Who Loves You Best (32 page)

“How can I help you?” Clare asks pleasantly.

Words are my living. Every intelligent one deserts me.

“Flowers,” I blurt.

Flowers? Dear God, is that the best you can do? You’re in a flower shop, for Chrissakes. Of course, flowers! Flying carpets are next door
.

Clare moves towards a bank of pink peonies; and suddenly I hear my mother’s slow Southern drawl as she guides me, an itchy, impatient boy of nine, around her hothouse, “The peony grants its recipient the power to keep a secret. Be careful who you give them to, Cooper.” Forty years later, and the memory is sharp enough to make me feel the punch of loss in my gut.

“Not those,” I say. “She has enough secrets.”

Clare looks at me properly for the first time. Suddenly it’s important she doesn’t see me as another customer, an
ignorant American. It’s important that she
sees
me. I almost forget why I’m buying flowers at all.

“Yellow tulips?” she suggests, with a dryness I only notice later.

“Hopeless love and devotion? Hardly. And not,” I add, as she reaches for anemones, “abandonment.”

Wedding ring on her finger. I’m ambushed by a blaze of disappointment.

A clerk babbles behind me. I still can’t take my eyes off Clare; though of course I don’t yet know that’s her name. I only discover later that she has twin babies, a boy and a girl, whose existence amazes and terrifies her in equal measure; and a husband she talks of as if he’s a third child. I don’t know that she’s the most honest, trustworthy person I will ever meet, that she’s exhausted, bled dry, with the effort of trying to take care of everything and everyone, that her worst enemy is herself. All I know is that I’ve met the woman I was meant to marry, and she’s married to someone else.

I only learn these details of her life later, but by then they don’t matter; the bell has rung. I return to her flower shop two and three times a week, unable to keep away. I don’t fail to appreciate the irony: In order to see Clare, I have to feign obsession with Ella. I turn down an important assignment from
Time
magazine. I spend a fortune on London taxis. I apologize to Jackson a thousand times in my head for not getting it: for not understanding what you would do for a woman, the right woman.

I know from the start it’s pointless. A woman like Clare
would never cheat on her husband. If she did, she wouldn’t be the woman for me.

I can’t stay in London forever
, I tell myself, pushing open the door to Clare’s shop and stepping into the damp gloom one afternoon in mid-June. Sooner or later, I’ll have to pick up my life. I’m used to being alone. Jackson’s dead, but he lived half a world away. Nothing’s really changed. So why in hell do I feel so lonely?

Clare emerges from the back room, and I savor her smile of recognition.
The small things
.

“How’s Ella this week?” she asks.

“Recovering at home.”

“Oh, I’m so pleased.”

Ella’s just gotten engaged to William. To my surprise, I find myself wishing them well. I glance at a bucket of zinnias. Not my favorite flowers, but they’re cheerful, and I imagine Ella’s tired of lilies. The zinnias, bold and brash and colorful, seem appropriate.

I never know how to talk to Clare, and so I just watch as she bundles up the flowers with a twist of raffia wrapped around her wrist. She always works fast, not wanting to keep me waiting; but it’s the waiting I come here for. She’s lost more weight, I note with concern. I can count the knobs of her spine through the thin knit sweater.

I remember the irritating assistant telling me about Clare’s daughter last time I came in. Jackson had meningitis at fourteen. Lolly and I thought we’d lose him; it was the longest forty-eight hours of my life. Even the doctors were amazed at the speed of his recovery.

I fumble over the words. “How’s your daughter? Poppy, isn’t it?”

She smiles. “She’s much better. How did you—”

“Your colleague. Craig.”

“How kind of you to remember. She had us terribly worried for a few days, but she seems over it now. She had so much salt in her body, they thought I must have given it to her.” Suddenly, her voice cracks. “The police came … it was so dreadful—”

I don’t know what to say. The police in this godforsaken country must be fucking idiots. It has to be obvious to anyone with half a brain that this woman would never poison her own child.

She rubs at her eyes like a child and hands me Ella’s zinnias.
Ella
. One of the top pediatricians in London. I can do something for Clare, I realize. Finally.

