The Burgess Boys

  “I’m reading an amazing book by a Somali woman,” someone was saying now, and Pam said, “Hey, I’d like to read it.” To hear her own voice helped push Zachary’s presence from her. But oh, here came the sadness—she placed her hand over her wineglass to refuse more wine—her previous life, twenty years with the Burgess family, you couldn’t live a life for such a long time and think it would just disappear! (She had thought you could.) It wasn’t just Zach, it was Bob, his kind and open face, the blue eyes, the deep smile lines that sprang around them. Until the day she died, Bob would be her home—and how awful, she had not known! She did not turn to look at her current husband now, it would not matter if she looked at him or not, at such moments as this one he was not really any more familiar to her than anyone else in this room, all slipping away from her with the ease of vast indifference, because they were hardly real and meant almost nothing to her at all, there was only the deep metallic magnet of the presence of Zachary and Bob—and Jim and Helen, all of them. The Burgess boys, the Burgesses! Her mind filled with the image of little Zachary at Sturbridge Village, his cousins calling to him to come do this, come do that, and the poor little dark-haired creature looking like he just didn’t know how to have fun, and Pam had wondered that day if he was autistic, although apparently they’d had him tested for everything, Pam, already knowing that day in Sturbridge that she would leave Bob, though he did not know and he held her hand as they walked the kids to the snack bar, it made her heart ache horribly to recall— She turned her head. From down at the end of the table the man who had been contemptuous about the threat of terror was saying, “I’m not going to vote for a woman president. The country’s not ready for that, and I’m not ready for that.”

  And the Southern what’s-her-name woman, her face bright red, said suddenly and amazingly, “Well, then fuck yew, just fuck yew!” She banged her fork down on her plate, and a fabulous silence fell over the room.

  In the taxi, Pam said, “Oh, wasn’t that fun?” She would call her friend Janice first thing in the morning. “Do you think her husband was embarrassed? Who cares, it was wonderful!” She clapped her hands and added, “Bob didn’t come to our Christmas party this year, I wonder what’s up with that.” But she no longer felt sadness about it, the pressure of sorrow that had overtaken her at the table, the longing for all the Burgess kids, and the sense of the irreplaceable familiarity of her old life—that had passed the way a cramping of a stomach muscle passes, and the absence of its pain was glorious. Pam looked out the window and held her husband’s hand.

  Midtown was a crowded place at lunchtime, sidewalks overflowing with pedestrians who moved through the traffic-jammed crosswalks, some on their way to a restaurant to maybe make a deal. There was an added urgency today, because just that morning the world’s largest bank had reported the first mortgage-related loss at well over ten billion dollars, and people didn’t know what that meant. There were opinions, of course, and bloggers writing that people would be living in their cars by the end of the year.

  Dorothy Anglin was not worried about living in a car. She had enough money that if she lost two thirds of it she could still live exactly how she was living, and sitting in this trendy café on Fifty-seventh Street near Sixth Avenue, with a friend she had met at a fundraiser for an art-in-the-schools program, her thoughts were, as they always were these days, on her daughter, and not on the program they were discussing, and not on the financial situation the country might be facing. She was nodding vaguely to give the appearance of listening when she looked over and saw Jim Burgess sitting at a table with his new paralegal. She made no mention of this to her friend, but she watched the two of them carefully. Dorothy recognized the young woman; they had spoken one day when Dorothy stopped by the office. Dorothy thought of her as a shy girl, long-haired and thin-waisted. They were sitting at a table near the back, and neither—it seemed to Dorothy—had seen her. She watched while the girl put a large cloth napkin to her face, as though she needed to hide a smile. A bottle of wine sat in its cooler next to the table.

