Interlude: Cavatina Read online

  Alone on the patio, spotlighted in the patio lights and stripped down to his underwear, one hand choking the neck of a bottle of bourbon and the other delicately holding the end of a hookah pipe to his lips. On the ground beside his lounge chair, Faisal’s solid gold hookah burbled away, one large dent marring the scuffed surface.

  Two months ago, Doc had dropped the sixty-thousand-dollar hookah, a gift from extended family in the Kingdom.

  Adam groaned.

  Faisal whispered away, one hand ghosting down Adam’s arm as he slipped down the hall to their bedroom. Adam watched him leave. He closed his eyes and tipped his head back, whispering both a curse and a prayer in the same breath.

  The glass door was nearly silent as he slid it open and padded onto the patio. “Dude. You gotta stop this shit.”

  Doc took a deep hit from the hookah, holding the flavored smoke in his lungs. Apple and peach tickled Adam’s nose. Leaning back, Doc puffed three perfect smoke rings, one inside the other. He grinned. “Always wanted to do that.” His words slurred.

  Adam could walk away. He could ignore this like he always did. He could leave, let Doc keep spinning off on his own, let him live out of their guest bedroom forever, locked in his self-imposed exile to Bahrain. Adam had always left, ignoring Doc’s nonsense and his bullshit and his mind games. Mental fucker was Doc’s superpower. And pushing people away.

  Not tonight. Something snapped in him. He was done. “Did you hear what I said?”

  It was Doc’s turn to glare. His eyes darted to Adam and then away. He gulped from the bottle of bourbon.

  “You know Faisal doesn’t want alcohol in his home.”

  “His?” Doc snorted. “Not yours?”

  “Ours.” Doc wanted to fight. Adam’s own anger rose, longing to lash out, swipe at Doc with all the nasty, bitten-off thoughts he’d kept back. “You have your own home, you know. Back in the US.”

  Snarling, Doc heaved off the lounger, tossing the hookah pipe down. He kept hold of the bourbon. Unsteady, he whirled on Adam. “I’m never going back.”

  “Why? Why didn’t you go back with Coleman?” Coleman and Doc had visited over the summer after Adam and Faisal had moved to Bahrain. Both had stayed for a month, and then one morning, Coleman was gone.

  And Doc hadn’t left the villa since.

  “You know why!”

  “No, I don’t! If I knew, do you think I’d be fucking arguing with you at one in the morning—”

  “The last time I was back in CONUS, my friend’s throat was sliced in his own apartment! I was run off the road! You picked me up, ‘emember?”

  “What does that have to do with—”

  “And then it was our friend, our fucking friend, who tried to kill us!” Doc hurled the bottle of bourbon over Faisal’s pool, toward the bay.

  The glass sailed beyond the landscaped garden, beyond the hedges that hid the yard from the boulder beach at the edge of the island. Adam heard the crash of glass against rock over the gentle lapping of the bay’s waves, the slap-slap of water on stone and wood.

  “Everyone is dead,” Doc hissed. “Except us.”

  Adam’s rage guttered, a candle suddenly snuffed out. He tried to swallow. He couldn’t. “You have to move on. Like Coleman and I have—"

  “Don’t give me your shit, bro,” Doc sneered. “You haven’t dealt with this shit any more than I have. You moved to fucking Saudi Arabia to avoid it. You haven’t been home. You won’t ever go back home. Don’t tell me you’re about to hop on a plane and fly back to MacDill on a happy memories tour. Six months you’ve been here, and tonight is the first time you’ve even spoken to an American ‘sides me and Coleman. It ain’t just me that’s been a shut-in in this place, L-T.” Doc chuckled, shaking his head. “Don’t even try to tell me that I am the only one who is all fucked up.”

  “I’m not alone,” he growled. “I have Faisal. I have someone who is helping me. Who do you have?”

  Doc scoffed. He paced away, almost stumbling. Fuck, he was drunk. More drunk than Adam had seen him before. Doc hadn’t been this drunk since Coleman left.

