“Our mother’s brother, Jack, died with the name ‘Gabriel’ on his lips.”
“He said it over and over, during his last days,” Annie put in.
“But no one knew who Gabriel was,” Gabriel went on. “Jack’s wife was called Helen, their sons were Declan and Paul, and nobody in the family knew anything about a Gabriel, so they had no idea how to fetch him. Still, he kept asking for this Gabriel. Even years later, my mother couldn’t speak of it without welling up, because she couldn’t forget the way he had looked at her, pleading. She asked him where he was, this person, but Jack could barely speak.
“So, determined to find this man, she went through all Jack’s papers, his address books, his desk, and one day she even pulled every single book he owned off the shelves and looked through them for a note or a name on the flyleaf, anything.”
“That’s one of my earliest memories,” said Annie. “I must have been about four, and I remember all these books falling off the shelves at Jack’s house, raining down on us, with Mam leafing through them, like a madwoman.”
“What about his wife?” asked Stéphanie. “Did she not know?”
“She’d left him years before,” Annie explained, “so it was just Mam nursing him through his illness. He was only forty-nine.”
“And all the time she was looking for Gabriel,” said Gabriel, “it turned out she was expecting me.”
“Did she ever find him?”
Gabriel shook his head. “No. My namesake has never been tracked down or been found lurking in old papers. Not one clue. The family concluded that there must have been a son. Our cousins, Declan and Paul, still wonder if some bloke will one day roll up on their doorstep claiming to be their brother, but Mam has her own theory.”
Marie swallowed a large mouthful of food. “Which is?”
“A love affair,” said Annie.
“Ah,” said Stéphanie, “of course.”
Annie nodded. “It wasn’t spoken about, but it was fairly obvious why his marriage had failed.”
“When I was born,” Gabriel went on, “she wanted to pay homage to the love she had witnessed for the unknown Gabriel.”
“So you were named after a stranger,” said Stéphanie.
“Yes, and the only thing Mam knew about him was that somebody loved him, a lot, and that’s good enough for me. Better than being the namesake of some twerp with wings.”
“In the Quran,” Rashid said, vaguely, gazing down the strand, “the angel Gabriel is called Jibril.”
By day, Prudence stayed around more often, wandering about the house, eating the apples or lying on the cushioned bench, sleeping, staring, smiling if he passed. She even read, or at any rate flicked the pages of his few magazines, leafing through them again and again. He suspected she didn’t see what she was looking at; it was a movement, something for her hands to do.
“How does it work for you?” he asked one afternoon. “Do you decide, ‘I’ve had enough now, I’m going home?’ Do you call it home, wherever it is that you go?”
When she was with him, she said, she knew of nowhere else, and she came because she wanted to be in that quiet place, where she could listen to the sea and lie with him.
Dutifully, Gabriel phoned his parents every few weeks, the calls coming toward him, days out, like a slow-moving storm that could not be avoided. His parents’ voices would echo and bounce along the line and only the expense of the call saved him from anything more than fleeting inquiries. His father’s anger had not subsided. He said each time, “I’ll get your mother,” and she would say each time, “Is it very hot?”
Dutifully, he visited Annie as often as he could bear to leave the house, because he wanted to see her and to work on her. One weekend she intimated that, come the end of their lease in Muttrah, he would be moving in with them.
“Actually,” he said carefully, “I’d like to take on the lease myself. It’s working out so well.”
“In what way is it working out well? You have no friends, no music. No work. What do you do all day?”
“The solitude is good for me. It’s helping.”
“Helping with what? You’re not ill.”
“Christ, Annie, I’m ill as a dog!”
Her dead eyes turned back to the dishcloth she was running across the table. “Then you should be here, where I can look after you.”
“No.”
She looked up.
“I mean—no, thanks. I’m better alone. Really.”
“Your jinn lady keeping you busy, is she?”
He was not so dutiful, however, toward Max, whom he betrayed on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. Irrational though it was to be in love with a woman he knew nothing about—who claimed, indeed, to know very little about herself—Gabriel was nonetheless gliding through the days in happiness. Prudence soaked through his pores and flowed through his limbs. Every time they made love, he betrayed his brother with exultation and oblivion. He delighted in her presence, quiet though it was, and relished her ignorance. She knew him not at all. There was scarcely a person in Ireland who didn’t know what he’d done. Even the nation’s favorite broadcaster had churned it over with his listeners, many of whom rang in to the show to express their heartfelt outrage that he escaped with only a warning. It must truly have been a living nightmare for his parents. He had crippled them. The depravity had been momentary, perhaps, but its gruesome consequences would be lifelong. His every relationship had been compromised, damaged or destroyed, and any future relationship would feel it also. But Prudence knew nothing. He asked her. He said, “If I told you I’d done something despicable, would you still come?”
It was nothing to her, she said.
“I could be dangerous.”
She pointed out that she could leave any time.
“You leave too often.”
When she lay with her back to him, letting his hand curve over the hill of her hip toward the dip of her belly, he felt good, rich, lucky. Luckier than he
