Zeitoun (32 page)

They waited until eleven. No word. Twelve. Nothing. It wasn’t until one o’clock that they were given notice that he would be released any moment. Kathy was told to wait for him outside. A bus would be dropping him off at the gate.

Zeitoun was in his cell praying.

“Zeitoun!”

A guard was calling to him.

The guard can wait
, Zeitoun thought. He had no idea that Kathy was at the prison and his release was imminent.

He continued his prayers.

“Zeitoun!” Now the guard was at his cell, yelling through the bars. “Get ready!”

Zeitoun continued his prayers until he was finished. The guard waited silently. When Zeitoun stood, the guard nodded to him.

“Get your stuff. You’re getting out today.”

“What?” Zeitoun said.

“Hurry up.”

Zeitoun fell against the wall. His legs had given way.

Kathy waited outside the prison with Adnan.

A white bus arrived at the gate. A figure moved from within, from left to right, and then stepped down onto the pavement. It was Abdulrahman, her husband. He had lost twenty pounds. He looked like a different man, a smaller man, with longer hair, almost all of it white. Tears soaked her face.
He’s so small
, she thought. A flash of anger overtook her.
Goddamn those people. All of you people, everyone responsible for this
.

Zeitoun saw her. He smiled and she went to him. Tears all over her
face, she could barely see. She ran to him. She wanted to protect him. She wanted to take him in the crescent of her arms and heal him.

“Get back!”

A heavy hand was on her shoulder. A guard had stopped her.

“Stay here!” he yelled.

Kathy had crossed a barrier. It wasn’t visible to her, but the guards had delineated an area within which the prisoners’ relatives were not allowed.

She waited, standing a few yards away from her husband. They stared at each other, smiling grimly. He looked like a sad old man. He was wearing denim pants, a denim shirt, orange flip-flops. Prison clothes. They hung off him, two sizes too big.

A few minutes later he was free. He walked to her and she ran to him. They held each other for a long moment. She could feel his shoulder blades, his ribs. His neck seemed so thin and fragile, his arms skeletal. She pulled back, and his eyes were the same—green, long-lashed, touched with honey—but they were tired, defeated. She had never seen this in him. He had been broken.

Zeitoun hugged Adnan, and then quickly pulled away.

“We should go,” Zeitoun said.

The three of them quickly got in the car. They didn’t want whoever was responsible for this to change their minds. It wouldn’t have surprised them. Nothing at all would have surprised them.

They left the prison as fast as they could. They felt better after they passed through the main gate, and felt better still as they drove down
the long white-fenced driveway and reached the road. Zeitoun turned around periodically, to be sure no one was following them. Adnan checked his rearview mirror as they sped down the rural route, trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the prison. They passed through a long corridor of tall trees, and with each mile they felt more sure that Zeitoun was absolutely free.

Kathy sat in the back seat, reaching forward, stroking her husband’s head. But she wanted to be closer. She wanted him in her arms, she wanted to hold him and restore him.

They were only ten minutes away from the prison when Ahmad called Kathy’s cell phone.

“We’ve got him!” she said.

“What? You do?”

She handed the phone to Zeitoun.

“Hello brother!” he said.

“Is it you?” Ahmad asked.

“It’s me,” Zeitoun said.

“Praise God. Praise God. How are you?”

Ahmad’s voice was trembling.

“Okay,” Zeitoun said, “I’m okay. Were you worried?” He tried to laugh.

Now Ahmad was crying. “Oh praise God. Praise God.”

Kathy has lost her memory. It’s shredded, unreliable. The wiring in her mind has been snapped in vital places, she fears, and now the strangest things have been happening.

She was at the bank in November, just to deposit checks from clients and withdraw cash for the week. She comes to this bank, Capital One, so often that everyone there knows her. This morning, like any other, the employees greeted her when she entered.

“Hi, Mrs. Zeitoun!” they sang, and she waved and smiled.

