Snakehead

I

A gentle wind, warm now that the chill had been burned off it, blew across the parking lot as Li and Margaret walked from her car toward the terminal building. The dust it raised off the tarmac blew around their ankles. Li carried his overnight bag in his left hand, a cigarette in his right, and a silence laden with tension.

After Hrycyk left them, they had gone back to the hotel and eaten a light breakfast before collecting Li’s bag from his room and driving out to Hobby. There hadn’t been much to say. Li’s part in the investigation was effectively over. A message on his answering service had summoned him back to Washington to report to his Embassy. And then he had the whole mess of his family to deal with, to resolve somehow. Of course, he would have to return to Huntsville with Xiao Ling for the second hearing in front of the immigration court. Between now and then there was no reason for him to be in Houston, nor Margaret in Washington. They were still separated by half a continent, and neither of them appeared to know how to bridge the gap.

In the departures hall, Li collected his ticket, and Margaret walked with him to the gate. The first available flight went via Dallas and would take more than two hours. Li was not looking forward to it. They stood awkwardly before the entrance to the baggage check. Still neither of them knew what to say. Finally Li forced a smile and said, ‘I’ll e-mail you.’

‘Will you?’

He shrugged. ‘Sure.’

‘Why?’

He was puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

She sighed. ‘What would we have to say to each other in an e-mail, Li Yan? If we’re not together, if we can’t say the things we want to face to face, what’s the point?’

He studied her features for a long time. ‘Do you want us to be together?’

‘More than anything in the world.’

‘But?’ He knew there was a ‘but’. Somehow there always was with Margaret.

‘I’m not sure it would work any better here than it did in China.’

‘Why?’

‘For all the same reasons. Because of what we are. An American and a Chinese. Oil and water. Because of where we are. Houston and Washington. Still a world apart.’ People always said if you were in love nothing else mattered. She wanted to believe that, but couldn’t. She wanted to tell him she loved him, but was scared that would only hurt them more. She said, ‘Tell Xinxin I’m thinking of her.’

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak. Then he laid his bag at his feet and took her in his arms, almost crushing her. They stood that way for so long that people were beginning to stare. When, finally, he let her go, her face was wet with silent tears. She reached up on tiptoe and kissed him, and then turned and hurried out of the building without once looking back.

II

Lucy looked up from her desk in surprise and said, ‘You look terrible, Dr. Campbell.’

‘Thank you, Lucy,’ Margaret said. ‘That makes me feel a whole helluva lot better.’ She stopped immediately and raised both her hands in instant apology. ‘I’m sorry. I forgot. Hell is very real to some of us.’

‘Particularly,’ Lucy said dryly, ‘those of us who have been left trying to keep the ship afloat with nobody at the helm.’

‘Stormy waters, Lucy,’ Margaret said. ‘Forced me to abandon ship. But I’m back now, and I’ll try to sail us into calmer seas.’

‘Well, you’re going to have to do a lot of calming at the Houston Police department. Homicide has been agitating for twenty-four hours now for reports on two autopsies that have not even been carried out yet.’

‘I thought we arranged for Dr. Cullen…’

‘Called back to say he couldn’t make it.’ Lucy smiled sweetly. ‘Of course, that was after you’d, uh…disappeared…yesterday afternoon.’ She paused. ‘Something wrong with your cellphone?’

Margaret ignored the jibe and sighed. ‘You didn’t tell them the autopsies hadn’t been done, did you?’

‘Now you know I wouldn’t lie about a thing like that, Doctor.’ She hesitated. ‘I’ve been…stalling them.’

Margaret smiled. ‘Thank you, Lucy. Ask Jack to wheel them out, would you? I’ll do them now.’

She went wearily into her office and her heart sank when she saw her desk groaning under the weight of paperwork that had accumulated, even since yesterday. She sat down with her head in her hands and felt her headache returning. It was all she could do to stop herself bursting into tears. She was tired and sore and sorry for herself. She took a deep breath and sat up. There was nothing for it but to get on with it. On with life. On with death.

The body on the table was that of a young Caucasian male, Margaret guessed in his early twenties. He was short, only about five-seven, but powerfully built and covered with thick body hair. The hair on his head was already thinning. There was evidence of trauma around his face and neck. The knuckles of his right hand were bruised and deformed as though one or more might be broken. She would look at the x-rays in a few minutes. His penis had been severed, almost in its entirety, and was absent. There were multiple stab wounds in his chest and abdomen. Margaret counted thirty-three.

