The Garden of Last Days (59 page)

But this anger, it is distracting. He closes his eyes and makes the du’a for it.
I take refuge with Allah from the accursed devil
.

He breathes deeply through the nose. The kafir whore, her uncovered hips beneath his fingers, her rising and falling.
Already, sweetie? Already?
As if he is a boy. As if they are all boys. He opens his eyes once more. The line moves slowly. At the nearest window an old man purchases stamps. His hair is white and his back is hunched from the pull of the earth and he leans hard upon his walking staff. Soon he will die and soon they will burn, Allah willing. All must be turned back to the Creator; these people will fail because the Holy One will deem it so. There is no need for Bassam to be distracted with this anger. He must return to a state of purity and good deeds, that is all, for Shaytan is at work, is he not? How happy would be the dark angel to see them fail. How happy he would be to further strengthen the unbelievers and protect them and keep them.

You should feel complete tranquillity, because the time between you and your marriage in heaven is very short
.

Yes, Insha’Allah, yes.

From his rear pocket Bassam retrieves the letter. It is warm from his body, and he wishes to send that warmth directly to his mother. Her laughter when he was small, her smell—perspiration and cinnamon, garlic and silk—how so often she would embrace him and hold his face between her hands. She will pray for his soul, he knows
this. For she, too, like Ahmed al-Jizani, does not understand the true meaning of jihad. Or perhaps she once did, but no longer. Slowly she is being pulled into the ways of the far enemy, but how can jihad be only a struggle within when the Creator has so clearly shown us His enemy without?

The baby cries. The old man walks slowly from the window. The baby continues crying, and the young kafir mother bends forward and lifts him from the carriage and lays him against her shoulder. Her voice is quiet. Bassam does not hear her words, only the ceasing of the baby’s cries. The baby’s head, look how large it appears for his small neck. He has difficulty holding steadily, but he looks once again at Bassam. His eyes are blue, and they stare at him in their blueness as if he knows his thoughts.

The line moves more quickly now. A man dressed in a suit approaches the window. A large woman walks to the next, and soon a kafir in athletic clothing is summoned to the third. The man’s shirt has no sleeves and his shoulders and arms are uncovered, the muscles there much larger than even Imad’s.
But are we strong enough, Bassam? What if they are stronger?
Surely Bassam and his brothers are weaker than this man. But in body only, Bassam. In body only.

He is hungry. But there will be no midday meal. Already he is looking forward to the greater hunger, the emptiness that only the Sustainer can fill. And he wishes he began fasting days ago with Imad. But instead of this, what did he do? He drank alcohol and let his lust lead him and now he has lain with a whore and can only pray he will fight tomorrow, Allah willing, as did the pious early generations. He can only pray that his love for the Creator will be stronger than any kafir like this man and others like him.

O Allah, protect me from them with what You choose
.

The line begins to move, and Bassam follows the mother and her now silent and sleeping child.

THE PROTECTIVE INVESTIGATOR’S
name was Marina, an unfortunate first name, Jean thought, in a place full of boats. But she was pleasant enough, sitting on the edge of the sofa beside Jean, nodding respectfully at Jean’s answers to her questions with the detached warmth of a nurse.

“So she sleeps here every night?”

“No, just on the nights her mother works.”

“And that’s five nights a week?”

“Sometimes four.” Jean sipped her ice water. The woman wrote something on her notepad. She was short, with olive skin and a man’s haircut, her khakis tight at her hips. She hadn’t touched her water.

“What time does she get home every night?”

“Oh I don’t know really. I’m asleep.”

“But you said she used to carry her daughter upstairs. What time did she do that?”

“Around three or three-thirty, I suppose.” Jean’s face burned. Most of the women’s questions were about April, but she began to feel scrutinized in a place she’d been hiding.

“May I see the room?”

“Certainly.” Jean led her down the hall to Franny’s bedroom, stepping to the side as the woman walked in ahead of her. Jean watched her look at the bed and homemade quilt, the stuffed animals, posters, and curtains; was she taking in how clean and neat the room was? The love and care obviously at work here? What else could she be jotting down in her notebook?

The woman looked up, neither smiling nor frowning, and a weight began to press on Jean’s chest: What if she denied them anyway? What if what she saw wasn’t quite enough?

“May I see your room, please?”

“Of course. It’s that one.”

Marina DeFelipo thanked her. Jean didn’t know if she should follow her or not. Would that look like she was hovering, trying to distract her from seeing something? But she couldn’t just turn and walk away either; it may seem as if she didn’t care what was put in her report. She stayed in the doorway.

The woman took in Jean’s mahogany nightstands, the matching reading lamps with the tasseled shades, the half-empty water glass, and the paperback Jean bought last week in St. Armand’s Circle,
Anxiety: The Cure
.

“Do you suffer from anxiety?”

“No.” Heat tightened the skin of Jean’s face and throat, this lie so obvious. “Well, panic, I would say. I sometimes get these attacks.”

