“Oh, I’m sorry. Did you think we were taking the elevator?”
Salman’s voice came from the living room, in the direction of the patio and the dinner they had had the night before, when she’d let herself get lost in it all.
He walked into view… He was awash in sunlight, and she lifted her hands to shield her eyes in an attempt to see him better. She could make out the movement of his hand, motioning for her to come out to the terrace. She hesitated, looking at the door to the elevator; the exit from this world back into the one she knew, where he family was waiting for her, where she wouldn’t be pulled further into this mess.
But that world didn’t have any mystery to it. It didn’t have the sun. If didn’t have him. She turned, and walked to towards where Salman was standing.
She felt overdressed when she saw him. She’d assumed that he was taking her somewhere fancy and expensive, and that they would need to dress to impress the people around them. But he was in a polo and shorts, and looked more comfortable in the warming day than she was.
“Come on,” he said, taking her hand. “Come see the other reason I picked this place.”
He led her around the plants of the terrace to a staircase leading up. The guardrails were made out of Plexiglas, and it gave Nadya the heady sensation of climbing a staircase at the top of the word.
The stairs led to a platform, up above the penthouse. And there, in the middle, waited a helicopter.
Salman grinned like a little boy watching the look on her face. “New York traffic is terrible. I try to avoid it.”
They headed no
rth, over the city. First the high-rises disappeared, and then the city. Then there were only towns smattered about. And then the towns grew less and less frequent, and there were only odd houses nestled amongst the forests and hills.
As they flew, Nadya grew more and more certain that her plan was useless. They were going too far. They’d passed Hastings-On-Hudson quite some time ago, and they were still moving quickly. Out here, cabs would be too rare to count on getting one quickly, before Salman and his people realized she was gone. And there was little to no public transport, so even though she wasn’t that much further physically from where her sister was, she might as well be back in Seattle for how much she’d be able to reach her.
She saw their destination before Salman pointed it out to her. That had to be it. It was less of a house and more of an estate. From up here, it was hard to tell much about it, other than that it was large, and the architecture appeared to be somewhere in between Western and Middle Eastern.
“Why would they build a hotel all the way out here?” Nadya asked, struggling to be heard over the headset.
Salman shot her a confused glance, and she thought he hadn’t heard her, but when she tried to repeat herself, he shook his head. “Wait until we’re on the ground,” he said, although she understood it more from reading his lips than from being able to distinguish his words over the beating of the rotors.
They landed out front, in the middle of a circular driveway. There were no cars, nor, as far as Nadya could tell, were there any other guests. Just the same usual milling about of people who she knew were intended to help in some ill-defined way.
“Where are we?” she asked, though it wasn’t the biggest question on her mind.
“The Catskills,” he said. “You know, I love the mountains. Back home in Al-Ahradi, we don’t have any. It’s a really flat country. As soon as I saw this place…” His voice trailed off, looking at the front facade of the house. There was real affection there, Nadya realized. Not pride, or anything so base. He was happy here.
“This is yours?” she said in awe, drawing his attention to her.
He took her hands in his. “I was hoping it could be ours,” he said. “If you like it.”
His accent came out more when he was speaking from the heart, she noticed again. She’d seen it last night, when they’d been talking about what they most missed from growing up. Nadya had had to talk in abstract, talking about the feelings and safety of childhood. But Salman had talked about his home, and the concrete things he missed.
She saw many of those things now, in the way he’d chosen to build his house. She took it in. There was a grandness to it. The steps leading up to the front facade were marble, and reminded Nadya of the steps to a courthouse, or some great institution. They went all across the whole front face of the building, and gleamed in the sunlight.
The building possessed an unmistakable sense of gravitas. That was one thing newly-built houses never had, and it set it apart. It felt like the house was rooted in the earth – like the great entranceway staircase continued on down beneath their feet the way islands that are just the tops of undersea mountains continue beneath the water.
“Have you ever lived here?” she asked, as they slowly climbed the stairs, flanked by servants.
“It depends what you mean by ‘lived’. My things have been here for some time. Most of them, anyway. But for the last few years I’ve mostly been traveling.”
Nadya must have seemed like this worried her, because he quickly added and addendum.
“Because I’ve been a single man. I don’t have a family, so I get sent around on assignment. It won’t be the same once I’m settled.”
Nadya felt a sense of relief, and realized that the reassurance had been warranted after all. “Are you looking forward to it?” she asked, as they crossed the threshold. though the answer seemed fairly obvious.
The doors that swung open for them glimmered like they were carved all of one piece from some giant blue gemstone. It was some kind of technological trickery, Nadya guessed, though she’d never seen anything like it before. The playful part of her mind set about imagining how it would have been mining a gemstone that size.
She laughed, and her eyes darted to Salman, expecting him to ask her what she was laughing at. But his gaze was fixed at something behind the giant doors. She followed it, and what she saw took her breath away. Even though she’d seen from the air that the house had a courtyard to it, she had been expecting an entryway. Something in her mind had assumed that it would be a large room, full of hard surfaces, with cut flower arrangements in deceptively expensive vases littering every flat surface. Like the homes of old money New Yorkers, or the Beverly hills mega-producers ripping off their style in an attempt to gain credibility.
No, this house was Salman’s. It was his taste, and no one else’s.
They entered the wide courtyard. In a way, it almost reminded Nadya of the patio where they’d eaten the day before. But where the terrace had come with a certain feeling of exposure, this felt sheltered.
There were plants everywhere, and Nadya recognized some of them, although she realized with fascination that many of them she had only seen in movies.
“It’s a garden,” she said, mostly to herself, and saw Salman nod, out of the corner of her eye. “Who takes care of all this?” she asked, imagining one of the stone-faced grey-suited men wandering around with shears, pruning bushes and avoiding thorns in floral-patterned gardening gloves.
“There are three gardeners, actually,” he said. “I chose them myself, and they all live on site. This is the heart of the home, and my home is my heart, so I wanted to make sure it was well looked after.”
“You’d like them, I think,” he said as he took her hand, and brought her in. There was a winding path through planters, alive with bushes and towering, flowering trees. “They’re characters. I hear them arguing, when they don’t realize I’m nearby. One is an old woman, who seems like she’s always got a pie cooling somewhere. She’ll talk your ear off, if you’re not careful, about what works best in this climate and how things have ‘always’ been done.
“Another is a very scientific man. The head butler said that when he moved in, he brought with him a full collection of specimens, and they had to give him an extra room in the servants’ quarters just to store it all. The third one is just a boy. He can’t be more than nineteen, but he loves growing things, and he just seems to know how they grow best. So I took him on to sort of fill things out, as it were. I like to imagine he keeps the peace.”