What We've Lost Is Nothing Read online

  Chapter 12

  8:00–9:54 p.m.

  Dara and Sary sat straight-backed and hip-to-hip on a puffy suede love seat. Sary’s toes barely reached the floor. Their daughter, Sofia, sat at their feet on the floor, resting against an arm of the chair. Americans had such big furniture, like clouds. It swallowed you. Fingerprint dust floated in the air, glittering in the gentle glow of floor lamps. It seemed as if everything were softer in America: towels, toilet paper, sofas, grass, motorcycle seats, beds, clothing, sponges, hair, cattle, people. Except the voices. ­Americans spoke, she thought, as if in competition with a wall of blaring ­speakers; even all these years later, it seemed to her their primary mode of conver­sation was the yell. When Sary had first moved to Oak Park, she was unnerved by the quiet of the streets. So few people outside.

  In Phnom Penh, the noise was everywhere. You were never alone. But Americans thrived on solitary lives, it seemed to her. They chose to be alone, all the middle-aged, unmarried people, the young girls who put off marriage indefinitely. She couldn’t understand what existed inside someone who could live that way, live without others.

  “I believe it would make Detective Wasserman’s job a whole lot easier if we formed a communication channel,” Michael McPherson announced. “The point man, so to speak. He won’t have to update all of us all the time if, say, he updates me and then I update all of you.”

  Several heads nodded in agreement.

  This was the first time Dara and Sary had been in the McPhersons’ house, or any of their neighbors’ homes. A faint floral scent was in the air, with a dusty overlay, Sary thought. The room seemed too full. Maybe that was the key to understanding how Americans lived; they filled their homes with furniture, rather than people. In Cambodia, it was just the opposite.

  Not understanding much of the proceedings and with Sofia serving as a lackluster translator, Sary took to counting the family pictures in the living room. Moi, pbee, pbai, pbooun, bpram . . . There were ten, she thought . . . maybe eleven or twelve. She couldn’t quite tell with Arthur Gardenia’s head in the way. It seemed strange to have so many pictures all in one room yet none showing the family in formal attire. One shot captured Mary jumping in the air, her legs splayed in a split, her arms spread toward the sky in a V. Sary found herself embarrassed for Mary; she couldn’t understand how Mary’s parents had allowed her in such a pose. Sofia had assured Sary and Dara that cheerleading was a normal American-girl thing to do. But given what Sary now knew about her daughter’s whereabouts that afternoon, she was beginning to wonder if Sofia was as honest as she and Dara had always assumed.

  Sary studied the other photos. In one Mary was sitting beside her mother in the grass. Why the grass? Didn’t they soil their clothing? Sary wondered. A large photo next to it showed Michael and Susan on a boat wearing sunglasses, their hair blowing wildly in the wind. Michael was dressed in shorts, and Sary could even make out the hair on his legs. Everyone who came into the McPherson house would see them at their worst . . . hair disheveled, full of silly grins and skimpy, soiled clothes.

  “Mama.” Sofia was touching Sary’s calf and said in Khmer, “Mr. McPherson wants to make a list of everything that was stolen from our houses.”

  “Why?” Dara asked.

  “We have paper here,” Susan said, offering ballpoint pens to Helen Pappalardo and Sofia. Michael leaned down and whispered to Susan, glancing once toward Arthur. “Or, I can just write it all down here,” Susan said, holding up a notebook.

  Everyone kept their shoes on, Sary noticed, even Susan and Michael. It had taken Dara more than a year to convince Sary that she mustn’t take off her shoes when visiting American homes. Sary wiggled her toes. They felt constricted. So unsanitary. All the dirt from the outside world coming to the inside. Yet, American homes were mysteriously clean and free of this dirt.

  “We’ll make a copy for all of you and you can carry it around. Say you’re at a garage sale, you might come across something, and you’ll have the list to cross-check,” Michael said to the group. “My golf clubs were taken. They’d be the sort of thing you might come across.”

