It might have happened differently. She might have returned to Kuwait and told Atef everything: How she hated the heat and dreaded the summer, had nightmares of being buried in hot sand, how she found the city oppressive, always felt numb, as though moving in swamp water. But then they’d gone to the beach one afternoon, and Riham had almost drowned. Nearly died. And Alia, clasping her shivering daughter as she heaved, holding her so tightly the girl had tugged for air, as she wept and grabbed at her daughter—as the drowning lunge for wood or flesh or tire—for the rest of the day, Alia understood that she’d very nearly been punished.
It is not that she believes Allah is vengeful or cruel. The opposite. When she thinks of Allah, she imagines only love, magnified and multiplied into a room of marble, blinding white and then traveling with synaptic speed onto the earth, into her mother’s voice as she prayed, into the breath of those around her. And it was this love that made Allah so dangerous, so terrifying. Because the sin, the real sin, she’d learned that summer, was to forget it or take it for granted. No, Allah hadn’t punished her out of spite or malice. He’d been warning her not to forget.
Alia flips through the television channels in the dark, the screen a kaleidoscope of newscasters, music videos, soap operas. She finally settles on a program about elephants and lowers the volume. The couch cushions are soft beneath her as she sits, adjusting a pillow between her knees. She feels the anger quiet into a briny resentment. The bitterness floats like an inkblot in her mind’s eye.
Suddenly exhausted, she drops her head back onto the couch arm. The steps to her bedroom seem impossible. Screw them all anyway. Let them wake and find her. Let it be her final protest on this night.
Bastards, she thinks and sleeps.
She dreams of a foreign city. A marshland and some women walking throughout it. Someone is speaking in another language. French, or Spanish. Somehow Alia can understand it. The person is telling her to turn around, that it is about to rain. She follows the voice. There is hail. Someone is dying.
It is morning when Alia wakes, her consciousness still pulling at the marshland, the foreign language. Sunlight pours into the living room. Alia’s head is angled uncomfortably against the cushions. The television screen is blank; someone—Atef, Priya—has turned it off. She sits up, flooded with déjà vu, the sensation of waking on this couch—then recalls the night before, Souad’s words, the fight. Not déjà vu, then. Memory.
She walks into the kitchen. Atef is drinking coffee at the table. Alia can hear Priya’s humming in the laundry room, the whir of the washing machine.
“Good morning,” she says.
Atef sips his coffee, suppressing a smile. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
“That couch is a nightmare.”
“We’ll have to buy better furniture. For nights you stand guard.” His voice is mischievous, and Alia laughs, feeling the tension break. She cracks her neck with the heel of her hand, a satisfying pop.
“My back’s killing me,” Alia admits. A mess of papers are scattered in front of Atef, his briefcase open. “What’s all this? Are you finally divorcing me?”
He glances at the clock above the oven. “The staff meeting’s today.” He starts piling the papers up. Alia remembers vague talk of changes in the department.
“The British professor?”
“Professor Roberts.” Atef says the name with uncharacteristic sarcasm. “The liberal. Coming in to change everything. Those British, they still think Arabs are impressionable. Starving to be saved. We’re having a meeting on his proposal today, some referendum vote. He even wants to take out smoking in the classrooms. Says it gives people asthma.”
“He sounds awful. Maybe they’ll have him oversee the construction projects.”
Atef grins. “We’ll just give him Souad to deal with. He’ll trip over himself rushing back to England.” He finishes the coffee and sets the cup on the counter. “Au revoir.” It is their little joke, begun when the children started taking French in school.
“Au revoir.”
On his way out, he places a hand on her shoulder and grazes her temple with his chin. Another ancient gesture of his, from the days when they first wed. She watches him from the window above the sink, walking down the driveway, his familiar silhouette dark in the bright sun.
Priya makes her some tea and boils an egg. When the water froths, Priya cracks the egg with a spoon and carefully peels it. Two pinches of salt, a sliced tomato.
“Thank you,” Alia says. She eats absently, her mind still on her daughter.
“Chicken today?” Priya asks as she wipes the counters. Her hair is pulled back into a gray-streaked braid.
“I was thinking lamb. With a nice stew.”
“We finished the lamb yesterday. I can walk to the store?”
“No, no. The chicken’s fine. Priya?” Alia says impulsively. The other woman turns, the dishrag in midair.
“Souad . . . she never listens. I talk, I yell. Nothing works. Do you know how she—why she . . . does the things she does?” she finishes lamely.
Priya’s gaze is sympathetic but resentful, as though she was hoping she’d never be asked. “Madame, children are not easy to know.” She pauses for a moment before resuming the wide, swooping circles on the counters. Alia feels ashamed for asking, as if she has admitted some shortcoming in her maternal abilities.
Alia sops up the remaining yolk with bread, places the plate in the sink. She begins walking to her bedroom but hesitates in front of Souad’s closed door. The urge to pull it open and yell is fierce, but she forces herself to walk on.
In her bedroom, Alia restlessly trails her fingers along the cosmetics atop her dresser. Much of them are old and unused, dust filming the covers. Her favorite is the burgundy jar, a cream that smells of lavender. She dabs it onto her face, rubs circles on her forehead and cheeks.
She is still attractive, somewhat. At dinner parties she catches glimpses—from the men, an aloof appreciation; from the women, scrutiny. She can feel them scanning her neck, the flesh of her arms, with hawkish eyes.
“What a tiny waist!” they exclaim. Or, “Your skin is so smooth.”
And Alia—capriciously superstitious—finds herself fumbling for some wood to rap her knuckles against. She remembers her mother in such moments, how Salma used to recite Qur’an whenever anyone paid her children a compliment.
Alia likes her body in the same way she likes her bedroom, or her car, or the lovely green curtains in the living room—as a commodity, something she can smooth over with her hands, a working machinery. Nice legs, firm abdomen, even after the children, though she’d held her breath at each pregnancy, dismayed as her body stretched and flared.
The irony is that the features she loathed twenty years ago have become her assets. The dark skin that remains unblemished. The square jaw and broad shoulders that now give her a certain stateliness. And her height, which has become suddenly fashionable, women in magazines and films teetering in impossibly high heels.
We never want it when we have it, Mimi likes to say.
The restlessness grows. Souad’s words return to her. You’re a liar, and you’re always lying.
Alia showers and chooses slacks and a T-shirt. The bed looks warm and inviting, and she flops onto it, feeling like she did as a child on rainy days.