Tazkia doesn’t refute this, just sits twisting the mauled blue silk in her fingers. Maybe it was a bad idea to sit in the studio, where they are surrounded by paintings. Naked women, alone, entwined, embodying objects, confront them from every side. Miranda feels an impulse to turn them all toward the wall.
She struggles to come up with a scrap of hope for her protégée. “Most of my friends and family are in the US,” she says, “but I don’t think we can get you there. It will be too hard to get a visa. Same with the UK. Let me think…Do you have friends in any other Arab country? Jordan? Egypt?”
Tazkia shakes her head. “I have never had the opportunity to travel,” she says. “My family has no money. People like us don’t leave home. You know this.” It is true; only women from the most elite families, with both money and political connections, are able to study abroad, develop careers.
“Is there anywhere you think you might like to go?” Miranda asks hopefully. “It’s probably safest if we get you out of the Middle East altogether, actually.”
“No.” Tazkia is decisive. “This is my home. What I want is to be here. With Adan, with my family.”
Her heart sinking, Miranda lists out loud the places she might have friends willing to help Tazkia. “I have a very good friend in Stockholm. But it’s cold. Very cold. You get cold easily. And my friend is a man so that probably won’t work. There’s, let’s see, there’s Anna in Australia, but again, the visa issues. Saudi Arabia—no way. I don’t know anyone there anyway. Okay, where is easiest to get a visa…The Dominican Republic? I have a friend who moved there. Or Panama? My friend Virginia from grad school moved there and she loves it. Or, what about—”
“Mira, I cannot go anywhere alone. I have never been anywhere alone in my life. I have never been in a car alone. I have never slept alone. I have never been in an airplane either alone or with someone. You cannot just send me somewhere, like a parcel.”
Miranda studies her face, trying to think of a solution, any solution. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. Well, we will just have to find a way to take you with us, wherever it is we end up going next. You are a sister to me, as much as anyone has been. Until we go you’ll stay here.”
Tazkia looks more miserable than ever. “You’re not my family. This is not my home.”
“No,” says Miranda sadly. “We’re not your family. But we are less likely to kill you.”
MAY 5, 2011
Finn
Finn sits on the edge of the tub, watching the girls. Blissfully ignorant of the drama unfolding around them, threatening to uproot their lives once again, they are pressing colored foam letters against the tiles of the bath. Cressida sticks a purple j in place and turns to her father. “Look!” she says, pleased with herself. Her string of letters spells efjkdssdvojewzapfjsvkdvj.
“Clever girl,” says Finn. “What word is that?”
Cressida frowns at him. “Not a word, it’s a story.”
“Ah,” he says. “Of course. Can you tell me the story?”
“Daddy,” she says disapprovingly, “you can read!”
She turns her attention to the little wooden boats the staff have made for her, loading them up with tiny wooden people and laughing when they capsize. Luloah watches her, mesmerized. She can sit up on her own and has started to crawl. It amazes him how quickly Cressie has adapted to her presence, treating her a bit like a special pet. Cressida can, however, be a wee bit tyrannical, reveling in the fact that she has found someone smaller than she is, someone who knows less. She speaks to Luloah in a mix of primitive English and Arabic, explaining the world to her. “Azraq, habibti,” she says now, grabbing a bath crayon in her fist and smearing it on the wall. “AzraqAzraqAzraq!”
Cressie knows all of her colors now, in English and Arabic. She can count to five. And she has developed a close relationship with the elephant at the bottom of her porridge bowl. Sometimes when she is eating breakfast, she stops abruptly and says, “Elmer? ELMER?” with great anxiety in her voice. When that happens, he or Miranda scrapes a bit of the porridge aside to ease her mind that the elephant is still there. “Elmer!” she then shrieks with glee. “HELLO, ELMER!”
Luloah tries to imitate everything she does, though her little tongue cannot yet find its way around l’s. “Emma! Emma!” she yells with Cressie, banging a spoon. Luloah has great fun with spoons, though she cannot manage to get one anywhere near her mouth. Sometimes Cressida tries to feed her, splattering Luloah’s cheeks (and the table, chairs, clothing) with pureed sweet potato or lentils.
