The Divide (42 page)

Yesterday evening she had found Pablo in front of the TV, watching a videotape that he said he’d found in the bedroom closet. It seemed to be a transfer of a home movie. Eve was mystified. Two young kids she didn’t recognize, a boy and a girl, were splashing around in the shallows on a beach somewhere. Then the camera panned around and there was Sarah in a swimsuit holding up her hands and trying to get out of shot, Ben’s voice chiding her and laughing from behind the camera, telling her she looked great and should stand still.

It was one of the tapes he had secretly packed when he left. He’d tried watching it once when Eve was out but found he got too choked up and stopped. Pablo, of course, knew Ben had two grown-up kids but insisted these young ones were different and wanted to know when he was going to get to meet and play with them.

It was a quarter past eight now. Ben finished his beer and paid and the barman said
Y’all hurry back soon, y’hear?
Ben said he definitely would.

Outside, it was almost dark. The air was cool and clear and the neon signs along the sides of the highway shone sharp in many vibrant shades. Ben drove slowly out of the lot and headed back toward the entrance to the mall and did another circuit of the stores. They were all still open, though the cars were fewer than before. In zone M there were probably thirty or forty vehicles but they all seemed to be empty. Maybe she would come on foot.

On his second circuit, the clock on the dash turned to 20.28 and this time when he reached Petland, he turned into zone M and cruised slowly toward the corner and row 18. There were only two cars within twenty yards of the third trash can and nobody visible in either. He would be able to park right next to it. A little farther away, across the dividing strip of concrete, in zone L, an old couple were trying to lift something heavy from a cart and into the back of an old station wagon. But they were the only people anywhere near.

He stopped by the space and reversed so that the rear of his car was within three or four yards of the trash can. As the clock flicked to 20.30, with the engine still running, he got out of the car and walked around and stood by the trunk, taking one last quick look around him. The old couple in zone L were arguing but neither of them gave him so much as a glance. Ben quickly opened the trunk, took out the yellow plastic bag, and in one quick move, dumped it in the trash can. Then he shut the trunk and, exactly as Abbie had instructed, got back into the car and drove away.

As he crossed the lot, back toward the road that passed in front of the stores, he kept looking in his mirror and all around him for any sign of her. But he saw none. In front of Old Navy, he stopped to give way to a passing car and then pulled out behind it and followed it slowly around the corner. And as the parking lot behind him slid out of his mirror, he took a last glance over his shoulder. But nothing had changed. No new car by the trash can. No new people.

She had to be somewhere watching. There was no car following him but he wanted to give the unseen eyes the impression that he was still obeying orders and so he followed the white exit signs painted on the road as if he was going for good.

But he wasn’t. He’d already figured it out. There was a slight rise about three hundred yards along the highway and after it some lights. By the time he got there he would be out of sight and far enough away and she would assume he had gone. But at the lights he would take a right turn and then another right which would bring him into the far end of the mall again where he could pick up the internal road and make his way back to the parking lot.

In no more than about three minutes he was coming past JCPenney and Bed Bath & Beyond and up ahead now, across a little link road, he could see Petland. He had to wait for three cars to go by and he peered through the darkness at the people inside but none of them was Abbie. And now he was across the link road and drawing closer to Petland and looking to his right he could see a white car, a little Ford, crossing the lot to the far corner of zone M, much farther away from the stores than you would need to go if all you wanted to do was park. It had to be her. He knew it was. But he was still too far away to get anything more than a vague impression of the driver.

In zone L, which was closer to where he now was, he could see the old couple still trying to maneuver whatever it was into the back of the station wagon. On impulse, instead of driving on to zone M, he turned sharply into the entrance to L and made his way toward them. The white car was almost at the trash can and Ben had a sudden stab of panic that if she saw him she might just turn around and go. It was dark enough by now and she wouldn’t, of course, recognize his car. But he wasn’t going to risk being seen too soon and he quickly turned the wheel and parked in a slot between two tall SUVs. He got out and started to run.

