Bride of the Sea

by Eman Quotah

  “They’re effing lying to me,” she says. “He’s in there but they won’t say so.”

  When they go inside together, she shows the guards the letter.

  “We’ve got a couple Iraqi guys,” they say.

  Through the several hours that Hannah and her father wait, the minutes are punctuated by the hummm-kachunk of the vending machine in the waiting room. Hannah wonders if coming to this place reminds Muneer of his own detention in a different country a dozen years ago. He has fully recovered his composure and kept himself busy reading a Miami Herald that someone left behind on a chair.

  As lunchtime rolls around, the room smells like Cup-a-Soup and microwaved pizza, probably coming from the guards’ lunchroom. Hannah buys two bags of Cheetos.

  “I would rather have that other kind—Doritos,” Muneer says.

  He eats a whole bag of Cheetos. After finishing, he holds his orange-crusted fingers up to the ceiling, almost in the position of supplication.

  “It’s time for prayer,” he says to her quietly.

  “Keep a low profile,” she says. “Wait till we’re at the hotel.”

  Despite her warning, he disappears to the bathroom and comes back with water-slicked hair. If some guard had seen him washing his feet in the sink, she doesn’t know what would’ve happened. He asks for the car keys.

  “I will sit in the car,” he says. “There are ways for travelers to—do it.”

  “Can you make it look like you’re, I don’t know, on the phone?” she says. “And turn on the air conditioner or you’ll roast.”

  He nods. While he’s gone, she talks to the guards again.

  They swear Fouad’s not here. Perhaps, they suggest, he’s at another detention center.

  In the parking lot, she calls the other lawyers on her cell.

  “He’s there,” they say on speakerphone. “Our client told us he’s there.”

  Her father is creakily letting himself out of the car. He seems to have weakened in this short passage of time, but he waves her away when she offers him a hand.

  The guards snicker when they see her.

  “This man is waiting to see his son,” she says. “Do you have kids?”

  One of the guards looks sheepish. Hannah tries to imagine his life. Maybe he coaches his kids’ sports teams. Maybe he’s a former military guy. Maybe he’s the child of immigrants.

  “Four o’clock,” he says.

  It’s two o’clock.

  Hannah and Muneer share sections of the paper. She reads sports, he reads style. She can’t bear to read about the war.

  Baba pulls out a notebook. Over his shoulder, she sees he’s making notes in English for his memoir. Or maybe not. He writes:

  This room. This waiting for my son, which is like waiting for my heart to be replaced in my chest.

  She told him to cool it with the Arabic, but she wishes he were writing in Arabic so she wouldn’t understand.

  She reads a thick stack of papers for a case she is handling at work. Every few minutes, she checks her silenced phone in case someone is trying to reach her.

  Four o’clock rolls around, and no one comes out to tell them why they can’t see Fouad or why he’s being held. Phone already in hand, Hannah tells her father she’s going outside to call the lawyers again.

  “Maybe they can tell me something about how this place works.”

  “Don’t leave me,” he says.

  “Come with me.”

  “They’ll think we left.”

  So they sit.

  At five o’clock, a guard enters the room and Muneer stands immediately, ready to see his son.

  “Time to go,” the guard says. “We’re closing up.”

  Hannah stands up, too, but she is invisible to them. Her father and the guard size each other up. They are the same height, but one is thirty years younger, white, muscled, and in the place where he belongs. The other does not sense the differences between them. Later, Muneer tells Hannah that the day’s waiting suddenly overcame him and reminded him how hateful it felt to be held against his will. He didn’t tell her how those few hours of waiting felt as long and hard as waiting for her return. A day doesn’t compare in the slightest to fifteen years, of course, but losing a child for any amount of time is torture.

  She sees a middle-aged man forgetting he is middle aged and foreign and not in charge, arguing and shouting, stupidly reaching for the guard’s throat—despite the man’s uniform and the gun in his holster, his broad shoulders, his crew cut, his fiercely square jaw. Before Muneer can touch the man, Hannah shoves herself between them, but the guard’s arms are long and muscular, and he grabs Hannah’s father by the scruff of the neck.

