The Last Maharajan (Romantic Thriller/Women's Fiction)

by Susan Wingate

  Lately, Geoff had taken to complaining about her sloppy habits, the books piled on the wooden floor, the heap of newspapers a foot high on top her desk, and the mountain of laundry waiting to be washed, dried, folded, and put away. Even her library wall looked disheveled. Books she’d read were replaced in careless disarray on shelves, and not properly slotted into each author’s spot. After looking around the room, she realized she’d chewed her thumbnail down to a jagged quick – a nasty habit she could barely abide in herself. She examined it and then used the ragged thing to pull a cord of hair behind her ear – another nervous habit. Then, she shoved her hand under her arm to stop all of it.

  With fall well underway, she made a silent promise to spend the season becoming more organized, more thoughtful about her husband’s wishes. That, of course, meant taking time out of her busy workday – writing obituaries for a mid-size newspaper’s online service – to do household chores. Her anger flared when she considered

  Geoff’s ability to make cleaning and cooking her responsibility alone and not his own. She rolled her eyes and the steaming subsided into a simmer. Anyway, writing obits wasn’t exactly what she’d intended when she set off on a career as a writer. The book she’d embarked upon at forty came to a cold stop before it ever got off the ground. Still the idea of writing something longer like a novel tugged at her. And, since her mother’s illness turned critical, she contemplated writing a memoir. Although she wasn’t clear her motives were pure – if writing the memoir was appropriate in light of her mother’s coming death (at which point she could use stories she might not if Belle was still alive).

  Even so, she figured the story could be truthful without being cruel and so resolved that now was just as good a time as any. She could squeeze the memoir into her workday even if it meant forgoing an extra load of laundry.

  Damn! How did laundry become more important than her own work?

  She realized she’d flitted from Lebanon to the laundry within a matter of seconds. Maybe hormones were controlling her feelings this morning. Then she reconsidered. Maybe her mood was the rumbling from some of old history in her life giving way to her emotional unrest.

  In a matter of minutes, the day had turned a grizzled haze. She watched a flurry of soft winds sway the trees and imagined herself rocking in a cradle. She wished for a time before, an easier time from her youth.

  A remembered dream snuck into her mind from the night before and muzzled Euly’s swelling animosity to those things, those people, outside her control. In the dream, her ex-mother in-law, Sharice and she were locked in an embrace and profoundly happy to see one another after so many years. The mirage slid from a dream into a nightmare when she considered some virulent manifestation of her subconscious creating the vision – perhaps some hidden meaning about Belle’s deteriorating health. She’d always gotten along well with Sharice but after the divorce from her first husband, she’d lost track of her. So, why then would she let this memory crop up now? Guilt socked her in the gut and shuddered through her body.

  Sharice and Belle were vastly different from one another, a Mutt and Jeff of mothers. Euly remembered how they talked together one Christmas. Sharice sat nervously next to Belle who seemed to be conducting her own version of a cross- examination. The only things missing were a hard wooden stool and a flashlight. She remembered approaching the women. Belle’s smile appeared trite and fake. Sharice turned her head away. Euly knew by her mother’s pinched face, she didn’t approve of Sharice. At that point, Euly had pinpointed a disparity. When Belle smiled, she smiled only with her mouth not her eyes.

  Euly’s tea was still searing hot. She blew on the brew before each sip, trying to divert a sting on her tongue and sucked in cool air along with each thorny snap of bergamot.

  Her cat, Raz, jumped onto the arm of the couch where she sat startling Euly back to the present. When she jerked, tea spilled on her sweatpants boiling through to her legs.

  “Raz.” She squawked quietly pulling up on the hot wet spot and blowing at it.

  Finally, Euly stretched out crossing her legs over the ottoman. She patted her lap in a welcome for the cat. The cat coyly placed a single paw on one of Euly’s spreading thighs.

  The earliest part of mornings were the few hours of the day she didn’t mind her recent weight- gain – in the dark, and for the cat. Menopause, so far, had been kind to her. Anyway, she decided, she could use a pound here and there, for the cat, if nothing else.

