by Holly Rayner
Mia grinned. “I was just heating up some food, actually. Do you want to sit and eat with me, or would you prefer some privacy?”
“I want to spend as much time with you as possible before I leave,” Rami told her, smiling a little more warmly. “I’m not looking forward to not being able to see you for a few days.” Mia returned his smile, still uncertain, but willing to go along with whatever he needed for the time being.
As they ate, Rami and Mia talked about everything but their relationship. She listened to Rami’s stories about his father, knowing he was searching for some bigger, grander theme to latch onto. “You know, the first time I got drunk I think I was maybe fourteen,” Rami said, spearing a tomato on the tines of his fork and bringing it to his mouth. “I was sent into my father’s home office for punishment.” Rami smirked. “Dad said that he would give me just the one pass—but that if I was caught drinking again, he would punish me more severely than I could imagine. As long as I wasn’t caught, he didn’t have to punish me.”
“Sounds like a pretty fair system to me,” Mia said dryly.
“I realize now that mostly he just didn’t really want to be bothered with punishing me,” Rami said, looking down onto his plate for a moment of meditative silence. “But he was…I mean I have to assume he cared about me at least a little, you know? Why else would he have adopted a child?” It was a question that Mia had asked herself about Rami’s parents on so many occasions that she was almost relieved to hear someone else asking it.
“They’re children of royal lineage too, right?” Rami nodded. “So maybe that’s all they ever knew.” Mia didn’t think that was much of an excuse, but she bit her tongue.
“But I want different for my child,” Rami pointed out. “Why didn’t they, if they grew up that way?”
Mia shrugged. “They may have wanted to do things differently from their parents but not known how,” she said, uncertain as to why she was defending Rami’s parents when his mother had been so openly cruel towards her. “Either way, there’s no point in carrying any kind of bitterness about your dad with you anymore.” Rami hesitated for a moment and then nodded.
“You’re right. I can’t keep looking for his approval; he’s not around to give it to me anymore. I’ll just have to do what I think is right.”
Mia smiled. “Well I think you’re on the right track.”
Rami reached across the table and gave her hand a squeeze. “Let’s hope I stay that way.”
SEVEN
Rami scrubbed at his face with his hands as the engine in his rental car cut off. It had been an exhausting twenty-four hours, but he knew that he had at least another week to get through before things would even begin to calm down. “Just keep doing the next right thing,” he told himself, closing his eyes and tilting his head back against the headrest.
He had had to take the first flight to the family compound; while his parents had a home close to his, for the purposes of the funeral, Rami knew that his mother, siblings, aunts, uncles—everyone—would be convening at the big property in California, where his branch of the family had first established themselves in the US. The cemetery that held all of Rami’s family members’ remains was just a few miles away from the sprawling family compound,.
He had called Mia the moment the plane had touched down, even a moment before the captain had cleared the use of phones in the cabin. “I assume you made it safely, then? Mia had said without any preamble.
“I did,” Rami had replied, smiling slightly. “How are you feeling? Are you resting?”
“I laid down for a nap after you left and I’m just eating some dinner now. I don’t even really know what it is.” Mia had laughed. “I just sort of threw things together until it started to smell good and then filled up a bowl.”
“Some of the best things you’ve ever cooked for me, you’ve made that way,” Rami had pointed out, smiling slightly to himself. “You are going to be able to make it in time for the funeral, right?”
“You let me know when it will be and I will make sure to get there in time,” Mia had told him. “But you need to take some time to be with your family. Especially your mom. I’m sure she must be absolutely wrecked by this.” Rami had his doubts about that; his mother had always struck him as the most self-sufficient, self-controlled woman on the planet. He couldn’t imagine her falling to pieces, even over the loss of her husband.
Rami couldn’t escape a sense of guilt that, rather than intense grief, all he felt was a kind of cold numbness. Maybe if I had more than a dozen memories of my father, I would be finding this more difficult, he thought, stretching against the tightness in his back and shoulders. He looked through the windshield at the main house. All of the lights were on, and a few cars had already arrived. “I might as well get it over with,” he told himself.
Rami opened the car door and stepped out, walking to the trunk to extract his suitcase. He glanced at his reflection in the tinted glass of his rented car’s windows and decided that the black dress pants, clean white shirt and matching black blazer, would be acceptable for meeting with his family.
He carried his suitcase over to the front door. He walked through the door, not stopping to knock or ring the doorbell; this compound was as much home as his parents’ place on the other side of the country. “Mama! I’m here.” Rami felt a rush of apprehension—what if his mother was still angry with him about the engagement? What if she didn’t want to see him even now?
“We’re in here, Rami,” Karima called out from the living room. Rami could hear the sounds of crying, muffled by distance, and steeled himself for the sight that he knew awaited him. He walked through the foyer and towards the living room, wishing that Mia were at his side. If I’ve messed everything up with her I will never forgive myself, he thought, remembering their conversation the day before.
