Refugees (6 page)

“A group home would've destroyed me. Don't know how you got through it.”

“Me neither. She's out there—I just know it, Jude.”

“Have you ever looked for her?”

“Online, yeah. I spent months looking for a Laurel Sweet. Contacted every online adoption service. Absolutely nothing. She must have changed her name.”

“Don't give up,” Jude said softly.

“No way.” But Dawn sank into the car seat.

Their nighttime conversations were intense. But the daytime views from the window were spectacular. They passed eerie red cliffs in Utah and the Badlands in South Dakota with ancient rock formations reminding Dawn of Mars or of rock-candy mountains. Dawn had never been east of Sacramento, and the landscape belted out stubborn beauty like those folk songs. Later, over the cornfields of
Kansas, the sky was so thick with blue that it could have been sliced like turquoise cake.

Toward the end of the trip, everyone grew vicious. They had driven through industrial sections of Ohio and were now on the highway north of D.C. The sour pollution matched the foul vibes polluting the sedan.

“I can't wait to take a shower,” Jude said. “My shirt is absolutely stuck to me.”

“Yeah, you stink like moldy onions,” Burnout complained.

“Well, you smell like a urinal,” Jude retorted. “I kind of like roughing it,” Dawn admitted. “You ain't roughing it, you're getting the presidential treatment,” said Burnout.

Jude rolled his eyes. “You mean POW treatment.”

“I'm itching for a steak and fries.” Red Fro rubbed his jelly belly.

“You're getting fat as a rhinoceros,” Burnout shot back.

Dawn was sick of them all, and especially of Jude's whining. He whined about leg cramps and his wrinkled silk shirts and sleep deprivation.

“What's wrong with a warm sleeping bag?” she asked.

“It sucks, that's what. I can't wait until we get to Pax's and can sleep in a real bed.”

“Maybe we shouldn't even stay there,” replied Dawn. “If we stay somewhere else, no one could track us down.”

“You've got to be kidding!”

“No, I'm not.” She was worried about Victor telling Louise what she had done. Dawn drowned everything out with her headphones for the last five hours of the trip.

In Jersey, Burnout left the highway, pulled onto a shabby street, and parked.

Dawn took off her headphones. “Where are we?”

“Kaypo and I are staying in Newark,” replied Burnout. “Your ride ends here.”

“What?” exclaimed Jude.

“PATH train into Manhattan,” said Red Fro as he shook hands. “It's been real.”

In an exhausted but exhilarated daze, Dawn and Jude shot under the Hudson River in the PATH tunnel toward their dreamland, Manhattan, then rode an escalator up and out of the station into a seemingly endless marble concourse.

Jude scanned the signs. “We're in the World Trade Center!”

They wandered out onto the streets of Tribeca. “Look.” Jude pointed back to where they'd been. “It goes up forever.”

“It's taller than on TV,” Dawn exclaimed. “The Transamerica Building doesn't even come close.” She cupped her eyes and arched her neck skyward. The vastness of the steel-latticed building made her feel tiny, yet as if she could soar right up alongside it and into the sky. “It's like a mythical castle.”

Jude bowed. “I pledge to be milady's footservant in her castle.”

Dawn curtsied grandly. “Many thanks, milord.”

They watched fancy people slip into seriously capitalistic limos and dash around the sidewalks to pop in and out of dark bars.

An image of Louise clambering into an ICRC jeep in the desert came into Dawn's mind, followed by one of Louise chucking her hiking boots for heels and mincing down the marble concourse of a skyscraper with briefcase in hand. The images made Dawn giggle. It was weird how she had suddenly thought of Louise. Dawn's eyes focused on the empty sidewalk. “Jude?” she called as she spun around. “Jude?” she called again. How would she find Pax's apartment without him? Her throat caught in a half-scream, then held.
“Jude!”
There he was, across the street asking someone for directions. He motioned Dawn back into the concourse. She heaved an enormous sigh.

“We have to go back in here, Dawn,” Jude shouted from the steps, which led back into the Trade Center. “Number six train.”

“This street reminds me of the Mission,” Dawn remarked as they left the subway and crossed Third Avenue onto St. Marks. It pulsed with art and music types, street hustlers and vendors hawking hats, scarves, and earrings.

“I told you you'd like New York.” Jude's eyes scanned a dreadlocked kid who strutted by with a spaniel festooned in a red bandana. “Half these people are musicians or actors. This is going to be so sweet.”

Dawn was stoked by the iridescence of St. Marks at night: its tinseled jewelry, awnings lined with blinking lights, the interior of St. Mark's Comics, with rack after rack of gaudy displays. Music and conversation poured onto the street from restaurants and falafel houses. Dawn's ears latched onto a Middle Eastern beat, which jogged her into a vision of Louise tending to a sick child under a Red Crosstent.
Dawn forced the image away, refusing to lend it space in her head. “How far are we from Avenue A?” she asked. Jude was the guide.

“Next block.” Worry crossed his face. “I hope Pax is OK with this.”

“I thought you said Pax would be happy to see you, no questions asked.” They squeezed by two restaurants whose outside tables competed for space on the sidewalk.

“Oh, Pax will be fine. It's just his roommate, Sander.” Jude's hand went up in a dismissive wave and he grinned. “We'll have to charm him, Dawn.” Jude launched into his spacey jig, the pack bouncing on his rounded back.

