Brilliant (20 page)

“You're demented, Fiona, you really are,” said Deborah, and pulled into traffic.

 

The Horizon School had either undergone massive changes or her standards had fallen after three-and-a-half years in Abu Dhabi. There were separate classes now, organized by grade level, instead of by age or disability, and teachers, actual teachers, not just well-intentioned aides. The principal was a friendly chap from Auckland who practically cheered when she told him about her background. Of course, they needed her. “Would next week be too soon?” he asked. “Our Grade 3 teacher just told us her husband is being transferred back to Melbourne at the end of the month. Way of life here, but it makes running a school a nightmare. Our kids need stability. But you know that.”

The class was small — six boys, five girls — and higher functioning than she'd dared hope. Four of the eleven were Emirati (all but one had Down syndrome), two were from India, while the rest were from Russia, France and the
UK
. Several of the children had cerebral palsy, two had language delays and two were clearly on the autism spectrum. But everyone was reading (if slowly), everyone could add and subtract (if not always correctly), and, best of all, they loved one another.

“I've never had a class like this,” she told her men over dinner. “Plus the principal's a dream, the staff's friendly, and the other teachers actually seem to know what they're doing. Who would have thought?”

“It's still the honeymoon, Deb,” Harris said.

“Yeah, Mum,” said Jon. “It's just the first week.”

What did they want from her? Fine, she'd curb her enthusiasm in front of them, and quietly go about being productive and happy. She would be useful at long last, would make her small contribution. Not that the boys noticed much of anything that did not directly concern them. They were deep into university applications and girls that winter. And not that Harris was noticing much of anything that did not concern his job. The intrigue at Al Nahyan University had reached new heights of Abu-surdity that winter. The new
new
provost had gotten the boot, and the search was on for another; number twenty-three, was it? Truth was, she'd heard so many faculty stories over the years, the dirt, the skinny, the scoop — usually about people Harris was up against for tenure — that they'd begun to overlap. Sometimes when Harris would talk about a particularly obnoxious, lazy or scheming colleague, she'd have to remind herself that this wasn't so-and-so from Carleton.

Still, she had to admit, none were juicier than the stories out of Al Nahyan. Harris himself had been embroiled for most of the school year in a grievance involving an Emirati student caught stealing a classmate's iPad. The girl's family — connected to the ruling family in some way, though these ways were always mysterious — was now trying to get Harris fired. He had discredited their daughter. He had brought shame upon the family.

In the past, Deborah would have stood by her man, working herself into a froth defending him, only to watch the crisis fizzle before merging into the next. There was no shortage of crises in academic life and no pay-off for caring. In fact, it sometimes irritated Harris that she got emotionally involved. And in this case, the allegations were so clear — there was footage of the girl tucking the iPad into the folds of her
abaya
— that even in this logic-free zone, justice would have to prevail. Besides, she had her own stories now, her own life again. Somewhere she sensed this might not be an entirely good thing for them as a couple, but as she began telling herself: Tough.

Looking around the teachers' lounge that first day, she realized this was what she'd come for. It was so different than the faculty lunchrooms back home, where colleagues sometimes barely spoke — not because of bad blood, but because they were madly marking, photo-copying or calling parents. They were often windowless rooms, furnished with rejects from someone's cottage and smelling of damp boots. But the teachers' lounge here was like a family kitchen, filled with delicious smells and a dozen conversations. Someone would be stirring a curry on the stove or steaming rice, someone else slicing mangoes and watermelon. Large plastic containers were popped into and out of the microwave. “Try this, please.” One of the Indian teachers shyly pushed a large bowl of dal toward Deborah her first day. “But what will you eat?” Deborah asked. And the woman had bobbled her head in the Indian gesture of pleasure, agreement, all good things. The Hindi equivalent of
prego
, Harris called it. “There is always enough,” she said.

