I coughed. “What in the world are you talking about?”
“I know you know this story.”
“I thought she just pointed a rifle at him?”
Brad was leaning forward, suspended. My dad said, “She did! And then she shot him!”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Right in the eye.”
“That’s crazy!” Brad said. “She didn’t go to jail or anything?”
My dad reclined in his chair, lifting his arm over the seatback, more relaxed than I’d seen him in months. “Nope. But you could kill a Black man back then and get away with it. Dumped his butt in the river. No one was looking into the details. This is Louisiana, remember.”
I thought, no wonder my dad has so many issues.
“I’m sorry, Daddy, I didn’t know that.”
“Sorry? That man was whooping my ass—he had it coming.” My dad stood to empty a pan of corn, onions, and potatoes into the pot and stirred. He was walking freely, without crutches now, but still dragged his foot a bit. The sky was navy and purple. Brad asked him a series of breathless questions, and my dad answered them happily. It struck me that all this time, he was looking for someone to listen to him, someone who cared about what he had to say.
After we ate, Brad went back to the basement. He was a better tenant than I expected. There was a hole in the house that he didn’t fill exactly but seemed to patch over with his presence.
“How come you never told me the full story?” I said.
“I thought I did.”
I shook my head, laughing. “That’s a pretty big detail you left out.”
“I’m just glad she died before all this crap,” he said, looking at the sky.
Chapter 78
Over the next few months, I put my head down, went to work, and wrote my novels. But that summer, the president deployed thousands of national guards into our streets. They prowled the city in packs, they hid behind masks, behind green camouflage, inside anonymous black vehicles, hurling middle school lunchroom barbs at those who heckled them, terrorizing people then turning their terror into a low-budget movie trailer. There was a checkpoint with officers making traffic stops on U Street near the restaurant. I had many dark and elaborate dreams that August. In them I screamed, “Get the fuck out of my city!” until the blood from my tired lungs drowned me from the inside out, until the spit from my bloodied mouth blinded every fascist intruder fucking up my town. I screamed, “Squabble up,” and they scrambled like ants. But these were just dreams. I mostly stayed in the house on the days I wasn’t working, watching my city get stolen, my hope trampled, immobilized by my helplessness to stop it.
Every now and then, I searched news articles about the West Bank, irrationally, for Anwar’s name. His family’s website hadn’t changed, but that meant nothing. More and more of the region was being wrecked by war. There was a man-made famine in Gaza that failed to be declared until it was too late. I wouldn’t allow myself to imagine the worst even though we were already experiencing the worst. Instead, I reread the last email Anwar sent, now over three months ago: a video of a dance troupe with the subject line “I wish I could dance like this.”
I remembered he told me he was doing a summer program at his university. I had work in a few hours, but I decided to call the school to see if they could help me find out what happened to him.
I dialed the number on WhatsApp. It made a strange ringing sound that reminded me of an alarm. A man with a gravelly voice answered in Arabic then switched to English.
“Who’s this?” he asked.
“My name is Cat St. Clair. I’m trying to reach one of your graduate students, Anwar Shaheen? He’s in your engineering program.”
There was a long pause. “Cat like ‘meow’?”
I conceded, “Yes, Cat like ‘meow.’?”
“Okay, one minute, please.”
I assumed he was searching to see if they had a student by that name, but, ten minutes later, a young man answered the phone in Arabic.
“Hi, is this… is this Anwar?”
He said in English, “Yes, hi? I’m told someone’s looking for me?” His voice sounded different than I expected. It was rugged, like something was stuck in his throat.
“It’s Cat.”
