The Ruins of Us (35 page)

“Sir! Sir!” Ayoub called out.

It was more difficult to ignore the flailing, calamitous Indian than the repeated phone calls from his daughter. Abdullah wished he’d driven himself, but when he’d considered it earlier, he found that his pride wouldn’t allow it.

“Mariam just called me, sir. Found my number in your datebook. It seems your wife hasn’t been home in twenty-four hours. Faisal, too. I told the miss that we’d come home, but I don’t know if she heard me. She was crying, sir. She asked me why no one wanted to live with her anymore. She said she was sick of Yasmin’s cooking, and . . .”

“All right, enough. I understand. We’ll go.” He paused, then shouted, “We’ll go!”

Had God answered his foolish, furious prayers from yesterday evening, airlifting them straight out of his life? No. On earth, he was a powerful man. In heaven, he doubted it. Rosalie had probably gone to Lamees and Khaled’s, trying to teach him a lesson, and Faisal was camped out on the dirty floor of Majid’s basement. He would go to them and they would return home. A request, granted. It was how he had always done business.

He stuffed his club in his golf bag, then thrust the bag at Ayoub. The carob trees and palms whispered to them as they walked down the concrete path. The sun was lost behind haze, the afternoon already succumbed to dust’s monotones. Out on the browns, the forgotten golf balls stared up into the empty sky like a hundred lidless eyes.

AT THE BIG
house, Mariam and Raja, Rosalie’s driver, sat on opposite sides of the kitchen.

“Raja knows something, but he won’t tell,” Mariam said, her eyes red and swollen.

“Sir, a moment in private?” Raja was a small man, his shirt stretched tightly around his narrow shoulders. He did not meet Abdullah’s eyes.

“Of course.”

In the soft light of the study, Raja kept his body angled toward the door, as if he might flee at any moment.

“Funny, sir,” Raja said, “but Rosalie did not wait for me at Biltagi Brothers’ last night. I sat for nearly an hour outside the store. I thought perhaps she had gone down the street to another shop. Perhaps she called a taxi?”

“I don’t think I understand you, ya Raja. Are you telling me you left my wife on the streets of Al Dawoun at night?”

“Sir . . .”

“And you had the audacity to return here and sleep peacefully in your bed?”

“Sir . . .”

“And where is my wife now? Did she go to another shop? Did she take a taxi?”

“No, sir. She isn’t here.”

Abdullah stood, his ears hot. He turned his back to Raja, ran his forefinger along the spines of his books, quickly, so it made a snapping sound.

“And why in the name of Almighty God did you not call me, when I was a short walk away?”

“Sir, you said never to bother you there. You said I was never to come there for anything.”

Quickly, Abdullah was at Raja’s side, his hand around the man’s elbow—so bony he felt he could snap it if he leaned into it.

“Not in an emergency.” He squeezed. Raja yelped.

“Sir, have mercy! I didn’t know it was an emergency. The madam has been so upset, I thought maybe she wanted to be with friends, to disappear for a while, smoke shisha, I don’t know.”

Abdullah held Raja’s arm a few beats longer, teeth clenched. He was not usually an ill-tempered man, except when afraid. When his mother was dying while he was still a teenager, he had tormented an old, tethered goat, throwing pebbles at it though it had nowhere to run.

“Get out of here.” He stepped back. “You’re back to Sri Lanka in the morning.”

Abdullah stared at the green lampshade on his desk until he heard the door to the garage slam. He exhaled, closed his eyes. Moving to the overstuffed chair in the corner, he sank down, drew his feet up onto the ottoman. That she wouldn’t even call, for Mariam’s sake.

“Baba?”

Mariam stood in the door of the study, her hand on the doorknob, her dark hair falling in her face.

“What is it?”

“A’m Nabil has been calling for you since this morning. He wants you to come to his house this evening after work. He says it’s urgent.”

“Everything’s always urgent to Nabil. He’s a newsman.” Abdullah massaged his hairline, felt where the hair had thinned, felt the movement of his loose skin against his skull.

“Why didn’t you answer your phone, Baba? I tried calling you a hundred times. And A’mi was upset you weren’t in the office or at home. He said it must be nice to be a man of leisure.”

“I’ll meet him. If he calls back, tell him I’ll be there at six p.m. Now please, give me some peace. I have a lot to think about.”

