What We've Lost Is Nothing Read online

  In America, no one had spirit houses and yet people were, for the most part, safe. Even when there were car crashes, Dara knew that Americans believed them to be accidents, rather than from the guiding hand of an angry ancestor. He wanted to believe the way the Americans believed. He wanted to believe his life was wholly under his control. But he’d grown up being told otherwise, believing that spirits were around him all the time, in the tops of trees and the doorways of unprotected homes, in intersections and in lakes and in rivers and in buildings. In cacti and flowers, in rice and wind. The spirits controlled the human world, and the humans had to tend to the needs of those who’d passed into the spirit world. Perhaps Sary was right. Perhaps Neaktu had visited them, taken just a cell phone, just a token, as a cautionary word, a sign to let them know he was unhappy. Be careful. Be cautious. Be mindful. Be warned.

  A coworker nicknamed Grimace walked into the break room and sat at a Formica-topped table just down from theirs. He kept to himself, mostly, but had nodded when he’d walked in. His face carried scars from an earlier life Dara and Sary knew nothing about, scars that had earned him his nickname. He popped open a bag of Doritos. In the quiet room, the sound was oversize. Beige lockers spanning the length of the wall behind Grimace created a tedious backdrop, reminiscent of a kind of industrial incarceration. Grimace pulled a magazine from his back pocket and began to read. Dara saw blond women draped over motorcycles.

  Sary stood to let Dara know their break was over. Her face was tight, furious and sad at once. He’d only seen her that way before when they first learned Dara wouldn’t be allowed to work as a pharmacist in America without redoing school. They didn’t have the money for him to redo school, and even if they had, both Dara and Sary knew it would go toward Sophea’s schooling, not her father’s. But that angry, sad face had been for Dara then, wanting to fight for him, wanting to take on his own disappointment, his own dream of something different and better in a new place. This time was different. This time, Sary’s expression was directed toward Dara. In his lower back and in his knees, he felt the fatigue of standing too long, the weight of what he knew he had to do. For his daughter. For his wife.

  “Okay,” he told Sary. “I’ll try to build something.”

  Chapter 23

  2:16 p.m.

  After she left the Housing Office, Susan sat in her driveway. She knew Michael was at home, and something kept her from wanting to face him. What was it, exactly? His overzealous grasp for power and control? He’d always been that way, someone for whom leadership had been elusive. He’d been passed over as management material his whole career, more times than Susan could count. And even before then, he’d been an average student, an average baseball player, an average runner. In her darker moments, she’d accuse him of being an average father.

  She hated this about him, his averageness. He’d been the antidote to Harley, uncomplicated in the ways Harley was complicated. Michael had been dependable. He’d been there. The problem, she told herself back then, was that dating someone like Harley, who carried a kind of magnetism and darkness inside him, would sap all her energy, eventually (the irony today was not lost on her, that she herself had required so much of his energy). She’d be better off with a Michael McPherson. But she knew now that the very qualities of what made him average cast the burden for everything else onto her. She now saw the eight years they’d waited to marry as a sign she’d overlooked. If you wait so long, there’s a reason. Now, nineteen years and two children later, she knew the truth. It hadn’t been a fullness of commitment; it had been apathy. Only in moments like this, moments when Michael’s yearning to lead, when the disappointments he carried about himself were so blatantly and embarrassingly on display to her, was she reminded of whom she’d really married, whom she’d spent—maybe even wasted—half her life with.

  The burglaries weren’t his fault. Her being temporarily laid off wasn’t his fault. Yet somehow these two events seemed linked to a husband she was eternally, darkly, deeply disappointed in. Which made the weakness, ultimately, hers. After all, she was the one who’d said yes.

