The Pact We Made

by Layla AlAmmar

  I turned to him. ‘Why not?’

  He nodded. ‘Why not.’

  The next day at work, Yousef passed by my desk and we headed for the balcony of an empty office space upstairs.

  The day was nothing but endless sky of blue and cotton-candy white, the breeze carrying only sweetness. It was the kind of day that should not be spent behind a desk, hence our escape five floors up. The abandoned office had been used by an old accounting firm. There were still some generic posters of landscapes and inoffensive abstracts in their cheap plastic frames stacked against a wall. The gray carpet was pulled up here and there, electrical outlets gaping up through the holes. The windows were tall and wide but so grimy with dust and muddy streaks that the office was dim despite the high sun.

  Once Yousef got the joint going he passed it over and I took a tentative, mousy puff. I tried the stuff once every few months to see if my reaction differed, but, with only slight variations, it hardly ever did. The first time I’d tried it was in the beach house of a friend of Yousef. Some Cape Cod hipster whose name I couldn’t recall. He was not actually from Cape Cod, of course. He was from Haifa by way of Amman, but dressed prep with a dash of hashtag hipster, which may or may not have been ironic. I didn’t know him well enough to tell. Anyway, I hadn’t been prepared for the effect it’d had on me, namely that on my way to his living room my legs would forget how to negotiate stairs. I have a vague recollection of tumbling down the final three steps onto my hands and knees to the sound of people giggling like I was a child who’d done something terribly cute. I spent the rest of the party on Cape Cod’s couch, eyes closed, fully convinced my body was a record spinning round and round, my head at the center, the needle hopping over my feet when they went by.

  We talked about the exhibit, and Yousef told me how happy Zacharia had been with it and that the reception had been good.

  ‘You were happy with it, right?’ he asked, grimacing as he released a long breath of smoke.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, turning my face towards the sun like a flower. ‘It was good. I’m glad I did it.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘Thank you, Yousef,’ I said in a sing-song voice, making him bark-slash-cough out a laugh. When he quieted down, taking a swig from the bottle of water he’d brought, I asked, ‘You think I could turn it into a job?’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ he said. ‘People do all sorts of weird shit now.’

  We sat quietly, watching the birds dipping and lifting, the cars honking, and the people moving about like toy soldiers, marching here and there. I hadn’t told him about art school. I didn’t want to hear him say that it was unnecessary, that I could turn it into a job without going to school, that he could help me bullshit my way into making money off it. Instead, I told him again that I wanted a tattoo, and he was more receptive, asking where and of what.

  ‘No, don’t tell me!’ he said, holding one hand out while the other handled the cigarette. ‘A dahlia.’

  I laughed, my eyes tracking a little bulbul soaring down to a garden in front of the building next door. ‘Maybe. I was thinking of here.’ I pointed to the inside of my left wrist.

  ‘No, no,’ he croaked. ‘Somewhere less visible, like around your boob or something.’

  ‘My boob?’

  ‘Yeah, like here.’ He stuck his chest out and pointed to his side, near the right pec. I wrinkled my nose and he shrugged.

  ‘It has to be less conspicuous, though.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I agreed, even as something in me insisted I make it public.

  He took one last drag before stamping the cigarette out underfoot, grinding it beneath his patent leather brogues until there was nothing left but scrapes and dregs of black and white. ‘Why do you want one?’

  Why indeed? I wished I had a sketchpad – maybe then I could make him see, in lines and curves, in the absence of light and deepening of shadows, how futile I felt, how utterly inconsequential it all seemed, how oppressive, intolerable, it was becoming. Maybe Ariel and his bat would get the point across, or Goya’s condemned women and upright jackasses, or Fuseli’s nightmare. Maybe those prints would say what I couldn’t find the words for. Although there they’d been, lined up on a wall in that gallery, and no one had seen beyond the lines and precision of them.

  ‘Have you thought any more about what we talked about?’

  It took me a minute to get what he was referencing. ‘Should I have?’

  He scowled and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. ‘You can be a bitch sometimes, you know that?’

  ‘You can’t be serious.’

