The Terrorist (3 page)

Laura’s clothing shivered on top of her skin.

Billy took the Underground.

Billy could be such a jerk. He liked to play with the car doors. He’d stick his head out, or his foot, and yank himself back in the nick of time. Laura was always yelling at him.

But of course it couldn’t be Billy, because Billy was the kind of person who survived. Billy would always land on his feet.

Andrew saw Laura first, and turned toward her, his eyes bright and shocked.

Jehran tagged a policeman’s arm, and pointed at Laura.

Mohammed and Con and Bethany shifted to face in Laura’s direction. Her math teacher looked up and stared at her.

It seemed to Laura that all those people swung toward her, as if attached in a chorus line. As if her own foot, leaving the bus, landing on the pavement, signaled them.

She let go of her book bag. She held up her palm to stop bad news as if it were traffic.

Beneath her, London swayed: a tube train passed below her feet like an aftershock

“No,” said Laura Williams, trying to get back on the bus. Trying to go back in time. “No. Not Billy.”

L
AURA HAD BEEN CRYING
so much, her face was as swollen as if she’d walked into a beehive. Her eyes were nearly puffed shut, and her fair complexion was mottled and patchy.

It was Laura who had been talking to the police; Laura who had been phoning everywhere for her father, and not found him.

I’m sixteen, thought Laura. In America, I lived in a little white house with a picket fence and maple trees. I lived in the same town where Louisa May Alcott grew up. I’ve never had a drink except Coca-Cola. I’ve never tried a cigarette. I’m ordinary. I’m the most ordinary American there is. And my very own brother has just been killed by terrorists.

Billy had forgotten to take his lunch. It rested on the kitchen counter in the Williamses’ flat. The peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich was in its plastic bag, cut into triangles and not squares, the way Billy required. It was made of the only peanut butter Billy would eat: crunchy Jif, mailed by Grandma every month. Welch’s grape jelly was mailed in the same package, because if you asked for grape jelly in England, they looked at you as if you wanted jelly made from locusts or pizza. They would tempt you with their designer marmalade and their strawberry jam with Cointreau, but Billy wanted only Welch’s grape jelly with the cartoon glass.

He would never eat that lunch.

He would never finish up the grape jelly so he could drink from the Tom and Jerry glass.

The flat was full of people. A horde of Englishmen filled her home. Laura’s mother had come back from her volunteer morning at the Royal Free Hospital and found them there: Laura and the police.

But no Billy.

Never again Billy.

Her mother’s pixie face was twisted like paper crushed in your hand to throw in the trash. “I want to see my son,” she said over and over.

They said it would be better not to see Billy. There wasn’t much to see. Just bits and pieces.

Laura wanted to scream. She could even hear her scream, the huge ripping violence of her own noise, but she did not scream. She wanted to pick up candlesticks and library books and cans of tomato sauce and throw them at these intruders. But she sat quietly with her arm around her mother.

“Who are all these people?” asked her mother. Her mother had become dim, like a bulb going out. They kept covering the same topics, but it didn’t stick and shortly, Mom would ask again.

“Everybody,” Laura said. “Scotland Yard, Scotland Yard’s antiterrorist squad, the Metropolitan Police, representatives from the American Embassy, and faculty from the school.”

Her mother said, “Please leave my flat.” She even remembered to say “flat” and not “apartment.” But nobody left.

“Laura, where is Daddy?” said her mother. And to the strangers, “Where is my husband? Where did he go? Why isn’t he here?” And to herself, “Thomas? Thomas?” as if he were hidden by the Englishmen pacing in her living room.

“We can’t find him, Mom. He’s on the road somewhere.”

Dad might not get home till six, or seven, or even eight. Laura looked at her watch. Her father had gotten her the watch as a moving-to-London present. Bribe, actually, to make her cooperate. Laura had not wanted to come. “Miss my junior year?” she had shrieked back there in Massachusetts. “Leave my friends? Never! I won’t! You can’t do this to me!”

The watch had tiny setting moons and suns that rotated around the clock face, like signposts to an antique world.

