Zeitoun (6 page)

“Don’t tell Zeitoun,” she said, and wrote him a check.

Kathy turned on the TV and flipped through the channels. Every station was covering the storm.

Nothing had changed: Katrina was still headed their way, and it was losing no power. And because the hurricane as a whole was traveling so slowly, about eight miles per hour, the sustained winds were causing, and would continue to cause, catastrophic damage.

The coverage was just background noise, though, until Kathy caught the words “family of five.” They were talking about the family lost at sea.
Oh no
, she thought.
Please
. She turned up the sound. They were still missing. The father’s name was Ed Larsen. He was a construction supervisor.
You’re kidding me
, she thought. He had taken the week off to take his family sailing on his yacht, the
Sea Note
. They had been at Marathon and were sailing back to Cape Coral when they’d lost radio contact. His wife and three kids were with him. They were on their way back to shore for a family reunion. The extended family had gathered only to realize that the Larsens were missing; the celebration turned into a vigil of worry and prayer.

Kathy couldn’t stand it.

She called her husband. “We have to go.”

“Wait, wait,” he said. “Let’s wait and see.”

“Please,” she said.

“Really?” he said. “You can go.”

*    *    *

Kathy had taken the kids north a handful of times when storms had gotten close. But she was hoping she wouldn’t have to make the trip this time. She had work to do over the weekend, and the kids had plans, and she always came back from those trips more exhausted than when she’d left.

Almost without exception, whether it was fleeing a storm or for a weekend vacation, Kathy and the kids had to go without Zeitoun. Her husband had trouble leaving the business, had trouble relaxing for days on end, and after years of this vacationless life Kathy had threatened to pack the kids and just leave for Florida some Friday after school. At first Zeitoun hadn’t believed her. Would she really pack up and leave with or without him?

She would, and she did. One Friday afternoon, Zeitoun was checking on a nearby job and decided to stop at home. He wanted to see the kids, change his shirt, pick up some paperwork. But when he pulled into the driveway, there was Kathy, loading up the minivan, the two youngest already buckled inside.

“Where you going?” he asked.

“I told you I’d go with or without you. And we’re going.”

They were going to Destin, Florida, a beach town on the Gulf about four hours away, with long white beaches and clear water.

“Come with us, Daddy!” Nademah pleaded. She had just come out of the house with their snorkeling gear.

Zeitoun was too stunned to react. He had a hundred things on his mind, and a pipe at one of the rental properties had just burst. How could he go?

Nademah got in the front seat and put on her seatbelt.

“Bye bye,” Kathy said, backing out. “See you Sunday.”

And they were gone, the girls waving as they left.

He didn’t go that Friday, but after that, he no longer doubted Kathy’s resolve. He knew she was serious—that in the future he’d be consulted on vacation plans, but that trips to Florida or beyond could and would happen with or without him. So over the years there were other trips to Destin, and he even made it on a few of them.

But always his decision was made at the last minute. One time Kathy was late in getting started, and he was so late in deciding that he couldn’t even pack. She was in the driveway, backing out, when he pulled in.

“Now or never,” she said, barely stopping the car.

And so he jumped in the car. The girls giggled to see their dad in the back seat, still in his work clothes, dirty and sweating—as much from the stress of the decision as from the day’s work. Zeitoun had to buy beach clothes when they got to Florida.

Kathy was proud that she’d gotten him to Destin once a year. Zeitoun didn’t mind going too much because, given how close it was, he knew he could come back at any time—and more than once, he had cut a vacation short because of some problem at one of the work sites.

By 2002, though, Kathy wanted something that really felt like a vacation. And she knew she had to do something drastic. In all their time together—eight years at that point—he had never taken more than two days off in a row. She knew that she had no choice but to kidnap him.