  “A garage sale, Dad?” Mary said.

  Susan shushed her daughter, mumbled something encouraging about garage-sale season approaching.

  Michael cleared his throat. “Were you able to explain to your parents?” he asked Sofia. “Just in case they don’t understand. We want transparency here.”

  “Definitely, yes, Mr. McPherson. I told them.”

  “Tell him my hand phone was taken,” Sary whispered to Sofia. Sary wasn’t sure why she was whispering. Something about the moment seemed to call for it

  “My mother’s cell phone was stolen,” Sofia told the group.

  Michael McPherson nodded sagely to Susan, who wrote it down in the spiral notebook on her lap. She sat in the other overstuffed, beige suede chair, her legs crossed like a yogi. At the top of the page, she’d written Stolen Items. Under Cambodian Family, she wrote cell phone.

  “Okay,” said Michael. “And?”

  “And what?” Sofia asked.

  “What else?” He glanced quickly, around the room. Sofia’s cousin, of course, had not come.

  “Oh, just her cell phone. That’s it.”

  Helen Pappalardo, in the small foursquare house beside the McPhersons’, let out a tiny gasp. Aldrin Rutherford, Craftsman bungalow between the Kowalskis and Étienne Lenoir, who’d had bicycles and power tools stolen, among other items, suddenly perked up.

  Michael took his hand out of his pants pocket, where he’d been diddling with a pocketknife on a tiny keychain, weaving it through his fingers. “Your mother’s phone? That’s all they took?”

  Sofia nodded. So did Dara, though he wasn’t entirely sure what he was nodding for.

  “They don’t have anything to steal, Dad,” Mary said.

  Sofia turned sharply toward her. “Shut up. We do so!”

  “Well, not really, you don’t,” Mary said sheepishly. “Like, no offense. You’re lucky!”

  “What do you know?” Sofia shot back. “We have lots of stuff. We have loads of money in the bank. Loads! You don’t even know!”

  Dara touched his daughter’s shoulder. He may not have understood her words, but he certainly understood her tone of voice and body language, and he frowned on such public displays. Sary reddened.

  “Girls!” Michael McPherson yelled, making all of them jump. “This is not the time and place.”

  “But, Dad, I was just saying maybe they were, like, lucky in a way to be poor.”

  “We’re not poor,” Sofia said. Her parents had told her recently that they had enough money to send her to a university that wasn’t even a state school. If she did well in high school, she could go to just about any college she wanted.

  Mary leaned toward her. “It’s okay that you’re poor.”

  “We’re not poor!”

  Both Sofia’s parents worked at FedEx, the 7:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. shift. They worked all the American holidays (they also worked the Cambodian holidays, of course), and they never turned down overtime. They put boxes on conveyor belts and took boxes off conveyor belts and saved every penny they possibly could.

  “You’re sort of poor,” Mary said, wanting her friend to understand that it was okay, that she didn’t think anything differently of Sofia.

  “That’s enough, girls!” Michael McPherson said, but he realized in that moment that he was staring in the face of his daughter’s infamous accomplice, a certain Sofia Oum. He should have known, given who her relatives appeared to be. What other secrets, he wondered, did that quiet girl have?

  Chapter 13

  8:00–9:54 p.m.

  As Arthur sat on the McPhersons’ couch, his photochromatic lenses cut into the bridge of his nose, a tiny line of sweat forming in the indentation. The lenses felt heavy and claustrophobic over his eyes, a
nd he found it difficult to concentrate on what Michael McPherson was saying. Arthur had long believed deep down—though no doctors had confirmed it—that he would someday go completely blind. He didn’t know how he had come to this knowledge, but he’d grown to accept it. In a strange way, his disability was not a bad one to have . . . he could don his glasses and to some degree see in black-and-white whenever he wanted to. But total blindness. Blindness without any hope of reversal? That was something different altogether. He decided that if he lived his life now, when he could still sometimes see, then maybe when the day finally came, he wouldn’t feel such misery. If he took the pain, the despondency, in tiny medicinal doses, then he was placing a bet on his own emotional resilience. Keeping at bay the magnificent ­sorrow that threatened him.