Karima was sitting with Rami’s younger siblings—two boys and one girl: Adil, Hafiz, and Ghaliya. On the other side of the room, Rami saw his mother’s sister, Hadiyah, and his uncle Latif. His mother was nowhere to be seen. “Where’s Mother?” he asked Karima.
“She’s in her room,” his sister said quietly. “She…” Karima shrugged. “She says she can’t keep herself composed. She’s refusing to see anyone.”
“Let me take her something to eat,” Ghaliya suggested, pointing to the table where friends and relatives had already started piling food.
“No, Gali,” Rami said, giving his youngest sister a brief smile. “I’ll grab a couple of the pastries she likes and go tell her I’ve arrived.” He hugged each of his siblings, kissed his aunt and uncle in greeting, and made up a small plate of the foods he knew his mother loved most. She can’t keep herself composed? What happened to the woman who raised me? Rami shook off his disbelief, left his siblings and other relatives behind and made his way down the hall to his mother’s room.
He knew without asking that she would be in the same room she had always stayed in—the one she had shared with his father. Rami took another deep breath as he came to the door. He could hear muffled sounds of crying even through the thick wood. The sound, and the emotions it stirred up, shook him. He somehow hadn’t expected to find his mother actually, truly grieving for her husband. Rami lifted his free hand and tapped lightly on the door. “Mama, it’s Rami. I brought you some food.”
“Come in, Rami,” she called, her voice thick. “I’m not hungry, but you can come in.” Rami opened the door and the sight that greeted him was like nothing he’d ever seen. His mother was on the floor, her face buried against the blankets on his father’s side of the bed. She was dressed in black, but her veil was cast off, thrown onto a chair. She looked up at Rami, still standing in the doorway, and he saw that her makeup was smeared, inky trails from her mascara running down her cheeks.
“Mama,” Rami said quietly, finally remembering to close the door behind him. He strode across the room quickly, setting the plate down and sinking onto his knees next to her.
“I don’t know what to do
, Rami,” his mother said, her voice tragic. She buried herself in his chest, her arms draping around his shoulders. “I don’t know what to do without him. I don’t know how we’re going to live. Who’s going to run the companies? What am I going to do, Rami?” Rami stroked his mother’s back, wrapping his arms around her.
“I am your eldest son,” he told her firmly. “I’m sorry it took me so long to get here, but now that I’m here, I will do what I have to do. I will take care of Ba’s affairs. Don’t worry, Mama.”
“I miss him so much, Rami,” his mother said, her words stuttering to a stop on a hard, ragged sob. “I miss him. I don’t know who I am without him.”
“It’s okay, Mama,” Rami said, holding his mother’s shaking body tightly against his. “It’s going to be all right. I know you miss him; I miss him too.” Rami felt a pang of guilt that his words weren’t genuine, but he knew the truth would only hurt her more. “I will take care of everything, I promise you.” His mother nodded, rubbing her face against his shirt. Rami suppressed a wince at the knowledge that his smart, clean outfit would be hopelessly ruined by the makeup his mother was smearing on it. You’ll just have to change clothes, then. How much of an asshole are you, worrying about your clothes when your mother just lost her husband?
Rami hadn’t had any idea that his mother felt so strongly about his father. The two of them had been—at least in his eyes—almost as icy towards each other as they had been to their children. But they had had four other children after adopting me; they must have liked each other enough to conceive them. Rami patted his mother’s back, a frown beginning to form as he realized just how much more difficult the next few days were going to be with his mother so thoroughly distraught. He had counted on her being able to help him—on telling him all of the people he needed to contact. “Do you want me to get Gali or Hadiyah to come sit with you? You shouldn’t be alone right now, Mother.”
“Just hold me for a moment, Rami,” his mother said between gulps for breath. “Please, just hold me a moment and let me cry. I have to be strong around the others…” Rami nodded, stroking his mother’s back, still astonished that she could possibly have even an ounce of weakness in her. He had never seen any evidence of it in his entire life until that point.
EIGHT
Rami decided he would set to work on dealing with his father’s estate first thing after breakfast the next day. More and more family members were arriving in town, and to his relief, his mother had regained at least some of her composure.
At breakfast, Rami spent a few minutes talking with aunts and uncles. He greeted his grandmother, kissing her hands before consigning her to the care of the other members of the family. “I will be back, but I must leave for a few hours to begin taking care of Ba’s affairs,” Rami told his relatives.
Relief flooded through Rami as he left the compound. His father’s corporate headquarters were only about twenty minutes’ drive away from the house, and the stresses of his family’s grieving. As he climbed into his rented car and navigated his way out of the compound, Rami couldn’t help but feel slightly guilty that he was relieved to be getting away.
