Sunday, October 17, 2004
The mansion across the street
had stood empty since the All-Star break, and now it was nearly
time for the World Series. So we
were relieved when a moving truck finally pulled into our
dead-end street, a mile north of downtown Columbus, Ohio. Our
dog, Pudge,
noticed it first—not the truck, but the dog sitting erect
and regal between the two dark men in the front seat. Broad-shouldered
and shaggy as a wolf, the dog was taller when seated than
the
passenger on his right, and just a little shorter than the
driver, who was so lanky that he had to duck his head to
peer under the
sun flap.
Pudge thrust his boxy head through the
porch balusters and barked at the wolf-dog as he would at any
intruder. After the mansion was taken from the previous neighbors—either repossessed by the bank, or seized as part of a meth bust, depending on who you asked—Pudge’s
territory had grown to include not just the brick mansion and
pillared front porch, but also the yard with its bare patches
under pine trees, its sagging white fence, its cracked sidewalk
next to the weed-choked grass along the curb, and even a length
of the street where the moving truck had now pulled up and
stopped.
The cab door opened, and the driver dropped soundlessly to the street. Standing upright, he was as long-limbed as a catalog model, and he was dressed in the fall collection: khaki slacks and a beige corduroy jacket over a matching turtleneck sweater. The fall colors continued into his face and hands, whose skin was tawny as an oak leaf.
The passenger—shorter and darker, wearing jeans and a black leather car coat—jumped down from the far side of the truck and landed heavily on the curb. He fastened the wolf-dog’s leash and led the wolf-dog through the white picket gate into the back yard. Tail high, the wolf-dog trotted imperiously around the inside of the fence fence, sniffed the crabgrass as though sampling the house merlot, and raised its leg approvingly against a white pine near the house’s
foundation.
Pudge’s barking rose to an hysterical
pitch.
“Pudge!” My husband Brad stood up, wiping his hands on his jeans. He’d been stuffing wet maple leaves into a paper yard sack. “Pudge, that’s
enough!”
I leaned forward on the porch swing to
grab Pudge collar. Or I tried to: like an air bag, my pregnant
belly kept me from reaching very far. “Do you want to play?” I asked Pudge. “Do
you want to meet the big doggy dog?”
“Wants to kill him, looks like,” Brad
said.
I stood, then crouched open-kneed to pull
Pudge back from the railing. His nails scrabbled on the concrete. “Don’t listen to Brad. Brad’s
just grouchy because the Red Sox are losing.”
“You call this grouchy?” Brad crimped the mouth of the yard sack. “If the Sox lose again tonight, there are men in Boston who won’t
say a pleasant word until spring.”
“Let’s greet our new neighbors, then.” I led Pudge down the stairs and took Brad’s damp hand. “While there’s
still time.”
Pudge tugged us across the street, and we reached the moving truck just as the tall driver finished raising the door on the cargo bay. The passenger stood in the back yard, making the wolf-dog sit before he opened the gate.
“Hi,” I said. “Need a hand?”
When the driver saw my belly his eyes
widened. He raised his palm. “We are all right.” No one ever
accepts help from a pregnant woman.
“We live across the street,” I said. “I’m
Vickie. This is Brad.”
“I am Faisal.” The tall man shook Brad’s hand and nodded at me. The shorter man closed the yard gate and joined us. “And
this is my brother Samir.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Brad said. “So.
Where you from?”
“Boston,” Faisal said.
“I mean originally.”
I shot Brad a glance, but he wasn’t looking
at me.
“Of course.” Faisal smiled. “We are from
Cairo. But it is seven years since we left.”
“Really?” Brad said. “What brought you
over?”
“We were students,” Faisal said. “I trained
at M.I.T. as a civil engineer. Samir works in computer security.”
Brad nodded. I could see he was about
to ask another question, so I broke in. “I’m a lawyer,” I said. “I work downtown at a family law firm. Brad writes a column for a sports website.” The column was a minor part of Brad’s
job; he spent most of his time managing relationships with
advertisers. But Brad had just started the column, after months
of wheedling his boss, and it was the only aspect of the job
that he wanted to talk about.
Samir scowled. “Web advertising,” he said, as though he knew what Brad really did for a living. “Many
security issues there. Click fraud. Denial of service attacks.”
“That’s right.” Brad nodded, impressed. “You
looking for a job, Samir?”
Samir shook his head irritably. I dug
my nails into Brad’s palm.
“Where do you work, then?” Brad asked.
I interrupted. “Did you say you were from Boston? Brad’s
from Boston, too. Grew up in the western suburbs. Newton.”
“Ah, Newton.” Faisal nodded and smiled broadly, as though the name brought back fond memories. “We
lived more centrally, near Fenway Park.”
“Fenway Park?” Brad brightened. “Are you watching the Sox tonight?” He looked at his watch. “Game
four starts in half an hour.”
