The Ruins of Us (18 page)

“No wonder your marriage fell apart. I
can’t
just call and tell her. Then she’ll ask me where I am. And then when she finds out, she probably won’t speak to me again. I need you to tell her that I was called away on an emergency business trip. Go in person. Take flowers.”

“I’m not going to lie for you, Abdullah. Not to Rosalie.” He clenched his fist around the phone.

“Tell her I’m in . . . I don’t know. Muscat.”

“We don’t even have dealings in Muscat.”

“Who cares? She’s been there several times and won’t ask questions about it.”

“Abdullah . . .”

“
Do not
mention Dubai.”

“But . . .”

“Also, call the Al Dawoun office and update them on the story, in case she calls there.”

He sighed. “Anything else?”

“Yes. Isra’s family owns an apartment here. Never,
ever
mention this to Rosalie. She’ll think I bought the apartment and then it’ll get messy. Understand? Also, Dan?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t forget to stress that it was an emergency.” Abdullah hung up the phone before Dan could protest.

The son of a bitch. Of course there was no need for Abdullah to wait for an answer, no reason for him to expect anything but compliance from the man whose ass he had saved with a job. Though he dreaded lying to Rosalie’s face, he couldn’t wait to see her. They would talk for hours about how hard life was. His heartbeat kicked up a notch, like it used to before a date. Of course. Now he and Rosie would really understand each other. Life was long, but too short for the bullshit—being taken for granted, or getting bogged down in the mud of nostalgia. He would wait a couple of hours before calling Ellie, enough time for the sun to rise over Boston. It had been so long since they had talked. He felt a pang of guilt. When he’d realized he and Carolyn weren’t going to reconcile, he’d fled back overseas to what was familiar, and to what was far away. Truth be told, he hadn’t thought much about the kids and how such a move might affect his relationship with them. Heartbreak and the need for a paycheck had conspired to make him a deadbeat dad, or at least an absentee one.

Getting up from his office chair, he stretched his hands over his head, felt the familiar pain in his lower back from his year—the worst year—working as a stock clerk for MegaSavers. The year of reeling, of making his way without a sail after Carolyn had cut him loose. The terrible irony of it was, she had wanted to leave the Kingdom, go back to the States to be closer to her family. She grew tired of the desert, bored with life on the compound. But then when he couldn’t find a job after they left, when he had to spend his days doing laundry and picking the kids up from school, she’d blamed him for it.

When he’d moved out of the family house, he’d rented a duplex just blocks away. He liked to think that Carolyn could smell the ceiling rot, hear the roof as it sagged ever lower. He let his lawn die; he was not above cheap metaphors. With his useless back brace on, he’d arrange bulk boxes of cereal from midnight until nine a.m., go home, and sleep the day away. After ten months of this—of praying for asbestos poisoning, of standing beneath creaking scaffolding, of crossing low-water markers during floods—he’d gotten the call from Abdullah. He had a job for him. At a desk. It was summertime. Dan had left Joe and Ellie to clean out his house and gotten on a plane, taking nothing but a pair of topsiders, a couple of shirts, his wallet, his well-thumbed passport. Austin to Houston, Houston to London, London to the Kingdom. To sanity, to salary, to worth.

AFTER LUNCH, WHICH
he’d eaten hastily in the dusty canteen, Dan returned to his desk. He hesitated a moment before picking up the phone and dialing Ellie’s landline. It was Sunday morning. He realized he had no idea what her Sunday ritual was. Did she go get the
Globe
and a small, bitter coffee from a neighborhood deli? Did she jog along the Charles, counting bridges or the oars of rowers?

“Hello?” A male voice. Momentarily surprised, he tried to recall if Ellie had written anything about a boyfriend.

“Ellie there?”

“Just a moment.”

From ten thousand miles away, the rustling of sheets, of two bodies realigning themselves to accommodate his intrusion.

“Dad?”

“Hey, kiddo. Staying warm out there?”

“Oh,” she laughed nervously. “Yeah. Well. That was Sean. Remember? The guy I wrote to you about?”

“Sure, hon. What kind of accent is that?”

“Irish. Sean’s from Dublin. He’s here doing his PhD in comparative lit. Anyway, I called because we have some news.”

