"I don't understand. You're telling me that the trunk, the one I can see sitting on the floor behind you, is lost?" Fonnie eyed the pasty-faced desk clerk incredulously.
"Oui, madamoiselle. In so many words, that is what I'm saying. Once luggage is abandoned, it becomes the property of Tangier Sea to Rail. Ce n'est pas my policy. It is not mon problème."
Fonnie could feel her face heating up with anger, and tried to counterbalance her frustration by lowering her voice.
"Monsieur, I need you to understand something: I am alone. My home is 4,000 miles away, je ne parle pas français or Arabic, and I have nothing of any value on my person." Fonnie thought of her mother's wedding jewelry and revised the statement. "I should say, I have nothing that I can sell. So, it appears that I have no options besides selling the contents of that trunk and buying a ticket back home."
The clerk seemed amused by her assertiveness. "Oh! You are businesswoman! You mean to sell your wares? Well, then, I take it you are traveling with gold bouillon, mademoiselle, which you will most certainly need since all second and third class tickets to America are sold out two months in advance of the ship's departure. The only tickets available for purchase at this time would cost you over...let's see, francs to dollars...over $500."
Fonnie caught the gasp in her throat. She could see the corners of the man's mouth upturned slightly beneath his greasy mustache and had no intention of letting him know he had gotten to her.
"Not that it would matter what you have in the trunk," he whined. "It no longer belongs to you. But perhaps..." He paused for a moment to let her know he was sizing her up, then grinned devilishly. "Well, perhaps you have something else to sell." With that he turned his gaze to the line of passengers behind her. "Next! La prochaine personne!"
Stunned by the clerk's bizarrely gratuitous rudeness, Fonnie hardly noticed the next customers edging her to the side until she was no longer in front of the counter at all. For the second time that morning she could feel the panic spreading like shockwaves throughout her body. Her mind raced. Where will I sleep? I'm not safe. Is there any way for me to make money here?
Fonnie glanced around the station. Every employee she saw was male. It occurred to her that the clerk may have been right. Maybe there was only one thing she was in a position to sell. The thought sent a shudder through her and she inadvertently drew her legs together tightly at the knees. No, that was ridiculous. There had to be something women were hired to do here. But how could she speak to people? The clerk spoke English, but likely only because he was a Frenchman hired to work in an international setting. Did the average Moroccan—or the average Moroccan in a position to hire her as, say, a teacher or a clerk—speak Arabic, French, and English? The thoughts were coming faster than Fonnie could process them.
Someone tapped her gently on the elbow and a sudden awareness of her childish stance washed over her. She sensed the blank stare on her face and quickly lowered her arms which had been wrapped around her waist in a kind of self-hug. How long had she been standing like that? Reluctantly she turned around, expecting to find herself face to face with a station officer ready to toss her out for loitering. She was not, after all, a customer anymore.
"Excuse me, Miss. I think you dropped this."
The person standing in front of her was so small in stature that Fonnie first thought she might have been approached by a child. Looking closer at her face, Fonnie saw the smile lines around her mouth and eyes and guessed the woman to be about the same age as her mother. The woman wore a heavy, navy blue robe with a matching piece of fabric covering her head, neck, and shoulders. Fonnie had seen women dressed like this in the National Geographic Magazines Leland's father always had lying around their mansion, but before she and Leland boarded the ship to Tangier, she had never actually seen anyone wearing the robes. The woman's smile was warm and sincere, so much so that before Fonnie realized it, her eyes had begun to well up with tears. It was one of the things she liked least about herself—the way she stayed together in a painful situation up until the moment someone showed her tenderness. The woman held out her hand, and nestled in her palm was necklace that looked like a silver labyrinth encircling an oval turquoise stone. Before Fonnie could argue, the woman took Fonnie's hand and put the necklace in it, then abruptly changed the subject.
"You are lost, no?" the woman asked her, her accent sounding faintly French, but mostly Arabic to Fonnie's untrained ears.
"Yes, well, not exactly..."
"I heard you speaking at the counter. That clerk is not a nice man. I would like to help you if you will let me."
Fonnie didn't know what to say. The people she had met so far had not been kind and Fonnie wondered why this woman cared about her situation. The woman must have sensed her apprehension, because she reached out and took Fonnie's hand in her own.
"Dear, let me explain. My name is Khadija; this is my husband, Hasan." Fonnie hadn't yet noticed the gray-bearded man standing behind the woman—an odd thing, she thought, since the man was almost two feet taller than his wife. "Like I said, I overheard your conversation. Hasan and I were waiting for our luggage nearby. I don't want to see another lost girl have to resort to desperate acts. I run a girl's school just a few kilometers from here. Perhaps you could come stay with us for a while and I could employ you as a janitor there."
Fonnie had come to Morocco with Leland expecting to live a life of luxury, and yet she had never gotten used to the idea of herself as a privileged woman. That morning, she had had to consider just what she would and would not do for money. After some of the things she'd considered, cleaning up classrooms at a girls' school seemed like the job of a lifetime. Again, though, there was the question of why was this woman being so nice to her.
"Madame, you are so very kind and I do not want to seem ungrateful for your offer of assistance, but what..."
"What reason do I have to help you?" the woman concluded Fonnie's sentence with a disarming smile. "No reason, girl. I tried to leave the station after overhearing what you said, but I couldn't do it. You are in a very difficult situation—one that you almost certainly couldn't get out of by yourself. As I started to leave, I felt my conscience, perhaps it was Allah, telling me that I could not leave this poor girl here to be eaten by the wolves. That is all."
Fonnie was dumbstruck. No one had been this kind to her in weeks.
"So let's go then, dear. I have been gone from my students for a month now. The interim headmaster surely has let the place go to shambles."
Fonnie looked at Hasan again. Surely he had protested his wife's decision she thought, but his face looked calm and he offered her a kind smile. He seemed neither annoyed nor pleased that his wife had just chosen to take in a complete stranger—as if it were a totally normal thing to do. There was nothing for Fonnie to do but accept. She tried to say thank you, but the words caught in her throat.
"Of course, dear. I have a feeling you would do the same."
There was just one more thing. "Madame, this is not my necklace. I didn't drop it."
"No? It was lying right beside you, so I assumed it must be yours." The woman looked at the necklace lying in Fonnie's outstretched palm. "It's very beautiful, girl. I guess it has found you."
Fonnie started to protest, but the woman reminded her that if she turned it in, the owner wouldn't be able to retrieve it anyway.
"It's yours now, dear. Perhaps a sign of good fortune to come."
Fonnie smiled at the thought. When the couple turned to leave the station, beckoning her to follow, she quickly tucked the medallion into her brassiere. She had no idea what would happen next and it occurred to her that the last time she had trusted someone with her future, she had ended up stranded half-way around the world. But then, maybe she wasn't stranded after all. As she left the station, Fonnie thought of her mother again. We'll see, mama, she said to herself. We'll just have to wait and see.