What We Bury, page 18
part #4 of Call of the Crow Quartet Series
The first thing he did was disable the passcode, so he could come in whenever he wanted without having to bother typing that long string of numbers. Then he decided to start with her texts, to see whether she’d gotten any strange or threatening messages.
He didn’t see anything like that, but one message caught his eye. Ok, thanks! Have a good trip! It was from Andi.
What? Why was she texting his mom?
He opened the string and scrolled all the way back up to the top. It had started in April, right after he moved out. Sounds like he loves it at Zetik! He showed me around his cabin, it’s so cute, Andi had written. His mother responded, Glad to hear it. How was his mood?
Andi had texted back a sun emoji. His mother responded with a rose. That means thank you. I appreciate you doing this, Andi.
It went on and on. For months. A weather emoji from Andi that apparently corresponded to his mood on a given day, a flower emoji from his mother.
Is that why Andi had called him every day? So that she could check up on him and report back to his mother?
He was so disgusted, it was all he could do to keep scrolling. But at the bottom of the string was something even worse. Andi had texted a photograph of four men, two of whom Naveed recognized.
There was Alastor, in his clean-cut alter ego, looking different, but still recognizable, without his long gray beard.
And standing right next to him was Tim Schmidt.
He looked exactly the same as the day Naveed had first met him back at Englewood, when he’d been masquerading as a CDC scientist studying MRK. Sandy blond hair, floury skin, tweedy jacket.
Oh, Tim Schmidt has big plans. Big plans.
Naveed found himself shivering again. Seeing those two men together was bad enough, but even worse was Andi’s message beneath them: Hey Cy, I need your help figuring out who these guys are.
And then: Oops! Never mind. Sent by mistake.
Followed by Maman’s reply: Let this go, Andi-jaan. It doesn’t mean anything. And please leave my sons out of it.
Naveed set the phone down, pulling his blanket tighter. Where had Andi gotten this picture? And she’d gone behind his back, asking Cyrus for help instead of telling Naveed about it, not even stopping to consider that he might have useful information, too. Whatever happened to no surprises, no secrets?
She had broken the pact.
She had been keeping so much from him.
He understood, now. Maybe it was the after-effects of that purge. By getting rid of everything, all that excess baggage he carried around, all the emotions that clouded his judgement, he could finally see things for how they really were.
Andi had just been a spy for his mother. She had never loved him. Well, maybe, at one point, she had loved the idea of him, but that wasn’t really him.
“How could you do this to me?” he said out loud, slamming his closed fist down on the table, causing the bowl of cherries and walnuts to knock into Maman’s mug. He looked beyond it to her empty chair. “Both of you—but especially Andi. She betrayed me. She lied to me. How could she. How could she.”
He had to keep repeating it for another few minutes before he could move on, before he could touch the phone again and close the text string. But he couldn’t do that without seeing the photo again, reigniting the fury—and the fear. What did it mean? Had Tim Schmidt been working with Alastor and those other two men? Had they been plotting something long before Alastor’s death? Big plans….
Had Maman known what they were up to? Let this go. It doesn’t mean anything. Had she not let go, though? Had she figured something out? Is that what had killed her?
He opened her browser, hoping that he might find something useful in her search history, but of course Cyrus had set it up so that her searches were not tracked. So he decided to try looking in her email. There were hundreds of unread messages: notifications of upcoming events, appeals for donations from various organizations, petitions she would never sign. It was all so overwhelming that he nearly closed it again, but he forced himself to keep scanning subject lines for potential clues.
Then he saw something: a message, still unread, that had been sent the day she died. The subject line was, “RE: Genbiotix Application # 31336.”
Dear Ms. Mirzapour,
Thank you for coming in for an interview earlier this week. We regret to inform you that we have decided to hire a different candidate with more recent experience in the industry. You may want to consider applying for an entry-level position as a lab tech in order to become familiar with contemporary research methods. We do not currently have any such positions available, but wish you luck should you seek to find employment at another company.
Best,
Charisma Cooper
Genbiotix Pharmaceuticals
“What?” Naveed said. “What? Genbiotix?”
Koffka looked up at him, weary. Here we go again. But Naveed couldn’t hold back; he was too shocked. “What the fuck, Maman? Why would you apply to work there?”
Silence.
“And what a load of bullshit. ‘Ms. Mirzapour.’ You have a PhD, they should be addressing you as ‘Dr.’! And Charisma Fucking Cooper is telling you to get a job as a lab tech? Yeah, I remember her. Of course I do. She’s the one who gave you her card when I was in the ICU last summer. Were you hoping she would help you get your foot in the door? But why, Maman, why? Were you planning something? You had Big Plans too? Trying to take them down from the inside? Yeah. That makes sense. But of course Charisma would have guessed that, wouldn’t she? You’re probably blacklisted from every company Nutrexo was ever associated with….”
He trailed off, feeling queasy again, because now he was thinking of that article about Tara Snyder, the pieces of it that were true, the horrible things Maman had done to sabotage Tara’s research at Nutrexo, the events that had been set in motion all those years ago. He hovered over the saucepan, expecting something to come back up, but nothing did.
