Finding Nouf (25 page)

It was a spacious bedroom. The floor was carpeted with a cerulean rug, like a massive sea upon which the various pieces of furniture had been cast adrift. A white canopy bed floated between
two matching dressers. The walls were smooth and white, undecorated but for the wooden letters. On the dresser, however, were a few family pictures in ornate golden frames. Two potted palm trees near the bathroom door looked real enough. Like flotsam in a harbor, all the room's smaller items—the stray shoes and stuffed animals and jewelry boxes—had drifted into a corner.

There were no windows, but two skylights let in the light. A lamp stood beside the bed, next to a small reading table with a magazine poking out of the drawer. Katya approached the bed. A heart design embroidered on the pillows and the softness of the white cotton sheets were touchingly virginal. The fluttery mosquito netting only added to the sense that this bed had held someone innocent and sweet and needing protection. When she opened the drawer to the reading table and took out the magazine, it was open to an article entitled "The Seventy-seven Words for Love."

Instinctively Katya looked back at the doorway. No one was there. There were doors on every side of the room; all of them were shut. Katya went to each of them and studied the handles, but none had a lock. Someone could walk in at any moment, from any direction. Nouf must have felt exposed here—and yet she'd been comfortable enough to leave an article like this one lying around. Her parents probably wouldn't have approved unless it had been titled "The Seventy-seven Words for Allah." Katya sat on the bed and looked at the article. Perhaps with a blind mother, a teenage girl could do what she liked.

There was a sound and one of the doors swung open. Katya quickly stood up, shoving the magazine into her purse by some idiotic force of instinct. She instantly regretted it—now she was a thief.

Abir stood in the doorway. "What are you doing here?"

"I, ah ... sorry. I was looking for you, actually, and I found this instead." She motioned to the room.

Abir glanced down and saw the magazine stuffed awkwardly into Katya's purse. "Why were you looking for me?"

"Well, I got bored in the sitting room, and I saw you leave, so I figured..." She shrugged.

Abir eyed her as every teenager eyes an adult who seems to understand her, not certain that the understanding is genuine but
fearing that it won't be, and repulsed in either case. Katya met her gaze. She was wearing a headscarf—she must have been praying—and she held a copy of the Quran, open and clutched to her chest. Abir was the same age as Huda.

"Which sura are you reading?" Katya asked.

Abir lowered the book, shut it, and set it on the bedside table. Awkwardly, she sat on the bed. "Actually, I was only trying to read."

Katya felt a bleakness steal over the room. She glanced at the photographs lined up on the dresser and noticed that Abir was not in any of them. There were four frames; two contained pictures of Abu Tahsin and Nusra; one was a picture of Nouf at a younger sister's birthday party, cutting cake and grinning happily. The remaining picture showed a pair of saluki dogs, their tails wagging happily. "I'm sorry about your sister," she said.

Abir didn't respond.

"You must have been close," Katya prodded.

Abir slid her hands nervously beneath her thighs. "You saw her body, didn't you?"

Gently Katya sat down on the bed beside her. "Yes, I did."

"So you know how she died?"

"Yes," she replied, looking down at her hands. She had a sense where this was going. "She drowned."

Abir clapped a hand to her mouth. "Oh."

"I'm so sorry." Katya could see that she hadn't known. Had her parents felt that she was too young for the truth? What was the shame of drowning, when the position of Nouf's body at the funeral had practically been an announcement of the worse crime of fornication? Or had Abir not noticed? Still, it was a kind of relief to learn that Katya wasn't the only victim of secrecy in the family.

Abir's hands were shaking, and she seemed to be trying not to cry. "They won't tell us anything. I know she ran away. She got lost in the desert and she died, but I don't know the details. And I have to know. I keep worrying..." She clasped her hands into tight balls and jammed them into her lap. "I keep thinking she—what if she—what if it wasn't an accident? What if she ran away and didn't want to come back? Maybe she wanted to..."

"You mean, did she kill herself?" Katya offered.

Abir nodded, and tears slid down her cheeks. "I don't want to think that her soul is in hell. She was my sister." At this, her voice trembled, and she started to cry harder. Katya resisted the impulse to wrap her arm around the girl's shoulders; she sensed it would be unwelcome.