  “He wants to see his son,” she yells, and her father is saying, “I’ll go, I’ll go! Let me go!”

  “What the fuck are you doing?” says the guard. “Do you want me to lock you up with your terrorist son?”

  “Whoa,” says Hannah. “You’ve got no proof of that. We’ve been told of no charges.” This is her brother the guard is talking about, but she’s going to keep it professional. She doesn’t want him to know Fouad is her brother, her baby brother who loves DC comics, Batman especially, and used to ask her to send issues back with their father whenever Muneer visited her.

  “Get this old guy out of here. He’s not going to see his Al-Qaeda son today.”

  Muneer mutters in Arabic, “Goddamn him to hell and make his teeth fall out.”

  “What’s he saying?” Behind the guard, more men shaped like bears hover and growl.

  Hannah tugs her father by the sleeve. “Don’t do that. Don’t talk in Arabic. You’re going to make things worse.”

  The guards escort them out. One of them tells Hannah, “Don’t bring him back. His son is not here.”

  “Someone should tell him where his son is,” she says. “You can’t detain someone without reason.”

  “Only scum would defend a terrorist.”

  She should stay calm for her father, but her heart slams against her chest, trying to escape. He sinks to his knees, panting, unable to stand any longer. Hannah slips her arms under his armpits and pulls. Swiftly, she grabs him by the waist and says, “Lean on me.”

  None of the guards moves to assist. Hannah screams, “One of you help me carry him to the car, whether you like it or not. If you’ve given him a heart attack, I will sue your asses.”

  “Be calm, be calm,” Baba says. “I can walk to the car.”

  They’ve missed a downpour. The sidewalks and pavement are darkened by wetness. Steam rises from the hot surfaces. It touches their faces, and she feels as though they’re walking through a gauze curtain. The cars look fresh and clean. Hannah breathes the moist air.

  Sitting in the driver’s seat, she brings her hands to her face. Soon her shoulders shake and she sobs as though she has lost someone she loves. Her face is a wall of tears, her mouth a cave of saliva.

  Baba puts his hand over hers on the steering wheel. “Are you OK?”

  “We can’t leave him there,” she says.

  She has been calm and stoic. She has been pragmatic. Her dad must not speak Arabic. They must not appear angry. But Fouad’s situation hits her hard. She is thinking about how she never knew what she was missing the years she was gone. She has family again, she knows. She feels how scared Fouad must be.

  “We’ll get him out,” Muneer says. “God willing. They can’t keep him forever.”

  She’s too distraught to drive, so they switch places. She lowers her window and puts her arm on the sill, her head in the crook of her elbow. The breeze on her face lulls her.

  At the hotel Muneer calls Lamees. He is ashamed of what happened—attacking a guard—and yet not ashamed. This is what you do to protect your family. You act and pray to God for forgiveness. You use vitamin Waw—for wastah, connections. Hannah will not understand, but wastah works in America, too. On his instruction, Lamees calls Uncle Fareed, who calls a guy who knows a guy who knows a prince who knows a US officia
l. By the next day, everything is arranged.

  In the morning, over coffee and muffins at the hotel Starbucks, he tells Hannah they can go back to the detention center to pick Fouad up, and he won’t need her help with the book anymore.

  She asks if he’s sure. She wants to be involved, she says.

  “I’m tired,” he says. “Perhaps I will write it later.”

  Hamza sees the connection before Hannah does.

  “He doesn’t want to rattle cages,” he tells her over the phone, while she and her father and Fouad are waiting for their flights at the Miami airport. Fouad will go back to Jidda. His education in America is over. He won’t talk to anyone about what happened in the detention center. He swears wallahi he’s never hung out with terrorists or zealots. He wants to go home.

  “Whose cages?” she says.

  “The people who shut him up last time, who put him in prison. Those are the same people who got his son out.”

  She’s not naïve. She should have seen it.

