Annie came and sometimes didn’t, like Prudence. She turned up more often at the pool than the house. Checking up on him. One afternoon, she shaded her eyes and said, “Gabe, I want you to come to an exorcism with me.”
He gave her a look. “You think I need to be exorcized?”
“No. I mean—yes, you probably do, but this is, well, about the baby thing. It’s some kind of ceremony. It won’t be much different from going to a Catholic shrine that promises babies to barren women.”
“Of course it’s different!”
“How do you know? Have you been to one?”
“There’s a lot more to that business than throwing pennies in the shrine, Annie.”
A dip of frown indented her brow. “You’ve been informing yourself, I see.”
“Talking to people, yeah. People go into trances at these things.”
“So it’ll be interesting. I’ve always been fascinated by this stuff.”
He gave her another wry look. “You don’t need me. You have Rolf.”
“He won’t come.”
“Why not?”
“Well, he . . .”
“You haven’t told him.”
“No.”
“They call it ‘sihr,’ Annie. Witchcraft. Are you really so desperate?”
“And some call it ‘ruqya’—healing.”
“Only when it’s done in the proper Quranic way by the right person. Like priests doing exorcisms.”
“We need some joy in our lives, Gabriel. All of us.”
“That’s not your responsibility. You don’t have to get pregnant to save the rest of us.”
“I’m trying to save myself.”
“It could unhinge you, something like this.”
“Remaining barren is unhinging me. Will you take me?”
“I’d really rather not.”
“You’d really rather not, would you? You’d really rather not.”
The nights continued into darkness. Howling Atlantic winds raged across the tranquil Gulf of Oman and bits of sentences tiptoed across Gabriel’s hearing, like actors muttering their lines backstage: “. . . maybe later?” and “. . . so much the better,” and intriguing snippets like “. . . say that because it’s time to look the other way.” He even heard a woman say, “What the mind can . . .”
“Am I tuning into the jinn world?” he asked Ali. “And if I am, how come they’re speaking English?”
Ali discussed it with the other men, who leaned over their camel sticks, stroked their white beards, and concluded, as they had before, that he had been put under a spell. Someone was angry with him and had brought the evil eye upon him. They waited while he considered this, more seriously now than he had before. For sure, people were angry with him, but Max was not a vengeful man; he would scarcely know the meaning of the word. Geraldine, on the other hand. . . . She would never forgive him, she had told him so, and no doubt she wanted him to suffer as she now suffered. Perhaps this was the spell she had cast: an evil fairy sent to torment him.
No. No. He was losing grip. Geraldine—casting spells? That meek woman sending purring cats and radio shows? Hearing voices, in any creed, was a common infliction.
And yet revenge was being sought, and found, and Gabriel was shrinking. “But she’s very beautiful, my jinn,” he said, feeling forlorn, “and kind to me.”
“That is all part of the trick.” Behind the beauty, they agreed, there could be a foul-looking jinn—an old hag who meant him harm—and they shunted about so uneasily in their plastic seats that he didn’t like to query them further.
“You should go home to Ireland,” one of the old men said.
Ali translated, retorted, then translated his retort. “Don’t go home. Jinn travel. She can go with you, and in your country there is no one to subdue her. You must go to the holy man and he will send her out.”
They all nodded sagely.
Gabriel walked back to the house, sticking to the shade where possible, and found Prudence waiting, ready to shoo all the riddles away. They had a shower, giggling when shampoo froth slid down her face and she blew through the bubbles. The very idea that she was anything other than a delectable woman standing in a shower made him smile all the more and come like a bull elephant.
There would be no exorcisms.
Afterward, wrapped in a towel, she sat on his bed, leaning against the wall, her hands clasped around her raised knee, and said, Your parents will forgive you. Your sister already has.
“Forgive me? For what?”
The night in the music school.
He stroked her ankle. “Who told you?”
Prudence talked, that day, as she never had before.
The self-loathing, she told him, would never dissipate. In years to come, he would still stink of it and parts of him would grow rotten and wither, but he should expect that. Such were the consequences. And although he would spend a lifetime trying to understand his motivation, that lost moment would never make sense. Such were capricious mortals. His bitterness toward his parents was a dead end; he went there only because he had nowhere else to go. In truth, he blamed only himself, which was as it should be, she said, since he was to blame. There would be no relief. Time intermingles. The past cannot be revisited, she said, because it continues with us, embedded in a network of capillaries in our hearts and minds. That night in the music school happened every day, over and over; it had been rooted in all their lives forever, and so he confused things, couldn’t see through it. His mind could never be quite clear, because what he did was not behind him. It walked alongside him.
Gabriel rolled from his stomach onto his back. “Might as well just slice my wrists, so.”
Enough with cowardice and self-regard, she said, and he looked up
