Mirage

by Soheir Khashoggi

  How did I get along without him? Jenna wondered almost every time she looked into those blue-blue eyes.

  “I have a cottage in Marblehead,” he said one Wednesday night as he tinkered with Jenna’s computer, trying to recover a file that had apparently disappeared. “I think you’ll like it. Why don’t you come up there with me for the weekend?”

  “All right,” she said, though she knew there was more ahead than a simple summer weekend at the beach.

  O

  “Cottage?” Jenna exclaimed, marveling at the sprawling oceanfront Victorian with gingerbread woodwork, ornate plaster ceilings, and handmade brass fixtures. “You New Englanders certainly believe in understatement.” “The Puritan influence. We feel guilty about having so much, so we pretend we don’t.”

  As he gave Jenna the grand tour of all eighteen rooms, Brad pointed out portraits of his ancestors, the saints and sinners and those who fell some- where in between. “We even have a pirate somewhere in the bunch. But my grandfather Benjamin—he’s the one who built the house—he refused to dis- play the rascal’s portrait. He said Kincaid Pierce was hanged once and that should be enough for any man.”

  Jenna laughed. “I love this place,” she said. “It has a lot of character. Like you.”

  “I’m flattered. Is that a personal judgment—or a professional one?” “Both.” It was true. If she had ever been certain about anything, it was that Brad was one of those very rare individuals: a truly good person. Which made her feel miserable about deceiving him.

  Though the house’s refrigerator and freezer had been fully stocked by the caretaker, Brad insisted they should have lobsters—“not in a restaurant, but cooked with our own two hands over a driftwood fire, the way God intended.”

  Everyone in the quaint seaside town seemed to know and like Brad—the policeman who patrolled the streets on foot, the greengrocer who sold them freshly picked corn, the owner of the lobster pound who deliberated at length before selecting two prime specimens. “The best of the lot,” he assured Brad, as if nothing less than the best would do for Mr. Pierce.

  This is what living with him would be like, she thought. Relaxed and easy and familiar. Stop it, she chided herself. You have no right to that dream.

  “You seem very much at home here,” she observed. “Even more than in Boston.”

  “When I was growing up, we spent every summer here, lots of weekends, too. I always felt that only good things happen here.” He paused and squeezed her hand. “I thought you might feel that way, too.”

  I wish, she thought, I wish it were that simple.

  “Why did you wait so long?” she asked, as they cooked the lobsters and corn over a wind-fanned fire on a hidden cove of the rocky shore. “To ask me out, I mean.”

  For a moment, he seemed to go away a little. “I guess I’m a traditionalist,” he said. “A mourning period for someone you love is a tradition, and it seemed right to me.”

  She liked his answer. “Where I was born, we didn’t mourn the dead, at least not formally. It’s considered irreligious. But, knowing you, I think it’s a beautiful custom.” She hesitated a moment. ‘‘But why me? Why not one of those suitable women Boston seems to be full of ?”

  The blue eyes twinkled. “Because you’re a good listener. Because you’re beautiful through and through. Because you seemed to care about me when we were just strangers. Because,” he paused, smiling mischievously, “Pat would have liked you.”

  They made love that night in a big feather bed, a candle burning on the bedside table, casting flickering shadows on the walls. As Brad caressed her, murmuring endearments and promising to love her forever, she gave herself without fear or hesitation. Perhaps for the first time. It was like coming home.

  O

  “I want to marry you,” he said as they snuggled together, limbs still inter- twined. “It’s going to happen sooner or later, so why waste time?”

  Jenna was speechless, joy and dread intermingling. Joy that he loved her.

  Dread at what she would have to say.

  “I’ve learned how precious life is,” he continued. “Losing Pat, realizing how quickly it can all slip away.”

  “But we don’t … we don’t really know each other well,” she protested weakly.