“Unfortunately, no.” Faisal said. “Even
were we to unpack our television, our cable service is not
yet active.”
“You can watch with us,” I said. “Come for dinner. We’re having pork chops.” The Muslims exchanged glances, and I felt my face redden. “Or
something else. Pizza?”
“You are very kind,” Faisal smiled again. “But
no. We have much unpacking.”
“Can’t say I blame you for skipping it,” Brad said. “No team’s ever come back from three games down. And with Hernandez pitching, there’s
not much hope, is there?”
Faisal glanced confusedly at me and I
shrugged, giving him permission to smile. “If you say so,” he said. “You
are the expert, Brad.”
Pudge sidled toward the fence, sniffed one of the pickets, and raised his back leg. The wolf-dog snorted and trotted out from under the pine trees, hackles raised, yellow eyes slitted. Pudge dropped his leg and started forward.
“Sit,” I said, and snapped his leash. Pudge lowered his haunches slowly, as though unsure that I could handle the situation. “This is Pudge,” I
told Faisal.
“Budge,” he said.
“No, Pudge.” Brad broke in. “Like
Ivan Rodriguez. But really he’s
named after Carlton Fisk.”
Faisal squinted, confused.
“The catcher,” Brad said. “For the Red Sox. You know. Hit that home run in the ‘75 Series.” When Faisal didn’t answer, Brad went on. “Now Budge—Don Budge—was
a tennis player.”
I broke in. “I always think of his breed.
He is a pug. His name is
Pudge.” I looked down the leash and clucked my tongue. “Isn’t it? Isn’t your name Pudge?” Pudge
stared up at me and panted anxiously. His back legs trembled.
The wolf-dog stood behind the fence and looked entreatingly at
Samir, as though awaiting permission to start on dinner.
Brad nodded toward the wolf-dog. “Impressive specimen,” he said. “What’s
his name?”
Samir turned his head slowly toward Brad. “Beedoos,” he
said.
“Sorry?” Brad asked.
“Virus,” Faisal said. “With a V.” His
teeth buzzed his bottom lip emphatically, as though the letter
took special effort
to pronounce.
Brad said, “Oh. Okay,” which unfortunately
is the signal that releases Pudge from his most-recent command.
Pudge sprang up,
barking, and Virus lunged toward him, snapping, trying to shove
his jaws through the slats of the fence.
“Beedoos! ” Samir shouted a short
command in Arabic, and Virus dropped to the ground. Suddenly
calm, he looked up
at Samir for further instructions.
“Pudge!” Brad said. “We told you to sit!” When
Pudge continued barking, Brad knelt next to him and pressed
his hips to the ground.
But as soon as Brad let go, Pudge stood up and started to bark
again.
“I’m sorry,” I told Faisal and Samir over the barking. “We’d
better go.”
“A pleasure to meet you.” Faisal waited
for Brad to straighten, then shook his hand. I reached for
a handshake, too, but Faisal
simply dropped his hand and nodded.
As I led Pudge back across the street,
I snapped his leash, less for his benefit than to show Faisal
and Samir I was in charge. “What’s wrong with
you?” I said. I climbed the front stairs and let Pudge into the house ahead of me. He ran to the front window and set his paws on the sill. He stared across the street into Virus’ yard,
and let out little wuffing under-barks.
After we’d closed the front door, I turned to Brad. “And you,” I said. “What
was that all about?”
“What?” Brad hung his jacket in the front closet. “What
did I say?”
“You were interrogating them. I half expected you to ask their mother’s
maiden name.”
“Their mother.” Brad started for the back of the house. “That’s
funny.”
I followed him through the dining room
and into the kitchen. “What’s funny? You think they don’t
have a mother?”
“Not the same one.” Brad opened the refrigerator and pulled out a beer. “They
look like brothers to you?”
“They said they were brothers.”
“Samir’s dark and short, with a thick beard, and stubble halfway down his neck. Faisal’s light-skinned, taller than me, looks like he’s
never had to shave in his life.”
“And my sister has bright red hair. They said they
were brothers, Brad.”
“They said they were from Boston, too.” Brad popped the top of the beer can. “But they’d
never heard of Carlton Fisk?”
“Why would they?” I asked. “He hasn’t
played baseball for a million years.”
“Eleven.”
“Whatever. They haven’t been in the country
that long.”
“He’s part of team lore.”
“Maybe they don’t care about baseball,
Brad. Not everyone works for sportfreak.com.”
“So why say they lived near Fenway Park?” Brad
picked up his laptop computer and headed for the TV in the
living room.
“Because they did? ”
“They could say they lived near B.U.
Kenmore Square. Back Bay.”
“Or they could tell the truth, right?” I blocked Brad’s exit at the kitchen doorway. “That they hate America. That they’ve
come to strike at the heart of American power and depravity.
