The first place Hannah’s father took her after she arrived at King Abdulaziz International Airport was her grandmother’s flat. Almost the first place. They stopped for hot pita bread on the way, Hannah waiting in the car while her father hopped into a hole-in-the-wall bakery and emerged with a steamy blue plastic bag. As they drove down a quiet residential street toward her grandmother’s house, the two of them, the bread smell made her giddy and intensified her feeling of displacement: Was she in a car, or a bakery? How had she come to be in this city and country she’d barely known until her father showed up three years ago?

She’d tried to find out about where she was going before she left Ohio. But the books about Saudi Arabia in the library were about oil and history. She’d had no way to start to comprehend what life would be like here.

Muneer had not brought Lamees or the boys to the airport. He wanted Hannah to meet her grandmother before anyone else, he said.

“I’m so happy you came.” He tapped his horn as he steered the car through an intersection with no stop signs.

Hannah wasn’t sure yet if she felt the same. She always reserved judgment on new situations: a new job, art school, a new boyfriend. Why should visiting her homeland be different? In any circumstance, things could go to crap, or be OK. Best to go in with low expectations. She gripped the handle on her door and pressed her foot to the floor, as though she were braking the car. She closed her eyes and imagined a bumper sticker: “I brake for stop signs.” She opened her eyes and sand-colored apartment buildings marched past.

She could tell, being here for less than half an hour, that she was a different person than she might have been if she’d grown up here, with her family intact. There was no changing that. Her father had a black abayah thingy and scarf sewn for her and sent to Ohio so she would have them to wear when she arrived. One of the stewardesses—none of them were Saudis—had shown her how to put the abayah and scarf on.

Her grandmother’s building faced a block of empty sandlots, as though the builders of the neighborhood had suddenly run out of steam and given up on trying to populate the desert. In front of the building, a leggy bougainvillea bush grew in a square of dry soil surrounded by sidewalk. The bright pink blossoms burned Hannah’s eyes.

“Hellfire flowers,” Hannah’s father said.

Two men sat on the curb, their white robes tented over their knees. She had never seen anything like them, and at the same time, they were as familiar as her own hands. What other lost elements of herself would she find here?

A grandmother. A family. The thoughts took her breath away.