His heart started pounding. He knew what was coming by the way she giggled. Then she said it—
marry
—and his stomach fell away, far from his center, and his heart continued to test its casements. He mumbled some pleasantries, some jokes as he tried to be overjoyed, but mostly he was still stuck at the word, the idea. Marriage. Twenty-five years before, he had leapt too, and landed on his ass in a chasm so deep he was just beginning to claw his way out. Ellie was only twenty-four.

Mabrook, congratulations,
he said. And,
I’ve gotta run, love you,
before hanging up the phone. From his desk drawer, he took out the photo he kept stashed there. Carolyn, her blond hair a mane falling on Joe’s bald baby head as she leaned over him, and Ellie, tenacious, her four-year-old face just beginning to lose the openness that goes away forever once you start to learn things about the world. Now she knew so much more, but not enough. He worried at the pain she would come to know, the heartbreak, the abandonments that accompanied the togethernesses. She was leaving the boat. Ellie and Carolyn, men overboard. He placed his head in his hands.

Quietly, he grabbed his mask and shouldered out into the storm. Yaser shouted something behind him that got muffled by the wind. The sun was low and uneasy, moving from orange to red in an ombré ball over the distant jebel. He could not properly process the news alone. He would go to Rosalie with Abdullah’s message and then tell her about Ellie.

HE’D DRIVEN THE
last hour in near-darkness, the newly installed streetlights not yet operating but standing in the median like an army of sleeping giants. He should have stayed overnight at the camp or departed earlier. Driving the route at night, with its unmarked detours and potholes, invited disaster. But he had to deliver Abdullah’s message before the family sat down for dinner. When he finally saw downtown Al Dawoun’s fuzzy halo of lights, he felt relief. The idea of getting stranded on a dark and remote road did not appeal to him. Though most of the recent kidnappings had been in or near Riyadh, nearly four hours to the west, he was still wary. He didn’t want to be the guy who was seen, posthumously, as just asking for it.

Cars packed the curbs of the Diamond Mile. The storm had been carried south and the air was now remarkably still. After parking on the side street adjacent to the house, he stood and listened for a moment. Car doors slammed, people shouted salaams and marhabas to each other across the wide boulevard. But from inside the houses, nothing. Behind the twelve-foot walls, each home was a world unto itself, each garden the moat to catch all stray voices and secrets. Though there was a sense of neighborly camaraderie, at the end of the day, the Saneas ate with the Saneas, the Rashids with the Rashids, the Gosaibis with the Gosaibis, the Zamils with the Zamils, and so on and so forth, down to the smallest, least-powerful family in the Kingdom.

At the side gate, a maid buzzed him in and he made his way down the long path to the door. Anisa, the Baylanis’ tiny Indonesian maid, swung open the heavy door and invited him inside. She motioned for him to wait on the foyer couch and poured him a tall glass of apple juice before leaving to fetch Rosalie. He could hear voices coming from the dining room, probably Mariam and Faisal. He did not feel like exchanging pleasantries with Abdullah’s kids, did not need further reminding of Abdullah’s familial glut. No matter what he did, Abdullah could never be excised from his family. “What a stupid life,” Abdullah had said to him after learning of his divorce. “Listen to me. I’m old and ugly. Rosalie is old and ugly. You are
very
old and ugly. The Ugly?”—his nickname for Carolyn—“Of course, she too is old and
very
ugly. We should all be old and ugly together. It’s as simple as that. You can tell her I said so.” Marriage advice from a serial husband.

“Ahlan, ya Dan.” Rosalie stood at the room’s entrance, her red hair pulled back into a loose ponytail.

There was a moment of awkwardness as he tried to decide on the appropriate greeting. Since she’d left the States in ’
78
, he’d never been alone with Rosalie for more than a minute. A hug? A kiss on the cheek? A handshake? He reached out his hand, an inelegant gesture, as if she were a colleague and not an old friend. In Saudi, rules were rigid but not often articulated, leaving him on occasion to stumble through blindly.

She laughed and took his hand.

“Abdullah won’t be able to make it tonight.”

No lies.

“He’s tied up.”

Still, no lies.

“Doing what? We’ve got the family here. Even Faisal. We’re expecting him.”