The woman nodded slowly, taking her in more fully now: the loose jowls under her jaw, her fleshy bare arms and massive sundress, the varicose veins in her calves, the slippers she was still wearing. “Are you getting treatment?”

“No.” Jean looked away, the weight pressing harder against her chest. A cool sweat broke out on her forehead and upper lip, the back of her neck. “It’s not that bad, really.” She walked quickly to the window
and parted the curtain. She was thinking of the hospital Friday night, of ripping off the wires and leaving the pills in the bedsheets.

“You should get some help for that, Mrs. Hanson. Anxiety is a common problem. May I see your bathroom?”

“Yes, please, follow me.” Jean moved down the hall quickly because moving helped; her breath seemed to come more easily, the weight on her chest easing up a bit. She didn’t wait for the woman this time; she knew she was going in there to look for medications; in the mirrored cabinet she would find some for her blood pressure, another to lower her cholesterol, some aspirin to thin her blood. But nothing for anxiety or panic. Nothing that would make her look like a liar.

While the woman was inspecting the bathroom, Jean picked up both water glasses from the coffee table. Her vision blackened as she stood, her heart fluttering. Now she could see clearly again, but there was more cold sweat she wiped away with the back of her arm, her skin cool.

“Are you all right?” Marina DeFelipo stood at the end of the hallway. There were the beginnings of gray along her hairline, and she had put on glasses with silver wire rims.

“Yes, I just haven’t been sleeping well.” Jean moved around the counter. She rested the water glasses in the sink. She could feel the investigator watching her and she’d had quite enough of this, she who’d done nothing wrong. “Are you going to interview April now?”

“Yes, thank you.” Her eyes lingered on Franny’s drawings on the wall, so many of them crooked houses under bright suns.

IT WAS ONLY
one inspector, the same woman who hadn’t let her see Franny, and April was surprised she’d gone into Jean’s first. She was down there a long time. Now she stood in April’s living room looking at the dusted row of Disney movies under the TV, her notepad open.

“How is she?”

“She seems very nice.”

“No, my daughter. Your tests. Please, how is she?”

The woman looked steadily at April. “She shows no real signs of having been abused. I’ll be seeing her again, however.”

April nodded, her eyes filling. She turned and walked past the peninsula into the kitchen.
Thank God, Thank God, Oh thank God
. But she didn’t like how the woman didn’t ask to see her daughter, just informed her she would. Nor did April like the hope in her that this woman had taken note of her tears.

“May I see her room, please?”

April led her down the hallway. She stepped to the side to let her in, and it felt as if she were showing her a lie.

The woman looked at the made bed and the Barbie dollhouse at the foot of it. She looked at the new beanbag chair. She walked over and tested the latch on the window.

“This is kept locked?”

“Yeah, the AC’s always on.”

The woman glanced at the poster of the moon over the ocean and she opened the closet and took in the hanging dresses and tops, Franny’s pink backpack on the floor, her new flip-flops lined up neatly beside her old ones. She peered inside and looked in both corners. She turned and smiled. “Is this where she plays a lot? Here in her room?”

“And downstairs with Jean. She’s there every morning.”

“Until you get up.”

“Yeah, that’s about ten.”

“Jean said eleven.”

“Between ten and eleven.” April’s face hummed. She tried to smile but couldn’t.

“Does she know what you do?”

“Jean?”

“Your daughter?”

“I’ve told her I’m in show business.”

“Does she know what that means?”

“I tell her I dance on a stage.”

“What did she see Friday night?”

“Just women in a dressing room. Just, you know, women.”

She nodded. She kept her eyes on her, and April saw Mary, her good sister Mary, who never broke a rule and never would. And should she tell the woman now that she didn’t even work there anymore?

“May I see the rest of the home?”

“Please.”

April stood to the side and let her go look herself. Yesterday she’d
put the ironing board and iron in the closet where they never went, she’d hung her clothes on hangers and dusted off the bureau and bedside table. She’d straightened the stack of magazines and vaccumed the carpet and washed the windows. Now she heard the closet door slide open. Her leather pocketbook was on the floor beside her bed. It was zipped shut. All that money from the foreigner she hadn’t deposited yet. Today was her first chance to do it. Would the inspector look inside it?
Could
she?

But now she was a shadow moving down the hallway, smiling at April as she found the light switch and stepped into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet.

“Do you own any weapons? Firearms?”

“No, never.”

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No.”

The woman closed the cabinet. She parted the shower curtain and looked at the gleaming tub, Franny’s bath toys lined up along the porcelain, her Barbie mermaid sitting at attention.

BETWEEN THE ‘ASR
and Maghrib prayers, Imad and Tariq take the opportunity for one more exercise session in the hotel’s gym. Imad urges him to go as well, but Bassam has not been disciplined enough and knows his muscles will be sore tomorrow, Insha’Allah.