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“People said similar things about immigrants from Italy and Poland and Germany and Russia. Thing is, McNulty, we’re all immigrants here. Native Americans are the only ones with a legitimate beef against immigrants.” I leaned toward him and squeezed his shoulder in what I hoped he’d take as a gesture of conciliation and encouragement. His deltoid was surprisingly robust. “You must work out a lot. Do you?”
“Four or five times a week.”
“Don’t forget to challenge your heart muscle,” I said. “Most important muscle in the body. Takes a much stronger man to be kind than to be a bully and a jerk.” He gave a perfunctory nod, but I could tell he’d had enough moral instruction for one day—maybe enough for a lifetime. “Now get out of here. I’ve got work to do.”
He stood and headed for the door. “Just so you know,” I called after him, “you’re not out of the woods yet.” He stopped in his tracks and turned, looking alarmed. “If Mona wants to file an assault charge or a conduct complaint, she’s within her rights. But I’ll encourage her to give you another chance. If you apologize—and I mean a sincere apology, not some half-assed, sullen sham—I hope she’ll show you some compassion. Which is more than you showed her.”
“Yes, sir,” he said. “Thank you.” And with that he was gone.
I slumped in the chair, suddenly weary—and painfully aware that I wasn’t out of the woods yet either.
MIRANDA WAS IN THE BONE LAB, AS I’D THOUGHT she would be, but—contrary to my prediction—she wasn’t absorbed in an e-mail or a Google search or a post for her Facebook page devoted to forensic anthropology. She was staring at half a dozen skulls, arranged in a semicircle on a lab table, their empty eye orbits all staring back at her. Surveying the lot of them, I noticed that she had three males and three females; two Caucasoids, two Negroids, and two Arikara Indians. “What are you looking for,” I asked, “and what do you see?”
“I’m looking for an explanation,” she said. “A reason why people choose to see differences as defects. As deficiencies.”
“You’re looking in the wrong place,” I told her. “You won’t find your answer in the dead. Only in the living. But you already know that.”
She sighed. “Yeah, I guess I do. It just always surprises and saddens me when I smack up against that kind of thing.”
“I know,” I told her. Quit stalling, Brockton, I scolded myself. I drew a slow breath. “You know I admire your idealism. And your sense of justice. And your bravery.” I paused. Here came the hard part. “But Miranda—”
She interrupted me with a sudden, keening cry. “I know, I know,” she said, her shoulders suddenly shaking, her words so choked I could scarcely understand them. “I crossed a line. I did.”
“You did,” I agreed. “Never lay hands on a student in anger. Never, never, never.”
“I know, I know,” she wailed. “You’ve taught me better than that. You’ve shown me better than that. I’m so sorry, Dr. B. So, so sorry.” She wiped a trail of tears and snot off her face with her scarf, then stared at the slimy mess. “Goddammit,” she said, but there was no heat in the curse; just defeat. “Do you need to fire me? Do you want me to quit?” Her eyes, so sorrowful and vulnerable, damn near broke my heart.
“Good grief, come here,” I said. I opened my arms and enfolded her in a hug—not the first one I’d ever given her, I realized, but one of only a few, and the only one that had ever been more than a quick, awkward, surface-level gesture. “When I was a little kid,” I said, “maybe five or six years old, my grandmother came to visit. Nana, we called her. She loved to take us for nature hikes, and one day, on one of these nature hikes, she was teaching me how to make a Robin Hood hat out of a great big leaf. She pulled a leaf off of this bush and made a hat for herself, to show me how, then pointed to a leaf and said, ‘Now you try.’ So I grabbed the leaf and pulled and pulled, but it wouldn’t let go of the stem. Finally I snapped, ‘How do you get these damn leaves off?!’ She was shocked. Hell, I was shocked—I didn’t even know I knew that word, let alone how to use it—and I knew I was in for it. Sure enough, when we got home, my mother said she’d have to wash out my mouth with soap.”
I felt Miranda move—was it a sob, or a chuckle?—and heard her snuffle, and I went on. “But hours passed, and she didn’t do it. I knew it was still coming, and the suspense was killing me. So finally, just before bedtime, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I found the biggest bar of Ivory soap we had, and I crammed it into my mouth and I rubbed it all over my tongue and the roof of my mouth, and I scraped it back and forth across all my teeth. By the time I was done, I’d whittled about half of that bar into my mouth, and I was gagging from the taste.”
“Good story,” Miranda said, disengaging and stepping back so she could look at me. “And there’s a point, too, I’m guessing?”
“Two weeks later, one of my older cousins was visiting, and said the f-word. My mother washed out his mouth on the spot, but all she did was rub the soap back and forth across his lips a couple times, like ChapStick. My point is, don’t go overboard on the self-punishment. Quitting would be the worst thing you could do. Just . . . go and sin no more.”
Smiling through her tears, Miranda pressed her hands together, as if in prayer, and gave the slightest, sweetest bow of her head. “No more,” she said. “Never, never, never.”
I believed she was telling the truth.
For both our sakes, I hoped she was.
CHAPTER 29
“SOMEONE’S ON LINE ONE FOR YOU,” PEGGY ANNOUNCED curtly when I picked up the phone. “Says it’s important, but he won’t give his name.”
I felt a bloom of sweat on my scalp, and my mental alarms went nuts, all of them shrieking at two hundred decibels. “Does it sound like Satterfield?”
“How would I know what he sounds like? I’ve never talked to him. Never heard him interviewed.”
“Sorry. Stupid question.”
“But just guessing? I’d say he sounds young and scared, not middle-aged and murderous.”
“Okay, I’ll take it. And Peggy?”
“Yes?”
“I know I’ve been acting strange. I’m really sorry. Please try”—I almost said “not to take it personally,” but that seemed like a surefire prelude to an epic case of foot-in-mouth disease—“to bear with me a little longer. Till this Satterfield storm blows over.”
There was
a pause. “I’ve borne with you for nearly twenty-five years now,” she said. “I’d say that’s a pretty good testament to my patience.”
“Touché,” I said, feeling the unaccustomed sensation of a smile twitching at my lips.
I pressed the blinking button for line 1. “Hello, this is Dr. Bill Brockton. How can I help you?”
“Dr. Brockton?” Peggy was right, though if anything, she’d erred on the side of understatement. My caller sounded very young—the age of my grandsons, perhaps—and extremely scared. “The Dr. Brockton who’s the head of the Body Farm?”
“That’s me,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
“My name is Hassim,” he said. “I met you the other day? When you came to the mosque?”
My nervousness vanished, replaced by a sort of electric hum of hope. “Hello, Hassim. Nice to hear from you. I hope I didn’t cause any trouble by showing up uninvited.”
“No, sir. I mean, people are pretty nervous these days, with all the terrible things being said about Muslims.” His voice—no discernible accent, so perhaps, like Mona, he, too, was the American-born child of immigrant parents—sounded less fearful now; more weary, perhaps, with a hint of bitterness.
“I’m not surprised,” I said. “I’d be nervous, too. Not everyone feels that way. I certainly don’t.”
“No, sir, I didn’t think you did. I remembered you when you came to the mosque. You talked at our high school last year. The STEM Academy. The new magnet school in the old L&N train depot.”
“Y’all were a good group,” I said, although the truth was, I didn’t actually remember them. School groups tend to blur together, at least if you talk to a hundred a year. But I did remember liking the setting: a magnificent old railway station, converted into a school for science nerds. “What’s on your mind, Hassim?”
“I’m not supposed to be calling you. The imam said we should keep the community’s business to ourselves. But it doesn’t seem right, not to help . . .” He trailed off.
