The Ambassador's Wife

by Jennifer Steil

  —

  “WOULDN’T WANT TO meet you in a dark alley.” Finn’s car had pulled up while she was firing, and he was standing in his pin-striped suit at the back of the range. Her headphones had muffled the sound of his arrival.

  “You’d be fine in a dark alley,” said Miranda, lowering her weapon. “I couldn’t sight for shit in the dark.” Damn. She’d managed to swear in front of the team again. She wasn’t sure how much of it they understood, but she had been trying to avoid shocking them more than she already did on a daily basis. Fortunately, the men were all busy loading their weapons or rolling old tires onto the range to create an obstacle course. Miranda handed her gun to Mukhtar and took Finn behind the car to give him a pair of his jeans and a work shirt.

  The new guys and Bashir (who had arrived with Finn, looking very smart in one of the new suits and ties Tucker bought for the men; they had to blend at diplomatic events, after all) clambered up a rocky mountainside for a better view.

  It worked like this: Finn began striding through the obstacle course the men had erected—his bodyguard glued to him—as if he were heading to a meeting. One man was always assigned to be immediately beside him (putting the “close” into “close protection”), while the rest positioned themselves strategically ahead and behind. The tires represented bushes, stumps, or trash cans behind which Finn could hide. Probably bushes would be too porous. But anyway. Six of the guys were spread out, three on either side, alert for threats. Their elbows jutted stiffly out at their sides as they swung their heads left and right. They reminded Miranda of a cluck of wary chickens prowling a farmyard. Bashir beckoned to her, and Miranda clambered up the rocks to the ridge overlooking the range. “Nice suit,” she said to him. He smiled, turning toward her so she could see her face reflected in his mirrored sunglasses.

  A whistle blew, signifying enemy fire. Yusef, operating as Finn’s bodyguard, grabbed Finn around his waist, arresting him midstride, and shoved him down into the dirt behind one of the tires. Then, yanking Finn up by his belt, he propelled him forward, running him through the gunfire to the next hiding place. Finn’s legs cycled through the air at the end of Yusef’s arm as if he were a marionette pantomiming a sprint. All the while, Tucker’s team was shooting live bullets at the “enemy,” covering Finn and Yusef while backing away. Their goal was to allow Finn to be safely extracted, rather than to chase the enemy. Miranda could see Yusef shouting in Finn’s ear, but the gunfire made it impossible to hear anything. Even from the ridge it made her ears ring.

  Miranda watched as Yusef shoved Finn into the dirt again. She worried about his glasses. Her eyesight blurred for a moment, and she realized her knees were trembling. Yusef yelled at Finn as he hauled him up again. Was it the manhandling of the person she cared most about in the world that brought up the waves of nausea? The fact that live bullets were flying around him out here in the desert? Or the reminder that this wasn’t just playacting, that Finn could actually face such an attack? I will not cry in front of the men, she willed herself. I will not cry in front of the men.

  “The guys have to get used to being rough with him if the situation calls for it,” Tucker said when the exercise was over. “Being too respectful in a situation like this could get him killed.”

  Miranda nodded and tried to smile. Finn strolled toward her, flushed and smiling, his forehead slick with sweat and his jeans streaked with dirt. “You survived,” she said weakly.

  “Sorry!” Finn squeezed her sweating hand.

  “Okay, Madame Ambassador, your turn.” Tucker slipped a hand under her elbow and steered her down the slope. “Let’s show the guys how to treat a woman.”

  Miranda walked with him to the course, where he turned her over to Mukhtar. Her legs felt strong again, and she wasn’t afraid. Only things utterly beyond her influence terrified her. Keeping Finn safe, for example. She never feared for her own safety; her own safety felt more within her control.

  A wave of euphoria struck as she walked alongside Mukhtar into the imminent ambush. She felt a temptation to laugh. “Walk faster,” said Mukhtar. “More purposefully. You’re strolling.” She quickened her pace. Where might she be rushing? To a meeting of the Heads of Mission Spouses Association? The thought of any of the designer-suited ambassadors’ wives waddling at speed made her want to laugh again. No one except Finn ever walked quickly and purposefully in this country.

