I could of course telephone to the police and pursue criminal charges against Kathy Nicolo, charges for trespassing on my family’s property with a dangerous weapon. But upon opening the telephone book to the page listing the number of the Corona police, I found I was unable to make the necessary call for it was clear to me this woman was only intent on harming herself, and in my mind I saw repeatedly her crying face as she attempted—with great ignorance of side arms—to fire a large bullet into her breast. I put another cube of sugar into my mouth, took a drink from my hot Persian tea, and listened for a time to the muffled cassette music coming from Nadi’s room. Yes, it was weakly romantic, but it put me in mind of my boyhood home in Rasht, of wrestling under the sun in the dusty road with my fat cousin Kamfar, his sister Jasmeen watching us from behind the wall of stones before my father’s house, only the top half of her small face exposed, her large eyes smiling. I thought of Pourat’s nephew Bijan, who would speak with impunity of severing the limbs of children while I drank vodka beside him, convincing myself that my refusal to dip into the mastvakhiar with him was a sufficient moral stand for a man of my station to make. But on those evenings, I would drink enough for three men and for days afterwards would carry out my daily duties in a joyless manner, treating junior officers in a lowly fashion, and giving orders whose sole design was to show my inferiors who was truly in charge.

Three times I walked silently down the corridor to make an inspection of this Kathy Nicolo. Each time I saw she had not moved her position, but continued sleeping as still as a small child, her face turned in my direction, her eyes closed, a portion of her hair lying across her lips which were partly opened. My son’s room smelled of her now, of old liquor from the mouth, and for an instant I felt disgust rise in me. But then, perhaps like a bubble of air from deep water that dissipates once it reaches the surface, I felt no more disgust, only pity for this Kathy Nicolo, pity and a newfound pull in my heart to treat her well. In my country, there is an old belief that if a bird flies into your home it is an angel who has come to guide you and you must look at its presence as a blessing from God. Once, when Soraya was still a young girl and we were spending the summer at our bungalow on the Caspian Sea, she discovered at the base of a cypress tree a small young bird whose wings had been broken and she brought it to us. Nadereh made for its wing a wooden splint and they together nursed the bird with sugar water and bits of bread and by summer’s end they took it from its cage to our porch overlooking the sea. Soraya parted her fingers and the bird flew up and away into the woodlands. For two days our daughter cried, though at the end she told to us she was very happy a broken angel had come to bless our home.

I return to the kitchen and drink more tea. The bungalow has grown quiet. No more Googoosh, only the silence of two sleeping women. The gray fog outdoors has not lifted, and I turn on the kitchen’s overhead light. It shines upon the silver samovar on the opposite counter, upon the clean and dry plates in Nadi’s dishrack. I feel strangely content, and I am put in mind of that afternoon with the Iraqi in his shop near the Highway Department depot when we played backgammon near the window, our silence a mutual acceptance to let the blood between our two countries flow under the bridge away from us. For days afterward, working as a garbage soldier on the highway with the old Vietnamese Tran and the Panamanians, I felt a lightness and goodness in me, and even Mendez, with the long scar upon his arm and the smell of old wine in his sweat, even he could not pull hatred from me as he called me old man in his mother tongue, as he dropped his empty water cup upon the ground for Tran to retrieve.

And this feeling is within me once more. Who can say how many more desperate and drunken moments would have passed before this Kathy Nicolo found the safety mechanism and then succeeded in shooting her heart very still? Yes, pride is weak vanity, but I do feel a sense of joy at having saved life. And yes, the woman is intoxicated but nonetheless I am encouraged by her words of not caring any longer for this house. Perhaps, after waking from her sleep, after eating a fine meal prepared by Nadi, Kathy Nicolo will be willing to put that in writing, will be sufficiently able to acknowledge who her real enemy has become, and she will begin acting accordingly.

But now I must rouse Nadereh to prepare an evening meal. I must enter her darkened room with its scent of facial cream and cotton bedding, and I must sit and tell to her of the sad drunken bird I found outside our door, of the beggar angel asleep in our son’s room.

PART II

IT WAS DARK NOW, AND LESTER HAD BEEN SITTING ON THE FISH camp’s porch for over two hours. The fog was thick in the trees, and it made the black woods around the cabin appear to be under a milky water. He could still smell the maple he’d cut, split, and stacked, and twice he heard a car go by on the asphalt along the Purisima and he waited for the engine to gear down, for the swing of the headlights through the trees, but they didn’t come, and so he waited.

He was hungry, thirsty too, but he stayed in the cane chair near the screen door and didn’t move. He kept seeing Bethany’s face, the way she looked this afternoon standing at the kitchen table in her school dress. She had just come home, and already she was waiting to hear from him what was happening to them, to their family, standing there bravely waiting for the words to come out of his mouth. But then the phone rang and Carol answered it, her nose stopped up. In a tired tone she said it was for him and she left the receiver on the counter and went to Bethany, turned, and walked her gently from the room. Lester watched them go through the foyer and up the stairs before he moved to the phone. It was Lieutenant Alvarez, Internal Affairs. Lester knew him, but not well, because he was IA and because he was a short and humorless ex-marine who ran six miles every morning before work, whose on-duty appearance and professional record were as spotless as the tie he wore even during the summer months when the sheriff didn’t require it. Other deputies felt automatically uncomfortable around him, but this was not what Lester felt as he picked up the phone, his daughter upstairs about to break; he felt interrupted to an almost cruel degree, and he answered as if he didn’t know who was on the other end. “What?”

The lieutenant identified himself in that calculated emotionless tone of his, pausing to give Lester a chance to get his protocol in order, but Lester stayed quiet and Alvarez had just a trace of heat in his voice as he asked Lester to dispatch himself immediately to Redwood City for a talk. Lester let out a long breath and could feel his heart beating in it. “Can it wait till I’m back on duty, sir?”

“No, Deputy. It cannot.” The lieutenant said he would be in his office and hung up directly, but Lester had no plans to drive directly to the Hall of Justice to be interrogated by that prick about what could only be his after-hours visit to the Iranian colonel. And as he hung up he considered denying everything, just lying about it all. He wasn’t up to facing any more truths right now, not after a day that began early this morning with him walking into the house hungover, his hair still wet from the Purisima riverbed, Kathy’s smell still on his skin. Carol had been in the kitchen pouring water into the coffeemaker at the counter, and she had kept her back to him, said in a wary voice she wasn’t expecting him. Lester apologized for not calling first and he sat at his chair at the table and watched his wife wash the kids’ breakfast dishes. Her frosted hair was tied and pinned in a knot at the back of her head, and she wore khaki shorts and a white sleeveless top. Her upper arms looked fleshy, always had, though that had never bothered Lester and whenever she’d complain about them, he’d tell her she was fine just the way she was. And he meant it. She was.