Brilliant (14 page)

It hadn't been a particularly white Christmas that year, light flurries on Christmas Eve, Pete said over the phone when he called Christmas night: “Deck the halls with boughs of Holly.” He'd been singing this to her since they were kids, cracking up when he got to her name. But at the start of the new year, temperatures all along the East Coast shot up, an accidental spring. Vince emailed Holly a picture of Pete floating on a spare tire in the backyard thaw. And then the temperature dropped: a sudden minus 30 on the night of January 20, the night Vince and Pete were coming back from a party in Tiverton. Those signs on the side of the road as you approach a bridge, the ones that say
BRIDGE
IC
ES
BEFORE
ROAD
? They're true.

“You see, what happens is the cold air surrounds the upper and lower surface of the bridge.” The police officer who'd found the truck in the frozen river the next morning must have thought knowing the details would be, if not a comfort, then a way to understand the tragedy. “This double exposure causes the water on the bridge to freeze faster than that on the road.” He'd remembered to say how sorry he was and that he hoped her family had some “closure” soon. Vince and Pete would have snorted at that word.

 

She'd been overly ambitious, Holly realized after baking the cornbread for the stuffing. It was now one o'clock. If the turkeys went into the oven within the hour, they'd be lucky to eat by eight. Eat. She hadn't actually thought beyond the shopping, cooking, baking part. Who was going to eat all this food? Parting the birds' legs to push in the stuffing, she saw again how small they were, how puny compared to last night's Butterball. And again it struck her as completely nuts — a piled-high platter of leftover turkey sat in the fridge — to be doing this. “Can't make lemonade without lemons. Can't make gravy without a turkey,” she said out loud and heard herself laugh again.

But she could do without the non-essentials. She'd bake the potatoes instead of mashing them, ditto for the sweet potatoes (who needed all that butter and brown sugar again?) And for dessert there was plenty of leftover apple pie and pumpkin mousse. The night before, Holly had tried to pack up leftovers for her dinner guests, but after the Pakistanis threw each other startled looks, she'd stopped. She would never, ever, completely understand another culture. After twenty years abroad she knew this for a fact. It was time perhaps to stop trying. It was time perhaps to go home.

 

Their mother hadn't been a vain woman, not one to get manicures or spend a lot on clothes. But she was bold and bright, a tall redhead with a wide mouth, olive-green eyes accented with a sweep of pearly shadow, a small waist — what men used to call “a looker” — and the mouth of a truck driver. You couldn't miss her. You didn't want to miss her if you were one of her chosen.

Carolina chose people, pulled them in from the crowd. She didn't necessarily go for the obvious power-brokers, like bank presidents or school principals. But she wooed their teachers, their coaches, anyone who might be able to open doors and eliminate the rest of the competition. “You can't say Mom isn't ambitious for us,” Vince once said after Holly and her mother had finished each other off in a shouting match, begun when Holly refused to give chocolates to her teachers before exams. “Ungrateful bitch!” Carolina had growled. That mouth, that tongue. Even after her mother left them to pursue another life, Holly could still hear the names: Slob. Brat. Pain in the freaking neck. Bitch.

Finding Carolina wouldn't have been that difficult. There had been various addresses and phone numbers over the years, mostly from aunts or cousins who'd heard from her. But she never contacted them, the family of four she'd let fall away, even after their father died at fifty. And so she didn't hear what had happened to her boys — thirty-six- and thirty-seven-year-old bachelors, managers at the Safeway in town, best friends. “Why should she know?” Holly asked Mark, who knew better than to offer anything but a soft-eyed nod. She must have known, of course. Word would have reached her somehow.

 

Holly slipped the turkeys, propped on a mound of sliced onions, celery stalks and unpeeled carrots, into the oven just at two. And then, even though she knew it was not a sign of mental stability, she went back out in search of cranberries. She'd already checked in the obvious places, but something kept whispering at her, and finally, at the other Choitram's, the one in Khalidiyah, a store you couldn't even get near with a car, she found one sad bag. It was thirty dirhams, an absolute crime, but she bought it anyway. Back home, the kitchen was warm with the smell of roasting birds. She tipped the cranberries into a pot, stirred in sugar and orange juice and felt the knot that had been there since yesterday loosen. Cranberries were part of what made Thanksgiving dinner a feast, not just another big dinner, and she had found them.