  “That’s what the next fifty years are for. Because I want to know all about you. I want to know where you go when you get so quiet. I want to know why you don’t trust our love …”

  “But I—”

  “Hush,” he said, gently placing a finger against her lips. “You don’t have to explain anything. Not until you’re ready. But I want to be with you, Jenna, while you work through whatever it is that stands between us. I don’t want to be someone who just waits …”

  Like a parent comforting a child who has nightmares, Brad spoke eloquently and persuasively. But in the end, it didn’t matter. His proposal touched her heart—and broke it into a million pieces.

  Because Jenna had to say no.

  Mirages

  The little room off the main lobby of the al-Remal International Airport was clean and not uncomfortable, but there was no mistaking its function: it was a cell.

  Waiting for the self-important man with the familiar name to return, Laila, like many prisoners, could hardly believe that this was happening to her.

  It had started with a phone call.

  David Christiansen was a new force in Laila’s life—a force and an anchor. She was beginning to believe that he was the one man, besides her father, she could rely on.

  She had been running on the edge for a long time when she met David. Recovering from the shock of rape—the outrage, the self-blame, and finally the psychological numbness—had been like going through a dark tunnel, and when she came out on the other side, it was hard to take anything very seriously.

  She lived one day and one night at a time. Parties and new faces carried her through to more parties and new faces. Only once did she leave her- self vulnerable, becoming infatuated with a young actor, talented, impossibly attractive, as self-centered as a shark. For six months, her world revolved around him. Then one day, she overheard him talking with some of his hangers-on. What he said about Laila made her sick with shame: what he said about Malik’s money, on the other hand, was highly complimentary. She walked out without a word.

  After that, she began to drift away from the glitter-world of Hollywood, Topanga, Malibu. Not completely; she could still show up at the latest hot spot and be welcomed to the party. But that was no longer what she wanted. One day, for no reason that she could think of, she went down to the waterfront, a marina she had never visited. One boat caught her eye: schooner-rigged, maybe sixty-five feet, lines like a seabird in flight. The North Star.

  While she admired the teak decks and sparkling fittings, a man emerged from a hatch and rummaged through a tool chest. He noticed Laila, gave her a sun-crinkled smile, and turned back to his work.

  “She’s beautiful,” said Laila. “Thanks. You sail?”

  “Some. I’m not Columbus.”

  “Who is? Come aboard if you’d like. Dave Christiansen.”

  “Laila Sorrel.” It was the name she chose—after the woman who had once rescued her—when she didn’t want a stranger to know who her father was.

  He showed her around the North Star. The boat was his—“mine and the bank’s, that is.” He sailed day cruises and charters. “Catalina, the other Channel Islands, once in a while down the Baja. Hawaii twice.” Sailing was his life: “I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. When I was fourteen, a kid I knew took me out on Lake Mendota in a little Sunfish. From then on, I never thought about doing anything else.”

  When it was time to go, she thanked him for the tour.

  “Listen,” he said, “I’m doing a group tomorrow, an overnight to Catalina— assuming I can fix the water pump on the auxiliary by then. Want to come along? As honorary crew, I mean. No charge. No pay, either.”

  Why not? “Sure,” she said. “Sounds like fun.” “S
ome work, too. Eight o’clock tomorrow morning?” “See you then.”

  They took twenty paying customers out to the beautiful little hill-ringed harbor of Avalon. Laila slept on deck under the stars. The next morning, they ran before the wind back to the mainland, where Laila, David, and the first mate, a serious young black man named Roy, toasted a successful voyage with icy bottles of beer.

  Sun darkened, exhausted, muscles aching, Laila couldn’t remember when she had felt so good.

  After that, she was on the North Star often. There came a time when everyone thought of her and David as a couple, and there came a time when they were. He wasn’t like the men in her social set, whether in France, New York, or Los Angeles. He was as calm, confident, and strong in a storm at sea as when he was holding her close. He wasn’t brilliant or witty, but his dry, easygoing sense of humor didn’t wear thin.