  • • •

  Michael was inside the house, sitting at the dining-room table, paper in front of him, pen in hand. Sting wafted from the kitchen radio. Michael’s intention was to write a list of every possible thing he could do, and every possible lead he could offer the police. He’d begun by trying to think of anyone who might have access to their homes, anyone who might know, or be able to gauge, their comings and goings. So far, he had:

  FedEx/UPS deliverymanTelephone companies

  PostmanUtility companies

  Internet companies (?)Taxi drivers

  Dog walkersHoodlums

  GardenersGangs

  BabysittersHandymen

  House sittersAirline reservation agentsMaidsCIA

  Travel agentsFBI

  Then, in tiny script at the bottom of the page, he wrote:

  Etienne?

  Cambodian gang?

  He was just about to write a list of questions when he felt a hand on his shoulder and flew into a momentary spasm.

  “What are you doing here?” It may have come out more harshly than he’d intended.

  “I could ask you the same.” Susan wandered into the kitchen and filled a glass with water from the door of the fridge. She noticed last night’s pizza box still on the counter and felt a surge of rage. He couldn’t even toss out an empty pizza box?

  “Larry thought it might be a good idea to take a little time,” he said, referring to his boss. “To get on top of this thing.”

  On top of this thing. Susan cringed at the description. She knew Larry wouldn’t have said such a thing, wouldn’t have offered time off. The man was monosyllabic, had the personality of a cinder-block wall. Michael must have asked. He must have presented himself as de facto leader of the Ilios unfortunates. Must have convinced Larry that he was the abiding foundation for the collective trauma of Ilios.

  He had called in sick once when he was sure the electric meter was being misread and they were being overcharged. He watched the meter’s numbers every fifteen minutes, created an Excel spreadsheet, typed an angry letter to the electric company, and, at the end of a twenty-four-hour period, realized the bills had been right all along. It wasn’t that Michael was or wasn’t a fighter, Susan often thought; it was that he wasn’t able to pick his battles, which made him less a man formed by justice—as he believed himself to be—and more a man formed by anger.

  She wondered how much time off Larry had given him. She even wondered whether Michael was telling the truth at all.

  “No clients today?” Michael was asking her.

  She gulped down too much water at once and choked half of it out all over the counter. Michael either did not hear, or did not acknowledge her momentary coughing. “There were clients all right,” she said after a moment. “But Evan thought it might be a good idea for me to take some time off, too.”

  “Why?” Michael shouted as if she were two houses down. She hated this about him. The strength of his vocal cords even in his normal speaking voice.

  “Apparently, I’m a bad advertisement for east Oak Park at the moment. My face in the news.”

  “You haven’t even spoken to the reporters.” Michael was taken aback for a moment. He had been the point of contact. His face was all over the news. Susan had merely stood beside him.

  “Well, what can I tell you, Michael? Evan asked me to take a little time off until things die down.”

  “You sound pissed.”

  “I am pissed!” She walked back into the dining room and stood behind a chair across from him. “I mean, what better advertisement than someone who’s been through this kind of thing and still believes in the diversity mission, right?”

  Michael shook his head. He knew it wasn’t her fault, but he couldn’t help but think she’d somehow thwarted
his plan to take action, even if the precise nature of that action eluded him. And this ridiculous idea of diversity. People were people, and someday she’d have to learn that difficult lesson.

  “Anyway . . . ” She rubbed her eyelids. “I guess if you’re home, we won’t have another break-in.”

  Michael slammed his pen on the table. “What in the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  Susan shook her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know where that came from. I was being funny.”

  “No, I don’t think you were, Susan.” He felt the urge to stand up, his muscles tensing.

  “I’m sorry, Michael. I really didn’t mean it.” She’d meant the chances of a second burglary with a second family member home had to be about nil. Though hadn’t she also meant to hurt Michael just a bit, to poke fun at the idea that he could protect any of them from anything? That he could in any way offer help to the police? His ridiculous list?

  Susan’s eyes were mildly bloodshot and she needed some Chap Stick. Michael wondered if she’d been crying, “cracking,” as Mary called it. The two of them had made it their inside joke, but the first time Mary had said it, he’d been there, too, and all three of them had laughed and laughed. Now, it was as if he’d never been in the room. Did they even remember him there?

  “Are you saying the burglaries are somehow my fault?”

