The Ruins of Us (34 page)

But in the next instant, he was glad his grandfather was not there to see the mess they’d made, or his own grandson at the mercy of the desert that Jadd and his family had lived in, at times mightily, at times timidly, for generations. Certainly, Jadd would not have approved of this treatment of his mother. Faisal felt gnawed by guilt. Even if she was going to leave them, she deserved better than a bed of sand and bound wrists. But now they were in it, in deep. In their preparations, he and Majid had focused too intently on the glory of their ideas. They’d forgotten the basics—that in order to realize an idea, a person must have water, protect his tender skin from the sun’s blazoning. Though he hated to admit it, they were city boys. Faisal took another breath and waited.

“FAISAL.”

After three hours of quiet, the voice startled him. It was Dan, who spoke to him without sitting up, without even raising his head. How strange to see such a large man lying vulnerable like that.

“Faisal,” Dan said again. “I have to . . . relieve myself.”

“What?”

“I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Just go where you are.”

“I don’t think you want me to do that. Because if I do, you know you’re going to smell it for days.”

Faisal considered what Dan said. If Majid came back soon, they could clean it up and be done with the issue, mafi moshkela. But what if he took longer? What if it took him a day or more to find water? It wouldn’t do to have the hostages turn the shelter into a hamam. In the midday heat, it would be unbearable.

“Fine. You can go by the water. But she has to move outside where I can see her.” He looked at his mother. “Get up, please.”

Rosalie stumbled to their feet and walked toward the archway. Dan rose more slowly and moved in behind her. His white sneakers were brown with dust, his Polo shirt rumpled.

“No talking. Face the building,” he instructed his mother.

Rosalie dropped her eyes and gave the slightest shake of her head. It was the kind of gesture he’d seen people make at funerals, as if to say
What a shame
. Nonetheless, she moved to the spot in the sand that he had indicated. Faisal turned back to Dan. “OK, yallah!” He walked a few paces behind Dan until they were a respectable distance away.

“Don’t turn around,” he said over his shoulder.

He felt his blood surge. Here, he was in control. It was a good feeling, one he had not experienced in quite a while. Though he regretted his mother getting in the way, if it meant the sheikh’s freedom, it would be worth it. They stopped at the water’s edge, twenty meters from where Rosalie stood, still as a boulder. Clearing his throat, Faisal turned to face down the coastline so that the man could have his private moment, and he was annoyed to have his politeness overlooked when Dan began talking as his urine caught the breeze and blew out over the sand.

“It’s not too late,” Dan said. “No one’s been hurt. Think about it. That’s your mother up there.”

“No talking.”

“Son . . .”

“I am
not
your son, thanks be to God. And you are in no position to advise me, after what you’ve done to my family.”

“Be honest with yourself, just for a minute.” Dan zipped his pants and turned to face Faisal. “They’re people. It’s a messy business.”

“This is about Sheikh Ibrahim. He would have been killed if we didn’t act. The prince told my father.”

“I was there when they discussed it. Abdullah didn’t mention anything about anyone getting killed. He said something about reeducation and . . .”

“No, my father told me specifically that Ibrahim would be tortured. That he might not live much longer.”

“I’m telling you, I was there and your father didn’t say anything about that.”

Faisal considered what Dan said. Was Ibrahim even in danger? Could it turn out to be a routine arrest that ended with a slap on the wrist? No. His father had spoken with such conviction. There must have been danger.

“What exactly did you hear?” Faisal pressed. “I need to know the prince’s exact words to my father.”

Dan shook his head. “They were speaking in Arabic. I . . . I couldn’t understand.”

“Please, think! You must have a basic idea of what they said.”

“I remember hearing the prince say ‘fitna’ a few times. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. I’m sorry.”

“You’re telling me that you’ve lived in this country for more than twenty years and ‘fitna’ is the best you can do? Ya Allah!”

Dan’s ignorance was an insult, but worse than that, it meant that Faisal had no access to those crucial moments between his father and the prince. He believed his father to be a lot of things—a drinker, a showman. But a liar? He had never known Abdullah to lie. Of course, there was Isra. Hadn’t he lied to Rosalie for years?

