I Left My Husband Bleeding, and the Mob Boss Said Good novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Meijer Lot
In a Telegraph Road parking lot before dawn, with her husband's blood on her sleeve, Nahla is climbed on by a three-year-old, ordered across by a feared boss, and chased by her husband's brother, so she drops the Buick key down a drain and gets into the boss's car.
At four-forty on a Friday morning, in a parking lot in Dearborn Heights, a three-year-old in one boot climbed into my lap.
I had my husband's blood on my left sleeve and his car key in my right fist.
I had been sitting in his car with the dome light on for twenty minutes, trying to decide which way to drive.
The child came across the ice between the rows in a pink parka, pulled my door open, and climbed up my coat.
She was crying so hard she hiccuped.
She got both fists into my scarf and held on.
"It's okay," I said, in every language I had, because I didn't know which one a baby understood.
She bit my wrist through my glove.
I let her.
A man was running toward us across the lot, in a black wool coat with no gloves and his hair standing up on one side.
He stopped ten feet from the car when the girl shrieked at him.
"La!" she screamed. "No! La!"
A second man ran up behind him and put a hand inside his coat.
I knew the first man's face.
I had seen it once, across a church hall, at a funeral I hadn't wanted to be at.
His name was Marwan Karam.
The mothers at my husband's church said his name when they wanted their daughters to behave.
He had broken a Sarafa man's jaw on a church step, at his own father's funeral, in front of the priest.
"Tell him to take his hand out of his coat," I said in Arabic.
Marwan Karam looked at me for the first time.
"She'll scream until he does," I said. "She's three. She doesn't care who he works for."
He didn't turn his head.
"Take it out," he said to the man behind him.
The hand came out empty.
The girl hiccuped twice and stopped screaming.
Marwan Karam came forward through the slush and went down on one knee, so his face was level with hers.
"Yara," he said. "Come here, ya albi."
"No," she said into my neck, in English now.
He breathed out through his nose.
He had a short black beard and red eyes and the look of a man who had been driving in circles for hours.
"She woke up alone in the car," he said. "I stepped away to take a call, thirty feet from her."
"She picked me," I said.
"I can see that."
His eyes went to my face, then to my scarf, which had slipped.
He put one finger under the edge of it and lifted it an inch.
His knuckle touched my jaw.
It was warm and rough, and it did not move away.
I let him look.
There were four dark marks on the left side of my throat and the print of a thumb on the right.
They had come up in the last hour.
His face went flat and very quiet.
He put the scarf back, slowly, with the same finger.
"Who?" he said.
"My husband," I said.
"Where is he?"
"On our kitchen floor, in Sterling Heights," I said.
"Is he dead?"
"I don't know," I said. "I hit him until he stopped reaching for me, and then I took his keys."
Headlights swung in at the far entrance of the lot, high and wide.
I knew the grille.
My husband's youngest brother drove that Tahoe.
My husband had put a tracker in the Buick after our first anniversary so he would always know where I was.
I had known about it all night.
I had driven the Buick anyway, because it was the only thing in our driveway with a full tank.
I had meant to leave it here and take a bus.
I hadn't thought they would be this fast.
"That's his brother," I said. "Your sister won't let go of me, Mr. Karam."
He didn't look at the Tahoe.
He kept his eyes on me.
"You are a Sarafa," he said.
"I'm leaving him," I said.
"My family does not take Sarafas into its house."
"Your house is the only door in Michigan they can't walk through."
Behind him, his driver said something low and fast in Arabic.
The Tahoe was crossing the lot, slowly, with its lights on high.
Marwan Karam stayed on one knee in the slush and did not hurry.
"Why should I?" he said.
"Because I'm not asking you to take me in," I said. "I'm asking you to drive, while she's holding onto me."
Something moved in his jaw.
I stood up with the girl on my hip.
My legs held.
I walked to the storm drain at the end of the row, dropped my husband's Buick key through the grate, and listened for the water.
Then I carried his sister to the Range Rover, opened the back door myself, and got in.
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