The Ruins of Us (36 page)

“Tell me something you remember about your mother. Please.”

She was silent, and he couldn’t tell if she was thinking or ignoring him. The pool filter gurgled. She wiped away the water that had gathered at the point of her chin.

“She wore this white bathing suit while we were in France last summer. You weren’t there. Neither was Faisal. It was just us. She wore it every day, and each day, her skin got more and more brown. She bought a huge pair of sunglasses from a postcard shop. When she wore them with her bathing suit, she looked like a movie star. A man approached her, even though we’d paid extra to sit in a private area of the beach, underneath a canopy. But he saw her from way down by the water, and he walked right up to our chairs. He gave her his card. At first, he spoke a language I didn’t understand; he must have thought she was from his country. Then they switched to English. She seemed angry, but after a little while, she was laughing. He had a broad face and some gray in his hair. His shirt was very thin cotton, pale blue like smoke. I remember because I had been searching for a dress just that color. His tan was even better than Umma’s. When he walked away, she looked over at me, and I looked up from my book like I hadn’t been listening. I knew it wasn’t polite to eavesdrop. She blew out her cheeks and shook her head. Then she crumpled up the card and tossed it out into the sand. Later, our waiter picked it up and threw it away.”

She looked at him, her head tilted to one side. The electricity behind her gaze surprised him.

“What about earlier? When you were a little girl?” He felt desperate. Mariam’s story stung, and he welcomed the pain.

“My teacher says it’s not healthy to think only about the past. She says that about Palestine. Whenever a girl gets angry, the teacher says, I am not interested in dwelling on the past. It’s not healthy. Draw me the future of Palestine.”

“It’s unrealistic to think about Palestine’s future without acknowledging her past.”

“Baba.”

“I’m sorry. Nothing?”

Another long pause.

“You and Umma going to Tarek’s wedding. You were in the kitchen eating peanuts, your mouth was full of peanuts, and you were trying to tell her something. She said, ‘The food won’t be
that
bad, will it?’ and you made your eyes really wide and nodded. She reached over and pinched your ribs, and you spat the peanuts out everywhere, all over her dress and the floor. I thought she was going to scream at you. She’d ordered the dress special from the White Rose, and she’d had Jibran do her hair and makeup. But then you started singing, clapping your hands and sitting back on your haunches like you were trying to do a wedding dance. She reached down and pushed you over, and both of you were laughing. She leaned over the sink trying to catch her breath, and then she washed all the peanuts off her face. I went up to her room with her when she changed. You were so late leaving, and her makeup was ruined, but she didn’t seem to care. She rested her head on your shoulder as you walked out the door.”

Yes. He remembered that night. The food had been delicious. He’d had bad intelligence from his friend at the Gulf Hotel, who’d told him the family was skimping on dinner. And Rosalie’s dress, a gold lace sheath, had smelled of spit and peanut butter, and had to be thrown away. She’d said, mock-scolding, that she’d found peanuts in her undergarments for weeks afterward.

“I’ve got thousands of things I could tell you about Umma, and a thousand more I couldn’t tell you because I can’t write or speak them. They’re mine. I can’t give them to you.” She paused. “I won’t.”

She told him she was hungry. He took this as a hopeful sign. They went inside. Should he wake Yasmin to make them something?

“Umma always cooked my dinner when it was just the two of us.”

“Oh.”

He’d never known. He was seized by the extreme tenderness of this gesture, imagined his wife slicing onions and chopping garlic, making the kitchen fragrant in his absence. She didn’t have to cook—Yasmin had a book of all the family recipes—yet she had chosen to feel the sting of the onions in her eye, smell the pungency of the raw garlic, nick her nails and burn her fingertips, all to feed her daughter. How often? If he were in an honest mood, he admitted he spent more than half his days with Isra. He had never excused himself for these absences. Rosalie understood the sacrifices he needed to make for the business, for their lifestyle. But all along, she was the only one sacrificing anything. Do the sacrifices we make without knowing we are making them count toward heaven? He wondered. If so, Rosalie would be crowned three times over in the gardens of janna.

