31 Hours Page 18

  “Can I stand here to make a call?”

  The man eyed Mara and Aaron for a long beat before answering, “Sure.”

  Mara dialed her father’s new home number and let it ring. No answer. The store had only two aisles, and Aaron began walking down one of them, inspecting the shelves. “I’m going to try his cell,” she said.

  Her father answered on the second ring. Mara felt relief shoot up her spine.

  “Mara.” He sounded angry. “Are you at school?”

  “No,” she said. “School doesn’t start until 8:40.”

  “Then where the—?”

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “What do you mean here?”

  “St. Johns and Kingston,” she said. “I’m at the corner.”

  “What? How did you get there?”

  “Subway. And now we’re in a deli.”

  “No deli,” corrected the man behind the counter. “De-Morris Bodega.”

  “De-Morris Bodega,” Mara repeated. “Can you come meet us?”

  “The subway? Alone? Mara, you know—”

  “I’m with Aaron,” she interrupted.

  “Aaron?” Her father sounded incredulous. “Does his mother—”

  “Dad, can you just come meet us?”

  “You scared us, Mara. Damn. I’ve been calling everyone.”

  “Dad.”

  Her father let out a breath of impatient air. “I’m not there.”

  Mara looked around guiltily. Aaron, still among the shelves about ten steps away, glanced over at her. She didn’t want him to know, not yet. She tried to speak quietly. “Where are you? How soon can you get here?”

  “I’m here. I’m . . . I’m at home.”

  Though her father spoke hesitantly and sounded confused, Mara was not. She suddenly saw with sharp clarity that prayer was a powerful tool. Her father had returned home. “Good,” she said. “Home.”

  “I came to . . . to talk with you. I thought we could have breakfast together. Both your mother and I were surprised to find you gone. And we’re going to have to discuss your actions, Mara.”

  “You’re moving back,” Mara said, barely hearing the rest of it. “He’s moving back,” she said to Aaron, who was closer now and watching her.

  “Mara. No.”

  “You’re not?”

  “I wanted to talk with you over breakfast. I wanted to hear how things are going for you. School. Other stuff.”

  “School?” Now she felt confused.

  “Let’s save it for in person,” her father said. “Look, put Aaron on for a minute.”

  Mara walked back to Aaron, who was standing in an aisle looking at a box labeled “Jamaican-style dough mix.” She handed him the phone.

  “Hello?” Aaron said. “Yes, sir . . . yes . . . okay . . . okay, ’bye.” He handed the phone back to Mara.

  “You two walk right back to the subway,” her father said. “It’s, let’s see... it’s about 8:05. You should be here by 9:25. I’m going to meet you at the station—I’ll be waiting there by 9:15, so call me as soon as you’re aboveground, okay?”

  “Okay, but, Dad—”

  “Just get back here, Mara. Then we’ll talk. I promise we’ll talk for as long as it takes. We can all be a little late today,” her father said.

  Mara hung up the phone and looked at Aaron, who had gone back to inspecting the food.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “But maybe it’s good—I mean, he’s home and he wants . . .” She trailed off, suddenly noticing that Aaron was holding a jar of something called “Horlicks breakfast drink” and appeared to be intently reading the ingredients. She began to dig in her coat pocket. “You didn’t have any breakfast, did you?”

  Aaron shrugged and put down the jar.

  “Let’s get something.”

  “Your dad said we should go right away,” Aaron said.

  “We will. But . . .” She approached the man behind the counter. “What can you recommend for breakfast?”

  The man grinned at her. He pointed to what looked like slices of pound cake, individually wrapped. “Coconut sweetbread, missy,” he said.

  Mara dug in her pocket in earnest and pulled out seventy-eight cents. “How much for two slices?” she asked.

  “Two dollars.”

  “I have five dollars,” said Aaron.

  “But I want to treat you. You got up early and you came all this way and—”

  “It’s okay. If I hadn’t come, what would I have been doing? Just sleeping.”

  Aaron said it so seriously that she laughed, and then he pulled out his money and she added her coins and they left with the coconut sweetbread, which they began eating as they walked back to the subway.