Right here. In Columbus, Ohio.”
Brad shook his head and smiled. But the
smile faded quickly, and he said, “Don’t tell me you didn’t
think about it.”
“No,” I lied.
“Come on. If something happened and the TV news came around, you’d
tell them you never suspected a thing?”
I pantomimed a reporter’s microphone in front of my mouth. “They seemed so quiet,” I said. “They
kept to themselves.”
Brad glanced down, then looked into my
eyes. “Somebody trained
that dog to attack.”
“Or not to,” I said. “At least he’s trained. We can’t
even get Pudge to sit.”
“And that name: Virus. Creepy.”
“Not really,” I said. “Not if his master
works in computer security.”
Brad help up a surrendering palm. “Okay,” he said. “You
win Most Tolerant Spouse.”
“It’s not about that.”
“Can you let me through? The game’ll
start any minute.”
I stepped out of the doorway and let him pass.
He’s not himself, I thought as I got the pork chops out of the refrigerator. He wasn’t himself, and it didn’t have much to do with terrorism—it had to do with baseball. Brad was ebullient, of course, when Boston made the playoffs, but if they’d been knocked out early, say back in August, he probably would have recovered quickly. It was this tension—with the Red Sox almost out, but still clinging to a sliver of hope—it was the tension that set Brad on edge. Maybe that’s
why Boston has so many hospitals.
Maybe they’ll win tonight, I thought. That ought to help. But no, then they’d
still be down three games to one. Winning tonight would only
prolong the agony.
I glanced up to assure myself that Brad
was out of earshot, then told the pork chops what I’d only
then realized.
“I hope they lose.”
Monday-Wednesday, October 18-20
But the Red Sox didn’t lose. Not only did they win game four, on a twelfth-inning home run, but they won game five in extra innings as well. I was asleep before the end of each game, but Brad’s
bellowing from the living room let me know the outcome. On
Tuesday, the Sox led game six from the fourth inning on, and
won four runs to two to force a seventh game.
Wednesday evening, when I came home from work, Brad stood with his back to the television, staring out our tall front windows at the house across the street. Pudge stood next to him, his paws on the windowsill, his ears making soft corners on his head, like a stocking cap.
“Evening, boys.” I hung my coat in the front closet. “Interesting
goings-on chez Virus?”
“That dog is out all the time,” Brad said. “They’ve
tied a rope between those two pine trees, and rigged up a kind
of harness and pulley for him. All he does, all day, is run
along the rope from one tree to the other. He stares through
the side fence, then the back fence. Side, back, side. Patrolling.”
I came over to the window and scratched
Pudge’s head. “Thinks he owns the place, huh?”
“There have been comings and goings all day,” Brad said. “Cable
truck, plumber, electrician.”
“They’re fixing up. Great. That place
has a lot of potential.”
Brad pointed to a white van parked near
the alley. “That van’s been here at least four hours. No markings.”
“A one-man shop making a long service
call. We should get his card.”
He pointed at three sedans along the curb
by the front porch. “Those arrived about thirty minutes ago,
and six Arab men got out.”
“Good,” I said. “Good for them. I’m glad they’ve got friends in the area.” I remembered Faisal nodding at my outstretched hand, as though contact with a Western woman was taboo. I fully expected that every visitor he’d
have, as long as we lived here, would be Arab and male.
Game seven started at 8:30, and it was effectively over by 9:15. Boston opened up a six-run lead in the second inning, and stretched their lead to seven runs in the fourth. Brad sat back on the sofa, open-mouthed, and the break in the tension made me feel very tired. I went to bed at the start of the fifth inning, around ten-thirty, and I was fast asleep when Brad woke me at 12:45.
“Can you help me?” he said. “Please. I can’t
get on to the Internet.”
“Really?” I said without opening my eyes. “Something’s
wrong with the cable?”
“The cable’s fine. I just watched a four-hour
baseball game on cable TV.”
“Good,” I said. “I’m glad you figured that out.” I
sank back toward sleep.
After a moment, Brad repeated, “I can’t
get on the web, Vick. Something happens after the cable comes
into the house. Maybe the splitter, in the basement?”
“You want to go to your office?”
“The office is half an hour away.” When I didn’t answer, Brad continued, “This is a huge story, Vick. The Sox are going to the World Series. They haven’t been there in eighteen years, haven’t won in eighty-six. The Red Sox just beat the Yankees, on Mickey Mantle’s birthday, to cap the most surprising comeback in baseball history.” He paused. “If
my column goes up late, our advertisers are going to notice.”
No, they won’t, I kept myself from saying.
The effort to be polite made me open my eyes.
“Who am I kidding?” Brad said. “Nobody
comes to sportfreak.com for my column. But this is a chance
to change that, Vick. There’ll be thousands of sleepless
Red Sox fans clicking deep into the Web tonight, looking for
a fresh angle, a reason to stay up a little later, a way to
make the glow last.”