  On the night he told her he loved her, she told him who she really was. “You’re kidding,” was his first reaction. When she convinced him that she wasn’t, he laughed. “Well, it’s not going to change my feelings any. But it must complicate yours.” “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I say ‘I love you,’ and you say, ‘But my daddy’s a billionaire.’” He laughed again. “Hey, I’m not a total dummy—I know what the whole world will think. Who cares? What matters is what you think.”

  “I don’t think you’re after my money, if that’s what you mean.”

  He grinned. “Now there’s a declaration of undying love if I ever heard one.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that you’re right. My feelings are complicated. By a lot of things.” It was true. She wasn’t sure how she felt about David. He was a harbor after a storm, and deeply valued for that. She liked, admired, and in a very real sense, needed him. But did she love him? Could she love anyone? Did she dare? Her feelings for this man raised so many red flags from her past, small-craft warnings fluttering in the winds of emotion.

  “It’s okay, Laila,” he was saying now, completely serious. “Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

  It was a few months later, on a midweek sail out to Santa Rosa, just the two of them at an anchorage David knew, that he asked her to marry him. “You don’t have to answer until you’re ready,” he added. “I just want you to know how I feel.”

  Two days after that, she invented an excuse to go to France. She needed to be away from David for a while, she told herself—a couple of weeks, a month—to sort things out. She needed to remember what life had been like without him.

  What she discovered was that life without him no longer existed. In the Louvre, a Monet seascape reminded her of the North Star. Over dinner with friends at Le Carre des Feuillants, she found herself wondering if she could prepare an amateur version of the meal for David. At a party, she wished he were there, so that they could laugh later about the idiosyncrasies of this or that Parisian video artist or fashion designer or politician’s mistress.

  When he called, it was a comfortable thing, as if she were just across town and seeing him the next day. Then, in one conversation, he asked, as an after- thought, whether she had her birth certificate in California.

  “No. Why?”

  “I just thought of it. You ought to pick it up, or get an official copy, while you’re there. Never know when it’ll come in handy. Who knows, you might want to get married someday.”

  Despite that last comment, the birth certificate didn’t seem like pressing business, and it slipped her mind for days. Then, one afternoon, she remembered and decided that she might as well have it. It would be right here in the Paris house—in the wall safe where Malik kept personal papers. He was in Marseilles at the moment, but she knew the combination from years of watching him open the safe.

  She had no intention of prying; the birth certificate should be easy to find. But as she went through the sheaf of papers, some items naturally tugged at her attention.

  Photographs of Genevieve brought tears to her eyes. And here was a picture of her father as a boy—how mischievous he looked. Who was the little girl with him? Funny, she looked a little like Jenna Sorrel. A few letters that meant nothing to Laila. An odd one from someone named Amira, extending condolences about Genevieve and adding that Amira herself was well and doing work she loved. Vague explanations of why she hadn’t written before. Karim was fine, too. Karim? Well, the name was common in the Arab world. Probably this was some old flame of her father’s, hoping to slip back into the picture after Genevieve’s death.

  Another photograph, a formal portrait, but small, the size a man might carry in his wallet. A striking young woman in Remali dress. Oddly familiar. Where had Laila seen that face? Suddenly, a chill ran up her spine. My God, it was like looking in a mirror!

  Laila spread the papers on her father’s desk and went through them more carefully. There was no birth certificate, but she found a marriage license for her parents. They had married when she was four years old, nearly five. And there was a little ledger with a record of monthly cash payments to someone in al-Re- mal—a name Laila didn’t recognize, in a town, if that was what it was, she’d never heard of. The first payment had been made the month she was born.

  She looked up from the desk. On the facing wall was an oil portrait of her grandmother, Jihan, who had posed for it against her husband’s wishes and had given it to Malik to remember her by in France. Laila had always studied the face, searching for signs of Jihan’s tragic fate, but now she noticed the hands—and a ring, a star sapphire in an unusual setting. She had seen that ring before. Jenna Sorrel had been wearing it.

