House of Sand and Fog

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1999

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Part 2, Chapters 53-54Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2

Part 2, Chapter 53 Summary

Lester is being held in a cell, where he learns Esmail is in surgery. The deputies who arrested him lead him to the holding facility across the street for intake, where he is searched, fingerprinted, and photographed.

He is allowed to use the phone and attempts to call the house in Corona; he hangs up when he doesn’t receive an answer. He’s led into a holding room with several other arrestees. To his dismay he recognizes one as a small-time bookie, who Lester fears will out him as a law enforcement agent. Lester changes into a prison jumpsuit before being led into a protective custody cell.

Lester lies in bed and waits for mealtime, after which he will be allowed access to another phone. He imagines calling Carol and trying to explain his situation to his children. He drifts off to sleep and dreams he is lying in between his wife and Kathy as they float down a river in a boat.

Part 2, Chapter 54 Summary

Kathy wakes up in a hospital room in pain and unable to speak. She has been arrested for her part in holding the Behranis hostage and will be transferred to jail after she heals. She learns through the police and Connie that the Behranis are dead and Lester has been arrested.

She is transferred to jail, where her muteness earns her attention, a nickname (Remote), and a sense of belonging among the other prisoners so profound that, even after she recovers her voice, she continues to pretend that she can’t speak. She receives several visits from Connie but seems uninterested in pursuing her defense, reasoning that she doesn’t “have one. A family is gone” (361). Frank and her mother visit to find out what happened, but Kathy has trouble explaining and tells them to call Connie. Afterward she joins her fellow inmates in a game of poker, putting two fingers to her lips to indicate her desire for a cigarette.

Part 2, Chapters 53-54 Analysis

Lester and Kathy, the only survivors of the ordeal, are left to evaluate the aftermath of everything that transpired. For Lester, this involves the ruin of his family life as well as the new life he hoped to start with Kathy. Chapter 53, detailing the deputy’s imprisonment, depicts a version of Lester’s recurrent nightmare coming to life when he sees a criminal he knows from his beat in the holding cell. Shortly thereafter he is perturbed by another arrestee’s smile, which seems like he “had looked and seen the trajectory of Lester’s entire life and was now gratified it had all come down to this” (344). While the narrative retains some sympathy for Lester, his arrest in this penultimate chapter is the closest Dubus comes to providing cathartic justice. When the guard locking Lester in his cell taunts him by saying “home sweet home” (346), it is both idle cruelty and an external expression of Lester’s belief that he is receiving the comeuppance he deserves.

Kathy views her imprisonment with a measure of relief. She also believes she is getting just treatment, but unlike Lester, her feeling is rooted in remorse for her part in the Behranis’ deaths. That her final scenes are rooted in compassion is an important character moment. Her decision to feign muteness represents her final retreat from her own agency, as her silence allows her fellow inmates to perceive her however they wish. Kathy’s story is tragic, but this final chapter offers a glimmer of hope for her character. Having never truly been heard or understood by anyone—not her family, Lester, Behrani, or Nick—she finds comfort in the freedom from misunderstanding and presumption that her silence affords her in prison, where her fellow inmates accept her on her own terms, without expectation.