“Why does he follow light?” Thea asked. “Don’t animals feel safer in the dark?”
“Yes, but they’re programed to hatch at dawn,” the warden explained, “to follow the sun.”
The group was dispersing, moving back toward the parking lot. Two men were trailing Jamil, asking how best to go through the sands.
“You have four-wheel drive, yes?” he asked them.
“Ah, no. Just a car.”
“You are crazy, yes?”
“I’d swear no one cares what he says,” Hetty declared. “We’re all following Jamil just to hear that beautiful enunciation.”
“I’m with her,” Kim muttered to Thea, then saw Gabriel alongside her. “Gabriel! Hi! Are you stalking us?”
“The tours generally follow the same route,” he said.
“I love your accent. Reminds me of Thea.”
“Well, it’s much diluted. I haven’t been to Ireland in over twenty years.”
“Really?” Kim was leaning forward to see around Thea. “Not even on a visit? That must be hard.”
“Not particularly. I’m not a turtle. I don’t need to return to where I started.”
“I can’t imagine being away from Ireland for more than a few months,” Thea said.
“Is that why you went back?” he asked her.
“How do you mean?”
They’d stopped on the last dune before the parking lot. Abid and Kim went ahead.
“Is that why you left Oman?”
“As you can see,” she said curtly, “I have not yet left Oman.”
“Last time, I meant.”
Her breast lit up. Her phone was flashing in the pocket of her shirt. She took it out, saying, “Look, if we’re going to keep running into each other, I would ask you to stop speaking to me as if you know me, because you don’t.”
The whites of her eyes glimmered; he nodded; they walked back to their cars.
“Okay, Abid,” Kim was saying, “you can tell us—did that hatchling come out of the warden’s pocket for effect? They usually hatch at dawn, don’t they?”
“Most times, but there are always a few babies on the beach.”
“No! Does that mean we might have squished infants in the nursery?”
Thea’s phone was throwing a creamy light on her smile, as she leaned against the bonnet reading a text.
“Believe me,” said Abid, “many more make it to the ocean than they would if they were not protected.”
“Crabs love them,” said Gabriel. “And birds.”
“Come, come,” said Abid, ushering the two women into the jeep. “It is very late now. We will have a long day tomorrow.”
Another wadi. Another swim. Another sighting.
This time, Gabriel found Thea in the belly of a canyon. He had led his charges to one of his favorite places—a sliver of water that ran like a crystal snake through a gully, which ended at a turnstile of rocks, above which were more pools and some caves. Stopping on the pebbly shore, the women demurred. Too much clambering, they said. Too much heat. He didn’t argue. Thea’s bag and towel were on the ground with Kim’s, guarded by Khaled, a wiry teenager, and one of his pals.
Sue was wriggling out of her dress, her silver hair up in a tight bun—everything about her was tight, Gabriel thought, while the other two, who complained so much about the heat, refused to swim. He threw off his top and waded in, chatting to the boys, who joined him, and all three allowed the water to carry them around the bend to the end of the narrow channel, where they hoisted themselves up and squeezed through a fissure to the next level.
There, with her back to him, Thea was reclining on a slimy curve of rock, half in, half out of a crescent-shaped pool, her face lifted to the sunlight that had fought its way past the morning’s clouds.
“Fuck!”
The sudden grunt and gush of water initially startled her, but then she said languidly, “Oh. Gabriel.”
The gold-tinged rocks that dipped into the shallow water were treacherous. He had slipped and crashed down, sliding into the pool some meters from where she lay.
“Be careful. It’s deadly.”
He grasped his elbow. “Yeah, just figured that out.”
“I’d help, but if I move I might break something.”
The two boys scampered like goats over the ice-smooth boulders, past Kim, who had climbed into a natural jacuzzi one level up and lay with her head on the rocky rim.
“I have a message,” he said, rubbing his arm, “from Abid. Lunch will be ready in ten minutes. I hope that information is worth a cracked elbow.”
“Not really, no,” Thea smiled, “but I am very hungry.”
“He’s built a fire back at the picnic site. Smells good.”
“We bought barracuda straight from the sea. We left the tourist trail this morning and powered along a beach instead. Unbelievable.”
He slid closer, like a seal paddling around a curved rock. Such a relief to find her, after the scraping disappointment of waiting fruitlessly over a breakfast of industrial toast and grainy coffee in the hotel restaurant that morning, listening to some American girl at the table behind him talk about her hair, and her mother, and her Visa account.
Thea tilted her face toward the sun. The water fussed around her breasts. “Like an Irish summer’s day—trying to catch a few rays between the clouds.” She squinted at him. “Or have you forgotten what an Irish summer is like?”
“Even if I hadn’t, I’m sure it’s different now. Hotter?”
“Wetter. There was talk of vineyards in climate-changed Ireland, but so far all we’ve had is more rain. Still, you must miss it?”
“Irish rain?”
“Ireland. Both.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“So why don’t you go back?”
“Because it brought out the worst in me.”
“Don’t you have family in Cork?” she asked.
“My parents, yeah. But they like coming here for the weather.” He smiled.
She looked around the rock room in which they lay. “Where are your women?”
Gabriel raised an eyebrow in the direction of the fissure, thinking about the proverbial camel and the eye of the needle, but said only, “Bit too much of a