  It wasn’t that she was overweight. She just wasn’t her prime weight any longer. Her dog, Jonathan, lie quietly next to her and didn’t stir, not through the shift of their positions nor through the cat’s motor-like-purr drumming like a soft muffled alarm clock stuffed somewhere in a drawer.

  Euly sat alone in the fog the morning provided. She wondered if she could ever remember a time when things were happy in her small family. She desperately flipped through pages of her history trying to recount happy moments, if only just one. Her heart pounded as page after troubled page elicited heartache, bitter scenes of accusation, threat and tears. She rubbed her eyes in order to thwart an onset of emotions but already felt a dewy film under her fingertips.

  Then, what brought her to this point, returned her yet again when she remembered another childhood memory, the memory of a party and how that party was the last one like it they would ever have.

  Her father’s family was of Arabic descent and it was this side Euly most identified. The Maharajan was an annual bash. Euly remembered going to several when she was young, but that was a good forty years before. That was when the parties ended too. Euly remembered a younger version of herself then, an innocent version – lost and forgotten – and maybe it was that girl’s voice when she heard herself utter a prayerful, Jesus.

  The day was a Saturday, a morning one summer during the middle 1960s. At Maharajans, people of Middle Eastern descent – and for Euly, Lebanese people – reconnected, caught up on lives, and felt some sense of unanimity in their heritage. People met, laughed, sang, danced, and gossiped.

  Belle, fair-skinned and blonde, went along to these parties out of marital obligation. Others thrilled to join in the times meant for heritable camaraderie.

  Everyone drank punch or beer, if old enough. People ate, drank and sang by a deep winking pool that seemed to laugh.

  By shaking her head, Euly tried to derail the memory and where it would end, but it didn’t work. She understood these early morning hours were saved for past acquaintances, those tortured visions of life we stuff under a rug and then shake out when the filth reaches a critical point. Euly winced at the metaphor, how a dirty rug might relate to her past.

  Still, Euly let the vision of the pool ebb out and return. The cool offender, adorned with sapphire tiles demarcating a high fill-line and ochre-stained cool deck from years of dirty feet on it, summoned its visitors.

  Aunt Moon’s son was there, Micaiah. He had he showed her how to roll her towel in order to carry it under one arm instead of holding it awkwardly in front of her like a doll at her chest while she walked. He was the closest thing she had to a brother. Anyway, he felt like a brother. She was only six-years-old at the time and small for her age. She remembered bouts with allergies and a variety of illnesses that kept her body from growing. Like that old cartoon character she recalled, an alligator – a sadly distorted fellow – only its large head scene out of the water swimming across a river. He crawls out and reveals a comparatively tiny body. The alligator then looks straight into the camera to explain his odd shape and says I’ve been sick. Somehow Euly identified with the sickly alligator but Micaiah did a great thing when he showed her how to roll her towel. He made her feel normal.

  Euly staved off the memory a few seconds longer by looking out toward the lighting sky. The tea’s scent taunted her senses and helped yank her back into the present. She dragged in another deep breath and held it for a second before shooing Micaiah out of her mind. A thin line in the East’s horizon meant only minutes until dawn.<
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  However, when she turned her head back, she was with Micaiah.

  He was about ten, a year older than Enaya, Euly’s sister. He was a big brown boy with thick black whorls of hair. Yet, Euly couldn’t help going back to that day at the Maharajan.

  The day sweltered. The sizzling blacktop glistened from heat. The shiny tar softened under their feet when Micaiah, Enaya, and Euly ran from the broiling car toward the coolness of the hall inside. The party was already under way.

  A sense of great promise bubbled up in Euly, especially when she thought about the crystalline water of the pool. Ready for a swim, she and her sister donned bathing suits showing-off shapeless fledgling bodies – tube-like figures of childhood, lean legs prickled with blonde peach-soft hair, red and tanned skin, and Micaiah in his boy swim trunks and round barrel chest.

