Nadirah got into the passenger seat of the government-issued vehicle as Gifford positioned his lanky frame behind the wheel and pulled out of the parking lot.
“What have we got?” asked Nadirah.
“Suspected Muslim terrorists. A group of five suspects was temporarily renting a place, one of whom developed a conscience in the end and decided he wanted out of their deadly game. The plan was to bomb some schools, but then they shot the guy who wanted out and nothing more to do with their plot, and moved on to some unknown location.”
“And they left us some of those deadly concoctions to analyze, right?”
“Something like that. You’re of Arabian descent. Know any Arabic?”
“Nope.”
Gifford laughed and said, “And your little Jewish friend said she only knows a few Hebrew words. Too bad Arabic isn’t one of her languages, but there’s always someone else who could translate anything that may need translating.”
“Kimal’s Iranian. He can do it.”
“So, does the grand revelation your friend thanked you for have to do with what I think it has to do with?” Gifford asked Nadirah, surprising her with the change of subject as they made their way to an old, rundown apartment building toward the center of town.
“Yup. And she’s not a friend.”
“How’d she react to the news?”
Nadirah shrugged. “She was kind of surprised.”
“Was she?”
“Yup.”
“Did she seem sorry about the past and like she wanted to move on? Or was the revelation an instant crush killer?” Gifford asked.
Nadirah laughed sarcastically. “Sorry? Oh, no, she’s not sorry at all. Harassing me was kind of fun, she told me.”
Gifford laughed. “At least she’s honest.”
“But she does regret her mouth, whatever that means. And what’s this crush killer you mentioned?”
They were stopped at a red light, and Gifford looked over at his colleague with surprise. “You mean you don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“My God, I can’t believe you can’t see it.”
“See what?” Nadirah asked, impatience now evident in her voice.
“She’s totally hot for you, Nadirah. Totally.”
Nadirah felt herself almost blush, which only added to her irritation. “I don’t think so, Giff.”
“She is. I can easily see it. I just think it’s probably only a physical thing, though, since you two don’t exactly get along.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter either way. She not only doesn’t live here anymore, but she’s someone I would never have. She’s just not an equal.”
“That’s your problem,” Gifford said, stepping on the gas pedal. “I tell you, that’s your problem. You not only expect people to be perfect and focus too much on their faults, but you also keep living in the past. What someone was yesterday is probably not what they are today. So while Joni may not live here anymore, I’m sure she’s changed and grown up at least somewhat by now. You keep going for those carbon copies, and you’ll be alone forever. That’s why there are so many failed relationships out there, my friend. People need to seek out people who are different from them. They really do. It balances things out better that way and keeps things fun, interesting, and less predictable.”
“Thanks for the advice, Dr. Sheridan, but animated basket cases that can’t sit still or shut up for longer than five minutes don’t do much for me.”
“Yeah, them ADDers don’t like to sit still for long,” Gifford agreed with a smile. “Can you at least admit she’s cute?”
Nadirah hesitated, then said, “Okay, so she’s cute. Big deal. She’s gone soon anyway.”
“Gone when?”
“Not fast enough,” Nadirah half-lied, knowing a part of her would truly miss the bubbly little prankster and whatever it was she thought to surprise her with next, be it in reality or Dreamland.
“You know another thing that would make you two the perfect pair of opposites?” said Gifford.
“I can’t wait to hear,” Nadirah said, rolling her eyes.
“I’ll bet that if someone confronted her and asked her if she had a thing for you, she wouldn’t hesitate to admit that she did.”
“So?”
Gifford parked the car alongside the curb in front of the apartment building, then turned to face Nadirah before exiting the vehicle. “Do you have a thing for her?”
Nadirah’s eyes bulged. “Huh? No. No way!”
Gifford let out a hearty round of laughter. “See what I mean?”
Nadirah slammed the car door shut, not at all happy to see what she didn’t want to see.
But Gifford was right.
Joni lay awake in the semi-darkened hotel room that night as Huan lay sleeping in the bed next to hers. She had been tossing and turning for hours, unable to sleep.
She couldn’t get Nadirah off her mind. She replayed their lunch meeting over and over in her mind like a broken record.
Nadirah Haddad. Who’d have ever thought her path would cross with Nadirah Haddad’s of all people nearly two decades later? The woman who had broken her heart even though she never quite had it to begin with. Their encounter had been brief, but the effects had been lasting. At least for Joni, they had been. She eventually got over Nadirah, but she certainly had never forgotten her.
The passage of time had left several gaps in the memories of their one meeting and a few phone conversations, but she remembered enough to take a trip down Memory Lane. And so she rewound the hands of time and peeled back through the years from California back to Oregon, then back to Arizona, and finally back to New England.
