The Terrorist (14 page)

He was killing time.

Or time was killing him.

December twenty-third was the last half day of school, and classes were thin. Many kids had already left. L.I.A. parents never thought the school calendar meant them. Nobody did any real work. The girls giggled and gossiped while the boys talked about American college basketball.

Laura had gotten excellent at talking softly. “Jehran, what about money? You have to live on something. New York is expensive.”

“I will have ten thousand dollars in my carry-on,” said Jehran.

Ten thousand dollars!

What if somebody went through her luggage and found so much cash? They often opened your bags at luggage checks; that was the point of luggage checks. And whether or not it was against the law to move that much money from country to country, it was certainly odd for an eleven-year-old boy. If the money were found, Laura and Jehran would be questioned, and then would come a phone call to her parents.

“As for living expenses,” said Jehran, “I have removed money from my Swiss bank account and wired it to a new account in New York.”

Laura’s jaw dropped.

“In Billy’s name,” added Jehran.

Would Billy ever love that! Laura hoped it was a million dollars. A million dollars in Billy’s name, straight out of an unnumbered account in Switzerland.

“At the airport,” Jehran said, “you’ll call me Billy, and I’ll behave like your little brother.”

As if the elegant Jehran could ever behave like Billy Williams. Laura said nervously, “Jehran, is Mr. Hollober right? What will your brother really do to you if we get caught?”

“It is in Allah’s hands,” said Jehran calmly. “If Allah wills my safe passage, I shall have it. If Allah does not, I shall not.”

Laura was pretty sure Allah would expect Jehran to obey her brother. That’s what Muslim women did: they obeyed the men in their family. So if it was in Allah’s hands, Laura didn’t see how it was going to work.

It’s in my hands, thought Laura. But should it be?

Jimmy Hopkins woke up in the middle of the night.

It was a horrible awakening: that knife-in-the-heart kind, shakes and sweat from a bad dream.

He was dreaming of Billy’s empty plane seat.

The bedroom was cold. English rooms were always cold. But this time, Jimmy’s insides were cold, too.

He pulled his dream back. He couldn’t always, because waking up shattered the dream, but this time he was able to reach inside and find the edges of his nightmare.

He had dreamed that somebody really was sitting in Billy’s airplane seat.

Rentals in London were furnished. The Williamses’ flat had come with furniture and sheets and television, vases for flowers, and a pencil sharpener. It even came with a maid two mornings a week.

But the flat did not come with Christmas ornaments. The very best were left at Grandma’s: the spun-gold stars, the crystal angels. But Nicole had shipped strings of wooden cranberries, an evergreen forest of candles, and a manger with stacks of sheep.

And, of course, four stockings.

Nicole had gone through a cross-stitch stage the year Billy was born, embroidering four glorious stockings with kings and stars and sweet new babies on hay.

Filling stockings was a family activity. The Williamses had never gotten into the Santa Claus thing. Even when they were toddlers, neither Billy nor Laura expected a Santa.
They
were Santa. Each Williams was on the look out for things that were small and just right. Secret purchases were year-round.

Laura had found stocking presents for Billy ages ago: a miniature license plate with the name of their Underground Line, the Jubilee; a savings bank shaped like an old-fashioned red London phone booth; a collection of foreign change: Israeli shekels, Norwegian kroner, Italian lire.

She knew what Billy had gotten for her, too, because Billy was always so excited by his brilliant purchase, he’d have to get up in the night and show her.

On Christmas Eve, the Williamses went to church. Laura felt as if she were watching rituals performed by aliens from particularly strange planets. “How are we supposed to rejoice over this little boy being born when our little boy died?”

“The point is Easter, not Christmas,” said her mother. “Jesus rose from the dead. And Billy, too.”

Laura wanted so desperately to believe Billy still existed that the idea reversed itself and became idiocy. Quadrillions of people had died over the ages. Was there really some acreage where those souls hung out?

Anyway, she wanted to know what good it was to have your brother get eternal life if he got it somewhere else?

They drove home in silence. They trekked upstairs. Inside the flat, Nicole’s attempts at Christmas decorating seemed obscene.

Laura gasped, shocked.

