The Submission - Amy Waldman [40]
Seven of the twelve hands went up. Jamilah hesitated, then raised hers.
“Excellent,” Malik said. “We have a two-thirds majority. Now we need a strategy. Laila, can you walk us through the options on the legal front?”
She was brief and to the point. Their best bet, she said, was to create the fear of a lawsuit without actually filing one. Mo, she said, should publicly identify himself as the winner, which would force the jury’s hand. “You have a press conference, introduce me to imply the legal threat, or maybe have me take the questions—”
“I don’t think that’s the right approach,” Ansar said.
“We should have the committee leadership—Issam, Jamilah—up there, or people will mistake Ms. Fathi for the face of MACC,” Imam Rashid said.
An awkward, even unpleasant, mood had taken hold in the room. Mo looked at Laila. She was studying, too intently, her notes.
“I think it’s an excellent idea,” he said. “Ms. Fathi will answer all the questions for me.” She compressed her lips. Mo couldn’t tell if she was pleased.
“The committee should be up there,” Imam Rashid said. “Issam?”
The meeting broke up soon after, and Mo managed to walk out with Laila. “What was going on in there between you and them?” His much longer legs had to work to keep pace with hers.
“Which of these things is not like the other.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You didn’t notice I was the only uncovered woman in there? It’s a big deal for me to even be in that room. Those other women fought for seats on the council, and they couldn’t have won if they weren’t wearing the hijab. I’m new. Malik got me in there because I’ve been getting high-profile cases involving Muslims. Because I’m good. But it’s tense, as you noticed.”
“So why bother with them? They don’t seem focused—that guy droning on about the Iraqis.”
“I’m a solo practitioner. They can send cases my way. They publicize what I do. They lobby for my issues. The law is political, especially right now. If the government wants to find a way to forget the Constitution and detain people without charges, it will. Just as they will deny your memorial if they want.”
“Not with you on my side.”
She ignored this. “As for Ansar, he’s annoying but he’s not wrong. Not about the history of our foreign policy, not about how many Muslim civilians we’ve killed since the attack because of what was done to us or what might be done to us. We barely even pretend anymore that we’re trying to spread good in the world; it’s only about protecting us because we are good.”
“I guess I’ve stumbled into something bigger than I realized.”
“You don’t strike me as a stumbler,” Laila said.
Maybe it was a coincidence, but the week the jury learned Mohammad Khan’s name, Claire’s son, William, dreamed that his father couldn’t find his way home. The nightmare came night after night, in black harmony with Claire’s tension over the memorial. After soothing William to sleep yet again, she poured a glass of wine and tried to think how Cal would have comforted him.
The air was sharp, the grass dew-beaded, when she took the children outside early the next morning. Collect the stones, she told them, pointing to the dozens that bordered the flower beds, spiraled in the close-cropped grass, edged the paths to the pool and tennis court. She and Cal had scavenged them on trips to beaches, woods, mountains. Lavender, pale mint, coal black, veined, smooth, striated, glitter-traced, dull as mud. River-polished, sandpaper-rough, dagger-sharp.
“Do you remember what Daddy showed you when you went hiking?” she asked William. “About how to find your way home when you were lost?”
William shook his head no, and she nearly screamed at the speed of his forgetting. But he hadn’t even been four when Cal took him to the Catskills. She crouched and stacked some stones into a little pile. “You put a pile on the trail so you remember which way you came. Then, a little farther on, you put another one, then another. Just like the bread crumbs in