  When the college offered him disability pay, he had no choice but to take it immediately. He stopped driving. He hired people to help him maintain his life.

  It had been his intention to hire Mary to come and clean his house, give her a little pocket money. She’d be far less expensive than his cleaning service. But after a few weeks, he’d discovered that Mary had a most extraordinary voice. Soft, young, calming in a way that he couldn’t quite ever remember in any other voices from his life. A soft vibrato emanated from the back of her throat as she spoke, a shaky undertone of vulnerability, the eternal teenage search for one’s place in the world. So he began to ask her to read to him, and then he began to tape-record her reading to him.

  They read upstairs, in his office, he in his worn leather chair, while she sat at his desk, the small, green library lamp aimed directly at the book so it wouldn’t hurt his eyes. Arthur hoped she’d forget he was there, sometimes, and get lost in the words as he did.

  “There is a housing project standing now where the house in which we grew up once stood,” she read not long ago—part of a weeks-long Baldwin kick he’d put her on, “and one of those stunted city trees is snarling where our doorway used to be. This is on the rehabilitated side of the avenue. The other side of the avenue—for progress takes time—has not been rehabilitated yet and it looks exactly like it looked in the days when we sat with our noses pressed against the windowpane, longing to be allowed to go ‘across the street.’”

  She’d looked up and laughed for a minute, asked Arthur when it had been written.

  “Early sixties, late fifties,” Arthur’d said. “I can’t quite remember.”

  “It’s so funny, about all this historical stuff.”

  To Arthur, of course, it wasn’t history. It was life, it was his youth, and it was beginning to feel like yesterday, as is so often the case with aging. The further away we get in years, the closer it marches in memory.

  “What’s funny?” he asked her, sitting up, but covering his eyes with his palm. She switched off the light so that they sat in darkness—an act that had become a habit for her. They spoke, so often now, in darkness.

  “It’s like this dude could have written it today. About Austin Boulevard.”

  “What do you know about Austin?”

  “Are you kidding me, Arthur? My mom never shuts up about Austin Boulevard.” Her chair squeaked, the roller wheels skidding on the floor’s plastic protector as she pushed her seat into and out of the desk—a habit that Arthur tolerated.

  Mary was used to talking in the darkness, though she knew if she ever told her friends that she spent her free time sitting in the dark with an old man, no one would understand. It was odd, she knew. But it was comfortable, too. As if she were alone, but not alone, and though she didn’t have the words to describe it, she recognized the rarity of those afternoons all the same. At first she’d thought she was just doing a good deed, like the kind teenage girl in the movies who befriends the lonely old man, but after a few weeks, Mary wasn’t sure that it wasn’t the other way round, the kind old man befriending the lonely teenager. Ultimately she just really liked hanging out at Arthur’s house, where she could ask questions without feeling stupid, and where she could curse without being told off, and she could even move things around downstairs because he’d never know the difference, and so she came to feel quite at home, sometimes more at home in his house than in her own.

  “My mom talks about the lady who started the Housing Office like she’s freaking Gandhi,” Mary said. “She had death threats and all that from the Ku Klux Klan. I think her kid maybe had a

  bodyguard to walk to school and stuff.” Mary herself walked to school. She wondered what it would be like to have to walk between two giant musclemen just so you’d be safe. What about all the other kids? Would the bodyguards have to sit in class, too? Would they have to go to the bathroom with you? Mary wondered if the kid had been popular or outcast, celebrated or shunned.

  “It’s funny,” Mary said. “I wonder how that family would answer your question, Arthur. About the worst thing that ever happened to them?”

  Arthur murmured a kind of hmmmm. He’d never thought much about the historical dimensions of his theory, people for whom life—he naturally assumed—was far more difficult than in the ­present.