  “Michael, of course not. I’m just . . . ” She stole a quick glance at him and then backed up toward the kitchen again. “It was the stress talking. I’m sorry.” She set her glass in the sink and took a deep breath. “I’m going for a run.”

  “Okay, fine, but then we need to do those elimination prints for the police. I’ve asked some of the other neighbors to head over there together later.” He was only half talking to her. He stared at his list, trying to remember what he’d intended to do, before she’d thrown him offtrack, practically accused him of the burglaries. As far as he was concerned, she couldn’t leave the house fast enough.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do the neighbors need to go together? What’s the point?” She was picking a fight, she could feel it in herself and yet she was powerless to stop.

  Michael did stand up this time—and marched into the kitchen. “Because we are a community, Susan. Because we are all in this together.”

  “Fine, Michael. You want to appoint yourself our grand leader, that’s just fine.”

  “What in the hell has gotten into you? You of all people recognize community, don’t you?” He said the word community as if it were toxic. “Neighbors with neighbors. We’re all we’ve got in this thing.”

  Susan held up her hand in what she hoped looked like a truce. But Michael shouted after her as she left, “The police are pretty busy in case you haven’t noticed. Wasserman has a pretty full caseload in case you hadn’t noticed. If we all go together, we’ll save them some time, Susan . . .”

  She knew she was being a bitch. What disturbed her was her complete absence of remorse.

  • • •

  Susan’s runs followed no particular route, though most often she ran west, a fact she’d never once thought about until now. West. Never east. Never toward the ghetto, never even along Austin Boulevard, that arbitrary razor’s edge where safe and unsafe collided in a kind of perceived dark energy. She spent her days trying to convince people that the east side was safe, that the gangs of black teenagers hanging along the cement front porches of brick two-flats and multi-units meant no harm. That the blaring rap music, the laughter of inside jokes, was simply teenagers engaging in teenagedom. Yet, she herself, a Believer in the Cause, in the experiment, in the laboratory that was Oak Park, had never before run east.

  Perhaps this was what had really happened at work that morning, perhaps she’d only mouthed the words all along—equality, diversity. Assurance. Perhaps her coworkers had picked up on some kernel of insincerity in her, some element of hypocrisy far below the surface—so far that she herself was unaware of it. She lived on the east side, yes. In a lovely, two-story foursquare, painted the butternut squash and olive green of a Midwestern fall, on what until yesterday had been a quiet, safe cul-de-sac three full blocks west of Austin. How far, she wondered for the very first time, how far exactly, to the social and prejudicial millimeter, was Three Blocks?

  Susan stretched her calves on the curb. She pulled each leg up to grab hold of her ankle and stretch her quads. If she kept her run relatively short, she’d make it home before Mary returned from school. She rolled her shoulders, reached up toward the clouds, and then down to put her palms on the sidewalk. She stretched and stretched.

  Then she ran east.

  Chapter 24

  2:38 p.m.

  Sofia and Mary Elizabeth sat across from each other in the library during their study hour. Mary Elizabeth had her biology book open to a page on mitosis. When cells divide into two daughter cells, each with the same number and type of chromosome as the parent . . . She wondered if somewhere deep inside it the cell felt pain. Her thoughts circled back to Charles Darwin again, and she searched through the dusty aisles until she found a section of books about him. Mostly, she found the same pictures of him over and over. Darwin in profile, his bushy beard reminding her of a sea sponge. Occasionally he faced forward, and then she could see his gaze, oversize brow shadowing his asymmetrical eyes. He looked sad, in every picture. It wasn’t simply that a photograph seemed never to capture him smiling; it was that he looked downtrodden, as if the idea that so many people disbelieved him had left him shattered. After fifteen minutes, she gave up her search for a smiling Darwin, but that look in his eyes stayed with her. It reminded her a bit of Arthur Gardenia.

