by Trish Doller
“What an oddball place,” Dad says as we leave the park and head back toward the metro station. “I like it, though.”
The asr prayer is being called, which means it’s probably around three thirty. One of the things I’ve learned since we’ve been here is the names of the prayers and when they fall during the day. They’ve become kind of like the church bells back home. I know what time it is when I hear them. “That’s kind of how I feel about Cairo. It gets under your skin. Kind of like . . . a tattoo.”
Dad nods. “Some places have the ability to do that.”
“You should bring Mom here on your next date night. I bet when the lanterns are lit, it’s romantic.”
The kind of relationship my parents have is the kind that people wish for, but it’s weird for me to be jealous of them. I want to be here with Adam when the lanterns are lit. Sneak kisses under the bamboo. I need to quit thinking about him, but the memory of his mouth against mine is seared into my brain.
Just before the Helwan metro station, Dad stops at a street cart selling coctel, a parfait-like treat with strawberries, bananas, apples, mango, and yogurt. Supertasty. Except as we ride the subway home, the swaying of the car makes me queasy, a feeling that builds until my stomach gurgles and a sour taste rises into my mouth. When the train stops at the next station—I have no idea which one it is—the doors open and I shove my way out onto the platform just as the coctel makes a messy, splashy return. More than one commuter looks at me in disgust as they sidestep my sick, and the subway guard rushes over to scold me in Arabic, as if I puked on purpose. Ignoring him, Dad leads me up the steps to street level and hails a cab to take us the rest of the way home.
For the first several months of my life—while my mom was finishing her residency—Dad was my primary parent. He was working as a mate on a liftboat in the Gulf of Mexico but quit his job to take care of me. From the stories they tell, he sang the lullabies (which is good because Mom can’t carry a tune), walked the floors with me when I wasn’t sleeping through the night, and even took me to a mommy-and-me group at the library. I love my mother, but Dad is the parent I want when I’m sick. Back at the apartment, he doses me with medicine to stabilize my insides and keeps the bottled water flowing until my stomach settles enough to sleep.
“It’s all my fault,” he confesses when Mom comes home to find I’ve burned through an entire roll of toilet paper. My body hurts from heaving, because I still keep throwing up, even though there’s nothing left. “Street food.”
“What did you eat?”
Dad tells her about the parfait and she just shakes her head at him. “Fresh fruit is always iffy. Even if it’s been washed and peeled, you have no idea if the person preparing it has clean hands.”
“Lesson learned.”
That’s easy for him to say. His stomach is lined with cast iron, while mine feels like it’s been turned inside out.
I’m feeling less vomity when Jamie arrives for dinner the next evening. Mom’s assistant looks fresh out of medical school, with a prematurely receding hairline, a toothy smile, and a brand-new wife, Sarah, who has never been outside Oklahoma. Jamie is as thrilled to be in Cairo as my mom was when she was first offered the clinic, but Sarah confesses that she is terrified of basically everything. “It’s so hot and dirty, and just thinking about going outside overwhelms me. Jamie does the shopping because I am afraid to go out there without him. And . . . I miss my mom.”
Dad occupies Sarah with tugboat tales while Mom and Jamie spend the whole dinner talking about eyeballs. I’m still a little zoned out, so I go to bed right after dessert, leaving the adults to linger over coffee. In the morning I feel well enough to go sandboarding. I am dressing for the trip when I receive an e-mail from the Daffodils inviting Aya and me to come practice with the team.
Mr. Elhadad arrives while I’m filling a thermos of coffee, and as we drive to pick up Vivian, I ask him how his family is doing. Subtext: How is Adam?
“Aya told us she would like to join the Garden City Daffodils.” He chuckles at the name. “I will take you both to the practices. And my son . . . well. Sometimes we have to do things we do not enjoy. Life is not always fair. With time I think he will understand this.”
Is Mr. Elhadad talking about Adam’s new job or about me? Both? Unsure of how to respond, I ask him to say hello to Adam and to tell Aya I can’t wait to play soccer with her.
“She is very excited,” Mr. Elhadad says.