He put water on to boil. In silence, they waited, his daughter facing away from him on one of the tall kitchen stools that lined the counter. At the first sign of bubbling, he dropped in a package of pasta that he found, almost by mistake, as he combed through the kitchen for something to make. He hadn’t cooked once since returning to the Kingdom, a small change he had hardly noticed as they’d settled into their new lives in Al Dawoun.

Mariam swiveled around slowly.

“What would you like on your pasta?” he asked.

“Butter and red pepper flakes, please.”

She stared at him with her smooth face, features in just the right places. He and Rose had made this from their union; shouldn’t beautiful children beget beautiful life? If only Faisal had fiercely loved his mother as Mariam had, then perhaps she would have been more inclined to generosity. Instead, the boy had been miserly, the love for Rosalie existing in his heart as it does in the hearts of all children for their mothers, but quietly, hidden behind the swell of his newfound ego, the self that was forming each and every day without any help from either of his parents. It was terrifying, and had reached the worst possible outcome: a child turned back against his originators. The stuff of myth, not of life. At least, not of their lives.

He pulled out the butter to let it soften while the pasta cooked. It was a gesture from another lifetime. He and Rosalie would cook together in her tiny apartment on Rio Grande. Neither of them had much talent for it, but they liked to crack open a bottle of cheap wine and brush up against each other in the cramped kitchen. She had liked to make a ridiculous coq-au-vin—said it made her feel sophisticated—though the chicken was always tough and bland, the wine overcooked to a thickening vinegar. Still, they ate it and were happy.

“The spices are over there,” Mariam said, pointing to a tall central cupboard.

“I know,” he said, though he didn’t. He was embarrassed by how little he knew the house.

“Not that one. To the right. The pepper flakes are on the middle shelf, toward the back.”

He fumbled past the za’atar, the white pepper, the ground cloves and cinnamon. The shelf smelled like Rosalie returning from the marketplace. The Hadrami jeweler was not accountable for Abdullah’s betrayals, though he wanted him to be. Abdullah would go to the shop, buy up his entire inventory. He would shutter the storefront, scatter the jewels in the dirt behind him. Let the women who would collect them from the dust and wear them on their breasts, ears, wrists, necks, feel the weight of his regret.

Using the lid of the pot, he drained the water, let a handful of pasta slither out into the two waiting bowls. On the steaming noodles, he placed a pat of butter. He handed the pepper flakes to Mariam, watched as she dumped what seemed like an unkind amount first into his pasta, then into hers.

“Habibti, that will burn.”

“It seems right,” she said.

He waited until she had eaten a few forkfuls of the pasta before speaking. She slurped the noodles up into her mouth, and he was reminded that she was still a girl, a child whose brain was rapidly shaping itself with each passing day. But he had to tell her the truth. In case she knew anything at all.

“Mimou, I’m afraid Faisal and Majid have taken your mother somewhere. And Dan Coleman, too.”

“On a trip? If they went camping . . .”

“No.” His heart fell. She knew nothing. “They left a note with A’m Nabil. They’re in hiding somewhere.” In the background the boiling water did its hushed work. “Think, Mariam. Do you have any idea where they would be?”

“No.” She frowned. Her eyes filled with tears. “Faisal’s been so grouchy these last few weeks. We’ve barely spoken.”

She slid off the stool and rushed over, colliding with him in a forceful hug that knocked him back a step. She was crying now, her face buried in his side, her arms tight around him. He squeezed back, stroked her head. He didn’t know what to say. Reassurances meant nothing if you couldn’t make them real.

After a few moments, she pulled her head back and looked up at him. “I know how we can find out.”

“How?”

“I’ll post something to my blog,” she said, her eyes widening with excitement. “I won’t use any names, and I won’t mention the situation, but I’ll describe them, their cars. It will be like a missing persons report. I’ll ask everyone to link to the post, or repost it. I’ve got four hundred followers.”

He nodded, but he wasn’t hopeful. Four hundred people were nothing in a nation of twenty-five million. Faisal and Majid could be anywhere, and the Peninsula was vast, but Mariam was already bounding for the stairs. “Come help me write it, Baba. Come on.”