  Adam stared up at the moon, at the crescent hanging in the sky. Allah, help me get through to him. “You know that shit, what we went through? I can’t get it out of my head. We had a front row ticket to the end of the world, and we watched our team, our own family, be murdered. But I’m trying, Doc. I’m trying to get right. And tonight was big. I mean, for us. For Faisal, for the Kingdom. Our marriage, it’s public now. A Saudi royal is in a gay marriage. I never thought this could be my life—”

  His throat closed around his voice. How many nights had he agonized through, in the beginning? Faisal would never be his. He would always be part of the Kingdom. He and Faisal had no future.

  Now the only shadow on that perfect future was a hundred fifty pound drunk, a shadow of the man Adam had commanded in the Marines.

  That wasn’t fair. He knew what Doc’s nightmares looked like, what they sounded like. He knew the cold wash of adrenaline, the burn of the fire, the touch of the ice that kept stabbing him, even after he screamed himself awake. “Luis, man. You need to work on this. You need someone—”

  “I thought I had you.”

  His stomach lurched. He looked away. His blood turned to acid, leaching through him, scraping away at his muscles, his bones.

  “Why the fuck else do you think I’m here, L-T? I mean, you were the one who got me out alive, right? You were the one who saved us. Saved me. If there was anyone in the world I thought would be better than your sorry ass, don’t you think I’d be there?”

  “Then what do I do? What the fuck do I do? How do I help you, Luis? You don’t let anyone in. You say you want me to help you, but all you fucking do is snarl at me! You drink yourself into a stupor every fucking day! You drove Coleman away, too, didn’t you? That’s why he left?”

  Doc stared at him, the light from the pool deck catching on his eyes, making his pupils shine. “Fuck it,” he growled. “I don’t need anyone. I don’t need you.”

  “Luis—”

  “Don’t bother L-T.” Doc stormed off the patio and into the house. He slammed the door behind him, the glass warbling in the frame.

  Adam slumped on Doc’s lounger. He’d wanted to leave that part of him behind. The Marine lieutenant, the officer. He didn’t want these memories, that life, the days and nights he’d run away from, to flow back into his mind. He’d wanted to carve a life for himself after, run away into the sun with Faisal. The past belonged in the past, where it stayed dead. Buried in sand and ice.

  Doc kept pulling Adam back. He’d never met a man so in need of rescuing from himself, except, maybe, for himself. Was Doc too much like Adam’s own shadow, a memory of an angrier version of his life? The nights he’d rescued Doc from a bar fight or a night in the brig, or mouthing off to an officer flashed in his memory. Doc, shitting on regs and bucking the Corps, pushing every limit he’d ever been given.

  But now, without the Marines, without the team, without anyone around him, there was nothing for him to push against. Nothing for him to rebel at, nothing to wage a one-man war against. There was nothing left but himself and the memories of what they’d done.

  Fuck, Adam knew exactly how that felt. Exactly.

  The sands were collapsing beneath Doc, faster than he could dig himself out. When he searched, all he saw was his shadow, the reflection of his darkness. His nightmares.

  How did he even begin to help Doc?

  Adam had found his salvation in Faisal.

  But Adam was no one’s salvation. He’d learned that lesson long ago.

  * * *

  3

  McLean, Virginia

  December’s frosty air cut the crystal mosaics and cast rainbows of light across the Al Fatiha masjid. Dawood whispered a prayer beneath his breath, his wandering mind coming back to the mosque, the lessons. He cleared his throat, shifted on his aching knees. A decade in Afghanistan was catching up to him. His body was not what it was. Ev
ery day something new ached. The cold cut through his bones, and some mornings, before he opened his eyes, fear gutted him, the terror that he was back in Kandahar, or on the mountains, washing through him. That Kris wasn’t curled up at his side, as warm as the sun.

  “Recite for me, habibi, Quran chapter forty-nine, verse thirteen,” Imam Youssef said gently. “And tell me what you believe it means.”

  Behroze took a slow breath in. His fingers clutched at the kameez stretched over his thighs, a worry line of pulled threads going across the bony knob of one knee. “‘O people’,” he began, “‘We created you all from a male and female and made you into different communities and different tribes so that you should come to know one another, acknowledging that the most noble among you is the one most aware of God’.”

  “Good, habibi,” Imam Youssef said. “Your tajweed, your recitation, is excellent. Now, tell me about the tafsir. The deeper meaning beyond the words. Beyond the noises of your throat and tongue.”