  They wore faded, yellow rubber thongs on their small feet.

  The exact point in time?

  When thongs were made of flimsy rubber. When the Beatles and Frank Sinatra mixed into a medley of songs. When vendors drove in lazy vans through the neighborhoods playing plunky ice cream tunes. And, when a quarter bought a 50-50 bar.

  Euly’s dad and Uncle Teddy hurried into the party even before the kids. Mother and Aunt Moon lagged behind gathering up picnic items they’d brought along for the family. Euly fumbled with the towel and that’s when Micaiah helped her.

  She stared in awe at the beauty of the resort.

  With its yucca framed gardens, saguaro cactus and bright berried prickly-pear, the choky fragrance of mesquite trees intermixed with pungent chaparral, and rosy bougainvillea dripping from a high white jagged stucco wall, a wall that surrounded the resort’s Olympic-size pool where the festivities took place, by the edge, just a toe-in away.

  All the laughter screeched to dead silence when a woman screamed her daughter’s name – a scream that ended the morning. Time staggered like a skip in an old scratched record. Sound faded into beats, a muffled footfall of bare feet coming to a standstill. Then, there was no sound, only a poisoned hush – the kind of hush when a cuckoo strikes one – when movement and breathing altogether stop. And, it all takes place in the time it takes a hummingbird wing to flutter just once. Then, a slow rumble buoyed up in a swell flowing up and over the crowd watching – a rumble of whispers. She’s only five someone said. As if five had some special meaning. As if five was the determining point of swimming or drowning. As if five meant she shouldn’t die.

  Then, someone said the girl was her cousin yet even back then Euly couldn’t remember her eyes or smile. She couldn’t remember running fast with her on slippery concrete that hemmed the pool’s water or running by signs that warned NO RUNNING. She couldn’t remember slapping patty- cake-hands with mirrored faces beating out the words to Baker Man. Things cousins should remember. Then people began to move again but this time in slow-motion. Their heads their faces locked in statements of wonder, shock, torture.

  Their movement all slowed down as if the world itself had stopped spinning that very second. But, in the very next heartbeat, time sped up again. People’s heads turned fast. Their wet hair slapping faces in quick snaps. They finally paid attention long enough to see why the woman was screaming, what all the fuss was about. And, then everyone realizing in unison, the girl there, still arms and legs splayed out comfortably as the rocking water moved her body softly along the bottom of the pool. People stood idly by watching as if it were a street show.

  That’s when someone moved. A man dove in. She couldn’t recall his face but he dove deep and stayed under for a terribly long time, if only in seconds.

  Then, Euly stopped in a jolt. Amid all the fun, the singing, the laughter, the swimming, she couldn’t recall the lemony tabbouleh she must’ve eaten or the chalky paste of chickpeas in the hummus. She didn’t remember the boozy licorice nip of Arak her father, Ray, always let her sip, or dancing with him. She didn’t remember other kids’ laughing faces or jokes, or the music blaring over a clamor of voices. She didn’t even remember the stink of chlorine that must have smothered the air. What she remembered was the keen sense of panic and sudden quiet.

  Euly’s hand covered her mouth when her memories took her to the drowning. Phoenix, a burgeoning southwestern desert town, that looked more like an oasis back then than the sprawling metropolis it was today. She could still feel the sun burning her skin even ten years after she’d stolen away to the cooler climate of Washington. The oasis had long since dried up and grown into just another big city where one town encroaches onto the next, another encroaches onto it, and another, and goes on like this past the city boundaries until you can’t tell where one line ends and the other begins. Squalor found in every large metropolis had found its way there too. Crime, smog, back-to-back traffic, toxic garbage-can-lined streets, the indigent, the transient, a floundering ghetto but Phoenix had heat to boot, a daunting and oppressive heat.

  Euly knew the heat drove the little girl into the pool at that last Maharajan. Yet, everyone at one time or another jumped in to enjoy its sweet coolness. They did to get out of the tireless never- ending sun. The girl who drowned was no different from any other child there that day. The water looked cool and quenching. Kids already in the pool bobbed above the water-line like apples in a barrel. Others swam like tadpoles from one long end to the other. No problem.