And thousands of wives who wish they’d just go to bed. During Brad’s speech, I’d come fully awake and realized that the fastest way to get back to sleep was to help him. I turned on the bedside lamp. “What
do you want me to do?”
“Help me fix it?” The lamp shadowed the furrows in Brad’s forehead. “Go
down to the basement and check the connections.”
“Can’t you? ”
“I’d have to keep running upstairs to
try the laptop.”
Right, I thought, because you need to plug into the router. Eighty dollars. For eighty dollars, we could have bought a wireless connection.
“It’ll go much faster if you help,” Brad
said. “Can
you take your cell phone down to the basement and check the
connections? Call the upstairs phone and keep me posted. I’ll
keep trying the router.”
I stared at the ceiling. The lamp made a little circle of light there, in the darkness. I had just got to sleep half and hour ago, after willing the baby to take his knee out of my bladder. Sleep deprivation. Better get used to it.
It took me a couple of starts to roll
out of bed, but once I did, momentum carried me to my cell
phone on the bedside table and my robe in the closet. I stepped
heavily down the stairs, and when I reached the ground floor
Brad called down to me. “Hon?”
I turned and saw him at the top of the
stairs. My “Yeah?” was all exasperated sigh.
“Thank you. Thank you, sweetheart.”
I nodded. It didn’t seem like much, but as I walked toward the basement stairs I felt a little lighter. The Red Sox were in the World Series, and if that meant a happy husband I was all for it. I dialed upstairs on my cellphone. Brad picked up. “Hello?” he
said.
“You’re welcome.”
“Who is this?” Brad demanded. “Do you
have any idea what time it is?”
I was too groggy to play along. “I’m just
going down into the basement now. Descending, descending. Turning
on the light. Ah.”
Our house is a hundred years old, and
in the basement every year shows. Cold War bomb shelter in
one corner, open toilet and showerhead in the other. Holes
bashed in the interior walls to cram through ductwork and pipes.
It’s a wonder the house is still upright.
“Looks good,” I said. “We should entertain
down here.”
“I’ll send out invitations. Can you find
the cable?”
A cluster of wires ran through the cottony
insulation on the ceiling. I didn’t know what most of them did, but the thick black coaxial cable wasn’t
hard to pick out. It ran from the cinder-block foundation to
the foot of the stairs, then split into two branches. One branch
continued along the ceiling toward the bomb shelter, and the
other branch disappeared into the filthy little crawlspace
under the porch. I peered into the crawlspace and a filmy cobweb
stuck to my nose.
“I don’t know which cable goes to your router,” I said. “But if it’s
the one in the crawlspace you better look for a new line of
work.”
“I’ve thought of opening a check-cashing
franchise.”
“Sounds good,” I backed away from the crawlspace. “Nice
clean work.”
“How’s the splitter?” Brad asked.
“Let me check.” I ran my hand along the
cable and grasped a little brass fastener at the split. Over
the phone, I heard a short bzzt like the touching of
two high-voltage wires. “Hey!” Brad said.
“You’ve got a connection now? I barely touched—”
“Just a second. Okay, okay.” I heard Brad
tapping on his keyboard, then the buzzing sound, again. Bzzt. Bzzt.
After the fourth buzz, Brad said, “Oh,” in a tone of slow wonderment. “Oh.
Shit.”
“What?” I asked.
“No!” More tapping on the keyboard, louder
this time. “Stop! ”
“Brad!” I said. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” Brad said. “Can you come
up here? Fast?”
“You want me to let go of the splitter?”
“Yes. No. It doesn’t matter. Just hurry.”
Hurry is a relative term when you’re seven
months pregnant. I kneed my belly up the basement stairs, going
just slow enough to keep my sore breasts from bouncing. On
the first floor I resisted the urge to stop for breath, and
shoved round the corner to climb to the second floor.
When I arrived, panting, in Brad’s home
office, he was standing at his desk and stuffing his laptop
into his carrying case.
“You’re done?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“What happened?”
Brad zipped the case. “I was in a hurry. When you were messing with the splitter, I saw a message on the screen: ‘A wireless network is in range. Do you wish to connect?’ Lucky break, I thought, and clicked OK. Then it said, ‘Do you wish to upload files,’ and
I said OK again.”
I nodded. “The buzzing sound.”
“Right. Then after the upload started,
I though, wait a minute. Upload which files? Upload them where? I
hadn’t highlighted my column, and selected a connection to the office network. So God knows what files I was giving, and to who. I tried to stop. And you know what? I couldn’t
move the cursor.”
“Like something took over.”
“Oh, yeah,” Brad said. “That computer’s
a zombie now.”
“What are you going to do?”