  ‘What if I am?’ he said, looking away from me as he twirled the pack in his hands. ‘What if I’m being totally serious and this is me laying my cards on the table? What then?’

  ‘Then I’d say you should probably quit smoking those things,’ I replied, nodding down to the remains between his feet.

  He made a noise between a hiss and a growl, and I laughed, which only made it worse.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, nudging his arm. ‘I’ve known you a long time. And I know you well enough to know when you’re serious, and this isn’t one of those times.’

  ‘Yes, it is!’ I recoiled from the sudden anger in his voice, but he carried on. ‘Maybe not about the love thing, although I do think I love you enough to do it, maybe not in the way I should, but well enough—’

  ‘Yousef …’

  ‘Well enough to marry you, for sure. We know each other better than any couple getting married this year.’

  ‘I know, but—’

  ‘I’m solving your fucking problem, Dahlia! Your parents are pressuring you to marry, well, guess what? You’re not the only one going through it. It’s not like my parents aren’t hounding me. I’m their first-fucking-born.’

  ‘So, why don’t you get married then?’

  ‘Why don’t you?’

  I looked away to buy time, though I hardly needed to think over his question. The drug was doing me in; I must have only had three or four turns, but there it was, the spinning was taking over. I rubbed my palms across my knees in an effort to feel them.

  ‘It’s different for you,’ I finally said. ‘You’re the instigator. You can choose. You can make it happen.’

  ‘So can you,’ he argued. ‘You could say yes to any of the guys your mother brings around or to someone from the matchmaker.’ I snorted, and it seemed to anger him. ‘You act like such a martyr sometimes, like you’re the only one being pressured to do what you don’t want to do. You sit here talking to me about shit like tattoos and how all of these great guys your mom brings around are shit and then say I’m the one not being serious.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ I said, but my voice was weak and my mind was rotating.

  He stood up with a sigh. ‘Whether it’s fair or not, it’s the truth.’

  He waited, a sky-blue and navy shadow at my side. I didn’t know how many minutes passed, but when it became clear that I had no more to say, he turned, picking his way over boxes and around dusty furniture and out of the office.

  And then it was just me, staring at a spinning city, hoping it would stop.

  16

  Fifteen Candles

  A quiet Friday. The morning sky was overcast, just godly rays breaking through every now and then. The air was muggy with rain, but I was outside anyway. My attempt at Goya’s number 23 sat in my lap: the condemned woman on the platform, head down and trussed up in a dunce’s cap; the official reading the charge, or perhaps the sentence – it doesn’t seem to matter. A crowd is gathered, surrounding the platform, packed so tight they can’t breathe. And they’re bored, barely a face turned to the condemned. They could be asleep for all the attention they pay her, all indistinct faces and lowered eyelids. Why are they there? Why attend a hearing they have no interest in? What is this morbid curiosity we are so afflicted with, this rabid schadenfreude? It’s disgusting. The etching is grotesque; there is no beauty there, nor in any of his other Caprices. B
ut it is sublime; sublime like Dürer’s Melencolia or Doré’s Inferno series.

  Nadia came through the gate. The children weren’t with her, and there was a serious expression on her face. She said nothing as she approached, nothing as she climbed the steps, and nothing as she took the wicker chair by mine. When she was seated and settled, handbag on the ground by her feet, hands in her lap, she turned to me.

  ‘Uncle Omar died.’

  I looked straight back down at my sketchpad, pencil poised over the dunce cap. It was a reflex. Whenever I heard his name, I looked down.

  ‘You didn’t hear? It was a car accident.’

  I shook my head. I hadn’t seen my parents yet that day, and if Mama had been told she would have rushed to the family house to see her siblings.

  ‘How do you feel?’

  I brought pencil to pad, darkening a shadow, but careful not to press too hard. Light shading. Hold the pencil so the point is sideways on the paper. The garments were tricky. They had lines, vertical and horizontal, that did most of the work, but there were also folds and draping. It was almost impossible for me to recreate.

  ‘Dahlia?’

  ‘What do you want me to say? I feel nothing.’

