away the circumstances, but a slow intake of warm night air and the sight of a minaret along the bay brought him properly to Oman. He thought about the invaders and the traders sailing into this cozy cove over the centuries. Arriving in their long wake, he felt the history in the soles of his feet and saw it in the towers that overlooked the town from the surrounding hills. The three Muscat forts, Rolf had said, were built in the sixteenth century when the Portuguese, alarmed by the size of Oman’s navy, occupied this coast to protect their route to the Indian Ocean. Now it was one of the busiest waterways in the world, and the lights Gabriel could see on the blinking horizon were oil tankers, no doubt, plying back and forth.
The dinner party had been the first social event he had attended in months, the first time he had been part of light conversation, had eaten a meal in lively company. It was a relief that nobody had known anything about anything. He had been prepared to face further reprobation, and even though a bunch of strangers could inflict no greater humiliation than he had endured in his own tight neighborhood at home, he was grateful for his sister’s discretion. In Muscat he could breathe, was breathing already, in spite of Annie’s froideur. How deeply aggrieved she must be, he thought, to go to such lengths to disguise the events that had brought him here. She had almost convinced Gabriel that Max’s wedding had been a grand shindig, so much so that, listening to her describe it in fantastical detail, he had vicariously enjoyed what had not happened, and never would.
“Max, Max, Max,” he said out loud, and the warm Muscat wind curved around him, like a longed-for embrace.
A shuffle of bare feet in the stairwell made him turn: Annie, coming to join him. Good. Perhaps they could talk here, with only the sky to eavesdrop. But no one emerged. He had heard her, he was sure of it. Stepping toward the door, he put his head inside. No Annie.
It was Geraldine who kept Annie awake, not Max. Geraldine, the perishing non-bride.
She had been, in Annie’s view, an entirely predictable event. Ten years earlier, she could have described to a T the woman who would one day drag Max away from his piano for just long enough to get him to the altar. Geraldine had made herself indispensable from the start, as if she had seen too many films in which able, slightly frumpy but frightfully sensible women take on those men who are not quite tuned in to the diurnal workings of a life and manage to make them function by reminding them to eat, show up for appointments, and change out of their pyjamas before leaving the house. Geraldine almost certainly seduced Max first—it would not have occurred to him to do so, and if she did not exactly propose to him, he most likely proposed under nifty direction. Everyone rejoiced: the family now had less cause to worry about Max because, with Geraldine’s help, the world made more sense to him, and he to it.
She had been endearingly excited about getting married and went for the full hoopla. This otherwise sensible woman in sensible clothes became altogether giddy when talking wedding dresses, bridesmaids, and banquets. Her dull purposefulness was lost in the romanticism of the event, and she even counted the days, she coyly admitted, from ten months out. When Annie had gone home for the summer, to avoid the murderous Omani heat, she shared in Geraldine’s excitement—somebody had to, since her brother frequently forgot that they were getting married at all and seemed bewildered whenever his fiancée mentioned entrées or invitations. So Annie became fellow plotter and even helped Geraldine select her dress. It was at least elegant, which could not be said of any other item of her clothing.
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
