What of Geraldine now? she wondered, sitting up in her bed.
She got up, as had become her habit, and went to the kitchen, where she sat, desolate, pretending to wait for the kettle to boil. For all his oddities, Max was never a caricature; he wasn’t a nerd, quite, though his eyes were round and protruding, and his smile vaguely goofy. He was thin and gangly, and always wore drab V-neck sweaters (dirty gray and dull olive), with check shirts, inoffensive corduroys, and heavily rimmed glasses. He enjoyed watching soccer (he supported Liverpool, because his younger brother did), had few friends, and he liked for everything to be nice and for the people around him to be happy, so that he didn’t have to expend energy on their concerns. Most of the time, he simply wanted to think about musical scores.
He was an unassuming person and Annie liked him, but she loved Gabriel more. She still hoped that nobody would ever find this out. When she was little, having a favorite brother felt like a sin; as an adult, it felt unfair. But Gabriel was so much more accessible than Max and he knew her so well.
Until recently she had always believed that she knew him too. Now she had learned that there was something in Gabriel that none of them had known or seen, not even himself. She wanted to pretend that it had nothing to do with him, that he too was a victim, an innocent. It didn’t work. What he had done was part of him, was in him. It had come out. He could not disown it any more than Annie could, because there it was—out, for all to see, and horrible. She could not swallow when she thought of it, and often woke at night sweating, waving her hands over her head until Rolf took them and calmed her.
She felt ashamed: guilty by association. The truth was, she hadn’t wanted to be the one to put Gabriel back on his feet, but there was no one else to do it, and she owed it to their parents. Her job, and Rolf’s, was to gather him in, as only family could, and reconstitute him. Not punish him, but fix him, then put him back into the world with the fervent hope that he would never do anything like it again. The black patch that had shaded all their lives would surely pass over, having dumped its storm upon them.
But this visit—Gabriel coming for an indeterminate stay—was difficult before he had even arrived. Her anger with him bordered on disgust, tinged with hatred. That was it. That was why it had been so hard to smile when he had come in, looking forlorn, from the airport. She had wanted to shake him, but she had hugged him instead, saying, “How are you?” when she meant, How could you? Oh, she’d already said it, many times, in Ireland. It had become the broken record, an unspoken mantra, a plea. Even when she held him against her, feeling the steady embrace of the brother who had protected her, comforted her, seen her through bullying schoolgirls and broken hearts, all she could hear in her head was, How could you, how could you, how could you?
In her dreams, she hit Gabriel. In her dreams, night after night, she hit him, over and over, and woke exhausted from all the slapping. It never served to reduce him, or what he had done.
“We must take you to Nakhal,” Rolf said to Gabriel over breakfast the next morning. “It’s a beautiful spot, with hot springs and a fort. I like to paint there.”
Whenever he wasn’t ordering spare parts for heavy plant machinery down at the refinery, Rolf was painting. Self-taught, and good, he was neither immensely successful nor struggling, but he was generally preoccupied with his canvases and colors, and Annie knew how to live with that. She had come well prepared for life with an obsessive.
“Great, yeah,” said Gabriel. Tone of voice was everything, he was learning. In Cork, he hadn’t spoken much of late. No one had wanted to hear what he had to say, and they had had nothing to say to him, so he had been getting the silent treatment, far and wide. But not this far, he hoped. Here, he would surely find his voice again.
“So what will you do today?” Rolf asked him.
“I have to go to the house.” Annie wiped some crumbs off the table and into her palm. “Check on the painters.”
“I’ll go with you, so,” Gabriel said, looking around the neat front room. “I don’t know how you can leave this place, though.”
“It’s too small,” said Rolf. “The villa is very nice. You’ll like it.”
Gabriel didn’t like it. It was in a new suburb made up of low houses with high walls, big gates, and yards too young to have sprouted so much as a weed. The house was spacious, open-plan, and had a huge window overlooking an uncultivated space, the kitchen was wall-to-wall with dapper American units, and the three square bedrooms each had their own bathrooms.
“But this is the best bit,” Annie said, flicking a switch in the hall. “Air-conditioning! It’ll make such a difference. It’s pleasant now, but the summers are . . . well, they don’t call this ‘hellish Muscat’ for nothing.”
“How do you cope?”
“By leaving. I’ll get away again this year, for the hottest months. Go to Switzerland and then home. Poor Rolf has to stick it out, though. It’s like a furnace.” She led him down a corridor to one of the bedrooms, where easels were stacked against the walls, and canvases, used and unused, stood in clumps. “And, look, Rolf can have his own studio now. Honestly, I cannot wait to get out of Muttrah.”
“But it’s lovely there. Authentic.”
“Maybe, but that house never felt right to me.”
When they got back home, Annie went to the kitchen to make lunch, while Gabriel stood in the front room facing the wide, narrow window, hands in his pockets. Annie was right. There was something odd about this place. He had come indoors, yet felt as though he was still outside. Warmth permeated his bones, like the heat of direct sunlight, even though he was in the cool indoor umbra. Someone passed through the room behind him. He glanced over his shoulder. Whoever it was had gone to the kitchen, but all he could hear was Annie banging about.
Gabriel shivered.
There was something odd about this house.
They were invited out again that night, to a party in the home of soon-to-be-neighbors. Gabriel played it Annie’s way—he chatted and flattered, laughed at jokes he didn’t altogether understand, and frowned in concentration when the conversation turned to the atrocities just north of them, across the Strait of Hormuz.
“Saddam Hussein is as much of a tyrant as the Ayatollah,” said Thomas, a Dutchman, standing with a small group by the outdoor buffet. “They should both be wiped out.”
“I thought he was the good guy,” said Gabriel. It hadn’t impinged much on his existence, the Iran‒Iraq war, but now he was a lot closer to it—uncomfortably so—and he realized the only thing he knew about it was that the Ayatollah was a raving madman.
“Hussein—a good guy?” Thomas exclaimed.
Embarrassment drenched Gabriel; he had said “baksheesh” again.
“He took power in a coup, wiped out his own cohorts, and now the West is throwing him garlands!”
“No, no,” said Jasper, all earnest, “America is neutral! Just like the Soviets.”
Everyone laughed.
“Hussein’s tanks are Soviet,” Thomas explained to Gabriel, “but his intelligence is American.”
“The West has no choice,” Mark said flatly. “If Saddam doesn’t win this war, the Ayatollah’s fundamentalism will flow out of Iran, and God knows where that will lead.”
Gabriel glanced around the walled-in, paved yard, with a solitary tree in the corner, and noticed how the men were all standing together, while the women were chatting indoors, draped across the living room. Voluntary segregation.
“This is propaganda,” said Thomas. “America should not be assisting