Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (33 page)

“I’m gonna cut up here,” said Leila, indicating a long flight of cracked steps. Dylan wouldn’t want to take her shortcut. It would mean scrabbling across a scrub lot, and unlike his skateboard, his sneakers were precious to him; his shoe-care regimen was a family joke. She started up the stairs at a rapid clip, with taut fists, like Rocky.

Dylan called after her. “I hope you didn’t give those Diary people anything. What if they were a cult? Or an Armenian ID thievery ring?” It was annoying that Dylan was getting to be the sensible one here, he who had once styled himself a didgeridoo musician.

But why had her phone gone comatose? And the way the Toyota had been repoed. That felt like evidence disappearing. She still had her Lola Montes papers. Was she supposed to destroy them? Or would they self-destruct? She moved them from beneath her mattress, lest she be engulfed in flames, and put them into a plastic envelope and then under the large pot of the struggling lemon tree on the tiny back patio.

That afternoon in Costco, Leila had a fight with her mom about the type of T-shirt they would buy for Cyrus. Mariam had selected for her husband another five-pack of white V-necks, the same shirt she had been buying for her husband for thirty years.

“How about some of these, Mom?” said Leila, holding a couple of alternatives above the rowboat-size shopping cart. Two crew necks, brown and light blue.

Mariam did not disguise her disdain for her daughter’s suggestion. She made a waving motion with her hand at the idea. In the back of her throat, Leila could feel a fight coming on.

“You think if you came home with shirts other than those broken-man shirts, he would somehow not be all right with it, right?” said Leila, a little too loudly. “You’re going to imply that
he’s
the one who has trouble with change. But that’s you, Ma. Just let the man try a blue shirt.” Leila thought she saw the surprise in her mom’s face; she thought she saw her almost engage on the point. Things had been brittle between them in the three days since Leila had returned. Her family was like the American Midwest—storms brewed for days before cracking open. But the middle of a Costco aisle was not the place, in Mariam’s view.

“Leila. Show a little respect.” She cast her own eyes down quickly, as if to teach her daughter how submission was properly expressed.

“Mom,” said Leila, trying a deep breath, “I do show you respect. But I’m a grown-up. Let’s try a little co-respect, can we?”

Mariam rolled her eyes in a brief and minuscule fashion. “Leila,” she said, “I really don’t know what you want from me. Your father likes these shirts. I should ignore what I know to be true? You say I make him into a broken man. Why would a daughter say that? It is not respectful. Your father needs routine right now. Those shirts you would bring to him…” She stopped and silently contemplated the medical risk posed by the T-shirts that Leila had chosen.

“They would cause his death. I know, Mom. That’s why I want to get them for him,” said Leila, fuming.

Mariam poked her chin high to avoid crying, and then she started crying and wheeled the cart away from her daughter. It was a grand wheeling-away, swift and dramatic. Leila looked like the asshole who had made her mom cry. She had swung too wildly, using that word
death
.
What is it with the brutal lights in these hangar stores?
she thought.
It’s like living under a different sun.

A fat man in a Lakers jersey and cap, munching a sample burrito, stopped to stare.

“Fuck off, clown,” Leila said to him.

Leila bought the two T-shirts and met her mother at the car. Silently, they co-loaded the groceries into the Camry.

Only when they were both sitting in the still car did Leila say, “Mom, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you in there.”

Mariam was in the passenger seat; her eyes were smudgy with run makeup. But her voice was soft when she said, “Yes, you did, Leila. You are so good at it. But you should refrain from doing that, at least in public. There were people in there watching us.”

Leila pounced. “What do you mean?”

Her mother caught the pounce. “People. People who know your father, who are probably looking at us for some sign. What people did you think I meant?”

Leila ignored the question. “Mom, you’ve been totally oppositional since I got back. You’re finding every fault in me.”

Mariam came right back. “You are always mocking me. The others don’t make fun of me or of how I’ve spent my life. Then you get home and I am the big joke.”

There was some truth in that—Leila was the lead plaintiff in the family. “Yeah. Maybe a little. I’m sorry. But you know what, Mom? You can’t very well tell me I’m letting down the side by causing a scene in Costco when you’re out whoring around with Peggy Pilkerson every night.” Mariam pretended to be offended by the verb. “Oh, come on. You know what I mean. Gallivanting. Whatever.”

