Love from A to Z(24)

Oh, right.

They’re often not treated well. Just like our migrant workers here.

I looked across the street again. One worker took off his hat to wipe his brow.

Then he looked over at me.

I busied myself with pretending to dust off my sandals, but what I was really doing was wondering what he saw when he looked over at me, sitting in front of pricey condominium buildings full of Europeans and us North Americans.

? ? ?

As soon as the Uber driver pulled up to the shelter and I saw Adam waiting outside a stucco building with “saluki rescue” in Arabic and English on it, I felt that twinge again.

The same thing I’d felt every time I’d glimpsed him on the field trip yesterday.

And when he’d texted me.

Oh God.

I was really getting into him.

I slid out of the back seat to be immediately greeted by Hanna, who popped up to the side of the car from I don’t know where.

“Hi, Zayneb.” She had her backpack on. Adam had told me that she’d be getting picked up after school for this. That she was crazy about animals.

“Hi.” I grinned at her.

“Did you know we’re going to see Ariel first? She’s my favorite saluki here.”

“Let me guess—does she look like this beauty?” I turned my phone to her and showed her the gentle-looking dog I wasn’t completely scared of.

“Oh, that’s a pretty one!” Hanna said. She wiggled out of her backpack and unzipped it to take out an iPad. After scrolling through photos for a while, she showed me a white-and-gray dog with its mouth wide open.

Sharp teeth greeted me.

“Wow.” I managed to say this with a smile, because Hanna was looking up at my face.

“She’s been at the shelter for two years because nobody wants her. Do you want to know why?” Hanna put her iPad away. “Exactly why nobody wants her?”

“Why?”

“Because she bites people when she gets stressed. Like hard. Do you want to know why she does that?”

“Sure.” I twisted the handle of my bag. “Why does she bite people?”

“Because she was treated horribly by the people who’d kept her before. She had trauma. It means a really bad experience.”

From near the door to the shelter, Adam turned around to look at me, eyes full of mirth. “I think Zayneb knows what the word ‘trauma’ means.”

I nodded, feeling the trauma in my right ankle.

“You’re going to love the shelter. They want prospective adopters to see the personalities of the dogs, so they let them run around the warehouse and the pen outside, in the sand, and we can just mingle with them,” Adam assured me, holding the door open to my personal nightmare. “Salukis love running long and hard, so it’s amazing to see.”

“But not Ariel,” Hanna said to me. “Ariel stays in a separate area. She can’t handle everyone. Even the other dogs.”

“Is she in a cage?” I asked hopefully, pausing in the space between the double doors.

“No, don’t worry. She’s not caged. It’s just like a low divider, so we can still be with her but with a barrier,” Hanna said. “But it’s not in the warehouse. That’s the sad part but also a good part for Ariel. She needs it calm.”

“I think I’ll spend time with Ariel then,” I said. “With you, Hanna, of course. Because she knows you, she’ll be okay with me there.”

Adam turned to me again and smiled.

Twinge.

I decided to do this thing.

Be chill with fear—which, if accomplished, meant I could be chill all the time.

? ? ?

Ariel began barking and howling when she saw us and then ran around her pen like a crazed . . . dog.

I stopped walking. Hanna and Adam kept going, following the shelter worker down the wide room toward Ariel.

Adam noticed I’d held back and waited for me.

“You guys go ahead. She knows you two. I’ll wait a bit,” I whispered, trying to summon the right word to make it sound like I cared about Ariel’s feelings. “Let her acclimatize, you know?”

Adam nodded and caught up to Hanna, who was already sitting cross-legged in front of the barrier, talking to Ariel.

I leaned on the wall and waited.

I was waiting for something to arrive within me: a sense of sympathy for Ariel.

I’d read the mission statement of the shelter: We are a nonprofit that works to find loving homes for the dogs native to this area (salukis) that we rescue from abuse and neglect.

Adam and Hanna had filled me in on the stories. Of dogs being mistreated by different sorts of people—some locals, some Westerners, expatriates working in the Arabian Gulf who took them in and then didn’t care for them as their canine type needed to be taken care of, some who then even just released the dogs into the streets when they moved back home.

And then there were the cultural taboos about dogs being bad.

That made me sad. But not sad enough to bravely go forth.

I called to mind the Islamic story that I’d been taught in Sunday school, that Hanna had recounted to me as we waited for Adam to fill out papers at the shelter reception desk, because her dad had just taught her the tale.

Prophet Muhammad once told his companions of someone who was forgiven completely by God for every ill deed she’d ever done—because she’d been thirsty and so had climbed down an abandoned well to drink water, and, when she emerged from the depths of the well, she found a dog at the surface, panting from the same thirst she’d felt. She climbed back down and filled her shoe with water and brought it up for the thirsty dog, and thus, for this act of kindness, she was utterly forgiven.