  Suddenly, it all began to make sense. And yet, it didn’t. It couldn’t. It would mean that her whole identity was a kind of illusion. She wasn’t who she thought she was, and never had been. Her father had lied to her. Her mother, too—if Genevieve was, in fact, her mother. And Jenna—or whatever her real name was.

  Yet, it was Jenna she decided to call. There was no answer at the apartment in Boston. Laila tried the office. Dr. Sorrel was out of town. No, she couldn’t be reached. Was this a patient? No? Well, was there some emergency? If so, the names of other therapists could be provided.

  Laila hung up. She couldn’t call Malik. She wouldn’t call David. He would think she was crazy. Maybe she was.

  Among the documents in the safe was her Remali passport. As the child of a Remali citizen, she was a citizen herself, and her father, a great believer in dual or even multiple citizenship, had insisted on her having the passport. She was glad of it now. She booked a seat on the first flight to al-Remal.

  O

  The man at the car rental agency looked at her with disgust and anger. Didn’t she know that it was illegal for a woman to drive in al-Remal?

  She wandered through the terminal. Men stared at her. One said, in heavily accented English, “Cover yourself, woman!”

  She found a taxi and gave the driver the name of the town from the ledger. “A little village on the southern outskirts,” he said. “I will take you there—but not dressed as you are. Dressed as you are, I will take you only to the Hilton.”

  “Take me to the Hilton.”

  At the hotel, she instructed the driver to wait. “Forever, if you wish—and are paying.”

  She took a room and sent out for suitable clothes. A maid brought two horrible dark robes of some kind, at a price that must have been ten times what they were worth. Laila didn’t care. “Show me how to wear this,” she ordered. The driver was still waiting. He nodded approvingly at her new garments, but seemed offended when she immediately agreed to the price he asked for his services. Too late, she remembered Malik’s saying that a Remali enjoyed haggling more than he would enjoy having his first offer met. Well, too bad. She was in a hurry.

  The village was an ugly place of poor mud-brick houses baking in the sun. The Arabic that Laila had learned from her father was serviceable, but it took her efforts and the driver’s to find a house that went with the name in the ledger. Inside, was a very old woman and another
who appeared merely old. The room was dark after the blinding desert brightness, and Laila instinctively pushed back the obscuring veil. The older woman screamed and rocked back as if about to faint. Then she made a sign against evil—Laila recognized it as one Maliksuperstitiously used—and scuttled out the door. The other woman stared, came closer, stared harder.

  “Are you who I think you are, young miss?” she asked Laila in Arabic. “You tell me. Who am I?”

  “If you are who you seem to be, you are the child I nursed for the first year of her life.”

  Laila’s eyes widened with horror. “My mother?” she asked, nearly gagging on the words.

  The woman seemed shocked.

  “Are you the one to whom my father has been paying money?”

  “No. That was Um Salih, gone to Paradise five years now, by the will of God. Since then, the money has gone to another aunt of mine—the woman you just saw.”

  “Why was she afraid of me?”

  “She thought you were your mother come back from the grave.” She shook her head. “A nuisance. The whole town will know by now.”

  “Um Salih was my mother?” “No.”

  “Who was?”

  “So many questions, miss.”

  “I know I’m rude. I’m sorry. I need to know.” “Then I will tell you.”

  She told the story bluntly and quickly. When it was over, Laila felt nearly as shaken as the old aunt.

  “My mother was killed with stones because of me?”

  “Because of the law and God’s will, miss, not because of you.” The old wet nurse had become increasingly nervous with each passing minute. Clearly, she was anxious to have this sudden guest leave. “Miss, your father had been generous over the years. You have money for me?”

  “Money?”

  “Miss, by coming here you may have killed me. I must go somewhere, some- where far. Do you have money for me?”

  Laila gave her every rial she had. “I didn’t know I was putting you in danger.” “You beware, too, miss. Here is not a good place for you. Not just this poor village, but al-Remal.”