“Where’s Umma?”

“I’m sure she’s with Lamees and Khaled. Nothing to worry about, Mimou. She’ll be home soon.”

But he wasn’t certain. Raja’s news troubled him. He knew Rosalie loved Mariam too much to leave without a word.

THE SAUDI TIMES
offices were on the outskirts of Al Dawoun, just inside the freeway that looped the city like a modern fortress wall, a thin edge between civilization and everything else. Though it was dinnertime, half the building’s windows were still illuminated, and Abdullah imagined the stories streaming through the telephone lines, pinging into inboxes. Nabil had worked there since his return from Texas, where he and Abdullah had overlapped by a few years, their scholarships identical, their productivity markedly not. Within five years, Nabil was editor-in-chief of the paper and though the royals financed it, he was fearless in his coverage. In the Kingdom, the
Saudi Times
had become the paper of record. Editorials grew denser, more involved. One of his reporters had his car destroyed after questioning the methods of a radical cleric. When Nabil had married Abdullah’s sister, Nadia, the Baylanis had wondered how it would affect their relationship with the al-Saud. But the machine churned on—the contracts flooded in, the foreign dignitaries continued their elaborate, well-rehearsed visits to the big house. The royals knew that bullying did not look good to the outside world.

In a small office on the third floor, Nabil sat waiting for him. He had the shrewd face of a carnivorous bird, all beak and intensity. His hair was dark gray, salted through with white. He was both harried and distinguished as he sorted papers on his desk, his thobe still crisp and immaculately white at day’s end.

“Ahlan, brother,” Nabil said. “Close the door.” He removed the phone from its cradle, placed it down on the desk.

Abdullah sat, already feeling the soreness in his arms from the hours of golf.

“There was a note, slipped under my door last night. A janitor brought it to me. I thought you should see it before anyone else, since it’s your man they’re talking about.” Nabil thrust an envelope at him.

Scanning it quickly, Abdullah tossed it back among the papers on the desk.

“A prank,” he said with a snap of his fingers. “I’m going to kill Dan, that son of a bitch. He’s trying to get back at me.”

“No, I don’t think so. I checked with my sources. Ibrahim is in prison, taken a few nights ago. And Coleman wasn’t at work today, in case you didn’t notice while you were out on holiday.”

“You have no idea the kind of week I’ve had. And I’ll tell you, this is nonsense. Somebody’s writing a bad screenplay with other people’s lives. Be careful here, Nabil.”

“Abdullah, yanni, I know this is hard, but I’m going to ask you once, and if I don’t get a proper answer, I’ll be forced to take this matter to the police. Faisal studied with the sheikh. Is this your son? Is this his note? Now, think, Abdi. Be honest with me.”

Abdullah clasped his hands together tightly and thought of his son, of his feverish words at the feast, his defiance, obstinacy, and contempt. And then he thought of his own words, said to his son in anger:
The light of day won’t look good on a dead man’s face.
Those words, hiding under his tongue, tasting of bitter tea leaves. Nabil was a man who traded in words, whose very livelihood depended on them. The royals feared words nearly as much as they feared bombs.

He felt chastised by the fluorescent light, the chair beneath him, the rug at his feet. To know one had done something terribly wrong. To face it. Did he have the strength?

“Is it him, Abdi? Is it Faisal?”

“Yes. And his friend. Majid al-Urbutiin.”

The evening had deepened outside the window of Nabil’s office.

“I know your family,” Nabil said. “I know the last thing you’d want is police involvement, especially if this is about Ibrahim Ibn Sayid. Since Abqaiq, they’re keening for arrests, any arrests.” He paused. “I know a man who can help you. Ghassan. A former police officer. He knows Hasa. He knows the towns. And he owes me a turn. He was a source for me. Remember the story we broke after Palm Court? About some police allowing the killers to slip away?” Abdullah nodded. “I kept his identity secret even when I had government men in here leaning on me. He’s trained in counterterrorism.”

“That’s not what this is.”

“He’s good, Abdi. He’ll help you find them, get to the bottom of whatever this is.”

“All right,” he said. “I’ll call him.”

All Abdullah heard was the unusual quiet of the city below. His mind a riot in the stillness.

Rosalie. Where was she?