If I had thrown enough tantrums, she thought, maybe we would have stayed in Massachusetts, and Billy would still be alive.

It ticked like a bomb inside her heart:
we didn’t have to come.

“Don’t put it over the radio,” her mother begged the police for the tenth time. “Thomas listens to the radio when he drives. You can’t let him hear it over the radio.”

They promised that Billy’s name would not be broadcast, but the news of an American child’s death had been on the air since ten o’clock that morning.

Daddy’s going to hear it, thought Laura dully.
Eleven-year-old boy from London International Academy killed by package bomb.
He’ll hear it and he’ll say to himself,
Don’t worry, it can’t be my son.
And he’ll drive a little farther, and he’ll be furious with himself for not taking the cellular phone on this trip—he left it accidentally in Darlington; they’ve got it right there—and he’ll stop to use a public phone, and he’ll say to Mom, all casual, “
Nicole, honey? Um … Billy have a good day?
” He’ll be holding his breath, but he won’t make a big deal of it, because it can’t be Billy.

It’s Billy.

“Laura, we have a policewoman to sit with your mother for a moment. Would you find us a photograph of your brother, please?”

The photograph albums had been left in America. They were wrapped in an old sheet and tucked carefully in Grandma’s attic. But school pictures had just been done at L.I.A. Laura brought an uncut sheet to the police.

Billy was handsome. Dark floppy hair over a smooth, tan face, much darker in complexion than anybody else in the family. His easy wide American grin showed perfect white American teeth that were not going to need braces. For his school portrait, he’d worn a white sweatshirt with the school logo: a map of the worlds—scarlet land on blue seas. Behind Billy, the sky was as blue and clear as Arizona, which puzzled the police; London did not have skies like that. “It’s a backdrop,” said Laura. “They always use that fake sky backdrop for school pictures.”

Back home, like millions of American households, the Williamses had had an entire wall of school pictures with the same gaudy fake blue sky. Laura and Billy in kindergarten, first, second, and so on. “You pay fifteen ninety-five for a pack,” said Laura, “because you want to trade the little wallet pictures. But nobody ever really does and by spring you’ve lost them all, anyway.”

They cut apart the wallet-sized pictures and passed them out among each other.

What a kick Billy would have gotten out of it Scotland Yard studying his photo.

“Talk to me about Billy,” said one man. He was wearing a too-large wool suit, as if he had recently lost weight, but not enough to warrant buying a new suit. Laura had dimmed like her mother; she could not seem to get their names, even though Laura was terrific with names.

“We need to find out if Billy was a specific choice,” the policeman went on. “He was murdered the day after terrorists escaped from their courtroom. He might have seen something.”

At L.I.A. you were required to take current events no matter what other history class you might also have, because these particular students were so often caught in the maelstrom of changing governments.

“London simmers,” her current events teacher liked to say. Mr. Hollober was Canadian. Laura loved his pale accent. “Exiles fill this city, and they’re all in a bad mood. All mad at somebody. Iraqi, Tamil, Nigerian, Cypriot, Azerbaijani, Hong Kong Chinese, Irish, Israeli, Palestinian, Kenyan.”

It made Laura dizzy to think of so many countries sitting here in London, riding the tube and mad at each other. Or mad at America. There were an awful lot of people out there who didn’t think much of America. Laura was still trying to get used to that since as far as she knew, America was perfect, and she was luckier than they would ever be because she was American.

“London,” Mr. Hollober would say, “is the seismograph of the world. A needle that shakes at the slightest political tremor.”

Had Billy touched the needle? Or the people who held it?

“Or,” said the policeman, “the bomb might have nothing to do with the escapees. Some other terrorist group might have done it. Nobody has claimed responsibility yet, so we have nothing to go on. Finally, Billy might have been chosen specifically as a child, or specifically as an American child.”

Laura could hardly think about who had killed Billy. It filled her mind too much, knowing that Billy was dead. We need Daddy, she thought. We need him right now.

