Brilliant (13 page)

“I got into a fight with Lola,” said Tina. She wasn't staring him down today, kept studying her hands, twisting her rings.

He tried to imagine Lola — short and plump in jeans and T-shirt — and Tina, Pilates-lean and coiffed in a white suit, going at it. Lola with a frying pan perhaps. Tina with a shopping bag from Paris Gallery. He tried not to smile.

“It wasn't funny, Dave,” said Tina, regaining something of herself. “She's a thief and she's not helping those girls one bit. We have to do something.”

“Look, Tina,” Dave began, and as soon as he said this it felt like such a relief, he wondered why he hadn't set down the boundaries with her earlier. “We're guests in this country.”

“We serve at the pleasure of the sheikhs and if we don't like it we should just go back to wherever we came from?” said Tina, raising her face. There was some colour in it now, making her look younger again.

“Pretty much,” said Dave, knowing he didn't completely buy this. How could he do his job if he did?

“That's what my husband says, that we're here to build their bridges and blow their noses, ‘and if you don't like it,
habibti
, you know where the airport is.'”

“What does your husband think about your visits to the camps?” Dave asked, surprised this hadn't occurred to him before. Her husband was a big shot working for the ruling family. He would have a whole lot to protect. Dave half-guessed the truth before Tina shook her head. Her husband didn't have any thoughts about the visits because he didn't know about the visits.

Thankfully, Arjun knew, as he always did, the precise moment to make his slippered entry. Once again things were smoothed over, or at least stalled, as tea bags were dunked in steaming water and spoons swirled in cups.

“How are your children adjusting?” she asked.

“They're troupers,” he said. “Fourth country in twelve years. They've got it down.” But as he said this he thought of Rachel's flat answer to nearly everything these days: “Fine.” And Erik's bedtime prayers: “Dearest, beloved, most-on-high, almighty, heavenly Father…”

“What about your children?” he asked, a little ashamed he hadn't asked before.

Tina laughed. “My children are so old,
they
have children. The two eldest are back in the States, both lawyers, both with two kids. No, it's only Paul, my baby, who's here with us.”

“He's at the British school?” he asked and Tina laughed again. She could be quite…pleasant once steered away from her usual topic of conversation. “What is it about you Brits and that school?” she asked. “It's not the only high school in town, you know. No, he's a senior at the American Community School,” and he watched her smile fail. “Only now he's hanging out with some Emirati boys, sons of my husband's employers. They dropped out this fall, so he's threatening to do the same thing or at least do so poorly he'll be expelled. My husband's ready to put him on a plane for home, let his older brothers straighten him out.” And then, as if this subject was even more difficult than clandestine trips to the camps, she fixed him with a look he was coming to anticipate.

“So?” she said.

“I'll talk to Lola,” he said. “We'll get things sorted.”

She looked unconvinced, but before she could push for more, he cut her off. “And, Tina, you can't go to the camps on your own any more. You're going to get us both in trouble. Do you want to put our little program, such as it is, in jeopardy?”

No, of course, she didn't. “Righto, Dave.”

 

He thought he saw Eden in the loose circle of Ethiopian women that Friday. Their circle of swaying, singing devotion, white muslin on brown skin, never failed to move him, to rejoice even. This was why he was here, far from home. This. But the circle broke apart quickly and in the blur of shawls and skirts, he lost sight of the one who might have been her. Still, he felt sure she would come back. Unless — and this was the thought that kept him circling the compound in the early mornings — something worse yet had happened.

The Tuesday after, he tried Maktoum's office again. Yes, His Highness was back, yes, they'd given him Dave's message. Dave called twice more that week, told each time the message had been passed on. The following Sunday, after the nine o'clock service, Maktoum called. “It's been a crazy week, absolutely mad. I sincerely apologize. What can I do for you? My office said it was a matter of some urgency.” He was different on the phone, less expansive, as if they'd only exchanged pleasantries at their first meeting, not pondered matters of the soul.

“There's a young woman, Ethiopian, who's been sleeping in our compound,” Dave said. “Someone took a knife to her, carved a chunk out of her.” He didn't mean to say it quite so baldly, but the image of her leg had come back. What would that have
felt
like? Bloody butcher.

There was a gap long enough for Dave to hear phones ringing in the background, other conversations. “Where did you say she was from?” Maktoum asked.

“Ethiopia. I told you when we last met about the nannies and housemaids who seek refuge, temporary refuge at best, at St. Edmund's. They've nowhere else to go.”