AT THE BIG
house, Mariam sat in the living room, blinds drawn, no light except what escaped underneath the kitchen door. There, where he couldn’t see her face, Abdullah told her that everything would be all right. It was what fathers said to daughters. He would dome himself around her, keep her safe and unseeing. They sat together in darkness. She cried; even without details, she understood that her mother would not be back that night.

“Come here, Mimou.” He gestured to the spot next to him on the couch.

She shook her head no and went upstairs.

AFTER MARIAM WENT
to bed, Abdullah got in the car and drove to Biltagi Brothers’. He parked at the edge of the store’s lot, startling when he heard the scramble of wild dogs as he stood and slammed the door. There was a small flashlight on his key ring. He went to the concrete steps and flashed its narrow beam along the seams of the stairs. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find—a piece of ripped cloth, a smear of lipstick on the sidewalk? One of the dogs howled, a high, lonely sound that prickled the hair on his arms. Perhaps Rosalie was watching nearby, sniffing him out as he stooped gracelessly by the stairs. His desperation would please her, so would his guilt, his melancholy. He turned quickly toward the black of the abandoned lot, searching for the giveaway, the whites of her eyes.

“Rosalie!” he called after the fleeing dogs, running like a fool to the edge of the parking lot. In his chest, a painful unfurling. He would do anything to please her again. Less a choice than a realization, it was not calculated for any purpose. It was truth.

And then he saw it, partially obscured by the Dumpster: Dan’s Hyundai, its B-Corp decal reflecting the thin light from his flashlight’s beam.

They were together, then: a boy resembling his son, a woman resembling his wife, a man resembling his best friend. They had gathered in this parking lot, deciding fates, and where had he been?

He asked himself,
Why had she been here?
He waited for anger, a sense of betrayal. Instead, he only found one thought: Protect her, Dan. Bring her back to me alive.

THAT NIGHT, ABDULLAH
lay down on the bed Rosalie had recently refused to share with him. He did not sleep, but he did dream, or at least his thoughts unspooled in that dreamlike way of memory. It was a nervous exercise, one he did when anxious about losing certain people. It started with his mother’s death, so young when she left him. After she passed—her soul tumbling out into the desert to seek the highest jebel, where Abdul Latif said it would be lifted to heaven—Abdullah had stayed awake in their tent for days, committing every mundane detail of her appearance to memory: the mole like a teardrop at the corner of her left eye, the soft protrusion of her stomach beneath her robe when she leaned forward to stoke the fire or shift the kettle. And then he had worked on the events of their days, the way her voice sounded when she scolded him or his sisters and brothers, the memorization games they would play with suras. The child who missed the fewest words from a verse received the second-best cut of meat at the evening meal.

But where were memories of Rosalie, Texas, and a love that, like most loves, came from nowhere to become, suddenly, everywhere? He waited for the montage of their love to flood his head. He lay on his stomach as he always did, his face pressed into the pillow, which was freshly washed, no trace of Rosalie, and rubbed his palm over the smooth surface. He rolled to his back and tossed the covers off his legs. He closed his eyes, held his breath, felt the quick movement of eyeballs against eyelids. Still, he couldn’t conjure any image of her. Could he not have even the torment of memories? Or had he, in the years with Isra, pushed them so far from his mind that he could not now recover them?

“Have some mercy,” he said to the darkened room as he sat up.

He dashed down the stairs, away from the scentless pillow and the emptiness of his head.

IN THE COURTYARD,
he found Mariam, who sat facing the pool, chest pressed against her folded legs, chin resting on her knees. Water dripped from her shorts, from the ends of her long hair.

“Faisal used to swim at night, when he thought no one was watching,” she said. “Stupid boy. My window looks right out to the pool. Did he think I wouldn’t hear his splashing?”

Faisal, the imposter-son, now sleeping or not sleeping under the dirty light of the shrunken moon.

“Idiot boy,” she said. She put her head down on her folded arms, croaked a half-stifled sob.

She looked up.

“Do you even remember how it was?” she said.

No, I don’t, he thought. Remind me. Help me.

She paused, looked away from him. “I remember when you stopped going on vacation with us. It was because you wanted to be with her, wasn’t it?”

“Please,” he said. “Things are too difficult right now.”

“They’re not coming back, are they? They had to get away from you. But they left me here.”