“For years now you have been saying I should loosen up and get my own life. Now I should stop having a little fun in the midst of a dark time. Which is it?”

“How about you can take up gambling and gin but only after Dad’s out of these woods?”

“So we’re negotiating now? How long are you home for this time?”

“That’s not what we’re talking about here.”

“Certainly not. We’re never allowed to talk about that.”

Deep breath. “Mom, it’s not that we’re not allowed to talk about it. It’s just that that’s not what we’re talking about
right now
.”

“Then what are we talking about right now?”

That could have been a rhetorical maneuver—put the agenda-making on the other guy’s shoulders—but here it seemed a sincere offer of armistice, like when you admit that you are adrift on the sea of your argument. Leila tried to see her mom in full. Not just as her mom but as all the things she was: a woman who had given up a career, an exile who had never stopped missing home.

“I guess we’re talking about why we’ve been so mad at each other since I got back. I think our sniping at each other is making it harder for everyone else, you know?” Leila started the car and eased out of the spot.

“Okay,” said Mariam. “I’ll tell you why I’m mad. You always treat your father more kindly than you treat me.” That was all she said, and she even said it without rancor.

Leila was pierced with contrition. Of course, now, with his being laid up in that bed, marooned in the den, Leila was being extra kind to him. But her mom was right: Leila had always been a little nicer to her dad. That’s just the thing she had with him: more distance, more kindness. “I’m sorry,” she said. They were waiting to take a right.

“Now, you go,” said her mom.

“What?”

“Why you’re mad.”

Fine. “Because I’m doing what you told me to do.
You
said I should be independent.
You
gave me all those lady-doctor coloring books and
you
said study study study. I am
really
good at my job,” Leila said. She didn’t want to go into the situation with Helping Hand, about how maybe she hadn’t been as good at that job. Point was that she was accomplished and well thought of in her field. “You never ever say anything about that. And now you just want me to make babies.” She joined a slow chute of traffic and was looking to get three lanes left in a block and a half.

“Leila, you
will
want children. Please don’t wait too late. The study study study was just so that you would have your pick of men. I wanted you to have the smartest and kindest and handsomest.”

Of course. Mariam was mad at the NGO sector for making her marriageable daughter into a global houseguest, willing to live in a second-tier megalopolis for eight months in aid of toilets or something, but unwilling to do the work that leads to a family. Now Leila had waited too long, turned down too many good men; she would end an unclaimed treasure, a clog-shod saddo, a terminated branch of the Majnoun tree.

But for Leila, her mom’s endorsement of marriage and children had come too late. Mariam had done a fine job raising her children, but she’d looked mildly aggrieved throughout. Little Dylan once asked her, “Mommy, are your shoes too tight?” It was not recorded as a funny family anecdote.

“Well, also so that you would be smart,” Mariam hastened to add. “So that no one would be able to fool you. But it was
not
so that you could be alone, giving all your youth to these…bureaucracies.”

How Leila wished to refute the charge. But lately it did feel as though her impressive career was adding up to nothing behind her. Allie, her best friend growing up, had two children and a successful bakery business, with a fleet of vans and a twenty-foot-wide oven. Leila had lots of good stories, and was prized at dinner parties. But the stories people wanted to hear were not the ones she wanted to tell. She still carried school debt and still had cardboard boxes in her parents’ tiny attic.

They rode most of the rest of the way home in silence, though not the frosty kind that had stretched between them at breakfast or the taut kind that had snapped in the Costco. It was kinder; a détente. Nearing home, they passed Peggy Pilkerson’s place, with its plaster lions rampant before six feet of driveway. Leila tried to bring up again the subject of the nights out till all hours with Peggy. What she wanted to say but couldn’t quite was:
Why are you choosing right now to quit being the Good Wife? Don’t you know he’s innocent?

“I think
you
could stand to go out, Leila,” said her mother as they neared the house. “You’re helping neither yourself nor your father by just sitting in that little room and looking at that Tubeface.”

