The Ruins of Us (38 page)

Her body felt light, as if she could close her eyes and float, nose first, to the ceiling. She was barely anchored there. The air was heavy enough that she would just rise and rise, using her bound hands as a rudder. Levitation as escape. She would watch Dan and Faisal and Majid grow very small, until they were dots on the lip of the desert, where it met the Gulf in a sloppy kiss. Then, they would be nothing at all, and she would puncture clouds, sucking in their moisture, bathing her face in their cooling mist, all the while barely breathing, high from the thin air, and forgetful.

Her son, her Faisal. He resisted erasure. He was the reason she had chosen not to flee with Dan, because she knew that in his absence from her life, he would be more powerful than any living, breathing child. His eyes, the color of the flesh of a cucumber, or even the paler seeds within that flesh, always closed tightly when he stepped into the desert sun. She had imagined that his blood vessels were perhaps too active, that they expanded too readily and absorbed too much so that the merest thing—a fleck of dust, a friend’s sneeze—would send him into a fit of ill health. But it wasn’t just a matter of the body. His heart was overlarge; he expected too much of people, even the world. A few weeks before, she’d come across him crying at the call to prayer. His teenaged moods were unpredictable, or predictably sour. He felt easily wronged, but by turns was easily lifted by approval. Somewhere, he’d started channeling those vulnerabilities into shows of strength. No longer was he the porous adolescent at the mercy of his environment. To dust, to germs, to teasing, to her pleas, he was now impermeable. His heart was a diamond of righteousness.

By the car, she’d seen him falter, an exuberant panic spreading over his face. It was the fear that follows a mistake—a mild consequence compared with the encumbering yoke of guilt that would come with time. She knew, for she now felt those things deeply when she considered her son, a boy made to feel so far outside his family that he would take up a gun before asking any of them for help. It must have been harder for him than she had ever imagined.

Then, of course, after seeing she was unharmed, he’d assumed an eerie calm he had been cultivating since his return from Switzerland. Somewhere, Faisal had learned a stoicism that made her feel as if all the years spent coaxing words from him were a wash. Boys and men and silence—its false, beguiling strength.

“Faisal, I need water.” She spoke to his outline in the doorway.

“There’s none left,” he said without moving.

He sat back on his heels as if he were preparing to eat or pray. For several minutes, he stared out to the water. Rosalie closed her eyes to steady herself but it only intensified the dizziness.

“Please, habibi. Bring me water. I can barely breathe. I’ve made mistakes, but I don’t deserve this. Please. You can’t make everything right this way. Our mistakes are only our own.”

“This isn’t about your mistakes. It’s bigger than that.”

“I know you have forgiveness in you. I didn’t raise you this way.” Her tongue was dry, so that she struggled to shape the words.

“No, you didn’t raise me to be this kind of man; a man who stands for what he believes in. This is about beliefs.”

“Maybe it was, but now it’s just us.”

“ ‘Let those who would exchange the life of this world for the hereafter, fight for the cause of God; whoever fights for the cause of God, whether he dies or triumphs, on him We shall bestow a rich recompense.’ ”

“Yes,” she sighed. Her eyes drooped shut. “Aren’t the verses beautiful? Like poetry or songs. Read me verses, please. Read to me, Faisal. I’m tired.” She heard his muffled footsteps on the sand.

“Umma, open your eyes.” He paused and then palmed her head, giving her a shake. “Wake up.”

“Everything is small,” she said. With difficulty, she opened her eyes and scanned his face. “Let’s go back, Faisal. Let’s go home.”

“Why did you come here?” he asked. “Didn’t you know? Didn’t Baba tell you what it would be like?”

She felt as if she were someone very famous and this was a moment in the interview to be dramatized for the sake of her viewers, the ones who longed to know the intricacies of her love life, her simplest domestic choices.

“I was in love.” She let the last word float the pitch of the sentence higher. She wanted to make the accompanying gesture—run her hand through her hair, put it on her hip, to punctuate this simple phrase that excused everything. And didn’t it? Whether that love was for a place or a person, and regardless of whether that place or person deserved to be its object?

“Promise that you and Baba won’t make me go to America.”

If she concentrated very hard, she could follow his meaning.