"I don't know exactly what happened," she said, "but I'm fairly certain she didn't kill herself."

Abir swallowed and glanced at her.

"She was hit on the head," Katya said. "It wasn't what killed her, but it may have knocked her unconscious, so when the floodwaters came, she had no defense."

Abir's face went white. "But I don't understand. Who hit her? Was someone with her?"

"I don't know." Katya hesitated. "Listen, Abir, can you think of any reason that she might have run away?"

Abir shook her head. "I know that she was nervous about her wedding."

"Why?"

She shrugged. "She didn't know Qazi that well."

"Did she ever talk about leaving?"

"No. Only sometimes, as a joke." Abir wiped her eyes again. "
Did
she run away?"

Katya hesitated. "I don't know."

Abir seemed to regain her nerve. She sat up straighter and her shoulders stopped shaking. She wiped her nose on her sleeve.

There was an awkward silence, and Katya fumbled through it. "I'm sorry I've been asking so many questions about Nouf. I don't mean to upset you. I know it won't bring her back."

Abir nodded.

"I wish I'd had the chance to know her better," Katya said.

Stiffly, Abir stood and went to a door in the corner. She opened the door, switched on the light, and motioned Katya inside.

It was an enormous walk-in closet stuffed with clothes—on racks, hangers, stacked in plastic drawers, clothes in trunks and lining the overhead shelves. Shoe racks were filled with shoes. Everything was clean and pressed. Katya stepped into the closet with amazement.

"Wow," she whispered. "Was she always so organized?"

"No, no. After the funeral, my mother arranged for everything to look neat."

Katya was afraid to touch anything, but Abir began to hold the clothes out for inspection. A motley assortment it was. A pinstriped blazer rubbed shoulders with a siren-red negligee. There was a slinky ball gown with sequins, a fluffy pink mohair sweater with a cable knit, and a pair of pink leather pants. Shorts and T-shirts were stacked on a shelf, and the undergarments seemed ridiculously skimpy, ribbon panties and see-through bras. For the first time Katya felt that she was seeing some of the personality she had hoped to encounter in the room outside. This lavish closet—probably hundreds of thousands of riyals' worth of clothes—was a fantasy world where Nouf could actually wear a man's blazer or a pair of shorts. There were jeans, of course, and dozens of black skirts and blue button-down shirts, private school uniforms from the looks of it. But right beside them was a tremendous white floor-length coat made of the softest fur.

Katya stopped at the coat, struck with a fierce, instantaneous longing to have a coat like this and a world to wear it in. It was something her eponym would have worn. On the hanger beside it were two gloves, a muffler, a scarf, and a large fur hat. She buried her fingers in the hat's furry pile. It was cool and smooth, and for the briefest second she was Nouf standing in the closet, reaching across the gulf of time and space to touch a clear lake of ice, or the very zenith of a glacier.

Turning, she saw Abir holding out a formal hot pink gown. The skirt was wide enough so the dress was almost able to stand on its own. Katya realized what it was.

"Her wedding gown?"

"Yes."

"It's extravagant." Katya looked around. "Wait a second—how much of this is her trousseau?"

"Everything on this side, and about a third of that." Abir motioned to all that was interesting in the closet. Katya looked at the fur coat again and felt a stab of disappointment. Nouf hadn't bought these clothes; Qazi had. What remained of Nouf's original
possessions was a row of cloaks, a pair of jeans, some T-shirts, and a dozen housedresses.

Katya motioned to the trousseau. "I thought she'd chosen all of this."

Abir shook her head. "She didn't like pink."

Qazi, of course, would have had no idea. Did he buy the clothes thinking that all women liked pink? Or was that what he wanted: a woman who belonged in it? Katya thought of her own trousseau. Othman was still putting it together, but she hoped he would avoid this order of clothing, tantalizing items whose only functional purpose was to symbolize what the wearer would never be.

When she looked back at Abir, she saw that the young girl was ready to leave. Katya followed her back into the bedroom. Abir's expression was cold and formal now. She picked up her Quran.

"I'd better go," she said.

"Yes, of course."

