The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train and Three American Heroes. Anthony Sadler

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       And which also, occasionally, produces such extraordinary violence in those who believe they can return the world to that utopian period, if enough trauma can be delivered to the powers corrupting Muslims that they shrivel up and retract like severed arteries.

       Despite the wealth around him, work was sparse; Ayoub was near that rich, verdant world, but not of it. His family was poor.

       In 2005, Ayoub’s father was forced to board a ferry for the short ride to Spain so that he might find better work. Eventually he got a job dealing in scrap metal, extracting value from the things other people discarded.

       He was gone for two years, so Ayoub went through his adolescence straddling two kinds of lives. Not fatherless, but his father was absent, living in another country, living on another continent, and yet not even a hundred miles away. There, and not there. Close, but in another world.

PART I

       AUG 13, 11:49 AM

       Joyce Eskel:

      Spence how is your ankle? What happened?

       AUG 18, 6:50 PM

       Joyce Eskel:

      Hey need to post pictures!!!

1.

      JOYCE ESKEL CLOSED THE COMPUTER with an uneasy feeling.

      She didn’t love the idea of Paris. She’d followed the story of the terrorists attacking the magazine there, Charlie Hebdo, a few months back. She’d been reading about Islamic extremists since 9/11, and she knew France had open borders. Paris was a big city of course (she’d been there before, but that was many years ago now) and the odds that the boys would be at any kind of risk were low. She knew that.

      Still, she felt something.

      Plus Anthony was there, and whenever her son got together with Anthony, things just happened. Two weeks into their trip, she couldn’t quite believe they’d managed to avoid major catastrophe.

      Although they’d avoided major catastrophe only barely. She knew about the two drinking just a little too much, so that Spencer stumbled over a cobblestone and nearly broke his ankle, on the very first night of their trip. Spencer told her, when he connected to the Internet, that he might need to call it off and go back to base. Call off the whole trip, done on the first day. Could you even get an X-ray there? Would his insurance cover it?

      It was uncanny, how they brought the mischief out in one another. She couldn’t figure out their relationship, two mostly laid-back kids who didn’t seem to have much in common, but when they were together … She remembered once when they were in eighth grade how they’d redecorated the neighbor’s house with a dozen rolls of toilet paper, then took turns ringing the doorbell and diving for cover in the hedges. When together, the two just seemed to love trouble.

      So she sat down after closing the computer, and thought about the feeling. Twenty years ago she might have dismissed it; now she knew what it was. The still, small voice. She called it “intuition” to those who wouldn’t understand; to those who would, she called it what she knew it was: God. Preparing her for the events that would follow, just as he’d done countless times before, once she learned to listen, warning her when her children were in danger. What mattered now was what to do with it, and so she decided to do what she always did in situations like this: she prayed. Joyce Eskel closed her eyes, bowed her head, and prayed that things would turn out okay for the boys in France.

      BY THEN, JOYCE HAD LEARNED to leave a lot up to God. She’d learned early, when Spencer was a baby, when she first brought the kids to their new house, fresh off a traumatic divorce and a devastating custody battle. She’d taken them to her parents’ first, a single mom feeling like a failure and wondering what had just happened.

      For a time that was a refuge for her, but she couldn’t rely on her aging parents forever. She mustered up all her strength and got a job, and with her parents’ help she found a house with room for the kids to roam. The neighborhood had a swim club and a tennis club, all within walking distance. Joyce excitedly pointed it all out to the kids that first day, but when they pulled up to the house, the kids got out of the car looking deflated. To them the house was old and ugly. It was the best Joyce could do with almost no income of her own, but the carpets were worn through, the rooms stank, and the paint was faded. It was a signal to the children that their big bright lives with two loving parents and a big happy home had been blown apart, and this was what was left. An ugly old ranch-style, beckoning them into a new and uncertain world.

      But Joyce had a vision. She would turn this place into a colorful home for the kids. It was a mighty burden she had: the three kids and a messy divorce, the children’s father not so far away but mostly out of their lives, finally a new job but as a worker’s comp adjuster for the state, which meant the kind of long days that could wreck you and leave you gasping for air. It meant constant exposure to the ugliest human qualities; the things people do to each other, the things that happen to them. The way wily people manipulated the system to get a buck; the way the system suppressed people in need. Every day she was submerged in desperation, and in greed. She hardened. She began to feel that her whole life prior to her failed marriage and her new job she’d been embarrassingly naïve. She’d always assumed the best in people. That everyone was capable of goodness; that everyone was inclined to act on it.

      Not anymore. Now she read bullshit professionally, and her children were beginning to pick up the skill.

      When Spencer cried in his room because it was cleaning day—what an emotional child he was!—she gave no quarter.

      When she lay in her room and yelled out to Spencer and Everett, “What’s all the noise?!” as long as Spencer said, “We’re just having fun,” even if it was in an oddly pinched, high voice, she let them be.

      Of course, she didn’t know that most times, outside on the floor, Everett was sitting on top of Spencer’s chest, holding him by the wrists and making him punch himself, saying he’d swing harder if Spencer snitched. “Tell Mom, ‘We’re just having fun.’ Say it!”

      Even then, as far back as when Spencer was a four-year-old, he was picking up on his mother’s skepticism. He had a hard time accepting rules, no matter from what height they came. Joyce took him to church with her, sat him right up front every Sunday, and when the pastor asked who’d like to receive salvation, Spencer raised his hand. Every single week; the pastor smiled every time. “I got you, buddy.” Joyce tried to teach him the scripture. “You don’t need to do it again and again every week!” But the rule didn’t make sense to Spencer, that you only had to do it once. Who decided that? Why was it up to that person? Maybe it was insolence, maybe Spencer just wanted to eat more than his fair share of the savior, but Joyce started to see it differently, that Spencer had a tender heart; her boy wanted to be right with God every week. So she decided to stop fighting. She saved her energy for the fights that mattered.

      She pinched pennies and turned the ugly old house into a warm family home, fires always burning when it dropped below fifty, shrubs well tended and grass always mowed. Saturday was cleaning day. She wanted her kids to go out into the world, when they were ready, knowing how to leave it a little better off than they found it. Having СКАЧАТЬ