“You’re our son. You’re our only son. Remember that book we read? The son left the wadi in a caravan, and the mother went crazy. Remember? Her name. I wish I could recall . . .”

“ ‘Forgiving those who wrong you is a good thing.’ ”

“There,” she said. “It’s the only true thing. Please, get me water.”

Faisal shook his head. He took a step inside the customs building, then back out again.

Before she could see him, Rosalie heard Majid returning, the slap of his feet resounding against the hard sand of the beach. Water; she had prayed a hundred blue prayers for water; Muslim prayers, Baptist prayers, yogi prayers. Arabic, English. She knew they were desperate for grace, and she asked for it any way she could.

The two sips a day were barely enough to keep her heart beating, and she could feel her whole body slowing down. Majid would pass the water around and it would taste of the jug’s plastic and she would not care and she would not spill a drop. Outside the portico, she heard Majid shouting for Faisal.

From where she sat in the cool shadows of the building’s interior, she watched Majid and Faisal standing by the shore. Majid yanked the gun back, and she was glad that her son was no longer responsible for it. Sand crusted her ears, rimmed her nose, and cracked against her teeth. She wondered when and how she would feel clean again.

“What happened to the car?”

“My mother . . . she took it.” He hesitated. “She tried to escape.”

“Where are they?”

“It’s fine. Everything’s fine. They’re inside.” He spoke slowly, each word like a boulder he had to push out of his mouth.

“It’s not fine. How could you let this happen?” Majid gave Faisal a shove that sent him stumbling backward.

Majid turned to face through the archway. He grinned at her and his teeth glowed white in the dusk, which had cast the beach in purple shadows. “I think we need to start teaching lessons today.”

“Where’s the water?” Faisal asked. He sounded as if he would cry.

“There was none. The drought must have dried up the spring. I went as far as I could. So we will be like Hagar and Ishmael. We will ask, and God will provide.”

Rosalie’s legs felt leaden beneath her. She shifted to try to get the blood flowing. When she pinched her calves to reawaken the flesh, the skin remained in little peaks. Her thirst had become something huge, a space within her body that roared with need.

Majid looked at her and laughed a long, wheezing laugh, so that Rosalie wondered if he were a bit touched by the sun. It didn’t seem hot enough for heatstroke, but he had been gone all day. Faisal shifted his weight, a half-smile on his face, a look equal parts eagerness and doubt.

“Can I stand up, please?” she said.

“Yes,” Majid said. “Yes, actually. Stand. Both of you stand up, now.” He moved toward her, the sand from his steps landing on her arms and neck. He grasped the crook of her elbow and, wrenching her shoulder, pulled her to her feet. He was a full head taller than her, his body like a looming building. She stepped back, swooning a little. Across the room, Dan struggled to stand.

“Move outside,” Majid said. “No more hiding. We’re going to take care of something right now. We’re going to do something that we should have done when we first got here.”

Majid dragged her past Faisal and out into the fading daylight. The Gulf was the color of a new bruise, edged in dark blue. Rosalie scratched her scalp, felt the sand lodge beneath her fingernails. What would it be like to dive into the bay and swim along the seafloor, clutching at the cool mud and feeling nothing but the movements of the Gulf: the whisper of fins, the silent pirouettes of jellyfish. She would open her mouth and swallow bathtubs full of water. She would move through sunken gardens of seaweed.

“Where are you taking her?” Faisal said.

“You stay here and watch Coleman. I’m going to make sure she doesn’t try to escape again.”

Majid tightened his grip on her elbow. Hours before, her whole body had begun a slow shaking—shivers of hunger and sleeplessness and a low-grade fever. Now, fear. She hoped that Majid could not feel the pulse of her delirium, which moved through her body to make her feel that she was standing up out of a chair too quickly, her surroundings turning black as she waited a moment for the blood to reposition itself.

Majid continued, “And I’m going to give her plenty of time to consider the crimes she committed against your family.”

“Wait, Majid,” Faisal said. “I think maybe you misunderstood. It’s not like I thought . . .”

“I understand what happened; you told me yourself. Remember your anger, brother? I won’t let anyone treat you that way, not even your mother.”

“But she wasn’t even supposed to be here. It was an accident.”

