The Pact We Made

by Layla AlAmmar

  ‘Baba …’

  ‘That’s why it took me so long getting home.’

  He was behind me, in the doorway, and didn’t see the tears that dropped to my cheeks. But he felt it, he must have, because he wrapped his arms around me, squeezed and gave me a kiss on the back of the head before leaving me alone with my flowers.

  I got into bed, under the covers, wrapped up tight and coiled, to wait out the day.

  Dahlias everywhere, but all I smelled was incense. I could see the funeral, the patriarch’s basement dense with bukhoor, the spicy woody scent that clung to the hair. I could see the rows of black abbayas, the prayer booklets, and I could hear the Quran ringing out from a CD player tucked in the corner.

  Legions of women would trudge up and down those stairs, morning and evening, for the next three days while the men would hold court in the family diwan. Mama and her sisters and aunts would sit nearest the door, so people would know who to offer their condolences to first. There would be weeping, the sobbing and wailing that accompanied untimely death. There would be whispering behind cupped palms and questions about my absence that Mama would deflect with claims of some debilitating illness that had incapacitated both father and daughter. There would be shaking of heads and appeals to Allah for mercy. There would be little improprieties: those not close to the family who might end up not greeting my mother at all; water spilled or a nervous chair toppled over; young women with perfectly sculpted curls and precise brows, aware even then of possible prospects.

  How many of them knew he was a monster? How many of them had glimpsed his proclivities? Did any of my cousins know what his weight felt like?

  How many of us were keeping his secret?

  They came for me. I’d known they would. As I dozed among the flowers, Mona and Zaina pushed into my room and climbed into bed with me, wrapping me up until we were one being, like Aristophanes’ origin of love, only with three sets of arms and legs. They let me cry and shudder and shake – I didn’t even know what I was mourning. Zaina’s tears met mine and Mona took over the comforting of us both, rubbing our backs like we were children and this was a nightmare.

  Eventually, they led me away, bundled me up in the car as the sun was dropping into sand and drove me to Mona’s place.

  And then we lay like a trefoil on the floor, immovable and heavy with things we couldn’t say. Zaina’s hand would not release mine, hadn’t since we’d left my house. Only Mona defected from time to time, getting water or tissues or changing records. She was struggling to find one that fit the mood. I stared at the ceiling with its recessed lighting as she went from U2 to The Doors to Tom Waits, muttering all the while under her breath, ‘Too sad’, ‘Too angry’, ‘Laish?’ Finally, she plopped back down with a huff, a record sleeve hitting the floor and disturbing the air between us. I saw the cover out of the corner of my eye: Neil Diamond. I’d never heard of him, but he looked confident.

  It was dark, a light on in the adjacent kitchen, another in the hallway; car lights from the street below flashed across the ceiling like fireflies. Neil Diamond’s voice was pure, clear, and accepting, a voice that gave without taking, and I sank deeper into the floor. He sang of walking on water and night-time shoes; I floated on the words, clinging to syllables like life-rafts, and ignored the chaos in my chest. He sang of music in the head, but I wouldn’t examine what was in mine. I shut myself off from my body, from the skin that was starting to itch, from the brain that couldn’t find anything to latch on to, from the veins and the poison they carried.

  It was over. I should have been happy that it was finally, truly over. Even if I hadn’t seen him for ages, even though we hadn’t spoken in fifteen years, there was the knowledge that he was there. He was out there, living and breathing and free. Free to marry, to have children of his own, to walk into bank branches and through malls. Free and innocent to everyone but us, like those fingers punching in ATM codes hadn’t crawled over my skin, like those knees he used to walk and to run with hadn’t been used to immobilize and spread apart. They were quiet now, hands and fingers and knees, quiet and still. It was over. But inside my head there was noise, crashes and booms and clangs, like objects thrown too quickly to guard against. A white, white noise that I couldn’t silence.

  17

  Those Specks of Dust

  I remember the first time I considered just how fragile humans were. I don’t mean in the head; I was only fifteen at the time and was unable to properly reason through anything. The only things I felt with any degree of certainty were my body and my wandering heartbeat. My head was a jumble of noise, static noise that kept getting louder and louder.

  I had cut myself, for the first time, that weekend. That wasn’t what made me think of fragility though; my body was a casing, and many things were done to it at that time.

  I was holding Zaina’s newborn brother. A tiny, poorly wrapped, wriggling mass of kicking legs and waving arms. His head was on my left forearm, pillowed by the gauze wrapped around my broken skin midway between wrist and elbow. ‘What happened there?’ ‘Oh, I scraped myself on the corner of the dresser.’

  I was getting good at lies like that.

  In any case, he wouldn’t calm down, wiggling and wiggling. I remember turning this way and that, casting around for help, terrified he was going to shimmy off my lap and faceplant on the floor. I lifted my knees, a sort of quasi-guardrail, straining to roll him back towards my belly. I held that position until my thighs screamed.

  He did faceplant, ten years later, walking in the zeffa for Zaina’s wedding. Behind Mish’al and the fathers, sandwiched between the brothers, his foot caught on the carpet as they walked down the wide aisle. From my vantage point, standing by Zaina’s platform, he was there and then he wasn’t. He flailed on the way down, making a grab for, but thankfully missing, his new brother-in-law’s bisht. The procession ground to a halt, though, brothers pulling Moodi up by the arms. On his face was the bewildered, rage-infused embarrassment of a child who still has an instinct to act like it was intentional but is old enough to know it won’t fly.