She looked at the photographs from the crime scene on the stainless steel counter behind her. It looked like someone’s bedroom, but not that of the deceased, according to the report. There was a lot of blood on the floor around the body, but not much of it seemed to have come from the stab wounds. Margaret guessed that the penis had been severed first, and that the victim might have bled to death even before the frenzied knife attack.

She returned to the body, and Jack helped her turn it over. Jack Sweeney was one of her autopsy assistants. He was in his mid-thirties and of indeterminate sexual orientation. He had been working for the Medical Examiner’s Office for nearly ten years. ‘Be careful with this one,’ he said. ‘I read the report. Apparently he was a male prostitute.’

Margaret glanced up, surprised. ‘He’s not what I would have thought of as typical,’ she said.

‘Some men like them rough,’ Jack said. Then added, smirking, ‘So I’ve heard.’

Margaret found evidence of trauma and semen in the anal passage and immediately felt herself breaking into a sweat. She ran a sleeve across her forehead and found her breath coming with difficulty. ‘Is it very hot in here?’ she asked.

Jack shrugged. ‘Usual, Dr. Campbell. Pretty cool.’ He peered at her. ‘You okay? You look a bit flushed.’

Margaret put both hands on the table to steady herself. She was light-headed now and starting to feel nauseous. The sweat turned cold on the back of her neck.

She made a dash for the sink and was violently sick into it. Jack was at her side instantly, arms around her shoulders. But she shrugged him off. ‘I’m sorry, Jack, I need a little space.’

‘What’s wrong, Doctor? Something you ate?’ He was concerned for her.

She saw her breakfast in the stainless steel sink and turned on the tap to wash it away. ‘Probably.’ She took off her latex gloves, filled her hands with cold water and sluiced her face, then stood, leaning against the sink, willing the trembling in her legs to stop. She remained like that for several minutes, until she began to feel some control returning. She snapped on a fresh pair of gloves and returned to the table.

‘You sure you’re up to this?’ Jack asked.

She nodded, but even as she turned her attentions back to the bloodless white flesh on the table, the sweat began beading across her forehead, and a further wave of nausea rose from her stomach. ‘Jesus.’ She made another dash for the sink and acid bile burned its way up her throat into her mouth.

Lucy looked up in surprise as Margaret hurried through the outer office, still in her green surgeon’s pyjamas and apron, hair tucked away under her shower cap. She was deathly pale. She stopped in the doorway to her office. ‘No one’s to come in here, Lucy. And I mean no one. Lock the door. Do not leave the office. Stay at your desk.’

Lucy was alarmed now. ‘What’s wrong, Dr. Campbell?’

‘Just do what I tell you, please.’ Margaret slammed the door and crossed to her desk, digging out the phone list from her bag with trembling fingers, and snatching the phone from its cradle. Her breathing was tremulous and erratic, her body wracked by uncontrollable shivering. Fear and dread had balled themselves up together in a huge knot in her stomach. She listened as the phone rang twice at the other end before the operator picked up.

‘USAMRIID Fort Detrick. How may I help you?’

‘Dr. Margaret Campbell for Colonel Robert Zeiss. It’s an emergency.’

‘One moment, please.’

The one moment stretched into eternity. Margaret rounded her desk and dropped into her chair, but perched on the edge of it, only barely in control.

‘Colonel Zeiss.’

‘Colonel, I think I’ve got the flu.’

There was a brief silence at the other end of the line. Margaret could almost hear the colonel thinking. ‘Why do you think that?’ he asked.

‘Because I’ve just had two bouts of vomiting, I’m sweating and shaking from head to toe.’

Another pause, then Zeiss said, ‘Stay where you are, Doctor. I’ll have a team with you as fast as I possibly can. We’ll need isolation facilities. What’s closest to you?’

‘Hermann Hospital, I think. They have an infectious diseases facility and isolation rooms.’ She could almost see the hospital, in Medicine City, from her window.

‘I’ll alert them.’ He paused again. ‘Who have you been in contact with in the last few hours?’

‘My secretary, my autopsy assistant. Li Yan, the Chinese criminal justice liaison…’ Her heart sank at the thought. Please, God, not Li as well. ‘But he’s on a plane to Washington, via Dallas.’

‘Shit!’ Zeiss almost whispered the oath. ‘What airline?’

