The House on Carnaval Street

  Noah and I were whisked to Kabul’s Serena Hotel, at that time the most secure place in the country, where we were to hide out while the escape plans were being hatched by Jane and her all-volunteer extraction team. In the hotel, the doors were triple-locked behind us. I was allowed one call. “Make it fast,” barked Calamity Jane as she handed me my phone. “Don’t give away your location, and don’t give away your ­situation.”

  I didn’t have to think twice about who to call. As I started to dial the number I had dialed so many times before, but never for this reason, I thought back on the evening five years earlier, when Karen and I had made “our plan.”

  The bartender slapped down two white bar napkins in front of us. “So, what are we celebrating tonight, ladies?”

  It was Wednesday, and for my best friend and me, it was our one night of the week to catch up, have a margarita or two, and share a good laugh. But on this particular Wednesday night, our conversation was rather sober. It was my last call before leaving Holland, Michigan, for my first trip to Kabul.

  Karen was the type of mom who always made sure her children were decked out in the right safety gear, for fear they would suffer a broken bone, or a hangnail. Her kids called her Safety Mom. “Will you be with the group the whole time? Do they provide security?” she asked in between sips, with barely a pause to swallow.

  “I don’t really know about the security,” I said, trying to sound reassuring, “but I’m sure we’ll have it.”

  “Still, we have to have a plan in case . . . you know . . . ,” she said. We looked down uncomfortably at our drinks. I was going into a country we had just bombed the hell out of and that was in massive need of rebuilding. I motioned to the bartender for another drink and lit a cigarette.

  “At our last meeting they told us to bring a substantial piece of gold.”

  “Define substantial,” Karen said, peering over her glass.

  “In case . . . I guess . . . if we have to pay our way out of a situation.” I took a long, nervous puff at my cigarette, then looked away. I didn’t want to freak her out. I didn’t want to freak myself out. The unfortunate reality was that Kabul still wasn’t a very safe place.

  Karen sat up and smoothed out her shirt. I could see a plan brewing in her head. “Okay, so here’s what we’ll do,” she said, using the tone I’d often heard her use with her kids. “We need a word or phrase that will tell me you’re in trouble and that I need to call somebody.”

  Knowing Karen, and knowing who she knew, I had no doubt that she would be able to get me out of any situation safely. Though I didn’t even want to think about why I’d need her, I went ahead and humored her. “You’re right! We need a code word.”

  We spent the rest of the night channeling our inner 007s, kicking around different words and phrases—bun in the oven, the goose is cooked, the armadillo can’t cross the road.

  “When was the last time you actually said the goose is cooked?” I teased. “And really, an armadillo?”

  “Okay, then, who on earth would believe that you or I have a bun in the oven?” She laughed back.

  We finally settled on the turkey is in the oven. I’m not sure why we chose that one. It wasn’t even November. I blame it on the margaritas. But I was glad to have a plan.

  Now, after the fiasco call to the U.S. Embassy, I wasn’t so hopeful. One ring, two rings. What time was it there, anyway? Please don’t go to the machine, I prayed. Karen’s deep voice came through on the other end.

  “Hello?” I said, not sure whether I was talking to a person or a machine.

  “Debbie?” was the reply. She sounded peeved. I admit that I may have, on more than one occasion, called her in the middle of the night. But there was no time for apologies, so I went straight to the point.

  “The turkey is in the oven.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing myself say, but I was seasoned enough by now to know that phone lines in Kabul were hardly secure. My words were met with silence. In the meantime, Jane the Australian mercenary was motioning to me to wrap it up.

  “What?” replied Karen, groggily.

  I tried once more, slower. “The turkey . . . is in . . . the oven.” I closed my eyes and prayed she would remember that conversation from years ago. “Wait!” She remembered. Thank God! “Are there . . . giblets with the turkey?”

  I paused and looked at Jane, now holding her hand out for my phone.

  “Are there giblets with the turkey?” Karen persisted.

