My eyes widen, no one dares to speak to the ruler of Jahwar like that.
Both the guard standing beside me and the one standing at the balcony’s marble ledge must agree. They both reach inside their suit jackets to fish out their guns. But Zahir’s hand goes up, stopping them before they can draw.
“Who am I?” he answers. “I’m Zahir al-Jahwari, sheikh of the original Jahwari tribe, king of this land. And despite your efforts to appear reformed, you remain the hot-headed girl who flipped me off within moments of making my acquaintance. I see now that my instincts about your true character were correct.”
That declared, Zahir turns to leave a wide-mouthed Princess Jones behind.
However, she doesn’t just let him go quietly. In fact, her earlier disrespectful tone pales in comparison to what she does next.
She lunges forward and grabs his arm, touching the king without permission. That crime alone is punishable by years in jail, but then she kisses him.
Kisses my cousin. The King of Jahwar. In a country that doesn’t allow public displays of affection between unmarried men and women.
Her actions seem to shock her as much as they do me.
After pressing her lips into his, she jerks away from him, then takes off running in my direction.
Not seeming to see anything in her blind panic, she pushes past me.
I watch her go. Then turn back to look at my cousin wide-eyed.
He remains where she left him. But now instead of his usual calm and polite mask, he is breathing hard, his expression thunderous.
I look back over my shoulder to the wedding reception. Princess Jones is nowhere to be seen in the large crowd.
But I already know without a doubt that no matter how fast she runs, my cousin won’t allow her to get away with this.
4
MIKA
Not that anybody would ever ask me, but if they did, I’d say the kids and I had a way better time than anyone at that lavish wedding reception. The boys played video games, a few of which were still in beta and hadn’t even been released for public consumption. And meanwhile, Aisha and I danced to random songs on my smartphone.
Despite her earlier understatement, I soon found out the cheerful little girl didn’t merely like to dance either. She loved to get down. And not just silly videogame and YouTube dances either like the boys.
She showed me old-timey moves from Bollywood movies that a random aunt had taught her. And they held up shockingly well, even when listening to a mix of last summer’s top 40 hits, Taylor Swift’s poppier stuff, and a bunch of Korean boy band jams that Aisha insisted were the best songs ever recorded, even though neither of us understood a word they were saying.
When my nine o’clock alarm went off reminding me that it was time to get Aisha back upstairs to her mother at the reception’s official ending hour, I felt a little bit like the reverse of Cinderella at the ball. I had been having so much fun with my new little mouse, but now it was time to return her to her glamorous life.
After dropping the boys off at the sets of rooms we were sharing next door to the Calson’s suite, I took Aisha back upstairs to the reception.
However, her mother was nowhere to be found in the still full ballroom.
“Aisha, sweetie, any idea where your mom might have gone other than here?” I ask.
Aisha, who’s suddenly gone very quiet, shakes her head.
“Okay, well I’m going to ask someone where your mom went…” I answer, giving her a reassuring smile.
But then I trail off when I see the sight on the dance floor.
Sylvie and Holt still dancing. Like no one else in the world exists but them.
Normally, I don’t mind my role in the background of the Calsons’ epic family story. After what happened in Hawaii, I’d welcomed the chance to sit back and watch other people’s drama unfold. However, looking at Sylvie and Holt on that dance floor makes something funny happen inside my chest.
What would it be like? To fall in love with someone like that? To be free and unafraid?
But those are silly thoughts...
I force myself to look away from the happy couple and make my way over to the guard standing at the ballroom’s doors.
* * *
“Do you really live in one of these palaces?” I ask Aisha, a few minutes later as we walk across the palace grounds. Actually, I should say palaces grounds. Though Sheikh Zahir’s estate sits larger than everything else behind us, there are several other mini-palaces lined up on either side of it.
According to the guard I asked at the reception, Aisha’s mini-palace is a short five-minute walk away, just four palaces down. Hopefully, I don’t have any trouble finding it.