“No, I think God has arranged it this way. We were meant to discover them at the market. It was the only way to get you to act.”

The waves continued their shushing. Yes, thought Rosalie. Quiet. Please, just be quiet.

“Please, Majid. I didn’t actually
see
anything at the house.”

“You saw the ticket and the visa. They were going to run away together.”

Majid’s face had a yellow tinge to it, the color of chicken fat pooling on the surface of a boiling broth.

“I’m telling you, leave her out of this,” Faisal said. “What she has done or not done is for God to judge.”

Rosalie watched Faisal’s face twist into an angry knot. With his free hand, Majid reached down and grabbed the shovel that sat among the other supplies along the wall of the building.

“Let’s go.”

“Ya Majid, you’re making a mistake,” Faisal said. “They’re not coming for us. We should go home.”

“Don’t try to interfere, friend. You’ve obviously forgotten our purpose here.”

“Our purpose? It’s been five days and still you talk about purpose. You’re fooling yourself if you think that anything we do here has meaning anymore.” He was close to shouting, breathing heavily as he spat out the words. “They’re not coming, Majid. No one’s coming.”

It surprised her to hear Faisal raise his voice, especially to Majid. In all sixteen years of his life, she had never heard him be gruff. He had learned to talk a year later than most children, and even then, he spoke so quietly that she had to lean in close to his tiny mouth to catch the whispered words. His Arabic was like sheets tumbling in the dryer—the language of poets and soothsayers. When she found herself close to his face trying to hear him, she would kiss his cheek and breathe in the smell of his soft baby skin. She’d heard that softness again after he’d fired on her in the car; a boy calling for his mother to lean in close. He was a boy, a searching boy. She saw it in his face, which was not prepared to reflect tragedy; she saw it in his shoulders, which were not prepared to bear tragedy.

Majid looked at Rosalie and smirked. “Come on.” He yanked her toward the water, pushing the shovel into the sand like a walking stick. She looked back at Faisal, whose arms were folded across his chest. Dan was standing, but he was swaying gently back and forth like he was starting a samba or a faint. Although the sun was setting over the desert, the air was still hot. Now she was moving forward, stumbling along toward the ruins of the Ottoman fortress that stood adjacent to the customs building. She wanted to put her tongue to the chalky stone, taste the salt of four hundred years of sea air. Her brain was in a fog. A gulp of water per day. How long had they been on the Bay? Days? Weeks? She was no longer sure, time spooling out in a dizzying zigzag.

“Hey! Ya Majid. Shway shway. Where’re you taking her?”

Faisal had caught up to them and trotted beside Majid. He was pulling Dan along beside him; Dan had been given the least water among all of them, when he probably needed the most. His skin was ashen, and before his mouth was taped, he hadn’t spoken but to ask for something to drink.

“I’m going to make sure things don’t get out of control again,” Majid said.

“You’re not going to hurt her?”

“La. Just a lesson, as I told you. To remind her that, by her actions, she’s made herself lower than the dirt on the ground. Go back to the customs building.”

But Faisal did not go back. He hovered a few steps behind them. Rosalie glanced back, but Faisal’s gaze was fixed on Majid. They arrived at the fortress’s crumbling wall, and Majid leaned Rosalie against it. He began shoveling the sand. The corners of his mouth were white. The dry surface layer of sand caught the wind and blew away from them, but as he went deeper, the sand became moist, clumped together in heavy shovelfuls.

“There,” he said after a few more minutes. He threw the shovel down and dusted off his hands. In one swift movement, he was in front of her. He picked her up, his arms so tight around her that she couldn’t breathe.

“Please,” she gasped. “Please.”

He placed her on her knees in the pit he had dug, and all around her was cool sand. She was eye to eye with the bay’s small, breaking waves, and for a moment, she felt protected, tucked into the earth and away from Majid. But as he started to dump sand in around her, a sense of panic returned, and she flung her bound arms out onto the sand, desperate to hold on to something.

“Bismallah, Majid,” Faisal said. “Stop. Bas!”

Majid turned to him and whacked him on the throat with the side of his hand. “She’s been with someone who wasn’t your father!” he yelled. “And you’re
defending
her? Where’s your sense of honor?”