The Burgess Boys (32 page)

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 Abdikarim’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.

“Can he return here?” he asked the minister.

“He can, of course. And he should, before the misdemeanor trial. Otherwise he’ll be in more trouble. He’s supposed to be here,” Margaret said, seeing the confusion on the man’s face, “when the court date arrives.”

“Explain, please,” Abdikarim said. After listening, he said, “And what would happen to make those charges gone, same as the federal charges?”

“The federal charges were never brought, so they didn’t have to be dismissed. What it would take for the district attorney to drop the misdemeanor charge, I don’t know if that can happen.”

“Can you find out?”

“I’ll try.”

Otherwise, Abdikarim spent the days in his café, or on the sidewalk in front of it, talking with the group of Somali men who gathered there. As the weather became warmer they could stand outside longer; they preferred to be outside. There was fighting in Mogadishu, and it was all the men talked of. A family who had been in Shirley Falls for two years—exhausted with homesickness—had packed their things and returned to Mogadishu in February. Recently no word had come from them, and now what was feared was learned to be true: They had been killed in the fighting. The other week, when the insurgents had fired at the government, and also at the presidential palace and the Ministry of Defense, where the Ethiopians were based, the Ethiopians had fired in return—wildly, savagely, and without discrimination—killing more than a thousand people, even their animals. News of this came through cell phones, and news came through the Internet, which could be checked in the Shirley Falls town library, and it came through the daily broadcasts from the shortwave radio station 89.8 FM from Garowe, the capital of Puntland. The men spoke worriedly of something else: The United States was supporting Ethiopia. The president, the CIA—weren’t they involved? They had to be. Claiming Somalia was harboring terrorists. Islam was a religion of peace, and the men on the sidewalk in front of Abdikarim’s café were defensive and ashamed.

Abdikarim listened, and felt what the men felt. But he thought he might be getting senile, because tucked now in his heart was something private, and if it was not hope, it was close enough to be hope’s brother. His country was ill, having a seizure. Those who should be helping were treacherous, underhanded. But in the years to come, and he understood he would not live to see it, his country would again be strong and good. “Understand this fact,” he said to the men. “Somalia was the last African country to get the Internet, but in seven years its access has the highest growth and also we have the cheapest cell phone calling rates. Look at this street, if you want proof of the intelligence of Somalis.” He thrust out his arm, indicating the new businesses that had sprung up during the winter here in Shirley Falls. A translation service, two more cafés, a store that sold phone cards, a place for classes in English.

But the men turned away. They wanted to go home. Abdikarim understood that very well. It’s just that he could not seem to stop what felt to be an opening in his soul as the horizon itself stayed open those extra moments each day.

3

Pam’s life was ruled by so many appointments and errands and parties and playdates that she did not, as she told her friend Janice, have time to think. But now she was having insomnia, which gave her lots of time to think, and it was driving her insane. Hormones, Janice told her. Get your hormone level checked and take some. But Pam had already taken a frightening amount of hormones in order to conceive her boys. She was well aware of the risks she’d incurred; she would not be adding more. So she lay awake at night and at times there was a curious peacefulness to this, the darkness warm as though the deep violet duvet held its color unseen, wrapping around Pam some soothing aspect of her youth, as her mind wandered over a life that felt puzzlingly long; she experienced a quiet surprise that so many lifetimes could be fit into one. She couldn’t name them so much as feel them, the soccer field of her high school in autumn, her first boyfriend’s thin torso, the innocence unbelievable to her now, and the sexual innocence in some ways being the smallest part of innocence, there was no way to name the slender, true, and piercing hopes of a young girl in a rural town of Massachusetts so long ago—and then Orono and the campus and Shirley Falls and Bob, and Bob, and Bob, the first infidelity (there it was, all innocence gone, the fearsome freedom of adulthood, to enter the complications of all that!) and then a new marriage and her boys. Her boys. Nothing is what you imagine. Her mind hovered above this simple and alarming thought. The variables were too great, the particularities too distinct, life a flood of translations from the shadow-edged yearnings of the heart to the immutable aspects of the physical world—this violet duvet and her slightly snoring husband. Sometimes, to help herself make sense of this, she would picture meeting the boyfriend from high school now—at a diner near her mother’s nursing home, perhaps, leaning across the counter, his eyes quiet with curiosity—and telling him. Well, this, and this, and this have happened. It would not be accurate as told. She thought nothing could be told and be accurate. Feeble words dropped earnestly and haphazardly over the large stretched-out fabric of a life with all its knots and bumps— What words would she use to spread her experience before him? That he would have his own experience did not interest her as much, she was aware of that. Horribly—but freely, because she was alone in her violet darkness—she saw that it was not another’s experience she wanted to touch and turn and mold and devour, it was her own.

Her mind grew weary, ran down.

Then she would try not to picture her skeletal mother in the nursing home, the clouded confused eyes, unknowing, as Pam thought, Mom, Mom. Or, turning over, tugging the duvet, she tried not to picture those two (young) mothers at school who were never pleasant when she chatted with them, waiting on the sidewalk for the last bell to ring, and why was that? What did they have against her?

And so on.

Reading was the best thing to do when her mind became this way, and so she clicked on her tiny book light and started the book about Somalia that had been mentioned at that splendid dinner party where the Southern woman lost it. At first the book was dull, but then it picked up and Pam became horrified. It was incredible, all she didn’t know about lives so utterly different from her own. Her plan was to call Bob about it in the morning, but it was that morning when she found out that her job at the hospital was getting phased out, and then Pam had a run of real panic.

Somehow—and it probably had to do with long-ago fantasies—she took hold of the idea that she would become a nurse. So for a few weeks Pam looked into nursing courses, picturing herself filling syringes and taking blood and holding some old woman’s bruised arm in an emergency room, having doctors glance at her respectfully; she saw herself (and maybe she’d finally look into Botox) speaking to young parents who were frightened out of their wits, like those mothers at school who weren’t nice to her. She imagined herself striding through the swinging doors of an operating room, authoritative in all her gestures. (She wished nurses were still required to wear white uniforms and caps instead of the frumpish things they wore these days, all kinds of silly sneakers were allowed, and always those baggy pants.) She pictured herself administering blood transfusions, holding a clipboard, lining up a row of meds.

I can’t think of anything worse, Janice told her. Nurses work like mad, on their feet for twelve hours. What if you made a mistake?

Stupidly, that hadn’t occurred to her. Of course she would make a mistake. Except surely people with less intelligence than she were nurses, she saw them all the time at the hospital, gum-snapping, heavy-lidded—ah, but with the confidence of youth. No exchange rate for the confidence of youth.