They’d met on a Wednesday night, “gay night” at a predominantly straight club, which was in Niantic, just as Nadirah had said. It was June of 1989. Nadirah introduced herself with a friendly handshake and asked her to dance as soon as she arrived at the club. It turned out that she knew her friend Kim from a sign language club they both attended. Kim was her married, bisexual neighbor at the time who had driven her to the club that night. Nothing had ever happened between her and Kim. She was never attracted to the blue-eyed, blond paramedic turned RN whom she’d met about six months earlier in Hartford as she was leaving the ER after having an asthma attack. This was back in the days when she smoked.
Kim convinced her then lonely and troubled self to escape the polluted chaos of the city, telling her about an apartment for rent in East Lyme, right next door to her and her husband, a local police officer. It was one of just two apartments in a small building above a business that supplied lumber for houses.
After living in tiny old apartments, Joni was impressed with the spacious, modern apartment and all its extra features, such as a motion-detector burglar alarm. The kitchen had a garbage disposal, a trash compactor, and a dishwasher. The huge bathroom had a Jacuzzi built into the bathtub and a full-size washer and dryer as well.
Joni had grown up in a wealthy town with a wealthy family. They weren’t millionaires, but they’d been pretty comfortable. She didn’t see much of her brother and sister because they were eight and twelve years older than her, and because they flew the nest so much sooner than she had, she’d often felt like an only child. She didn’t always get along with her siblings anyway, so she didn’t mind.
Her preteen years had held a mixture of both good and bad times, but most of her teenage years had been pure hell. She’d been shuffled from one foster home to another, as well as a few hospitals and private schools that were no better than prisons. Oftentimes, she was misunderstood, misdiagnosed, and turned into a walking pharmacy. She was often made to feel like she had to be someone she wasn’t and that her true self just wasn’t good enough. She learned to bottle her emotions until she exploded and had very low self-esteem. She also learned about rejection and heartache at a young age and became very mistrustful of people in general. Things that tarnished one’s outlook on life while they were young didn’t exactly help pave the way for a bright future.
One day, she was suddenly on her own, her brother off God knew where, her sister living in New York, her parents living in Florida. With no real social skills to guide her through life after being sheltered in a so-called private school for so long while on a cocktail of medications, and after one serious suicide attempt that had broken her arm, she would develop quickly on the intellectual side, but any personal growth would be slow in the making.
Her parents were sometimes as cold and insensitive as they were pleasant and helpful. They sometimes provided financial assistance when times were rough and didn’t seem to mind that she liked women. But they didn’t see the emotional scars their actions, both direct and indirect, had left upon her, and they didn’t seem to want to see them either. Or maybe they did, and they just didn’t know how to deal with it.
“If I weren’t married, I’d be all over you in a heartbeat,” Kim said to Joni the night they’d headed for North Star.
While Joni had smiled politely, the thought of Kim all over her didn’t appeal to her at all. What did usually appeal to her were women who were tall, dark, and older.
“I really appreciate you taking me here,” Joni said.
“Oh, it’s no bother. If anything, it gets me out of the apartment for a while and away from Mark, who wants to do little more than nurse beers by the TV lately when he’s even home to begin with. It’ll be interesting to see what the club is like anyway. It’s not something I get the opportunity to check out very often, you know?”
Joni nodded mechanically, though she didn’t really know. Where Kim had very little free time and was always coming and going, Joni had too much time on her hands, and she was beginning to wonder if moving to East Lyme had been a mistake. Sure, she had a nicer apartment in a safer neighborhood. But she had no life to go with it. Loneliness and boredom were more of a friend to her there than they had been in the city.
And then she’d met Nadirah.
The thought of a possible relationship with the attractive woman she would meet that night had really perked up her spirits. Oh, how she had longed to experience love, acceptance, and passion! She was cautious and wary, but eager and excited. Up to that point, most of her past boyfriends and girlfriends had been mere settlements. These days, she was more determined to be honest with both herself and with others. No more saying yes to people she should really be saying no to simply because they were there, available to her, and expressing an interest in her. She would rather be alone than settle. And that’s exactly what she’d been doing for a while because it seemed she’d fallen into an endless cycle of wanting those she couldn’t have while being wanted by those she didn’t want to be wanted by. Yet as far as Joni had believed that warm June night, the interest and attraction were mutual.
But had she really read her all wrong? she wondered to herself that night in present-day 2008. According to Nadirah, she sure had, and this surprised her too, because she was normally good at reading people. Could wishful thinking have fooled even her? Okay, so she wasn’t perfect, nor was she the brightest. But she was usually perceptive enough not to think someone liked her when in fact they didn’t.