He can’t deny it; Finn enjoys the chaos of an additional child in the house, this house that has always been too large for his small family. And it’s difficult not to return Luloah’s affection when she hands him a stuffed zebra or clings to his knee. The laughter of the two girls playing together takes the sharp edges off everything else, even off Miranda. Could he seriously consider returning Cressida to the quiet life of a solitary child? Not that she had been unhappy, but having grown accustomed to a sister, wouldn’t she feel that loss were the girl taken away? He has stopped trying to convince Miranda to give up Luloah, and begun trying to figure out how they could possibly keep her. It will not be easy.
They cannot risk a fake passport. They cannot risk bribing Mazrooqi officials. And they certainly cannot risk sneaking across a border. He struggles to discover a legal way to do this. Finn has never broken a law in his life. He has never even parked on a double yellow line. Any way he can imagine getting Luloah out of the country with his family deeply contradicts his sense of self.
Miranda peeks into the bathroom and smiles at the girls. “She’s asleep,” she tells Finn.
He nods. “We’ll talk once we get the girls down.”
Now they have the additional problem of Tazkia. Where is she to go? How would they get her a passport? Miranda looks exhausted, grim, the lines etched across her forehead deepening. She blames herself, which probably doesn’t help her psyche at the moment. Once again, Finn feels helpless.
“Come on, girls, time for books,” he says, rising and grabbing two hooded teddy bear towels from the rack. Cressida protests with a howl, grabbing his wrist when he reaches to pull the plug. “Cressie sweetheart, I’ll make a deal with you. If you’ll be a good girl and climb out of the tub on your own, I’ll sing you ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic.’ ”
Works like a charm, every time. He dries his daughter while Miranda lifts Luloah out of the water and wraps her up. Finn sings as they carry the two girls to the bed and sit them beside each other. Each girl gets three books before teeth brushing and songs. Just a week ago they started putting Luloah in bed with Cressida, to see what happened. At first Cressida protested, standing up in her cot to demand that Luloah be removed. But as soon as she was, Cressie changed her mind and wanted her back. “Sing songs to her,” she says. “Need songs.” And as her parents shut off the lights and backed out of the door, they heard her start. “I’m all across Tesas with two in my arms, a zoo in my arms…” The lyrics disintegrated even further after that, but the voice remained strong. It was the song Miranda had sung to her fretful daughter night after night that first year, as they danced around the darkened bedroom. When Miranda disappeared, Finn had found a recording on iTunes and played it to Cressie in their old stone house, in the hopes it would bring a tiny fraction of the solace she once got from her mother.
Tonight, as they shut the door to the girls’ room, Miranda and Finn can hear giggling. It will be another half-hour or so before they quiet down, but this they can live with.
“Right,” says Miranda, collapsing on her side of the bed. “Now back to our regularly scheduled crisis.”
Crisis. Crisis. The word sparks something, the glimmer of an idea. He sits on the edge of the bed looking down at Miranda. It isn’t really a choice between her and his career. He had already made that choice when he stayed in the country and risked losing his job. So how is this any different? Either he wants a life with her or he doesn’t, and if he does, the path
is suddenly clear.
MAY 5–6, 2011
Miranda
Miranda lies awake, watching her husband quietly breathe in the twilight of their bedroom. How can he sleep at a time like this? But she is grateful to be able to watch him, unobserved, uninterrupted. Since her return, she had been going through the motions of partnership, of marriage, numbly, automatically. While she was dimly aware that love for him still lived inside of her, it had become frozen, inaccessible like dinosaur DNA in amber. He was kind, patient, he listened, and she was grateful. But his lips on hers felt dry and foreign. She hadn’t wanted to be touched. Until tonight. Tonight some shell around her heart had cracked, leaking a desire she had lost hope of rediscovering.
