“There’s a shocker. You fed me, and I’m not happy. Maybe I’m not a pet hamster.”
I frown. Everything with her hurts.
“Can I have my phone?”
“No.”
“I’m not going to call anybody. It’s not like I can get a signal out here. I just want to see if it still works.”
“Something tells me not to,” I say.
“You can watch me. You’ll see the little bars not firing up.”
I don’t know how the phones work. What if she signals somebody? But the phone would make her happy—I know that. I can’t let her go, but I can give her the phone.
“I promise,” she says.
She’s a reporter, my natural enemy, as much as she says she isn’t. I can’t see how it can be otherwise. She doesn’t trust me—not even enough to tell me the secret of the kitten.
But then she turns her pleading eyes to me and my heart melts.
I want to make her happy.
I force myself to hand the plastic bag to her.
“Thank you.”
My pulse drums in my ears as she takes the parts out of the baggies and fits them together. She moves over on the log and pats it. “Come here. You can see.”
I sit. The thing is just a black rectangle. She presses something. Nothing happens. “Please, please, please,” she whispers to her phone.
A white apple appears. “Yaasssss.” She turns to me. “Thank you. Thank you for trusting me.”
Something warms in my heart.
“I know it wasn’t easy,” she says.
“It was worth it.” I catch a brown curl in my finger. I watch her watch her phone. I enjoy making her happy.
“Look,” she says. “There’s my dog. Bernard.”
I look down at a large black and brown and white dog with a boxy nose. He has a stick in his mouth.
“Bernard?”
“He was a St. Bernard dog. Big. Friendly. He was…such a good dog.”
She flicks the photos by, one by one. She stops on another one with her and Bernard. Bernard’s licking her face. She’s smiling, laughing.
She flips on and stops at an image of her with an older couple. “My mom and dad. That’s our porch. Ten years ago. And here’s me and my sister, Maya.”
She shows me the house where she grew up. She shows me herself standing next to a dusty Jeep in front of a sign that has strange squiggly writing on it. Then her and four smiling men crowded around a table, all holding tall glasses with leaves stuffed into them. “That’s a café in Beirut,” she says. “We drank a lot of mint tea there.” The men are all journalists like her, doing pieces, she says. She shows me a picture of the desert. She stands next to a camel.
I sneak glances at her face as she moves through the photos. She seems so alive when she looks back on this life of hers.
This is how she looks when she’s happy, I think with a start. A way she’s never been with me. A way she might never be again. Because I’ve taken her away from her life.
I bite back the despair.