  “I mean, that lady who started the Housing Office? She’d probably say that the worst thing that ever happened to her was like being almost murdered, or having her family almost murdered. I mean, apart from actually being murdered, that’s pretty bad.”

  “Yes.”

  “So she could have given you an answer in like a second, right? But she did it anyway, sent her kid to the same school with the bodyguard, and kept working on opening the Housing Office. She could have moved away. Or at least stopped, and the worst thing to happen to her would be over instantly and her kid would have been safe.”

  “We can assume.”

  “It’s weird.”

  “What?”

  “She just kept on doing it.”

  Arthur smiled.

  “I wonder if I’d do that, Arthur? Keep going even with all the danger, even if it could kill me? Or kill the people I loved?”

  Arthur wanted to answer her, wanted to give her a short, sharp sentence that would stay with her for always. But nothing came to mind. This was what happened in real life. Words failed you in the moment. People failed you. The world failed you.

  Mary tugged the chain and the lamp came back on. “. . . These two,” she read, “I imagine, could tell a long tale if they would (perhaps they would be glad to if they could), having watched so many, for so long, struggling in the fishhooks, the barbed wire, of this avenue. . . .”

  • • •

  At the McPhersons’ meeting, Helen Pappalardo—in bright pedal pushers and a dark sweatshirt from Northern Illinois University, her alma mater—sat next to Arthur. She’d been jotting down the missing items as they were listed:

  Motorola cell phone

  Xbox

  Dell laptop

  IBM laptop

  Panasonic DVD player

  Griffin speakers

  golf clubs

  jewelry box

  pen set

  hand-crank radio

  Bosch headphones

  Samsung DVD player

  Canon all-in-one printer

  silver dollar coins in bank

  electric drill

  television

  GE answering machine

  paperweight globe

  Griffin voice recorder

  BlackBerry (2)

  checkbook (US bank)

  Moleskine notebooks

  Hewlett-Packard printer

  Epson printer

  Epson scanner

  Canon digital camera (2)

  Canon video recorder

  bicycles (2)

  lawn edger

  laser pointer

  iPods (multiple)

  liquor (liquor???)

  “Look, this is obviously a difficult time for all of us,” Michael said.
“The vulnerability, the fear. I know I’m scared. For my family. For those I love. I believe now is one of those moments where life really tests you. When you become one of those people in the stories we’ve all seen. You know the ones. Where what you think can never happen to you suddenly does. And we have to stick together here in this. Be a united front.”

  Michael let the thought dangle in the air for a moment. It felt like the end of the meeting.

  Dara nodded and stood, said a halting “Thank you” in quiet English.

  “Well, then,” Arthur began, but then he wasn’t sure what else to say. The meeting was clearly over. Lists had been made, suggestions for action, but the stinging quiet of the moment said what none of them could quite articulate: there was nothing to be done. They had been violated, invaded, they had suffered losses of a material nature that did not feel material at all, somehow. Why was everyone saying how lucky they were when they felt the exact opposite of lucky? Lucky would be to have not been burgled at all, to have not been forced into this uncomfortable ad hoc alliance. Soon, they would return to the normal obligations of life: work, school, errands and chores, the making of meals and the filling of gas tanks, the filing of papers and washing of sheets. All of it happening with perhaps the only sign that anything at all was amiss was an unusual quiet, a ­stillness in the way they’d move, in the way they’d answer their phones or walk down the corridors of their fluorescent-lit offices. “Before we go, I think the question ought to be asked,” Arthur said.

  Michael’s head jerked back in surprise. Besides listing what had been taken from his house, Arthur hadn’t spoken at all. “What question? I don’t think we overlooked anything.”

  “Has anyone . . .” Arthur struggled to get the words out, to get them just right. “Is there a reason someone would do this? Have we any known enemies?”

  The room went silent. Dara touched his daughter’s elbow to translate. No one met anyone else’s gaze.

  “Let’s not—” Michael started to say.

  “He means did any of us, like, really super piss off someone?” Mary said.