Zeitoun (21 page)

The Red Cross took down all of Zeitoun’s information and scanned the photo Kathy had brought. They were efficient and kind, and told Kathy that thousands of people had been located, that they were scattered all over the country and every story was stranger than the last. They told Kathy not to worry, that each day brought more order to the world.

Kathy left with some renewed hope. Perhaps he had been injured. He could be in a hospital somewhere, heavily sedated. He could have been found somewhere, unconscious and without identification. Now it was just a matter of time before the doctors and nurses looked through the missing-persons database to find him.

But now the kids were confused. Was their father safe or not? The signals were mixed. Kathy had told them he was fine, he was safe, he was in his canoe. But then why report him to the Red Cross? Why the missing-persons files, why the mentions of police and Coast Guard? Kathy tried to shield them from all this but it was impossible. She wasn’t strong enough. She felt weak, porous.

When they got home again Kathy called the Claiborne house. The phone rang and rang. Until now she had been telling herself that the phone might have been out of service, but this day she checked with the phone company. If the phone was not working at all, they told her, she would have gotten something like a busy signal, a particular sound to indicate that the lines were down. But the ringing persisted, and the ringing meant that the phone worked, but no one was there to answer it.

*    *    *

Aisha was taking it the hardest. She seemed to swing between worry and fatalistic resignation. She was irritable. She couldn’t concentrate. She withdrew and wept alone.

That night, after the other kids had fallen asleep, Kathy sat behind Aisha on her bed. She took her daughter’s thick black hair in her hands and kneaded it with one hand, brushing it with the other. It was something she had done with Nademah to calm her before bed, and Yuko’s mom had done the same with Kathy after their baths. It was soothing, meditative for both mother and daughter. In this case Kathy was humming a tune she couldn’t even remember the name of, and Aisha was sitting, tense but accepting. Kathy was confident that this would ease her worry, would end with Aisha dropping back into Kathy’s lap, contented and sleepy.

“You hear from him?” Aisha asked.

“No, baby, not yet.”

“Is he dead?”

“No, baby, he’s not dead.”

“Did he drown?”

“No.”

“Did they find his body?”

“Honey, stop.”

But after a half-dozen strokes of her brush, Kathy took in a quick breath. Aisha’s hair was coming out in clumps. The brush was full of it.

Aisha’s eyes welled. Kathy bawled.

There is nothing worse than this
, Kathy thought.
There can be nothing worse than this
.

It had been six days since Kathy had spoken to Zeitoun. She could no longer explain his absence. It didn’t make sense. The city was overrun with help. The National Guard was everywhere, and officials were insisting that the city was virtually empty.

She ran the possibilities through her mind again. If he was still there, canoeing around New Orleans, he would have called again from the Claiborne house. If the Claiborne phone no longer worked, by now he would have found another working phone. Or he would have encountered one of the soldiers and asked for help in contacting Kathy. There seemed to be no way that he was in the city and unable to call.

Which meant that he had left the city. He might have been running low on water or food. He might have accepted a ride out of the city from one of the helicopters or rescue boats. But if he had left, and had been brought to a shelter, he would have called immediately.

She knew that bodies had been found floating, unclaimed and uncovered in the water.
He could be dead
, she told herself.
Your husband could be gone
. There had been murders, she knew. She did not truly believe the accounts of untethered mayhem, but she knew that some murders would have occurred.
It could have been a robbery
, she thought.
Someone had come to steal from one of our properties, he had been there, he had fought back—

He could not have drowned. He could not have fallen victim to any other sort of calamity. She knew her husband too well. She could not picture any accident taking him. He was too smart, too wary, and even if he had had some kind of incident, he was indestructible. He would have survived, he would have gotten help.

*    *    *

When it was noon in New Orleans Kathy called the Claiborne house. She let it ring, needing to hear her husband’s voice, but still the ringing had no end.

She had to think of life insurance. She had to think about how she would support her four children. Would she be able to run the business on her own? Of course not. But some semblance of it? She would have to sell the rental properties. Or maybe the rental properties would be something she could manage on her own. Too many questions. No, she would sell the painting and contracting business and hold on to the rentals. Or she could sell a few of the buildings, bring it down to a number she could manage on her own. Should she stay in New Orleans, or move the family to Baton Rouge? To Phoenix? It would have to be Phoenix.

And how long would anyone wait before assuming the worst? One week? Two weeks, three?

She got online and found another email from Ahmad. This one was sent to the TV station that had broadcast the brief interview with Zeitoun. From his office in Spain, Ahmad had found out which station it had been, and had found the name of one of the producers.

Kathy found a website with current photos of New Orleans from the air. She searched until she found Uptown, and zoomed in until she saw what was left of her home and neighborhood. The water was filthier than she could have imagined. It looked like the entire city was bathing in oil and tar.

She called every number of every person she knew who might still be in New Orleans. Nothing.

Yuko and Ahmaad consoled her.

“He’s old school,” Ahmaad said. It was normal for a man like Zeitoun, rugged and independent, to be out of contact for a few days. “They don’t make guys like that anymore.”

Yuko kept Kathy away from the phones and the news. Still, Kathy caught snippets in the car. In the Odyssey, she heard President Bush’s weekly radio address. The president compared the storm to 9/11 and the War on Terror. “America is confronting another disaster that has
caused destruction and loss of life,” he said. “America will overcome this ordeal, and we will be stronger for it.”

