American Heart

  I’d only had two bites of my sandwich when I put it down. My throat had closed up, and my tongue felt cold. I rested my elbows on the table, my hands folded over my mouth.

  When Chloe sat up, her hand on her ear, she saw that I was looking past her. She turned around and looked up at the television. When she turned back to me, her eyes were lowered. She’d pinned her flag to the right side of her hat.

  “It was probably your people who did that,” I whispered, wrapping up my sandwich. Her greenish eyes opened, steady on mine. I shrugged. It was a harsh thing to say, but I was feeling harsh. They were showing the victims now, their smiling faces, one at a time. An old black woman playing a piano. A handsome white man with an earring wearing a red graduation cap. An Asian boy about the same age as Caleb, sitting by his cat. I shook my head. They were all alive yesterday. The Quilter said it happened at night, so they were alive when I was in the woods with Caleb. We used to take the bus in Joplin sometimes—the city had tried to dress it up and call it a trolley, but it was just a bus. I knew what it was like to ride one, tired with your head against the window, but not thinking for a second it would be the last place you got to sit.

  “They are not my people,” Chloe said. She said it quietly, just through her teeth. “Whatever they call themselves, whatever they think they are, they are not. They are not Muslims.”

  She started to say something else, but she took a deep breath like she was trying to stay calm.

  “Well”—I wiped my mouth with a napkin and nodded up to the screen—“a lot of them seem to be confused on that point. Maybe the rest of you should straighten them out.”

  And maybe I shouldn’t be helping her, I thought. Because they didn’t mean us well. That’s what I was really thinking.

  “And how are we supposed to do that?” She said it like she was really asking, but then she held up her finger. With her other hand, she mimed holding a phone to her ear. “Oh hello,” she said into her hand. “ISIS? Yes. As-salam alaykum. This is Sadaf.”

  I didn’t want to know her name. Also she needed to be quieter. I bulged my eyes at her and looked around to make sure no one was listening. The mom was cooing to the baby, and the toddler was sitting beside her now, playing with an empty cup.

  “Yes, hello.” Chloe still had the pretend phone pressed to her ear. “Listen. I have something to say to you. Please either stop murdering innocent people or stop saying you follow Mohammed, peace be upon him.” She cocked her head. “What’s that? Oh. You want to kill me, too? Oh. Because I am a woman with an education?” She stared just over my shoulder, like she was really talking to someone on the phone. “Because I believe in democracy? Ohhhh. I see. I am an infidel as well because I don’t live my life the exact way you say I should, either?”

  “Keep your voice down,” I hissed. She was whispering, but there was no need for her to say words like infidel. My God. We were in a Subway in a Walmart.

  “Oh,” she said into her hand. “I deserve to die as well? Ahhhh, I see. And all my family and friends, you want to kill them too? Most of the people you’ve killed have been Muslim? Oh. Well. This is not a very productive conversation, then. Bye-bye.”

  She threw up her hands and glared at me.

  “Okay,” I whispered. “Sorry.” I said it to get her to stop talking, and also because I was sorry. I guessed me acting like she had anything to do with a blown-up bus was pretty mean. I’d be mad, if it were me.

  She started to pry off the lid of her salad, but she had trouble because her hands were shaking. I reached over to help, but she jerked the salad away from me. Once she got the lid off, she stabbed her plastic fork in a cherry tomato, but when she got it up close to her mouth, she made a face and set it back in the bowl like she’d lost her appetite too. She turned away, staring out the window. The sky was still low with steel-colored clouds, and a skinny boy without a jacket was pushing a train of carts up to the doors.

  “Why did you get a disposable phone?” she asked. “I deserve to know who you will call.”

  I looked down at the plastic bag beside me, where I could see the outline of the phone. I’d call Tess as soon as I could have some privacy. “I’m just going to let my friend know where I am. She won’t tell anyone. She won’t.”

  Chloe took off her glasses, closed her eyes, and pinched the bridge of her nose.

  “I need someone to know where I am,” I said. “The only person who knows is Caleb, and he’s eleven.”

  I don’t know why I was explaining myself. Maybe it was in my head that I had to, as she was an adult. Still, she wasn’t exactly in a position to tell me what I could and couldn’t do.