  It was still cold and the sky looked thick, but just as they reached the subway station, the sun seemed to muscle aside the clouds for a minute. A ray of sunshine fell on Mara’s shoulders. She looked at the street behind them, the rush of life, and she thought perhaps she understood what her father meant by “authentic.” In fact, this might be the solution. It seemed a stroke of brilliance, and she didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of it before. Mara and her mother should move to this neighborhood and live here with her father. She would discuss it with her dad. Maybe it was even what he planned to propose. Yes, that was probably it. This realization made her so excited that she reached over and hugged Aaron, and giggled at the startled expression on his face, and took his hand, and together they dipped down the stairs into the subway, leaving the sunshine behind.

  NEW YORK: 7:47 A.M.

  MECCA: 3:47 P.M.

  Vic stood in the bathroom, waiting for the water running in the sink to warm up. She wasn’t going to worry, not yet, but she hoped her father would call back soon. It had been half an hour since he’d rung to tell her Mara was missing. She knew there had to be a reasonable explanation, probably something to do with school. Vic had always been the one to pull stupid stunts; Mara was reliability personified. Still, Vic had carried the receiver with her into the bathroom, setting it on the toilet so she wouldn’t miss her father’s call.

  The dream she’d been having when the phone woke her was of tomorrow’s opening night. Not the performance so much, though she had dreamt of a stage lit with such force that shadows feared, an audience hushed in anticipation, her kicks precise, her body arcing as smoothly as the letter C. Most of the dream, though, had been of Jonas in the theater, smiling, and then Jonas at dinner afterward, the two of them in some dimly lit café, their fingers touching, the food unimportant, but nevertheless she dreamt of a bowl of kalamata olives and a plate with cubes of feta cheese, and wherever he had been and whyever he hadn’t called now explained and behind them. She dreamt of herself struggling to express something intangible, and him understanding at once, reaching to embrace her.

  She glanced at the clock and pulled her hair back so she could wash her face. Out of nowhere conscious, she flashed on an image of Mara—a memory from last winter, when the two of them had made New York City–style s’mores, roasting the marshmallows over the kitchen burner using a rosewood-handled stainless-steel kebab skewer and then slapping them between graham crackers and chocolate and warming the whole concoction in the microwave for five seconds. She remembered Mara, her face glowing with an orangeish light from the flames, telling a joke—a knock-knock joke, something silly, what had it been? “Knock, knock.” “Who’s there?” “Zeke.” “Zeke who?” “Zeke and you shall find.” And they’d both started giggling, Vic pleased to see Mara acting like a kid. Vic thought now that was the last time she could remember seeing Mara laugh.

  She was drying her face when the phone rang again. She picked it up. “Did you find her?” she asked.

  “Vic? It’s Carol.”

  “Who?”

  “Jonas’s mom.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry—my sister—well, anyway, hi.”

  “Everything okay? I hope it’s not too early?”

  “No, no, everything’s fine.”r />
  “You haven’t heard from Jonas?”

  Vic sank right onto the bathroom rug, her legs crossed. “No.”

  “I knew you’d call me . . . but I wanted to check. You see, Jonas’s dad and I, we’ve decided to contact the police.”

  “Police?” Vic realized she’d stopped breathing.

  “We found out he went to Pakistan in September. Do you know about that?”

  “Pakistan? Jonas?” Vic said. “No. It was a yoga retreat.”

  “The police would like to speak with you,” Jonas’s mother said.

  “Police?”

  “Since you are one of his closest—well, probably his closest . . .” Her voice faltered for a moment. “And because of the Pakistan trip, I was wondering about friends he might have discussed that with, and I thought of this man he mentioned once or twice. I think he’s from Saudi Arabia. I don’t know if you know him?”

  “I do,” Vic said. “Masoud. I know him.”

  “Masoud. Good. And his last name? Do you happen to know it?”

  “Al-Zufak,” Vic said slowly.

  Jonas’s mother exhaled, as though a lakeful of air was coming out of her, and that was how Vic recognized how tightly she was wound. “Masoud al-Zufak,” she repeated, but not directly into the phone receiver, as if she were relaying the name to someone else in the room. “Zu-fak,” she pronounced again, and then, after a pause, “Vic, do you have contact information?”

  “No, but he—” Vic was going to mention last night’s odd phone call but stopped herself. Masoud was Jonas’s friend. She didn’t want to see him get in any trouble. These were times of appalling biases, when anyone from an Arab country could be dragged into custody for sneezing.

  “What? Vic, anything is helpful,” Jonas’s mother said.

