“I thought maybe you would end up a teacher or something. You always turned in the best paper in AP English.”
But that was my only AP class. The truth was, I hadn’t been a great student in high school. Always distracted, the teachers said. It wasn’t distraction, though, it was exhaustion. I worked after school, took care of my sister, and stayed up most nights until my father came home. Nothing the teachers talked about in class seemed all that important by comparison. In AP English, at least, we got to read novels, and I’d always loved reading. I took a drag from my cigarette and tried to picture myself the way Nora had, in a classroom with kids, but the image seemed incongruous to me. The path my life had taken was the only one I could imagine for myself now. “I guess we don’t always end up where we expect,” I said. “What about you?”
“I’m a musician. A composer.”
“See now, that makes sense.” What could be more natural than Nora at the piano? She was always a minute or two early to music class, a minute or two late in leaving. Played every tune perfectly the first time around, then had to wait for the rest of us to catch up. “Is there someplace I can hear your music?”
“Not really.” She hesitated. “I mean, I’ve recorded a few pieces you can find online, but I don’t have orchestra commissions or a record deal or anything like that. I work as a substitute teacher to pay the bills. So.”
Without knowing why, I felt I had to stave off the disappointment I heard in her voice. “I’m sure you’ll get one soon.”
“That makes one of us,” she said with a chuckle.
We were quiet for a long moment, though the silence was not uncomfortable. Sitting together in the dark, we could see everything inside the house. It made the moment feel intimate, as if we were sharing something secret, or even illicit. In the kitchen, her sister put a fresh kettle on the stove, then said something to two women standing at the counter. An elderly couple walked into the living room, carrying Pyrex dishes covered with aluminum foil. The phone rang three times before someone went to answer it. “Are you waiting for those people to leave?” I asked.
“It’s been such a horrible day, I can’t bear talking to anyone.”
“Who are they?”
“The man sitting next to my mom is my uncle. He brought a friend of his from the mosque out in Los Angeles, to help her arrange the funeral. The couple drinking coffee in the kitchen are our neighbors. And the others are friends of my sister’s, for the most part.”
In the pi?on pine, an owl hooted. Nora brought her knees to her chest and gathered her arms around them. “I can’t cry,” she said.
“I didn’t either after my mom died. Not for a while, anyway.” I stubbed out my cigarette.
“Can I bum one off you? You’re tempting me.”
When I flicked the lighter for her, I noticed a tattooed inscription on the inside of her wrist, but I couldn’t make out the words. It was too dark and her hands were shaking. “This is probably no consolation,” I said, “but Coleman—the detective who’s working the case—she’s really good. She’ll find the bastard who did this.”
“She hasn’t told us anything. My dad gets run over half a block from the restaurant and she can’t rustle up any leads. Nothing.”
“She will. It’s just going to take a little time.”
“I knew this would happen.”
“How do you mean?”
“I knew something terrible would happen. You remember his business was arsoned after September 11th? They never found out who did it. And then he put up a huge flag outside his restaurant, like he had to prove he was one of the good ones. I told him over and over that he should sell. But he refused, he loved it here. God only knows why.”
It seemed to me that she was talking to herself, arguing with the past as though she could alter it. As though the past could ever be altered. That was how I had felt, too, when my mother died. Late one afternoon, I came home from baseball practice, still basking in the coach’s praise of my swing, still aroused by the sight of Maddie Clarke in a miniskirt cheering me from the stands, still smiling at the teasing jokes of my teammates, to find my mother passed out in the hallway, her purse slung across her chest, the day’s mail in her hand. I scrambled for the phone, all the while struggling to remember the first-aid class I’d taken two years earlier, in the seventh grade. Was I supposed to look for a pulse? Move her or leave her on her side like that? Carefully, I turned her on her back, tapped her cheeks, unbuttoned her collar. Somehow I managed to find a pulse, but I couldn’t wake her and neither could the paramedics when they arrived. By the time my father and sister had caught up with me at the Hi-Desert Medical Center, she was dead. Pulmonary embolism. To this day I can still remember, with a clarity that startles me, my father standing in a colorless hospital hallway, telling the doctor that there must be some mistake, that all she had was a little cough.
But there was no mistake; she was gone. She wasn’t there when I returned to our dark and empty house later that night. She didn’t call my name from her bedroom, didn’t ask, What are you still doing up? You’d better go to sleep, it’s a school night. In the morning, she wasn’t leaning against the kitchen counter, sipping from her cup of coffee, looking out of the window at the new day. She didn’t say, Did you forget to take the trash out last night? Because I smell something. She didn’t ruffle my hair and ask if I slept well. I didn’t sleep at all, either that night or many, many others to come. Her absence was too heavy to be surrendered to dreams.
For the funeral, my aunts Aura and Estella drove down from El Monte and my uncle Paul flew in from Oregon. They bought me a black suit and helped me with my tie and told me stories I hadn’t heard before, stories about how my mother had won second place in a dance contest at the Orange County fair; how she had hives when she sat for her teaching-credential exam; how she could play any tune on the violin by ear, any tune at all, no matter how difficult; how she’d traveled all the way to Sonora three weeks after giving birth to Ashley, just to help out a cousin who’d gotten into trouble. These stories were meant to be comforting, but in truth they were excruciating. I wished all the family would leave. Then they left, the house was empty again, and I wished they had stayed. At school, nothing made sense. My bandmates gave me a condolence card they had all signed, but I had missed the spring recital, and I felt left out of the conversations they had about it. Some of the boys on the baseball team came up to me to say they were sorry for my loss, but at lunch they all stayed away, as if my grief were contagious. And when I came home, my father was sitting in the dark, drinking and staring into space. The silence was so profound, so unrelenting, that Ashley went to eat dinner with the Johnsons, a rowdy family that lived two doors down from us.
“Dad, should we just have cereal for dinner?” I asked.
“Whatever you think,” my father said.