“No.” He looks back at Alexandria, then smiles at me. “I’m fine. I’m ready.”
Khalid remains on the boat while Ramy takes the rest of us into the water. We make a human chain, holding each other’s hands as we descend, because the water is kind of murky. As we near the bottom, dark shapes begin taking form. Unlike in Florida, there is no elaborate coral growth and only a few colorful fish, but the sea floor is littered with square and cylindrical segments of the pillars that once supported Cleopatra’s palace. Everything is crusted with barnacles, but Ramy points out a number of large stone bowls and Dad swims through a tunnel formed by large blocks of rubble. We follow our dive master—and a school of tiny silver fish—to the body of a sphinx about the size of a horse. The head is missing but the shape is intact. Not far away is a second sphinx, this one barnacle-free to get a better idea of what it originally looked like, but again headless. I wonder if the heads were stolen and make a note to ask when we surface. We stay down for about an hour and even though pillars make up most of what we see, it is clear that the palace complex was huge. Fit for the queen of Egypt.
Finally, Ramy taps his watch, signaling that our time is up, and we swim to the surface.
Adam yanks the regulator from his mouth, and his face is nothing but smile.
“This was the most exciting thing I have ever done,” he says. “I had difficulty not shouting bubbles at everything we saw.”
“You should see the reefs down in the—”
“Your phones have been going crazy,” Khalid interrupts from up in the boat. “Many text messages and missed calls, I think. I did not read them, but someone is trying desperately to reach you.”
We scramble into the boat and Dad grabs his cell phone with wet hands. A stricken look crosses his face as he listens to his voice mail. “Shit,” he says. “We need to leave. Now.”
“Dad, what’s wrong?”
Adam’s phone and mine are both filled with messages from my mother saying Call me right away and I am okay, but call me ASAP.
The dive team quickly unties the boat, and Ramy drives us back toward Alexandria as my dad phones Mom.
“Beck, are you hurt? Where are you?” he says, and my hands start to shake. What is happening? Adam takes my hand, but he looks worried too. “We’re on our way . . . no, I’ll rent a car . . . we’ll be there as fast as we can . . . I love you, too . . . I’ll be there soon.”
“Dad?”
“A car bomb exploded outside the clinic.” His tanned skin has gone pale. “She wasn’t there.”
“Oh, thank God,” I say at the same time Adam, Ramy, and Khalid all say, “Alhamdulillah.”
“She was feeling worse this morning when we left,” Dad says. “So Jamie went to the clinic in her place. He was killed in the blast, along with two patients. Your mom is blaming herself. So we need to get back fast.”
“The distance to Cairo is the same by car or train,” Adam says.
“Yeah, but the train doesn’t leave until this afternoon,” my dad points out. “We don’t have that kind of time.”
“I will have to drive.”
If this were any other situation, I would laugh. But just like on the day of Mr. Elhadad’s heart attack, Adam’s utter fearlessness behind the wheel might be exactly what we need right now.
We reach the jetty and Dad jumps out of the boat. Khalid follows. “I will take you to the car rental.”
Twenty minutes later, outside the rental agency, Dad thanks him and offers him baksheesh for everything he’s done. Khalid pushes it away. “I hope your wife will be okay.”
“Thank you,” Dad says. “I hope so too.”
We are a damp mess as we enter the rental agency, but Adam takes over, laying out the situation in Arabic. Dad signs the paperwork and offers up his credit card, but once the car is pulled around to the front of the building and we have the keys, Adam takes the wheel. I use the GPS on my phone to guide us out of Alexandria, and once we are on the highway, Adam’s foot rests heavy on the accelerator. In the backseat, Dad calls Mom again.
“We’re on our way,” he says. “Adam is driving . . . aw, Beck, don’t . . . you’re not a terrible human being for laughing at the kid’s driving skills . . .”
Dad stays on the phone with her the entire way back to Cairo, talking softly, telling her comforting stories she already knows about when they met, reassuring her that he’ll be there soon. One thing he never says is that everything will be okay, which worries me, because will everything be okay? He flings open the car door before the car stops in front of the apartment building and runs toward the vestibule.
“Go to your mother,” Adam says. “I will take care of the car.”
I sprint after my dad, up the stairs, and arrive at the apartment just behind him, just as Mom launches herself from the couch and he catches her in his arms. She sobs into his shoulder and the sound is one I have never heard. My mom is always strong. She rarely cries. To see her so broken brings tears to my own eyes. Through the blur I see Mrs. Elhadad rise from the couch.
“I will go now,” she says quietly to me.
“Thank you for being here.” I step forward and she lets me hug her. The soft pat of her hand on my back is comforting.
“If you need something,” Mrs. Elhadad says, “please say.”
Nodding, I thank her once more. She looks to the door when Adam comes in and speaks softly to him in Arabic. He glances at me as he follows his mother out the door, his eyes filled with questions and concerns.
“You and your crazy driving came through again,” I call after him. “Thank you.”
I want to ask my mom what happens next. Will OneVision send us home? Or open a new clinic in a different part of the city? What if whoever was responsible for the bombing wants to try again? What if Mom isn’t so lucky the second time? My breath catches in my chest. Even though she wasn’t killed today, she could have been. People who were alive this morning are dead now. They were loved and now they are gone. But I can’t ask her anything because Dad leads her into the bedroom and closes the door.
CHAPTER 32
Yesterday morning, according to witnesses in Manshiyat Nasr, a car pulled to the curb alongside the clinic. A man wearing an ordinary blue button-up shirt and jeans got out and walked away. Just a little more than a minute later, the car erupted into a giant ball of fire and the ground convulsed like an earthquake. Windows in the bakery across the street shattered. Stucco and brick spewed out in every direction. And when the fireball subsided, the car was nothing but a burning frame and the clinic was a pile of rubble.