A House in the Sky (33 page)

Hassam surfaced at my door later, carrying the afternoon flask of
tea. He paused and studied me with what looked like concern. I was still on my mattress and still crying—the wild sobbing of the morning having given way to a seemingly endless dribble of tears. Something in Hassam’s expression told me that although he’d stayed behind, he knew where I’d gone and what had happened.

“Do you like go outside?” he asked me. At first it seemed like a cruel joke, a reference to the night before, but then I realized it was, in fact, an offer.

“Go outside? Today? Now? Yes, please,” I said. I fumbled for my Koran and made like I wanted to pick it up and carry it with me, saying with a sniffle, “I can study outside.”

Hassam nodded. “I ask,” he said, before closing the door.

I was hardly hopeful. If you’ve had occasion to read
5-Minute Stress-Busting: Instant Calm for People on the Go,
you will know that hope is a thing that can dry up. “People faced with emotionally demanding situations over a long period,” the book had told me in my weeks of reading after the care package arrived, “can reach ‘burnout’—physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion. The sufferer experiences feelings of hopelessness, disillusionment, and cynicism (plus the usual physical, mental, and emotional symptoms of stress).”

Which felt about right to me.

To my surprise, Hassam came for me in ten minutes’ time. He waved for me to pick up my Koran and follow him down the hallway, past Nigel’s room, past the bathroom and shower, to a door that was almost never used. The daylight we stepped into seared my eyeballs, which were accustomed to shadows, causing pools of yellow to bloom between me and the outside world. Once the pools wore away, I could see we were in a small courtyard that connected to the driveway, around the corner and out of sight from the veranda where the boys hung out with the captain, though surrounded by the same set of walls. The sun blazed through the leaves of a papaya tree growing up out of the dirt, dangling a few nubs of dark green fruit.

Now that we were outside, Hassam seemed almost shy. He had brought his gun. He gestured for me to sit in the shade by the tree
on an overturned bucket. He then walked to the far end of the driveway, where a set of padlocked metal gates led to the road. I’d passed through here the night before, in the darkness, but now it was a different place. Still holding on to his gun, Hassam sat himself against the wall close to the gates, maybe twenty feet away from me. It was as much space as I’d been given in four months.

Taking a seat on the bucket, I rested my hands on the cover of my Koran and stared at them, blue veins under opaque skin. I studied the papaya tree, with its arching branches and curved leaves. A few clouds floated like white popcorn against the bright sky. In the daylight, my polyester dress had gone a psychedelic red. The walls surrounding the compound were painted white with baby-blue trim running along the top, beneath a tangle of razor wire. A shredded plastic bag was caught up in the razor wire. Everything felt sharp, weird, unreal. Down the driveway, in his spot against the wall, Hassam appeared sunk deep into thought, his eyes scanning the sky. I hadn’t bothered to open my Koran, and he hadn’t bothered to look once in my direction. Before it was over, we’d stay out there about twenty minutes, me and Hassam, each of us having something that approximated a private moment. It was just enough time for the sun to work over my pale cheeks and nose and even the tops of my fingers, burning every exposed bit of me to a painful but dimly nostalgic crisped pink.

*

Nigel told me I should get my things in order in case they killed me. He said I should write down anything I wanted to say to my family, or tell it to him at the windowsill, and he would—if he were lucky enough to live through this and get out—deliver it to my family. Final thoughts, apologies, an agonized declaration of love, a last will, a dispensation of my worldly belongings, whatever it was. This was my chance. I tried not to be offended by the idea of it, the idea that I would die and he would live. He was, he argued, being practical.

“Just think about it and let me know,” he said.

“I don’t want to,” I said back.

I thought of him now mainly as a voice, disembodied and floating, like a field of energy. I imagine I was the same for him. Nearly every interaction between us played out in the soft acoustics of the alleyway behind our house.

Once, when I was coming back from the bathroom, Nigel had opened the door to his room and stood waiting at the threshold for me to pass by. I tried not to look shocked by the change in his appearance in the eight weeks since we’d been separated. He was dressed in a sleeveless white tank top with a sarong wrapped around his waist. He was extremely thin, heavily bearded, his skin sallow. His blue eyes were watery and a little jaundiced, the kind of thing you’d see in a very old man. I was my own horror show. I could read it on Nigel’s face. I was rickety and pale, and I’d seen in my compact mirror the white fungus creeping across my face, crusting on my cheeks like ribbons of dried salt. At his door, I mouthed the words “Look at me,” as in
Look at what I’ve become.
I smiled and shrugged, and he did, too. There was no changing it. We were happier, probably, thinking of each other as voices crisscrossing the alleyway.