The look on her face—plaintive, eager, desperate—made Abdullah put one foot in front of the other until he was upstairs in her room, sitting on a chair by the computer. He would give her this pipe dream, allow her to believe she could write her mother back to her. She wrote using her brother’s most obscure nickname, Zizi, and she called Majid only “M,” but her physical descriptions of the boys and the cars were vivid and meticulous. For a moment, Abdullah could picture his son exactly as she wrote about him: thin, swimmer’s shoulders, large green eyes with heavy lashes, skin the color of wet sand. Sixteen years old. Missing. Wanted back at home. Family worried. If you have any information about his whereabouts, e-mail [email protected].

IN THE MORNING,
Abdullah went to Isra’s to tell her what had happened. He had Ayoub drive him the short distance between the houses, something he had done a hundred times before, but now he asked the man to park in the street, which he never did.

Isra was watering the flowers in the courtyard, wearing jeans and a navy sweater. She’d been wiping her hands on the front of her jeans; dirt and water formed imperfect handprints there. She kept watering while he spoke, but when he came to the part about the kidnapping, how Rosalie had been taken too, she stood up, her mouth gaping, water spilling out of the watering can and drowning the seedling it hovered over.

“You’re killing it,” he said.

“What?”

He leaned forward and righted the can, then took it from her hand and set it down.

“Your jeans.”

“No matter,” she said, her long fingers brushing her hair behind her ears. “They’re old. You’re upset. Let me make you some tea.”

She put her hand on his arm.

“Bring Mariam to me. Let me watch her here until you find them.”

Slowly, he lifted her hand, placed it gently back by her side. She was so beautiful. He thought of Rosalie, missing somewhere out there, in danger. He couldn’t stand to look at Isra.

“Go to your family for a few weeks,” he said. “There’s no need for you to be part of this mess.”

If she stayed, looking as she did, acting as she did, his Isra . . . it would be too much for him. He needed all his energy for Rosalie. He owed her that.

“My love, you’re distraught . . .”

“Have Aziz arrange it today.”

“Abdullah, be reasonable. I don’t want to leave you like this. Your daughter needs someone. You need someone.”

“I’ll tell you what she needs. She needs her family, and you are not that.”

He walked to the courtyard gate and buzzed it open. He turned back toward her. She was magnificent, her generous features even more pronounced in the honest light of early day. Her eyes—topaz, deep-set, and wise—looked at him now as if at a stranger. Perhaps it was what he should have been to her all along. How easily he had called the number on the real estate flyer in Dubai. How easily she had answered the phone and shown him the two-bedroom flat with the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the glittering city. How easily he had invited her to dine with him. How easy to fall in love with someone. How easy. And then, how hard.

“You can stay here,” he said, turning back toward her. “But I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to see the lights of this house. I don’t want to hear you take a single breath.”

The sound of it, he thought, would have me back here in a moment, leaving Rosalie to whatever fate God had for her.

ABDULLAH MET NABIL’S
contact, Ghassan al-Badeen, in front of the concrete fish at the public beach. Ghassan was kicking at a wax soda cup and examining his cell phone. He was not a garrulous man; they had made their plan in fewer than five sentences. They would start in Al Dawoun and move outward in circles until they had covered the entire Province. It could take weeks, but perhaps the boys would give up after a few days.

“Was he trained?” Ghassan asked. “Some of these boys have been trained.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Don’t think, or don’t know? It can mean life or death.”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think he means anyone any harm?”

“No. I don’t think . . . no, Faisal would never harm anyone.” Quiet boy, studious boy, a boy who wouldn’t harm anyone. Abdullah hoped that boy was still there in his son’s core.

BEFORE STARTING THE
search, Abdullah sent Mariam to stay with her aunt Nadia. He told her to phone him if she received any news from Faisal or her mother. “Or the blog,” she said. “Yes,” he said. “Or the blog.”

Abdullah and Ghassan drove south along the Corniche, past the poor neighborhoods on the outskirts of Al Dawoun. Laundry lines hung along the roofs of the shabby apartment buildings, the clothes waving like faded flags.

“I grew up there,” Ghassan said. “Twentieth Street.”

He waved his cigarette in the direction of the buildings, which had grown tea-colored with age. The narrow, spider-webbed streets; the small windows in apartments dark as fortresses. It was like being in another country, one whose traditions Abdullah did not understand. The Diamond Mile was as distant from these people as Houston. In the car, there was only the sound of Ghassan’s exhalations. After a time, they left the city and entered an open stretch of desert road.