“Have you tried their embassy? I would think that would be the best route to go, don't you? Those girls are the responsibility of their own country.”

“But as I told you, there is no embassy in the
UAE
, just some skeleton operation in Dubai.”

“Then you'd better take her to the hospital yourself, if she's that hurt. Sheikh Khalifa Medical City would be my recommendation. They're discreet in matters like this.”

And then he was getting another call and suggesting they get together sometime in the future and Dave was left with a phone in his hand.

 

“The girl she is back,” Arjun told Dave when he let himself into the vicarage that evening. Eden was lying on their bed, eyes closed, a comforter over her, Suzette on a chair pulled up close. “She's burning up,” said Suzette. “I was just about to call an ambulance, and then I realized I had no idea where to take her or who to call or anything.” And his wife, stable, unflappable, North England Suzette, sometimes better in a crisis than day-to-day life, began to weep. “I saw her leg. Who would do that to someone?”

It took two hours of phone calls and misunderstandings — one ambulance driver even refusing to take her — but they finally got Eden, delirious now, to Maktoum's hospital of choice. “We're run by the Cleveland Clinic. She'll be okay here,” the intake clerk reassured them. “Some of those other places? You don't want to know.”

They were still in the emergency waiting area when Bishop Mueller called to confirm a meeting for later in the week. “It sounds like you are at the bus station,” he said, and Dave explained — briefly — where they were and why. The bishop didn't say anything right away and Dave wondered if he should have kept him out of it. “It is beyond shameful, isn't it?” the bishop said finally, clearing his throat. He hoped Eden would be all right. He would pray for her. “We have some rooms here at St. Mary's. Under the radar, of course, and nothing fancy. The girls help out when they are able and we finesse their visas, calm the angry employers, etcetera. When she is better, you send her to us.”

“Who was that?” asked Suzette, closing the Arabic fashion magazine she'd been flipping through. In the green light of the hospital corridor Dave saw the effect of the years, the moves, the effort.

“I think it was an angel,” he said.

“‘For they are like the angels.' Good old Luke,” she said.

 

The infection was serious, according to the young Lebanese-American doctor who came to speak to them an hour later. Eden seemed to be responding to the drip of aggressive antibiotics; her fever at least was coming down a little. Still, if the infection had penetrated to the bone… The doctor shrugged. “Different scenario.”

“Do you want to report this to the police?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Suzette.

“No,” said Dave.

The doctor looked at them for a long moment and they looked back at him. “Well, no sense in staying. We have your mobile, right?” he said.

 

She was sitting on the steps again, but in shadow, so Dave didn't recognize her right away, and she didn't speak, even after Suzette had settled her inside on the sofa, sent for Arjun and slipped out of the room. As a pastor, Dave had been witness to such moments before, such stories, but they were always and forever new in the terrible way of terrible news. Tina's son Paul had gone out to Liwa, to Mehreb Dune, with his Emirati pals for a day of dune-bashing. “I didn't even know he was going,” she said.

The boys had roared up and down the massive mountain of sand — Dave could hear the sound, the ugly, polluting roar of the bikes — and then they'd gone for one last ascending attack and the bike had flipped out from under one of Paul's friends and he'd fallen backward, tumbling over himself and the bike, down and down the sand until he landed near the bottom.

“The boy?” he asked, afraid.

“He might be paralyzed.” Tina, who'd been staring at the wall behind him, lowered her eyes.

“But Paul, he's okay?” said Dave, willing him whole and upright, as he'd been the last time he'd seen the young man, awkwardly balancing cup and saucer in the vicarage garden.

She didn't cry as she told him about the police, about the cocaine they found in Paul's shirt pocket, when they came out to investigate the accident. The other three boys had quickly dumped and buried their stashes in the dune. “Who could find cocaine in all that sand?” Paul had not been quick enough. And despite all the good, shared, wild and crazy times, Paul's friends had not come to his defence. They looked him as if he were a stranger. He was an outsider, after all, not a member of the clan.

“The police didn't even check the other boys,” said Tina. They were sent home with a reprimand about safe driving and Paul was now in a prison in Al Ain.

One of her son's friends did try to call, but her mobile had been switched off. “You know why?” Her face when she turned to him was stricken, but also defiant. “I was at the camp. The girls had a karaoke machine and they put on Abba and we were singing to ‘Dancing Queen.' They were so happy I was there and they were feeding me rice and beans and we were dancing on the beds. They kept giving me the mic and I kept saying, no, no, I have a terrible voice. ‘Sing anyway!' they said.”