  I scrunched my forehead, trying to remember what she could be referring to. And then I understood.

  “Yes,” I said, looking at Noah. “The big giblet. Right now, it looks like it will come out okay, but if you don’t hear the timer go off within twenty-four hours, it’s time for a backup plan.”

  “Gotcha.” I felt a little relief knowing that Karen had my back; if push came to shove she would do whatever she could to summon help. Of course, what she didn’t know was that I had already struck out with our own embassy.

  “Thanks, Safety Mom.” I hung up and placed the phone in Jane’s firm hand. She popped open the back, removed my SIM card, and gave it back to me. It was go time.

  With the convoy ride behind us, we bustled through check-in and then immigration, draped, tied, wrapped, and veiled beyond recognition, thanks to the Afghan disguise Calamity Jane had insisted upon. I didn’t say much as we sat waiting for the plane to leave Kabul airport. I kept glancing nervously out the window to make sure that my husband, Sam, or one of his thugs wasn’t coming after us on the tarmac. I knew it was dangerous for a wife to leave an Afghan husband without permission, and that house arrest, imprisonment, or even an honor killing was often the fate of an errant woman.

  When we finally did lift off, I hid my face behind my head­scarf and allowed the tears to stream endlessly down my cheeks. My sweet son held my hand tightly, not knowing quite what to say. For two and a half hours and a thousand miles my mind raced with questions. What just happened? Where did I go wrong? How do I keep Noah safe? How do I keep myself safe? Where the hell should I go? Where the hell can I go?

  The first thing I did once we landed in Dubai was to call Karen to let her know we were okay. Safety Mom had sat by the phone for twenty-four hours straight, at the ready to pull some strings to persuade Holland’s mayor, our congressman, and the governor to come to my rescue, if need be. That was my girl. The next step was to connect Noah with his brother in Northern Cyprus. He would be safe there. But me? I had no clue. With just two suitcases to my name, the options were few. I had lost my life, my work, my home, everything I had thought was mine to keep forever, all within just a couple of days. For the first time in my life, I was truly scared. I felt guilty, worried about the girls I had been forced to leave behind. And I was alone.

  Karen graciously offered me a place to stay, my hometown being the obvious solution—but not to me. Holland, Michigan, is one of those towns you don’t get out of. You grow up there, you go to school there, you marry a Hollander, you die there. You just don’t leave. But I had. And going back did not seem like an option. My sons were no longer living there, my father had passed away, and my mother was involved with a new man, unfortunately a man who didn’t seem to think there was room for us both in her life. There didn’t appear to be ­anything left for me there.

  The truth is, I had become a sort of mini-celebrity in ­Holland, due to my book. And now everything had gone up in smoke. If I did move back, I’d have to tell my story over and over and over, answer the same questions again and again, at the grocery store, at the bank, over margaritas with my girlfriends. I just couldn’t see it. I wasn’t even sure what that story was. My life had just crashed and was burning around me, and I was trying to figure out where the fire was and who started the fire and how to put the fire out and salvage my life, and I knew I couldn’t do it in Michigan. I would have rather lived alone on a mountain. And that’s exactly what I
did, sort of.

  It was a California guy who came to the rescue. Mike and I had met years before, and he was well versed in my Afghanistan adventure. So when he heard I needed help, he kindly offered the lifeline of his home on top of Bell Mountain Road in the Napa Valley. My decision was a quick one. I desperately needed somewhere to go where nobody knew me, where I could lick my wounds in private and try to pull myself back together. And Napa? The land of Cabernet? One of the top ten vacation spots in the world? I pictured massages and mud baths, gourmet dining and hot-air balloons, right?

  Wrong. I found myself in the woods. On top of a mountain in the woods. In a community of hardworking, teetotaling vegetarians who pretty much kept to themselves. Not that that was a bad thing, because all of a sudden I found myself among some very caring, nurturing people who seemed to thrive on helping those in need. And, at the time, I certainly was one of those. But they were also extremely conservative, and my bling-toting, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed, tequila-loving, bacon-craving self was still very much intact, despite my recent upheaval.