She started by planning a weekend in Destin. She chose a weekend when she knew things would be calm at work; it was just after Christmas, and there was rarely much work till well after New Year’s. As usual,
Zeitoun wouldn’t commit till the last minute, so she took the precaution of actually packing a bag for him and hiding it in the back of the minivan. Because she had made sure the weekend was quiet, he came along—as always, at the last minute. Kathy told him she’d drive, and because he was exhausted, he agreed. She made sure the kids were quiet—they were in on the plan—and he soon fell asleep, drooling on his seatbelt. While he slept, Kathy drove right on through Destin and onward down the paunch of Florida. Each time he woke up she would say, “Almost there, go back to sleep,” and thankfully he would—he was so tired—and it wasn’t until an hour north of Miami that he realized they weren’t going to Destin. Kathy had driven straight down to Miami. Seventeen hours. She’d checked on the computer for the warmest place in the country that week, and Miami was it. Being that far away was the only way to ensure he would take a real vacation, a full week’s worth of rest. Every time she thought back on the gambit, and how well it had worked, Kathy smiled to herself. A marriage was a system like any other, and she knew how to work it.

At about two-thirty, Ahmad called Zeitoun again. He was still tracking the storm from his computer in Spain.

“Doesn’t look good for you,” he said.

Zeitoun promised he would keep watch on it.

“Imagine the storm surge,” Ahmad said.

Zeitoun told him he was paying close attention.

“Why not leave, just to be safe?” Ahmad said.

Kathy decided to go to the grocery store before picking up the girls from school. You could never tell when people would make a run on the basics before a storm arrived, and she wanted to avoid the crush.

She went to the mirror to adjust her hijab, brushed her teeth, and left the house. Not that she thought about it much, but any trip to the grocery store or the mall presented the possibility that she would encounter some kind of ugliness. The frequency of incidents seemed tied, to some extent, to current events, to the general media profile of Muslims that week or month. Certainly after 9/11 it was more fraught than before, and then it had calmed for a few years. But in 2004 a local incident had stoked the fire again. At West Jefferson High School, a tenth grader of Iraqi descent had been repeatedly harassed by her history teacher. He had called Iraq a “third-world country,” had worried that the student would “bomb us” if she ever returned to Iraq. In February of that year, while passing out tests, the teacher had pulled back the girl’s hijab and said, “I hope God punishes you. No, I’m sorry, I hope Allah punishes you.” The incident was widely reported. The student filed a lawsuit against him, and his termination was recommended by the Jefferson Parish School District superintendent. The school board overruled; he was given a few weeks’ suspension and returned to the classroom.

After the decision, there had been an uptick in minor harassment of Muslims in the area, and Kathy was aware of the invitation she was providing in going out in her hijab. There was a new practice in vogue at the time, favored by adolescent boys or those who thought like them: sneak up behind a woman wearing a headscarf, grab it, and run.

One day it happened to Kathy. She was shopping with Asma, a friend who happened to be Muslim but who wore no hijab. Asma was originally from Algeria, and had been living in the U.S. for twenty years; she was usually taken for Spanish. Kathy and Asma were leaving the mall, and outside, Kathy was trying to remember where she’d parked
her car. She and Asma were on the sidewalk, Kathy squinting at the rows of gleaming cars, when Asma gave her a funny look.

“Kathy, there’s a girl behind you—”

A girl of about fifteen was crouched behind Kathy, her arm raised, about to yank the hijab off Kathy’s head.

Kathy cocked her head. “You got a problem?” she barked.

The girl cowered and slunk away, joining a group of boys and girls her age, all of whom had been watching. Once back with her friends, the girl directed some choice words Kathy’s way. Her friends laughed and echoed her, cursing at Kathy in half a dozen different ways.

They could not have expected Kathy to return the favor. They assumed, no doubt, that a Muslim woman, presumably submissive and shy with her English, would allow her hijab to be ripped from her head without retaliation. But Kathy let loose a fusillade of pungent suggestions, leaving them dumbfounded and momentarily speechless.

On the drive home, even Kathy was shocked by what she’d said. She had been brought up around plenty of cursing, and knew every word and provocative construction, but since she’d become a mother, since she’d converted, she hadn’t sworn more than once or twice. But those kids needed to learn something, and so she’d obliged.

In the weeks after the attacks on the Twin Towers, Kathy saw very few Muslim women in public. She was certain they were hiding, leaving home only when necessary. In late September, she was in Walgreens when she finally saw a woman in a hijab. She ran to her.
“Salaam alaikum!”
she said, taking the woman’s hands. The woman, a doctor studying at Tulane, had been feeling the same way, like an exile in her own country, and they laughed at how delirious they were to see each other.