  Jim leaned forward, then he sat back, folding his arms, cocking his head as though waiting for an answer. The napkin to her mouth again. They may as well have been peacocks with their feathers spread out. Or dogs sniffing each other’s behinds. (Helen, Dorothy thought, Helen, Helen, Helen. Poor stupid Helen. But she did not think it with deep feeling, they were just words that slipped over her mind.) They rose to leave, and Jim touched the girl’s back lightly as he ushered her from the table. Dorothy put the menu straight up in front of her face, and when she put it down she saw them on the sidewalk, laughing and walking with ease. No, they had not seen her.

  Classic: He was old enough to be her father.

  That’s what Dorothy thought as she pretended to listen to her friend across the table. This friend’s daughter had also behaved badly in high school but was now doing well at Amherst, and this was supposed to make Dorothy feel better about her own daughter. But Dorothy could not stop thinking of what she had seen. She could, she supposed, call Helen and say casually, Oh, I saw Jim with the paralegal, isn’t it nice they get along? She wasn’t going to do that.

  “It’s all right,” Alan said as he and Dorothy were getting ready for bed. “They’ve been working on a case together, and doing a good job. I don’t think Adriana has much money. I see her eating lunch from a plastic container at her desk most days. I’m sure Jim was thanking her by treating her to a nice meal.”

  “They had a bottle of wine at the most expensive place on Fifty-seventh Street. Jim doesn’t even drink when he’s on vacation.” Dorothy added, “I hope he didn’t charge it to the firm.”

  Alan scooped up his dirty socks from the floor. Walking toward the hamper, he said, “Jim’s having a hard time these days, ever since his nephew got in trouble up there. He’s really bothered by it. I can see it.”

  “How can you see it?”

  “Honey, I’ve known the man for years. When he’s relaxed or in fight mode, he talks. He opens his mouth and words come out. But when he’s preoccupied, he’s silent. And he’s been pretty silent for months now.”

  “Well, he wasn’t silent today,” Dorothy said.

  5

  Abdikarim tried to stay awake because nighttime brought dreams that pinned him to the bed as though boulders had rolled on top of him. Every night now the dream was the same: His son Baashi looking at him with bewilderment as the truck came slowly and then fast, screeching to the door of his shop in Mogadishu. On the back of the truck were boys, a few not even as old as his son. Abdikarim saw the quick, youthful motions of legs and thin arms as they jumped from the truck, the heavy guns strapped over their shoulders, balanced in their hands. The silent (in the dream) smashing of the counter, the shelves, the abrupt horrendous chaos, the surging wave of hell cresting over them. Evil had come to them, why had he thought it would not?

  Abdikarim had had many nights, fifteen years’ worth of nights, to think about this, and always he arrived at the same thought. He should have left Mogadishu earlier. He should have put the two worlds of his mind into one. Siad Barre had fled the city, and when the resistance group split into two, Abdikarim’s own mind seemed to split into two. When the mind occupies two worlds it cannot see. One world of his mind had said: Abdikarim, there is violence in this city, send your wife and young daughters away—and he had done that. The other world of his mind had said: I will stay and keep my shop, with my son.

  His son, tall, dark-eyed, looking at his father, terrified, and behind him the street, and the walls becoming upside down, dust and smoke and the boy falling, as though his arms had been pulled one way, his legs another— To shoot was bad enough to last this lifetime and the next, but not bad enough for the depraved men-boys, who had burst through the door, the splintered shelves and tables, who swung their large American-made guns. For some reason—no reason—one had stayed behind and smashed the end of his gun down onto Baashi repeatedly, while Abdikarim crawled to him. In the dream he never reac
hed him.

  Shouts brought Haweeya running down the hallway, and she murmured to Abdikarim, made him a cup of tea. “Don’t be sorry, Uncle,” she said, because Abdikarim always apologized on those nights his shouting woke her.

  “That boy,” he told her one night. “Zachary Olson. He is cutting my heart.”

  Haweeya nodded. “But he’ll be punished. The U.S. attorney is getting ready to punish him. Minister Estaver knows this.”

