Brian Freeman - Marathon

“Well, if I wanted info on a homeless guy, you know who I’d talk to first,” Maggie said.

“Cat,” Serena said with a sigh.

“Yeah. Good luck with that.”

Maggie hung up the phone and went back into the hospital room. Wade Ralston and Travis Baker were deep in hushed conversation, but they stopped when Maggie returned.

“Sorry for the interruption,” she told them. “Mr. Baker, I have just a couple more questions. You said you, your sister, and Mrs. Ralston were all outside the Duluth Outdoor Company shop for about half an hour prior to the explosion?”

Travis nodded. “That’s right.”

“Did you see anyone there who aroused your suspicion?”

“Yeah, there was one guy, actually. Wade and I were just talking about it. This guy was standing right near us, but he left a couple minutes before the bomb went off. Seemed like he was in a hurry.”

“What did he look like?” Maggie asked.

“Tall, good-looking guy but built kind of scrawny. Black hair, beard. He was alone, nobody with him. I’ll tell you something else, too. He looked foreign to me.”

“Foreign?”

“Yeah. You know the look. Son of a bitch was Muslim. That figures, huh? If you ask me, you find him, you find your bomber.”

“You lied to the police?” Ahdia said in astonishment. “Oh, Khan, what were you thinking?”

Khan mussed his black hair with both hands on top of his head. He’d finally confessed his mistake to his wife, and they were both frantic. “I wasn’t thinking! They took me by surprise. I just wanted to get out of there. I didn’t want to be in the middle of it.”

“And now that’s exactly where you are,” his wife told him. “This is what I warned you about!”

Khan stared out the front window of their house. His yellow cab was in the driveway. Long shadows stretched like giants from the woods at the end of the road, and in the distance, he heard a rumble of thunder. Around him, the house still had a delicious smell from the chicken pilau that Ahdia had made for dinner.

“What was I supposed to do?” Khan asked. “I was in Malik’s room! How could I explain that?”

Ahdia leaned her head into his shoulder. “With the truth. He’s your friend. You were worried about him.”

“The truth? The truth is, we’re Muslim. That’s all they see.” Khan shook his head. “Maybe they won’t find out that I was there during the race. They won’t know I lied to them.”

“Sooner or later, they will find out. You know they will.”

He saw the first drops of rain on the window. He wondered if it would be a summer storm, over and done in minutes, or whether it would linger long enough to drown them. Next to him, Ahdia’s face was dark with worry.

“What did you find in Malik’s room?” she asked.

“He left things behind. A brochure about the marathon. A small piece of wire.”

“Could it really be him? Could he have done this?”

“His soul has been poisoned this year. He’s not the same person he was. We all saw it happening.”

“And you were there. The police saw you in his room.”

Khan nodded. “Yes.”

“I wish you had never gone to the marathon,” she said.

“Malik is my friend. Practically my brother. I was trying to stop him. To save him. To save innocent lives, too.”

“If he did this, he is nothing ,” Ahdia hissed. “You owe him nothing .”

“I know that.”

“They will find out you were there, Khan. As soon as they do, you are a suspect. Do you realize that?”

“Yes, of course, I do.”

Ahdia put her arms around him, and he could feel her fear. It was a fear that every innocent Muslim knew. The religion he found beautiful and held sacred, around which he’d built his entire life, could also be a brand: You must be violent, like the others. You are all guilty. You are all terrorists.

“So how do we make this go away?” Ahdia asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s too late for that.”

Ahdia smoothed her dress. She stared at the rain. “No. Here is what you must do, Khan. Tomorrow morning, you will go to the police. You will tell them everything. Your worries about Malik. The efforts that you and the others made to stop him from violence. You will say you lied today because you were scared, and you will give them whatever information they want to know. You will help them find Malik in any way you can.”

Khan thought about the number that he’d memorized. The phone number where he could reach Malik in an emergency. If he gave it to the police, they would find him. They would arrest him, or, more likely than not, they would kill him.

“I’m not sure I can do that,” he murmured.

“You must think of your family first,” Ahdia told him. “You may love Malik as a brother, but he’s not your family. If he killed these people, he is not even Muslim. He is no different from those butchers overseas, building their so-called caliphate.”

Khan closed his eyes as tightly as he could. His world was chaos. He’d only known such turmoil in his life once before, when he’d found the trampled body of his brother in Lahore. Ever since that moment, he’d been running, trying to find peace and shelter. He’d thought that in Duluth, he had finally run far enough, but now he worried that happiness was about to slip through his fingers once again.

“Papa?”

He looked down when he felt a sharp tug on his pant leg. His son, Pak, gazed up at him with his wide, dark eyes. Ahdia had cut the boy’s hair today, but it grew like a weed and wouldn’t stay tidy for long.

“Papa, it is time for Maghrib .”

“Is it?” Khan asked. He reached for his phone to check the Athan app, which tracked the daily times of prayer as the sun changed throughout the year. Maghrib , the fourth of the five prayers of salat , had a narrow window between sunset and the end of twilight. However, he had no phone; he’d lost it in Canal Park. He checked the grandfather clock in the corner of the living room and confirmed the time.

“You are right,” he told his son. “Come, let us do our ablutions and pray.”

They washed themselves carefully in the ritual known as Wudu , and then Khan took Pak’s hand and led his wife and child up the stairs. Rain thumped on the peaked roof. Their small house had only a narrow attic, which the previous owners had used for storage of their Christmas lights. Mice, spiders, and wasps had made a home there, too. When Khan moved in, he’d cleaned up the attic and made it into a space for daily prayers. It was neat, lit by a single window, and lined in wood paneling, with a niche that he had built into the wall to mark Qibla , the direction they faced during prayer.

Nothing offered Khan more contentment than the time he spent in prayer, and nothing brought him more love than doing so with his son at his side and his wife behind him. At four years old, Pak was too young for obligatory prayers, but Khan wanted him to make it a habit early in life, and he and Ahdia were proud that their son already took salat as a serious responsibility.

He stood on the prayer mat with his head bowed, and he cleared his mind, pushing out all other thoughts. To him, prayer was a direct conversation with God, and he wanted nothing unclean between them. Sometimes passengers in his cab asked him if it was difficult to find the time to pray five times a day, but he told them that those moments of his day made more sense than anything else in his life.

When he was ready, he cupped both hands behind his earlobes and chanted the Takbīr .

“ Allāh u akbar .”

Standing straight, he took hold of his wrists with his arms over his heart, and, in Arabic, recited the opening verses of the Qur’an: