The Ruins of Us (23 page)

But then Abdullah had used it all against her:
You are the mother of my children.
It was how he saw her now. When he’d said it, she’d tried to cry, but she was stuck in that bleak room of depression that is not big enough to be sadness.
You are the mother of my children;
he said it as if it were enough. But she knew it only meant that she was no longer all and one. And what about during their honeymoon, when she told him that she wanted to be buried in the same coffin as him so that their bones would become dust, their bodies indistinguishable? Now he would be buried with Isra. Their hearts would grow gray and feathery as moths’ wings, collapsing side by side. Hers would mold in its cage of bones. She put her hand to her chest.

Mariam had fallen asleep and was leaning heavily into Rosalie’s shoulder. She pressed her nose into her daughter’s hair and breathed deeply. It smelled of the lavender shampoo Rosalie bought for her on the previous summer’s vacation to Provence, and of something deeper, the skin of her scalp, plain and earthy as oatmeal. Rosalie remembered the time they’d gone to France, walked around the sunflower fields of the Luberon, sunned themselves on beachside recliners in Cannes. She’d sipped from sweating glasses of pastis and rosé, and Mariam had finished one Shirley Temple after another, the grenadine staining her lips pink. At night, they’d eaten bouillabaisse and tiny calissons, whose nuclear sweetness kept them buzzing until well after midnight. There in the fortifying light of the Mediterranean sun, she had been happy.

She wanted to lay Mariam in her bed undisturbed. It seemed only right that when a child falls asleep in a mother’s arms, she should awaken in the light of morning with a sense of peace and no recollection of being deposited in her sheets. With a heave, she tried to lift Mariam in her arms but her daughter was too heavy. Her leg slipped from Rosalie’s grasp, and Mariam woke, blinking and starting, half in and half out of her mother’s embrace. Rosalie sighed, felt her uselessness settling around her like dust.

“Umma, what’re you doing?” Mariam laughed.

“I thought I’d put you to bed.”

“That’s OK. I’ll put myself to bed.”

Yes, she remembered. This is our family now, each person putting themselves to bed, striving and struggling and aching behind bolted doors. When would they let each other in again?

“Good night, then. Think about what I asked you, habibti.”

Mariam kissed her on the cheek. “OK. ’Night.”

She watched her daughter exit the room, the sway of her slim hips, her step buoyant. Rosalie wished she possessed the confidence she saw in her daughter. Mariam would never allow herself to be someone’s first or second wife. She would have been on a plane to Houston the moment she learned about Isra. She would be
wife
, or nothing. She belonged to a new generation of Saudi women. Things were changing, but not as rapidly as Rosalie had thought. She pushed her heels into the thick carpet, straightening her legs. Yes. She would leave. And she would try to take Mariam.

It was late, but she called Lamees to tell her she wouldn’t be able to go walking for the next couple weeks. Something had come up that needed her attention. The voice mail flipped on and she left a message. After she hung up, she wondered if she would ever see Lamees again. Perhaps after she left the Kingdom, she could meet Lamees and Khaled on one of their vacations, on a safari or a beach on the Indian Ocean. Even as she thought it, she realized it was impossible. The love could not be shared. And Rosalie knew her bitterness over their happiness would kill the friendship. It had already started to.

She needed to talk to Dan. He would provide answers, tactics for departure, bullet-pointed itineraries. He was a nomad. He knew how to come and go without disturbing the landscape, letting the horizon absorb him. One night when he had come over to drink with Abdullah, he’d told her that he was always ready to disappear. For months after the divorce, Carolyn had tried to contact Dan through Abdullah but somehow his name was never known, his information never shared. Always a bad connection or an issue of translation: Dan Coleman? Ma hua? Who’s he? This global Houdini. He would know how to help her disappear from the Magic Kingdom.

Chapter Seven

HERE WE ARE,
thought Faisal, two candles dying between us. It was the candles that so thoroughly depressed him, the glowing red wax and bright flames and polished silver candlesticks out of accord with the distinctly noncelebratory mood of the diners. Mariam drooped. Faisal could hear Rosalie swallow her lentil soup, each spoonful going down leadenly. Three nights had passed since the botched family dinner, when Abdullah had failed to show up and his mother had disappeared before they started the salad.