  She shook her head. “You want to tell your friend, but not your aunt? I do not understand.” She held out one hand, dangling her glasses. “Your aunt must be afraid for you. You are young to be out by yourself. Where does she think you are? She has probably called the police.”

  I rolled my eyes. She needed to drop this whole your aunt must be worried business. Like she knew one thing about Aunt Jenny.

  She put her glasses back on. “I hate to think she is so worried, your aunt, she must—”

  “Stop,” I said. “She thinks I’m with my mom.”

  She blinked. “But . . . your mother is . . . dead? The car accident?”

  “She’s sort of dead,” I said, and then I felt bad for saying it, like in a superstitious way. I didn’t want my mom dead, sort of or otherwise. What I meant was that she was only sort of my mother. More than anything, I was getting annoyed with all the questions. I especially didn’t like Chloe looking at me the way she was doing now, like she felt sorry for me, her eyes all sad behind her glasses.

  “Look,” I said. “You got bigger problems than worrying about my mom. Okay?” I met her gaze and nodded. Over her head, the television was showing the burning bus again. “And you know what I think? I think people like you need to just stay in their own country. Then we wouldn’t have these problems. You wouldn’t be in this mess. Couldn’t you have just stayed”— I didn’t want to say Iran—“where you were?”

  She forked the cherry tomato again, and this time she managed to slip it into her mouth. She chewed fast with closed lips, like a rabbit.

  “You wouldn’t be here,” she said. “You are not Native American.”

  I shook my head. I wasn’t going for that. People who wanted to let immigrants in were always bringing up the Native Americans, which, if you ask me, wasn’t the best argument for their case. I mean, the Native Americans tried being nice to foreigners. And look what happened there.

  “I mean recently,” I said.

  “That is convenient.” She took a big bite of lettuce, and then we both had to just sit there and wait until she chewed. She took her time, too, dabbing at her mouth with a napkin before she started talking again. “I came here for the same reasons I imagine your ancestors did. As I told you, I had admiration for this country. Or the idea of it. What it is supposed to have. Freedom of religion. Separation of church and state.”

  “You wouldn’t need it if you just stayed where everybody was Muslim,” I whispered.

  “To the contrary.” She took another bite of salad, and this time, she held her hand over her mouth as she chewed. “My husband is Sunni. Most of Iran’s population is Shia, and the government is Shia.” She put her hand to her chest. “I am Shia. To some people, that is a strange marriage. Sunnis in Iran are mostly tolerated. Mostly. But not always. And they are often at a disadvantage with government positions, and positions in universities.”

  “Well,” I said. “It couldn’t have been any better for him here.”

  “It was. For a while. There was a mosque in Chapel Hill when I was there, and there was one in Jonesboro. We had Shia friends, Sunni friends. And at work, I made Jewish friends. I loved it. It is why I became a citizen.” She tilted her head to the right, like she was trying to drain out her ear. “And also, there was much more chance for education, for work.” She paused, squinting. “Why aren’t you
in school? Are you missing school right now?”

  I shrugged.

  “What does this mean?” She mimicked my shrug. “You don’t care? You don’t care that you are missing school?”

  “The school I go to is pretty wacko,” I said. “I’m not learning much there.”

  She didn’t look like she believed me. “It’s up to you how much you learn. Don’t you want to go to college? Don’t you want to study history and literature and science? And how will you make yourself useful?”

  I made a face to let her know I didn’t appreciate her turning all guidance counselor on me.

  “I’m probably not going to college,” I said.

  She frowned. “Why not?”

  “I’ve had it with school. When I’m finally free, the last thing I’ll want to do is sign up for more imprisonment. Especially if I have to pay for it.”

  She wadded up her napkin. “That sounds spoiled to me, if I am honest with you. I’m sorry to say, because you are helping me. I appreciate that. But you are also spoiled.”

  I let my mouth fall open. I’ve been called a few insulting things in my life, but never once had anybody called me spoiled, not even Aunt Jenny. Excuse me that I wasn’t already making plans for the rest of my life that somebody else needed to approve of. Tess was going to college, but that was because her parents would probably die if she didn’t, as they’d been saving since she was a baby so she could go anywhere she wanted, as long as she got in. She’d gotten her applications in over winter break, and now she was waiting to hear. Columbia. Northwestern. Grinnell. She’d gone on campus tours with her parents in late summer, when I was full-time at Dairy Queen. I still had a couple of years to think things through, but I didn’t exactly have the setup that Tess did.