And now she was doubled over, crying, “Father, Father,” and he was doing what a father would do, holding her through the next hour and into the next.

 

Something snapped in Holly that Thanksgiving night, snapped like the breastbone of the eighteen-pound Butterball she'd spent an hour stuffing with homemade cornbread, chestnuts and morels. First, it was the Pakistanis — lovely people, really — who served themselves mere tablespoons of food. It was a tribute to their adventurous palates that they'd even tried her candied sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce. (Holly had scooped out a dozen satsumas and refilled them with homemade sauce, something she'd seen Martha Stewart do on
TV
.) But there was trepidation in their eyes as they lifted fork to mouth; Tamur, the husband, had looked alarmed when Holly ladled gravy onto his stuffing. Her brothers would have made history of that gravy, pouring it over everything, including the satsumas.

It was Jersey's idea to invite friends and colleagues who weren't American that year. “It would be so Abu Dhabi, Mom,” she'd said the week before, laying her head on Holly's shoulder.

Where they would all be next Thanksgiving was anyone's guess. Jersey wanted to go to Penn State, where Justin, a year older, was studying engineering. Her husband Mark's two-year tour of duty in Abu Dhabi was up in August. Every two years — three, if they were lucky enough to get an extension — it was someplace new. Or someplace old, if they were going back to Washington for home stay. Of course — she thought immediately of Turkmenistan — some countries made you wish those two years were two weeks. The pulling up and putting down. She was tired. Every bit of her was tired.
Women Who
Move Too Much.
Could be the title of her life.

But Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving could always revive her. It had all gone fairly smoothly this year, despite the long shopping lists that required visits to Lulu, Choitram and Carrefour, despite the sad-looking cranberries at Spinney's, the near-flop with the pumpkin mousse. Mostly fine, until Ryan and Linda's six-year-old Jeremy piped up with: “Who were the Pilgrims anyway?” It was the first actual reference to the holiday they were celebrating and Holly responded with the energy she was known for: “I am
so
glad you asked, sweetie. Well, the First Thanksgiving's a little bit of a story…” But she never got to tell any of it because Mark was being asked to pass the mashed potatoes and Tamur's wife, Aisha, dropped her fork and by the time it was all handled — seconds really — it was over. She tried to break in for the first little bit, tried to draw people back into the tale of that first feast and why it meant so much to Americans. She might even have told Jeremy about how her brothers dressed up every Thanksgiving when they were kids — Vince as a Pilgrim in a tall, black paper hat he'd made in Kindergarten and which they hauled out every year, Pete with a headdress from Indian Guides. Too late: Mark and Ryan were back into complaining about Etisalat's Internet service; Tamur and Aisha were explaining Eid al Adha to Linda, who'd recently arrived from the
UK
; and Jersey, who might have been able to corral the conversation, was in the kitchen repairing the broken crust on the apple pie.

And there she was, alone at her end of the table. The one who'd brought everyone together, lined up the damask napkins, buffed the holiday crystal, the one who'd stuffed the stupid satsumas. Who were these people and what were they doing at her Thanksgiving table?

She tried to explain it to Mark in bed later, after the guests had gone, after they'd texted Justin, who was spending the holiday weekend with a friend's family in Philadelphia. Post-parties were usually good for a little romp, a couple glasses of wine loosening Mark's mostly buttoned-down libido. “You know what I mean, don't you?” she asked, slipping her nightie back over her head. “I'm not explaining it well.”

“I think so,” he murmured, and then he was asleep.

It wasn't until the next morning, after a patchy night of sleep — all those courses not settling well — that Holly could wonder at what had left her feeling so bereft. Maybe she was being overly dramatic — the downside, Mark sometimes implied, of all that “energy.” But really: Was this
it
? One Thanksgiving following another? One more turkey to be trussed? Countries passing, kids leaving, families changing. And always, always missing people.

Get off the pity pot, she could hear her mother say. What the hell were you expecting, Hollyhock? She'd loved and hated when her mother had talked like this: the thrill of her
hell
s and
shit
s beside the accurate, often painful, aim of her observations.

The spectre of time passing pretty much sobered anyone over the age of forty, didn't it? It had to be something more specific than this. And then, watering the bougainvillea on the balcony, its coral petals flying off in the wind, she saw what had been amiss the day before, what had thudded in her soul. It was the gravy.