Brad stood and slung the computer case
over his shoulder. “Get out of range. Go in to the office, I guess. This story is going up way late, though, because I’m not going to connect an infected computer to the office network. Or copy the file over on a thumb drive. I can type the first screenful just by reading it off the screen, but if I still can’t move the cursor I’ll
have to write the rest from scratch.”
I nodded sympathetically.
He started for the stairs. “Then tomorrow I’ll have to show it to our network guy. But he’s such an idiot, I doubt he’s even updated the anti-virus software. This wouldn’t
have happened if he did.”
“Maybe you could show your computer to Samir,” I said. “He’s
in network security.”
Brad turned around, his hand on the banister. “You don’t
get it, Vick. Samir did this.”
“Don’t,” I said. “How could he?”
“He’s got a wireless router, that’s how.
Probably hooked it up today, after the cable truck left.”
“It’s not possible, Brad. Their house
is clear across the street.”
“You think someone closer hooked up a
wireless modem? Maybe Roxie, next door, with her hearing aid
and her walker?”
“But why would Samir care about your column?”
Brad patted the computer case. “All our banking information is on this machine. Balances, passwords, check routing numbers.” He started down the stairs, then stopped halfway down and turned around. “You
should probably get on the phone right now and report our credit
cards stolen.”
I followed him down the stairs and into
the living room. “This is crazy, Brad,” I said. “Sunday they were terrorists. Today they’re
identity thieves?”
“They need identity theft. They
need it for financing, for disguise. You think Faisal and Samir
are their real names?”
“You really believe this?”
“I don’t know.” He opened the front door. “God
damn Red Sox. Even when they win, they give me a heart attack.”
“Honey,” I said firmly. “The Red Sox didn’t infect your computer. They didn’t,
okay? And neither did Samir.”
Brad backed onto the porch and looked
protectively at my belly. He shook his head. “I hope you’re right.” He
climbed down the porch stairs, sat down in his car, and drove
away.
In the yard across the street, harnessed
to the rope between two pine trees, Virus stared blankly at
Brad’s empty parking spot.
Thursday, October 21
One nice thing about Brad: when he’s anxious, he does a ton of housework. Brad didn’t get back from his office until three-thirty, and he was still asleep when I left for work on Thursday morning, but when I turned onto our street at the end of the day, he’d evidently been hard at work. Three yard bags stood on the curb, puffed out with maple leaves. Red Sox pennants flanked our front door and our cast-iron yard gate. In the myrtle by the curb, Brad had erected yard signs for two other not-yet-lost causes: one sign supporting the Kerry/Edwards presidential campaign (“A Stronger America”) and one opposing the proposed same-sex marriage ban (“No On Issue 1”).
The yard signs were for me—a thank-you for my waking up to help him last night, and for my putting up with him, generally, over the past week. Politics is my thing, not Brad’s—my law firm had worked hundreds of pro-bono hours trying to get the gay-marriage ban struck from the ballot. Brad votes the way I do, but he’s about as invested in politics as I am in the Red Sox. If he weren’t from Boston, if he’d
married someone else, he could easily live out in the suburbs
with a Bush/Cheney yard sign.
The signs of Brad’s handiwork continued
into the back yard, where a fresh layer of wood chips had been
poured into the dog run. Pudge galloped through the wood chips
to greet me, a clean Red Sox kerchief tied around his neck.
I let Pudge out of the run, and he trotted ahead of me into the kitchen. His steps were quiet on the tile floor, which meant that his nails had been trimmed. As I hung my coat on the back hook, I heard a vacuum humming upstairs, and I noticed a marvelous homey smell, like cinnamon sticks in hot apple cider.
Pudge noticed the smell, too, and quickly tracked it to its source. He stood on his hind legs next to the oven, nose twitching, front paws balanced on the lowest drawer pull. Above him, next to the stovetop, atop a wire cooling rack, sat a warm apple pie. Strips of golden crust made a lattice over the top, and the mounded apples were dusted with rich brown cinnamon and nutmeg.
Pudge followed me to the foot of the stairs. “Hon?” I called up to the second floor. “This
pie looks amazing. It smells amazing.”
The vacuum shut off, and Brad appeared
at the top of the stairs with the cord bunched in one hand. “Thanks.” He climbed down the stairs, the vacuum bouncing ahead of him. When he reached the bottom, he said, “It’s
not for us, though.”
“It’s not? ” I stuck out my lower
lip, pouting.
“It’s for Faisal and Samir.”
I thought about this for a moment, then
squinted. “Why? ”
“I don’t know.” Brad crouched to wrap the cord around the back of the vacuum cleaner, and didn’t look up at me when he continued. “I
want to get a look inside their house.”
“Brad,” I said, “there’s nothing to see.”
“Then we’re just nice neighbors welcoming
them properly to Columbus.”
“With pie?” I asked. “Nobody does that
anymore. Not in the city. Not even here in the wholesome Midwest.”