“Have you recovered from
le grand bouffe
?” Mark always called at 4:30 unless he was in a meeting. Lately he'd been involved in a U.S. Embassy program on human trafficking. It was a hard sell, he said. “You know this part of the world. They want to look good, they want our respect and regard, but they don't want to change.” He sounded tired, like he was the one who needed recovering.

“Everything's pretty much back to normal,” Holly said and surveyed her counters, grateful again that she'd never employed a maid here. Who needed that scrutiny? A household was complicated enough. Bags of flour and corn meal, parts of vegetables, knives and cutting boards, plastic wrap from the turkeys covered the granite counters for the second time in twenty-four hours. She'd never been a neat cook. Well, it was. This was normal.

She started on the roux while the turkeys roasted, working her magic on the birds' innards. And when the turkeys came out at six she was ready, broth and flour in hand. This was the part she loved best: placing the roasting pan over two burners, turning up the flame and stirring like a dervish as the drippings turned dark as burnt caramel. Then came the wine, scraping the browned bits, pressing the remaining moisture from the spent vegetables, stirring, reducing, straining. And then…velvet.

Mark looked stunned, anxious, then simply blank as he stood in the kitchen door, shaking his head finally, surrendered, as he came to hug her.

“You are something,” he said.

“It was the gravy,” she said. “It wasn't right.”

Mark nodded. “Do I have to keep my suit on for this?”

Jersey looked delighted when she came home. “Why didn't you tell me we were doing Thanksgiving all over again?”

“It was the gravy,” Holly said, her only explanation.

The turkeys were surprisingly tender for such little guys, the baked potatoes better than last night's mashed potatoes with roasted garlic and crème fraîche, the stuffing crunchy and soft in the right places, the cranberries sweet and puckery. They broke the garlic bread — “Like croutons!” cried Jersey — in chunks over the salad of spinach and butter lettuce. And the gravy, while not her best-best, not quite to the level of that Thanksgiving in a Rhode Island bungalow a dozen years before, was splendid. Good gravy is no mere condiment, Holly read once in a cookbook. It's the tie that binds.

“Hey, guys, remember that time in Jakarta? We'd invited some under-secretary from the Laotian Embassy for Thanksgiving?” Jersey's face was bright with wine.

“Cambodian,” said Mark.

“Yeah, whatever, and the guy thought that the cranberries looked like some poisonous berry and he got really scared?”

“What about Turkmenistan?” said Mark, and they both groaned. Their two Turkmen Thanksgivings had required improvisation. The first year, Justin had been so disappointed at the sight of flatbread pieces and chickpeas in the stuffing he'd cried.

“Or the Thanksgiving where we just decided to keep it the four of us…where was that?” Holly asked.

“Paris,” said Mark. And she saw their apartment again. It had faced Les Tuileries and the two bedrooms had been flooded with light and there was a wonderful
boulangerie
right downstairs.

“What about that one when we went home and Uncle Vince and Uncle Pete and that crazy old aunt of yours danced around the kitchen?” said Jersey. “I think I dropped the pumpkin pie or something.”

“You remember that?” said Holly and had to look down at her plate because the room was suddenly swimming.

“Sorry, Mom,” said Jersey.

“I'm a tough old bird and don't either of you forget it.” Then realizing what they were eating, Holly laughed, a laugh she could feel in her chest. And they were laughing too.

“This was quite…unexpected,” said Mark, when he laid down his napkin finally, regarding his wife with a look of long, complicated love before she sent him off to the den.

Alone in the kitchen later — so much to wash and put away, so many containers to rearrange in the fridge — she caught sight of an Emirati family, they seemed like a family, taking a late walk on the Corniche: one
khandoura
followed by five
abayas
. Wives? Daughters? One was never sure. Families came in so many shapes and sizes. She watched them walk the full length of her window and disappear into the frame. Perhaps they were all going out for ice cream,
baba
treating his girls.