We pick up Vivian in Zamalek, a neighborhood on another island in the Nile that is filled with trees and freestanding homes. It feels more like Ohio than any neighborhood I’ve seen so far. Vivian lives in an enormous stone villa with wrought-iron balconies and black-painted lions guarding the front steps. “Palatial” comes to mind, and once she’s in the car, Vivian confirms that sometimes it feels like living in a castle.
“On the other hand,” she says, “it’s kind of ridiculous. My brother and sister are both gone away to college so we don’t need five bedrooms or a basement filled with empty rooms.”
“Our apartment is pretty huge, too,” I say. “Only two bedrooms but we have space we’ll never fill.”
Saying these words in front of Mr. Elhadad makes me want to cringe, especially after having been to his apartment, where the small rooms were crowded with furniture. Aya’s bedroom could have fit inside mine. Mr. Elhadad doesn’t seem to be paying any attention to us, though. He hums along with the radio until we arrive at the meeting site—a café in Giza not far from the pyramids.
Ethan comes over as we get out of the car. If he’s bothered that I invited Vivian, he has enough manners to greet both of us. “I’m glad you came.”
Before I can answer, Mr. Elhadad reminds me to text him when we’re on our way back to Giza tonight. “I will be waiting for you when you arrive.”
“I will. Thanks.”
Ethan gestures toward a line of dusty white Land Cruisers to carry all the students out into the desert. The SUVs have basketlike luggage racks on the roof filled with sandboards and coolers. “I’ve already staked out—”
“Have you brought enough sunscreen and water?” Mr. Elhadad interrupts. It’s a dad-like question that makes Ethan snicker, but I’m touched by the concern. I know exactly where Adam gets his thoughtfulness.
“Yes, I have both. Thank you for bringing us out here.”
“You know, my dad could probably recommend a better driver than the one you’re using,” Ethan says as we walk toward the Land Cruisers.
Vivian rolls her eyes at him. “Not everyone needs an armored embassy car with tinted windows and a gun-wielding American security guard behind the wheel. Some expats actually live here.”
All our homes are bigger than the average Cairo apartment. We have drivers who take us anywhere we want to go. We can afford to eat in five-star restaurants (well, maybe Vivian and Ethan can) and take sandboarding trips into the desert. We exist in a well-protected bubble inside the city limits, but none of us actually knows what it’s like to live in Cairo.
“I’m just saying that most drivers are paid to stay in the background.” Ethan rakes his hand through his hair. “And his car is kind of . . . old.”
“Who cares about the age of his car as long as it runs?” I glance back to make sure Mr. Elhadad hasn’t overheard any of this conversation, but he’s long gone. “Besides, I like that he doesn’t stay in the background. He’s nice.”
I end up sandwiched between Vivian and Ethan in the back of the first SUV, with Ethan’s friend Will sharing the front seat with our guide, Zayed. Vivian brought along a set of Trivial Pursuit cards and the four of us spend most of the drive challenging each other with the questions.
Although American culture has managed to span the distance to Egypt—even Zayed gets some of the answers right—it’s still easier to talk to other Americans. We get our jokes, we understand our idioms, and no one needs to translate. I loved the challenge that came with talking to Adam, but this is effortless.
CHAPT
ER 27
Pavement gives way to bumpy sand tracks, and the desert stretches to the horizon in every direction. Heat shimmers in the distance, but we never catch up to it. Finally we reach the dunes. When Vivian opens the car door, a smothering heat barrels in and there is no way my sunscreen is going to stand up to the blistering rays. At my closet this morning, I waffled between short- and long-sleeved T-shirts, but now I’m glad I went with long.
There is a breeze, but the air is too hot for the breeze to be cooling, and with it comes grains of sand that catch on our eyelashes and stick to our lips. Sunglasses protect our eyes, but I can taste the salty grit as it crunches between my teeth. Zayed laughs when Vivian brings the neck of her T-shirt up over her nose.
“By the time you are done sandboarding,” he says, unloading four boards from the roof of the SUV, “there will be no part of your body that hasn’t been touched by sand.”
She groans. “Remind me why I said yes to this.”