I bolt for the door, already dialing Ella’s number on my cell. (“She’s the one, isn’t she, Cooper?” Ella says, surprising me. “The one you’ve stayed here for?”) It doesn’t occur to me that I’m changing everything. I’m crossing the line, breaking my own cast-iron rule: Never get involved.

Lunch, I suggest to Clare, seizing my chance when I come back a few days later. You can thank me then.

I don’t for one minute expect her to say yes.

I feel like a fox in a henhouse in that flashy restaurant. I take her instead to the park—or to what passes for green space in this miserable, overcrowded island—and she slips off her shoes and walks in her bare feet on the browned
grass. I tell her I’ve been assigned to chase down a Taliban story in the North-West Frontier Province; though I don’t add that I called
Time
magazine that morning and volunteered. It’s time to get my head straight. I can’t sit around London for the rest of my life, mooning over Clare like a lovesick teenager.

I tell her, though not quite in so many words, that I love her.

I’m not made of fucking stone. I can’t go off and risk my neck while Clare thinks I’m in love with Ella. I’ll probably never get this chance again; I want to lay down my marker now, just in case. Life’s uncertain. If nothing else, Jackson’s death taught me that.

How did my brother bear it, knowing his wife was in love with another man?
I couldn’t share
, I realize. If Clare was mine, I couldn’t share her.

Through the next three brutal weeks in Afghanistan, I think of her, often. She gave me no encouragement, made no promises; I didn’t expect it. But her image is like a talisman in my pocket, a stone to touch when I need to experience something honest and real. I don’t bother to explore the implications for the future of my love for her. I don’t overdramatize it, or make the mistake of thinking it means anything cataclysmic. It just
is
.

I return to London thinner, browner, and calmer. In an hour’s time, I’ll be on a plane back to the U.S. Jackson’s death is still raw, but the shock has passed; I’m no longer raging at the world. Ella has slid painlessly into the past. Clare … Clare I will always carry with me. Surprisingly, the thought is comforting.

My plane has barely touched down at Heathrow before my phone starts buzzing with texts and messages that have floated around the ether, unread and unheard, while I’ve been skulking in damp caves. I listen to the first one, and don’t bother with the rest.

Before Ella has finished explaining to me about Rowan, I’m collecting my bag from the luggage carousel at Terminal One, slinging it over my shoulder, and taking the subway straight to Terminal Four. Screw
Time
. Their story can wait.

“Cooper, this is crazy,” Ella exclaims. “You can’t just get on a plane to Beirut!”

“Why? Think they’ll be overbooked?”

“I left you a message because I thought you’d want to know about Clare and Marc, not so you could drop everything and disappear off on a wild-goose chase. Don’t you think there are already people out there looking for Rowan? I’ve had the police interview
me
twice. No one even knows if Marc’s still in Beirut. He could be anywhere with Rowan by now.”

I slap my credit card on the British Airways ticket desk.

“I’ll find him.”

“You don’t even know where to start!”

“I’ll find him,” I repeat.

The plane to Beirut is empty. I stretch out on three seats, balling my coat under my head. I’ve worked the Lebanese story for twenty-five years: the pitiless civil war, the Western hostage-taking, and the fragile renaissance—before the car bombs and assassinations started again—of
the last decade. I know how easy it is to disappear here. Ask Terry Anderson, held hostage in plain sight for seven years. To the West, it was as if he’d vanished off the face of the earth. No one knew if he was dead or alive until he was released.

But I also know that if you ask questions in the right places, eventually answers find their way back. No one ever truly disappears. There are always ripples.

Marc Elias may have been born in Lebanon, but he’s a foreigner by all but blood. The ripples he makes will be noticed more than he realizes. Sooner or later, I’ll find him.

I refuse to allow myself to think of Clare, grief-stricken and desperate for her child; Clare, newly separated from her husband. I can’t afford any distractions. What matters now is finding Rowan. Everything else can wait.

It takes me six days.

Josef, my driver, comes to me.
“Habibi,”
he says. “I have a friend.”