  DREAMS

  2018

  LAST WISH

  Hannah prophesies her grandfather’s death.

  She’s always had memories of dreams here and there, like anyone else, but since her forty-eighth birthday two months ago, her dreams have been more vivid. She wakes up with memories of symbolic sheaves of wheat and fat sheep and never-ending stairways and the family in Jidda burying her mother.

  Unlike the Prophet Yusuf, she has no one to explain the symbols to her.

  For several weeks before the news of her grandfather’s illness arrives, she dreams of emaciated animals—dogs, cats, goats, chickens, a lion, a hyena, a zebra. She dreams of wilting fruit trees and straw-brown lawns. At first, she attributes these visions of near-death to the onset of her eleventh New England autumn, the primary intensity of the trees bursting against the deep blue sky, that last gasp before winter. She’s no wimp about winter; she grew up with the northern Ohio lake effect, frozen eyelashes, snow boots, snow pants, and snow mittens clipped to her down coat. The time she spent in temperate and tropical places strengthened her fundamental resilience.

  Still, fall depresses her. It conjures death. Hamza makes fun of her for saying that, but she knows she’s not wrong.

  She wakes up on a fall Tuesday morning and digs her sketchbook, which she hasn’t touched in years, out of her nightstand drawer. It’s the same fat book she took on her first trip to Jidda, set aside when she ditched art school for pre-law. Last night she dreamed she was drawing in it—was it a dream of the past, or the future? She isn’t sure. The sketchbook has been hiding under random photos of Fareed as a baby, as a toddler, in first grade; under a half-knitted scarf and smooth wooden knitting needles; boxes of not-her-taste jewelry from aunts and cousins; forsaken cell phones; and an iPod Shuffle.

  She sketches, in pencil, trees outside the window and snippets of her dreams, trying to capture in-betweenness: the space between seasons, between waking and sleeping, between life and death.

  A few hours later, Aunt Randah sends a WhatsApp message saying Hannah’s grandfather is in the hospital and she should visit him one last time. No one knows exactly how old he is, because there were no birth certificates when he was young, when her parents were young. And no one but God knows when a man’s time will come, Randah writes. But he’s old, and these are possibly his last days.

  In between classes at the ESOL school where she teaches, Hannah reads the message. She’s alone in the windowless cliché of a teachers’ break room, which smells of burnt coffee and reheated spaghetti and chicken.

  She does the math in her head to calculate what time it is in Jidda. It’s a decent hour, and probably not prayer time. It seems simpler to call Randah than to write back.

  There’s no debate over whether Hannah will go see her grandfather in the hospital. Randah takes it as a given. Hannah and her grandfather Fareed have grown close in the years since her reunion with her family. A dozen times or so he’s come to visit or asked her to meet him wherever he was speaking or attending, when he was younger and more able to travel. She flew to Chicago, New York, and LA to see him. It’s been a few years. She liked the light banter they had the times they met for coffee. He brought her clothes and jewelry from her aunts and uncles—sweaters, oddly enough, and rhinestoned things and good, soft gold earrings, and pretty embroidered abayah and tarhah sets in the latest colors (it’s not all black anymore). Over the years, he’s emailed her articles he wanted her to see, about youth in Saudi, about changes that are coming (“economic diversification”) and changes that seemed like they were not, but finally did (women driving). He has a rascally seriousness she wishes he could gift to her, instead of the jewelry and clothing. Sometimes, she almost forgets he is her mother’s father. He’s more like her dad in many ways. Curious. Opinionated. A truth teller.

  Her grandfather has never said whether he sees her mother in her. He never asks about her mother.

  And though she named her son after her grandfather, Hannah hasn’t told her father about the times she’s seen her grandfather Fareed, since the first time she mentioned him in passing. Her father paused so long on the phone she thought the line had dropped.

  “That part of the family,” he said. “I am not on good terms.” She would expect him to be grateful that her grandfather had helped get Fouad out of detention, helped her father get out of Saudi jail. But her father is embarrassed of these favors he can’t repay.