  My first few weeks in Mike’s ranch-style house were spent frantically trying to reach anyone I could in Afghanistan. Desperate to find out what was happening, I’d stay up all night to be on Kabul time, trying to connect on Skype, staring at my laptop screen, waiting anxiously for e-mails to come in. I needed to figure out the truth about what was going on. What can I do? Who can I call? I’d finally drift off into a fitful sleep, only to wake in a panic once I remembered what had happened. When I was able to connect with the salon, Sam would inevitably be there. I later found out that he had been spreading lies about my departure, saying that I had gotten tired of living in Afghanistan, had made my money, and was now off somewhere living the good life. The girls also later let me know that Sam had forced them to hand over a portion of the money I had sent them via Western Union. In the meantime, getting back to Afghanistan was all I could think about. I realize now that I was in shock, like someone who had just been involved in a horrible car crash or witnessed a devastating earthquake.

  But deep down inside I knew it was too risky to go back, and when a sense of reality began to sink in, I froze. Mike’s blue futon became my home base, where I’d watch TV—endless episodes of Army Wives and Boston Legal—for hours on end. The Kardashian sisters became my life. Weird things had begun to happen to me when I tried to leave the house, like the day I burst into tears when I couldn’t find the car in the Safeway parking lot. In fact, I was crying a lot, mostly inside the car, panicked that I’d lose my way among the twisty mountain roads and crisscrossing highways of the valley. I began to mistrust the GPS lady and her constant “recalculating,” and the fear became so overwhelming that I stopped going out.

  And that scared me even more. Who the hell was this person? I had traveled all over the world and never once had been nervous about finding my way. Ethiopia, Pakistan, Syria, India, Morocco, Malaysia . . . no problem! But something inside me had drastically changed. And now I was a self-imposed prisoner in a little house on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere—and spending way, way too much time alone.

  One day, not long after I had arrived, Mike suggested a road trip. He and his friend Shelly had planned a weekend of camping in Yosemite National Park.

  “Camping?” I asked, pressing the pause button on the remote.

  “It’ll do you good, Deb.” Mike ran his ruddy hands through his cropped hair.

  “Yeah, but are you talking camping-camping, as in sleeping bags and dirt and stuff ?”

  Mike laughed. “Of course it’s camping-camping. It’ll be fun. Just tents, flashlights, a Coleman stove. Really roughing it. You can sleep in the back of the truck if you want.”

  I thought, wow. I had gone without electricity, but at this point in my life I’d never choose to go without electricity. I’ve slept on the floor because I had to sleep on the floor. But this is a first-world country. After all I’d seen in Afghanistan, I had to wonder why on earth anybody would want to have this kind of make-believe adventure. I saw no point in it whatsoever.

  “And we might even get to see a bear!” Mike added, his voice rising half an octave with enthusiasm.

  A bizarre image of Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo with black ­Taliban turbans wrapped around their little fuzzy ears popped into my head, but out of gratitude toward Mike, and to escape the loneliness and boredom that had become all too familiar, I agreed to go.

  The first night wasn’t great. My back had gone out, and the rock-hard truck bed felt like a slab of cement. I lay there as still as a fallen statue, and even with my eyes open the entire night I couldn’t make out a single shape. It was that dark. And the noises! Hoots and howls and crackling and rustling. I had no idea what was out there. At least in Kabul I knew that a long high whistle meant a missile, and I could tell the difference between an incoming and outgoing rocket just by its sound. But in Yosemite I was terrified. The covered pickup felt like a coffin. Too scared (and achy) to even get up to pee, I sweated and hyperventilated for seven hours straight.

