She lifts her head unsteadily. Blinking in the sunlight, she looks around at the people gathered. Her mother kneels in front of her, sobbing. It occurs to Riham that she hasn’t seen her mother cry in years. Khalto Mimi is hugging her mother. Souad stands beside them, her face white and afraid, her eyes trickling tears. The towels have been wrenched around, and food is scattered everywhere, and for a second Riham thinks her mother will be furious, all that sand in the food, but then she remembers that her mother is crying, and crying for her.
“Riham.” Her mother chokes out her name like a talisman, a prayer, and suddenly Riham is enveloped in her mother’s arms, smelling the musk of her skin. She peeks around at the people surrounding her, the other picnicking families and the boys, too, Bassam standing to the side with the group of them. He suddenly looks very young, afraid. The voices merge.
“She’s alive, she’s alive.”
“Uncle, I’ve never seen anyone swim so fast, you saved her.”
“When I saw her on your shoulders, limp like that, my God, I thought—”
“Shh, we all did, but she’s fine.”
“She’s a tough little girl, she was carried so far out, but she kept kicking.”
“She’s breathing, right?”
Riham contemplates this last question, recognizes that she has never had to wonder about such a thing before, never had to consider her breath—what a remarkable thing to think about, her breathing, that thing she does without thinking—but now she becomes aware of how her lungs feel, tight and ragged in her chest, of how it hurts to inhale, like there are tiny spikes in her throat. She turns away from her mother and vomits promptly on the sand.
“Move,” her grandmother’s voice commands above the rest. “Everyone, give her space. She needs air.” A hand appears near the sand, holding one of the bottles of water. Riham looks up at her grandmother’s face, ashen beneath her veil but strong. She nods at Riham. “Drink this, slowly.” Riham brings it to her lips and her stomach cramps, but she sips.
A drop of seawater trickles into her eye, stinging. She blinks and is aware of her body, the flab beneath her bathing suit, her bareness while throngs of people watch her, while Bassam watches her. Watch her vomit too, they all saw it, she thinks, mortified at the lumps of white on the sand. Ancient, familiar shame begins to throb but she hears her grandmother breathing and realizes that this, the strings of vomit, this is what saved her, it is what kept her alive, what returned her to breath.
Suddenly she doesn’t care at all who sees her, who watches as she lifts her head and looks not at the picnickers or boys or swimmers but her family, at her mother still weeping. They are all, Souad and Alia and Salma, looking at her as though she is a ghost and it dawns on Riham that she did something, that she has accomplished something just by living, just by kicking and kicking in the water.
“Riham.” Her mother’s voice catches. “Riham, this is the man who saved you.” Her mother points to a young man from one of the nearby picnicking families. His trousers and shirt are wet, plastered to his body. Riham sees for the first time that her own mother’s dress is wet and caked with sand. She tried to swim as well, Riham understands. It’s like bathwater, see?
“You’re a strong little girl,” the bearded man says. “You kept kicking.” Riham tries to imagine this man carrying her, her body in his arms, but she feels no embarrassment.
“Thank you,” she says, and everyone starts laughing, even her mother, the hysterical laughter of the relieved.
Riham pushes her hair back, her hands less shaky now. She squints in the sunlight, people’s voices around her.
“It’s a miracle.”
“They need lifeguards here.”
“That water can be so dangerous.”
The sun glints and Riham sees, for the first time since waking, the water between the legs of people, that astonishing blue. She says something under her breath. No one hears except her grandmother, who bends down. She rubs a rough, callused hand through Riham’s hair as the voices around them continue.
Her grandmother’s arms are firm around her body. “Yes,” her grandmother says quietly, so no one else hears. “Yes, He saved you.”
And Riham remembers, as her grandmother holds her, she remembers, as though in a dream, how she’d been an old woman in the water, how somewhere she was dying and this would be part of that story. How, when the waves rocked her hard enough, she had called out for Allah and no one else.
Alia
* * *
Kuwait City
April 1988
Alia stirs the spoon in her teacup vigorously, though the sugar has long since dissolved. She finds the clanking comforting. A distraction. Outside the living-room window, night has fallen; the streetlamps are on. She glares into the night as though she can will a car—and from it, a lanky, disobedient body—into appearing.
“She’s still not back?”
Atef appears in the doorway. He frowns, dozens of lines around his face springing to life.
Alia shakes her head. She is tired but somewhat invigorated, her mind still buzzing from the fight hours earlier.
“It’s nearly eleven,” Atef says. “You should sleep.” Though it is slight, Alia can hear the accusation in his words. Atef loves the calm, listening to Oum Kalthoum in the evenings as he reads over his students’ exams. He finds such conflict unnerving.
“You should be more concerned,” Alia shoots back. Instantly his face falls, and she regrets her words.
He sighs. “Fine.”
Gesturing for her to move over, he joins her on the couch. For moments, there is silence, and she feels the anger radiating from her skin. On the television screen a Lebanese music show plays, beautiful girls taking the stage and singing.
“She may just go to Widad’s again,” Atef finally says.
“Widad makes it worse!” The outburst is cathartic. “She just coddles her, cooks her meals. What the girl needs is discipline.”
“Widad can’t just turn her away.” He sounds expressly unhappy to be having this conversation again.
“Oh! God forbid,” Alia says sarcastically. She lifts the teacup. It has cooled and fills her mouth with lukewarm sweetness. They fall silent once more, watching a young woman move around the stage in a blue dress. The audience applauds.
Several moments later, Alia erupts:
“Never, never, would something like this happen with the others.”
“Alia—”
“Never, Atef! Not once. Karam is a boy, he’s supposed to be the one that stays out late and gets into trouble. But no, never. He studies and sees friends, he goes to the university, he comes home and sleeps in his bed.”
“Comparing them gets us nowhere.”
“And Riham,” Alia continues, aware of the shrillness in her voice but unable to stop. “Can you imagine? She doesn’t even sneeze out loud.”
Atef clears his throat; Alia pretends not to hear. “Only Souad,” she finishes triumphantly. “Only her.”
“Different personalities, Alia. You know that,” Atef says. He is careful during these talks not to say the thing she knows he wants to. She knows this because she heard him say it, last year after an argument between her and Souad. She’d overheard him speaking with Widad, his voice low:
“I’ve never seen two people more alike.”