  She has never wanted to ask her grandfather if her mother spoke to him when they were hiding. She does not want to have to blame him. She will go visit him one last time, though it will be impossible to do that without telling her father she’s coming to Jidda.

  Randah is intent on complicating her life further with a request that pulls Hannah’s heart up into her throat. She chokes a little when she hears it: “Can you convince your mother to come?”

  Hannah swallows her heart into the pit of her stomach. “I don’t know where she is.”

  It’s a way of not saying: If I thought I could persuade her, I wouldn’t want to.

  Randah has a way of guilting her, though. “Please, habibti. It’s your grandfather’s last wish.”

  At home, Hannah pulls the calendar down from the bulletin board in the kitchen to try to find a weeklong break in her schedule. Hamza is browning ground beef for tacos. She wishes Fareed were here to grate the cheese, but he won’t be home from University of Washington till the holidays.

  “The family must be distraught to be losing their patriarch,” Hamza says.

  In this kitchen smelling of hamburger and onions, cilantro and Colby-Jack, she feels trapped by Taco Tuesday, the Americanness of her existence.

  RELICS

  When they moved to Cambridge ten years ago, so Hamza could code for a genetics startup, Hannah told herself one of the benefits would be living closer to W. A long drive or a quick flight, and they are in Toledo. They see W at least once a year, at Thanksgiving or Christmas or spring break. She visits them or they visit her. She’s edging up on seventy, and her accent is as hard-edged and as distant from Hannah’s mother’s accent as ever.

  Hannah hadn’t, at the time, thought about how Cleveland lay en route to Toledo, how her mother, as far as she knew, was a mile marker on the way to W. She’s never run into her accidentally at Hopkins Airport—the last place they met—but the possibility is a burden. Whenever she thinks of W, her brain has to pass through Sadie on the way there.

  Telling Randah she doesn’t know Sadie’s whereabouts wasn’t a lie. Hannah doesn’t know her mother’s home address or her place of business. She doesn’t know if Sadie is dating anyone, or married, or what church—church!—she attends.

  But she has a phone number that’s probably good. She changed her own number years ago so her mother couldn’t reach her, figured out how to keep it private so her mother couldn’t find her again, like she always seemed to. But on purpose, in case she ever needed it, Hannah saved her mother’s number. Not at Hamza’s encourageme
nt; on her own she’d done it. Written it down on a piece of paper because she didn’t trust her SIM card. In the end, the SIM card worked. It worked so well, her mother’s name is in her contacts twice.

  She texts the number. If her father were dying, she would want someone to tell her.

  “Your father is in the hospital. I’m going next week. Randah wants me to ask you to come.”

  Immediately, regret hits her like a hangover. She should have told Hamza to do it, or given the number to Randah. Why hadn’t she? Why hadn’t she thought of that years ago?

  It’s a relief and an annoyance that she gets crickets from her mother in return for her message.

  “At least she knows,” Hamza says over tater tots and pizza on Takeout Friday. “No one expects her to go. Her Saudi passport is probably decades expired.”

  When Fareed was younger, she rarely talked about her mother in front of him because he worried about everything—his grades, whether his parents would come home or end up in a fiery car crash, whether things cost too much, whether he was coming down with chicken pox (it was acne). So much worry was strange, she thinks, for a kid who grew up with stability she never had. She’s never told him about her childhood. She never explained why they didn’t see her mom. His Syrian grandparents were doting and visited often. There was no reason to tell him the truth about Sadie.

  She wonders if she should tell him now.

  Her phone begins to buzz. It’s her mom.

  “Thank you for the message.”

  She can’t do this alone. She puts the phone on speaker so Hamza can hear.

  “What’s up, Mom?”

  “When are you leaving for Jidda?”

  “Monday.”

  “I think I should go,” her mother says. “I think that’s probably what I should do. I don’t know… How is my father?”

  “He’s in intensive care. I couldn’t book an earlier flight.”

  The teakettle whistles. Hamza removes it from the stove and pours water into a teapot with mint and two Lipton’s tea bags.