Taking one more risk before moving away, I reached for Nigel’s hand and held it. For a full thirty seconds we stood there, locked on to each other, saying nothing.

Seven days came and went. I waited on edge for Donald or Ahmed or Romeo to show up and take me away. The seventh night passed with excruciating slowness. I awoke on the eighth morning in my room, unable to muster anything but dread. Automatically, I recalculated: When Donald declared that my family had one week to cough up the ransom money, he must have meant that they’d wait seven days and
then
kill me. Which meant now or soon after. The eighth day passed and then the ninth. Something vaguely like hope began to crackle, a single ember in an otherwise extinguished pit. I waited for a sign. None of the leaders had visited our house. The captain’s phone never rang. I spied on the boys through the tiny keyhole in my door, which gave me a slot view of their lives on the patio. I watched them praying, sleeping, eating, and drinking tea. In the late afternoons, after teatime, the boys often gathered around Captain Skids, who sat on a low circular
wall—probably a garden planter in better times—and delivered lectures on what seemed to be military matters. Sometimes he’d stand up and demonstrate a maneuver with a gun.

I watched the boys try to pass the long hours. When they weren’t praying or listening to Skids, I’d seen them meticulously plucking hairs from their own armpits using their fingernails, keeping up with the Prophet’s rules about hygiene.

I was growing desperate for some signal that the immediate threat had passed. In my care package, there had been several sheets of Somali phrases with the English translations printed next to them. With phrases like “Does anything make the pain better?” and “Please don’t shoot: We are doing everything we can to save lives,” it was clear the sheets were meant for foreign doctors and nurses doing medical missionary work in Somalia. I studied them carefully, looking for a way to reach out to Captain Skids, who rarely came to my room but was the only person in the house likely to know what was happening with ransom negotiations. Copying a mishmash of Somali words and phrases onto a piece of notebook paper, I composed a letter meant to ask for news and to assure him that my parents at home were doing all they could to get some money together. The letter said something like: “Peace be upon you. It is one week. What is the situation? Please tell me. We are doing everything we can to save lives.” At the bottom, I signed it “Amina.”

Later that day, I knocked on my door and signaled for Jamal to come see me. I handed him the letter and asked him please to give it to the captain and please to ask for a response. Jamal studied the piece of paper. I watched him first start to smile and then to giggle.

“Is it okay?” I said.

Jamal composed himself. He folded the note in two, still grinning. “Yes, okay,” he said. “I will give.”

Within minutes, I could hear them all laughing on the porch. Through my keyhole, I saw my note being passed around, the boys leaning in, sputtering with glee over my chunked-together bits of Somali. Soon they were falling down with laughter, the hilarity growing, their voices elevated as the letter got reread and reinterpreted. It
was the hardest I’d heard them laugh the whole time we’d been prisoners. I caught a glimpse of Captain Skids; even he was swept up in the guffaws. The boys were talking excitedly, cracking one another up, creating what I guessed was a whole flow of secondary jokes about me and my words. It was my gift to them, I suppose, a little diversion on a hot day. I’d sent the message out, and now I knew that nothing would come back. I’d get no answer.

You’re welcome,
I thought from behind my door.
You motherfuckers, enjoy.

*

Earlier in December, our captors had celebrated Eid again. The holiday comes twice each year in the Muslim calendar—once to mark the end of Ramadan, the breaking of the fast; and once two months later, around the time of the hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. This one was the second type of Eid, called Eid al Adha. It was similar to the last Eid, the boys washing and dressing themselves with extra care, food and prayers in more abundance. I spied on the festivities through my keyhole, watching as our captors came and went from services at the mosque, as Skids went out and returned with a big pot of food. He came to my room himself and delivered a tin plate with a few pieces of goat’s meat, taking a second plate to Nigel. Jamal brought us each three foil-wrapped toffees. Later that day, we were summoned to join the whole group as they prayed in a big empty room at the front of the house. Because I was a woman, I was expected to perform my prayers in the back, which was a vast relief. I’d gotten so lazy about my praying, I worried they’d notice that I’d almost forgotten how to do it properly. As the straggler, the sole member of the last row, I only had to follow along.