“I know that. So do you.” He finished rolling up the vacuum cord, and stood to face me. “But they don’t.”
Pudge trotted away and curled, dejected, in front of the old gas fireplace.
I started to unbutton my peacoat, but
Brad stopped me. “Better keep that on,” he said. “We’ve got
a pie to deliver.”
“We?”
“I was thinking you could carry it. They’ll
be less suspicious if it comes from a woman.”
I sighed and rebuttoned my coat. “I take it your computer’s
definitely infected.”
“Unusable,” he said. “Andrew found a keystroke logger and a routine that transfers new files out at startup. If you don’t start up often enough, there’s
another program that freezes you up and makes you reboot every
couple of days.”
“Andrew found this? Andrew from work?
You said he was an idiot.”
“It’s a well-known attack pattern, he said. I said, if it’s well-known why aren’t
we protected from it? And he said, why was I connecting to
a strange router?”
“Sounds like a productive conversation.”
Brad shook his head. The corners of his
mouth pinched in frustration. “Anyhow, neither one of us was sure he’d
found everything, or cleaned it up thoroughly. So he sent it
out to a specialist.”
“Can you still work at home?”
Brad shrugged. “He gave me a loaner. A guy from Time Warner is coming out tomorrow to look at our connection. If he can fix it, I guess I’m in okay shape for the Series.” He
handed me the pie and ushered me out the door.
Virus’ barking started as soon as we crossed
the street. After four days harnessed to the pine trees, his
possessiveness had turned frantic. He chased us along the fence,
barking and lunging, the harness snapping him back. I found
myself shying off of the sidewalk and walking along the grassy
easement.
We rang the front doorbell. No one answered.
“Maybe they’re not home,” I said.
“Someone’s here.” Brad pointed to the cars parked along the curb: the Oldsmobile and the two Toyotas. “Listen.”
He rang again, and inside someone shouted in Arabic. Feet thumped up a flight of stairs. Finally Faisal opened the door.
“Hi, Faisal!” I said brightly, doing my best to sound wholesome and Midwestern. “How
are you?”
“I am well, thank you.” Faisal glanced
down at the pie, then looked at Brad, questioning.
“It’s for you guys,” Brad said. “We wanted
to welcome you to the neighborhood.”
“Ah,” Faisal said. “Thank you.” He reached toward me hesitantly, as though touching me might burn his fingers. My first impulse was to make things easy for Faisal—just hand the pie over and leave. But Brad wouldn’t
let me hear the end of that. So I restrained myself and kept
the pie pressed close to my belly.
“I am being impolite,” Faisal said. “Please.
Come inside.”
“Thanks,” Brad said, and stepped over
the threshold.
The house was filled with unopened boxes.
Furniture sprouted here and there amid the cardboard. Brad
found a coat rack behind the front door, and hung up his Red
Sox windbreaker to show we’d be staying a while. I started to unbutton my peacoat, then stopped myself. If Brad wanted to make himself at home, fine. But I didn’t
have to play along.
I couldn’t have hung my coat anyway, because all of the hooks were full. Next to Brad’s Red Sox windbreaker hung the corduroy jacket that Faisal had worn the day we met. And on the other hooks were two denim jackets and a trench coat. In the living room, we met the coats’ owners. Three young men—two with mahogany skin and thick beards, one lighter-skinned and balding—sat
hunched around a large set of paper plans unfolded on the coffee
table.
They looked surprised to see us.
“Oh,” I said. “We didn’t know you had
guests. We would have baked two pies instead of one.”
“Brad, Vickie,” said Faisal (again, he worked conspicuously at buzzing the V in my name). “These are Zia, Ulhar, Habib.” Each man stood in turn to shake Brad’s
hand. They all ignored me, and I started to feel annoyed. I
made a mental note to Google how a Western woman should greet
a Muslim man.
Faisal said, “They are helping us with
some work in the basement.”
“Really?” Brad said. “What kind of work?”
I broke in. “These old houses can be so
much trouble.”
“Indeed,” Faisal said. “Yet Victorian
homes have great character.”
“We’re lucky,” I told him. “The owners
before us fully renovated our place. All we had to do was move
in and unpack.”
Faisal didn’t answer, and I wondered if
I had overstepped by suggesting that he would be renovating.
Maybe his guests were just helping with a superficial repair.
“So,” Brad said to the men around the table, “you
guys neighbors? Friends?”
“Relatives,” said one of the darker men, the one with the longer beard—Zia,
I think.
“Habib is an old friend,” Faisal explained. “Zia and Ulhar are Samir’s
cousins.”
“You mean your cousins?” Brad asked.
“Faisal?” I said. “Where shall I set this
pie?”
Brad said, “I’ll take it.” He reached
for the pie without taking his eyes off Faisal.