‘Air Tran.’

‘We’ll try to intercept him. Make certain that your autopsy assistant and secretary have no contact with anyone until we can get them isolated. Is there anyone else?’

Her mind raced. ‘INS Agent Hrycyk,’ she said. ‘Councilman Soong, and about a dozen Houston police officers — but that was several hours ago.’

She heard Zeiss groan. ‘Let’s just hope you’re wrong about this,’ he said, and she wondered if he only hoped that in order to save himself trouble. ‘Sit tight until the team gets there.’

He hung up, and she sat holding the phone, feeling like a criminal. As if somehow it was her fault that she had got the flu and had knowingly gone spreading it around. She replaced the receiver and sat numbly, wondering how she could possibly have contracted the virus. It could only have been during autopsy. Or could Steve somehow have passed it on to her? And, then, what had triggered it?

She looked around her office, her eyes lighting on all the little personal things she had gathered there over the months. The Chinese wall hanging she had been given by Li’s former boss in Beijing, a soft woollen pencil case she had kept from her schooldays — sentimental value, something that connected her with who she had been in happier times. There was a paperweight that her father had given her. It was just a big flat pebble he had found on the lake, with the fossil of a fish clearly visible on the top of it. A photograph of herself sandwiched between her mother and father on the occasion of her tenth birthday. She looked at the chubby, round red cheeks and the bobbed hair, the shining blue eyes, the fondness in her father’s gaze, the distance in her mother’s. There was a pair of old shoes, moulded to the shape of her feet, that she kept for changing into on return from a crime scene. They seemed ancient and empty and neglected, and she wondered if she would ever put them on again.

Depression and self-pity descended on her like a chill mist on an autumn morning. All these things, she thought, belonged to someone else, someone with a life, someone who did not expect to die, at least not for a long time.

The phone rang, crashing into her thoughts like a bucket of iced water. It was an internal call. She snatched at it. Lucy’s voice, small and scared, asked, ‘What’s wrong, Doctor? What’s going on?’

Margaret said, ‘I’m sorry, Lucy. It is possible I have contracted a virus. Some people are going to come and take us all into an isolation facility at Hermann Hospital. Even if it’s confirmed, the chances are I won’t have given it to you.’

There was a long silence. Then, ‘What virus, Doctor?’

‘It’s the flu, Lucy. A particularly nasty form of flu.’

The team arrived in under half an hour. Margaret saw them from the window of her office. Three army ambulances, drivers wearing Tivek suits and HEPA filter masks. Three two-man medical crews wearing full protective STEPO suits brought out litters for carrying contaminated patients. The litters were hooded in clear plastic and fitted with their own filtered air supply. They were all part of the national biowarfare defence force put in place during the Clinton regime. The sight of them made Margaret shiver.

III

The army interception team missed Li at Dulles by minutes. He had called home during his stopover at Dallas and told Xiao Ling to get a cab out to the airport to meet him. He needed to talk to her, away from Xinxin. To his astonishment, he had been met by both of them, Xinxin laughing, delighted to see him, gambolling around her mother as if they had never been apart. The transformation in Xiao Ling, too, was astonishing. Something had breathed life back into her broken spirit.

Both were concerned by the state of his face; it was even worse than when they had last seen him. And the three of them had stood hugging on the concourse, wrapped in their unexpected happiness, for a long time. Half shell-shocked, Li had told their driver to take them to the Washington Harbour complex on the Potomac, down the hill from Georgetown. It was a stunning fall day, a warm wind blowing up from a clear sky in the south and softening the air. They could get a drink at Tony and Joe’s and sit out in the sunshine and watch the roller bladers cruise by on the boardwalk.

The harbour was busy. The sun had brought the people of DC out from premature winter hibernation to enjoy the warm autumn sunshine and make the most of this unexpected reprise of summer. Tables and sunshades were laid out along the waterfront, and people crowded the steps to the fountains. The traffic on the Whitehurst Freeway was a distant rumble. This had once been a derelict area of crummy parking lots and scrap yards, transformed now into an upscale development of restaurants and shops and plush offices occupied by government lobbyists. Only the airplanes, threading their way along the curve of the Potomac, heading for Reagan, spoiled the peace. By law they could not overfly the White House on the DC side or the Pentagon on the Virginia side. And so the river had become the flight path into the National Airport. But after a while you stopped hearing them. Li sat with his sunglasses on, watching the sunlight coruscating on the river, drinking a beer, and smoking a cigarette. He felt relaxed for the first time in days. Xinxin finished a tall coupe of ice-cream and persuaded her mom to let her go and watch the joggers and the kids on roller blades. Xiao Ling told her okay, as long as she stayed inside the fence. She took a sip of her Coke and for the first time allowed her anxiety about her brother to show.