“She loves you, Faisal. Even though she’s upset with your father, she’s staying here.”

“Just be quiet. Please, no more.”

“Let’s leave before Majid gets back. No one thinks you’re a terrorist, Faisal. You’re a good boy. You mean well. Like your father.”

At this remark, Faisal pulled his pistol out. His face was hot, his teeth clenched tightly.

“I am not a boy. And I am nothing like my father.”

He raised the butt of the gun above his head—yes, he felt he would relish bringing this man low, finally—but before he could move, he heard a distinctly foreign sound, not the birds or the waves or the wind to which he’d become accustomed. He looked around and it took him a moment to realize: the car. Rosalie was gone from her spot, and the low sputtering he’d heard was an engine. He ran hard to the edge of the customs building, where Majid had parked the car four days earlier.

“Hey!” Faisal shouted, waving his arms.

The car had begun to crawl over the soft sand. Faisal stopped running. Twenty meters. Thirty meters. She was moving farther and farther away, gaining speed. His feet stuck deep in the sand, and he felt the drift and pull of the distance between them. This was what he wanted, wasn’t it? It would be so easy to let her go. She didn’t belong there with them.

But then he thought of Majid, the way he let the desperation take hold, hammering himself into something hard in order to save Ibrahim. Faisal couldn’t let her go. She would tell where they were, and then it would be over. Faisal took aim at the rear tires, bracing his body for the recoil. He fired. Nothing. The car kept moving. He aimed again, sending off a volley of shots. Again, nothing. With a mounting sense of panic, he fired a final time. His ears rang with the noise, but he heard another sound, a distant thunk. One of the shots had landed, and he saw the car slow to a stop. It was stuck in the shallow basin of a small rise of dunes. The door opened and Rosalie tumbled out.

“Jesus Christ!” Dan was standing behind him.

“She was leaving,” Faisal managed.

Sand coated his throat and the weakness of hunger made his legs leaden. The sun was high and clouded with dust. It had lost its distinct borders, heat spilling down on them. Faisal was suddenly tired, more tired than he had ever been. He wanted to lie down in the sand and sleep. He thought longingly of the blue tiles in the courtyard of his home. How often he had sat there in silence, grateful for God’s presence, which made it somehow less lonely in the empty house. He would like to be there now, feel the fountain’s water setting around his bare feet while he formulated his private prayers.

Dan broke into a run toward the car, lumbering awkwardly because of his bound hands. Faisal could not let him get to his mother first. Though he was weak with fatigue and thirst, he sprinted forward. He fought the give of the sand, finding reserves of fury in his legs that catapulted him forward. When he got to the car, his mother was kneeling in the car’s shadow, crying. Her nose was running and she struggled to breathe with the tape over her mouth. In that moment, he was terrified, for he felt that if he gripped the gun less tightly or relaxed the muscles that ran like iron through his shoulders, he might cry too. He might never stop crying. He turned to his mother, whose head was down, her nose dripping into the sand. Kneeling beside her, he gently peeled off the duct tape. She choked a little and wiped her face with the back of her hand.

“Untie my hands, Faisal. Let me hold you.”

He hesitated. For a moment, he felt as if it were the best idea in the world. Here was the woman who might make his mistakes seem OK, as she had so many times before, just by taking him in her arms.

“Umma.” He let the tears fall down his face. “They are going to kill him. Baba said so. I just want Ibrahim to live. We are going to make it so he can live. It’s why. I had to stop you from leaving.”

She made a shushing sound. He wanted badly to free her hands, to feel the cool of her palm against his sweating forehead like he was a boy with a fever. But if he untied her, then he would have to untie Dan, and he was not prepared to do that. It would mean abandoning their plan.

He left Rosalie’s hands bound. She searched his face, and this time, he stared back. He reached out and moved her hair away from her wet nose. It was midafternoon and the sky was a pitiless white. Dan walked toward them. When he arrived in front of them, he glanced at their faces.

“We’ll go back inside now,” Faisal said.

“You’re really going to continue this?” Dan asked.

