One of Our Own Read online

  “Thank you,” she said again. “I have a cold. I need to go lie down.”

  “I could walk with you if you wanted, just to make sure you don’t fall again. Most people aren’t like that—that person. I can’t believe the way some people behave. My grandson would say it’s because you’re black. We’re black, so white people don’t see us.”

  “I am from Mumbai,” Meera said. She felt as if somebody had reached up and snatched the caste mark right off her forehead.

  “Mumbai,” the man said. “I bet it’s warm there. Warm and sunny. Not like this.”

  “I can get home on my own,” Meera said. “I need to go home now.”

  “Then I’ll let you get on your way. As long as you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure. Thank you for helping me up.”

  “No problem. You get some rest now.”

  Meera made herself start walking. He wasn’t going to leave if she didn’t start walking. It hurt her to walk at the beginning. There was dirt on her hands. She would have to check to see if he was following her. You never knew with American blacks. Maybe he was just being helpful so that he could get her home and get into her apartment and then rob her, or worse. American blacks were supposed to be very prone to the worse. All her friends from Mumbai who had come to America before her had told her about it.

  She made it to her red brick row house. She made it up the stoop. She made it up the four flights of stairs to her apartment. The apartment took up half the floor. She let herself in. She forced herself to make it a little farther, across the tiny foyer and into the living room, and collapsed in the very first chair.

  It was then she realized that the woman who had knocked her down had not been a stranger. She knew that body. She knew that coat. The woman had not seemed to recognize her. What could that mean?

  She wanted to fall asleep where she was. Instead, she made herself get up again. There was a contraption in the kitchen for making coffee. In Mumbai there would have been somebody at home to help her. She wouldn’t have had to make her own coffee or cook her own meals. Even students didn’t have to fend for themselves, and students were poor.

  She got the coffee started, sat down in a kitchen chair, and took out her phone. Then she hit two on her speed dial and waited.

  Cary was a typical American in many ways, but he had irons in the fire, as he put it. He stayed late at work.

  He picked up. He said “Cary Alder” and nothing else.

  The rudeness of Americans was mind-boggling. In Mumbai, even untouchables didn’t talk to each other this way.

  “This is Meera Agerwal,” she said. He wanted her to call him Cary. She wouldn’t do it.

  “Meera? You’re calling me? Why didn’t you just come down the hall?”

  “Because I’m not in the office.”

  “At home? I don’t believe it. You never leave before I do.”

  The little timer thing on the coffee maker went off. She left it. She shouldn’t have coffee in the state she was in. She should have tea with honey in it. Later.

  “I have the flu,” she said. “I need to tell you what happened to me.”

  “Something happened to you? Are you all right? Do you think you should call a doctor? Do you need to go to the hospital?”

  Then she closed her eyes and counted to ten. In Hindi. Finally, she said, “Please, listen,” and launched into the story of the woman who had knocked her down.

  After that, there was a long stretch of silence.

  “Damn,” Cary said finally. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Marta Warkowski.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she come to the office?”

  “Not while I was there. And when I left, I closed up. The girls had all gone home. If she went to the office after she ran into me, she would have found it closed. And you’re in the back. You wouldn’t have heard her knocking.”

  “Hernandez says she never goes out in the dark. She comes home after Mass and locks herself in and won’t answer the door.”

  “Well, she was here tonight. And I don’t see what business she’d have in that neighborhood except for us.”

  “True.”

  Meera couldn’t do this anymore. “I need to lie down now,” she said. “I just wanted you to know. And to tell you you should be careful. Maybe she came up and she’s waiting right there outside the door, waiting for you to try to leave.”

  “Crap.”

  “I am going to hang up now. But I am going to tell you what I always tell you. Dealing with her was a mistake.”

  Meera turned the phone off and put it down on the kitchen table. She would have to take it with her when she went into the bedroom. She would make tea and go there and lie down. If somebody tried to wake her up, she would pretend to be dead.

  It was Cary Alder himself who had told her, when he’d first hired her, that it was always best to deal with illegals when you could. Illegals have no options. They can’t go to the authorities, for fear of being spotted and arrested and deported. They have to do what you tell them to. They have to work cheap. They have to keep their mouths shut.

  Marta Warkowski couldn’t keep her mouth shut if she sealed it with superglue.

  5

  Bennis Hannaford Demarkian had never really thought about having children. Unlike many of the girls she’d gone to school and college with, dreams of a family had never been front and center in her plans. She hadn’t spent the early part of her career obsessively reading articles about her biological clock. Even so, she’d always really liked children. She’d always been happy to babysit for Donna Moradanyan. She’d always been happy to coo over Lida’s photographs of her grandchildren. In a way, children had been to her like the setting of a science fiction novel—a vast and alien landscape, both endlessly fascinating and endlessly foreign.