  “Our differences, as people, are our strengths,” Behroze said. His voice was soft, still, even almost a month after arriving in America, as if he was afraid to speak too loudly. As if the world was too much, as if his voice would shatter this new world, this new reality of his. It made Dawood’s heart ache, hearing his son, the same boy who brazenly climbed a mountain to try and see the end of the world on his sixth birthday, so timid now. “Allah has made the world into different tribes and different peoples. We’re to learn from each other, He says. We’re supposed to be different.”

  “And?” Imam Youssef smiled gently.

  “And, those who are most aware of Allah are the wisest, the most noble.”

  “What does it mean to be aware of Allah?”

  Behroze looked down. His breath faltered, catching.

  Dawood’s heart ached again. It was these moments he felt the full distance between America and Afghanistan, both the miles and the centuries. Behroze, after the mountains, had grown up in the hornet’s nest of Kandahar. Dawood had tried his best, countering the radical ideologies that festered in the air, the seething hatred that coated the skin and the lungs and burned down the back of the throat like hot oil lit on fire. He and Behroze had studied by candlelight, hours and hours of conversations as Behroze turned from boy to teen, always circling around the love of Allah, the verses of the Quran that countered the hate Behroze was forced to recite in the madrasas.

  He’d come out to Behroze after he left Afghanistan. He’d thought Behroze would write him off, that he would never see his son again. That their love, the decade he’d raised Behroze, would not be enough to counter the brutality of Afghanistan’s teachings. After all, he and Behroze had been forced to watch the stonings, the executions carried out under the Taliban’s law. Behroze had a thousand reasons to turn his back on Dawood.

  Instead, he’d asked to join him, to come to America. To meet Kris. To take his place as Dawood’s son again.

  There were conditions. Kris, practical and blunt as ever, spelled it out in black and white: there was a not insignificant statistical chance that Behroze was attempting to come to the US under false pretenses. That he didn’t truly want to resume family ties. That he was operating under the direction of another, and that Dawood, or someone else in America, was a target. But if so, the target was most likely Dawood. The level of rage and hatred directed toward Dawood overseas had hit fever pitch.

  Behroze was picked up by a CIA team out of Islamabad and shuttled around the world from safe house to safe house before being flown to DC, and finally, brought to Dawood and Kris’s home. Shell-shocked, deathly silent, malnourished, and shaking, Behroze had collapsed into Dawood’s arms when they were reunited at Langley, and he spent the first three nights curled up in Dawood’s hold and clutching the front of his shirt.

  “He did this when he was seven,” Dawood had said, tears streaming down his cheeks. “After everyone was killed.”

  Dawood started taking him to their mosque, Al Fatiha, as soon as Behroze was over the jet lag. Behroze needed help, and lots of it, more than Dawood could even begin to provide. Deradicalization, counter-jihadist messaging, counseling, integration assistance, post-traumatic therapy. Sometimes, Dawood froze, paralyzed with uncertainty over which way to go, which way to turn. What was the correct choice, the correct path, to best help his son?

  You must follow the path Allah has laid out for you.

  Maybe his path could be a little less tumultuous? Where was the beach boardwalk, the sun and the sand and the surf? Why these endless mountains, the rugged tortures that scraped his heart and soul?

  Endure patiently, with beautiful patience.

  Patience had brought him home to Kris. Patience, and faith, would bring Behroze’s soul home to peace.

  Imam Youssef worked with Behroze every afternoon, guiding him through the Quran, through the Sunnah, through the hadith. Behroze’s Quranic teachings were turned upside down, retuned into the right key until the verses spoke about love, and tolerance, and acceptance. There were moments when Imam Youssef spoke that Dawood heard his father’s voice, carried on the dry Libyan winds across the decades.

  “What does it mean to be truly aware of Allah, Behroze?” Imam Youssef asked again.

  “To know that Allah is in everyone,” Behroze whispered. “His light and His love are in every person’s soul. And our purpose is to love each other the way Allah loves us, as we are loving Him when we do.”

  Imam Youssef gripped Behroze’s hand. “Beautifully said, habibi.”

  Dawood smiled.

