Hiding in Plain Sight Read Online Free PDF Page A

“I’ve been in a state since hearing of it. You know, I loved Aar more than I’ve cared for my own daughter.”
    â€œWhere is she?” asks Bella. “Any idea?”
    â€œShe is currently in Uganda, with that woman.”
    Bella knows that there is no love lost between Wendy and Padmini, whom she blames for Valerie’s decision to walk out on her marriage. But when Wendy offers to call and break the news of Aar’s death to her daughter, Bella is all too glad to accept the offer.
    They talk some more, and when Wendy speaks of being overwhelmed by the barbarity of the killings, Bella silently remembers something Hurdo once said after their country collapsed into anarchy and they fled Mogadiscio: “Death in Somalia seldom bothers to announce its arrival. In fact, death calls with the arrogance of a guest confident of receiving a warm welcome at any time, no questions asked.”
    The church bells in Trastevere chime, as if in tribute to Aar. Bella pictures death riding a tide of undulant waves of unheralded emotion—and she weeps again, unable to stop shaking, the hour as dark as a cave.
    â€œAnd what do they say down in Somalia?” Wendy is asking.
    Bella, despite herself, recounts some of the gorier details from one of the Somali websites, which reported without giving any evidence that one of the terrorists who entered the UN building after the suicide bombing held a knife to Aar’s throat and then stood by, waiting and watching, until his blood drained like a goat being made halal.
    â€œShame on the lot of them,” Wendy curses.
    Bella knows that these terrorists aren’t true Muslims. Yes, she is a secularist, no more than culturally Muslim. But with a mother born and raised a Muslim and a father born in Italy to Catholic parents and brought up a Christian, she believed she had the undisputed authorityto choose her faith. In her youth, growing up in a Muslim country, she embraced her mother’s faith. But she no longer thinks of herself as a true Muslim.
    Wendy is saying, “Death is a given, isn’t it?”
    â€œWe have no idea of the time of our dying.”
    â€œNor of the manner of our dying.”
    Bella says, “It is only that Aar’s death adds terror to the idea of death, the idea of dying, because he was unprepared for death and did not deserve to die in that infernal manner.”
    â€œHe was a good man,” Wendy affirms.
    And they say their good-byes.
    â€”
    Unable to reach her niece and nephew on their mobile phones, Bella rings the home of their hosts, the principal of the school and his wife. Surely the attack has been headline news in Kenya as well. Finally, Catherine Kariuki, the wife of the principal, answers the phone. Bella asks if the children have heard the news. Catherine confirms that they have and that they are taking it very badly indeed.
    â€œHow do you mean?” asks Bella.
    Catherine says that they seem to be traumatized and uncertain how to act. One minute they’re a little weepy, the next minute one or the other of them says, “This was bound to happen, given where Dad was,” and the other one commiserates.
    â€œI would like to talk to them, please.”
    Catherine goes to call the children to the phone but soon comes back to say that not only won’t they open the door to Dahaba’s bedroom, where they’ve sequestered themselves, they also won’t even acknowledge her knocking or her calls to them.
    So Bella simply tells Catherine that she will be on a flight to Nairobion the morrow, and the two of them burst into tears and weep and weep and weep until one or the other of them drops the line, and the next thing Bella knows, she is holding a dead phone in her hand and listening to approaching footsteps. Looking up, she realizes that Marcella has come back with the boarding pass for the plane ticket she has booked.
    Bella puts the boarding pass in the external pouch of her