 

You know how parents tell kids as their marriage is busting up: Honey this has nothing to do with you it's between me and Dad (or me and Mum) it's not your fault we hope you understand sometimes grownups just can't live together anymore we still love you honey this has nothing to do with you?

My parents couldn't say that.

They worked — she still does — at the New Medical Centre. She's an internist; he's an ob/gyn. Babies, private parts. I never got why he would pick that specialty, but Dad says he just loves pregnant women. “He loves women in general,” Mum says, but not meanly or jealously. Other women weren't the problem.

We have an agreement going, now it's just the two of us. We will not badmouth Dad. We will not be negative. We will not be dramatic. That one's for me. My mother could star in an ad for Xanax, she's so fucking calm. She could open a yoga studio, start an ashram. Dr. Nadira, doctor of serenity and bullshit. But I'm not supposed to crap all over her either. Them's the rules.

Dad's take is that I don't have enough rules. “That's what this place does to kids,” he says. “This place” happens to be my home sweet home and I'm never leaving it. Another issue, I guess you could say, between me and the rents. I love my Abu. I love it to pieces. The heat's ridiculous and sometimes it gets to me how other Indians are treated. Like there are these guys who wash the windows of our apartment tower. Twice a year they're out there on this creaky, stupid little box with their squeegees and they look so tired and sweaty and like they
really
don't know what they're doing and I know they're probably getting about a dirham an hour and living out in the labour camps. So what do I do? Pull the blinds. Rude and basically useless, that's me, but I can't watch.

The British School Al Khubairat, where I'm cruising Grade 10, is
for precocious, entitled kids with ambitious, guilty parents. “We're so sorry, sweetie, for taking you away from your friends in Flitwick (or Henley-on-Thames or Glossop…take your pick of any British backwater). But we shall make it up to you, my darling diddums. Promise!” The joke, of course, is that kids love it here. They love it after five minutes. What's not to love? The city's buzzing. The beach, the sun, the shopping, the travelling. Golf lessons, billionaire buddies, gold dust on the chocolate mousse at Emirates Palace. Freedom.

My cousins back in the
UK
don't believe that last thing. “Really, free as a bird,” I tell them when we visit in summers. “But, Raakhi, it's, you know,
Muslim
.” It's standard that Brits — even Hindu Indians, who should be more tolerant — get vexed when it comes to Muslims. That's why so many Brits are moving to France and Spain. Most won't actually come out and say so. They just roll their eyes and say something about lax immigration, blah, blah. It's dred.

I have a theory why kids feel so free here. The dads are flat roofin' it at some job with insane hours and random bosses. The mums are bored out of their skulls, so they roll with a bunch of other expat ladies. Their world's busy, too busy for kids. Besides, there's always the nanny or the maid or both. If your folks are working, and doctors to boot, you basically write your own ticket. I had a nanny when I was younger, but she ran away when I was ten and Mum hasn't trusted anyone since. “We manage,” she says, which means she calls every hour to check on me and leaves samosas from Lulu in the fridge for after school. Oh, the life of an only child.

But that's not what's bugging me now. Not even missing Dad with all my hard little heart — his words — comes to the level of being grounded for National Day. National Day is brill. National Day is jokes. National Day is wicked fun.

First off, it's December 2, so it's blue skies, no clouds and not a drop of humidity. At school, the day before, we come in national dress. Somewhere in our closets we all have an
abaya
or
khandoura
. Just for this one day I glide along in my long black dress, jeans underneath, slut-heels on my size 6s, like a real Emirati lady. I love the way the material — light as nothing — swivels around my legs when I walk, the way the
shayla
slides off my hair onto my shoulders. So buff.

Mum says she might let me go for the school thing if I don't pull any drama between now and next week. But National Day, the real holiday, she's taking me to work with her. No parade on the Corniche. No watching the fireworks on the beach in front of Emirates Palace. No meeting up with friends. First she said she might take me up to the roof of the hospital to watch the fireworks. Then she thought about it. “Better yet, I'll order in from India Palace. It'll be fun.”