Next he checked her sent messages, but that only made him feel worse: most of the emails were addressed to various debt collection agencies, as well as the bank that serviced their home loan. He could barely focus by this point, but the words “foreclosure” and “bankruptcy” came up a lot.
“How could that be?” Naveed asked Maman’s empty chair. “The Nutrexo settlement… should have covered… I don’t understand….”
He was exhausted by now, but he couldn’t stop. He moved on to the next folder, her unsent drafts. This one only had a few messages. The most recent was a few months old, dated March 30.
Akilah,
I heard the news. Another innocent young Black man slain by the hands of the state, with no justice in sight. I am so sorry—though no words can make heartache like this go away. Every time this happens, I think of you. Every time this happens, I wonder, how do you do it? How do you keep fighting, day after day, when these tragedies keep happening over and over?
I think I know the answer: because you have to. And I understand that, because I have the same compulsion, but lately I’m feeling stuck. I’m constantly on the defensive, just fighting, fighting, fighting all the time. There is beauty in the struggle, I’ve always believed that, but sometimes the struggle doesn’t feel so much like swimming against the tide as it feels like drowning. Maybe it’s just the depression talking, but I can’t stop wondering, am I making any difference? Am I doing the wrong thing, continuing on this path?
Everything’s falling apart. The settlement money never came through, we’re living on credit card debt and home equity loans, digging ourselves deeper every day. Which just makes me feel guiltier for sticking it out in the CFJ, when I could actually be putting my PhD to use. Makes me sick to think about working for a biotech corp, but I’m afraid that might be the only path left for me now.
Even that might not be open to me anymore though. I think I’m on their watch lists now, maybe I’m just being paranoid but obviously I haven’t gotten over being interrogated by Homeland Security after coming home from Iran, stuck in that hell for hours when all I wanted to do was hold my daughter who was in the hospital at the time. I was just bringing my son some traditional medicines but all they could think was Terrorist! Biological weapons! It dug up so many of the things I work hard to keep buried so I can make it through each day… and then there’s the trial… you have no idea how much I’m dreading that, watching Tara smirk at me while I testify, the things she’ll say about me, I know she’s going to dredge up a whole bunch of other traumas from the past, and having to relive everything that happened last summer, I don’t know if I can take it.
Thank god for Saman, though. Seriously. When things get bad like this, he always manages to convince me that everything will work out. I don’t know if it will or not. But I do know that I owe it to him, and my children, to not give up. No matter how much I want to.
I’m so sorry, this letter went sideways, I didn’t mean to dump all this on you, of course I won’t do that, I’m never going to send this so I guess I should just stop
Naveed lowered his head into his hands. He couldn’t even look at her empty spot across the table anymore, couldn’t speak to her. That heaviness had settled into his chest, into his whole body, and he felt her hand pressing into his shoulder, holding him down. He couldn’t cry. He couldn’t feel anything but this unbearable weight.
He opened her photos next. The one that appeared first, the last photo she had ever taken, was a view he recognized. It was the ridge right above the ravine where she had fallen. It was sunrise, and the whole valley was bathed in golden light. He could picture her there on the mountain, hiking up to the ridge to greet the sun, just like in the poem she had carried in her blue silk robe. But what had happened next? There were three paths, all of them seeming equally possible now.
She had greeted the sun before being attacked from behind, her phone dropping to the ground, not even time to fight back before she was thrown over the edge.
She had greeted the sun before saying her final goodbye to the earth, setting her phone in the underbrush so that it might give answers, however messy, to those she left behind. She leapt from the ledge, soaring into the empty air like a bird, feeling the brief release, the freedom, before crashing down to the rocky ground below.
She had greeted the sun, giving thanks for surviving another bout of depression, but the rocks were slick from rain and she’d slipped, her phone had clattered into the brush, she had fallen, she had tried to find something to grab onto but she couldn’t, her head cracked open on the rocks and she died there, at the bottom of the ravine, her face pressed up against the dirt, bathed in the golden light of dawn.
Somehow, the last possibility now seemed the most painful.
It got his stomach churning again, so he crawled back to bed. Koffka curled up next to him, but he couldn’t even feel the dog’s warmth. He didn’t think he’d ever feel warm again.
His thoughts swirled into a spiral, orbiting around one central figure. Tara Snyder. No matter what had really happened up there on the mountain, Tara Snyder was the person responsible for his mother’s suffering—and for his. For his entire family’s. No matter how you followed the threads, it all came back to Tara Snyder.
And Naveed was the only one who could bring her to justice.
III.
Scythes
27
Andi
Tuesday, May 31
ON THE MORNING THE TRIAL was to begin, Andi was pulled out of an anxious half-sleep by her buzzing phone. She’d been keeping it on at night in case Naveed called, though she hadn’t heard anything from him since the day of the memorial.
She looked at the screen and blinked in disbelief. She rubbed her eyes, thinking that maybe she’d misread the name, but she hadn’t. It was impossible, but somehow it had happened all the same.