  Aunt Moon had told the family another horrific morsel of information surrounding the girl’s drowning. The girl’s parents also lost their youngest son only a few years prior. They’d relocated from Ohio to Phoenix because of it. Their youngest boy himself had drowned in a cistern at a nearby farm. As kids will during a summer heat wave, they found a swimming hole. Euly could only imagine the depth of pain felt by the parents that day. She couldn’t grasp the lopsided fate the universe had handed this single family. She thought how one child dying from drowning is surely the limit for any family and, yet, they drew another losing card.

  Euly remembered the vastness of that day, at the beginning of it. She pictured the events in broad terms but only moments later, the day was brought into surgical view as if watching it on a homemade movie.

  People mingled. A group of older gents danced the dubke, a line dance her people had brought with them from the old country. A couple of old men played the tablahs and bendirs – bongo- like instruments wrapped in dried goatskin for the drumming surface. Old women behind them sang in warbled melodies that swung from soprano to alto like a wild rollercoaster, and twisted their hands and moved their bodies in a slow rhythmic gyration to the men’s music. These scenes were sketchy as if Euly might be making them up for effect.

  But she hadn't made-up the vision of that woman, the mother, shrieking as she tore through the crowd. When she noticed, she nearly knocked down another lady in a hurry past to get to her daughter. Her voice, wretched and guttural, wailed as if a fox caught in a trap.

  That’s when the man jumped in. The mother crumbled to her knees at the edge of the pool and waited there on the hot decking. She groaned out a muddle of words while her body rocked and swayed above the water line. She pressed her hands so hard into her mouth that it seemed to freeze her face into a scream.

  Her moaning and rocking continued until the man swam up with the girl’s limp body in his arms. He had little trouble lifting her small drenched frame out of the water. As the child lie motionless in front of this woman, she seemed unsure of what to do with her hands. They hovered over the girl’s dead body as if they had eyes of their own and were examining her, then she brought them back to her face again and, all the while, they continued to shake uncontrollably lost somewhere in a limbo between her dead son and her daughter’s lifeless body.

  That’s when the mother let loose of all her emotions. Screaming her name, she grabbed hold of the girl’s frail shoulders and shook her violently many times to try to revive her. Then, without warning, she let go of her tiny shoulders. The girl’s head dropped and her skull cracked hard onto the decking. A wave of shock pulsed through
those watching. Once again, the mother pressed her hands into her face and through the whole scene she repeated, “No,” until the word sounded more like a mantra than a command.

  Euly reached up after swallowing her last gulp of tea and touched her fingertips to her lips, not so much to dab any liquid off but instead to quiet the sad memory. She remembered how the man, whom she could barely visualize, clung to the edge of the pool inside the water next to the grief-stricken mother and watched.

  Euly recalled police leading onlookers away and paramedics funneling past them toward the pool. That was the last time she remembered ever seeing the girl’s parents. She didn’t recall going to the funeral and resolved that she must not have.

  Then, at some indeterminate point, the whole event disappeared from conversations. No one spoke about it and after a while they did something only survivors do – they let the memory die.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Recently, Euly was opening up old wounds, purging, as psychologists call it. She realized that maybe Belle was doing a bit of purging herself when, yesterday, she disclosed to Euly one of her deepest secrets.

  When she swallowed, Euly detected a hint of toothpaste mixed with Earl Grey. She murmured for Raz, in a half-hearted, irritated manner to, finally, take her spot. Her irritation, she reconciled, wasn’t at all caused by the cat. Euly rolled her eyes when she thought about her day’s duty – the real cause of irritation she’d impatiently directed onto her feline companion. The cause of her malaise was she would once again have to face her mother at the hospice and do so in the glaring light of this new information.

  Euly’s visits to see her mother had been daily for the past five months since the doctor cautioned that time was closing in on Belle. The doctors had said less than six months’ time.