  She looked out over the garden with a sigh. ‘I should probably go to the funeral.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  I smiled down at my sketch. ‘I know.’

  There were clouds rolling in, big and dark and too convenient. The sun was trying, peeking in and out between the smoky grays. It was no use, though; we’d definitely see rain.

  ‘He’s not why you don’t want to get married, is he?’

  ‘Who said I don’t want to get married?’

  ‘Mama was saying—’

  I cut her off with a scoff. ‘Mama was saying!’

  ‘She just doesn’t know why it’s taking this long for you, and I was wondering if it was because—’

  ‘It’s been fifteen years, Nadia.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean you’re over it.’

  ‘I didn’t say I was,’ I snapped.

  ‘I know. I just mean it would be awful if what happened, if what he did to you … if that was making you not want to be with a man and stuff.’

  A sound escaped me. It might have been a laugh, or another scoff, or something that didn’t yet have a name. ‘That’s got nothing to do with it.’ She seemed unconvinced, so I was forced to meet her eye, to say it again with emphasis. ‘It’s not about that.’

  She studied me for a moment, and my eyes returned to the pad and the curves I was trying to create there. I abandoned the fabric to focus on hair. The condemned’s hair was curly, I remembered. Three little tangled balls at the nape of her neck, with wiry bits poking out here and there. But I was distracted. I was distracted by the expression on her face. It was not right. The brow was more troubled, not as resigned as the original. The eyelid was too dark; my light was wrong. And the mouth, the bottom lip should be fuller. It was wrong. All wrong. I had a violent urge to tear the page into ribbons.

  ‘Do you maybe want to talk to someone about it? Like a professional?’

  I looked up at her. ‘I didn’t see a shrink when it happened. You want me to talk to one now?’ She was contrite, ducked her head, picked at a loose thread on her sweater. I felt bad; she only wanted to help, but it was too late for any of that. ‘When was the last time you saw him?’

  ‘Oh God,’ she said, folding her arms over her chest and looking up into the heavy sky. The sun had gone away again. ‘It must have been when everything went down with him and Baba. What about you?’

  She saw her mistake immediately; I didn’t have to react. Her hands went to her eyes then her mouth then my arm. She gripped me, pleaded with me to forgive her, said it was a stupid thing to ask and she knew it. She was more agitated than I was. Not just about that, but about the news in its entirety. I had no feeling where he was concerned. I couldn’t even muster up a proper rage anymore. He might as well have been dead for the last decade for all I cared. I had no contact with Mama’s family, not her phony siblings and cousins or her evil parents. I would not mourn him, not even for appearances’ sake.

  ‘I saw him at the bank once,’ I heard myself say, ‘when I got my first job.’ Far away there was thunder, a low steady rumble. And then the rain came, in small unobtrusive smatterings, darkening the red tile of our yard with spots. ‘I turned around at the take-a-number machine and walked back out. I made it to the car door before I threw up.’ I wondered what the sketch would look like wet, and I was already moving. Out of the chair and off the porch into the drizzle. Nadia said nothing. What more was there to say about any of it? I held the sketch up to the sky like an offering, watching the splattering dots and fading graphite.

  ‘I’ve never gone back to that branch.’

  The bathroom tiles were cold. Cold beneath my butt, so I didn’t know if the numbness was from them or the fact that I’d been sitting there so long. Around me were fifteen candles; shall I enumerate them? There were two black ones with round bottoms, emblazoned with crystal skulls; there were two flat ones, either suns or starfish – one was red and the other tangerine; there were two tall ones (why did they all come in pairs?) that were white like fresh cream; there was a generic purple one, unremarkable with a label of lavender sprigs; I had two beeswax yellow votives and five pasty tealights; and there was one more, a soup bowl of a candle, pink as flayed flesh that burned heavy with the scent of rose bushes.

  I was not suffocating yet. I’d only just started. All the candles were assembled in a semicircle before me. Tile was good, spilled wax would dry and flake right off – same as when it hit me. I was not aiming to hurt myself, but I hadn’t done it in a while and pain could be nothing but a bonus.