“Yes,” she answers, her voice sullen.
“So your father is a big tech genius and your mother is a princess and you live in, like, a huge palace neighborhood. That sounds like a story I would have made up for myself when I was a kid,” I say, trying to keep my voice upbeat despite her suddenly dejected attitude.
“Baba works a lot,” Aisha answers, her voice still set on sad. “I was hoping we’d be able to have fun together at the wedding. But then Mama said she had to talk to Baba and left me with you all night.”
I officially quit my psychology program last semester, but I find myself leaning back on the main tenant of validation to cover up my surprise that their gorgeous family isn’t quite as perfect as they seemed. “You must feel really disappointed that you didn’t get to spend time with your dad.”
“Yes, that’s what I am. Disappointed. But I think it might be my fault.”
“Why do you say that?”
She goes silent.
For a while, all I can hear is the far off sound of the wedding reception behind us and our feet crunching over the white gravel path. It’s no longer scorching hot like earlier in the day, but the only slightly cooler air sticks to my skin, somehow heating and chilling me at the same time as I wait for the little girl’s answer.
Finally, Aisha says, “I shouldn’t have told him. I shouldn’t have told Baba about the guard I saw coming out of Mama’s rooms.”
My eyebrows raise.
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
That’s a famous quote from a Tolstoy book I never finished reading in high school. But I have one more line to add: and in either case, the servants possess all their secrets.
I should know. I work as a nanny for an unexpectedly happy family. The whole world gasped when Holt Calson, the taciturn CEO of Cal-Mart, announced his marriage to Sylvie Pinnock, his former Jamaican nanny. But you know who didn’t? Me, the new nanny, and Lucynka, Holt’s long-time housekeeper. We’d seen that dramatic reunion coming a mile away.
Lucynka also guessed Sylvie was pregnant again, even before she found the test at the bottom of the master suite’s waste bin a couple of weeks before the wedding.
“I could have told her this without her having to waste money on that test,” she informed me, her heavy Polish accent ringing even thicker than usual with the good gossip. “I haven’t had to remove any tampons for weeks and weeks.”
I’ve also had several conversations with Holt and Sylvie’s prodigy son, Ender, about his dream of spending a whole summer in Portland without a nanny, on an internship with GoBionics. Now he just has to figure out how to get Sylvie on board. And Wes asked me if I thought he was ready for summer overnight camp despite his emotional issues weeks’ before telling his father that he wanted to try going away for the summer.
So, I’m well aware that servants know all the family secrets. But I hadn’t expected such a huge bomb drop from a little girl I just met.
“Baba is like you. Always smiling. Never cross,” Aisha continues. “But he looked really cross when I asked him about why a palace guard was visiting Mama the other night. And then the guard wasn’t there when we went to the big party after the wedding. And Mama kept looking for him. Then she left me with you.”
“Oh
, honey, that’s tough,” I say, giving her shoulder a little squeeze.
As much as Aisha claims to love trashy reality shows, I can see this parental drama is tearing her apart. And my stomach twists with sympathy for her. I don’t just empathize, I overstand the guilt that comes with feeling responsible for something someone else did.
Suddenly I’m back in Hawaii on Christmas Eve, waking at the sensation of Albie’s father, Alberto Sr, slipping out of bed in the middle of the night. Again.
He’d been quieter than usual lately. Grumpy and waking up in the middle of the night to go read his bible—code, I think, for sneaking a smoke. He’d quit after Albie was born, but I’m pretty sure he took it up again after deciding not to reenlist with the Navy and getting a civilian job.
After he’d gotten out of bed for the third night in a row, I’d lain beneath the covers, making excuses for his recent mood and behavior.
Yes, he was technically going back on his promise to stop smoking, but the year since finishing his final enlistment with the navy had been tough on him. I should cut him some slack. I mean, he’d found a job driving cargo boats back and forth from the mainland, hadn’t he? A really well-paying job that provided more than well for our family. For the first December since having Albie, we’d paid the rent and all our other bills with plenty of money left over for Christmas gifts.