  When she got back to the table where Sofia sat before half a dozen books about palm trees, Mary knew she had so much to catch up on with her. Starting with her dad’s knowing they had done ecstasy together and ending with Caz and his promise to meet her after school. Both her parents would be at work, so she and Caz would have the house to themselves until at least five thirty. She could hardly concentrate. Two luxurious hours, maybe a bit more. She had a momentary vision of them, together, in her parents’ bubble bath, Caz slowly washing her hair. Her kinky, curly, terribly embarrassing hair. He would hold it in his hands and it would be shiny and straight and fall in a cottony wave to her shoulder blades. She felt her thighs tingle whenever she thought of it. Caz. In her house. She tried to remember how she’d left her room. Messy? Tidy? Was anything embarrassing on display? A book maybe? Or bad music? Would he ridicule her framed portrait of Man o’ War, or would he understand a girl’s infatuation with horses? (She ought to take the picture down, she thought. Maybe the whole horse thing ought to be over at her age.) What about the color—mostly purple, though lately she’d gotten into black and had even begun working on her mother to let her paint one wall black. She knew if she got her mother on board, her father would be forced to go along. She told her mother that a black wall was a sign of her individualism.

  She began to wonder what Caz’s lips would feel like. Soft? Chapped? She’d been kissed once, in eighth grade, by Jeremy Weiner, but they hadn’t done tongues, and later she found out he’d been put up to it for five bucks from Joshua, Caleb, and Cameron, his three best friends. They’d called themselves—and still did—the Gang of Four. Her shame lasted the rest of the year. She’d wanted to switch schools, but she could think of no compelling argument that would convince her parents. She’d never told them about the kiss. If there was one thing she couldn’t talk to her parents about—and indeed, there were far more than one—it was boys. Sex. Even kissing was out of bounds. She had carried her shame alone, that her one true kiss had required payment (the logical train of thought followed that this was, perhaps, not technically a “true” kiss, but this was even more painful for Mary Elizabeth to admit to herself).

  On this day, though, fifteen-year-old Mary Elizabeth McPherson
still had the illustrious hope of youth, and her hope was that Caz could change everything. She had no misconceptions about becoming his girlfriend. She doubted she’d be that lucky. But maybe she could hold on to him for a couple of weeks. Or even just the rest of this week. Long enough for a few key people in school to see her with him. That’s all it would take to turn everything around for her. Her hip still burned where he’d touched it with his own at lunch. In public. In front of everyone.

  • • •

  Sofia was not interested in sitting with Mary Elizabeth, especially after the accusation of her family’s supposed poverty the night before, but they’d chosen their seats the first day, and now they were stuck with their seating arrangement. She knew Mary Elizabeth would talk to her about Caz, about how they sat so close to each other during lunch. Everyone saw it. You could hardly not see it. Caz was practically on top of her, and her face blushing the entire lunch period. Plus she hadn’t eaten a thing. Caz had scarfed his lunch. If Mary Elizabeth had eaten just half of what was in front of her, her fellow classmates might have believed what they were seeing, might have believed that she had some sort of control in her new dealings with Caz. But, alas, the full plate revealed her insecurity.

  Sofia pretended to concentrate on her book, An Encyclopedia of Cultivated Palms. She had a report due on palm trees by the end of the week—an assignment that she could practically write off the top of her head. She’d been in love with palm trees for all of her life. She used to listen to her mother talk about the palm trees of Cambodia, how green they were, almost iridescent green, an obscene green. Sary talked about the noise of the monsoons, how sometimes you couldn’t hear the person right next to you, how the rain scared her when she was young. But for Sofia, it was the greens of the palm trees she pictured, the endless variety. The tall, tall coconut palms, or the thick-trunked oil palms. There were more than six hundred varieties of climbing palms alone. For Sofia, palm trees had a familiar foreignness to them, she didn’t live among them and never had, yet palm trees were in every picture, every story she’d ever heard, from her parents’ other lives. Once, she read about a rare palm tree called a sangapilla, which had the most beautiful scent in the world. But the closer you got to it, the more the scent disappeared. Sofia loved the idea of something being so lovely from afar, something so determined to be alone and wonderful in the world, something so convinced of its own worth, that its beauty was self-contained.