A striking young woman in a bright headscarf sat at the end of the lunch table that first day. Every time Deborah looked over at her, she smiled and waved a little welcome. When the room emptied, she came over. “Tomorrow I will bring some of
my
food for you.” Hynda, Deborah learned over the next few lunch times, was Somalian, though she had never actually been to Somalia. “The troubles there, you know.” Raised in Kenya, she'd come to Abu Dhabi as a bride of nineteen with her engineer husband. When he'd left her after six years with four young children, she'd gone back to school for a teaching degree. “I love kids. Well, of course, I'd have to love kids,” she smiled. They had “a girl,” Hynda explained, a nanny who lived with them and did most of the cooking. It helped that there was no man to take care of any more. “Who needs them?” Hynda said, laughing. “Big babies.”

The school was like a village: Risa, the single, Grade 1 teacher, who sent nearly all her salary home to a family of seven in Sri Lanka; Suha, from Amman, who had a PhD in linguistics and could speak seven languages, including Bulgarian and Portuguese; Vera, who'd converted to Islam when she married her Sudanese husband and whose family in Hungary had disowned her; Hari, an Indian Brit who'd lived in eight countries in fifteen years, following her diplomat husband from post to outpost. (“Best?” she told Deborah. “Paris. Worst? I think here.”)

At the end of the semester, her students gave Deborah a collage of the flags from their countries. One of the mothers had attached them to Bristol board and each child had signed his or her name next to their flag. “To Our Dear Miss,” was rainbow-lettered at the top. On the last day of school, Hynda invited her to dinner. “Please excuse the late notice, Deborah. I have wanted to ask you since the first day. But, you know, with the children and the teaching, so little time.” There was an obligatory, end-of-year Al Nahyan faculty party at the British Club that night, the kind of event Deborah had come to dread, not knowing who to make nice with any more.

“The next night then,” said Hynda. “You are my sister now.”

The children — three girls, one boy — were as handsome as their mother, with bright eyes and velvet skin. “My husband was very tall,” Hynda explained. “And, yes, handsome.” She wasn't wearing a headscarf when she met Deborah at the door, no males, other than her young son, being present. “Oh, my hair, don't look,” she said, laughing and smoothing the front of her short do. “There are all
kinds
of good reasons for wearing a headscarf, as you can see.”

Hynda gave her a tour of the aging villa. “We've been here forever. The landlord is good to us.” There was no clutter — hardly a book or a painting — though overstuffed brocade couches filled two of the five rooms to near capacity.

“Are you Muslim?” the oldest girl asked Deborah over dinner.

“No,” said Deborah. “But I am very interested in your religion.” This was actually beginning to be true. She'd had a vague notion in the first year to read Karen Armstrong's books on Islam, but only since meeting Hynda and some of the other women in the school had it become a desire. Next year, she told herself. Next year, it will be part of my reinvention. Not a conversion, of course not. But she would educate herself, read, ask more questions.

“What are you then? You're not Jewish, are you?”

“Amina, we respect everyone, remember?” Hynda said with a warning look.

“It's okay,” said Deborah. “I like being asked questions. Well, let's see… I was raised in the United Church of Canada, but I can't say I'm really anything anymore. I don't go to church except on Christmas and Easter. I'm kind of bad about that. I do believe in God, though.” She realized this might be too much contradictory information for an eight-year-old, and was aware of something lacking, of looking less in the girl's eyes than the woman she should be.

“Allah is great,” piped up the boy. He was five, Hynda had said.

“Yes,” said Deborah, not knowing what else to say. “Yes, he is.”

“Mohammed too,” said one of the other girls.

“Peace be upon him,” said Hynda. It was clear she wanted this conversation to end.

Afterward, over coffee served in the sitting room by their Bangladeshi maid, Hynda apologized for the children's questions. “They're just curious,” she said. “I want them to know about other religions, but it is delicate, you understand. They are still young and impressionable. It is enough to grasp our faith.”

She said it so naturally: our faith. It was inside her, part of the identity of the family she was raising. Deborah couldn't refer to her own wavering path this way. As for her family, the boys had never seemed compelled to attach themselves to a formal belief. Her fault, probably. It might have been an anchor for them, perhaps even for her.

