Even months later, Olivia will be shocked at how long her mind kept the word bomb at bay. It was 1979 and Lebanon, where she would change planes, was thick into its civil war. Los Angeles to Paris to Beirut to Baghdad. A journey of airports, she joked before boarding the first flight. Now her heart beats faster and the back of her neck goes damp. But all around her are calm faces. Nothing can be that bad. Turbulence, she decides, though the wine in her glass is still.
Beside her, Delan continues to sleep as if the dead press upon his chest. Suddenly the plane pulses, and something rattles by the front of the cabin. She nudges his shoulder. “We’re landing in Switzerland.”
He raises his head slowly, glancing out the window, as if perhaps the reason for her words should be found in an alignment of stars.
“Delan. Can you find out why?”
“Switzerland.” There is a whiff of wine on his breath, and he now focuses on the orange upholstery before him as if still crawling from whatever dream had pinned him to his seat. When he puts his hand on the knee of her corduroy pants, his light touch changes, his fingers curling, short nails finding the tiny trenches. A leap within her chest. Even before they’d started dating, their chemistry was like a quiet rage, something that lit even the most banal activity, and touch, though then under the guise of friendship, was constant. Whenever he could, he walked with his arm around her. At any opportunity, they sat too close on the couch. Sometimes she missed an entire episode of Barney Miller, simply because she couldn’t take her eyes off the place where his leg leaned against hers. Drawn to each other from the start, they’d been held back by a fear of ruining a friendship and a living space—her fear—or making a move too soon and scaring the other person—his fear.
Now Delan turns to the man in a gray suit next to him.
There is a flurry of talk between them, in Arabic, Olivia assumes. All hushed tones and hand gestures and strangely—perhaps she’s wrong?—the word Disneyland. My Arabic is rusty, he told her when they’d booked their tickets. I need to brush up. Speaking Kurdish to the wrong person could get us killed. He laughed then, and despite what he’d told her about his homeland, she’d thought it a joke.
He turns back to her. “We’re making a landing in Switzerland.”
“But why? What does that mean?”
“It means my mother gets chocolates.” He smiles.
“Mechanical trouble?” In her mind, she sees a flock of pigeons blending into the night, sucked silently into an engine.
“Sure,” he says. “Mechanical trouble.”
“But you don’t know? You were just talking to him for five minutes.”
He lowers his voice. “He’s a Kurd. He used to buy shoes from the shop where my brother worked. His wife’s a professor at university and he was just in Los Angeles for business. He didn’t get to Disneyland but he got the Mickey ears for his nephew.”
A kaleidoscope of mountains exists within Delan’s eyes, a turn of deep brown with bits of faraway trees. She watches them now, the way they spin tales. “All that just happened.”
“Don’t be mad, but we might have tea with them when we land in Baghdad.”
This quality of his—to be generous and affable and see the world in a series of potential friendships—it’s one of his greatest draws. What people love. What she loves. But it’s also what challenges those closest to him, because he can’t say no. Can’t look into someone’s eyes and allow his own image to shrink, lessened by their disappointment—even when his money or comfort or time is put at risk. Thanksgiving dinner, random Tuesday nights, someone new it seems is always in their house. Just once, I’d like to know the people in my living room, Rebecca, their other female roommate, has said. Rebecca, the only woman financial manager at her firm, bold and midthirties with bobbed hair and a low threshold for strangers. Am I to feel honored that the bartender from the Formosa raids my fridge and the mailman carves the turkey?
Then there is the crackle of another announcement. This time to fasten seat belts. Something’s wrong. Olivia feels it now. Can even hear it, a sort of murmur in the engine’s hum.
“Olivia Anna Murray,” Delan says, and the names sound into one, Oliviaannamurray. “Why worry? What can you do from up here?”
“Pray?”
He smiles. “Sure. Then pray.”
When the envelope with news of his cousin’s wedding first arrived, crammed with stamps and containing a letter that was heavily redacted by the government, as if decorated with black rectangles, Delan’s face went wistful. Constantly he spoke of going home, and when asked what was stopping him, he cited money, time, or politics, and the words tended to transform into a heavy drink that got poured and an early night asleep on the couch.
As he read the letter, Olivia chopped garlic. The wedding, he said, would be a party for days. There would be four different kinds of rice, and each dance would last for twenty minutes. The cousin, Ferhad, the one getting married, was an amazing flute player who once hid in a tree with Delan as they waited for Delan’s brother to have his illicit first kiss. For an hour they crouched on a limb, cramped and irritated but knowing this would be the secret spot, till Soran at last appeared with the girl and leaned in for a kiss, and Ferhad started playing and Delan tipped a bowl of paper confetti into the air, releasing a flurry like snow on a hot August evening. Ferhad was the cousin who chased an older boy half across town because he’d stolen Delan’s pocketknife. The cousin who’d spent summers