Perhaps it was the knowledge that Luloah would (insha’allah, insha’allah) soon and forever be hers—would be theirs. As Finn had outlined his plan, she had reached tentative fingers to his face, his eyes, his cheeks, unable to speak her gratitude, her hope. Then, pushing herself up to search his eyes for doubts and finding none, she had leaned down to kiss him. How long had it been since they had made love? But their bodies remembered, responded, retrieved what had once been so effortless. His skin was soft, scentless, his ribs more prominent than she remembered. She sank into him, became warm and human and hungry. Here he was again, her Finn, whom she had forgotten how to love. She was remembering now. She wanted to open all of his wounds and disinfect them with her tears.
When at last they lay still, their breath slowing, sweat evaporating in the desert air, Miranda twisted in his arms. “Sweetheart,” she said, the fingers of her left hand fluttering over his right cheek. “Do you think that now you could tell me about Afghanistan?”
—
RELIEVED OF THE burden he has carried alone for so long, Finn sleeps deeply, unmoving. But slumber will not take Miranda, who lies watching her husband, piecing together this story with the rest of his history, with all that has happened since they met. What does she feel? A swirl, a muddle of compassion and regret, love and sorrow. Not anger, not blame. She thinks about the doomed Charlotte and her team of would-be rescuers. There is no getting around Finn’s responsibility for those deaths. It’s not a pain she can ever lift from her husband; it will live in him, like the tip of a poisoned arrow buried too deep to be removed.
Oddly, she dwells even longer on the girl, on the bewitching Afsoon, conjuring up her long legs and dark eyes. Had Finn not shared his plans with her, had she not told her brother, would Finn eventually have persuaded her to marry him? Is Finn sleeping beside Miranda now simply because he had trusted Afsoon and she had betrayed him? How different their lives might have been. What has become of Afsoon? Has Finn ever tried to find out? She needs to know. If Finn doesn’t know, Miranda will do her own research. It feels important, to find out whether Afsoon has survived, whether she has found some kind of happiness. Well. It can wait. With any luck, there will be time.
MAY 6, 2011
Miranda
The two explosions are seven minutes apart. The first jolts them awake, sending Miranda halfway down the hall to Cressida’s room before she realizes it hadn’t been in the house. After quickly peeking at the girls, who astonishingly are still asleep, curled feet to heads in a lopsided ying-yang, she runs back to their bedroom. Finn is standing naked at the bedroom window, clutching his cell phone. “I think that was a plane.”
“A plane?” She struggles to understand. “A crash?” They are just a few miles from the airport.
“Shot down. The sound was too familiar.”
“What kind of plane?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything yet. It could have been—” The phone in his hand begins to vibrate. “Tucker,” he says, answering it.
It had been a plane, a commercial passenger jet taking off from the Arnabiya airport. Tucker thought it was a domestic flight but wasn’t sure. According to airport security, there may have been more than one hundred passengers onboard. It crashed just outside of the city, crushing an entire block of houses.
Finn is still on the phone when the shock waves of a second explosion rattle the shutters of their bedroom. “Christ, Tucker, what the hell was that?” He listens for a moment and sets down the phone on the windowsill.
“Start packing,” he says abruptly, turning to Miranda. “If that was another plane, I’m going to have to order an evacuation. In fact, no matter what that was, we’re evacuating.” It’s clear he has been waiting for this; it is not a surprise. They have spent several evenings discussing the possibility and mechanics of evacuation, but Miranda had never seriously believed it would happen before they were due to leave. They had so little time left.
For a moment, she cannot move, their newly formed plans crumbling at her feet. “This is war, you mean,” she says. “That’s what this means. That this is it.”
He nods, already pulling on boxer shorts and a white undershirt. “I’ve got to get downstairs and make some calls. I want everyone locked down until we know things have settled a bit. If it’s possible, if people can get here—local security is going to have roadblocks everywhere—there’ll be a meeting here a little later, just critical staff. Pack a suitcase, just one. Passports, small valuables. I’ll come up as soon as I know more. Just…be ready. We have about forty-eight hours, I’d say. And I think this goes without saying, but no one leaves the house.”
“We’ll go together? All of us?”