From the mantel hung four stockings. All four bulged.

At the wrong time, in the wrong place, had Santa suddenly shown up?

“I wanted to use Billy’s stocking, too,” said Nicole. Her words came out in jerks and pieces. “I found your stocking pile, Laura, and I found his, and I divided them up the way it looked right.” She began to cry. “But it doesn’t look right.”

No. It didn’t look right.

Nobody wanted to be in the same room with the stockings, and Laura knew that she wouldn’t touch her stocking in the morning either.

Thomas stacked Christmas CDs to play all night long, and all night long, Laura listened to harps plucking and choirs singing and organs playing.

“So, God?” said Laura around two in the morning. She’d listened to so many carols about His baby being born, she felt He must be here. “So how come you’re such a meanie?”

Her father heard her yelling at God. He came and sat on the edge of her bed. He looked young in pajamas, his thinning hair sticking up. “God wasn’t a meanie, Laura. The terrorist was.”

“But Daddy, why didn’t God stop him?”

“Only other people can stop evil people.”

“But we didn’t know evil was coming. How were we supposed to stop it?”

“I don’t know, sweetie. I guess …” He struggled with it. Laura hated to see her father struggle, as if he too were young and without answers. “I guess our job, as good people, is to try to stop evil where we do see it.”

And was it evil for different countries to have different customs? Was it evil for Laura to interfere in Jehran’s family decisions? Would it be evil if she did not?

On so many Christmas Eves, neither Laura nor Billy could fall asleep. The excitement of unknown gifts! The tension of waiting, and hoping hoping hoping to get wonderful, amazing things.

Now she was old and crushed, and who cared what was under the tree?

At three in the morning, hearing her parents mumbling, Laura got up. The carpeting padded her bare feet. She moved toward their closed door.

“I don’t want her to go on this Edinburgh trip,” said her mother.

Laura ceased to move.

“Nicky,” said Laura’s rather, “she needs a breather. She needs to be a regular teenage girl for a few days, instead of a professional mourner. She needs to be away from us touching Billy’s things and staring at Billy’s empty chair. She needs some sort of Christmas. Some sort of celebration. I guess Edinburgh is it.”

Laura could hear the irregular breathing of people trying not to cry. People who had cried enough and were teaching themselves to un-cry.

“But what if something happens to Laura?” Her mother’s voice was a weeping heart.

“Nothing will happen.”

“Thomas, I can’t stand it! I could not live through it!
I cannot lose my other child
.”

Laura slid back to her room.

Don’t take this one, too!
Nicole was crying to a Fate that put her son in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Laura had been looking through broken glass. Now she saw the whole. Her mother and father needed her.

I will give Jehran Billy’s final gift, Laura Williams decided, and then I will tell Mom and Dad that it’s time to go home, whether they think so or not. They’ll give in to me, and once we’re home, we’ll heal.

They were beautiful words.

Home.

Heal.

Billy would say, Go for it.

Go home, he’d say. I’m okay.

J
EHRAN WAS STUNNING IN
a scarlet wool ankle-length coat. Her black hair had been woven to the side, the single braid a thick and glossy rope. Black suede gloves with lacy cutouts covered her hands, and black suede boots trimmed in braid gave her another three inches of height. From her shoulder hung a smart leather carry-on, swollen with possessions. She quite literally looked like a million dollars.

“
Where have you been?
” hissed Laura. “
I’ve been waiting half an hour
.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Jehran, embracing Laura first on one cheek, then the other. In her most clipped British accent, she explained, “My brother was difficult. He not only drove me to St. Pancras himself, but wanted to come in and hand me over personally to Mr. Hollober.”

That would have been fatal. They had, of course, never handed in their permission slips. Mr. Hollober was not expecting them.

“However,” said Jehran, “there was too much traffic, and the police wouldn’t permit my brother to leave the car, so I bade him good-bye and hurried into the station by myself.”

“Did anybody see you?” demanded Laura.

If anybody actually going to Edinburgh, like Con or Jimmy, had seen Jehran, they would have run over to say hi and want to know where she was going, looking so fantastic, and Con would have exclaimed over the carry-on—more lies; more time wasted.