  I’d been staring at the pink candle too long. That was why my butt had gone numb. The candle had burned low through the years, but there was a sinkhole on one side, scooped out over and over like the favored side of a tub of ice-cream. I tried to do the math: how many years had it taken? How many times had my two fingers dug and scooped into the soft gooey wax? Why hadn’t I spread it out, like I had with the others? If anyone saw the candle, there’d have been questions. Mama would probably have thought I had some bizarre fetish.

  I lit them all, one by one, indiscriminately. Only the pink one was deliberately left till last. I leaned back against the wall and let them work up a burn. The flames flickered and jerked in the late-afternoon light. There were dust motes in the air, thrown up by the hanging robes I was leaning against and the bathmats on the floor. They sunk into the candles, vanished without a sound. I shut my eyes against it all – crawling hands and alcohol breath, Baba’s face when I’d told them, the shouts, Mama’s screams, and the bloody noses. It was an effort to not bang my head against the tile and robes. I rocked instead.

  I used to do this all the time. Back when he’d still been welcome in our house, when he’d stopped at lingering hugs, or his hand pressed low on my body. I used to do this, run upstairs to the bathroom and wax myself in until he was gone, until the bathroom stank of lavender and cinnamon and roses and whatever else I could find in the house. It was the only way to block out the noises, the only thing I could focus on.

  I couldn’t wait any longer, already the panic was in my throat and my head swam. My yathoom played me like an accordion, blowing his tar onto the back of my tongue; my lungs were surrendering bellows in his claws. I tapped at all the candles, looking for the most malleable. Always the tealights. I scooped out thick fingerfuls of wax, warm and safe, and pasted them to the crack where door met wall. Scoop, work into a long strip, and plug into place. From the bottom and roll up, it was easier that way. Thick strips of wax, reds and pinks and creams and yellows and lavenders, climbed the door-jamb like a vine of melted crayons. Sitting down, I could only reach as far as the handle, so I started on the opposite side. Three fingers down the crater of the pink candle; it had a fierce flame that burned my knuckles, b
ut I didn’t care. Three fingers down, and I pasted the door hinges, covering the brass till it was nothing but pink. I wished I had clay, or cement, then I could have stayed in there forever, but there was only that weak wax. And still I filled the gap between door and floor with beeswax yellow until it looked like a line of spilled curcumin.

  Baba was the one who found me, just like when I was fifteen, and sixteen, and seventeen. He pushed against the door. The bottom of it pinched me awake and flakes of wax cascaded down like falling snow. The candles were dead; only the pink one persisted, and he squatted down to blow it out. His coal eyes looked me up and down for signs of injury, and I felt more than heard the little relief that puffed from his lungs. He smelled like dirt and grass and air.

  ‘Ya Allah,’ he said, dropping into a cross-legged position with a sigh and groan and popping of weak knees. ‘Your baba’s getting old.’ He started picking up the dried wax, pinching the flecks and flakes between thumb and forefinger and releasing them into the trashcan. He cupped his palms, scooping the line of yellow until it was a manageable mound and depositing it in the bin as well. ‘Mama’s not coming home tonight. She’ll stay with her sisters. She and Nadia can give our regards.’ He tried to smirk, but there must have been something in my face that stopped him because he turned his attention back to the wax. He pinched and scooped and scraped until I was lying on clean tile again, until the door was clean and white with only tiny flecks of pink in the hinges. He lined up the candles like toy soldiers underneath the sink, stood and washed his hands, then looked down at me. ‘I can’t carry you anymore, mama.’

  He pulled me up by the biceps and splashed water on my face, flicking his fingers like when I was a child. Only I didn’t laugh now, I just tried to spit the residue of panic into the sink before he led me to my room.

  It was a field of dahlias: single dahlias, blooming pale pink and cream; dwarfs clustered in threes and fours; and fat, bushy spheres of orange and red. All of them alive and perfect, clamoring for the ceiling and spilling over edges. They were in glass pots and wooden pots and plastic pots, covering every surface of the room, every shelf and dresser and table.