“You’ve been back twice in fifteen years,” she says to him. “And now you’re almost there. And I know you’re nervous, but—”
“Nervous is waiting for a callback. Nervous is parking the car to pick up your date. This isn’t nervous. This is a pit I keep getting in my stomach.”
“Delan, it’s a different nervous. It’s bigger. Mixed with so much else. Guilt for leaving? Sadness for having missed out on things?”
For a moment, he says nothing. “Did you know,” he says at last, “I came to America on the same plane as the Beatles? Their first tour in America. When I told my mother that, she cried because she thought it was a sign that I’d be famous. And then I cried because I knew she’d one day die never having flown on a plane.”
Always she’d heard the story of his arrival to the country, the women screaming from the tarmac, how he’d—for just a moment, he’d be sure to add in, laughing—thought they were there for him. But never had he told her the part about his mother.
Now he waits for her to speak, to allow him this turn of events. But she doesn’t want to, because she believes it will be fine and that at his core, he is just nervous, and there is simply too much riding on this trip—for both of them—to go home. So she gets up and turns, sitting beside him to face him. “It’s good for us to go. You know it is.”
At first, he doesn’t look at her. Just watches the ceiling as the lights slink across the surface. “And you’re not worried?”
“A little. Of course. But tonight? I’m alone with you.”
Now he meets her eyes. “For the last time.”
His gaze is steady, and just that, the way he’s looking at her, makes her feel as if everything has come loose within her. For the last time. She hears it again and is brought back to just minutes ago when she’d stood at the window telling herself to only think of taking photos, since he wasn’t going anywhere. And with the recollection, she feels it. A ripple of unease.
“For the last time in weeks,” she corrects and sits up again so she can rest her right leg on the other side of him.
Her fingers stretch along his stomach, and she hears the sound of her own breathing and through the open window, a car door that slams and a dog that barks at someone’s return. Then his hand is against her chin, and she turns in to his touch, feeling his eyes steady upon her. And even when he sits up, when he’s slid his hand beneath her shirt and pressed his palm hard between her shoulder blades as a brightness flares against them from a turn of headlights, even then she knows he’s not looked away.
CHAPTER 4
Baghdad. Hot even in slender strips of shade. Wide streets with no lane markers. The swerve of cars pitted from sand. Date palms sway past rooftops or lift high above billboards, the clusters of fruit like pollen on giant flowers. At times, it feels as though Olivia’s found herself caught in the pages of a magazine or history book, until the noise and dust and the smell of buses and grilling meat plant her where she is. All of Baghdad is a work in progress and a collision of centuries, with unfinished buildings and white houses, everything seeming to move but against itself, the whole city caught in different, conflicting currents of motion all at once.
Though some men wear thawb, white tunics and white headdresses encircled at the top with a black cord, most are dressed as they are in the West, just as the women are both in shapeless abaya, long black cover-ups, as well as in short-sleeve dresses that hit their knees, their hair loose in waves. At a light, a young man in flared brown pants and a striped button-down shirt that’s left open at the top watches Olivia, his toes tapping, the bones of his chest showing through like a pattern.
“The Tigris,” Delan says as they approach a bridge.
When they’re stopped, she opens her camera bag, trying to focus on a boat capsized in the reeds. Then her attention’s drawn to a boy jumping in from a pile of rocks, joining his friends who float nearby. Click. Her early-childhood summers were spent in lakes or rivers as well, and at once she feels that really, truly, the differences between her and Delan could be negligible. Since they’ve arrived, she’s started gathering similarities. Coca-Cola. Oleander that grows against high walls. Swimming in rivers.
He nudges her. “You see? Every country had a British invasion.”
She turns and catches a red double-decker bus cutting off a pickup truck. The driver honks four times. Hot air pushes fumes into their car.
They have no luggage, so Delan gave the airlines his aunt’s address in Baghdad, which Olivia remembers having used for her visa application to not draw attention to the Kurdish area she’d be visiting.
“Will she be mad that we’re just showing up?” Olivia asks.
“Mad? She would be mad if we didn’t stay with her. She’s my favorite aunt. And we have chocolate.”
A mosque draws nearer, the four minarets on the corners rising up like giant birthday candles. “Al-Kadhimiya Mosque,” Delan says. “You should see it up close. The tiles. If you didn’t believe in God, you would then.”
She turns to him, surprised. “Really? And not in the power to create?”
“And who gave you that?”
“My father.”
“Everyone has a father. Some fathers are just not on this earth.”
The city streaks behind him. In the last decade, most of her friends—even those who’d not gone to war—had let the concept of God be beaten away in torrents of Vietnamese rain, burned in the jungles, or obliterated in a blast that claimed a village. A world of