Gravy was Holly's one gift as a cook. She was competent enough in the kitchen. Mark would say she was exceptional, but then Mark thought Old El Paso tacos were something else. There was no gravy recipe per se, just years of practice. What she lacked in culinary talent elsewhere, she more than made up for when it came to scraping drippings from a pan and transforming them into what her brothers used to call Velvet.

“Hey, Sugar, pass me some more of that Velvet,” Vince would say and Pete would put out his plate too, though his white meat would be swimming in sauce. They were already man-size in their early teens, cute, hardy boys in big sweatshirts. “Hey, Hol, ever think about bottling this stuff?” Even at sixteen, the year their mother packed up and moved out, Holly knew this was something that would define her: loyal friend, head for numbers, klutz at sports, makes really good gravy.

 

Black Friday, a shopping bacchanal at home, was dead quiet in the
UAE
. But then so were most Fridays, at least in the morning, before noon prayers, before families packed up food trunks — they were trunks here, not mere baskets — and installed themselves in parks around the city. It wasn't about chasing a ball or a Frisbee. It was about parking yourself on something that might be grass, unloading the food, cooking the food — cubes of lamb or chicken on a grill — serving the food, then sitting and talking deep into the evening, kids darting back and forth, though they were rarely the centre of attention. Picnics were for parents and grandparents, a sedentary pleasure.

Holly was sorry they hadn't gone out more on Friday afternoons during the lovely winter months. Mark was hopeless with a hibachi, and the kids, older teenagers by the time they'd arrived in Abu Dhabi, grew impatient after an hour of sitting. (“Mom, I've got to study.”) Now driving past clusters of women in headscarves and men smoking
shisha
on a Friday afternoon, everyone sitting around nothing more eventful than a metal grill, could bring tears to her eyes. They made it look so easy to belong exactly there on that spot.

The parking lot at Spinney's wasn't empty — it was never empty — but she found a space at the back near where the recycling bins had once been. “Too ugly,” the store manager, a gracious Indian man, had tried to explain six months before. “The municipality take away.” “But why?” she'd asked, knowing this was a question for which there would be no logical answer. “Maybe they bring back, madam.” The manager had bobbled his head politely. They both knew those bins — the only recycling deposit in the entire city — would not be coming back. True, they weren't pretty, but they weren't the eyesore of the rusting dumpsters parked on every street, filled with garbage, busted Ikea furniture and crawling with feral cats.

The store was out of fresh cranberries now, the display having been ravaged two days before. More tomorrow,
insha'allah
, a clerk told her. So they could do without the cranberries. Holly bagged more potatoes (Idahos grown in Saudi Arabia), a few bulbs of garlic, a fresh baguette, picked up a can of pumpkin and another pint of whipping cream. But the Butterballs were gone, every single one. Holly asked a man at the meat counter if they might be getting more. “Before Christmas.” The smiling, shrugging Filipino butcher couldn't tell her more than that. “But I need one today. I have to have one today,” and in the way her voice rose and stayed there, Holly realized how much hinged on this Thanksgiving redux.

Every couple of years — okay, more than that — she would come to a juncture where things stood out in too-bold, too-sad relief. Usually there was a trigger. Justin's departure for university had set off mornings of tears. He's gone, she'd think as soon as the alarm went off. Some of their departures — Paris was one of those — felt so premature they broke her heart too. “But we just become
les amis
,” cried wonderful Juliette, someone she'd met only a month before decamping. It was often like this — the very loveliest people surfaced after two years of loneliness, as if now that it no longer mattered, Holly could loosen her grip and let things happen. “Where have you
been
?” she would say to some smart, sympathetic, interesting woman in a café, as somewhere across town the apartment was being packed up. There's email, there's Skype, they would reassure each other. But how do you stay in intimate touch with fifty people? A hundred? She'd shared the wonders and weirdness of life abroad with so many good souls. But when you left, you left.

These junctures were mostly internal, though after twenty-five years together — he was not an insensitive man — Mark could see a dip coming. He would take her out to an expensive dinner, call from work more often, try to be more attentive in bed. But there was something dutiful in his efforts as he stroked her breasts a bit too roughly. Holly could practically hear him curse her mother: Why couldn't you have just
loved
her?