  “I . . . I was just going to say . . . I think he lives somewhere in Brooklyn.”

  “Brooklyn. Thank you.”

  “But you know . . . Masoud really likes Jonas. I’m sure he’d want to do anything he could to help you.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you’re right,” Jonas’s mother said, though in a distracted way. “Jonas also liked—likes—Masoud. But this is the way they want to do it.” Vic heard a noise like something dropping in the background from wherever Jonas’s mother was. “Whatever will help us find Jonas is what I want,” she said. “You understand?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “And finding this Masoud may help us find Jonas.”

  “This Masoud.” It was such a distancing way to express it. There it was again: the “they” that became an “us” and that was separate from this Arab man considered suspicious simply because of his name. That was something Vic did not want to be part of. “Are you . . . are you sure Jonas is missing?” Even as Vic asked it, she knew on some intuitive level that this was it precisely. Jonas was missing. Whatever “missing” meant. Maybe he’d been hit by a car or lost his memory or been kidnapped by criminals. Otherwise he would have called her. He would have. How could she have thought anything else for even a second? Jonas would have called Vic by now if he could. A chill swept from the soles of her feet to her stomach. She felt her shoulders clench.

  “So. The police will be in touch with you. They say they’ll send someone to interview you.”

  Vic felt her heart in her neck. “Okay,” she said softly.

  “Thanks, Vic. I’m sorry. We’ll . . . we’ll probably laugh about this someday,” Jonas’s mother said. “I just want to get to that day, you know?” Then the phone line went dead.

  Jonas missing. Vic dialed his cell phone one more time and got his voice mail. “Shit, Jonas. You are scaring us all. Call me, damnit. Call me, call me,” she said, like a prayer, and then she hung up.

  She was pulling on a pair of jeans when her home phone rang again. “Hello?” she said, thinking, Jonas, Jonas, Jonas.

  “Vic, it’s okay.” It was her father. Vic had forgotten about Mara being gone.

  “Oh, Dad,” she said.

  “She and Aaron went to Brooklyn, can you believe that? To try to find me. I don’t know where she got that idea; she doesn’t even know my address. But anyway, I just spoke with her and they promised to hop right back on that subway. She should be here by 9:30, and we’ll have breakfast. I figure she can skip morning classes today, and I’ve let them know at the office that I’ll be late.”

  Vic’s father sounded like he wanted her to realize he was making an effort; he wanted her approval. But Vic was thinking of something else. She remembered now Mara’s plan to talk to their father, and she felt ashamed that she hadn’t remembered it earlier, or asked Mara about it on the phone last night. “Oh, God,” she said.

  “Okay, baby. Sorry to have alarmed you for nothing,” her father said. “I’ll talk to you before your opening tomorrow night, okay?”

  Vic wasn’t listening. “God—Mara. But she’s fine, right?”

  “Completely.”

  “So that means maybe . . .”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just . . . maybe we’ll find other missing people.”

  “Vic. What are you talking about?”

  “Jonas,” she said.

  “Jonas? Where’s he gotten himself to?” Her father sounded slightly amused now.

  “We don’t know, but his parents are freaking.”

  Vic’s father laughed. “Well, a young man. That’s a different matter than a little girl.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “He’ll turn up, Vic.”

  Vic closed her eyes and imagined Jonas’s face, his blue eyes, his hair. “Yes. Maybe so.” But her father had already replaced the receiver.

  NEW YORK: 8:21 A.M.

  MECCA: 4:21 P.M.

  Underground at Columbus Circle, three lanky boys wearing do-rags were setting up their “orchestra,” a couple African djembe drums along with some homemade cans—a metal sink, a plastic tub overturned, two wide pipes—as Sonny ambled by. Despite a night of evil dreams that had left Sonny queasy, a morning pang of hunger had kicked in, and he’d dragged himself up into the station. The Columbus Circle station was God’s heaven, far as the trash cans went. Everything in the neighborhood, from a cuppa on up, was too costly—so, as proof of the perversity of human nature, folks stopped valuing it. They took a bite or two and then let it go, and the food they tossed aside at Columbus Circle on any given morning was enough to keep Sonny full for half the day; he could eat and not worry for dinner.