Returned to our rooms, standing at our respective windowsills, Nigel and I made a decision—something small and also big—which was to save our toffees for later, for Christmas. Was it pessimism or pragmatism that told us we weren’t going home before then? I don’t know, but the thought of it was so stark, so totally miserable, I figured we should at least prepare. I couldn’t bear the idea that I’d be apart
from my family for the holiday, stuck in a hot room with nothing but a mattress, a mosquito net, and a piece of brown linoleum, still enduring Abdullah’s assaults, still praying for a way out.

Christmas was the one time of year when my brothers surfaced at home, when my grandparents and father and Perry congregated to eat my mother’s roast turkey, when we took pictures and felt like a regular, united family. As the day drew closer, it seemed certain that even in the wake of my near execution, there was to be no change in the stalemate between our captors and our governments or our captors and our families. Nigel and I started to make more plans. We had the toffees, to begin with. I had stored mine in the lineup of care-package treasures I kept next to my mattress, right next to my St. Ives body lotion. We agreed to exchange gifts and write stories for each other—stories of the best Christmases we’d ever spent, recorded in exacting, drawn-out detail, especially the parts about food.

I worked hard on my story, pulling up long-past memories of the Christmas my mom had surprised us with a trip to Disneyland, with a room at the Holiday Inn and an extravaganza of rides for me and my brothers. I wrote it all down for Nigel’s benefit and for mine. For his gift, I chose a white hourglass-shaped plastic bottle of cough syrup that had come in the care package and painstakingly converted it into a little doll. I drew a smiling face on the top part and took one of my black socks and fashioned it into a tiny tailored sweater, complete with sleeves. I sliced up a Q-tip stick to serve as my needle and unwound strands of dental floss for thread. I used Nigel’s beard trimmers—which he’d left at my request on the window ledge in the bathroom—to do the cutting. I embroidered three words—“My Little Buddy”—on the front of the doll’s sweater. I then made Nigel a Christmas card containing a pumped-up advertisement for his new toy. “Never feel alone again: Little Buddy is here!” Finally, I took out a blank sheet of paper and drew striped candy canes all over it, tucking Nigel’s gift inside as if it were wrapping paper, securing the whole thing with more dental floss. I made him a stocking, using more paper, stitched together with more floss, and stuck my three toffees inside.

On Christmas morning, somewhat brazenly, I walked down the hallway with a bulge under my dress and left it all on the high ledge in our bathroom—the gift, the stocking, even the full notebook containing my story. I knocked on the wall to tell Nigel to go get it. A while later, he knocked again, instructing me to retrieve some things he’d left for me, a wrapped gift and a decorated paper stocking with his toffees in it.

We spent the morning singing carols—“Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” “Joy to the World,” things like that. We sucked our toffees down slowly, one after the other, until each became a grain on the tongue. Nigel’s story was about the Christmas when he and his siblings bought airplane tickets for their parents to go to Ireland. At our windows, we asked each other follow-up questions to drag the stories out. I loved him in that moment, on that day, more than I’d ever loved anyone, in a way that reached past the standard boy-girl love and hit some sort of deeper bedrock. I loved him as a human, with no complication.

Blessedly, our captors left us alone. We sang “Little Drummer Boy” and, each of us throaty with emotion, we sang “Silent Night.” Finally, standing at his sill, Nigel opened his little buddy with an amused gasp, and then I was allowed to open my gift. For the stocking, he’d used red ballpoint ink to color two full notebook pages. He’d torn them into matching sock-shaped sides and then sewn them together with dental floss, adding a dried strip of a Wet Ones to the top, as a stand-in for white fur trim. Inside it was a small box—the cardboard insert from a package of cologne Donald had brought Nigel months earlier—wrapped in hand-decorated paper. Inside the box was a delicate-looking bracelet he’d made for me, a chain of saved-up pop-tops from his old tuna cans, carefully and intricately strung together with threads and accessorized by colorful little tassels he’d pulled from the edges of his sarong, tying one to each link in the chain. It was clear he’d spent days putting it all together, using his fingertips to make knots the size of poppy seeds. It was done with care, made with exactly what he had. It was better than anything you’d find at Tiffany’s. It was better, in that moment, than anything I’d ever received.