I didn’t and shouldn’t blame him for having a hard time adjusting to civilian life. I’ll probably have a hard time, too, when my enlistment contract is up and I transition into becoming a stay-at-home mom.
Maybe I was the problem, I told myself. Maybe instead of lying here, wondering what was going on with him and why it felt like our previously pleasant marriage was unraveling right before my eyes. I should go downstairs. Talk to him. Try to get him to talk to me. Just like the internet articles had advised when I looked up, “Husband quiet and not talking to me.”
Hope and determination flared in my chest as I climbed out of bed and shoved my feet into the cute Muk Luk slipper boots my younger sister Jazz had gotten me for Christmas. But I didn’t find Alberto on the lanai, having a smoke with the bible he kept on a little porch table. Instead, I arrived just in time to see him climb into the new truck he’d bought with some of the leftover money from his cargo boat job.
For years afterward, I’d wonder what might have happened if the circumstances for following him hadn’t been just right.
If I hadn’t chosen the gift that turned out to be a pair of rubber-soled slippers when we all opened our traditional one present that night, I wouldn’t have been able to follow Alberto out the door…
If Jazz hadn’t fallen asleep on our couch as opposed to walking down the street to the two-bedroom she shared with our parents, I wouldn’t have gotten in my own car without worry for my then five-year-old son’s safety and trailed behind my husband until we got to the pier…
If our marriage had truly been as solid as I thought it was before I followed him out our front door, maybe I would have approached his truck when I saw him pull in to a Zippy’s drive-thru, as opposed to idling in the parking lot as I watched the cashier hand him a huge bag that looked like it was filled with at least ten sacks of food…
If I’d actually been committed to leveling up our communication, I wouldn’t have snuck behind at a distance as he climbed onto the cargo boat, he’d be driving to the mainland the day after Christmas. I would have caught up with him, asked him what the heck was going on…
If even one of those circumstances hadn’t lined up, maybe I’d still be in Hawaii, pleasantly, if not happily, married to Alberto…
But instead, I found myself on that cargo ship, watching him from a distance and praying. Praying so hard that there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for this. Maybe he and his work buddies were doing something special for Christmas Eve. Getting away from the wives and kids. Eating some Zippy’s together and blowing off some steam. Please let it be a work thing, I begged as I trailed behind him.
But I knew it wasn’t as soon as he stopped in front of the huge crate, buried toward the back of the boat. It was orange, the dull kind, not bright or flashy, and totally unmarked. Al shifted the huge sack of Zippy’s meals to one hand, then pulled up his shirt.
It was an unusually hot and balmy night for winter in Hawaii, but my whole body ran cold as I watched him tuck in the hem of his tee so that a Desert Eagle 1911 I didn’t know he owned was on full display. And easily accessible, I noted.
Al and I had always been a simple couple. We’d met-cute when he brought an Army friend he’d been jogging with into the base clinic with a sprained ankle. As it turned out, our families lived in the same neighborhood. If my parents hadn’t sent me to a Catholic all-girls K-12 and his parents hadn’t sent him to a Catholic all-boys school, we might have met in the public kindergarten. Guess what else? We both had American military fathers and Asian mothers. Mine was Filipino, while his mom was Thai.
What kismet that we had so much in common, but hadn’t met until now when we were both in our early twenties, old enough to want something that would last. And when dating would be perfectly allowable since he was a sailor and I was an army nurse. A year of dating and using the pull-out method later, we’d decided to marry when I discovered I was pregnant, shortly before his next deployment.
Now that he was no longer enlisted and my commission is almost up, we’d been talking about having another. Sure, Alberto was still gone most of the time on his trips back and forth to the mainland, but Albie was in kindergarten, and I was more than ready for another one. A girl this time, I’d told him last Thanksgiving with a laugh when I first introduced the idea of resigning from the army and becoming a stay-at-home mother. A girl with my dimples and his ingenuity.
