“I have things to smile about.”
“It happens to us all, you know,” she said, fiddling now with the top button of her shirt, “the big love affair we never want to get over, but the fact is we have to get on, grow up, have families.”
“Says who?”
“Our DNA.”
“We can’t all live the same life. Some of us have to buck the trend. Besides, why do parents always assume that people who don’t have kids are missing out?”
“I don’t know, now you ask.”
He crossed his arms on the edge of the table. “So who was he, the big love affair you don’t want to get over?”
She looked away, as if, beyond the uneven, clotted cream sand, she saw that other man. Gabriel could almost see his reflection in her eyes. “Ah, yes,” he said, “the Indian.”
Her eyes swung back. “What?”
“You told me about him.”
Thea pushed back from the table. Other people were emerging from the tents and coming toward breakfast. “I never told you any such thing.”
“Not now. Last time.”
“Have you . . . have you been eavesdropping?”
“No.” He shook his head firmly. “No, Thea. You told me about Sachiv.”
Abid was hovering on his phone, kicking the sand with his sandals. Word had come from Muscat: the rains had been so heavy, there was concern about flash floods. “There are twenty wadis between here and Nizwa,” Gabriel heard him say to Kim. “Any of them could flood when the rain comes from the mountains. We must leave quickly.”
Gabriel was delivering the same message to his charges and, not long afterward, in great spits of sand, several 4x4s took off. Now he had a proper excuse to speed, and he took his ladies flying across high dunes on the way back to the sandy superhighway, the vehicle at times perched as if about to somersault, until they reached the broad, track-marked valley that led out of the sands. The pale dunes poured into the dull brown of the valley floor, and as they came past a Bedouin encampment, a herd of children materialized from behind the fences and ran toward them. Betty insisted he stop, and when the children gathered around the window, she handed out cookies. A little girl in a long red dress emerged from the nearest reed hut—no more than three—and came waddling over, as many fingers shoved into her mouth as could fit, and reached up to his window with her other hand. Her eyes were as big as planets. Gabriel gave her a cookie. Thea was right about DNA. He longed to have children, to have a daughter like this.
The drive to Nizwa proved floodless, in spite of purple clouds sitting over the mountains, and they arrived in the old fort town by noon. After checking the women into their hotel rooms, Gabriel went in search of Thea and found her sitting on a lounger in the garden, watching Kim doing laps in the kidney-shaped pool.
“Hello,” he said, sitting on the end of the adjacent lounger. “What you up to?”
Thea pushed her hair behind her ear, but didn’t look at him. Through her shirt, he could see the outline of bra, the slight bump of nipple. “Not much. Abid says it wouldn’t be safe now to go into the mountains.”
Gabiel’s phone rang. He picked up. “Annie, hi. Can I call you back in ten?”
“No, I’m heading out in a bit,” she said, “but it’s fine. Just ringing for a chat.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah, yeah. You?”
He looked across at Thea, caught her eye. “Oh, I’m fine, all right. You’ll never believe who I ran into the other day.”
“Who?”
“I’ll tell you later. Kids all good?”
“Your adult nieces and nephew are very well, thank you. Stop calling them kids. They hate it, and so do I.”
He chuckled. “Right. Bye, talk soon.” He put his phone in his shirt pocket, saying, “Abid’s right. The wadis will be unpredictable.”
“Which means we’ll miss out on Wadi Bani Awf.” She looked toward the mountains. “Is it really so spectacular?”
“Do you want me to lie?”
“Yes.”
He shrugged. “Seen one wadi, seen ’em all.”
“And the truth?”
“Mind-blowing.”
“Shit.”
“What will you do instead?”
“We had thought Bahla maybe.”
“Ah. Jinn-town.”
“Apparently. That’s why Kim wants to go, but Abid isn’t keen. Says his wife wouldn’t have him back in the house if he went there.”
“People worry about the evil eye,” Gabriel explained. “Look, my lot have opted to rest up. They’re done in. So I could take you over to Bahla later, if you’d like.”
“Kim would like that very much.”
“What exactly happens there?” Kim asked, when they were heading out of Nizwa that afternoon. “I mean, why is it called the City of Jinn?”
“It’s a tradition,” Gabriel said. “If you’re lumbered with an evil jinn, Bahla’s the place to get rid of it. Lots of wise men and exorcists used to live there and some still do, but not a lot of people pay much attention to that stuff these days. The drivers and guides love to entertain, as you’ll have noticed, but the Omani population is highly educated and youngsters are more interested in Facebook than magic, which in some ways is a pity. The wealth of lore that Oman enjoys, the mix of Arab and African myth, is being left behind.”
“Same as everywhere else,” said Thea.
“All the more reason for me to write about it,” said Kim.
He glanced at Thea. “They took me there, you know.”
“Who did?”
“Family. When my sister was living here, people got to her, told her to have me exorcized.”
Kim leaned forward, her head coming between the seats. “Somebody performed an exorcism on you? To get rid of what’s-her-name?”
He shook his head. “It was after Prudence left. Annie thought I could be cured of missing her. As if sadness itself is a bad jinn.”
“It surely is,” Thea said quietly.
“The way I understand it,” Kim said, “almost anything can be put down to jinn—alcoholism, depression, illnesses, bad temper—but a broken heart?”
He glanced in the side mirror. “My broken heart ran deep. I wouldn’t go out.