It works the way it always does. His friend, Mehdi, has a friend. Zahir has a brother, whose wife has a cousin. Cousin Antoine meets me at a seafront café for coffee and
man’oushi zaatar
. We smoke cigarettes and stare companionably over the Mediterranean. I have a friend, says Antoine, in perfect English, who lives in Jounieh, a few miles from here. More of an acquaintance, really. This acquaintance was recently asked to find a baby-sitter for an uncle. A widower, newly arrived from America. Or London. Perhaps Canada? His friend, or acquaintance, recommended his sixteen-year-old sister, who came home that night with stories of a sad baby
with big blue eyes. Antoine shrugs. It could be nothing. It could be something. He’ll arrange for me to meet the sister. It will be expensive, he warns.

I meet Rania the next day. Yes, she says, folding three hundred-dollar bills into her pocket. A blond, blue-eyed boy who cries all the time for his mother.
Rowan
.

But we have to be sure. So Josef takes me to Jounieh, a high-rise sprawl across the slopes of a large bay north of Beirut. During the civil war, this was the Christian East. You took your life in your hands crossing the Green Line, the no-man’s-land in downtown Beirut that divided it from the Muslim West. Josef risked his life for me a dozen times. I can count the number of men I trust on the fingers of one hand. Josef is among them.

A new American-style six-lane highway cuts through the mountains from Beirut to Jounieh. The Lebanese drive as if it’s still a dirt free-for-all. Neon signs blink fitfully on all sides. Washing is draped between apartment buildings still pockmarked with bullet holes from the war. Somewhere, hidden in this concrete jungle, is Clare’s son.

Josef takes me deep into an unfamiliar neighborhood. We stop at a café on the corner of two narrow, gritty city streets with old movie posters peeling from the walls. We drink thick, burnt coffee, and we wait. An hour passes, then two. We smoke filterless cigarettes. Every now and then, a small man with gold teeth comes over to our table and mutters in Arabic to Josef. I’m patient. This is the way it is in the Middle East. We share more coffee, sweet pastries, more cigarettes.

Suddenly, there’s a commotion outside. A silver car with
a badly painted green passenger door pulls up. Two youths get out, and the gold-toothed café owner goes out to talk to them. After a few minutes, he beckons. As soon as we get outside, Josef and I are hustled towards the vehicle. I would never get into a strange car in Lebanon without Josef. Even so, I’m alert to the tension in his shoulders. I have a bad feeling about this.

After fifteen minutes’ uphill drive, we arrive in front of an elegant, faded apartment building high over the bay. We sit in the hot car, waiting. A young woman comes out, glancing nervously at the car and twisting her hands. The two youths go over to her. There is gesticulating, shouting; one of the boys shoves the woman in the shoulder. I put my hand on the door handle, and Josef holds me back with a warning arm across my chest.

Without explanation, the youths climb back in and we’re driven back to the café. Josef huddles in a corner with the gold-toothed owner, who smiles at me and shrugs:
Shit happens
.

“The man with the child left,” Josef explains in low tones. “Someone warned him an American was looking for him. He was there until twenty minutes before we arrived.”

Josef and I wait down the street in our own car until the youths have gone, and the café owner comes out alone. We follow him as he walks through the town, keeping well back, but he doesn’t look around. He turns a corner and stops to hawk on the ground and scratch his ass. I grab Josef’s jacket from the backseat and leap out of the car, throwing it over the man’s head and bodily tossing him into the backseat of the vehicle. He weighs perhaps a hundred
pounds soaking wet. Josef guns the engine and races up into the hills. I pin the man, screaming in terror, flat against the seat. No one has even noticed us.

Josef doesn’t stop till he reaches a deserted parking lot high over the city. I press my knee into the café owner’s back, shoving his face into the leather seat.

“Now imagine you’re seven months old,” I snarl.

“Please,
habibi
!” the man cries, his voice muffled. “He said he’d kill me!”

“He’s not here. I am.” I tighten my grip.
“Talk.”

Ever since Ella broke the news, I’ve refused to permit myself to think about Clare in any other context than as Rowan’s mother. I haven’t dared to wonder what might happen, now that she’s free. She made no promises.

But now that I’m with her, separated by a few inches of charged, electrified air, it’s impossible to maintain my resolve. We sit next to each other on the plane to Beirut, my second such journey in a week; almost, but not quite, touching. Occasionally, our elbows brush on the armrest, and we both jump as if burned. Neither of us can look the other in the eye.

Jenna leans across the aisle and taps my shoulder, breaking the spell. “Are you
sure
it was Rowan?”