  The whistle shocked her from her reverie. Explosions erupted in every direction, the men opening fire. Miranda suddenly forgot everything she was supposed to do. “Get DOWN!” shouted Mukhtar, pushing her into the dirt behind the first tire. He held her to the ground with a hand on the middle of her back while she breathed iron-tasting dirt into her mouth. While watching Finn, she had imagined how she would do it when it was her turn, how fast she would run, how she would throw herself into the dirt. But now there was no time for her slow responses. All she could do—and all she was intended to do—was blindly submit. Not something with which she had much practice.

  A few seconds later she was dragged up by the waistband of her trousers and shoved in the direction of the next tire. Mukhtar’s mouth was next to her ear, shouting, “MOVE, MOVE, MOVE!” But she couldn’t make her legs pedal forward fast enough to keep pace. It was like running in a dream, where her legs became heavy or diffuse, unable to propel the body forward. The next time she hit the dirt her knee struck a sharp rock. She felt the indent it made in her skin but couldn’t register the pain. As they sprinted for the last tire, a muscle in the back of her right thigh gave a twang of protest. Yoga and swimming were apparently poor preparation for the rigors of dodging terrorist fire.

  By the time she and Mukhtar reached the end of the course, Miranda was suffused with adrenaline. She smiled at Finn as he trotted toward her, holding his camera aloft. “I got photos!” he said. “You were fantastic.”

  Miranda limped beside him to the car. “Nothing but glamour, the life of an ambassador’s wife.”

  An hour later, as they rode back to the Residence in their armored car, Miranda’s mood tumbled down around her like a house of cards. Discreetly squeezing Finn’s hand on the seat beside her, she found herself fighting back tears again.

  “You were good with that SIG Sauer,” said Finn. “I’m thinking about putting you on the team.”

  Miranda smiled, not at him but out the window at the endless beige horizon, so he couldn’t see her eyes. “Well, at least if you’re attacked and someone drops a pistol, I know what to do with it,” she said at last.

  “Let’s hope I have a clumsy abductor.”

  “And that he has a SIG. Otherwise, we’re fucked.”

  NOVEMBER 18, 2010

  Finn

  Finn sits at the tiny card table in his kitchen, staring at the drawing. Even Cressida seemed to have recognized its authorship, grabbing a corner in her damp fist while babbling “Mummmumummy!” Or perhaps she had somehow recognized herself, and deduced that only a mother would create such an image. For it clearly was Cressida, a version of Cressida. Miranda had always said she couldn’t draw her daughter properly, and Finn understood what she meant. Their tiny girl changed too quickly to pin to paper. But though the child in this drawing wasn’t a perfect resemblance—she had less hair, more fat on her thighs—she retained an essential Cressidaness. Cressidity. The shape of her eyebrows, her long, sweeping lashes, her tiny bowed lips.

  How long ago had Miranda drawn this? He had no way to know. It was Nadia who had produced it from beneath her abaya. Her family lived in the mountains a few hours north and west of the city, she said. Just outside her cousin Imaan’s village was a small training camp. Everyone knew what the men were training for, but it wasn’t openly discussed. Someone at the camp might have heard something about a Western woman taken hostage, thought Nadia. Surely these kinds of men talked with each other. She and the other women had been systematically—and cautiously—contacting relatives in their home villages, taking advantage of their vast networks.

 
Nadia rang Imaan, one cousin she was sure she could trust. When they were still in school, Imaan had caught her scribbling pictures in her religion notebook several times and had never told on her. She made Nadia tear up the sketches of their various relatives, but more from fear of punishment than from fanatical fervor. She didn’t want to see Nadia in trouble. Imaan hadn’t heard anything about an American woman but said she would pay a visit to her eldest aunt, who lived out at the camp, where her husband and son participated in the mysterious exercises. Aisha’s hut was far enough from the training grounds that she wouldn’t have to see any of the men. Imaan didn’t know any other women who lived out there, just Aisha, who cooked for the men and looked after them.

  With her fifteen-month-old son, Kabir, Imaan sat with this aunt in a small, dark hut. On a mat in the corner lay a small baby, waving its feet and hands. “I’m looking after her for her mother, who died,” Aisha said, without further explanation. Imaan wanted to ask who the mother was, but Aisha’s tone did not invite questions. She wondered what Aisha fed the child, who was surely too young for solid food. It was thin, though not as thin as most babies here. It didn’t look unhealthy. Obviously, it was eating something. The baby caught hold of its foot and stared at it with amazement. Imaan remembered that age, remembered Kabir’s astonishment at discovering his hands, that they belonged to him and could be commanded to do things. She hadn’t realized that babies were not born knowing that their hands are theirs.