Her father had been sent to England to close down factories. His company made electronic components, but business was poor and they were ending European operations. Daddy hated being the bad guy, but to be the American bad guy in towns already deeply depressed and jobless—well, it was not Laura who was sorry they had come. It was Dad. Laura had fallen in love with London and with L.I.A., Billy loved everything, anyhow, and Mom was having the adventure of her life. Dad had said only a few weeks ago that he couldn’t last much longer. “You have to last through the school year!” Laura had said. “You can’t ruin my junior year! What about my friends?” They had had a good laugh.

But if they bad decided to go home last week, Billy would still be alive.

She told the police about Billy.

She brought them his notebook. She hated letting them touch it. What if they laughed at Billy? She showed them his brick collection. She didn’t even want them to touch the bricks. What if they didn’t understand? What if they couldn’t tell that Billy was the most interesting person on earth?

But he was not on earth now.

She tried to tell herself that Billy was up in heaven, whipping it into shape, investigating the corners, selling stuff to naive angels.

A lump the size of a football lay in Laura’s throat. It blocked not only speech, but also action and thought. Billy, who jumped into life like an Olympic champion. Feet first. Never scared, never flinching, never worried.

“Why couldn’t it have been me?” she cried out. “I want to be the one instead. I want the package in
my
hands. I want it to blow
my
ribs apart and paste
my
brains on the wall and spray
my
blood on the baby carriage!”

The man in the too-large jacket put his arms around Laura, the way her father would have, if only they could find her father. “The baby lived, Laura,” he said. “Witnesses thought that Billy knew, that he tried to protect the baby. The baby isn’t even badly hurt. The mother will lose her leg, but not her life. She’ll still bring her baby up.”

“We don’t get to bring Billy up, though!”

Nobody said anything to that.

“And all those witnesses,” she said, feeling her way toward knowledge. “They must have seen who did it. What did they tell you—all those witnesses?’’

“They were witnesses to Billy’s death,” said the policeman, “but not to the moment in which Billy was handed the bomb. Nobody saw that. Trains continued to leave the station, and commuters continued to leave the Underground. The killer, or killers, left easily and without being known.”

The killer.

Somebody chose my brother, thought Laura. Somebody looked at my brother Billy and picked him to die.

Laura’s body switched channels. She moved from tears to wrath, from dim to volcanic.

I’m going to find them, she thought, and her body burned with the fever of revenge. A flush of rage crept over her, and shook her, so that her teeth actually chattered with hate and her cheeks actually darkened with intent.

I’m going to kill them. She felt in her hands the ability to hold a weapon; the ability to use it; and the need.

They’re going to die just the way Billy did.

“When will somebody claim responsibility?” Laura demanded.

The policeman looked tired. “Usually, if they do, it’s quick. Several hours have passed, though. Maybe nobody will admit it. Maybe some group that had nothing to do with it will claim to have done it, just for publicity. Bomb analysts will try to learn who did it by comparing Billy’s bomb to previous bombs.”

“Why do the terrorists tell the police anything?” said Laura. “I would think they’d want to keep it a secret.”

He shook his head. “The point is to terrify. To show off power. To prove they can do whatever they want and hurt whoever they want whenever they want to do it. The only silver lining to terrorism is that they give you the first clue.”

Outside, it was already getting dark London was so far north. You didn’t know that, living in America. You thought it was sort of across the Atlantic from New York. But it wasn’t. It was across from Labrador. You got sun-starved here.

The policewoman coaxed Laura’s mother to go lie down in her bedroom.

Laura walked over to the front window. Every flat on Heathfold Gardens had white curtains covering the windows: gauzy, or lacy, polyester or cotton, nobody kept bare glass. Laura’s mother had found it claustrophobic, and took her curtains down, which meant you could spot the Williamses’ flat blocks away. It was the only one without that extra barricade for privacy.

The English loved privacy. They didn’t let people into their gardens very easily, never mind their hearts. They pronounced it
prih-
vissy
,
which sounded even more private.

Americans were not awfully good at privacy. Especially Billy.

Had he invaded somebody’s privacy? Somebody who really, really had reason to care?

In the street below, people in gossipy bunches stared or talked or held television cameras, hoping to invade the privacy of the Williams family.