The white car was pulling up beside the trash can. There seemed to be only one person in it. Ben ran as fast and as low as he could, trying to keep the old couple’s station wagon between him and the white car. But he could see the driver’s door opening now and someone getting out. It was a man. Abbie had told Sarah she would be picking the money up herself. But this had to be Rolf. How stupid they were not to have thought of it. He wouldn’t trust her to do this on her own. He’d want to do it himself. And how could they be sure he was going to give it to Abbie? The bastard was probably going to steal it. Ben felt a sudden, uncontrollable surge of fury.

The guy was walking to the trash can, taking a quick look around him as he did so, trying to look casual. Ben was about twenty yards away, bounding low and fast like an ape, trying to keep the station wagon between himself and the trash can. But the old woman had spotted him now and was tapping her husband on the shoulder, clearly terrified that they were about to get mugged. Ben put up his hands, trying to tell them it was okay, not to worry, and luckily neither of them said a word. He was past them now and closing quickly on Rolf who had hoisted the bag of money out of the trash and was heading back to the car. Ben was only ten, eight, five yards away now.

“Look out!” someone called. It was a woman’s voice and it came from the white car. Ben looked and saw a face at the back window and in a moment realized it was Abbie. She must have been lying out of sight on the backseat. But her call had alerted Rolf and he turned and saw Ben closing on him, almost within reach. He began to run toward the driver’s door.

“Stop!” Ben yelled. “You lousy little sonofabitch!” Rolf was clambering into the car but Ben managed to reach him before he could shut the door. He grabbed at the guy’s leather jacket and got a twisted grip on the lapel and tried to haul him out. Abbie was screaming from the backseat.

“Go! Go! Just go!”

Rolf was thrashing at him, trying to punch and elbow him away.

“Give me back my daughter, you bastard!”

The car was moving away but Ben lunged forward and grabbed the guy’s leg and wrenched it so that his foot came off the gas pedal. He lunged for the keys but missed.

“Dad, don’t! Don’t do this!”

“Abbie, please!” Ben shouted. “All I want is to talk! Please!”

“Let go!”

“Please, Abbie! I just want to talk! Tell him—”

That was when the guy’s fist hit him full in the face, right between the eyes. Ben saw a sudden flash of light and then he was falling back, crumpling, the back of his head cracking against the ground, the door swinging and slamming shut above him and the car moving away in a shuddering blur of white.

And through the warped and thickening haze of his concussion, the last thing he saw was the face pressed against the rear window, looking back and down at him, the strange black hair, the shocked and wide and fearful eyes of his daughter.

O
f all the images of that September morning—the planes slicing in, the flames against the lucent sky, the crumbling towers—the one that etched itself most deeply in Eve’s mind was the billowing cloud of dust that chased and engulfed the fleeing crowds. For it seemed to roll ever on and out to engulf the watching world beyond and when eventually it cleared, every life was somehow reconfigured.

Eve hated the clarion invasion of news or what generally passed for it. And in summer and early fall when Pablo came in to wake her, she would put on some music and open the doors to the deck and let the sound stream out and the sun stream in. Her taste in music was capricious though mostly determined by what she was currently painting. That morning, she might have chosen Mozart or Tom Waits, Beth Nielsen Chapman or the chanting of Tibetan monks. But she opted instead for Bach, the Gold-berg Variations.

Pablo had dragged a chair under the cherry tree and was standing on it to refill the feeder jars for the hummingbirds. Eve was lying on her back on the deck in her nightgown doing her morning stretch routine. Through the music she dimly heard Ben’s cell phone ring but thought no more of it until he appeared in the doorway. She could see from his face that something had happened and her first thought was of Abbie. The call was from Sarah, he said. Something terrible was happening in New York. The NYU dorm on Water Street, just three or four blocks from the World Trade Center, had been evacuated. Josh was missing and wasn’t answering his phone. Sarah was almost hysterical.