  A slow walker, Kabir was still slightly unsteady on his feet. While his mother drank tea with her aunt, gossiping about upcoming weddings, he crept slowly around the inside wall of the hut, clutching his small fingers around the protuberant stones. As he neared the baby, it began to cry, whether from fear of the towering toddler or hunger or discomfort, it was difficult to tell. After a moment, Aisha rose to pick up the child. “Tch tch tch,” she clucked at the baby, jiggling it in her arms. The baby wailed more loudly, clutching at the folds of Aisha’s abaya. Turning its head toward her breast, it opened its mouth in a fishlike pucker, searching for a nipple. Imaan watched this with interest. Someone must be nursing this child, and it couldn’t possibly be old Aisha. “Dagiga,” said Aisha, taking the child outside.

  Imaan looked back at her son, who continued his investigation of the hut’s walls. He stopped for a moment as his hand touched something unusual, a sharp fold of paper. Intrigued, he pulled at it, until it slid out from between the stones where it had been hidden, the force sending him backward onto his bottom. Waving it triumphantly, he struggled to his feet and started inching back toward his mother. “What have you found?” she said, opening her arms to her son. Kabir staggered over and pressed the paper against her knee. It was difficult for Imaan to make out the image in the dim light of the hut, but she could see it looked something like a child. A tremor of fear shuddered through her stomach. A heretical image. An actual person. It couldn’t be Aisha’s, could it? Could Aisha draw? She had never seen her hold a pen for any reason. The only person she knew who could draw was her cousin Nadia. She should tear up this image. But something in her maternal heart resisted damaging the depiction of a toddler. Even this odd-looking, unusually chubby little toddler. No one in this impoverished region had children so fat!

  When a rustle of abaya announced Aisha’s return, Imaan’s initial impulse was to ask her about the drawing. But then suddenly she remembered something Nadia had said. The missing American was an artist. “She doesn’t draw people,” Nadia had been quick to reassure her. “Just flowers and mountains and things.” The woman might say that, Imaan thought, but it didn’t make it true. Quickly, she folded the paper and slipped it into her left sleeve before looking up to smile at her aunt in the doorway. Now, at least, she wouldn’t have to arouse anyone’s suspicions by asking about the American.

  Once home, she rang Nadia. “I found a drawing,” she said. “In a house out there.” She had to be careful on the phone. Some of the camps had ways of listening in. Nadia couldn’t conceal her excitement. What did the drawing look like? Nadia asked. Did the child have hair? Was it fat? “I will come Friday,” she said. “Please save it for me.” Only once Nadia had arrived and the two women were alone, walking with the plastic jugs to fetch water, could Nadia speak privately with her cousin. “There’s something else,” said Imaan. “There is a baby out there.” She described what she had seen, and Nadia looked thoughtful. “Miranda has a little girl in the city,” she says. “Maybe she was still feeding her.” The two women stared at each other in silence. Then, it was very important that she go back to Aisha, Nadia said. She must ask her what happened to the woman who drew the child. Was she still there? Could she be somewhere in the camp?

  Impossible, said Imaan. Then everyone would know she had some connection to the woman, and her own family would be in danger. Those men would do anything. Aisha would wonder why she was asking, why she hadn’t asked about the drawing as soon as she found it. And they didn’t want to arouse the suspicions of the men, did they? Come on, you’re smart, think of something, said Nadia. Think of some indirect way to ask. Imaan looked at her cousin despairingly. “I don’t know,” she said. “What if these men find out we are asking? What will become of us?”

  When she returned to the city, Nadia rang Tazkia, who had her brother arrange the meeting with Finn outside of the city. Maybe the drawing could help him. At least they knew now one place Miranda had been. It was possible she was still there, although Imaan had said she saw no trace of any woman, other than the unusual health of the nameless baby.