  “I’m sorry.” Chloe gave me a look like she wasn’t sorry at all. “But yes, to me, you sound spoiled, talking about an opportunity as if it is something you can throw away, like it is candy you do not want. You are talking to someone who had much greater obstacles, who still got herself to a university, into a graduate program, into a doctoral program, in a field that, even here, is not overrun with women. A university in another country, mind you. And my family was not wealthy.” She pointed a forkful of salad in my direction. “You are smart, Sarah-Mary. Quick.” With her free hand, she snapped her fingers three times. “You should care more about school, about your future. You should have a goal to do your part.”

  I fiddled with my sandwich wrapper. I guess it was impressive that she’d gotten through all that school. And now she was a professor. Or at least she had been. But I didn’t see how that gave her the moral high ground over someone like me.

  “So I guess teaching electrical engineering makes you Mother Teresa? You’re just doing it to help everybody out? That’s so good of you.” I smiled. “It’s like you’ve opened a shelter for the homeless. Or given your hair to Locks of Love.”

  She squinted. “You do not see how engineering helps people? You are joking?” She looked like she was going to say something else, but then she set her fork down and touched her ear, wincing.

  “They’re not working?” I asked. I glanced at the bottle of ear drops.

  “No. Not yet.”

  I leaned back, looking over her head at the television screen. They were showing Muslim fugitives again, two at a time. I waited as the screen changed to two more faces that weren’t Chloe’s, two more faces I didn’t know. But then Chloe appeared on the left side of the screen, with no glasses and the rose-colored headscarf. SADAF BEHZADI was written below. And beneath that, REWARD. But that didn’t tell me what I really wanted to know, which was why they were looking for her, what it was, according to them, that she’d done. If all she’d done was not show up for her bus to Nevada, then what I was doing wasn’t so bad.

  The screen changed again to two new faces, another man, and another woman. With them, too, it didn’t say what they’d done. Like with all of them, you could only guess.

  We’d only been standing out in front of the Walmart with our sign maybe ten, fifteen minutes when a white van pulled up at the curb, and three Amish people, two women and a man, came out and started loading groceries into the back of it. The driver got out to help, and he wasn’t Amish, obviously. He wore a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, and a John Deere snapback with the visor pushed low. The Amish were of course dressed old-fashioned—the women wore long dark dresses and white bonnets over their hair, and the man had a gray beard that almost reached down to the black vest underneath his black coat. When the wind tried to snatch his wide-brimmed hat, he tucked it under his arm and kept loading groceries.

  Chloe stared and stared.

  I wasn’t sure what was fascinating her about them. Maybe they didn’t have too many Amish down in Arkansas. But in Missouri, in some parts, you saw Amish all the time, and yes, they did go to Walmart. I did a report on the Amish in eighth grade, and I included a section about a Walmart in Ohio that had so many Amish going to it that the managers set up a little covered stable area for buggies in the parking lot. They even put out water for the horses. That system works for some Amish, but in Missouri, most of the Amish towns are too far away from cities and stores for them to get there by buggy. But the Amish have a way around the no-car rule: they can hire a non-Amish person to drive them. In my opinion, that’s a pretty crazy rule, with an even crazier loophole. I mean, saying you can’t drive because of religion, and then hiring someone else to do it, all just seems like rigmarole that doesn’t help anybody out.

  I got a B-minus on my report. My teacher said my research was good, and that the paragraphs were well organized, but it seemed obvious to her that the no-car rule was about maintaining community, and I should try not to be so judgmental.