At least I had been talking about having another child.
As he opened the door to that cargo container, I began to get an inkling of why all our conversations about me becoming a stay-at-home mother to our future children had felt distinctly one-sided.
But here’s how desperate I was to hold onto our marriage, to keep on believing the lies I had been telling myself about his cold and distant behavior after taking on his first civilian job.
Illegal immigrants…I quickly revised my prayer, renegotiating with God as I walked toward the cargo container. Immigrants I could bear. Even understand to a certain extent. If Alberto was running a side hustle for immigrants, trying to get into the country, I would find a way to reconcile it, help him even.
As I took hold of the cargo ship’s handle, I imagined myself saying something like, “Okay, just this once and never again. We can’t risk you going to jail.”
Please, let it be illegal immigrants, I silently begged. I swear I will go to church every Sunday from now on if it’s illegal immigrants.
But I guess God didn’t want my transactional church presence.
As soon as I opened the door, all hope died.
There Alberto stood, his phone held above his head, talking in fierce Malay to a bunch of women. I recognized the language from the early days of our relationship when I’d been so impressed by the fact the guy I was dating was studying Malay to receive the extra Foreign Language Proficiency Bonus (or Flip Bee as he called it). But I hadn’t considered that he kept up with it after he decided not to reenlist.
And even more horrific than hearing him speak the language I thought he’d forgotten…the sight of at least twenty women crawling around the floor at his feet. Thin and sickly, they wore nothing but bras and underwear. And like starved dogs, they desperately grabbed at the sacks of Zippy’s Alberto had thrown down on the floor of the crate.
They weren’t dogs though. I knew that even if Alberto didn’t seem to regard them as human beings as he watched the women scramble under his phone light.
He froze when he saw me in the doorway of the crate.
And for a moment, I waited. I actually waited for him to explain. To tell me I wasn’t seeing what I thought I was seeing. That he wasn’t a cold-b
looded trafficker, but a decent man.
I waited, but then the shock faded from his face. And instead of explaining, he said, “You shouldn’t have followed me here.”
Right before reaching for his gun.
“Please don’t make me go in there alone.”
Aisha’s little voice yanks me out of my memory. And I silently thank her for pulling me back as that painful Christmas Eve recedes back into the past where it belongs.
We’ve stopped in front of the mini-palace where she must live. Again, not as grand as Zahir’s, but it’s at least four stories, made out of the same white sandstone as the main palace, and even has a gold-flecked dome of its own. Holt is one of the richest men in New England, but the sheer size of this palace dwarfs his Connecticut compound.
But I guess that doesn’t matter much to the little girl standing with me in front of Middle Eastern Barbie’s dream house. “I don’t want to go in there by myself. Please come up with me!” she pleads, tugging on my hand, like a pitiful orphan.
“I don’t know if they’ll even let me in, sweetie,” I answer, recalling the massive amounts of security Albie and I had to go through, just to get onto the palace grounds a few days ago. “I don’t exactly have credentials.”
“You’re black. They’ll think you’re one of my nannies,” she promises. “Just don’t talk out loud.”
With that, she pulls me forward toward the mini-palaces marble and gold grand entrance. I, too, had noticed that many of the women who looked like Sylvie and me in residence were on the servant side of the equation. One of those things American productions often didn’t bother to include in their shows set in the Middle East. And in the end, Aisha is totally right about no one treating me suspiciously. I’m background here just like I’m background in the States, and she leads me past the outside guards with little more than a wave.
As it turns out, Aisha had no reason to worry about running into her parents after all. We don’t see anyone other than guards as she guides me up a marble staircase and down a hallway covered lined with rich mosaic tiles. Eventually, we reach a set of tall doors covered in intricate wood carvings.
RASHID: HER RUTHLESS BOSS: 50 Loving States, Hawaii Page 3