It was time for the girls to start school. They had been out for almost two weeks now, and no matter how awkward it might be to start classes in the middle of September, they needed some semblance of routine.

Kathy made the calls. The closest public school was Dr. Howard K.
Conley Elementary School. “Bring them right away,” Kathy was told. Zach, as a high schooler, would have a more difficult entry.

The girls were nervous. They were not happy to be brought to a new school, where they knew no one and where they would be branded as refugees. Why couldn’t they just wait until they returned to New Orleans? What would they study? The books and lesson plans would be different. What was the point? The point, Kathy said, was that their father wanted them in school, and that was enough.

Yuko and Ahmaad bought the girls a new set of school supplies, binders and notebooks and pens and pencils, and Pokémon and Hello Kitty backpacks to carry all of it. This gave the girls some measure of comfort, but when Kathy dropped them off, leaving them all in the office of the Conley principal, she was devastated. She couldn’t look at Aisha. Everything was in that girl’s wet black eyes, every worry Kathy shared—that these were the first days of their new life together, living in Phoenix, living without their father.

Driving away from the school, Kathy caught the news on the radio. The official death toll in New Orleans was now 279. It seemed to be leaping by a hundred a day, and the search for bodies had only just begun.

Did she have to prepare for a funeral? It had been seven days now. How long could she explain away his absence? President Bush had come to New Orleans two or three times at that point. If the president could make his way to Jackson Square for a press conference, her husband, if alive, could find a phone and call out.

With the kids at school during the day, Kathy spiraled downward. She
had more time to herself and more time to worry, more time to plan a wretched new life.

She called the house on Claiborne every hour. She called Zeitoun’s cell phone in case he had found some place to charge it.

The death toll jumped to 423.

She found Todd Gambino’s girlfriend’s number and called her. She was in Mississippi, and hadn’t heard from Todd in a week. This meant something. Perhaps something had happened to both of them? This was good news. It had to be. The two women agreed to stay in touch.

From Spain, Ahmad called Kathy every day. He called the Coast Guard and the Navy. He wrote to the Syrian Embassy in Washington. Nothing from anyone. He looked into flights to New Orleans. What could it hurt to have him searching for his brother on the ground? He worried that his siblings expected him to go, given that he was the only one who might have any chance at all of entering the United States; getting a visa from Syria was hopeless. His wife ruled out the notion, but still, the idea burrowed into him.

The death toll was at 648 and climbing.

Kathy checked in with the Red Cross every day. She soon had Zeitoun registered at half a dozen agencies dealing with missing persons. His photo was everywhere.

*    *    *

The girls went to school, came home, watched TV. They found momentary distraction with Yuko and Ahmaad’s kids, but their eyes were hollow. They too were planning lives without their father. Did they want to move to Phoenix? Would there be a funeral? When would they know what had happened?

In the countless hours of darkening thoughts, Kathy imagined again where she would live. Could she live in Arizona? She would have to find a house near Yuko’s. Ahmaad would have to be a father figure. Kathy had already leaned so heavily on Yuko and Ahmaad, she couldn’t imagine permanently thrusting her entire family onto them.

She thought of Zeitoun’s family in Syria. There was such a support network there, a vast and tight fabric of family. She and Zeitoun had brought the kids there in 2003 for two weeks to visit, and it had been unlike anything she’d expected. First there was the snow. Snow in Damascus! They’d taken a bus north to Jableh, and all along she’d been shocked at what she saw. She’d had, she later admitted, an antique idea of Syria. She’d pictured deserts, donkeys, and carts—not so many busy, cosmopolitan cities, not so many Mercedes and BMW dealerships lining the highway heading north, not so many women in tight clothes and uncovered hair. But there were vestiges of a less modern life, too—merchants selling sardines and cabbage by the roadside, crude homes of brick and mud. As they drove north to Jableh, the road soon met the coastline, and they traveled along a beautiful seaside stretch, hills cascading to the sea, mosques perched above the road, side by side with churches, dozens of them. She’d assumed Syria was entirely Muslim, but she was wrong about this, and about so many things. She loved
being surprised, coming to realize that in many ways Syria was a quintessentially Mediterranean country, connected to the sea and in love with food and new ideas and reflecting the influence of Greece, Italy, so many cultures. Kathy devoured it all—the fresh vegetables and fish, the yogurts, the lamb! The lamb was the best she’d had anywhere, and she ate it whenever she had the opportunity. In beautiful seaside Jableh she’d seen the homes that Zeitoun’s grandfather had built, saw the monument to his brother Mohammed. They stayed with Kousay, Abdulrahman’s wonderfully life-loving and gregarious brother, who still lived in their childhood home. It was a gorgeous old place on the water, with high ceilings and windows always open to the sea breezes. There was family everywhere within walking distance, so many cousins, so much history. While Zeitoun darted around town, reconnecting with old friends, Kathy had spent an afternoon cooking with Zeitoun’s sister Fahzia, and she’d done something wrong with the propane and almost burned down the kitchen. It was terrifying at the time but made for much hilarity in the coming days. They were such good people, her husband’s family, everyone so well educated, so open and hospitable, each of their houses full of constant laughter. Would it be impossible to think that Kathy could take the kids and live there, in Jableh? It was a radical idea, but one that would put her in a place of such comfort, embraced by family; the girls would be surrounded by so many relatives that perhaps they wouldn’t be quite so devastated at the loss of their dad.