Either way, Joni had been instantly attracted to what seemed like a very friendly, sincere, and outgoing person. The only thing Nadirah lacked was height. She was rather petite, much like herself. But she was just too good-looking for Joni to care. Where her past flings and romances had been a seven or lower on a scale of one to ten, Nadirah was easily an eight or a nine. She had beautiful hair and eyes, nice white even teeth, and a nice tan. She also had a great body. Joni loved her boyish shape, unlike her own, which was very feminine and more curvaceous. She also liked the fact that she wasn’t overly masculine, something Joni didn’t go for. Nadirah had been dressed casually in jeans and a gray T-shirt. It seemed she remembered her hair being in a ponytail, which ended up loose later on. Joni complimented her on how lovely her hair was. She herself always longed for the straight hair Nadirah had.
Kim and Nadirah discussed the sign language club they attended, and Nadirah occasionally held her beer bottle between her legs so she could sign something to Joni. Although Nadirah had been drinking, she hadn’t appeared to be drunk in any way. No slurring of words, no stumbling around. She spoke fast, but articulately. She seemed healthy and full of positive energy. Joni never sensed that the girl might have a temper or be so insensitive or uncaring in any way.
Nadirah had gone to the bar with a female friend but talked with Joni alone for a while, both on and off the dance floor.
The rest of the night was a blur—Nadirah asking Kim if you had to be able to lift a certain amount of weight in order to be a paramedic, joking that she was a wimp; Nadirah saying that she was living in Niantic, not being a morning person, and something about cooking a turkey.
She and Kim stayed at the bar for perhaps an hour or two. She didn’t remember who left first, but she did clearly remember exchanging phone numbers with Nadirah, and Nadirah kissing her on the cheek on the way out of the club. They had agreed to possibly get together the following week after speaking on the phone.
They spoke on the phone four times. Two of the calls had been made by Joni. She learned that Nadirah was also into playing the guitar. Joni had been into that and the keyboards for a while but was never as good at it as she was with singing and other things due to the counting involved. She and numbers had never gotten along.
She also learned that following a scary call Nadirah had received at work from her doctor, she had been prompted to quit smoking, something Joni herself did six or seven years later.
About a week after meeting at the nightclub, Joni sat alone in her apartment one night. She spent an hour or so convincing herself to follow her head and not her heart. She was still attracted to Nadirah and hoping for some kind of friendship and even some intimacy, but she didn’t want to get burned either. She’d been hurt too many times before by different people in different ways, and so the urge to protect herself overrode any thoughts of having a wait-and-see attitude.
“Go ahead, do it!” her inner voice commanded herself, even though deep down inside she was kicking and screaming in protest, not wanting to do what she was about to do. Nonetheless, she picked up the phone and dialed Nadirah’s number. Her answering machine came on. She waited for the outgoing message to end, in which Nadirah had told her a friend had left.
She spoke into the machine, trying to find the right words to explain her feelings, to be honest, and to let Nadirah know that she thought it best they just remain friends at least for a while. Joni couldn’t remember the exact words she’d used, but as she would soon find out, she had come across in a way she hadn’t meant to. Nadirah, who called her back shortly afterward, was angry as hell and seemed to come off as if she’d been dumped altogether.
“I didn’t appreciate the Dear John message you left me when there never was a relationship between us to begin with, and I didn’t intend to start one.”
Joni had been shocked at just how angry Nadirah was after seeming so sweet in the beginning. She could barely get a word in edgewise as the girl let her have it.
“Did I give you any reason to think I was interested in you?” Nadirah had demanded.
“Yes.”
“But you were the one with the twenty questions, not to mention the one who was persistent.”
Joni thought about this later on, and she didn’t think she’d asked any more than the usual questions one asks when getting to know a person, though it was true for her that the more she liked someone, the more she wanted to know about them.
“I told you my next partner was going to get an AIDS test,” Nadirah continued angrily. “I just had mine, and it’s negative. My next partner is going to be tested.”
“But we just met,” Joni had futilely insisted, “and I…”
“You won’t listen to me, and you’re alone for a reason, and that’s because of you!” Nadirah screamed into the phone before hanging up on her.
“No, I’m alone because of people like you,” Joni said to the lonely silence around her as she hung up the phone, feeling like a woman scorned.
Then she went numb. Nadirah’s outburst had been fast, furious, and unexpected. But once she’d had time to absorb and reflect upon the situation, Joni found that she was just as angry at herself as she was at Nadirah. If she just hadn’t jumped the gun and done such a lousy job at expressing herself, maybe something good would have happened at some point. And maybe if Nadirah had taken the time to really listen to her and try to understand her, she wouldn’t be left feeling so alone and miserable.
Yes, her sadness and frustration were about to turn into some serious bitterness and anger.
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