Brilliant

by Denise Roig

  Lauren and Rachel reworked their sleeping arrangements, barely registering the change. “The girl?” asked Arjun when serving late-evening tea. “No,” Dave told him. And Arjun had simply nodded, all things being equal.

  Dave found her the next morning, asleep by the wall facing the Orthodox cathedral. Her shawl was spread under her so that her long legs were exposed. She must have kicked the shawl off in the heat of the night, exposing more skin than she would have wanted. Dave looked around; then carefully, slowly, tried to rearrange the fabric before calling her name.

  The girl didn’t wake easily this time, curled away from him, leaving one lean thigh exposed again, allowing him to see what he couldn’t have seen before: a wound on her inner thigh that made the bruises on her shins look like cat scratches. It was huge, gaping, like someone had tried to carve a piece out of her, and crusted with pus. He ran back to the vicarage, hoping to find Suzette, but she’d already left for Dubai. Some of the thrift shop ladies had invited her on a shopping trip to Dragon Mart. “Not exactly my cup of tea, sifting through a bunch of junk from China,” Suzette had sighed the night before. “But what else are you going to do in this place?”

  He tried calling the Ethiopian elder again, but his mobile was switched off. Maktoum’s office was going to be no help with him still away. Ed Woods? He was in a prayer meeting but would call back later. Dave walked back to find the girl. He would need to be more persuasive. He made the full tour of the compound twice, but she was gone.

  When Ed Woods called back an hour later he was jovial, full of the spirit, until Dave told him what he was calling about. “Ethiopian nannies? We’ve got them here too, Dave. Terrible situation, but what can you do? Their government’s hopeless.” He wanted to know the young woman’s name. “Eden? Kind of ironic. But sure, I’ll send up a prayer for little Eden. I’ll ask my afternoon prayer group to pray for her too, how’s that? And speaking of prayer, my friend, when are you and I getting together?”

  That week Dave began getting up early, pre-dawn some mornings, to walk around the compound, sometimes rising even before Arjun, always the first up.

  On Wednesday morning he found two young women huddled inside the thrift shop entrance, but they took off, startled birds, into the street. Back at the vicarage, Tina was waiting on the front steps. “Couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I figured you’d be up.” She looked — for Tina — terrible. Even in the forgiving dawn light, he saw now that she was closer to sixty than fifty, that the roots of her hair were grey, not brown. She wore a pink track suit and matching sweat band. “Even running at 4:00 a.m. didn’t help. I can’t stop thinking about those women,” she told him as he let her in. Arjun, there already, nodded and disappeared into the kitchen when he saw her.

  Dave braced himself to hear another litany of labour camp abuses as he settled her — without resistance this time — on the loveseat. But Tina didn’t say anything right away, sat looking at her hands while Arjun brought in the tea things. “I went back to the camps this week,” she said when he left them. “I know, I know. I should have told you first.” On the way back from their first visit to the camps, hearing the intensity of her reaction, he’d told her about the couple who’d been deported recently for operating their own outreach ministry. As a registered charity — whatever that meant in this country — St. Edmund’s was their sponsor and protector. “The church has been in the UAE forever. The royal family trusts us,” he told her. Probably because the church had done so little to change anything, he wanted to add, but didn’t, realizing in the omission how little he must trust her. At any rate, he’d hoped the story about the couple would be warning enough, a gentle, but clear message to tread lightly.

  “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 S
unday, 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.

  Velvet

  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 lo
ng 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.”