Even after returning from his trip Abdullah had mostly stayed away, leaving Faisal with a weary mother and a fidgeting sister. Faisal tried not to look at Rosalie’s face, fixing his gaze instead on the puckering candles, the chandelier, a small red stain that looked like a bindi against the pale carpet, the badly done oil painting of his father in which his legs looked like large sausages coiled around the midsection of an Arabian stallion. He wondered what Abdullah and Isra were talking about at that moment as they sat at her dining table, just a few hundred meters away. He wondered if they too endured such moments of subterranean silence.

He’d seen Abdullah and Isra drive up to her house, just returned from the trip, their faces rosy, the car filled with duty-free bags from Dubai International. Isra whooshed out of the car, her white dress shocking against her tan shoulders, her abaya crumpled in a heap on the floor of the car. His father honked at him and waved with his good hand. Faisal didn’t wave back, instead fixing his eyes on the crane suspended over the top of the half-done skyscraper going up behind Isra’s house. He stared at the building’s skeleton long enough to make sure there would be no eye contact with them, and long enough to be pleased by the Windex-blue of the skyscraper’s reflective windows.

He was angry with his parents. They had to do everything noisily, misbehaving like children. Knocking on Isra’s door! Isra had gossiped to an acquaintance, and within days, the Diamond Mile was electrified by talk of Rosalie’s antics. Every time he passed by the neighbors’ homes, he imagined the burble of courtyard fountains to be low-throated snickers coming from behind the high walls. In some of the more outrageous versions of events he overheard from Ali and Majid and Hassan, the fig became a bottle of Chanel No.
5
smashed into a thousand shards against Isra’s door, a decaying chicken’s heart black with flies, a fat mongoose with a red ribbon around its neck, sharpening its teeth on the concrete. He wondered if women could keep nothing private—if the great secret of their days was, in fact, that they had none.

“You’re wearing me out with all this chatter,” Rosalie said, her fork poised over her lamb.

He grunted.

“What’s the matter? Did you and Majid have a fight?”

Faisal was surprised. She rarely asked him about Majid because she said she didn’t trust boys trying too hard to be men, so Faisal never told her anything about him. It was for the best, anyway, as Majid had a family network as complex and secretive as a walnut shell. Because Rosalie had never asked, Faisal never told her about Majid’s uncle, a Sahwi scholar imprisoned by the al-Saud in the late nineties, still floundering in jail because he refused to go on TV to confess his mistake in declaring the royals to be apostate. Neither did he tell Rosalie of the twenty-centimeter scar that snaked from Majid’s elbow to the back of his hand, earned in some back alley in Fallujah, where, Majid said, the acrid smell of smoke was counteracted by the sweet pungency of rotting garbage. And it was Majid, with his warrior’s heart, who had led Faisal to Sheikh Ibrahim, the man who spoke God’s truth and was unafraid of the al-Saud. She never asked. He never told. He liked keeping these secrets from her, and from Abdullah—liked the way the mysteries bunkered in his heart; the business of possessing knowledge that no one else in the family did.

“Majid’s a jerk,” Mariam said.

“Why?” said Rosalie.

It was a game they had started playing together, and it made Faisal twitch. One of them asserted something, and the other one made her justify the opinion. Rosalie claimed it would teach Mariam to make statements that were “clear and true,” whatever that meant. Rosalie said that, too often, and not just in newspapers, people lied or said fuzzy things, things they didn’t really mean or understand.

“Well,” said Mariam. “For one thing, he told me that after a certain age, a woman should never answer the front door. And he doesn’t smile. I almost preferred when he used to throw me in the pool.”

Faisal laughed; he couldn’t help it. When they were younger, Majid had made it his habit to throw Mariam in the pool behind the house, clothes and all, until one day Rosalie had seen him do it, charged from the house, and angrily shoved him in. At the time, they were twelve, and Faisal wasn’t sure if Majid had ever forgiven Rosalie that humiliation. Now Faisal was letting Rosalie entertain her vision of Majid as an ill-tempered child because if she knew the real reasons behind Majid’s scowl, she would try to squash their friendship. He didn’t want to sneak around in order to see his friend, and he had learned that defending something only led to further scrutinizing. Without Majid, his days would be tedious. He saw boys all over the streets of Al Dawoun: in the malls, throwing their phone numbers at passing girls, at the mosque answering text messages in the middle of prayer. He didn’t want to be like that—one of the mall boys with nothing to do but eat and fantasize about girls and money. That life reminded him too much of Bern and all he had endured there.