Jehran shook her head. “I walked straight out the opposite door and came here.”

London, whose train stations were numerous, had another train station right next door—Euston. Here Laura and Jehran would take a taxi to Heathrow Airport.

Laura tried to calm down. The first hurdle was over. The second hurdle was to change Jehran into Billy.

In the ladies’ room (the British used no euphemism; it was simply “toilet”), the girls entered the same stall.

Laura had two bags: her plain blue canvas gym tote and a very large opaque plastic bag from a dress shop. Joanna, it said in curly letters. The Joanna bag originally contained beautiful sweaters Nicole had bought before she understood the exchange rate. After Nicole grasped how many dollars she’d actually spent, the sweaters horrified her.

Laura’s mother had been almost chipper that morning. The nightmare of Christmas over, Nicole even managed a good-bye kiss and a smile. “You have a wonderful time,” she said, and Laura had never loved her mother more: Nicole really wanting Laura to have a good time; really believing that Laura was going to hike the streets of Edinburgh, tour a castle, listen to a bagpipe.

Nothing can go wrong for me, Laura told herself. The only things that can go wrong would go wrong for Jehran.

Jehran dumped the contents in Laura’s arms and then stuffed her red coat into the Joanna bag. Under such a coat you would expect a fine suit or beautiful dress. No. Jehran had loose, faded blue jeans rolled above her knees, and a faded Mickey Mouse grinned joyfully from a sagging T-shirt. Jehran yanked off her boots, jammed them into the bag, and rolled her jeans legs down. She put on a pair of Billy’s sneakers, ruined by London puddles.

Laura took nail polish remover from the makeup kit in her gym bag, and they removed Jehran’s layers of vermilion polish. The little stall stank of acetone. Jehran clipped her nails down to the quick, like a nail-biting kid.

Around them, toilets flushed and hands were washed, women rushing between commute and work.

Laura’s fanny pack held three sets of plane tickets: hers and “Billy’s” for this morning’s flight, with the returns in seven days, as if they really were going to visit their grandmother; and Laura’s real return ticket, for this evening. She had bought that at a much nicer agency, and nobody’d paid any attention to her. Next to the tickets were two passports. Laura opened them to check that she really had her own and she really had Billy’s.

She did.

She also had her mother’s kitchen shears.

“Are you sure?” said Laura. It took so long to grow hair! This was Jehran’s glory. “Jehran, we could still back out.”

“
Billy,
” corrected Jehran in a sharp whisper. Jehran handed Laura her hair, holding the fat braid rigidly from the side of her head. “I’m ready,” said Jehran, and the Euro-smile briefly crossed her lips: that I-know-more-than-you-do smile.

The braid was thick, and the scissors dull. Laura hacked at it. It felt as if she were amputating an arm. When the foot-long braid finally came off, Jehran held it aloft, the little smile hot with triumph. Without a glimmer of regret, she dropped her hair into the Joanna bag.

“Sit on the toilet rim,” whispered Laura. Standing above Jehran, she tried her best to trim the stubble of Jehran’s straight black hair. Then, she took out Billy’s beloved Red Sox baseball cap.

Billy had been an ardent Red Sox fan. Sometimes Billy had lived in this cap for weeks at a stretch. Back home, he and Daddy went to Fenway Park and cheered for a team that Billy used to say was not going to get a pennant in his lifetime …

… and it hadn’t.

What if Daddy needed this cap, to turn around and around in his hands, and remember his son by?

Jehran took the cap, not knowing its meaning (what non-American could ever know the meaning? Laura was overwhelmed by all that Jehran would have to learn; afraid for her, filled with admiration for her) and jammed it down over the raw-cut hair.

It worked.

There was nothing like a baseball cap for turning you into a disheveled little boy.

They waited for a moment until nobody was washing hands, left the stall, and stuffed the Joanna bag into the big trash container. Laura dropped the shears in, too, because they would set off metal detectors at the airport.

Jehran shrugged into Laura’s old denim jacket and slung her magnificent leather bag over her shoulder.

“Nope,” said Laura, almost grinning. “No eleven-year-old boy from Boston would have that kind of bag. We’ll switch. I’ll carry that, and you’ll take my gym bag.”