Abdullah responded with a name, Adnan, and a phone number. Two of my friends had been calling lawyers. But whenever they mentioned my name, each attorney said no.
Adnan had said yes.
My second call was to my sister-in-law, Muneera. My brother had been detained for twenty-four hours, until his friends had bailed him out. Thankfully, my son did not know what had happened. When Aboudi woke the morning, after I had been taken away, my sister-in-law had told him, “Your mommy is on a trip, fixing a big computer.” I asked her if the campaign had tweeted about my detention.
“Yes,” she said, and added, “Manal, we had to shut down the Facebook event.”
I was overwhelmed by fury and frustration. There had been more than 120,000 people signed up to attend that event. Why had I gone to prison if this was to be the outcome? Why did the authorities always get to win?
I started shouting at my poor sister-in-law with the prison administrator sitting right there, listening. “How could you do this? I’m here in jail and you are outside. You are supposed to keep that up.” During my interrogation, I had promised to remove my name from the campaign. I had promised to step aside. But I didn’t want the other girls to stop. “You’re giving away everything that I had to sacrifice for,” I railed into the phone. “You’re just giving that away.”
“We received phone calls from strangers saying, ‘You should turn the event off, take it down,’?” my sister-in-law explained. One of the people working on the campaign had already put the YouTube driving video on a private setting, accessible only by a password. The group had also changed the name of one Twitter account from @Women2Drive to @FreeManal. But eventually, the Twitter account was also taken down.
I felt betrayed. My sister-in-law tried to soothe me, saying, “No, no, we’re doing this for your own safety. It’s actually good. Now all we care about is that you leave the jail soon.”
But I was having none of it. “You cannot stop the cause because I was sent to jail. You should continue the cause because you have to pay the price.”
I had half expected those two calls to be my last, but instead, unlike other prisoners, I was allowed to make a phone call to my sister-in-law each day, rather than once a month. The call always took place in the prison administrator’s office. No one told me that I was allowed a daily call per some official policy. It simply happened, like so many other things, made up as we went along. Saudi society is highly rule-bound, but many of these rules are unwritten and, at arbitrary moments, some rules are changed. The same system that allowed me to be arrested and imprisoned without knowing under what authority also allowed me a daily phone call. Somewhere, someone had decided to apply different rules to me. This gave me hope that someone, somewhere else, might suddenly decide that enough was enough and declare me free to go.
On my next call to Muneera, she started to cry when she heard my voice. She told me that Aboudi was in the hospital with a high fever. He had fallen ill at his dad’s. Muneera was at the hospital with Aboudi’s grandmother. At first I couldn’t believe it. I kept asking if he was there for a checkup, saying he had been fine at home. But when my ex-mother-in-law got on the phone, I couldn’t hear her voice. She couldn’t speak at all. She just cried.
I kept calling into the phone, “What’s going on here? What’s wrong with Aboudi? Can I talk to my son?”
She held the phone up to his ear. I couldn’t even hear him.
I kept saying his name, “Aboudi,” and finally, in a voice that barely made a sound, I heard him ask, “Mommy?” I had never heard my son sound like that before. I kept saying, “Aboudi, stay strong.” I have only talked to Aboudi in English. I struggled for so many years to learn the language that I didn’t want my son to have to do so too.
He managed to ask, “Mommy, where are you?”
I never cry in front of Aboudi. When he falls or hurts himself, I don’t run up and fuss all over him. I just stop and tell him, “I want you to be strong. I don’t want you to be crying.” And he doesn’t cry.
“Mommy, where are you?” he said to me again.
I heard him but I did not cry. I said, “Aboudi, Mommy is fixing something and she will come back very soon, baby. I want you to be strong, Aboudi.”
After that, he was too exhausted to speak anymore.
When I turned off the phone, I broke my own rule: I started sobbing. I sobbed until I had no more tears.
By the second and third days, I realized that I would not be leaving prison anytime soon, so I created a routine. Every morning, at 9:00 a.m., when the guards opened the door, I would go to the prison administrator’s office, ask to make my phone call, and say that I needed to see my lawyer. For days, the prison refused to allow my lawyer to come and see me without a guardian or mahram or to speak to me on the phone. Instead, they allowed me to call my sister-in-law. In retrospect, I suppose that I was trading one for the other.
The next day, I learned that Aboudi was improving. He had become ill from a cat parasite. Our cat was completely vaccinated but it must have become infected from another animal in the neighborhood and passed the parasite to Aboudi. No one told me until later about how at the hospital the doctors had packed his body in towels and ice. Even my ex-husband had been down on the floor, on his knees, crying, as Aboudi’s body burned with fever and nothing seemed to bring it down.
Thursday arrived, my first official visiting day. Muneera came to the gates, and so did my mother. There had been no flights available, so Mama had ridden the bus for eighteen hours from Jeddah to Dammam and come directly to the jail. She must have been sobbing the entire time; she was still hysterical when she arrived at the gates of the prison. I was brought into the visitors room, which had two double Plexiglas panes with holes on either side. But the holes didn’t line up. You had to put your ear to one hole to hear and then turn and speak into another hole. Your visitor had to do the same. The room was noisy with so many people, hot without AC, and had a horrible smell of piss and shit. It was the same room where I had been strip-searched. When I undressed, I had not realized there was a clear window behind me.