  Finn had been grateful that only Tazkia saw his face when he opened the picture of his daughter. Choked by sorrow and disbelieving gratitude, he could not speak for several minutes. “Where was this?” he finally said. “Where is she?”

  AUGUST 11, 2009

  Miranda

  The first time Miranda ever left Cressida with a babysitter for more than a half-hour was the day she finally went to the orphanage. She had been planning to go for more than a year but something always got in the way: teaching, national days, work, pregnancy complications. There was no reason for her to be nervous about leaving Cressida; the baby adored Gabra, and there were three other women in the house to watch over her. “This baby, she has four mothers,” Negasi was always saying. But a nagging guilt persisted as Altaf steered her through the half-paved, litter-strewn streets. Should she have taken Cressida with her? Surely it would be fun for her to play with some other children. Or would it aggravate their parentless state, to see her caring for a child? And then there were the diseases to consider. Cressida had been shot up with as many vaccines as possible in London before they had flown back here to resume their lives, but she was too young to be fully vaccinated against the bacteria harbored by the less fortunate children of this country.

  This train of thought was derailed by her arrival at Marguerite’s. Miranda’s friend was waiting in the driveway, jingling her car keys, her blond hair braided and pinned up, her eyes concealed by enormous dark glasses. “Am I late?” asked Miranda, climbing down from her car.

  “Non, pas du tout,” said Marguerite, kissing Miranda three times on her cheeks. “I just wanted to be ready when you arrived. On y va?”

  “Oui.”

  “Suis-moi.”

  It would have made things so much simpler if the two women could have driven together, but Miranda was not allowed to travel in any car but her own, and Marguerite, who had no bodyguard, said she had errands to run afterward. It wasn’t far to the orphanage. Fifteen minutes later they were parked outside of a walled complex and striding toward the entrance. Miranda fervently wished she could leave Bashir (today’s escort) behind. She didn’t want him to scare the children. She hoped his guns weren’t visible.

  At the entrance to the courtyard, they were greeted by a flock of abaya-clad women. With a chorus of birdlike chatter, they welcomed Miranda and Marguerite, leading them through a series of courtyards to the buildings where most of the children lived. Marguerite had been
coming every week for several months and so knew many of the children. “I’m glad you’re here,” said Marguerite. “I don’t speak Arabic, and I don’t have any idea what they are telling me half the time.”

  Miranda had expected something out of Dickens, a crumbling, derelict structure crowded with dirt-smeared faces and starved, stick-thin limbs. But that wasn’t what she discovered. The children’s rooms in the sturdy cinder-block structures were airy and spotless, with two or three single beds per room. Not mattresses on the floor but actual wooden beds. They were all neatly made up, with a folded blanket on top of each mattress. In fact, they were far lovelier rooms than Miranda had seen in many of the homes she had visited. There was also a living room, and a television in the foyer.

  In the first building, the boys all ran to shake their hands, clutching her fingers with a gratitude Miranda felt she hardly deserved just for turning up. The boys were clean and neatly dressed in long pants and pressed green shirts. A woman in charge of the house came to the front room holding a tiny child wrapped in a pink polyester blanket. This was Abdul-Malik, said Marguerite. He had a thatch of shiny, dark hair and chicken pox scars covering his face. The woman handed the baby to Miranda. Immediately she could feel the unnatural heat of his body through the blankets. “Fever?” she asked. “Yes,” said the housemother. “But he is getting better.” The child felt as light as a kitten in her arms, and stared at her with blank brown eyes. “He is about two months old,” said Marguerite. “Though no one knows for sure. His mother died in childbirth.” So where is the father? Miranda wanted to ask. And the aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters and grandparents? Usually there was no shortage of these here. Where did the mother die? How could this child end up with no one? But she said nothing. Where did you start?

  As she cradled the limp child, the crowd of boys, who ranged in age from two to twelve, surrounded them. “Salaama aleikum!” they cried. Where were the women from? How old were they? What did they think of their country? They had endless questions, none of which were Where are my parents? When Miranda told them the name of her hometown, they savored it on their tongues. “See-ah-tull!” they cried. “Pretty name for a town.” They asked the questions any child would ask. Did she like soccer? What did she like to play? Did she have a television? When Miranda said that she and her husband had no television, they stared at her with sudden sympathy. She was obviously worse off than she looked.