She walked to one of the tellers and removed her checkbook and picked up a pen. She needed to write two checks, one for cash and the other to move money into the company’s payroll account.

She wrote the first check and gave it to the teller, and when she returned her attention to her checkbook, she paused. She didn’t know what to do next. She couldn’t remember what her hand was supposed to
be doing. She didn’t know how to write, or what to write, or where. She stared and stared at the checkbook; it became more foreign by the moment. She couldn’t identify the purpose of the checkbook on the counter or of the pen in her hand.

She looked around, hoping to see someone with these tools in their hands, to see how they were using them. She saw people, but they provided no clues. She was lost.

The teller said something but Kathy couldn’t understand the words. She looked at the young woman, but the sounds coming from her mouth were garbled, backward.

Kathy couldn’t speak. She knew, inwardly, that she was beginning to worry the teller.
Focus
, she told herself.
Focus, focus, focus, Kathy!

The teller spoke again, but the sounds were more distant now, coming, it seemed, from underwater, or far away.

Kathy’s eyes locked on to the sliding wooden partition that separated this teller from the others. She lost herself in the blond wood grain, slipping into the elliptical lines of age on the wood’s surface. Then she realized what she was doing, staring at the grain on the wood, and urged herself to snap out of it.

Focus!
she thought.
C’mon
.

Her hands felt numb. Her vision was blurry.

Come back! Come back!

And slowly she returned. The teller was talking. Kathy made out a few words. Kathy felt herself re-enter her body, and suddenly everything clicked into place again.

“Are you okay, Mrs. Zeitoun?” the teller asked again.

Kathy smiled and waved her hand dismissively.

“Just spacing out for a second,” she said. “Busy day.”

The teller smiled, relieved.

“I’m fine,” Kathy said, and wrote the second check.

*    *    *

She’s been forgetting numbers, names, dates. She has trouble concentrating. She tells friends that she’s going crazy, and laughs it off. She’s not going crazy, she is sure and they are sure—she’s still the same Kathy almost all the time and certainly to most of the people she knows—but episodes like the one at the bank are accumulating. She’s not as sharp as she once was, and there are things she can’t count on doing as she did before. One day she’ll be unable to place the name of one of the workers she’s known for ten years. Another day she’ll find herself with the phone in her hand, the other end of the line ringing, and will have no idea who she is calling or why.

It is the fall of 2008 and the Zeitouns are in the process of moving into a new house. It’s the same house, really—the one on Dart—but it’s been gutted, expanded, tripled. Zeitoun designed an addition that will give all the children their own rooms, and will allow Kathy to work at home. There are balconies, gabled roofs, a large kitchen, four bathrooms, two sitting rooms. It is the closest thing to a dream house they will ever have.

The office on Dublin was a total loss. They went there a few days after Zeitoun’s release from prison and found only mud and insects. The roof had given way, and everything inside was covered in the same grey mud. Kathy and Zeitoun took the few things they could salvage and eventually sold the building. They planned to move their office to their home. Now their house has an entrance on Dart, the residential address, and another one on Earhart Boulevard.

The Zeitouns have lived in seven apartments and houses since the storm. Their Dublin Street office was leveled and is now a parking lot. The house on Dart is still unfinished.

They are tired.

*    *    *

When they returned from Hunt, they stayed for two days on Adnan’s floor in Baton Rouge, then moved into the studio apartment of their rental unit on Tita Street, on New Orleans’ West Bank. There was no furniture, but it had been undamaged in the storm. Those first few nights, Kathy and Zeitoun lay on the floor, with borrowed blankets, talking very little. He did not want to talk about prison. He did not want to talk about Camp Greyhound. He was ashamed. Ashamed that his hubris, if that was what it was, had caused all this. Ashamed that he had been handcuffed, stripped, caged, treated like an animal. He wanted it all erased from their lives.

On that night and for many nights after, they lay on the floor and held each other, bitter and thankful and frustrated, and they said nothing.

