PROMISE
“Is that it? Is that one our plane?” Bastien races to the window and presses his face against the glass.
My brother is the King of Somewhere.
He’s not a real king, and it’s not a real place. It’s a scorched and broken void, our Somewhere, but even that is better than nowhere at all. There’s hope in Somewhere. Possibility.
Mother and Mr. Gansler are bickering on the other side of the room. She doesn’t trust him, and he doesn’t trust her.
They’re both right.
I sit down on the hard plastic bench in the empty departure lounge. It’s aggressively uncomfortable, an ode to a hasty departure.
I’m leaving behind a fairy tale—this land of plenty, so free with laughter and caresses. People like Emmy who give and give and give for no other reason than the pleasure of friendship. College loans and Happy Meals. Disneyland. Free refills. Boys like Ian, with dazzling eyes and kind, good hearts. Librarians with arms full of books for the taking, and shiny plastic jewels. Picnics in the park. Lucky Charms.
So much happy artifice. Such fanciful illusions.
For me, these things will never be real.
My old life, the one I fled, was real. It is real. It is real pain, and real war, and real deaths, and real guns. I can’t say that I’m excited, or happy to return. I’m not. What I am is ready.
I thought I was drowning here at times. But I wasn’t. I was changing. In the moment, they feel the same. Equally traumatic. Equally permanent. But these breathless, underwater months here have cleansed us, I think. Left us less singed than when we arrived. We are ready, the three of us—ready to go home. Ready to do whatever it takes to transform our Nowhere into something beautiful and peaceful.
Ready to make amends.
The edges of the folded picture dig into the skin near my heart. It’s my insurance policy. My weapon. My treasure. When the time comes, I will be happy to let it go. I have people and places I can hardly wait to visit. I’ll leave a bit of the treasure wherever I go—a merry trail of golden crumbs. Perhaps my homeland can produce a happy fairy tale yet.
Mother knows.
We don’t discuss it. We won’t discuss it. She looks at me differently now, with wary resignation on her face. She is at peace with my treachery. Or so she seems to be.
Really, only time will tell.
While we wait, I compose a farewell in my head. Dear Ian. Dear Emmy. Separate messages, of course, but both will contain the most important thing I have to say: Thank you. Thank you for giving me this in-between space in my life. The time and the place that rest between my Before and my After. It wasn’t meant to be forever, I know that now, but thank you for embracing me as if it were.
I stop when I notice the sound of music playing overhead. It’s Muzak—the watered-down version of a catchy song I heard Bastien singing along with just days ago. It will do. “Bastien,” I call out. “Listen!”
His face lights up, and I stand, hold out my hand. We used to do this back home, back before everything crumbled. He looks sheepish, since seven is so much more mature than six, but he humors me and takes my hand. We dance a foolish, spinning dance together, and I catch our reflection in the glass. There’s me, hair streaming, head unveiled, and there’s Bastien, a grinning, spinning, laughing child. I file the images away in my mind; they won’t be seen again.
“Okay, that’s enough, you two.” Mother is smiling as she claps her hands at us. “It’s time to go.”
I linger only slightly before I follow them to the boarding gate. I take one last breath, filling my lungs with the air of this place, and I make one more silent promise to myself. I am my mother’s daughter. I am my father’s daughter. And I have learned from their mistakes.
I am the Invisible Queen.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The seed for this story was planted years before I started writing it.
I spent the summer of 2003 in Baghdad, Iraq. Saddam Hussein was on the run, leaving behind a jaw-dropping collection of opulent properties. My work at the time took me through some of his palaces—some intact, some heavily shelled, and all thoroughly looted.
One of the compounds had housed various relatives, including a number of young children. On the property was a kids’ playhouse built into the side of a hill, though “playhouse” doesn’t even come close to describing the elaborate faux-rock structure. It was as if the Flintstones had built a Stone Age palace—an enormous multilevel maze with built-in seats and tables, an intercom system, and stereo speakers installed in most rooms. There was even an elevator. It was pure excess and was no doubt thoroughly enjoyed by whoever had played there.
Who were these children? I wondered. Did they know the secrets of the man who had built this palace of a playhouse? Did they realize how different their lives were from those of other children in their country? Was Saddam Hussein just a friendly grandfather/uncle/godfather to them? When they came of age and learned more, were they shocked?
The idea behind the book didn’t crystallize for another seven years. I was a mother by then, and had just moved onto a military base with my family. Various loud military exercises were a part of life there, and it was months before I stopped jumping every time I heard an explosion. My young son adapted far more quickly, and one day, not long after we had arrived, I was taken aback when he responded to the sound of gunfire by asking me to turn up the volume so that he could hear his Nemo video over the noise. His reaction rattled me. What type of life leads a child to find the sound of gunfire nothing more than a distraction from a cartoon? I asked myself. And in that moment—in that question—Bastien’s character began to grow.
When I finally began to write the story, I did not want Laila and Bastien’s home country to be a thinly disguised version of any one particular place—Iraq, or elsewhere. To avoid this, and to avoid the trap of having to be too wed to actual events, I created a melting pot of details, current events, and personal experiences.
I started writing in 2011, a year or so into the Arab Spring movement that was bringing so many changes to the Middle East and North Africa. What began as a smattering of local disputes had spread like wildfire, crossing borders and tapping into deep veins of civil unrest. Before long it escalated into a wave of protests, uprisings, and civil wars. The whole region seemed to be rising up against the authority of repressive regimes, calling out human rights abuses and condemning the leaders who had allowed inequality to fester and grow. On top of that, the continued presence of the U.S. military in the region added yet another layer of turmoil. At times the sheer volume of pertinent material appearing in the media seemed eerie—almost as if the news was writing my story along with me:
? After being ousted from office and with his palace surrounded, the president of Tunisia fled the country with his wife and three children. He and his wife were both convicted in absentia of various crimes.
? Osama bin Laden was found living a cloistered existence in Pakistan; no one knew what to do with his wives and children after he was killed. Were they innocents? What did they know? Where should they go?
? Rulers were being forced from power in one country after another: Egypt. Libya. Mali.
As I wrote, the daily news brought me inspiration from other parts of the world as well —for example, when Kim Jong-un, still in his twenties and completely without leadership experience, was declared North Korea’s supreme leader after his father’s death. He wasn’t exactly a seven-year-old king, but I couldn’t ignore the parallels.
And then came Syria. Any time I began to worry that my plot was becoming melodramatic (Was a school bombing perhaps too much for this sort of a book? The memory of a body in the street too sensational?), painful images from Houla, Homs, Ghouta, and Aleppo told me that my plot didn’t even scratch the surface of the atrocities happening in the world every day.
Similarities between what my characters were going through and real-world current events sometimes chilled me. Days after I wrote the scene in which Laila watches the news of a bombing at a vacation locale, for example, twenty people died in Afghanistan when a lakeside resort was attacked. I grimly went back and changed my mountain retreat to a lakeside resort in the text.
But the overlaps between what I wrote on one day and then read in the news the next were not eerie coincidences. I was simply paying more attention to the terrible things that appear in the news every day, because my characters were making those tragedies more personal.
Ultimately, this book is pure fiction that is inspired by real events. It isn’t about a specific conflict any more than it is about any one particular country. Rather, it’s the personal story of someone living on the periphery of war. It’s the story of a girl grappling with questions about guilt, choice, blame, and identity under circumstances both extraordinary and mundane. It’s a big story told in small details, and I hope that my readers come away feeling as if faraway issues are now a little more personal.