There was a moment of awkward silence before Abir turned to leave.

"I'm sorry," Katya said again. Abir looked back and shook her head as if to say,
It's not your fault.
With a gentle rustling of robes, she left.

K
ATYA PEEKED
into the laboratory. It was lunchtime, and she'd joined the other women in the ladies' lounge for fifteen minutes before making a pretense of needing to use the bathroom. Slipping back through the corridors on her way to the lab, she'd gone unnoticed. The men usually left the building for lunch, and the place was deserted.

In the laboratory, she sat down at the counter. Over the past two days she'd surreptitiously prepared the DNA samples, extracting the variable DNA and mixing it with a buffered solution of polymerase and primers. This morning she had put the samples in the thermal cycler. The machine always took a few hours to process the samples, and she had to be there right when they were ready so that nobody else would take them out by mistake.

There were two samples, one from Eric Scarberry and the other from Nouf's escort, Muhammad. She watched the machine whir into its final phase and glanced back at the door.

She had just enough time to put the profile printouts in her purse and hide the evidence of her work before Maddawi came back into the lab, followed by Bassma. The women sat down to resume their work, undisturbed that Katya was already there. They seemed happy and continued their lunchtime chatter.

Relieved, Katya went to work on blood samples from a case she'd prepared that morning. She glanced at her purse. She hadn't taken the time to look at the printouts, and now it was bothering her. Had either DNA been a match for Nouf's baby? She would have to wait until she got home to find out.

That evening she was distracted. Abu noticed that something was wrong, but when he asked, she lied and said she was coming down with a cold. All through dinner she thought about Othman and wondered how she would tell him what she'd discovered.

After dinner she called Ahmad. Half an hour later he came to the door. Abu invited him in and the two men talked while Katya went to her room, put on her cloak and scarf, and made minute adjustments to her
burqa.
She hadn't told her father she was leaving, but if she let the men talk long enough, eventually Ahmad would tell him. It was harder for Abu to say no that way.

A while later Abu knocked on the bedroom door. "Katya." He sounded angry.

She came out fully covered. "I'm going out for a little while."

"I know. Ahmad told me. Where are you going?"

"I've got to meet with Othman briefly. It's about his sister."

Abu eyed her dangerously. "Why can't you just call him?"

"It's not something I want to tell him on the phone." She looked pleadingly at her father, but his frown grew even deeper, and he might have stopped her from going if Ahmad had not appeared at the end of the hallway.

"Ready?" Ahmad asked. "Let's make this quick."

Katya wanted to kiss him. He always knew exactly what to say.

Abu turned to his friend. "You keep a good eye on her," he said grouchily. Katya felt his stare on her back all the way down the hall. Ahmad nodded and with his best show of sternness led her to the waiting car.

As they drove through the old town, Katya stared idly out the window at the souks, which were closing for the night, and at the buildings, which were made of coral quarried from Red Sea reefs. She had the impulse to reach out the window and touch one, to feel its rough texture beneath her fingers, something to snap her out of her unending thoughts about people. Abu. Nouf. Nayir. Salwa and Abdul Aziz. Othman.

When they pulled into the parking lot of the children's amusement park, she saw that Othman was already there. He'd driven the silver Porsche, and the top was down. He was wearing a blue button-down shirt, and his hair, thick and curly and black, was shorter than before. But it was the sight of his profile, his long arms, and something in the way his hand draped over the steering wheel that caught in her throat.

Behind him the amusement park was shutting down for the night, and one by one the rides went dark—first the Ferris wheel, then the roller coaster, then the smaller rides. Katya asked Ahmad to wait until the lights were out completely before pulling up to Othman's car. There was less chance they'd be noticed in the dark—and it was already suspicious, two cars in an empty lot exchanging a female passenger. At night the religious police were scarce, but Katya felt edgy.

"Your father will want him to keep the top down," Ahmad said. "But not, of course, if you're going on the freeway."

She smiled at him and got out of the car.

When she climbed into the Porsche, Othman pressed a button that brought the top over them. His eyes were dewy, as if he'd been crying, but she suspected he was just tired. She lifted her
burqa.
He clasped her hand and kissed it. "It's so good to see you."