Kathy fed him as much as she could each day. The day after his release, Kathy and Adnan took Zeitoun to Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, where the doctors found no major injuries. They could find no reason for the stabbing pain in his side. But he had lost twenty-two pounds. It would be a year before he was back to his previous weight. He’d lost hair, and what was left had gone grey. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes had lost their spark. Slowly, he regained himself. He grew stronger. The pain in his side dissipated, and this convinced Zeitoun it had been caused not by anything visible on an X-ray, but by heartbreak, by sorrow.

After Zeitoun’s release, their friend Walt loaned them a car from his Lexus dealership, and Kathy and Zeitoun drove it back into the city and to the house on Dart.

The smell was overpowering, a mixture of mold, sewage, and dead animals. Kathy pulled part of her hijab to her mouth to mute the stench. Zeitoun tried to flush one of the toilets and sewage poured out. More water had made its way into the rooms on the second floor. A shelf of books was ruined, as well as most of the electronics.

Without Zeitoun there to plug holes as they arose, the house had been devastated. He looked at the gaps in the roof and sighed.

Kathy leaned against the wall in the hallway. She was overwhelmed. Everything they owned was filthy. To think she had cleaned this house a thousand times!

“You okay?” he asked her.

She nodded. “I want to leave. I’ve seen enough.”

They took the computer and some of the kids’ clothes and put them in the car. Zeitoun started the engine but then ran back inside, retrieved the box of photos, brought it down, and put it in the trunk. He backed out of the driveway, turned down Dart, and remembered something else.

“Wait!” he said. “Oh no …” He jumped out of the car, leaving the door open.
The dogs
. How long had it been? He ran across the street and down the block, his stomach spinning.
The dogs, the dogs
.

He knocked on the front doors of the two houses where he had fed them. No answer. He looked in the first-floor windows. No one. The owners had not come back.

Zeitoun went back to the tree. His plank was still there, and he leaned it against the trunk. He climbed up to his usual perch and then pulled the plank up. He stretched the plank across to the house on the right and walked to the roof. Usually the dogs were barking for him by now, but today he heard nothing.

Please
, he thought.
Please God
.

He lifted the window and slipped inside. The stench hit him
immediately. He knew the dogs were dead before he saw them. He found them together in one of the bedrooms.

He left the roof, stepped back to the tree, and arranged the plank to reach the second house. The dogs were just under the windowsill, a tangle of limbs, heads to the heavens, as if they had been waiting, for weeks, for him.

After two weeks, Kathy and Zeitoun were still in the studio apartment, and the kids were ready to return to New Orleans. Zeitoun was nervous. “Do I look like me?” he asked Kathy. He was afraid he would scare them, having lost so much weight and hair. Kathy didn’t know what to say. He did not look like him, not yet, but the kids needed to see their father. So Kathy and Zeitoun flew to Phoenix, and amid much crying and hugging, the Zeitouns were reunited. They drove back to New Orleans and returned to the apartment on Tita. For a month they slept together on the floor.

One day Kathy opened a letter from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They were offering the Zeitouns a free trailer, a two-bedroom portable unit that would be delivered to them at their request.

Kathy filled out the appropriate forms and sent them back. She didn’t expect much from the process, so she was startled when, in December 2005, an eighteen-wheeler pulled up in front of their apartment with a gleaming white trailer in tow.

Zeitoun was on his rounds, so he didn’t see them install it. When he returned, he was puzzled. They hadn’t connected the trailer to water or electricity. And it had been installed on a rickety tower of cement blocks, easily four feet off the ground. There were no steps to reach the door. It was so high that there was no way to get inside without a stepladder.
And even if one reached the door, you couldn’t enter the trailer, because the delivery team had failed to leave a set of keys.

Kathy called FEMA and let them know about these issues. They said they were doing the best they could, and would get to it as soon as possible. Weeks passed. No key was delivered. The Zeitouns watched every day for signs of any FEMA personnel. The trailer stayed where it was, unused, unconnected, and locked.