*    *    *

On this day in August, the grocery-store trip went off without confrontation, and she picked up her girls.

“You hear about the storm?” Nademah asked.

“It’s coming toward us,” Safiya added from the back seat.

“Are we going to leave?” Nademah asked.

Kathy knew that her kids wanted to. They could go to one of their cousins’ homes, in Mississippi or Baton Rouge, and it would be a vacation, a two-day sleepover. Maybe school would be canceled on Monday as the city cleaned up? This was surely what they were thinking and hoping. Kathy knew the workings of her children’s minds.

When they got home, it was five o’clock and Katrina was all over the news. The family watched footage of enormous waves, uprooted trees, whole towns washed grey with torrential rain. The National Hurricane Center was suggesting that Katrina would soon become a Category 3. Governor Blanco held a press conference to declare a state of emergency for Louisiana. Governor Barbour did the same for Mississippi.

Kathy was rattled. Sitting on the arm of the couch, she was so distracted that soon it was six o’clock and she hadn’t started dinner. She called Zeitoun.

“Can you get Popeyes on your way home?” she asked.

At home, Nademah arranged the tablecloth and placemats. Safiya and Aisha set out the silverware and glasses. Kathy threw together a salad and poured milk for the kids and juice for herself and Zeitoun.

Zeitoun arrived with the chicken, showered, and joined the family for dinner.

“Finish, finish,” he said to his daughters, who were picking at their food, leaving huge swaths of it uneaten.

He had gotten used to it after all these years, but still, there were times when the waste got to him. The disposability of just about everything. Growing up in Syria he had often heard the expression “If your hand doesn’t work for it, your heart doesn’t feel sorry for it.” But in the U.S., it wasn’t just the prosperity—because New Orleans was not uniformly prosperous, to be sure—there was a sense that everything could be replaced, and on a whim. In his children he was trying to instill a sense of the value of work, the value of whatever came into their house, but he knew that much would be lost in the context, the waste and excess of the culture at large. He had been brought up to know that what God hates as much as anything is waste. It was, he had been told, one of the three things God
most
hated: murder, divorce, and waste. It destroyed a society.

After dinner the girls asked if they could watch
Pride and Prejudice
again. It was Friday night, so Zeitoun had no school-related reasons to block the movie. Still, it didn’t mean he had to sit and watch it again. He’d liked the movie fine the first time, but the need to watch it a dozen times in as many days was beyond him. In the past week, he and Zachary had retired to other rooms to do something, anything, else. Kathy, though, was right there with the girls each time, and this time all of them draped over each other on the couch, misting up at the same parts they always did. Zeitoun shook his head and went into the kitchen to fix a cabinet door that had gotten loose.

All evening they paused the movie to watch the news reports about the storm’s intensity and direction. Still moving slowly, the hurricane
was heading up the coast with winds over one hundred miles per hour. The longer it lingered over any region, the more destruction it would bring. All the news was terrible, and when Kathy saw the picture of the family of five she was ready to turn it off. She was sure they were gone, and she would obsess over this family for weeks, thinking about all their relatives gathered for the reunion, now forced to mourn the loss of so many at once—but then Kathy realized that the family was not lost. She turned up the volume. They had been rescued. They had docked their boat on a mangrove island near Ten Thousand Islands, and had ridden out the storm in the cabin of the yacht, praying and taking turns climbing up to look for help in the skies. Just hours earlier, the Coast Guard had spotted their boat and lifted them all to safety. The family of five had been saved.

Later, after kissing Zachary goodnight, Kathy lay down in Nademah’s bed and the girls arranged themselves around her, a mess of overlapping limbs and pillows.

“Who wants to start?” Kathy asked.

Safiya began a story about Pokémon. The stories, which the girls told collaboratively, were often about Pokémon. After Aisha introduced the protagonist, Safiya provided the setting and central conflict, and Nademah took it from there. They continued, taking turns advancing the plot, until Aisha was asleep and Nademah and Safiya were drifting off. Kathy looked up to find Zeitoun in the doorway, leaning against the frame, watching them all. He did this often, just watching, taking it all in. The scene was almost too much, too beautiful. It was enough to burst a man’s heart wide open.