Unfair. Leila had been reading her dad the newspapers, trying to help with the house when and where her mother left an opening. She wasn’t online more than a few hours a day, and then certainly not on Facebook. She worked in the little room under the stairs because she was sleuthing; she needed to concentrate, and she didn’t want to explain every page, or the black electrical tape over her webcam.

There was nothing on the Internet about Dear Diary. Finding nothing on the Internet about something is suspicious. Like,
yeah,
too
quiet
. There was a scrapbooking website called Dear Diary and some wry hunter’s blog called Deer Diary. But there was no whiff of Dear Diary the secret resistance and people-smuggling network with postnationalist aims and a neurotransformative eye test, nor of its pitched battle with a fascist consortium of data miners. Was there another Internet besides the one she knew about? Were there secret domains? She scoured her computer for the little owl icon that had let her contact Dear Diary in the first place, but it was gone. She went over and over the Heathrow meeting and the day in Dublin, but she could think of no way back in.

“I’m helping Dylan with the legal stuff, Mom.”

“How? Dylan’s taking all those meetings.
He
updates
you
. And what’s with that other phone you carry around and look at but never use?” Her mom was like this—oblivious, oblivious, oblivious, and then—
bam
—a noticer.

Then Mariam’s phone rang. She dug it from her purse. “Hello, Dylan,” she said. Her voice always brightened for him. As long as we’re talking about who’s nicer to whom, thought Leila, Dylan had better be getting this hard sell on grandchildren also.

Then Mariam sat up straight in the passenger seat. “What?” Her voice was hard with disbelief. Leila stepped on the accelerator. “But I don’t understand,” she said. Leila slowed a little; if the news were bad and medical, she wouldn’t have said that.

“What is it?” she asked her mom. “Can you put him on speaker?”

Mariam waved her away, annoyed. “How can you be sure?” Nod. Squint.
Hmmm-mmm.
“Okay.” She hung up, and even then she didn’t start sharing. She was savoring knowing something Leila didn’t. And when Mariam did speak, it was strange, because instead of sounding ecstatic and relieved, she sounded puzzled.

“That was Dylan,” she said needlessly. “They’re going to drop the charges against your father.”

“He didn’t tell you his name? He didn’t have some funny name? Did he mention me or Dear Diary?” Leila asked Dylan. They were outside the house, Leila breathing hard. She had run the last half a mile at three-quarters intensity. Before going out to run, she had left a note on her brother, who was asleep on the couch.
Can you meet me outside 8:30?
it said. When she pulled up at 8:35, he was outside, smoking a cigarette, drinking slurpily from a Winchell’s cup. He was definitely looking unyoung these days, but that was probably the hours he was keeping. He worked full-time at Whole Foods, went to law school at night, a school much less fancy than the one he’d dropped out of.

“No. I told you. I was just eating a hot dog, on a bench, like a schmuck—”

“This was yesterday?” she interrupted.

“Yes.” And he punished her for the interruption by taking an especially languid drag from his cigarette. It was going to be hard for Dylan to quit smoking; he smoked so expertly, his eyes bright behind the noxious veil. “And this guy walks right up to me. Too fast, you know? Like I kinda thought I was about to get knifed. But he just hands me this folded manila envelope, like I should know what it’s about. So I said, Excuse me, but what the fuck?”

“Is that what you actually said?”

Dylan thought. “Yeah.”

“And what did he say?”

“Wow, you’re really helping me tell this story, sis.”

“Sorry.”

“He said,
Show that to your solicitor
. And then he walked away.”

Leila made her eyes wide to indicate
That’s all?

Dylan made his wider to indicate
Yeah, that’s all.

“Dylan. What was in the envelope?”

“A thumb drive. I was about to poke it into my own computer right there on the bench. But then I got spooked and thought it should go straight to Kramer. Which was prudent on my part, because it turned out to have this thing where it could make only one copy of itself before it died. And at Kramer’s office they brought it straight to their forensic electronics guy—who marks like four hundred and fifty dollars an hour, by the way, and sits in a room called a SCIF—a sensitive compartmented information facility. He took the one file that the drive had on it, and he immediately copied that file about a hundred times to their special offline servers. When I saw what the file was—like, on the screen—I didn’t understand it at all. It was code, computer code. It could have been anything.”