“Stop it,” she laughed. But Jude's antics didn't prevent Dawn's muscles from clenching tighter as they rounded the corner of Avenue A and her eyes rested on two bedraggled kids hunched in a doorway. Their vacant eyes stared past Dawn.

“Excuse me,” Jude demanded.

One came half-alive. “Yo, we need to get to Jersey. Can you help us out?”

Jude tossed a quarter into the guy's outstretched hand, which was met with a distracted nod. Jude leaned over them to ring Pax's doorbell.

They heard pounding footsteps. The door swung open, and the two drifters shifted off the doorstep. “Buzzer's broken,” said Pax as he tried to catch his breath. He had unruly black hair and untied Skechers and was tall but hunched like Jude. It seemed to take him a few beats to realize who they were. “Jude?” Pax's stare grew angry. “What are you doing here? The parents have been calling for two days!” Dawn averted her gaze to the bank of mailboxes. “You didn't do something loopy like run away, did you?”

Jude seemed to shrink under his brother's gaze. “Well, yeah, um, we did, Pax. I thought you'd think it was a good idea. You know,
you
ran away.”

“Don't bring what
I
did into this,” Pax retorted. “You can't stay here, end of story. What will I say when the parents are all over me? Huh?”

Jude's voice was bolder, indignant. “You don't have to answer for me, Pax, I'm perfectly capable. But hey, at least have some manners and invite us in for coffee.”

“How did you get here, anyway?”

“We got a ride from your friends Bryce and Kaypo.”

“Friends! Bryce is so burned out on drugs that no club will hire him, and Kaypo? He's such an
herb.
” A goofy grin spread over Pax's face. “Okay. Fair enough, dude, you deal with the parental factor. It
is
cool to see you, just a huge surprise.”

Jude introduced Dawn, and they trundled up four flights into a cramped apartment smelling of sandalwood, a psychedelic rainbow shag rug on the floor. Jude had a shag back in Frisco. Dawn wondered if a preference for scuzzy long-haired rugs ran in Jude's family's genes.

“It's gorgeous,” Jude gushed as he examined posters and embroidered pillows.

Dawn spotted electric guitars, wah-wah pedals, amplifiers, and a DJ console. The array of instruments awed her.
Professional musicians.
The words trilled in her mind like an Ian Anderson flute riff.

“Our band, Paxmania, is playing tonight,” Pax said. “I play guitar, and Sander here writes our lyrics and plays percussion.”

A guy moved into the room as a lion might, feet stroking the carpet, blond mane streaming around his face.
Pax was just Jude's brother, Burnout and Red Fro were losers, but Sander was not only insanely cute, he was the real deal—a working rock musician.

Messy emotions began to branch through Dawn. She stared straight ahead at the instruments, willing herself to calm down.

“Hey,” said Sander. He padded over to his drum set and pattered out a drum fill.

Keep your head down,
Dawn thought,
or he'll see right into you.

Sander flipped back his hair and glanced at Jude. “So you're Pax's brother, I've heard lots about you. You want to be an actor, right?” Jude smiled, nodding.

Then Sander turned to Dawn, who was twisting her garnet ring around and around. “So what are
you
into, Dawn?”

I'm into running.
She turned that holy mother of a ring as if her life depended on it. “I'm into music.”

A
unt Maryam ushered Johar in. Peering out nervously from under her burqa, she quickly closed the door.

“What is it?” Johar asked. Maryam's movements were usually calm and deliberate.

“While I was away this afternoon, speaking with a student's mother, Ramila said two men came to the door, asking questions.” Aunt Maryam's assistant, Ramila, was a girl who had studied longer than the others and knew the lessons: poetry, Quran, math, and, most forbidden, English. She lived nearby, so she often stayed late to share in the evening prayers, eat, and keep his aunt company.

“What questions did they ask?” Johar removed his pattu and put it on the mat bordering the mud-brick wall.

“How long have I lived here? Why were girls coming to my house? Where was my husband?” Aunt Maryam
checked to make sure the curtains were closed, then removed her burqa, letting it fall, wrinkled, in a corner near where Bija slept on a square of carpet. His aunt's brown eyes were sallow and puffy with worry in contrast to the vivid blue of the lapis lazuli earrings her brother, Tilo, had given her before he'd gone to England. She kept them on even to sleep.

“Were they Taliban?” asked Johar.

“Who else?”

“What did Ramila tell them?” Johar asked anxiously.

“She told them my husband was a cloth merchant on the road to Herat. She said the girls helped me with washing and cleaning.” Aunt Maryam laughed bitterly. “Lovely lies, eh?”

Johar sighed. “At least they didn't torture the truth from her.”

“Not this time.” She walked toward the back room. “Some chai is in order.”

When Johar and his brother were younger, before the Taliban, Aunt Maryam never hid her village school. Children would flock from Baghlan and the nearby villages. They would sit in eager rows on the carpet as they listened to the morning lessons. Maryam had a decent blackboard and chalk then, and even the English textbooks Tilo had brought quietly in from England. “You must learn to read Dari, but also to speak English, the modern language of the world.” She had pronounced the word
English
slowly so that her students, who called it Ingleesi, could hear its common usage. But that was then.