“It’s going to be fun,” I say, scooping up one of the boards.
The sand on our bare feet is like stepping onto the beach on the hottest day of summer. We run up the dune as fast as we can, but the sand has no purchase and we slide backward several times on the way. By the time we reach the top, my shirt is soaked through with sweat and I’m surprised I don’t have first-degree burn blisters on the soles of my feet.
Zayed explains that we can go down the dunes standing up—like snowboarding—or sitting down on the board, toboggan-style.
“I’ll demonstrate,” he says, slipping his bare feet under the straps on the sandboard. “Then you follow.”
He crouches down and tips himself forward. Zayed carves along the face of the dune on his way to the bottom, kicking up a wake of sand behind him. This is not a mountain, so the trip doesn’t take long, and when he glides to a stop, he turns. “Yalla!” he shouts up to us, his hands cupped around his mouth.
Ethan—holding a GoPro on a stick—shoots forward first, mimicking Zayed as he zigzags his way down, trailing his fingertips in the sand like a surfer as he skims to the bottom of the dune. He throws up victory arms when he doesn’t fall. Will, on the other hand, does a crash-and-burn about midway down and rolls the rest of the way, his board sliding behind him. Vivian and I take a selfie together at the top with my phone, then go down the dune at the same time.
I stretch out my arms, trying to maintain my balance, as wind rushes past my ears. Sand peppers my face. And I fall on my butt almost immediately. Vivian makes it a few more feet before she wipes out too.
“Almost everyone falls,” Zayed assures us as we gather at the bottom, regrouping before we run back up. “Sand is less predictable than snow.”
We stay on the dune for a couple of hours, sliding, climbing, falling, and doing a whole lot of laughing. On our last run, Vivian and I borrow Ethan’s GoPro to make a video of ourselves as we toboggan down together on her sandboard.
As we pile back into the Land Cruiser, my legs are rubber, the tops of my knees are pink with an oncoming sunburn, and my face aches from smiling. Out here in the desert, where there is no haze of pollution, the sky is so clear and bright it almost hurts to look. The contrast of blue against gold, where the sky touches land, makes me feel as if I am looking at a painting. My breath catches in my chest and I wish . . . I wish I could stop wishing that Adam was here for this.
“Doing okay?” Ethan asks, dropping an arm around my shoulders.
“Oh, um—yeah. It’s just really beautiful.”
“I guess not everything about Egypt sucks.” He smiles. It would be a lot easier on my heart if I could like someone like Ethan Caldwell—someone American—but there’s not much point in that if your heart isn’t making the rules.
• • •
“Where are we going next?” I ask Zayed as the SUV bumps its way through the desert.
“Wadi Al-Hitan is called the Valley of Whales,” he says. “An ocean once existed here millions of years ago, and excavations have revealed thousands of prehistoric whales and sharks, as well as petrified coral and mangroves.”
We can get only so close to the Valley of Whales before we have to get out of the SUVs and trek the rest of the way. It feels as if we are exploring a science fiction landscape—the surface of an alien planet—and Zayed explains that the rock formations jutting randomly from the ground have been scoured for millennia by the sand-laced winds, carving them into strange shapes.
“That one looks like my dick,” Will whispers, making Ethan snicker.
The dig site is also home to an outdoor museum, where the exhibits are excavated skeletons of Basilosaurus and Dorudon whales, both prehistoric and both millions of years old.
Zayed says the Basilosaurus was equipped with small legs and feet that were not big enough to support the weight of a fifty-foot whale. “Scientists believe it is an ancestor to modern whales, that their legs evolved away as whales stopped coming out of the water.”
Vivian links her arm through mine. “As a science nerd, I’m not even going to pretend I don’t think this is completely cool.”
“Right?” I say.
“I want to discover something like this.”
“What? Whales?”
“No. I don’t know. Maybe the cure for an incurable disease or a species of fish no one has been deep enough in the ocean to find yet.” Just then Ethan and Will smash into each other—chest bumping chest—pretending to be prehistoric fighting whales. Vivian laughs. “Or I could pinpoint when exactly boys become such idiots.”
