Something crackled behind them. Thea swung around. Gabriel put his hand on her knee. “There’s nothing here you need worry about.”
Only part of his face was lit by the fire; a huge wad of night pressed against Thea’s back. “You remember so much.”
“I pretend not to, but over the years every bitter little trinket of memory has taken up residence, just to make sure I never forget. Putting him in there wasn’t the problem—people have done worse to grooms. The crime was that we forgot to take him out.”
The last word went down his throat with a swallow.
“And the wedding?”
“Never happened. Geraldine stayed with it, with him, for a year, but I’d turned him into a lump. Not even a gibbering wreck, just a living lump, and a health hazard. He was traumatized, and in those days there was no rush of counselors to sort him out. The buried-alive thing haunted him. Haunted all of us. And, thanks to me, even though living, to him, was playing, his fingers never again felt the soft slide of ivory, and his feet no longer dance with the pedals.”
“And yours neither. What he can’t have, you won’t have. Even women. Family.” The flames warmed her face, but her back was cold.
He pressed his fingers into his forehead, then rubbed his eyes.
“Where did it come from?” she asked quietly. “Such a vile idea.”
“From a booze-addled brain.”
“But at some level you must have resented him, blamed him for—”
“No. Listen to me.” Gabriel turned to her. “I idolized Max, all right? I adored him. When we were kids, I thought he was the best frigging pianist in the whole darn world. I only took up the piano to please him, because he wanted to teach me, and my face used to flush with delight whenever he told the parents how clever his little brother was. It made me feel worthy of him. We were so damn proud of each other, but what neither of us noticed, back then, was the light in our parents’ eyes when they realized what a little gem they had in me. And when I reached the same shitty conclusion—that I was so much better at what Max did best—I wanted to chop off my fingers. Max, of course, encouraged me, coached me, taught me to play more sublimely than he ever would, and had I had the right type of ego—the kind you need to succeed—I might have overcome it. The guilt. I might have handled the conflict in my head and in my hands. But I had to take the baton and run with it, because everyone expected me to, even though that meant leaving Max behind on the track, applauding even while I broke the ribbon. Took all the ribbons.
“Annie saw it. She knew it was only a matter of time before I threw it in, but it was pointless, giving up. Max would never have reached the same heights as I could. He knew it. We all did. But I couldn’t go on taking the accolades in his place, not when he kept on trying.”
“So resentment built up,” Thea said, “because he was the reason you stopped.”
“I didn’t care about that.” Gabriel, now, sounded like a different man, his voice gravelly and thick. “I just wanted him to stop punishing himself for not being me.”
His eyes held back. His loneliness had to be, could only be, as deep as that cave in the photograph. He had not stayed in Oman for love or jinn, she thought. He had stayed in order not to leave. He had thrown everything he could out of his life, even music, except for that tiny ukulele, as if its size made it less of an instrument. I’m not really playing. This isn’t really an instrument. An insignificant not-really-here-at-all thing.
You’d never fit a man into a ukulele.
“So you live like a monk,” she said. “In penitence. Hiding behind a specter.” She turned to him. “She was never real, was she? Not even to you.”
Without really meaning to, as if he were a child who had scraped his knee, she kissed the back of his hand.
He didn’t flinch, but after a time he said, “That’s the first real tenderness I’ve known in twenty-six years.”
Later, he played the ukulele, which made a coy, cheeky sound, backed up by the river, gossiping its way across the stones. No rest for rivers, Thea thought. No nighttime.
“My aunt nursed me back to health,” she said, “when I was ill.”
Gabriel slowed his playing, but didn’t stop.
“She wore nylons and had chunky thighs, and a fat cat called Featherweight.” In this light, Gabriel’s eyes were black, and beautiful. She held them fast. “He purred like a generator.”
He didn’t blink, but his fingers stopped. She wished he would blink.
“I know,” he said.
“I know you know. But how?”
Gabriel put down the ukulele. “I gave up looking for explanations long ago.”
“It’s as if, somehow, when I was ill, you heard my world and I saw yours.”
“Jinn magic can be powerful. She might have used you as an unwitting host.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in jinn magic?”
“In the best of us,” he said, with lowered eyes, “belief fluctuates.”
Rigid, Thea lay in the tent, her mind whirring. It wouldn’t let her sleep or think or stem her seasick apprehension.
Outside, Gabriel was shuffling around, but he soon went quiet, abandoning her to the night, which took up residence inside the tent. She missed Kim’s soft breathing and she needed to pee—she kept needing to pee: that it involved going out among the ifrit and jinn made her bladder fill as soon as she’d emptied it. Gathering her courage and the torch, she crawled out. Gabriel snored quietly on the roof of his jeep. It had been a long, tiring day for him. All that driving around U-bends.
She crouched not far from the camp, not sure where to point the torch, but inclined to hold it over her shoulder so that they might be repulsed by its
