“So how come no one else ever set eyes on her?”
“Because . . .” Gabriel stalled. How to explain it rationally when even he struggled to understand it, especially now, when the very woman whom he had only ever seen within the whitewashed walls of his home, and usually between hand-washed sheets, sat with him now asking questions about their affair as if it had never happened? How should he tell her about herself? He had to get into the right gear. He had to play it her way, for now, which meant finding the words and the mindset to disassociate this woman, Thea, from everything he knew of her. He sucked in his breath, and set his eyes on hers to let her know that if she so much as flinched he would see it. “There was something else,” he said, “about her.”
“Go on.”
“We were only ever together in one place—my house. She wouldn’t shift from there, though she was pale and wan and craved light. It was as if she had her ear on a wormhole to somewhere else. The jinn world, some would say. And the more I insisted we went out, the less I saw of her. But things were getting pretty weird by then.”
“Only by then?” Thea teased.
He dipped his head, conceding her point. “There was other stuff. Noises, in the house.”
“Ooh, spooky!” But the jokiness was contrived. He was reeling her in.
“Not spooky, no. Mundane. Irish. Like a radio in the background, and purring—I sometimes heard a cat purring, though there was no cat, and no radio, and no woman in the house who wore stockings.”
“Stockings?”
“Yeah, I used to hear that sound—nylons rubbing against each other. That was fairly scary, all right.”
The muscles beneath her eyes tightened. She leaned forward to turn up the lamp. “Why did Abid say she melted away?”
“Ah, yes,” he said, “the punch line—how an invisible woman disappeared.” He spread his fingers across his thighs. “I lost patience one night and I thought . . . I mean, I was fairly sure I picked her up to carry her out of the house, because she was there, but then she wasn’t there and I wasn’t holding anything, or anyone, and it was as if she had dribbled away to nothing.” He raised his hands in a cavalier manner. “Easily explained, in retrospect. I wasn’t eating properly at the time and was dehydrated so, obviously, I was hallucinating. She had already left me.”
The low murmur of conversation at the top end of the camp lifted into a gush of laughter, then dropped again to near silence.
“How long had it lasted, the affair?”
“Not long. A couple of months, but it has an extended tail—like a comet, gritty and fiery,” he turned his head toward the flap, “and I haven’t been able to escape the debris. Twenty-six years on, I’m still dust in her wake.”
“You must have tried to find her?”
He shrugged. “She wasn’t to be found. There wasn’t a hint of her anywhere in Muscat. But it comes back at me,” he said, dropping the offhand tone, “like a kind of torment. When I least expect it, I’ll suddenly feel her in my arms, writhing and thrashing.”
Thea ran her hand around the back of her neck. “Sounds very jinn-like to me.”
“Sometimes I think,” his voice was so low that he wondered if she could hear him, “not that she was a jinn, but that the jinn took her from me. Some kind of punishment.”
“But you don’t believe in jinn.”
“No. No, I don’t, but skepticism sometimes comes a cropper on this one.”
“And why would they punish you, anyway?”
He thought about kissing her. Instead he said, “One day she’ll slip into view, like someone coming in the back door, as she did before.”
“Why do you think that?” she asked, with unexpected sharpness. “The past doesn’t owe us any favors, you know. We all try to go back. We think we can walk into it, like into a room, and find everything the way we left it, but it isn’t there, any of it.”
Gabriel leaned forward, then changed his projection and made it part of his upward propulsion as he got to his feet. She wasn’t ready yet. “To each our own imaginings,” he said, bending over to peck her cheek. “Night.”
Kim came in as he went out. He walked around the brick bathroom and came again to the back of the tent.
“Entertaining strange men now, are we?” Kim asked.
“He’s certainly strange. Trying to get a handle on him is like trying to make a sculpture—you chip away only to find more stone.”
Gabriel heard her move, stand up maybe.
“But I know Gabriel, Kim. He is right about that.”
Early the next day, Gabriel was talking to the cook by the door of the brick kitchen when he saw Thea come out of her tent, pulling on a sweater, and head toward the enclosure in jeans and bare feet.
“At last,” he said, as she came over. “Sit down. I’ll get tea.”
She did as she was told. Like a couple, they were—easy together in the ragged morning.
“Sleep well?” he asked, bringing two glasses of tea to the low table.
“A few hours of light oblivion. Oblivion lite, I call it. I haven’t had a good night since I arrived. You guys talking late in your tent didn’t help.”
“Sorry.”
“And, come dawn, I was freezing.” She sipped the tea, turned her engagement ring around her finger, like Annie did, and looked across the dunes. “You were right about not seeing much desert. It’s beautiful here, but these aren’t the mountainous dunes I’d hoped for.”
“They’re farther south.”
“I could lie, I suppose. Tell the boys I climbed dunes as high as the Twelve Pins, and pretend my camera wasn’t working.”
“Two sons, you said? What age?”
Her face softened. “Nineteen and fifteen.”
“And the very thought of them makes you smile,” he added.
“You should try it. It’d give you something