“Faisal, let’s go home. You don’t need to explain why. We can work it out, just our family. We’ll figure it out together. Your baba can protect Ibrahim,” Rosalie said. She spoke in Arabic, as if it was a little secret they would share. But he was tired of her secrets. He was tired of his father’s secrets, of the Kingdom’s secrets.

“Please,” she continued. “We’ve made mistakes, both of us. I’m so sorry I’ve disappointed you. I’ve been out of my mind with grief, habibi. I love your father the way you love your God, and . . .”

“That’s blasphemy,” Faisal said cutting her off. “We will go inside and wait for Majid’s return.” He did not want his father’s help with Ibrahim. He did not want a man of Ibrahim’s pure spirit beholden to his father, who seemed to forget that a man’s purpose on the earth was to strive for the glory of jannah, not the false triumph of the dollar.

“Faisal, please,” Dan said.

“I said that’s enough! I’ve been tested once already today. Yallah, let’s get to the shade.”

He steered them toward a side archway that led back into the vast and cool room where they had spent much of the last four days. He drained the water into a thermos cup and took a sip before taking it first to his mother, then to Dan. They had drunk too much on the first day, rationing only for one or two days. On the third day, they were down to a few sips per day per person. Light-headed with thirst, Faisal floated back to his familiar spot in the archway. Every so often, he fought a spell of dizziness that threatened to send him face first into the sand. It had been six hours since Majid left. The water was gone. The waves thrummed. The gulls shrieked. No one had answered their demand. No one seemed to miss them at all.

Chapter Eleven

ABDULLAH WAS ANNOYED
when his cell phone rang. It was Mariam—the third time she’d called him that day. He was not in the mood for plaintive messages, so once again, he ignored the call and message. He had gone to play the State Oil golf course specifically to get away from his connections to the world. After his conversation with Faisal two nights earlier, it was a world he wasn’t sure he wanted to inhabit for the next few hours, possibly the next few days. He was not well-equipped to deal with vexation, and Faisal’s intimations about Rosalie and Dan had been vexing in the extreme. Abdullah was a rich man in a country ruled by rich men. He got what he wanted from people, and that news was, quite simply, not what he’d wanted.

Unfortunately, at the course, Abdullah had quickly discovered that anger wasn’t good for his stroke, the abused ball falling sullenly into every trap or rough until he’d moved to the driving range, where he could hack away artlessly. It was cool and gusty under the midday sun. He had told no one where he was going. Let them wonder about him. Let them grow worried when he didn’t show up at the office or at home.

With a sharp swing of his club, Abdullah sent the ball flying. He lost it against the white sky, then caught sight of it as it came down on the deep brown of the oil-weighted sand course, where it joined the hundred other balls he’d sliced out over the range. Another bad shot. Finesse was not in his blood this afternoon. He should have confronted Rosalie first thing yesterday, but when he woke up in the morning, he found he didn’t have the strength, and Isra had been there, soft and beckoning. Rosalie and Faisal would sort themselves out, he decided. He despised argument and apology, and had found that if given enough time, most personal matters handled themselves—the passage of time meant diffusion through disinterest, healed injuries, or provided the chance to return to one’s senses. He was certain Faisal’s accusations against Rosalie were nonsense. A woman only had her good name, her life spent preserving it. Rosalie was not stupid. She wouldn’t destroy that so casually.

In between the
pock
of his club connecting with the balls, it came to him: The Rosalie he had married was gone. The adventurer, the gypsy-souled livewire searching for a home in the world. That woman in her wildness was gone, replaced by someone who wanted him and everyone else around her to follow the rules of good conduct. She’d become a stickler, a nag, a preacher of right behavior. Where was that half-feral girl, the one who’d smelled of cigarettes and bourbon, who wore torn black tunics and dirty moccasins, the one who did her homework by the light of the liquor display at the Lazy Lion? The girl whom he had wanted so desperately to bring into his life despite all the living forces working against him because she was so different from any iteration of woman he’d known—she’d gone missing somewhere.

Abdullah glimpsed a flash of color from behind the row of oleander bushes that shielded the course from the parking lot, and soon Ayoub emerged, trotting down the path toward him. He was waving both hands, laboring despite his substantial bulk in an attempt at swiftness.