  * * *

  They walked home side by side, first enjoying the silence, then dancing over the surface of conversation. They avoided Imam Youssef and Behroze’s lessons, instead discussing the breaking of their Ramadan fast after sundown, the meals they had planned. Behroze laughed as Dawood’s stomach grumbled, and they both prayed together as they walked up the front steps to their house.

  Kris’s convertible was in the driveway, next to Dawood’s old truck.

  “Habibi! Nahn fi almanzil!” Dawood called as they walked in. We’re home.

  From the kitchen, the microwave beeped. Pepperoni, gooey melting cheese, and hot garlic crust burst through the house. Dawood’s stomach roared, and beside him, Behroze’s stomach gurgled as well.

  Behroze scowled. He stiffened, looked away.

  Dawood frowned and headed for the kitchen.

  “Hey.” Kris waved as he pulled a pizza from the microwave. He held his scarf to his chest as he tore away a piece and blew on it before shoving it in his mouth. His eyes rolled back as he groaned. “Dammit, I am starving. I forgot my lunch today, and the damn kids were in my office in between lectures.”

  “Kris.” Dawood pressed his lips together. “I thought we agreed.”

  Kris stared, his gaze bouncing from Dawood to Behroze, slinking into the kitchen behind Dawood and avoiding Kris’s gaze. “Sorry,” Kris said. “I…”

  Behroze sent Kris a withering glare. “It is Ramadan. You should be in prayer.”

  Kris dropped his pizza slice and gripped the counter’s edge. His knuckles went white, and he stared at the tile. “Behroze—”

  “Ya ibni, let us talk,” Dawood interrupted, speaking to Behroze.

  “Baba, how can you put up with this?” Behroze exploded. “He doesn’t respect Islam!”

  “Listen—” Kris snarled, whirling on Behroze. “You have no idea—”

  “Enough!” Dawood bellowed. “Behroze, to your room.”

  Behroze glared.

  “Now!”

  Behroze shot Kris another glare and disappeared, stomping up the stairs to his bedroom. Kris glowered at the ceiling, shaking his head at every heavy footfall, every rumble of the ceiling.

  “Habibi—” Dawood started.

  “I can’t take this much more. Every day, I’m unwanted in my own house.”

  “That is not true. Behroze cares for you—”

  “Sure sounds like he does, Dawood! Sure sounds like it!”
/>   “The adjustment is difficult for him. He’s clinging to what he knows best, and that is his faith. But he does care. He does like you. I know it. I know him.”

  “He won’t like me unless I’m a Muslim. But I’m not,” Kris snapped. “And you both need to stop trying to force it on me!”

  “No one is forcing you! I thought you said that you wanted to support our first Ramadan together. Preserve the fast, at least in our home.” He swallowed. “Couldn’t you have stopped on the way back from Georgetown?” Kris had accepted a part-time teaching position at the University.

  It was Kris’s turn to shoot daggers from his eyes. “I wanted to get home to my family,” he snapped. He ripped open the cabinet holding the trash can and dumped his uneaten pizza in the sack. “I thought I could beat you guys back, grab something quick. You’re early, you know.”

  “Youssef was preparing the fast tonight. He ended the lessons an hour earlier.”

  Kris threw out his hands. “Then it’s not my fault, is it?”

  Dawood slumped against the counter. “This doesn’t help you and Behroze, habibi.”

  “He doesn’t like me. And frankly, Dawood, I’m reaching the end of my patience.”

  “Habibi—”

  “I don’t know what to do.” Kris paced away, his arms folded across his chest. “This wasn’t what we thought it would be like, having him here.” He scrubbed his hands over his face, slid his fingers through his hair. “You know, maybe we weren’t objective enough about what he’s been through, about how he can adapt to the US. To you and to us. Or, to me, since it’s me he despises. He never speaks to me unless it’s a criticism. He acts like I’m some kind of kafir and it’s his personal mission in life to correct me. My clothes, what I eat, what I do—”

  “That’s not true—”

  “When will you face the truth? Maybe he thinks things are different with you cause you’re his father. Or maybe…” Kris trailed off, biting his lip. “Look, it’s glaringly obvious. Your son doesn’t like me.” Kris’s stare pierced Dawood’s heart, drilled right through him.