 

Last National Day, me, Miles, Rahim, Becka — mates from Al Khubairat — walked all the way down Khaleej al Arabi to the Corniche, Becka and me complaining all the way about our feet. At 7th Street, we got spun around in the crowd and lost each other in seconds. Miles miraculously found me on the corner, looking madly in all directions.

“Hey, isn't this the way we wanted it?” he said. He was lush, with these burning blue eyes and artist hands. We'd been texting each other like crazy for a week. We've been classmates since Grade 6, but it was like we'd just noticed each other, like we'd just woken up.

Of course, we couldn't hold hands, but we walked as close together as we could, passing the long lines of honking, grid-locked
SUV
s, sports cars, Hummers. Each was like a work of art, covered in red, white, green and black decals, crêpe paper, balloons and every gaudy, out-there decoration you could imagine. Some people had even got their cars painted green or red for the day. Happy Birthday,
UAE
! Thirty-nine years old, a baby of a country, if you think of Merry Olde. The car windows were open, Arabic music blasting out, people inside waving and yelling and squirting out green and red foam from giant canisters. Some green landed at my feet and I nearly slid into the people in front of us.

Two little kids were perched on the sunroof of a red van plastered with photos of Sheikh Khalifa and Sheikh Mohammed. “Look!” Miles was pointing at the kids, but I didn't want to. A couple of years ago a three-year-old boy slipped off the roof of his family's car onto the hood and got caught under their front wheels. They took him to hospital, where my parents were working. “These people,” Mum said, shaking her head. She doesn't think much of Emiratis. “If you saw what comes through our
ER
, you'd lose all respect,” she says.

When Miles and I finally waded through the traffic and reached the Corniche, it got crazier — ten lanes filled with cars inching along, mobs of Indian and Pakistani men in pastel
shalwar kameez
, women in saris, girls in
abayas
, cops trying and failing to keep order, kids dashing in and out of the street. A boy in a
khandoura
stuck his arm out of his Porsche and shot a long stream of red foam at the Pakistanis. It landed in their hair mostly, but one man, near me, doubled over, clutching his eyes. The boy took aim again, laughing and shouting in Arabic, and sprayed the men, aiming at their shoes.

“This is nuts,” yelled Miles, and took my hand since no one could see. In this party mood, nobody probably cared either. His hand was electric.

It was hardly my first National Day, but it was the first time my parents had let me come down here without them. “Only if you're with friends, understand?” Mum had insisted. “And it probably wouldn't hurt if there were some boys in the group.” Dad had looked at her doubtfully.

Back in our flat, Miles asked me to touch him and I did and then he touched me and then the thing just happened, though I was scared the whole time and hearing things. Miles kept saying it was just the cars on the Corniche. “They'll be out there all night burning rubber with their Lamborghinis. Idiots.”

Afterward, I changed into my trainers and we walked all the way to the Marina for the fireworks. My folks wouldn't have been happy about any of it — splitting off from the gang, going to the beach. And the other thing, a big thing I could never tell them. Miles and I didn't talk about it; instead we joked about our stupid
UAE
social studies class in Grade 8 and how Miss Khadija had made us memorize the names of the leaders of all seven Emirates. “I bet you can't remember them,” said Miles, turning to grin at me. His hair was messed up and adorable and for one scary moment I thought maybe I'd fallen in love back there.

I named the only one still in my brain. “Fujairah…Sheikh Hamad Bin Mohammed al-Sharqui. Remember old Sharqui?”

“The colours of the
UAE
flag are highly symbolic,” trilled Miles in Miss Khadija's high voice. “Red for sacrifice, white for peace, black for oil and green for…” he hesitated. “Not the environment?”

“Money,” I said.

“Right,” said Miles, and then about 100 years later: “Let's not make a big deal about…you know.”

The beach was so packed with bodies and blankets and camping chairs and hibachis and coolers that we stood on the sidewalk for ten minutes, scanning for one square foot of unoccupied sand. Miles finally dragged me to a place in the dark, somewhere to the left. We sat, the sand surprisingly cool. I pulled my knees to my chest. My body was sore and I now had oozy blisters on the back of both heels. Miles passed me a lit cigarette. It was just a cigarette, though, not the interesting stuff, which we would have been crazy to smoke out here, even if it was National Day and the whole place had gone postal.