“You know I can’t go until everyone else is out.” Seeing her face crumple, he drops his trousers to the floor and crosses to her. “I’m sorry, sweetheart.” He wraps his arms around her and presses her cold, still-naked body tightly against him. “I wouldn’t part with you for a second if I had a choice. We’re going to have to be patient through this.”
“But—” Pressing her palms against his chest, she tilts her head back to look at him. “But Luloah. Tazkia. Can we get them out?”
“We’re going to try.” There is no hesitation in his voice. He was built for situations like these. Nothing sharpens his mind like a crisis. Clearing a path through pandemonium, reassuring staff, generating exit strategies—these galvanize his energies like a drug. “Listen. We’ll do what we had planned to do for Luloah and Tazkia. This is just a little sooner than we’d hoped. I’ll get the ETDs issued this morning; Sally will help. Those will get them out of the country at least. I’ll probably need a week to shut down the embassy, and then I’ll meet you in Djibouti or Dubai or Beirut or wherever you’re evacuated to. We’ll go to London together and sort things out from there.”
Emergency travel documents would function as passports, allowing Luloah and Tazkia, who would pose as the child’s mother, to travel through four countries, as long as the last one was the UK. Issuing them illegally, as would be the case with an orphaned Mazrooqi child and a Mazrooqi citizen, could cost Finn his job. The chances of discovery were high.
“Sweetheart. You’re sure?” The question is for her as much as for Finn. Is she certain that she wants to accept the sacrifice? She will be stripping him of everything he has worked for, inviting a slow corrosion of their marriage. But getting Luloah out does not feel optional.
Finn’s phone buzzes again, and he releases her from his arms to reach for it. Dax this time. Keeping his eyes on Miranda’s, he listens. “Right. I suspected as much. How many inside? Have you talked to the Americans?” He listens awhile longer. “I’ll get on the phone to the ambassador. We’ll meet at the backup office as soon as it’s safe.” Whenever the embassy has to close for security reasons, the staff works from a backup office housed in the basement of the Residence. The warren of rooms—equipped with dusty desks and chairs, copy and fax machines, and several locked filing cabinets—is rudimentary but surprisingly vast. There is even a conference room and a small kitchen. Miranda has been down to the offices only twice; they don’t exactly invite loitering.
“The airport’s on fire,” Finn says, snapping the phone shut. “Probably the result of several IEDs. Meaning there is no chance of evac
uation by air, not that we could afford it anyway. But the Americans might have tried it; they’ve got fantastic helicopters. Listen, Mira. I’ve got to ring the Americans this morning, talk with their spooks, find out when they’re going. If they evacuate before us, you’re going with them.”
“But—”
“We talked about this.”
“They’ll take Luloah and Tazkia? Even though the ETDs will say they’re Brits?”
“We have an agreement with the US to take Brits if we don’t have our own evacuation.”
“But you will.”
“We will. But the Americans will have extra room. They always do. If they don’t let them go with you, they can come with us later.”
“But the others at the embassy will wonder about Luloah, about the papers. No? Since they have seen them? Tazzy and Luloah can’t travel with the UK staff or they’ll be discovered.”
Finn pauses, his forehead creasing. “Right. Okay. Of course. We’ll just have to hope the Americans will take you all. Look, there will be a fair amount of chaos getting out of here, no matter how organized they are. They might not even thoroughly process immigration papers until you’re out of the country. We are just going to have to risk this; there’s no other way. Not now.”
Miranda nods. There is no point in protesting. If there were another way, Finn would know it. The United States—the country she abandoned years ago—is their only hope.
MAY 6, 2011
Miranda
Miranda kneels on the floor of Cressie’s room, pulling clothing and toys from her drawers. Her daughter stands watching her, curious. Tazkia, who has no need to repack her few possessions, is downstairs playing with Luloah in the dining room. It’s difficult to know what to take. Very few clothes, Miranda thinks. Mostly photos, a few toys and books, diapers. Bears. She sorts through Cressida’s clothing, setting aside the baby things she has outgrown—her first few onesies, covered with monkeys and lions; a tiny, strawberry-shaped woolen hat; a hand-knit Aran sweater. Will they ever see these things again?
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