The Wall by Jeff Long Read Free Book Online Page B

grand reunion. Lewis really wanted it to be that for us. The way it was.”
    “I know.”
    “It’s no good, of course. We grew up, some of us anyway. And Annie’s gone.”
    Hugh aimed for the high road. “Lewis always was one for the past. It’s one of the things I love about him. He wants utopia so badly, and he wants us all right there with him.”
    “Have you ever tried driving forward while you’re looking in the rearview mirror? That’s life with Lewis.” She sighed. “Lewis.”
    “And Rachel?” said Hugh.
    He wasn’t sure where to begin with her. She had grown up. Grown away. Her perfume was perfectly stated, not a whiff of her heady musk of yore. Her laugh lines were smooth, the almond eyes younger than ever. She had an excellent surgeon, and stylist. Her waist-length mane had been cut to a shag, feathered and highlighted. Her nails were bright as plastic.
    The changes were all her doing, Hugh decided. Lewis had always been an earthy man. He liked hippie girls’ armpits. Without him, or despite him, Rachel had gone beyond that. She had turned herself into a trophy wife. Hugh couldn’t help but admire her conviction. She knew her beauty, and had chased it.
    “And Annie,” Rachel said. There was going to be no avoiding Annie.
    “Hayati,” Hugh said. “That’s what I used to call her. It’s an Arab endearment. My life.”
    “Mine, too.” Rachel took his hand in her cool hands. “She was my best friend. Even after you took her off to those places.”
    Those places. The desert surged in his mind. The wadis and wastelands and infinite sunsets. The dunes. He stanched it.
    “Did you know we tried to come to the funeral? But the Saudis wouldn’t issue us visas.”
    “They’re tough about that,” Hugh said. “Anyway, there was no funeral. The sand took care of that. I let her go.”
    “You know what I mean, we wanted to be there for you. I don’t know how you survived the whole ordeal.”
    “You walk on,” he said. The wind had altered the dunes. Even the Bedouin trackers had given up. God’s will, they’d said.
    “We never thought she’d last as long as she did over there,” Rachel said.
    Hugh grew very still. “Why do you say that?”
    “She hated it so much, the heat, the submission, the compound life.”
    “Is that all she told you about?”
    “ ‘Like a bird in a cage,’ she wrote me. Arrogant expatriates. Arrogant Saudis. More than anything, she hated the hatreds. The wars. After Desert Storm, she said that was it. But she stayed. I could never figure that out.”
    “Did she tell you about the wedding we went to?”
    “The one with the twelve-year-old girl?”
    “Yeah, I know,” said Hugh. “And Annie almost refused to go. But it turned out to be the beginning of something big for her, like a secret garden. It was an old-fashioned wedding. The women had their own tent, a black Bedouin bait sha’r, a house of hair. They sang and danced, and when Annie showed them a few modern moves, she was like a long-lost sister. They begged her to teach them.”
    “She said something about dance lessons.”
    “It was more than that. The dance was just a cover. She was their window on the world. They adored her, and vice versa. She taught them things. They taught her things. Henna patterns. How to pluck her eyebrows with a loop of thread, one hair at a time. How to belly dance. And make coffee from scratch. Green coffee.”
    “She was surviving, Hugh. It was just a way to keep her sanity.”
    “Her sanity?”
    “Yes, while you were gone looking for oil and climbing mountains. Did you know I told her to leave you? To come home? I told her you would follow.”
    “Yes, we talked,” said Hugh. “But there was nothing for me here. My job was there. And this will sound old-fashioned, but she was my wife.”
    “Don’t put it that way,” Rachel chided him. “Marriage wouldn’t have stopped her from coming home. Love, yes. The wifey thing, not a chance. Not the Annie I