  Now that there was to be a child in her life, however, she was beginning to wonder if she had fallen down on the job over the last few years. Gregor had been married and widowed before they met. No children had resulted from that, and Bennis had, without realizing it, just assumed that that was because Gregor had not been interested. She thought she probably should not have taken that for granted. They should have sat down and had a talk. They should have gone about it all deliberately. Instead, they were standing on the doorstep of St. Catherine’s School in the cold and dark, coming to pick up a seven-year-old they’d never met and whose language they couldn’t even begin to speak. The language was going to be a problem. Technically, Father Tibor Kasparian spoke Spanish—but apparently, it was the wrong kind of Spanish.

  St. Catherine’s School was unlocked during the daytime, but locked tight once it got dark. The church next door felt an obligation to keep its doors open. Father Alvarez felt strongly that a church should always be open for people to pray, and to be a refuge on the worst of nights for those who had nowhere else to go. The school had no such obligation. After a half dozen incidents of theft and vandalism—computers ripped out of their terminals and hauled away; expletives written on the walls of the first floor in feces; the Sodality Chapel torn apart and all the paintings of the Virgin slashed to ribbons—Sister Superior had put her foot down. The doors were locked after dark.

  Bennis and Gregor had to ring the bell and wait. Bennis looked at the side of Gregor’s face.

  “Here we go,” she said. “Are you sure you’re all right with this?”

  “I’m very all right with it. I was all right with it when Tibor first asked us.”

  The door in front of them pulled back and there was Sister Superior herself, Sister Margaret Mary, in her “modified” habit that left her neck and the sides of her face clear but sported a long black veil that fell down her back to her waist. Sister shot them both a vague smile. Then she stepped out onto the little stoop and looked up and down the street.

  “Is everything all right?” Bennis asked.

  Sister Margaret Mary stepped back inside and opened the door wide. “Come on in,” she
said. “I’m sorry. We’ve been having a kind of weird evening.”

  “You’ve been having trouble?” Gregor asked.

  “No, no. It’s been nothing, really. I was out earlier, watching for the Girl Scouts. It’s the neighborhood. I wish we had enough people to see them here and see them home on the nights when there are meetings. It’s the neighborhood, if you see what I mean. Anyway, I was out there watching them come in, and there was this van. This big, black, shiny, new, expensive-looking van. It came through four times in less than fifteen minutes. Let’s just say it wasn’t the usual kind of thing.”

  “Maybe it was something official,” Gregor said. “A police vehicle. Something unmarked.”

  “I’ll admit, I worry a lot more about sex trafficking,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “A van that size. With things the way they are these days, you don’t know what’s going to happen. It could be some perfectly innocent person who got lost. If you call the police, if you take the license number and turn it in—well.”

  “Did you get the license number?” Gregor asked.

  “No,” Sister Margaret Mary admitted. “It didn’t occur to me until it was all over. Never mind. It really was most likely nothing. And Javier is in the auditorium waiting for you. We’ve got four new foster families picking up tonight. Javier’s already getting acquainted with the dog.”

  “Father Tibor’s dog?” Bennis was confused. “I thought Tibor wasn’t going to be able to make it in until seven thirty.”

  “The dog came with the boy,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “He said he was with all of you, so we let him in and he’s been talking to Javier ever since. And they’ve been talking to each other, too, although I’m not sure how. The boy speaks English. Javier speaks Spanish. They seem to be making it work.”

  As they were talking, Sister Margaret Mary had been walking them down the main first floor hall to the back of the building. The hall ended in a set of double fire doors. She pushed these open. The room in the back was a large square space meant to serve as an auditorium on some occasions and a gym at others. The space was full of people. There were nuns. There were children. In one case there was a couple, sitting on folding chairs and talking to a very little girl with ribbons on the ends of her braids.

  “Over there,” Sister Margaret Mary said, pointing all the way across the room.

  Bennis looked across. There was Tommy Moradanyan, sitting on the bottom bench of the foldaway bleachers. Next to him was a very small boy dressed in jeans and a white shirt and a cotton crewneck sweater. Bennis recognized the clothes, because she’d sent them. She thought the boy looked scared to death.

  “I keep telling myself that of course he’s scared to death,” she said. “I’m scared to death.”

  “He may be a little more scared than most of them,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “It’s a difficult situation. I did try to tell you—”

  “No, no. That’s all right,” Bennis said. “We understand all that. To tell you the truth, I’m a little flattered that you think we can help. I wouldn’t have said I was the most obvious person to take care of a traumatized child. I supposed they’re all traumatized.”

  “Of course they are,” Gregor said. “What else would they be?”

  They all watched. On the other side of the room, Tommy leaned down to pick up Pickles, who was out of her raincoat and booties and was wearing only her turtleneck sweater. Javier put out his hands. Tommy put the dog into them. Pickles settled into Javier’s chest as if she’d been born there.

  Javier’s face lit up.

  “Well,” Gregor said. “That worked.”

  Sister Margaret Mary started moving again, but Bennis put out a hand to hold her back.