 

Abela, a store she didn't often shop in because it was expensive, had turkeys. Well, two turkeys. Someone had ordered them for Thanksgiving, but failed to pick them up. Holly imagined a woman, some oil-and-gas wife from Pittsburgh or Santa Barbara originally, waking up on Thanksgiving morning, the sun pouring through the giant windows of her villa, thinking: Fuck the turkey. Who needs it when the InterContinental caters a top-to-bottom Thanksgiving dinner for 2,000 dirhams? They were small turkeys — she'd need both — probably the runts of the lot, but they smelled okay and the butcher gave her 20 percent off.

Back home, the Gulf a glory of turquoise beyond the tenth-floor kitchen windows, the fixings for another Thanksgiving close at hand, Holly began to run low. Not a loss of confidence exactly. Conviction maybe. She'd just
done
this, all the effort, the concentrated focus. And Mark might worry. She was glad in that moment that he had gone into the office as he did on so many Fridays. She was not even sorry that Jersey, such good company as she'd gotten older, had gone to Dubai with friends for a day of shopping. “Got an American tradition to uphold, Mom,” she'd said, tossing a pashmina over her shoulder on the way out.

Holly put on music —
Glee
was good for a boost — poured herself a glass of last night's wine. Rinsing the turkeys in the sink, she suddenly thought: This isn't the First Thanksgiving, it's the Second. And laughing — this really was quite insane — she started in on the stuffing.

 

Vince and Pete hadn't meant to drive their truck off the Sakonnet River Bridge. They'd called it Suck On It Bridge when they were kids, then Suck My Dick Bridge when they hit their early teens, now that they knew what was what, causing their mother to rear up in indignant fury. She even grounded Vince for a month when he called the dog a “dumb shit.” “Where the hell does she think we get it from?” Pete, older than Vince by a mere eleven months, said later. They were a trio. Hey, Sis, got your back. Hey,Vince, got yours.

They were in Beijing that year, Mark having been promoted into immigration services, not the top spot, two notches down. Jersey and Justin were still young, six and seven, going to the American school, where Holly taught remedial math three days a week. It was still dazzling, the travel, all things new, feeling opened so wide. There was less to say to old friends back home in Rhode Island. Even with her brothers, there was more air to fill, though Pete and Vince loyally watched their slide shows every summer. “Wow, you been there, Hollyhock?” Pete was especially impressed by Angkor Wat. “Always did want to see the Taj Mahal,” Vince said.

“Any time,” Holly told them every summer. “You know we've got the room.”

But there was always something. Vince had a bad fall off a ladder, was laid up for nearly a year, pins, surgeries, therapy. Pete's longtime girlfriend died of a misdiagnosed appendicitis. There was constant work on the house their father had left them. “Gee, thanks, Dad!” the three would joke when the furnace exploded or half the roof blew off in a storm. Holly contributed to the repairs. Mark was making more money than her brothers' salaries combined, and technically, though she couldn't imagine living there ever again, she was part-owner.

They'd just been home for Thanksgiving, Mark having finagled a meeting in Washington for early December. It was brief, eight days, not enough time to get over the jet lag, but enough time to gather in the family bungalow. They celebrated Thanksgiving on the day itself — a treat after living abroad where Thursdays weren't a day off and gathering people for a feast meant postponing it a day or two. The turkey that year had been on the dry side, Mark managed to mangle his trademark mashed potatoes, little Jersey dropped the pumpkin pie as she shakily carried it to the table and Justin couldn't think of anything to be grateful for when they went around the table giving thanks. But the gravy? “Haven't lost your touch, Sis,” said Pete, and Vince gave her a thumbs up, misting unexpectedly.

The gravy
was
exceptional, though Holly had done nothing radically different that year: roasted the turkey over a bed of onions, carrots, celery and fresh thyme, later caramelizing the vegetables as she added wine, plus broth made from the giblets and neck. The gravy even looked gorgeous that year: rich mahogany with a nearly iridescent glaze and molasses-thick. She didn't make too much of the flavour, which was subtle, deep and complex, knowing her brothers would throw her scornful looks before teasing her to death. “Hey, Hol, we know it's good! We're having thirds, okay?” They were seven at the table that year; Vince had thought to invite an elderly aunt who would have otherwise been eating institutionalized turkey at her seniors' residence. Vince and Pete pulled her chair out, pushed it back in, fluttered around her like big turkeys over a nest. It was low-key, a nothing-to-get-fussed-about Thanksgiving, and Holly left for China thankful for what they'd shared and for the life she now had. What the hell did you expect, Hollyhock? Well, Mom, everything, I guess.