For what seemed like an eternity, as the horror unfolded on TV, they called everyone they could think of in Manhattan in the hope that Josh might have contacted them. Nobody had heard a word. Cell phones didn’t seem to be working anymore. Maybe one in twenty calls was getting through. At last, almost half an hour after the second tower collapsed, Sarah called again. He was alive. The windows of the dorm had blown in and everyone had grabbed what they could and gotten out. Josh had gone to see if there was anything he could do to help and had then made his way uptown to Penn Station where at last he had managed to call her. The boy was only half-dressed and coughing and shocked and covered in dust, Sarah said. But, thank God, he was okay. He was on the train and coming home.

It was many weeks before the Coopers came to grasp that although the day had spared them the loss of a second child, it had almost certainly cemented the loss of their first. The fragment of hope they had clung to, that Abbie might wake from her madness and give herself up, now all but dissolved. With luck, sound lawyerly advice, and a lenient judge, she might once have been able to elicit understanding, even some modest sympathy. But as the world hardened and retrenched and prepared itself for war, all delicate distinction that might once have been made now vanished. There were no longer any shades of gray, only the glaring divide of good and evil. And Abbie was irredeemably consigned to the black beyond.

Ben’s first inkling of this came in a phone call one evening from Dean Kendrick. It left him reeling. After the usual pleasantries, Kendrick had asked a whole string of what he called
routine
questions, about any possible connections Abbie might ever have had with Arab or Muslim countries. Had she ever traveled in the Middle East? Did she, to Ben’s knowledge, have any friends or acquaintances of those particular ethnic or religious backgrounds at high school or college?

“Give me a break, Dean,” Ben said.

“I know, Ben. I’m sorry. But unfortunately it’s a fact that there are often links between these various terrorist groupings—”

“Terrorist groupings!”

“Ben, I know how hard it is for you to think of Abbie in that way, but she is a terrorist. She wrote the initials of a terrorist group on walls. It’s a fact. We have to check every angle.”

Since that dreadful night in Newark, there had been no word from Abbie. Ben had a hunch she wasn’t even in the country anymore, that she and Rolf must have slipped into Canada or Mexico or gone even farther afield and were using the money to start a new life. Ben had come back to Santa Fe looking like a prizefighter, with two black eyes and a broken nose. Eve worried more, of course, about the deeper wounds the night had inflicted.

But curiously, as the months went by and the reality of Abbie’s new status beyond the pale began to sink in, something seemed to shift in him. He didn’t talk with Eve about it much, though she knew he talked of little else with his therapist. But from what he said, she got the impression that the events of that night had helped him draw some sort of line. He told her once that the face he had seen in the car window belonged to someone else, a stranger he no longer recognized as his daughter. Only by seeing her had he truly been able to know this. And since there was nothing he could do about it, the choice was clear: He could surrender himself to grief and go on blaming himself and make his life and the lives of those who loved him unbearable, or he could surrender to life itself and embrace all, both the new and the old, that was good and unsullied.

What seemed to help most in this process was his work. From a slow start—many phone calls and unproductive meetings and unpaid spec work that came to nothing—he now had some good contacts and a couple of projects that excited him. A young Hollywood film producer had asked him to design a house on twenty acres of rolling pine scrub desert beyond Tesuque, with views all around of the mountains. Ben by now had read every book ever written about Southwestern architecture and adobe and many more besides, about “building green” and all the many things that could now be done to make a house more environmentally friendly. He never said, but Eve knew that he wanted to build the kind of house for which his daughter might have felt proud of him. When he handed in his drawings the young producer was ecstatic. They began to build the following spring. Eve had never seen Ben so galvanized.

That July, for the first time, Josh came to stay. Naturally, Eve was nervous. But she knew enough wicked step-mother stories to realize that the worst thing she could do (though it wasn’t in her nature anyway) was to try too hard to be liked. She needn’t have worried. Although he only came for a long weekend, Josh was easy and open from the outset and this touched her and made Ben so happy that he couldn’t stop talking about it for days. It was the first time she had seen Josh since that fateful week at The Divide and she barely recognized him. He was taller but no longer awkward, as if he had at last grown into what he was meant to be. And apart from the new haircut that looked as if it had been done in the dark by a vengeful Marine, he was a lot better-looking than she remembered.