  “Just one more thing,” Bennis said. “Did you have a chance to check on any of the things I asked you about? I know it may not be possible, but any information we could have would help. At least it would be a start.”

  “I know,” Sister Margaret Mary said, “and I did try checking again, but it’s as I told you. We just don’t know. Nobody knows. He just showed up at Our Lady of Peace one morning, sitting in the side chapel. That’s run by Maryknoll. They’ve set up a mission at the border to provide water and food and some facilities to migrants coming in. Anyway, the usual thing is that the people come in and some of them are what are called ‘unaccompanied minors.’ The Maryknolls separate them out and then see if they can do something for them so they don’t end up in a detention facility. But Javier wasn’t with any of those groups. He was just there one morning.”

  “And he didn’t say anything about where he was from or what he was doing there?” Gregor asked.

  Sister Margaret Mary shook her head. “When he talks, he mostly talks about the Holy Mother. That she’s the mother to all of us. That she will keep and protect us. From what he knows, I’d say he’d at least started religious instruction wherever he came from. But that doesn’t help, does it? We don’t even know if he’s actually undocumented.”

  “You’re not worried he could have family somewhere who are looking for him?” Bennis asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “We’ve asked him about family. He just says the Holy Mother is his mother and the mother of all of us. I’ve been wondering if he came north with family and saw them die along the way. Saw them killed. Except—”

  “Except?” Gregor asked.

  “Except when that happens, the coyotes always take the kids. And they don’t leave them alone. But among the other things the Maryknoll sisters did was to get him to a doctor for a complete examination, and there’s no sign that he’s been sexually molested in any way, and no sign of physical abuse. No scars. No broken bones. One day he was just there. And we don’t know anything about him.”

  They all looked across the room again. Pickles and Javier were squirming around each other. Javier looked immensely less tense than he had when they first walked in.

  “Well,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “We might as well get this started.”

  6

  It took Cary Alder a full hour to get in touch with Hernandez, and even then, it was like talking to a wall.

  “You must have done something,” he said, listening to the sounds of children and women in the background. “You’re the only reason she ever comes down here.”

  “I don’t ever do anything,” Hernandez said.

  Cary was standing just inside his private office door. The door was mostly shut, but he had it open just a sliver, so that he could see out across the carpeted reception room to the frosted windows next to the front door. The reception room and his office were outfitted in tune with the public face of Alder Properties: upscale everything, probably too expensive for you to afford. His father had taught him that. Rich people didn’t want to believe they had anything to do with poor people. If the city made you put “affordable” units in your buildings, you very carefully made sure there was a separate entrance to them, so that Those People never appeared in the marble-floored lobbies.

  And Cary Alder didn’t blame them. You worked all your life to make something of yourself—and then what? You were supposed to live practically in bed with the muck and the filth and the failure? Who had thought up this whole thing about cramming “affordable” units into premier properties? And why did anyone expect they’d get away with it?

  She was out there, pacing back and forth in front of those frosted-glass windows. Cary could see her from where he stood at his office door.

  If it had been up to him, he would have had nothing on his books but those premier properties. He’d have had high-rises full of duplexes and acres of McMansions in Bucks County and on the Main Line. Unfortunately, his father had taught him something else that turned out to be true.

  Those apartment buildings downtown, the ones with nothing in them but “affordable” units, made money.

  He’d have smoked a cigarette, but he’d quit them over a year ago. You couldn’t smoke around rich people anymore. You couldn’t eat a Big Mac,
either. It was incredible how many people these days were turning out to be vegan.

  “Listen,” he said. “You were the one who told me she never went out after dark.”

  “To Mass,” Hernandez said. “She goes to Mass. There’s an English Mass at four o’clock.”

  “This isn’t Mass. This isn’t even the same side of the city.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  Forget the cigarette. Cary wanted a scotch. Laphroaig would be good. He didn’t have any.

  “Let’s try this,” he said. “Did you talk to her today?”

  “Only once. When she was coming back from Mass. She came back from Mass. She went into her apartment. I didn’t see her go out again.”

  “Did you talk to her?”

  “Only for a couple of minutes.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  There was no real silence on the other end of the line, because there was all that noise in the background. How many people was Hernandez shoving into that super’s apartment? It was only supposed to hold four.

  “Hernandez.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Hernandez said suddenly. “It’s the biggest apartment in the building. She’s there all by herself. She could take the one bedroom on the first floor.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Cary said.

  “I have a family that wants to move in. You could make a lot more money.”

  “And I keep telling you, no I couldn’t. She’s been living in that apartment since before I was born. She pays her rent on time every single month. She brings it right down here and gets a receipt. You know why she does that, right? She thinks you won’t give it in so that we can get her in trouble.”

  “I hand all the rent checks in. Every time.”

  “She comes down here because of you. I have to have that—gargoyle—in these offices at least once a month because of you. When I’ve got serious clients here. Who are not used to that sort of thing.”