“It is confusing, I know,” Faisal said. “Samir and I are half-brothers: we share only our father. Zia and Ulhar are from the side of Samir’s
mother.”
Brad nodded and raised the pie. “Should we serve this? I didn’t
expect all of you, but there should be enough to go around.”
Zia and Ulhar looked confused. Faisal exchanged a look with the bald man, Habib.
“It’s still warm…,” Brad cajoled.
“You are very kind,” Faisal said. “And
the pie looks tasty indeed. But it is now Ramadan. We cannot
eat until sundown.”
A flush of embarrassment climbed the back
of my neck. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish we had known.”
“I’ll just set this down into the kitchen,” Brad said. “For
later.”
When Brad left the room, the men looked at Faisal, then at me. I shifted my weight uncomfortably; my swollen ankles were starting to ache.
“Sit down, Vickie,” Faisal said. “Please.”
I lowered myself to the sofa, then looked
up, giving them permission to join me. Instead all the men
remained standing. They smiled and nodded at each other as
though the situation were satisfactorily resolved. I made a
note to Google “Muslim pregnant.”
“So,” I said after a moment’s silence. “Quite
a game last night, huh?”
Ulhar and Habib looked at each other helplessly; Zia shook his head.
“I did not watch,” Faisal said. “But I
am aware of the outcome.”
“Hey.” Brad returned from the kitchen, with a question that he pretended had just occurred to him. “Hey, where’s
Samir?”
Faisal turned to face him. “Samir is in
Boston. Finishing a project for his former employer.”
“Cool,” Brad said. “Who’d he work for?”
“Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” Brad said. “Pie’s in the kitchen. We won’t keep you gentlemen any longer. Pleasure to meet you, Zia, Ulhar, uh…”
“Habib,” said the bald man.
“Of course.”
As we crossed the street back toward our
house, Brad started talking under his breath. “Little alcove off the kitchen,” he said. “Little
alcove with a writing desk, a laptop computer. And a wireless
router.”
“Doesn’t mean a thing,” I said, echoing his conspiratorial tone. “I’d be surprised if a couple of engineers didn’t
have wireless.”
A muffled ring escaped from the pocket
of Brad’s leather jacket. He quickened his pace.
I sped up to keep alongside. “Aren’t you going to answer that?” I
asked.
He stepped onto the sidewalk. The phone rang again, and again. Brad walked briskly past our front gate and into the alley, where he reached into his pocket and pulled out a chunky green cellphone.
“What’s that?” I asked him. The phone
he usually carries is smaller, and black.
“Shhh,” he said. He didn’t answer the phone, but stared at the display screen. “Write
this number down: 617 235-5612.”
“I don’t have a pen,” I said.
“617 235-5612,” he said. “I think that’s in Boston.” He
tucked the phone back in his pocket.
“That’s not your phone,” I said. “Is it?”
He opened the back gate. “I found it in Faisal’s
kitchen.”
“Brad.” I stopped in the alley, then hurried to catch him as he climbed the back stairs. “This has to stop. You have no right to take that man’s
cell phone.”
“It’s just a cheap prepaid thing,” Brad said. “The
kind they sell at that sleazy convenience store on Fifth.”
“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s not
yours.”
“What I mean—” Brad hung his coat on the hooks next to our back door—”is what’s Faisal doing with a phone like this? He’s
an engineer. He should have a sleek gray cellphone that can
navigate the web.”
“Oh, that’s very suspicious.” I
rolled my eyes. “Not conforming to stereotype.”
“Nice thing about these prepaid jobs, though: You can buy them for cash and they’ll never be linked to your name. He can call anyone, say anything. No one will know it’s
him.”
“Maybe it’s not Faisal’s,” I said. “Maybe it’s Zia’s. Or Ulhar’s. Or what’s-his-name’s.”
“Habib’s. What’s the difference, Vick? They’re
all working together.”
“Yes, they are,” I said. “They’re working in Faisal’s
basement.”
“On what?” Brad asked.
“It’s none of our business.”
Brad opened the refrigerator and pulled
out a beer. “You see those plans they were looking at?”
“Sure,” I said. “I mean, not really. I didn’t scrutinize them.”
“What’d they look like to you?”
“I have no idea, Brad. Like plans. Probably for whatever they’re working on in the basement. If it’s anything like our basement, I’d say they’re
closing off the crawlspace, removing the toilet, installing
wall-to-wall carpeting.”
Brad nodded his head skeptically.
“Why?” I asked. “What’d they look like
to you?”
He popped the top of his beer can. “Fenway Park,” he
said.
#
It was a restless night. Since my fifth
month, I’d been getting up every two hours to use the bathroom, and I’d felt chronically overheated in our stuffy bedroom. Ordinarily, I could get back to sleep if I woke up, but tonight I kept thinking about Brad and his stolen cell phone, which since dinner had rung three times from two different numbers in the Boston area. I should steal it back, I told myself. Just slip it out of Brad’s coat pocket, sneak across the street, and place it quietly in Faisal’s mailbox. It all sounded like a great plan, until I realized that I couldn’t
be inconspicuous about it. Virus would be barking the whole
time.
