“Don’t,” Alia warns, and Souad sits again.
Two of the boys chase after the ball, laughing as they run. Their figures get closer to the group, one tall and lean, the other small and stout, their features slowly visible.
Bassam and Rafic.
Riham shimmies her body up, ducks her head, mortified, as they jog past. Her mind spins: Bassam isn’t supposed to be here, so far from Amman. She is excruciatingly aware of her body, the dampness under her arms, her smell.
“Ya Riham.” Her mother waves something silver in the sun. “Your sandwich.”
Riham’s face burns; she’s horrified at the thought of Bassam watching her eat, especially something so huge. “I’m not hungry,” she mumbles.
“What?”
Lower your voice, Riham wants to scream. From the corner of her eye she sees Rafic reach the ball, then the two of them running back to the group. “I’m not hungry,” she says louder.
Her mother frowns, waves the sandwich again. “You haven’t eaten since breakfast.”
“I want to swim first.” As soon as she speaks the words, Riham regrets them—what is she thinking?—but surprise crosses her mother’s face. She looks relieved, and Riham suddenly puts together the sharp, furtive looks her mother has been giving her all summer, that scrutiny—concern.
“Oh.” She lowers the sandwich. “Good. Swim first, then come eat.” Riham catches her grandmother’s quizzical eye. Alia gestures toward the sea. “Go, go.”
Riham rises reluctantly. She eyes the water, dread knotting her stomach. In her peripheral vision, she sees Bassam and Rafic with the group of boys, kicking the ball toward each other. She can’t walk to the water without crossing their path, she realizes with a jolt.
“I’m going swimming too.” Souad stands up, all leg, sand sticking to her skin. She looks like a dirty, beautiful urchin in a Victorian novel. “I’ll be back soon,” she informs their mother.
Without looking up, Alia clicks her tongue and points to the empty spot on the towel where Souad had just been sitting.
Immediately, Souad begins to whine. “That’s not fair, you’re letting Riham go. I want to swim too.”
“You,” Alia says to Souad, “sit your little butt down. You can go after you finish your sandwich.”
“I can just stay,” Riham offers desperately. “I’ll take her after.”
“You go have fun, habibti. She’ll be fine.”
Souad eyes her mother, hands clamped on her hips. For a moment they glare at each other. Finally, she kicks at the edge of the towel and sits down, pouting.
Riham begins to walk toward the water. Her heart pounds and she is painfully, overwhelmingly, aware that she is on display. It feels like a thousand eyes watching her. She feels an impossible hush settle over the beach, every single person—families, all of the boys, Bassam—stopping and turning to her.
She takes one step and then another, sand hot beneath her feet, suddenly conscious of her arms, how they swing unnaturally against her hips, how her knees knock together as she walks. All of them, she knows, are holding their breath, watching this agonizingly slow walk, this walk that is taking forever, years, really, because the water, even though it seemed so close from the towels, is far, far away. Sweat trickles between her breasts and that spongy scent is stronger.
And then, at last, she is there: at the edge of the water. She takes a quick look behind her and is stunned to find that no one is watching her. All the people are eating and talking. The boys are still kicking the ball around, jogging as they call out to one another. Bassam kicks the ball neatly through the air.
She watches him for a second, so lovely as his leg arches midkick, and, as if charged by her gaze, he turns and looks directly at her. The air leaves her lungs. He lifts his hand in greeting, his face brightening into a half smile.
She moves rapidly, taking off the dress and throwing it on the sand, then scrambling, mortified at the sight of her own naked arms and legs, toward the water quickly, quickly, before he can reach her, before any of them can see her in this awful bareness.
The only place away from the boys’ laughter is the water, and so she propels herself in. For the first few seconds she is so charged with adrenaline, her heart pounding at Bassam’s eyes, his smile, that she doesn’t even notice the water as she wades in. But then it hits her, the water freezing against her sunburned skin, so icy and unexpected that she gasps. She keeps her back to the shoreline—is he still watching?—and moves, her feet catching and slipping on mounds of seashells and tiny rocks and something slimy that makes her shiver.
She used to love the water when she was younger, would swim for hours during the summer, she and Karam racing each other to the little red buoys. She’d loved the way her hair still tasted of salt even after her grandmother scrubbed it with shampoo. Alone in the water, she was something magical, her limbs suddenly graceful as she pirouetted, pretending to be a mermaid floating in the sea.
But now she is filled with hatred toward it—at the water unfurling and undulating like some enormous tongue, aquamarine and gleaming with malice. Even though it terrifies her, she keeps her eyes on the sea ahead. To turn around would be disastrous, she thinks; to turn around would be to see him, and she imagines his gaze burning across the beach, skipping over the water to find her. She continues to wade deeper, moving messily in the water, aware that her skin is visible to those on the coast until she—quickly—blankets herself with water.
The water now reaches her upper arms, covering her breasts, the sea like a towel. She starts to swim. One arm after the other, she slices the water with her body. After taking a breath, she dives her head in, swims as far as she can until her lungs begin to burn. She lifts her head and sucks air thirstily. Her legs tread water and she notices that she isn’t cold anymore.
The only sounds filling her ears are the waves and her breath. Her back still to the shore, she moves her arms, making circles. A faraway memory jars her—her mother carrying her into the ocean as a child, a glimmer of seawater beneath her tiny hands.
“It’s like bathwater, see?” her mother had said, cradling her. Riham, looking up at her, saw the sun haloing her head. She remembers now what her four-year-old mind had thought: The most beautiful woman in the world.
Just as the memory is filtering through her, Riham understands that the water does, indeed, feel like bathwater, no longer icy, and not just from the effort of swimming—the water itself swirls warm. She turns at last to face the shore.