“Pretty sure they’re born like that.”
• • •
From the Valley of Whales we travel to Wadi El Rayan, a protected sanctuary composed of a pair of lakes joined by a short natural spillway and a series of small waterfalls. There we are invited to a Bedouin camp for a lunch of pit-barbecued lamb, rice, and vegetables. We team up for volleyball and a pickup game of soccer. We leap from the top of a waterfall into the spillway below. And at sunset we roast marshmallows over the campfire as the sun sinks behind the dunes.
The ride back to Cairo is quiet. All of us are exhausted, dirty, and sunburned, and Vivian falls asleep with her sand-dusted hair on my shoulder. On the other side of me, Ethan plays a game on his phone.
“If you want,” he says, not looking up, “my driver can take you home. Save your driver from having to come out so late. Vivian too.”
Ethan’s turned out to be nicer than I expected, so I take him up on his offer. I text Mr. Elhadad to let him know I won’t be needing a ride. Then, because I can’t help myself (and clearly have not learned my lesson about these things), I text Adam. I miss you. As the SUV returns to pavement, I watch the screen, hoping to see the little bubble that means Adam is responding, but it never comes.
It’s past ten when we unload ourselves and our backpacks from the Land Cruiser. The embassy driver is waiting, standing beside a shiny black BMW. My smelly body is unworthy of this kind of luxury, but the air-conditioning is glacial and there are bottles of water in the backseat cup holders.
“That was a good time,” Ethan says as we pull out of the parking lot. He turns to Vivian. “We should have invited you to hang with us sooner.”
She fluffs her hair, raining sand all over the seat. “Probably.”
He laughs. “Want to come to Hurghada with us next weekend?”
“Who’s us?” Vivian asks.
“Basically me and Will. Maybe Mohammed Aal, if he can talk his parents into letting him go.”
“So you need girls?”
Ethan nods. “We need girls.”
Vivian explains that Hurghada is a beachfront city on the Red Sea. “It’s basically like the Egyptian equivalent of Florida,” she says. “Beaches. Bars. Snorkeling.”
“The flight’s only about a hundred bucks,” Ethan adds.
“I’ll ask,” I tell them, but I’m skeptical my parents will give me permission to fly to another part of Egypt with a bunch of teenagers. Even if I leave out the part about the b
ars, my dad is not that gullible.
Dad is watching a movie on his laptop when I get home. We haven’t bought a television because the local programming is in Arabic, so everything we watch is online. Mom’s asleep with her head on his thigh, and Dad hits pause as I come into the living room.
“Leave any sand in the desert?” he asks, eyeing my dirt-streaked clothes.
Just scratching my scalp sends a tiny avalanche of grit down the back of my neck. “Only what I couldn’t carry home in my underwear.”
Dad laughs through his nose. “Good time?”
“Yeah. It was,” I say. “Got a ride home in an embassy car. You should think about becoming an ambassador.”
His shoulders shake as he tries not to wake up my mom. “Sure. I’ll get right on that.”
CHAPTER 28
Aya and I discover that the Garden City Daffodils are a tightly knit bunch of women ranging in age and varying by nationality. They have a handful of vacancies left by beloved members who returned to their home countries and I worry that getting on the team will be hard. Except tryouts go something like this: We kick the ball around to warm up, we play a short scrimmage, and then we are welcomed onto the team by Karin, the Australian cofounder, and Jessica, the American.
Karin is in her early thirties with streaky blond hair, tanned skin, strong thighs, and a voice that carries. She serves as both the coach and the number one goalkeeper, and getting the ball past her proves really tough. I manage to score on her only once.
“We’ve never had a winning season and I wish we were more competitive,” she admits. “But never to the exclusion of fun or to the point where we’d turn up our noses at new blood. If you’re willing to be here, we’re happy to have you.”
She introduces us to the whole team. Too many to remember all at once, but Maude is a fifty-eight-year-old Brit who proudly proclaims herself the oldest player on the team. And Diya is a bank teller/midfielder who wears a hijab during practices and games. Aya loses her mind with excitement over this. Mathilde is French-Algerian. Sophie is from Ghana.