Even though the prospect of spending the next few hours looking over reports and financial records wasn’t exactly appealing, he thought he would prefer it to sitting in the main house, surrounded by his shell-shocked family, talking about what a good man his father had been. Rami didn’t think his father had been a bad person, he didn’t hate the man, but he had so few genuine memories of him from childhood that he felt strange being surrounded by people who had dozens of recollections.
In next to no time, Rami found himself at the big, towering building, gleaming with glass and steel. He pulled into his father’s parking spot, a slight shudder running through him as he did so. I guess I should just be grateful that no one decided to take advantage of his death and snag the spot for themselves today. The office was the hub of his father’s multiple business interests; while he hadn’t come in every day, he owned the building and the grounds surrounding it, so a personal parking space was inevitable.
Rami stopped at security and showed his ID to the man who was seated behind the desk. “I’m here to look over my father’s estate information and financials,” Rami said, injecting his tone with as much confidence as possible. He wasn’t quite able to shake the feeling of being little more than a child, a sort of impostor, in the hallowed precinct of his father’s business.
The security official looked over his ID and typed a command into the computer in front of him. “Ah, yes, you’re listed here as having unconditional access to the building,” he said. He gave Rami back his ID and held up his hand to keep him from walking away. His fingers rattled on the keyboard as he input another command, and in another moment he produced a key card—unmarked except for a number along one side. “This will give you access to his office proper,” the man said. He met Rami’s gaze. “I’m terribly sorry for your loss, sir. Your father was a great man and I was proud to work for him.” Rami gave him a nod of acknowledgement, trying to summon something like a smile before he turned away.
Inside the private elevator that his father used to access his office, Rami hesitated over the security keypad before keying in the digits of his father’s birthday. The doors closed and Rami was once more alone, in the small, plush elevator car. He pressed the button for the top floor and waited, resisting the urge to fidget. He sometimes suffered from claustrophobia in small elevators like this one. “You’d think if I was going to get claustrophobia it would be in a crowded elevator,” he mused to himself, shaking his head as the car made its way up through the floors.
The elevator chimed and Rami took a deep breath as he stepped through the doors, steeling himself for a flood of emotion that never came. He walked down the short corridor from the elevator to the door of his father’s office and slid the key card into the reader, typing the security code into the keypad next to it. The lock clicked open and Rami took another breath as he opened the door to his father’s office.
Rami had only been to his father’s office a handful of times, but it was exactly as he remembered it. He stepped through the door and closed it behind him, peering around at the clean but cluttered space. It was obvious that his father had intended to come back soon; there were files and stacks of reports waiting to be perused. Rami exhaled and made his way towards his father’s desk chair, determined to get down to the business that had brought him into the office in the first place. He would need to go through all of the financial records that he could get his hands on and figure out which accountants he needed to contact. His mother, even if she weren’t so distraught, would never be able to help him with this task—she had always been carefully shielded from the business side of her husband’s life.
Rami set to work, going through drawers and finding various documents. He located his father’s address book and found the names of his accountants, whom he then called to set up meetings. He began looking through the records of the various companies and business interests under his father’s control. It took him a moment to parse through some of the shorthand his father used, but slowly Rami began to get a picture of his different business operations.
It was a picture that started to alarm him—a notation about a loan that had been taken out against the assets of one of the lower-performing businesses; a report that another one of the companies was at risk due to not being able to pay off its existing loan; a third note that an investment had tanked, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars. As he read more and more, Rami realized that those few notes weren’t exceptions to the rule; they were the signs of a trend that was slowly but surely destroying all of the wealth that his father had built up. “There’s no wealth at all here,” Rami muttered to himself, turning to the file of yet another company that had been under his father’s control.
Almost every single one of the companies that his father had owned was in debt or underperforming. Even without seeing the accountants, it was obvious to Rami th
at the successful image his father had projected was propped up with loans and extensions on paybacks. Whenever a company failed to perform, his father had borrowed more money, seemingly hoping for better times. As the list of indebted companies grew, Rami realized that there was no way that he and his siblings would be in a position to inherit the billions they had always been told was their birthright. He wasn’t even sure that the payout from his father’s life insurance, after taking care of his funeral arrangements, would be enough to keep the companies he’d managed afloat.
Rami’s fear began to subside and was quickly replaced by anger. He rose from his father’s chair and walked across the office floor to the cabinet where he knew a few bottles of liquor were stashed. Rami snapped the fragile lock on the cabinet door and grabbed a bottle of whiskey and a crystal tumbler, carrying them both back with him to the desk. He cracked the seal on the bottle and poured himself a healthy shot, knocking it back right away before pouring another. He began opening more of the desk drawers, sipping at the whiskey as he did so. There had to be something else, some note to contradict what he’d read—surely his father hadn’t run every one of his businesses into the ground?
