“I’m seventeen,” I pointed out, but he gave me a look that even his Ray-Bans couldn’t hide. One that said there was no way my parents would even consider letting me stay home alone while Dad was at sea. “Okay, so maybe I could live with Grandma and Grandpa when you’re gone. Or Grandma Irene.”
His eyebrows lifted above the top of his sunglasses. “You’re telling me you would rather move to a retirement community filled with elder humans than to the cradle of civilization?”
“When you put it that way . . .”
“I know this is not how you imagined your senior year.” Dad dragged a hand up through his salt-and-pepper hair and I caught sight of my name inked in black around his wrist like a permanent bracelet. He’d gotten the tattoo when I was one day old, just after they filled out my birth certificate. “I get it. I really do. Flights to Cairo are going to eat my time and money, but I’m willing to make the sacrifice because it is important to your mom.”
“Are we going to sell the house?”
“The program requires a one-year commitment,” Dad said. “So we’ll rent out the house until we get back.”
The thought of someone else sleeping in my bed made me ache, starting in my heart and radiating out into the rest of my body. I blinked a few times, trying not to cry, but when my dad wrapped his arms around me, I came undone.
We’ve lived in the same pumpkin-orange bungalow on Finch Street for as long as I’ve been alive. As the ferry churned through the deep, shimmering blue of Lake Erie, I could not imagine living in another house in another city in another country. Even now, as our plane taxies down the runway toward the terminal in Cairo, I still can’t fully wrap my mind around it.
Dad stands in the aisle, pulling down our carry-on bags from the overhead compartment, and I inhale deeply, pushing against the tide of tears threatening to spill. There is no point in crying.
We are here.
CHAPTER 2
Aboard the plane we were travelers, in the customs line we were foreigners, but once we are beyond the concourse with our stamped passports in hand, we become strangers in Egypt. Strange ones at that. There is my punk rock dad with his tugboat tan (arms, face, not much else) and a black T-shirt that leaves his tattoo sleeves exposed for anyone to see the pin-up girl wearing an old-fashioned bathing suit and the dancing skeleton holding a martini glass. Dad is sturdy, strong, and kind of intimidating.
My mom is imposing in her own way: a million miles tall with Nordic-blond hair. She’s dressed in a loose-fitting white tunic and black pants in an effort to blend in, but she looks like a Viking goddess and announces herself without saying a word. There’s no way she’s ever going to blend in.
Then there is me, halfway between them, with her pale hair and his pale Irish freckles. The less-cool Anna to Mom’s ice queen Elsa, just trying not to be noticed at all. But as the escalator carries us down to the baggage claim, people are staring. At her. At me. Particularly the men, who drag their gazes from my hair to my chest—even though my red bandanna-print top covers me completely—then look quickly away when Dad glares.
“Christ,” he mutters under his breath. “This is going to be a long year.”
At the bottom of the escalator, amid taxi drivers and chauffeurs, stands a man about my parents’ age with a neatly clipped goatee, black-rimmed glasses, and graying hair. He holds a sign that has KELLY FAMILY printed on it in bold black letters.
“We are the Kelly family,” my dad says.
“Welcome to Egypt.” The man’s smile is wide as he speaks with a heavy accent. “I am your driver, Ahmed Saleh Elhadad.”
“Shokran.”
My mother, the overachiever, spent the entire trip plugged into a computer program to learn the Egyptian dialect for her work in the clinic, but hearing my dad thank the driver in Arabic catches me by surprise. As Mom practices her Arabic on Mr. Elhadad, I raise my eyebrows at Dad.
He shrugs. “I figured it can’t hurt to know a few words. ‘Please’ and ‘thank you’ go a long way just about everywhere.”
On his very first tugboat job as a deckhand—when he was only a little older than I am now—my dad flew to Panama to meet his boat, passed through the Panama Canal, and ended up in Peru. He’s worked in Mexico, Cuba, and Honduras, up and down both coasts of the United States, and in several other South American countries, so he knows a thing or two about living in the world, outside of Ohio.
The four of us walk to the baggage carousel and it is hard not to stare back at the people around me, especially the women. I am surprised to see some of them with their hair flowing around their shoulders or knotted in buns. I thought wearing a hijab was part of the rules. At least that’s what Grandma Irene’s favorite TV news channel would have people believe about Islam—that women are forced by a cruel religion to cover themselves.
There are girls wearing hijabs, but the girl walking past me dressed in skinny jeans and strappy sandals—a stack of multicolored bangle bracelets climbing up the long sleeve of her shirt—kind of makes me wish I’d pushed a little harder when Mom and I argued over what I couldn’t bring to Egypt. Many—but not all—of the older women are cloaked in black abayas and hijabs, while a few wear veils over the lower part of their faces. These women unsettle me because their identities, their personalities, are concealed. Are they happy? Sad? With their mouths covered, it feels as if they’ve been silenced. I glance back at the girl with the skinny jeans as she stands beside her carry-on. Clearly the rules are more complex than I thought. But if Muslim women have a choice in what they wear, why would they choose to cover themselves up?
I look away, focusing on the conveyor belt as I wait for my suitcase to come around. Fragments of conversations flow around me and Arabic seems like a harsh and unyielding language that I will never be able to understand. Overwhelmed, I limit my world—at least for now—to the search for one big lime-green duffel bag.
“Caroline, Mr. Elhadad will be the person you call when you want to go somewhere outside our immediate neighborhood,” Mom says.
She overloaded me with so many rules of etiquette that I can’t remember if I am supposed to shake hands with him. If so, which hand? I smile, nod in his direction, and say hello in English.
To my relief, he does the same. “My home is not so far from Manial. I will take you wherever you would like to visit. Perhaps the pyramids or to the mall.”