Sons of the Mothers

Over the course of her eight-day visit, Marilynn says, every Arab she met espoused the same conviction. Eisa had never met Marwan -- their connection was tribal -- but he steadfastly proclaimed his innocence. Marwan's passport had been stolen. He had been killed or kidnapped.

Marwan's father died several years before Sept. 11, and his oldest son, Mohammed, became patriarch of the clan. Eisa would privately relay Marilynn's request for a meeting. Meanwhile, he offered his own wife, Amna, and her mother, Fatima. Fatima's sister was married to Mohammed, and had helped raise Marwan.

Marilynn remembers removing her shoes at Fatima's door, and how cool the floor tiles were beneath her feet. A lace-covered table in the living room was laden with sweets and bowls overflowing with dates. A servant appeared with sweet tea. Amna waited for Marilynn to mention Marwan first.

Yes, she told Marilynn, she had known him well. Their families had gathered for dinner at least once a week and the children had played together. "He was three or four years younger than I," Marilynn remembers Amna saying. "Such a perfect person. Smart and nice and funny; he made jokes with me." Amna went on about how quiet, kind and considerate Marwan had been.

"He was the only boy who was always avoiding fights," she told Marilynn.

Marilynn remembers listening quietly as Amna relayed the family's belief that Marwan, too, had been a victim of Sept. 11. "Either he was brainwashed or he was killed and his passport taken," Amna asserted. "His brother feels he is still alive, that he is in hiding and will come back someday."

Marilynn learned that Marwan's mother had been one of four wives taken by his father, Yusef, a date farmer and muezzin, the one who called the neighborhood to prayer each day. A call from Eisa interrupted the visit. The negotiations with Mohammed were not going well. Eisa suggested the women drive Marilynn past the compound, so she could at least see the outside. Marilynn was disappointed but snapped pictures from the car window as they circled the cluster of modest buildings and a tiny mosque. This is where Joshie's murderer was a little boy, she told herself.

But where Marwan's mother was remained unclear. The brigadier general had told Marilynn that Marwan's mother had divorced his father when Marwan was small, returning to her native Egypt, never to be heard from again, leaving her child behind. Another version of the story was that she hadn't abandoned Marwan but had gone back to Egypt after Yusef died in 1997.

Over the next few days, Eisa delivered a series of messages from Mohammed:

Marwan didn't do this. For four years, journalists have hounded us; we want to be left alone.

Marwan's mother is crying all the time; she has become blind.

And finally, this:

This family is still bleeding. We are a peaceful family. We wouldn't hurt a cat. We have nothing to hide. Perhaps in a few years, we will be able to talk to you.

Before they parted, Eisa let go of his usual cocky good humor to ask Marilynn a question of his own. Why did Marwan do this?

Not whether.

Marilynn replied that it was more important to know what he thought.

"He had a hole in his soul," the young Muslim soldier replied.

It was only when she was on the plane home that Marilynn realized what saddened her most about her strange and fruitless journey to this faraway place where truth could not be found.

"No one had asked me about Josh."

Changing Seasons

His ghost voice has faded over the past five years. Sitting on Josh's park bench, Marilynn tries to tell him what she has learned about his death.

They carried out this mad, murderous and ingenious attack on American might to show the world they could do it and hurt us and to drive us out of the Muslim world, she imagines telling him. You died in the name of their greater cause.

But her own nation is not blameless, she feels. The criticisms some Muslims have of American society are well-founded, she argues, "the conspicuous consumption, trash TV, too much drinking and drugs."

Boiled down to its barest essence, she is convinced that "oil is what the whole thing is about. Oil is why Josh dies." She installed solar panels in her modest house, and the next car she buys, she vows, will be a hybrid.

She doubts she will get what she really wants out of all this. "I want there to be accountability. I want justice, the truth. I want an apology from the leaders of this country for being so incompetent, for not doing their duty in protecting us, for taking us into war with Iraq on lies." Her voice shakes with anger, outrage. "I'm just tired of all the lies." She is compiling her research into a book now.

She doesn't think Marwan had a hole in his soul, and she does not forgive him.

"No, no. Why should I forgive Marwan? Marwan was a mass murderer. I wanted to understand Marwan as a human being."

She no longer opens her mail with gloves for fear of anthrax, or contemplates building a fallout shelter. She laughs at herself for stockpiling canned soup. Safety is an illusion.

No remains of her son were ever recovered. A week after his murder, Marilynn planted a sapling outside her study window in his honor. A redbud, because she loves the way it bursts into flower each spring, and she finds a certain comfort in a magnificence so fleeting, so fragile. How the tree has grown now, reaching into the empty summer sky.