“No, it’s nothing to do with Majid,” he said.

“Well, you’re sulking about something,” Rosalie said.

He took a long drink of the apple juice in his glass and finished the fattoush on his plate, waiting for her to continue. He picked the pieces of parsley from his teeth.

“Who told you?” she finally asked.

“What?” he said.

Now, apparently, she even read his scowls. There was no privacy with her.

“About the Isra incident.”

“Hassan told me.”

“And who did he hear it from?”

“He overheard his mother talking about it.”

Rosalie brought the dull end of her knife down hard against the tablecloth, so that it thudded against the dense wood beneath the cloth. He felt the shiver of the massive Norwegian beams. Two grains of rice jumped off of her plate and onto the tablecloth. Yasmin bustled in and cleared them away.

“There are no secrets in this town,” she said.

He remained close-lipped. It hadn’t taken him long to learn the power that came from ignoring his mother—her questions, her jokes, her outbursts. After draining his water glass, and then his juice glass, and then his glass of laban, he stood to go outside.

“Faisal,” she said, pausing. “I know you might be upset with me, but you must understand . . .”

“I already understand.”

“But . . .”

“You’ve embarrassed us,” he said. “Besides, Isra is a fine wife.”

“Pardon me?”

Mariam gave him a cold look, and he felt a moment of regret, but his mother needed to hear it. She’d been behaving like a child about Isra, as if she didn’t have a fine life, a better life than most women.

“I don’t understand why you’re so mad. Baba did nothing wrong.”

“Your father lied to me. For years.”

Since Isra, Rosalie had become obsessed with the act of Abdullah’s lie—when and where it had first occurred, how many people in the family had known and kept it hidden from her.

“The Prophet, peace be upon Him, said ‘The sons of Adam are accountable for all lies with these exceptions: During war because war is deception, to reconcile among two quarreling men, and for a man to appease his wife.’ Baba was only trying to keep order in our family.”

She shook her head and laughed a small, tight laugh, her usually broad mouth pulled small.

“I shouldn’t have expected any different from you,” she said. “I can’t see even the littlest bit of me in you.”

She laughed again, and it sounded hollow, like echoes along the wall of a cave. Because she never asked, he also never told her that the boys at school called him
Amreeki
, how much he hated it when Fat Ali shouted it out across the school courtyard—Ali, whose skin was Nubian dark and who, in turn, got called
takrooni
. Rosalie was staring in the direction of the front door, like she was waiting for someone to walk through. Faisal pushed his chair back and walked to the sliding-glass door. Through his hand, he felt the
whoosh
of the door on its tracks, an easy movement that made him feel, momentarily, that everything would be as it should be. Then he saw reflected in the glass his mother’s head in her hand. Perhaps he had been too cruel, but if he had to be the one to hold people accountable, he would.

Stepping into the courtyard, he breathed in the evening, fragrant with the frangipani flowers that glowed blue-white in the darkness. He sat down on the edge of the fountain. Through the glass door, he saw Rosalie rise and walk upstairs. She moved like an old woman, each foot heavy on the wide staircase. Would it always be like this now that his father had Isra? The quiet of the house deepening, as if they had all dived under the water and were trying to mouth words to each other? Would they no longer make the noises that families made? Even when they’d been whole, theirs had been an unusually small family, and he had ached for more siblings, brothers in particular. He blamed his mother for this, because he knew that most Americans had small families. It was unnatural, and he felt the silence in their house to be God’s rebuke. No wonder Abdullah had married again.

Earlier in the year, after visiting his friend Hassan, who had eight chattering brothers and sisters, Faisal decided that he was going to have at least six children. One wife. Six children. Breaking dishes. Honking toys. Quarreling. He knew God would give him this because at night when he prayed about it, he felt an exaggerated heat around his heart as he articulated the words, as if God was placing his hand there in reassurance:
Please, give me a beautiful Raja or Lamees or Hanouf or Rheem. And give us six children. Though five will also do. Even four would be OK. And make them beautiful and black-haired like their mother. Give them skin the color of a heated date. Do not make them halfway. Shukran Jazeelan.