Around midnight I threw off the covers, and at one-thirty I opened both bedroom windows and set up a fan.
It didn’t help. Cooler air poured in, but within ten minutes Virus started barking and whimpering. His harness whirred along the rope between the two pine trees in his back yard. He’d
whirr to the tree near the foundation and whimper, then whirr
to the tree near the back fence and let out three sharp alarm
barks. Whirr. Whimper. Whirr. Bark bark bark.
At the foot of our bed, Pudge snorted. He trotted to the window and began to whine.
“Can we close the window?” Brad asked
with his eyes closed.
“No,” I said. “It’s too stuffy.” I’d been thinking of closing the window myself, but Brad’s
asking made me stubborn. If his stolen cell phone was keeping
me awake, it seemed only fair to keep him awake, too.
“You can sleep this way?” he asked.
“No.”
Brad covered his head with a pillow.
I shut my eyes. Virus’ noises had a sort
of regularity, and I tried to convince myself that they could
be soothing if I tapped into their rhythm and counted. One.
(Whimper. Whirr.) Two. (Bark bark bark.)
When I’d counted to twenty or so, Virus’ rhythm accelerated, and then changed. Less whimpering, more barking. Faster whirrs. Brad pulled the pillow off of his head. “For Christ’s sake, Vickie,” he said. “Can we just close—”
A loud blast swallowed his words. First a crack like wood splintering, then a few seconds of debris pattering the ground, like the afterburst of a firecracker. Our open window shook in its frame.
I didn’t recall getting out of bed, but I found myself standing at our bedroom window. Brad, whom I didn’t
recall getting up either, stood behind me with his hand clutching
my hip protectively.
“Do you see anything?” he asked. “I couldn’t
find my glasses.”
“Sort of,” I said.
There was a four-foot hole in Faisal and
Samir’s basement wall. Large chunks of broken brick and cinder block lay in concentric circles around the foundation, and rubble had leaked through the fence and strewn the sidewalk. A section of the fence around Virus’ yard
had collapsed, the slats broken and splintered as though someone
had kicked them with an impossibly heavy boot.
“I don’t hear any barking,” Brad said.
“The fence is down. Maybe Virus escaped.”
“How could he? He’s chained to those trees.”
“It’s not a chain,” I said. “It’s a rope
harness.”
Pudge started to whimper again. He set his front paws on the windowsill and started to shake.
“I don’t like this,” Brad said. “I’m going
down to check it out.”
“Don’t. ” I grabbed his hand and clutched it to my belly. “It isn’t
safe.”
I had just found Virus. He lay at the
foot of the tree near the broken foundation, still harnessed
to his rope between the trees. He lay on his side as though
he were asleep, but his ribs weren’t moving. A sharp chunk
of cinder block lay on the grass above his muzzle, and the
white fur in front of his ear was stained dark. Behind the
stain was a dent where his skull had caved in. The dent glistened
with blood. Blood, or maybe exposed brain. Not that it made
any difference to Virus.
By now some neighbors had straggled into
the street. Nobody pays attention to sirens in our neighborhood,
and even gunshots get ignored if they’re far enough to the east. But a close-range explosion will get people out of bed. Our next door neighbor, Roxie, wearing a nightgown and a hairnet, had pushed her walker out onto her front porch. Some of the other black families—the ones that lived here before the neighborhood started to turn—walked
cautiously toward the mansion, gawking.
A guy I’d never seen before—white, sixtyish, bald—flipped open a cell phone, and within five minutes a cruiser pulled up in front of Faisal and Samir’s porch. Two young cops climbed out, and Faisal let them in the front door. After a few minutes the street cleared. I lay down on the bed, listening, while Brad sat against the bedroom wall, stroking Pudge’s back protectively. When we heard Faisal’s front door open across the street we sprang up again to watch through the window. I don’t know what we expected to see; only a cliché comes
to mind, the cops shoving Faisal, head lowered, into the back
of their cruiser. Instead, the cops came out alone, and let
themselves out the front gate. One shook his head and smiled
faintly.
I got back into bed, suddenly exhausted. “That’s a relief,” I said. “I’m
glad it was nothing.”
At the window, Brad turned to stare at
me. “Nothing?”
“I guess,” I said. “At least, we don’t
know any different.”
Brad closed the window and got into bed
next to me. He lay on his back. Just as I was drifting off,
he demanded, “How old were those cops?”
I thought about not answering, but if
I fell asleep, he might ask again and wake me. “Twenty-five?”
“At the most.” Brad threw himself onto his side. “Incompetents.
Fresh out of the academy. Who else would work this shift?”