‘Are you all right?’

He nodded. ‘A few cuts and bruises. I’ll survive.’ He took a pull at his cigarette and looked at his sister fondly. She was like the old Xiao Ling, the little girl he remembered as a child. Whatever scars the last few years had left were on the inside now. For the moment nothing showed on the outside except her smile, and her clear concern for Li. He leaned forward and took her hand. ‘You’re safe now, Xing,’ he said. ‘We’ve got the ah kung. He’s in custody.’ And he realised he had used, without thinking, the nickname he had given her when they were kids. Xing.

She squeezed his hand. ‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, Li Yan…’

But he was anxious to hear what had passed between mother and daughter, and interrupted. ‘What happened with Xinxin?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I woke up this morning, and she was in bed beside me. Curled into my back, fast asleep. I’ve no idea how long she’d been there.’ There was moisture gathering in her eyes. ‘It was like she was saying to me, okay, I don’t know why you went away, but you’re back now and I forgive you, so where were we…?’ Xiao Ling laughed as the tears ran down her cheeks. ‘And, you know, now I can’t for the life of me understand why I did leave.’

‘Make that two of us,’ Li said.

Shame fell across her face like a shadow. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. It was like…like some kind of madness. I can’t explain it. Something took over inside me. Something irrational, beyond my control. When I look back, it’s as if I was another person.’ Li wiped the tears away from her face. But she was determined to get it all off her chest. ‘I’m a different person now. I know that. Different from then, different from before then. So much has happened.’ She forced a smile. ‘What does a farmer’s wife from Sichuan know about anything?’

‘A lot more now,’ Li said wryly.

She nodded, and then suddenly she said, ‘Li Yan, I don’t want to go back to that immigration court.’

Li frowned. ‘Xing, you’ve got to. They placed you in my custody. I have to take you back.’

She shook her head vigorously. ‘No, you don’t understand. I don’t want to apply for political asylum. I want to go home. I want to go back to China with Xinxin.’

‘Not to Xiao Xu?’ Li said, concerned suddenly. He had always disliked his brother-in-law, from the first time Xiao Ling had brought him home. ‘You know he’s living with someone else now.’

She shrugged. ‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘And, no, I would never have gone back to him. He was part of the madness, a part of what drove me away in the first place.’ She hesitated for a long moment. ‘When I told him I was pregnant again, he beat me.’

Li felt his hackles rising. Had he known that, he would have been on the first train to Sichuan to deal with his brother-in-law himself.

‘I didn’t tell you,’ she said, ‘because I knew what your reaction would be. You’re like all men, Li Yan. You think the only way to settle a problem is with your fists.’

He smiled sheepishly. ‘Not always,’ he defended himself. But he knew that in this instance she was right. His smile faded. ‘So where would you go?’

She tipped her eyebrows back on her head and made a face. ‘I don’t know. Beijing maybe. I’ll need to find a job.’

And he understood then that his destiny had been decided for him. He could not let Xiao Ling and Xinxin go back to China on their own. His sister was carrying the flu virus. She would need special care. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said. ‘You will stay with me. Both of you.’

‘But your job…’

‘I will ask to be reassigned,’ he said. ‘Back to Section One. In the circumstances, I don’t think they will refuse me.’

She leaned forward and removed his sunglasses, and gazed into his eyes for a long time. She knew the sacrifice he was making. ‘I love you, Li Yan,’ she said, and she kissed him on the cheek.

IV

Margaret sat up on the bed in the small isolation room. Her sealed window unit looked out over the lushly watered Hermann Park. The midday sun had long since burned off all the dew, and she saw joggers plugged into Walkmans pounding their red-legged circuits around the park. She felt as if she were watching a movie, something unreal and unreachable. She had never had the least desire to go jogging, but suddenly it seemed like the most desirable thing in the world. Just to feel the sun on your skin, the air in your lungs, the ground under your feet. To be free simply to live.