“He’s . . .”

“Where is he?”

“It’s business.” And there it was. The big fat one.

“Business?” She paused, examining his face. “Dan, don’t tell his lies for him. It means he assumes we’re both fools.” Her mouth turned down at the corners, and he could see her cheeks reddening.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“I suppose I ought to go tell the kids. You know, this would have been the first time we’ve eaten as a complete family in God knows how long.”

He didn’t know what to say, so he kept quiet.

“I’m so tired of this,” she said. “Of the deception. It’s bullshit. I can’t go out there and participate in this charade in front of my children.” She gestured toward the sitting rooms, her voice a harsh whisper. “We need him. His son needs him. Doesn’t he understand that?” Her head dropped and she began kneading her forehead with a fist. A momentary pause and she looked up.

“Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s drive out to the beach. I’ve got to get out of this house.”

Before he could protest, she called Anisa into the room and asked her to tell the kids that she felt sick and was going to lie down. Then she grabbed her abaya off the hook by the doorway. Before they got into the car, she slipped the niqab over her face, something he’d never seen her do.

“The neighbors,” she said.

THE DATE PALMS
stood black against the young night sky, the branches pulled sideways by the wind so the trees resembled a line of dancers with arms outstretched to the heavens. They pulled past the empty guard booth and into the parking lot of the private State Oil beach. The guard was probably eating his dinner with some of the other guards of neighboring beaches. Nobody went to the beach in the chill of winter. Getting out of the car, Dan felt the gust against his face and looked out to the water’s edge, which glowed orange from the lights that stood over the empty picnic shelters lining the shore. Some three hundred miles east over the water, Iran lay hulking in the night, the two rival countries forced to stare at each other into eternity, with nothing but the salty Gulf to dilute their mutual mistrust. Earlier in the day, he’d pitched rocks into the low waves before driving to the North Compound. He was back, only now he would talk; not with the curses and insults that comprised his daily banter but with real words, and it would be glorious.

“Let’s climb to the top of the dune and count the ships passing,” she said.

She kicked off her slippers and pulled off her abaya, leaving it in a heap in the sand. The beautifully embroidered abaya had probably cost Abdullah four thousand riyals, and he would be furious to know it was being treated with such carelessness. That his wife felt he had shed her in much the same manner would be incomprehensible to him.

Dan knew she would get cold and wanted to tell her so, but she was already gone, running full-speed toward the dark mass of sand that divided the clean stretch of beach from the public one that was littered with fast food containers and watched over by a massive concrete fish that had once housed a snack stand but now served as a graffiti canvas. Huffing to the top of the dune, he felt every one of his fifty-two years. Rosalie was sitting at the edge that sloped down into the sea, her arms wrapped around her folded legs. The smell of salt was in his nose, the moon was half in darkness, and he could hear the flag by the guard booth snapping in the wind.

“Rosie.”

“Yes?” She looked up at him. The shadows fell just right across her broad face, and for a moment she was a charcoal portrait whose inner life was only to be guessed at. She turned back to the sea as he sat down beside her.

“You’ll be relieved to know that pain suits your features.”

“I’ll thank my Nordic grandmother for that. I got her suffering eyes.”

“Not at all.”

“I feel like I’ve been atomized, turned to dust.”

“Ellie is getting married,” he blurted.

She paused briefly before saying, “Dan, that’s wonderful.”

“You know better than that.”

A large cargo boat slunk along in the distance, its red light blinking slowly. It was the saddest thing he had seen in a long time. So slow, so far away, sending out its warning to a silent sea.

“It is, though—wonderful. It was for me and Abdullah. And I remember how you and Carolyn grinned when those kids were born. There was wonder in those days.”

In their pillows, the smell of Carolyn’s perfume mixed with the oil from her hair, her hand at the back of his neck, Sunday mornings on the deck. Then, the tiny, squirming bodies that bound them together forever, no matter what the courts said.

“Yes, but it can get taken away, and if it does, it’s an amputation. A death.”

“They have to try, though,” she said. “Give them a shot at joy. You know, they say this generation of couples is going to learn from our mistakes. I read an article.”

Your mistake was marrying a Saudi, he thought, but bit his tongue. Had he fared better? Had he the right to criticize?