Mahnaz had just texted her.
She opened the string. There at the bottom were their last messages to each other, the ones she kept re-reading even though they shattered her heart every time, Mahnaz informing her of her camping trip, Andi telling her to enjoy it.
Now, though, two more messages had been added, each in their own small bubble.
I just have to know one thing
Did you ever really love me?
It took a second for her to understand, but once she did, her whole body filled with numb dread.
Naveed had somehow managed to get into his mother’s phone.
And he had seen their entire conversation. Andi scrolled all the way back to the beginning, when they’d figured out their code, when his mother had thanked her for keeping an eye on him.
Oh, no. This was bad. Very, very bad.
Heart pounding, she wrote in reply, Naveed? Of course I love you! I’ve always loved you.
It sounded so generic, but it was true. Part of her wanted to yell at him, Are you for real?! Why do you have to doubt this—haven’t I done enough to show you? The whole conversation is just proof of how much we care about you! But at the same time, she could imagine how it would feel to be on his side of it, looking at how she’d boiled down his complicated moods into a little icon on the screen, reporting back to his mother like some sort of double agent. Plus, there was that photo of Alastor and the other men, and the accidentally-sent text showing she’d tried to contact Cyrus behind Naveed’s back.
She didn’t know what else to say. I’m really sorry about this, she wrote, even though that wasn’t quite accurate. While she did feel guilty for not being entirely honest with him, she had been glad to have this connection with Mahnaz, and happy to do her part in relieving someone else’s worry. I was just trying to protect you, she added, then sent the message.
His reply felt like a kick in the gut.
You’re lying
I can’t believe I ever trusted you
She started typing frantically. I’m not lying! It’s the absolute truth, everything I did is because I love you, and if I can’t convince you of that
But before she could finish her thought, let alone send it, a stream of new messages came in.
You broke the pact
You’ve been keeping so many secrets from me
We’re done
Goodbye Andi
Andi threw her phone forcefully onto her bed. Rage swelled up inside, threatening to consume her. Though there were plenty of things she wanted to say to him, she decided against texting him back. Sometimes silence hurt more than words anyway.
She wished she could call Brooke and vent, but it wasn’t even five in the morning yet. So she was left to soak in her feelings of resentment alone. Seriously, how could he do this to her? Just call off their whole relationship by text, not even giving her the chance to explain? Especially today, when she had to face Tara Snyder in court again. But as Andi and her father and Cyrus and Sam were undergoing the trauma of seeing Tara again and the torment of being questioned in court in front of her, Naveed would be hiding out in his little cabin at the farm, sulking and convincing himself that nobody loved him.
Well, fine. Hadn’t she tried her very hardest to show him otherwise? If he couldn’t see it, wasn’t the burden on him? She couldn’t force him to see something he didn’t want to see.
Knowing that she wouldn’t be able to find sleep again, Andi got out of bed. It was too early for a run, but she felt like banging on the piano. She got her MIDI keyboard set up on the small desk in the room, plugged it into her laptop and headphones, then started channeling her rage into music. Early on, she happened on a riff she liked. And, even better, she knew exactly where it belonged. Way back in the fall, she’d started working on an epic sonata that told her story through music. She’d stalled out on it a while ago, knowing it was missing something, but not sure how to fix it.
Anger, she realized now. That’s what it needed. Most of the song had come from places of fear and anguish, but it needed this too, this bright raging energy, to balance the more sorrowful emotions. The fiery sun beating down on churning water.
She poured herself into the music. As time flowed around her, she slowly came to a heart-wrenching realization: she was angry, yes, but also relieved. How much brain space did she spend worrying about Naveed every single day? Wondering what he was doing, dreaming about their next time together. And even when they were finally reunited after months apart, he hadn’t wanted to touch her, hadn’t wanted to kiss, had been pushing her away this whole time, and she, too, had been pulling apart from him, but she didn’t want to leave because she was afraid for him, and she didn’t know if she’d ever stop caring about him, but maybe this was never meant to be a romance, he hadn’t wanted it to be in the first place, maybe he’d known something like this would happen and both of them would end up getting hurt, and he had no space in his life to keep getting hurt, but then neither did she, and why was it always up to him to call the shots, he was the one to give permission for it to begin and end, while she went along with whatever he said, like that version of herself in the photograph who spent her life gazing adoringly at someone who didn’t—couldn’t?—love her the way she wanted to be loved, building her life around something that turned out to be an illusion.
She didn’t want to be that girl anymore.
A knock on the door startled her. “Peanut? I’ve got breakfast ready—want to join me?”
“Be there in a minute.” Andi pulled off her headphones and looked at the clock. Hours had flown by. She saved her work and slipped on the blouse and slacks she’d ironed the night before, after her dad went out and bought an iron. As she put on her makeup in the bathroom, she kept feeling a strange buzzing sensation that might have been anxiety, might have been anticipation, might have been… excitement. The buzz of freedom, maybe.
She would have to talk these confused feelings over with Brooke later, but there was no time now. Only time to force down breakfast and head out the door.