  That’s how it is. People like the Amish because they’re religious but they don’t bother anybody, and they definitely don’t blow anybody up. They just make bread and pies with real butter and also high-quality furniture that you can buy at their markets or just by the side of the road. I agree it’s kind of neat, eating something or sitting on something that somebody made without the help of any machine. And I know the Amish are healthier than we are because they eat food without chemicals and they don’t spend all their time sitting around playing video games or watching television. My teacher said they were probably happier, too, because they were so deeply spiritual. But I once read this book by a girl who’d run away from being Amish, and she didn’t have much good to say about it. It turns out some of the Amish have the same problems our world does, with girls getting raped and wives and kids getting beaten, and it’s not like they have any social workers to go in and make an assessment. That girl who wrote the book said if you’re Amish and you get raped or beaten, you’re just supposed to forgive.

  So I can see how being Amish might be a good life if you were lucky and born into a nice family and you were okay with lots of physical labor in every kind of weather, and not having any air conditioning or central heat, or zippers, or bras, or phones, or energy drinks, or earbuds to listen to music, or any music at all except your neighbor’s fiddle. But if you were born into a family with mental problems, or if you were the kind of person who liked to sit and read or just do your own thing, you were going to be pretty unhappy. Or you were going to leave and be shunned.

  I was thinking about all this when I noticed that the Amish man, who had eyebrows as crazy bushy as his beard, was standing still at the back of the van, and looking right at me and Chloe. I smiled, but he didn’t smile back. He said something to the two Amish women, and then they all turned around and looked at us. One of the women said something to the guy in the John Deere hat, and then he looked at us too.

  I told myself to just stay calm. But my heart was already pounding. Wouldn’t that be something, I thought, if it was the Amish that turned us in. I was being paranoid, probably. They didn’t even have televisions. Or internet. But they might have driven past a billboard on the highway. That old man might have looked at a screen in Walm
art even if he wasn’t supposed to.

  The driver jogged up to us, keys jangling. He had to hold on to his John Deere hat because of the wind.

  “We’re headed up to the Amish Country Store in Lamoni,” he said, looking at Chloe, and then at me. “You know it? It’s just over the state line. About an hour away. They’re only dropping off a few items, and we’ll turn right around and come back. But they said I could give you a ride if you wanted it.”

  “Oh, thank you!” I maybe said it with too much enthusiasm. John Deere hat took a step back.

  “I’m only the driver,” he said. “You can thank them. But just so you know, they don’t speak much English. It’s usually a quiet ride.”

  “That’s great,” I said, meaning it. A quiet ride sounded fine to me. I might not even have to go into the Portuguese business, or explain anything about Chloe. I was already feeling guilty enough. While the Amish had been loading up their van, I’d been thinking about how their rules and loopholes didn’t make sense, and how miserable it might be to be one of them. And then I’d been scared they were going to turn us in. And the whole time, that old man who maybe only spoke Pennsylvania Dutch had been thinking about how they could help us out.

  When we got over to the van, all three of them, the man and the two women, were in the very back seat. The man, who was tall, was hunched up between the women. They’d left the middle seat open for us. As I climbed in, the two women looked down at their laps, so all I saw was the tops of their bonnets, and a little of their sniffling noses and pink cheeks. But the man nodded at me, and then at Chloe.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thanks.”

  He nodded again, just once, to show he understood.

  11

  THE AMISH COUNTRY Store in Lamoni had an old-fashioned wagon on its front lawn, and also a covered porch with a swing, and it was connected to a little barn-looking building that was really a Maid-Rite restaurant. Nobody working in the store was Amish, which made sense, as it would be against their religion to run the credit card machine or turn on the overhead lights. But the store had the feel of a museum gift shop, with a wooden floor that creaked under your feet, and a high tin roof, and copper cooking kettles hanging on the walls. The place was bigger than any gift shop I’d ever seen, though. There was a section for rocking chairs, and another one for tables, and an entire alcove devoted to Christmas decorations, now part of the JANUARY SALE. Up by the registers, they had dolls made out of cornhusks, and butter churns and wooden bird houses, and a wheelbarrow full of needlepoint pillows that said things like Bless This House. You would think with all that stuff, it would start to feel sort of garage-sale cluttered, but the whole place smelled like cinnamon, and all the shelves and little alcoves looked tidy, everything polished and neatly arranged. A tabby cat with a red collar slinked around a corner, and Chloe crouched by a bin of wooden napkin holders to rub its little orange chin until it purred loud enough for me to hear. She couldn’t talk to it and call it a good kitty because people were around, but she held its cool gaze for a long moment.