  By the time morning came I was a wreck. My back was throbbing, so when Mike and Shelly said they wanted to make a pit stop before we started touring around, I told them I’d wait in the truck. As they crossed the parking lot toward the restrooms, I leaned back into the headrest and tried my damnedest to relax a little, breathing deeply to ease the pain and calm my brain. Who was that person last night? I asked myself. I had been truly scared, and I’m not scared of anything! Please. Where was the Deb who, not that long ago, was fighting mercenaries on the streets of Afghanistan?

  • • •

  Kabul was on high alert. Riots had been triggered by a military convoy losing control of one of its Hummers. Many foreign businesses had not reopened. I was just finishing up morning classes at the beauty school when a sudden, overwhelming craving for a coffee and a quesada from the coffeehouse just five blocks away hit me.

  “Debbie, you really must wait for Actar to drive you,” Akmed Zia pleaded, standing between me and the door.

  “I’ll be fine,” I insisted, grabbing my purse from the counter. Really, how much trouble could I get into in five little blocks?

  I had made it just two blocks down Wild West Street when I saw the men. Hundreds of them coming right toward me. Shit, another riot, I thought as I frantically searched among the walled compounds lining the street for somewhere, anywhere, to duck into. The mob was on me in a flash—I flattened myself against a wall, lowered my head, and tried my best to blend in, my heart racing as I realized I had been ­idiotic enough to leave without my headscarf. Just jeans, a big T-shirt, and my flaming red hair. But they weren’t running, I realized. They were walking, slowly. Maybe it’s some sort of a nonviolent protest, I thought, but I knew how those went. Peace and love for the first part, and all-out slaughtering for the second. I had no desire to be the uncovered infidel who set things off.

  As the crowd began to pass, I sucked in my breath, daring to look up for just one brief moment to see a body. A corpse enveloped in a white sheet, held aloft above their heads. The funeral procession passed silently by, the mourners too grief-stricken to even give me the time of day.

  I’d never been so happy to see a dead guy in my life. But feeling slightly less cocky by this point, I decided to stop at a friend’s compound to borrow one of their guards for the last three blocks of my walk. The request felt a bit ridiculous, but having an Afghan man at my side was a safer way to go, me being a foreigner, a woman, and an uncovered woman at that.

  Reza and I were just about to cross the narrow, pitted street when a speeding Hummer came barreling toward us. Children, bicyclists, donkeys, dogs were all flying to get out of the way. Then there was a sudden, loud crack, and the Hummer’s giant tire began to bounce down the street, missing us by inches, landing smack on top of a taxi.

  The taxi driver leapt out to assess the damage. A crowd began to gather, which made me nervous, cons
idering that this was exactly how the riots had started not that long ago. I sent Reza to the taxi to calm the driver down, and turned my attention to the folks still sitting in the disabled Hummer. It was hard to tell if they were U.S. military or private security, but I was sure that no matter who they were, they wouldn’t want another riot to start on their watch, and that they’d quickly right their wrong and offer to pay for the damage.

  I started across the gravel to see what I could do to help. My five years in Kabul had taught me that giving a little money and getting the foreigner off the street as quickly as possible could go a long way in keeping a situation from escalating. But by now the taxi driver was yelling, and people were pouring out of their shops to see the big foreign Hummer that had destroyed the little Afghan taxi.

  Reza ran over to me, frantically waving his arms in the air. “Debbie, we have to act fast. We must do something!”

  “Go find out how much he needs,” I said, turning back to the tan Hummer, when the doors flew open and out jumped a ponytailed blond woman and a stocky young man, both in black flak jackets, dark glasses covering their eyes and automatic rifles pointed at the crowd.

  “Don’t!” I yelled, running over to push the rifle noses down. “Are you guys okay? Anybody hurt?” They shook their heads. By now it was obvious that they weren’t military. I led them behind the Hummer, out of view from the crowd that just seemed to be getting bigger and bigger. “We need to handle this fast, and you guys need to get out of here.”

  “How much?” I mouthed across the street to Reza.

  “One hundred,” he mouthed back.

  “One hundred dollars, and it will be over,” I reported to the mercenaries. “Everyone will be happy.”