She had been in a daze when they wired her up to the monitor and took her blood samples. She remembered a doctor in a space suit telling her that her temperature was normal, but they weren’t taking any risks. They had stuck a needle in her left arm and connected her to a bag of lactated Ringer’s solution — salt and water to counteract the effects of any dehydration. Like Steve, they had also put her on a course of rimantadine antiviral drugs. The thought of Steve conjured pictures in her mind of his last moments, writhing and manic, vomiting green bile. And the cold, steel fingers of her own fear closed around her heart.

She had been aware from time to time of people coming up to the observation window in the corridor and peering in at her, but she hadn’t paid much attention. A near hysterical Lucy and a very subdued Jack were in rooms further along the corridor. She had heard Lucy’s plaintive appeals to God as they wheeled her away. But Margaret had no faith that even if there was a God, He could or would do anything to change things.

There was a phone by the bed which she was told she could use to make calls through the switchboard. But she couldn’t think of anyone to phone. She had wondered if they had caught Li at the airport in Washington, but when she asked, no one appeared to know.

She felt like an animal caught in headlights, frozen by her own fear, unable to move, unable to change or influence her own destiny. And something dark behind the lights was waiting to crush her.

The strangest thing was, she felt fine now. Physically. No more hot flushes or cold sweats. No more nausea. In fact, she was almost hungry.

She looked up as a doctor came through the ‘airlock’. There was something very strange about him. His white coat hung open, a stethoscope dangling from his neck, dark, baggy pants belted at the waist, a pair of scuffed loafers on size ten feet. Everyman’s cliché of a hospital doctor. For a moment, Margaret looked at him, puzzled, before she realised what was wrong. He wasn’t wearing a spacesuit. She wasn’t even sure if he was the doctor who had spoken to her earlier. He was about forty, sandy hair flopping across his forehead. And he was leaving the doors open behind him. His loafers squeaked on the linoleum as he crossed to the bed and disconnected her from the drip. He pressed a small bandage on her arm and drew out the needle from beneath it. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her curiously.

He said, ‘Good news and…well, other news. I’ll let you decide if it’s good or bad.’ He paused. ‘You don’t have the flu, Doctor.’

She stared at him, hardly daring to believe it. Other news, he said he had. Other news. What other news? ‘What’s wrong with me?’ she asked, and her voice caught in her throat.

He raised one eyebrow. ‘You’re pregnant.’

She sat for a long time in her office watching the sun sinking toward the western skyline, a great orange orb enlarged and distorted by the pollution that hung above the city, starting to turn pink as it tilted at the horizon.

Lucy had gone home. She had told Margaret that she would not be in the next day and that Margaret could expect to receive her resignation in the post. Jack had also gone home but said he would be in tomorrow. He said he was glad Margaret was okay. He was glad they were all okay.

Margaret hadn’t known what she felt. Numb. Scared. Confused. How could she be pregnant? She had blurted to the doctor that it wasn’t possible. That it had only been a matter of days…He had just shrugged. If she was ovulating at the time, sperm and egg would have combined within minutes, or hours. Her body was simply reacting to that. Earlier than usual, but it wasn’t unheard of.

Margaret ran her hand softly over her lower abdomen. She had Li’s child in her. A tiny, fertilised egg that in the next weeks and months would take shape and grow in her womb. It would develop little fingers and toes, a mouth, nose, eyes…She wondered if it would have her fair hair, or Li’s strong, black Chinese thatch, if it would have those beautiful slanted almond eyes, whether they would be dark like Li’s or blue like hers. Would it be a boy or a girl? It had taken a long time, several hours, but all the pain and anxiety and uncertainty had slowly but surely ebbed away, and she found herself suffused now with an almost unbearable happiness. This changed everything.

V

Li and Xiao Ling and Xinxin were laughing together as they came up the path to the front door of Li’s townhouse in Georgetown, Li chasing and catching Xinxin by the door. He wrapped his arms around her and tickled her feverishly. She squealed, laughing uncontrollably, and wriggled to try and get away. But he held her firm and breathed in the smell of fresh baked bread from her hair. But it wasn’t bread. It was just her own distinctive smell, sweet and clean and fresh. Bread Head, Margaret had nicknamed her in Beijing, but the translation had not worked in Chinese, so they had stuck to the English — and the nickname had stuck to Xinxin. The scent, and the thought, brought Margaret flooding back to his mind, and for a moment his happiness was touched by regret.