It was a happening crowd — people dancing and playing music, laughing and eating, mostly eating. All nationalities, all ages: a baby crawled in front of us. “I think we may be the only Westerners here,” Miles said. Interesting, I thought, to be included as his “people,” considering my ethnic origins. Though if you've never actually lived in India, are born in the
UK
and raised in Abu Dhabi, who's to say what you are?

I did go to India two years ago, the folks deciding I needed to discover my roots. Even my grandparents back in Brixton have only ever
visited
their parents' village. They're essentially British, but Brits who wear saris to weddings and argue about their curry.

I had been pissed about going at first. “Why are you taking me somewhere I'm going to get sick?” But Dad got me all the right shots, Mum loaded up our carry-on with antibiotics and it turned out, I absolutely loved the place. The poverty makes you want to cry every minute, but there's so much life and beauty, and my relatives — Dad's family, who live in Delhi — are like the sweetest people. I was spoilt rotten. “You come back,” they said.

“Get a look at those Pakistani guys over there. Where the bloody hell do they think they are?” Miles was pointing to a group of men to our left. They were dancing in a circle, holding hands — one guy seemed to be in the middle — and everyone around them was clapping in rhythm.

“They're having a good time,” I said and then there was a sound so loud and close, so skull-splitting that I lunged to the side, rolling over in the sand, as an
SUV
— green and red and white crêpe-paper streamers flying behind, horn blasting — roared down the sand toward the water, men and women and kids spilling out on all sides, as it ran over blankets and barbeques. The car slowed only when it came close to the water. People were screaming and running in all directions and Miles grabbed my arm, pushing me against and through the crowd running toward us, toward the accident. I was hit in the face by a shoe flying, someone stomped on my foot, but by now Miles was behind me, shoving me hard toward the sidewalk. One cab only was on the street and we ran toward it, Miles jamming me inside, before sliding over on the seat.

“Get us out of here,” he yelled to the driver, who was watching the horror through his open window. He didn't move, didn't speak.

“I mean it.
GO
!” Miles thumped the back of the front seat, and the man, as if in a dream, still watching, turned the key in the ignition.

“Fucking Paki, go!” Miles yelled and kicked the seat so hard, the driver lost his footing on the brake and the cab lurched.

I looked over at the boy with the cute hair and wished with all my heart I could live my life over. I got out of the car, ran back across the street, joining the tumbling mob. I saw bodies carried out by wailing men, women running with food hampers on their heads, blood coming down their arms, little kids turning round and round in place before getting trampled. I wanted so badly to help. But what could I do? I was a useless sixteen-year-old girl. When I couldn't stand there and watch any more, I limped back to the Corniche. No empty cabs still, just slow-moving cars. They looked sad now, inching along with their garlands hanging half off and dragging in the filthy street. It took me an hour to get home, but I managed, even with bleeding feet, to beat Mum and Dad.

 

The next week I couldn't eat. Gastro, I told them. “What did you have that night? Was it from one of those new restaurants on the Corniche?” My folks were ready to have the health department check every single one of them. “It's just a bug,” I kept saying. I lost a stone in a month.

The people who got hit were taken to Sheikh Khalifa Medical City and others to my folks' hospital, so they knew some of what had happened. As far as I could figure out, they were the Pakistani men I'd seen dancing. It was hard to put it together because
The National
only mentioned it on page six two days later and didn't actually say if anyone had died. They made it look like one crazy kid was responsible when the
SUV
had been loaded with locals. There was nothing in
Gulf News
.

I heard nothing from Miles either, not even a text. When we went back to school after National Day break, he put up his hand from across the classroom. I read it more as bye than hi and he didn't try to make me think he meant it any other way. Mum and Dad worried that I was becoming anorexic and because telling the truth was worse, I said, Yeah, I want to be thin, really thin. Food is my enemy. Stuff like that.