  He’d finished a successful round of trash-can-hopping: a banana with one little bruise, a quarter of a croissant, almost all of a turkey sandwich on rye with Dijon, even a half-bottle of aspirin he planned to give Mrs. Wu next time he saw her. He ate until he felt refreshed and ready to go to work—just in time for rush hour. Then he spotted the three musicians. They were silent as they prepared to perform but looked rhythmic even without music, the lines of their legs and arms rotating around the curves of the drums as they pulled the instruments into a half-circle. The sight of them, so out-of-season hopeful, moved him. Despite the late-autumn cold, despite the Monday-morning commuter fog, these boys stood ready to remind their passing audience that even on the saddest, most frigid of days, there was much to relish in this world. They looked lucky, too; some kind of sheen on their cheeks gave them that. Sonny had been seeing so many people who didn’t look lucky lately that the three of them went a ways toward improving his mood. He inched a little closer, feeling better than if it were Christmas. Not that that was any comparison; in this most plentiful of lands, Christmas had become a holiday of failures sorrowful enough to sink all the way down into the subway. Point being, these boys made him feel, as his momma would say, like the dawn of the Second Coming. As though with their music, the only tears from now on would be of gratification.

  The musicians were nearly set up when one of them, the largest, put out a hat to collect the handouts. Sonny reached into his pocket and dropped in fifty cents.

  The drummer laughed. “We ain’t even started playing yet,
old man.”

  “Just the same,” Sonny said. “This morning I got it, so I can share it.”

  He nodded and began to shuffle away, deciding to try his luck for a while on the D-train. He would head uptown for four or five stops, then reverse his order. Stay central for the morning, maybe head back into Brooklyn after lunchtime.

  “Wait, brother,” one of the musicians called. Sonny noticed, when he turned, that the speaker had a small tattoo of an eagle on the right side of his neck. “You paid,” he said. “Now let us play one for you.”

  Truth be told, Sonny desired no further extension of his workday break, but another minute or two wouldn’t hurt. “You gonna want more of my money afterward?” he asked, smiling, and they laughed with him.

  “Nah. Just get us an audience started, brother,” the musician said as he took his place between the other two. He seemed to go quiet inside for a second and then began bouncing his chin in time to some internal rhythm. After a few seconds, the center drummer glanced at his band-mates and they began playing, the one on the right using sticks on both the sink and the pipe, the other two with their palms on the drums, hands traveling fast enough to blur, their music a story without words, a new ancient rhythm raising Sonny’s spirit even higher and setting one foot tapping.

  A memory rose in him then. Ruby and he, along with their momma, at church on Sunday. He’d never wanted to go; to his way of thinking, Sunday wasn’t intended for church. It was meant for a pancake breakfast or a mean game of street baseball or, later on, recovering from Saturday night. But church, Momma used to tell him, was his Hobson’s choice, meaning it was no choice at all. As long as he lived in her house, to his memory, he’d missed only half-a-dozen church Sundays, and then only when he convinced Momma he felt sick enough that her dragging him out of bed would be a larger sin than him failing to walk through those holy doors.

  No matter how many times they changed apartments, Momma kept them going to the same church—a bitty one squeezed between a nail salon and Derrell’s Jerk Chicken Den, nothing from the outside to show it was even a church except for the green sign: Howard Street’s Holy Home of Jesus. Didn’t matter the season, the women all wore dresses the color of Easter eggs. And the music—that was what carried him from this moment back to that one. No drums made of sinks, of course, but there were always drums of some sort, along with a piano, a horn, sometimes something else if someone brought it. That music was a letting down of all the reservations that kept one body separate from another. The children would begin bouncing in their folding chairs at the first note, and soon enough one grown-up and then another would rise, the women starting to sway, the men beating on their own legs, and at the front of the room there’d be three or four women singing as if it were the last thing they’d ever do. And after that music, so powerful it made your blood beat in time, folks in turn would leap to their feet and begin to exclaim, the details of their week viewed through the prism of God and punctuated with “Save the Lord,” each detail answered with “Yes, brother. Amen,” the Rev. Herbert Watkis calling out, singing out encouragement, “Don’t you run away from God if you done something wrong. Run straight into his arms and all your sins are forgiven,” and everything, the musical confessions and pardons, the undulating hips and jumping feet, was a dance that carried them to some ecstasy beyond themselves. Momma always left those services feeling so much better, but it occurred to Sonny that it wasn’t the Lord so much as the music and the folks that deserved the credit.