  Abdikarim shook his head in his darkened room, sweat coming from his face down onto his neck. “No, he cuts my heart. You didn’t see him. He’s not what we saw in the newspaper. He’s a frightened …” finishing softly: “child.”

  “We live now where there are laws,” Haweeya said soothingly. “He’s frightened because he broke the law.”

  Abdikarim continued to shake his head. “It is not right,” he whispered, “for anyone, with laws or without, to continue making fear.”

  “And so he’ll be punished,” she repeated patiently. He took the tea and drank only a little, and told her to go back to bed. He did not return to sleep but lay damp on his bed, and the longing in his heart was what it always was, to return to the place his son had fallen. The very worst moment of his life, and his deepest longing was to return to that moment, to touch the wet hair, to hold those arms—he had loved no one as much, and even in the horror, or perhaps because of the horror, to hold his broken son had been as pure as the sky had been blue. To lie down on the spot his son had last been, to press his face into whatever dirt or rubble had been replaced a hundred times in the years since, was, it felt at these moments, all he wanted. Baashi, my son.

  In the dark he lay on his bed and pondered the DVD he had taken from the library when he first came to Shirley Falls. Moments in American History, but the only moment Abdikarim watched, repeatedly for weeks, was the assassination of the president, because of the pink-suited wife climbing over the back of the car to try to reach the piece of her husband she saw flying away. Abdikarim did not believe what was said of this famous widow: that she cared only about money and clothes. It was recorded, and he saw. She had felt in her lifetime what he had felt in his. Though she had died (living to be as old as Abdikarim was now), he thought of her as his secret friend.

  In the morning, instead of walking from the mosque to his shop on Gratham Street after prayers, Abdikarim walked up Pine Street to the Unitarian church, looking for Margaret Estaver.

  A month passed by. It was the end of February now, and while there was still snow on the ground in Shirley Falls, the sun was higher in the sky and caused, for a few hours some days, the snow to soften and trickle and twinkle beneath the yellow light that warmed the sides of buildings and made the parking lot at the mall have small rivulets of water running at its edge. Often now when Susan left work at the end of her day and walked across the large expanse of pavement, the air still held the open light of spring. On one of these afternoons her cell phone rang as she got into her car. Susan was not as used to cell phones as other people were; it still surprised her when it rang, and she always felt she was talking into something as insubstantial as a graham cracker. She took it from her bag quickly, and heard Charlie Tibbetts’s voice say that at the end of the week the Feds were going to charge Zachary with a hate crime. They’d stalled because of the issue of showing intent, but they thought they had a case now. An inside source had told him this. His voice sounded weary. “We’ll fight it,” he said. “But it’s bad.”

  Susan put her sunglasses on, then pulled out of the parking lot so slowly that a car honked behind her. She drove past the strip of pine trees, pulled up to the intersection, continued past the hospital and the church and the old wooden houses, and pulled into her driveway.

  Zach was in the kitchen. “I can’t cook,” he said. “But I can use the microwave. I bought you frozen lasagna and me macaroni and cheese. And we can have applesauce. That’s almost like cooking.” He had set the table, seeming pleased with this accomplishment.

  “Zachary.” She went to hang up her coat, and as she stood at the door of the closet tears fell down her face; she rubbed them off with her glove. Only after she saw that he had eaten his food did she tell him about Charlie’s call. Then she watched as he stared at her. He stared at the walls, the sink, and then back at her. The dog began to whine.

  “Mommy,” Zach said.

  “Now, it’s going to be all right,” Susan said.

  He looked at her with his mouth partly open, and slowly shook his head.

  “Honey, I’m sure your uncles will come back up for this. You’ll have plenty of support. Look, you managed last time.”

  Zach kept shaking his head. He said, “Mom, I’ve researched this online. You don’t know.” She could hear the stickiness of his mouth gone dry. “It’s so much worse.” He stood up.

  “What is, honey?” She said this calmly. “What is it I don’t know?”

  “The federal hate charges. Mom.”

