Too large for two people, it was outfitted with luxuries I would never have chosen myself: gold leather upholstery, curtains embroidered with camels and date trees, shelves and tables with brass frames and glass surfaces. Strangest of these provisions, to me, was the house. A year had passed since my husband, Ed, and I had moved from the Philippines to Bahrain, and still I thought of these three stories as "the" house-not "our" house, certainly not "my." Expatriate families like ours were well provided for: a car, a travel allowance, the promise of schooling if we were ever to have a child. Through the rust-colored designs on her skin I could see more of the pebbly tumors. Mansour held Aroush's hennaed hand and made it wave. Along the left side of her neck grew a pebbly mass of tumors. Faint brown smudges the size of thumbprints dotted her face. Her head swelled out dramatically at the forehead and crown, like a lightbulb. But I had never seen any child quite like the five-year-old Aroush. Back home in the Philippines I had been trained to work with all manner of "special" children. Mansour shifted Aroush's face to give me a frontal view. Mansour's hip and concealed by her garments all along. Once the outer gate had shut, she parted her jilbab to reveal a gold-embroidered bodice and a little daughter. She smelled pleasantly of tangerine and something stronger, perhaps a spice. Mansour leaned in further, to kiss me on both cheeks. I reached out to shake her henna-tipped hand, but Mrs. Only my birth certificate had ever called me Salvación. Sally Riva?" she said, removing the sunglasses. She wore sunglasses-Chanel, I learned, as she approached-and deep red lipstick. But there was something modern about her right away, even ignoring the fact that she had arrived without a husband. Naturally I could see only her face the rest of her had been draped in the traditional black. Mansour first came to the house, I thought she was alone.
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