The sound of the telephone ringing on the other side of the door snapped him out of his dream, and he released Xinxin to run giggling to her mother. He hurriedly fished the keys from his pocket.

He had spent two hours at the Embassy in the early afternoon. They told him that there had been some sort of scare over the flu and that the US authorities had been looking for him earlier. But apparently it was no longer an issue. He had spent an hour with the ambassador, briefing him on developments in Houston. And then he had requested a transfer back to Beijing. The request had caused some consternation, and several other high ranking officials were brought into the meeting. Li had been asked to explain his position, and he told them about Xiao Ling and Xinxin. He had been left waiting on his own in an ante-room for some time while, he suspected, the embassy conferred with Beijing. Eventually he had been summoned again to the ambassador’s office and told that he had been granted leave to return to Beijing. A decision on his future would be taken there in the next few weeks. But Li suspected that the PR value of Xiao Ling’s high profile return to China was irresistible. The American Dream, Beijing would tell the world, was not all it was cracked up to be. Li didn’t give a damn about the politics. He just wanted to take his sister home.

To celebrate, he had taken Xiao Ling and Xinxin on a whistlestop tour of the Washington sights. The Vietnam wall, where the name of every American who had died in the Southeast Asian conflict was etched in black marble. A sobering place. Arlington Cemetery and the grave of the assassinated John F. Kennedy, fine words once spoken by him now carved in stone for eternity. The changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The strange, mechanical, strutted ritual had fascinated Xinxin. The Lincoln Memorial. Another assassinated president, towering in white marble, seated in his temple and gazing out across the Reflecting Pool to the Washington Monument and Capitol Hill beyond. He wanted them to see these things, to have these memories to take away with them, because the chances were they would never be back. Tomorrow he would pull some strings to get them on a White House tour. And the day after they would fly to Beijing.

The dying embers of the sun slanted red light into the hall as he opened the door, nearly falling over his bicycle in his rush to get to the phone. He had called Meiping earlier and told her she could have the day off.

‘Wei?’

‘Li Yan?’

He recognised Margaret’s voice immediately, and his heart suddenly filled his chest and restricted his breathing. ‘Margaret.’ He waited a moment, but she said nothing. ‘They told me there was a scare with the flu.’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘False alarm.’ More silence, that neither of them knew how to fill. Xiao Ling and Xinxin came in at Li’s back and closed the door and went through, chattering, to the kitchen. Margaret heard the voices and said, ‘How are things with Xinxin and Xiao Ling?’

So he told her. About them making up, about the long talk they had all had. About his decision to return to China with them. About the Embassy granting him interim leave to return to Beijing while they took a final decision about his position. Xiao Ling, he said, would receive the best of care if, or until, the flu struck.

Fifteen hundred miles away in Houston, Texas, his words fell like stones in a desert. An arid wind blew through Margaret’s soul. Everything she had felt just minutes earlier, the hope and the happiness, withered inside her. Only his seed remained there, the one spark of life in a bleak landscape. He talked about their day, and she listened without hearing. For beyond his reserve in breaking the news to her, she sensed his happiness, something she had not felt in him for a long time. If she told him now about their child, it could only throw everything in his life back into confusion. He might resent it. Blame her. She didn’t want to be the one to hurt him again, and neither did she want to be hurt by him.

‘Margaret…? Are you still there…?’

She forced herself to refocus. ‘Yeah, I’m still here.’

He knew there was something wrong. He could feel it reaching out to him over all the miles. ‘Is that all you phoned for?’ he said. ‘To ask about Xiao Ling and Xinxin?’

For several long moments she did not trust herself to speak. ‘Sure,’ she said, finally.

He said, ‘Margaret, is there something wrong?’

‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘So you won’t be coming back to Texas for the Immigration Court?’

‘No.’

Silence.

‘Well…,’ she said, ‘…I guess that’s it, then.’

‘That’s what?’ he asked.

‘Goodbye,’ she said.

And he realised that this might be the last time he would ever speak to her. ‘Margaret…’ But he stopped. He had no idea what to say. Then, finally, he said, ‘I guess it is.’

Silence.

‘Well…Goodbye, then.’

Her voice was so quiet he barely heard her. He had to clear his throat before he could speak. ‘Goodbye,’ he said, and held on to the phone until he heard her replace the receiver at the other end. And a part of him died in that moment.

Margaret’s tears blistered the list of phone numbers on her desk, and she was glad there was no one in the building to hear her cry of anguish.