  “Tell me.” Beneath the table she shoved the poor dog hard because she wanted to shriek at the whimpering animal pressing her nose into Susan’s lap. “Sit down, honey, and tell me.”

  Zach stayed standing. “Like, ten years ago this guy—somewhere, I can’t remember—he burned a cross on a black guy’s lawn and he went to prison for eight years.” Zach’s eyes had become spidery-red, and moist.

  “Zachary. You did not burn a cross on a black man’s lawn.” She spoke quietly, precisely.

  “And some other guy yelled at a black woman and threatened something, and he went away for six months. Mom. I—I can’t.” His thin shoulders lifted. Slowly he sat back down.

  “It’s not going to happen, Zachary.”

  “But how can you say that?”

  “Because you didn’t do those things.”

  “Mommy, you saw that judge. He said bring your toothbrush next time.”

  “They all say that. They say it to a kid with a speeding ticket, they say it to scare young people. It’s stupid. Stupid, stupid.”

  Zachary crossed his long arms on the table and put his head down.

  “Jim will help Charlie take care of this,” Susan said. “What’s that, honey?” because her son had mumbled something into his folded arms.

  Zachary raised his head and looked at her sorrowfully. “Mom. Haven’t you noticed? Jim can’t do anything. And I think he pushed Bob over, or something, the last night at the hotel.”

  “He pushed Bob?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Zach sat up straighter. “It doesn’t matter. Mom, don’t worry about me.”

  “Honey—”

  “No, really.” Zach gave a little shrug as though his earlier fear had simply slipped away. “It doesn’t matter. Really.”

  Susan got up to let the dog out. Standing in the open doorway, with her hand on the doorknob, she felt in the air the faint moistness of the faraway but approaching spring, and for a moment she was caught inside the sudden absurdity that keeping the door open would keep them free. To click it shut would seal them up eternally. Closing the door firmly, she turned back to the kitchen. “I’m going to do the dishes. You find something to watch on TV.”

  “What?”

  She repeated what she’d said, and her son nodded, said quietly, “Okay.”

  It was hours before she realized she had not let the dog back in. But the dog was there, on the back porch, and her fur was cold as she lay down at Susan’s feet.

  6

  “Helen,” Jim had said that morning, sitting on the edge of the bed. “You are so good.” He pulled on his socks. Walking past her to the dressing room, he placed his hand on her head. “You’re a good person. I love you,” he said.

  She almost said, “Oh, Jimmy, don’t go to work today,” turning to watch him as he walked to the dressing room, but she did not say it, because she had woken feeling like an anxious child, and if she spoke like one, she would feel worse. So she had gotten up, put on her bathrobe, and said, “Let’s go to the theater this weekend. Let’s go s
ee something small, maybe off-off Broadway.”

  “Sure, Hellie.” He called this from the dressing room; she heard the hangers move on the rod. “Find something, and we’ll go.”

  Still in her bathrobe she sat at the family computer in the room off the kitchen and scrolled through all the plays in New York. Feeling her appetite for this run down, she chose a Broadway play instead, about a family in Alaska that was, as the advertisement said, merrily dysfunctional. Then she got dressed and remembered an elderly aunt from her past who had said to her one day, I’m not hungry anymore, Helen. A few months later the poor woman was dead. Helen’s eyes filled, remembering this, and she went to the phone and made an appointment with her doctor for a checkup. Helen didn’t think she was not hungry for food, but she did think there was some appetite that was missing. The doctor could see her on Monday; there’d been a cancellation. This made her feel efficient, and when she hung up she remembered how kind Jim had been this morning, and it warmed her, as though she had received a pleasant gift and had forgotten. She would go into Manhattan for the day. She picked up the phone and called two women from the Kitchen Cabinet. One was off to have a dental implant, the other was having lunch with an elderly mother-in-law, but their responses—Oh, Helen, how I wish I were free!—gave her a sense of buoyancy.