 

It was a different summer, the fourth one, the one that had just passed, less hectic than the earlier ones: fewer lunches, fewer doctors' appointments. She no longer spent hours shopping for things she couldn't find in Abu Dhabi. The first summer she'd stuffed their suitcases with boxes of maple sandwich cookies that grew stale next to the packages of
maamoul
in her Abu Dhabi kitchen. Some of their Ottawa friends she hadn't even alerted to this summer's return, not having the energy for all the back-and-forth emails:
Deb, we're at the cottage for the month of July, then in Vancouver for the last two weeks of August. When are you heading back to Abu Dubai? Let's try to squeeze in drinks. Hi, Deborah, we'll be in
PEI
all summer. Sorry to be missing you
. She and the twins rented a condo near the Byward Market. Not cheap, but at least there would be less reliance on friends and family, more meals in. She could even have people over, if anyone was around.

It was wonderful to see Thom, of course, by now an old university hand. He was full of advice for the twins, who would be going to the U of T in the fall, but also full of wistful questions. “Have they finished the construction on Al Salaam Street yet? Who played at
WOMAD
this spring? Is Felice still there?” Thom had not forgotten anything, including the daughter of the Tunisian ambassador. “You'll miss Abu Dhabi,” he warned the twins. “You'll miss it like hell.” He'd already announced that he planned to go back as soon as he finished engineering school. “Get a job. You know.”

“We'll be right behind you,” said Terry. “Better look for a flat for three, right, Jon?”

“You mean you're not going to live with us?” Deborah asked, pretending to be stricken.

“Face it, Mum, you and Dad are going to be long gone by then,” said Terry.

“Dead, you mean,” she said, laughing now.

“No, no, back here, living the boring, good life and dumping on Abu Dhabi every chance you can get,” said Thom.

“But I like it,” said Deborah.

Her sons turned to look at her.

“Since when?” said Thom.

“Since…I don't know. It creeps up on you. One day you realize, this is my life and I seem to be living it here. I mean, there.”

“What about Dad?” Thom asked. “He seemed so on the moon this year.”

“Hates it,” said Jon.

“Your father's had a hard year,” said Deborah, and as she said this she understood two things: She didn't really know
why
it had been so hard for him (the iPad caper was just that, a caper), and two, she could say this about most of his years. He was freighted with discontent. Discontent was his default. And here came a third thing: She was tired of it.

Still, it turned out to be one of their best summers. Thom was working at a Canadian Tire during the day, but free most evenings. He'd come for dinner, the four of them going through a bottle of wine, the twins teasing her that they missed Leena's cooking. Good company. It would be hard leaving again in August, saying goodbye to these young men, who by some miracle, had turned out pretty well. At least this year the boys would have each other — they were already talking about meeting up in Ottawa for Thanksgiving — plus they'd told Harris that all they wanted for Christmas this year was to spend it in Abu Dhabi. “Man, I cannot wait!” Thom kept saying.

“How're you going to live without us?” Jon asked one of those nights. They were sitting on the condo's small balcony, squeezed around the plastic patio table. It was wonderful to sit outside in the summer. That day, according to
The National
, which she still read online daily, it had been 46 degrees. Even now, 6:00 a.m. Abu Dhabi time, it would be in the mid-30s and dripping with humidity.

“It'll be tough,” she'd answered, knowing her voice would give way if she tried to make a joke of it. “But I have a sort of life there now.”

“Good on you, Mum,” said Thom.

 

It must have been the middle of the night. She didn't remember the phone ringing or picking it up. “I'm on my way home. I'll explain when I see you.”

“When?” she asked, trying to remember how deep into the summer they were. In the past, she'd counted the weeks until Harris's arrival; she hadn't kept such close track this time.

He was arriving the day after next, Etihad, direct to Toronto. “Thank God there was a seat,” he said.