make.”
“Jim, for heaven’s sake. This is important. If you really don’t like what you do—”
He turned. “Well, I really don’t like what I do. And it shouldn’t be a surprise, Helen, I’ve told you this before. I dress up in a fancy suit to go meet a fancy client. A drug company indicted for filling their pills with poisonous crap wants to know they can hire the great Jim Burgess. Who isn’t great anymore. It all gets settled, anyway. But still, there I am, on the side of a company who feeds crap pills to—to people in Shirley Falls, for all I know! Come on, Helen, for the love of God, this isn’t new. Don’t you listen to me?”
Helen’s face grew warm. “Okay. All right. But why are you being rude?”
Jim shook his head. “I’m sorry. Oh, Helen. God. I’m sorry.” He touched her shoulder, gently pulled her toward him. She felt his heart beating, saw through the French doors a squirrel run across the railing of the deck, the faint sound of its feet rapid, familiar. Why are you being rude? Her words bumped against some memory. (Months later she placed it. Debra-Who-Doesn’t saying to her husband, Why are you picking on me tonight?)
2
Up in Shirley Falls, spring was slower to arrive. Nights were cold, but the way the dawn light cracked open along the horizon, bringing a gentle moistness that lightly touched the skin, spoke of a full-throated summer to come, and it was painful, all the promise in the air. Abdikarim, who performed his morning prayer while it was still dark, could feel the aching sweetness of this season as he walked through the streets to his café. Morning, for Susan, a few neighborhoods away, was when she had to learn all over again that Zachary was gone. Waking, she had to settle the waves of terror that lapped through her some nights with dreams she could not remember but that left her nightgown damp. On these mornings she left the house early, driving to Lake Sabbanock, where she could walk for two miles without seeing anyone except an occasional ice fisherman with a truck to pull his shack to the banks of the still partly frozen springtime lake, and she would nod and keep walking, always with her sunglasses on, walking to calm that terror, and also the sense of having done something so wrong that only on this muddied path could she feel unobserved in her sense of shame, deep enough that had she been among others they would have pointed at her, knowing her as an outcast, a criminal. She had done nothing, of course. The ice fisherman would not be notifying the police of her presence; no one would be waiting for her at the store to say, “Come this way, Mrs. Olson.” But her dreams told her otherwise: She had entered (most likely long ago) some territory of danger where her life would rattle with unraveling; her husband would leave her, her son would leave, hope itself would leave, casting her so far outside the boundaries of ordinary life that she roamed the land of the unspeakably lonely whose presence society could not abide. The two facts—her son was alive, and federal charges, amazingly, would not be brought—were not diminished as much as occluded by the sadness of her nighttime dreams that lingered in the mornings. A little bit she was aware of the beauty she walked by, the sunlight sparkling off the quiet lake, the bare trees—it was beautiful, she was not unaware of this, but it was futile, and far away. Mostly she looked down at the muddy roots in front of her; the path, uneven with its little use, required concentration to maneuver. Perhaps it was the concentration that allowed her into the day.
Years before, when she’d met her future husband at the university—she a senior and he a freshman from the small mill town of New Sweden hours north—she had been surprised to find he practiced transcendental meditation, though it was newly popular back then. For thirty minutes in the morning and the evening, she was not to disturb him, and she never did, except late one Saturday morning when she walked into his room and found him sitting cross-legged on the bed staring vacantly. “Oh, sorry,” she gasped, and walked out, though the image of him embarrassed her deeply, as though she had walked in on his private handling of himself—which many years later she would do. But early in their marriage, he offered to tell her—this, a gift of intimacy; he wasn’t supposed to ever tell—the word he repeated during his meditation, a word he’d paid a guru to give him, a word the guru said he’d matched Steve’s “energies” to. The word was “Om.”
“ ‘Om’?” she said.
He nodded.
“That’s your private word?”
Stepping into her car now, the seat warmed from the sun, she thought how perhaps she had not understood at all, that to stare into space thinking “Om” was not so different from her walking and thinking only of the step in front of her. Perhaps Steve still did his meditation. Maybe Zachary did it now. She could email and ask. But she would not. Their emails were hesitant, polite. Mother and son, who had never written to each other before, had to learn a new language, and a shyness was evident for both of them.
Because of the missing person report filed with the police, a small newspaper article had appeared reporting the disappearance of Zachary Olson. Shortly after, the report came that Zachary was discovered to be living abroad. There was confusion about this from some people in town, as though Zachary, by leaving, had succeeded in avoiding what he should be forced to face. Charlie Tibbetts, breaking his own gag order, made a statement to the press, explaining that Zachary had not, as some said, jumped bail: His bail was for the Class E misdemeanor trial, and the conditions never required that he remain in the country. Charlie also released the information that his client was no longer under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and that decision should be respected.
The police chief Gerry O’Hare stated his concern: to keep the community safe. He would continue, he said, to encourage any report by any citizen that caused them to feel otherwise. (To his wife, he confessed relief. “I just hope the kid gets back here for the misdemeanor trial. Or if he doesn’t, he stays over there for good. We dodged a bullet with this one, the town did great, and we sure don’t need another ruckus.” His wife said it would break Susan’s heart if the boy never came home, but there’d been something unhealthy about mother and son, didn’t Gerry think? Always joined at the hip.)
The newspaper articles had appeared in February, and by April the name Zachary Olson was almost never mentioned anymore. It’s true that some of the elders of the Somali community remained angry; earlier they had gone to Rick Huddleston at the Office of Racial Anti-Defamation, and Rick Huddleston was furious, but there was nothing to be done. Abdikarim was not furious. For him, the tall, skinny, dark-eyed boy he had seen in court on the day of the hearing was no longer a source of alarm, no longer was he Wiil Waal, “Crazy Boy,” but simply wiil, boy. A boy Abdikari
m’s heart now leaned toward; even in the courtroom that day it had started, his heart, leaning across the courtroom to this tall, skinny boy. Abdikarim had seen newspaper photographs of him. But when he saw him in real life, first standing by his lawyer, and then sitting in the witness seat, spilling his glass of water, Abdikarim had felt quietly amazed. He was reminded of how he had imagined snow. Cold and white and covering the ground. But it had not been like that. It was silent and intricate and full of mystery as it fell from the sky that night he had first seen it. And here was this boy, living, breathing, his dark eyes defenseless, assailable, and he was not what Abdikarim had imagined at all. Whatever caused the boy to roll a pig’s head through the mosque would remain a puzzlement to Abdikarim, but he knew now it had not been an act of evil. He understood that others—his niece, Haweeya—were not impressed by the fear so apparent in this boy. (But Haweeya had not seen him.) So Abdikarim kept silent, though he believed the fear went deep into the bowels of the boy, and his heart, aching and tired, had leaned across the courtroom to him.
It was from Margaret Estaver that Abdikarim learned the boy was living in Sweden with his father, and the knowledge made his body warm with gladness. “Good, very good,” he told the minister. Many times a day he thought of this, the boy living with his father in Sweden, and each time his body was made warm with gladness.
“It is good. A fine situation. Fiican xaalad.” Margaret Estaver smiled broadly as she said this. They were on the sidewalk by her church. In the basement of her church was the food pantry. Mostly it was Somali Bantu women who lined up twice a week for the boxes of cereal, and crackers, the heads of lettuce, the potatoes, the paper baby diapers. Abdikarim did not speak with them, but sometimes if he was walking by the church and saw Margaret Estaver he stopped and spoke with her. She was learning bits of the Somali language, and her willingness to be strikingly wrong opened his heart with tenderness. It was because of her that he had started to try to increase his English.