  On that evening though, when he was new and smelled of powder and squirmed in my lap, Zaina’s mother came, stooping and taking hold of him with practiced ease. I raised my arm as she lifted him and he skimmed my forearm, his tiny head catching on the buckle of my bulky watch as she pulled him away. He let out a pitiful-sounding protest.

  ‘He doesn’t want to leave you,’ Zaina’s mother laughed, rocking him a bit as she moved back to the sofa.

  I didn’t argue with her, but for the rest of the evening I hardly took my eyes off that baby. I thought I saw a red mark on the back of his head and panicked that it might be blood. It wasn’t, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t hurt him. Nervous about him going to sleep and never waking up, I made as much noise as possible until Zaina’s mother hissed at me to quiet down. I stayed in the den when Zaina and Mona, bored, went to her room. I watched him being fed, I tickled his feet while they changed him, I argued that it was too hot when they put a hat on him. I couldn’t swallow down the fear that I’d done him some irreparable damage. He was so small – eyes like grapes, skin like a silk scarf, head like an uncooked egg.

  I slept over that night. I lay awake in Zaina’s bed, listening for sounds of distress from her parents’ room. There were none; it was quiet all night.

  When I woke in the morning, bleary-eyed and unrested, Baba was there, murmuring to Zaina’s father in the downstairs foyer. He looked tired, my father did, as though he too had slept little or not well.

  We drove to the hospital, and he tried to explain how my health nut of a sister was no longer pregnant. He spoke of stomach pains and then terrible bleeding and I stared out the window and thought about a baby that was suddenly no more.

  It was the size of a pear, Nadia had said at a Friday lunch a few weeks back, plucking one from the fruit basket.

  ‘Next appointment, they’ll tell us the gender.’

  ‘Don’t find out,’ Mama warned. ‘Ve
ry bad luck; leave it to Allah.’

  We snickered at this latest superstition, Baba kissing my mother on the forehead when she’d subsided in a huff. Later Nadia had been furious when I sliced into that pear, clear juice and white flesh glistening on the plate. She railed and raged about bad luck and my inexplicable thoughtlessness. She wouldn’t listen to reason, not from Baba or her husband, and she was wide-eyed and fuming when I broke off a wedge of the fruit and ate it, chewing in her face. She screamed and stomped into the bathroom, cursing me throughout her ablutions and probably right through her prayers.

  As we drove to the hospital I wondered if she would remember, if she would hate me, or would she be too preoccupied with her own guilt, knowing – as she did – that it had been a boy?

  I didn’t return to work; when they finally called, I told them I needed personal time. I did not, for one second, contemplate repercussions there. Part of me reveled in the instability. A voice in my head said to maximize the potential, use it as a catalyst for change. After spending my life keeping things steady, doing whatever it took to not rock the boat, suddenly all I wanted was drama. I imagined lining up Yousef and Bu Faisal side by side in front of my parents. ‘On the left we have Yousef; very nice guy of thirty-two. Bit of a gym rat, follows fashion with a … let’s say noteworthy dedication. There might be some unkind rumors about him floating around, but you know how people love to talk. On the right is Bu Faisal and, well … you could probably tell me more about him than I could ever tell you. Although I bet you don’t know how much he hates peanuts and that he only pretends to care about the World Cup.’

  It occurred to me that if I were crazier, I might have been happier. They say ignorance is bliss, and I imagined insanity must be a kind of ignorance, and in it, perhaps, I could have coasted along in a haze. But I wasn’t that crazy. I was capable of rationalizing, of remaining at the dining-room table when my mind had run upstairs to cower in the corner of my room. I could listen to my boss rabbit on about processes and due diligence when every part of my body insisted I was dying. I could sit at family functions, smiling away, when all I wanted to do was lie in the dark with my hands over my ears.

  I was not crazy enough; was it bad that a part of me hoped I might be one day?

  God knows he tried to get me there, with his litany of ‘You’re beautiful’ and ‘This is our secret’ and ‘Remember how I saved your life once’ and ‘Tell Mama or Baba and something very bad will happen’. Something very bad will happen. Full stop. There was never any way to know to whom exactly this very bad thing would happen. My parents? Just one of them? Me? Nadia? All or some of us? How was I to know with so vague and ambiguous a threat?

  I said nothing. Nothing said I. For two years until the night I was sure I was bleeding to death, that he had finally succeeded, tearing me in half, and then in half again, and again, until I was ribbons, thin and shredded and barely holding together.

  I had a good crack at crazy after that. There was an absence of tears (which everyone found troubling), of thought, of eye contact. A period of what I like to call cotton-for-brains. There were shouts and crying and murmurs behind half-closed doors. There were hastily administered pills to swallow down and Baba, smelling of dirt and air, quiet at my side. Mama banished – she was never in my recollections – and Nadia, with her fruity perfumes, only rarely. Never Mona or Zaina. The only constant was dirt and air.

  I did not eat for the longest time. It’s a wonder I didn’t keel over from hunger. (I have no memory of how I was sustained: Nadia with spoons of flavored yoghurt? Baba with broths? Mama – no longer banished – wielding something pureed and smelling of cinnamon?) My first memory of eating by my own hand was a Coke-flavored lollipop Nadia brought me, which I propped into the hollow of my cheek as I stared at the wall, occasionally bestirring myself to swallow the soda syrup and saliva that pooled in my mouth.

  No school for me. Mona and Zaina were told I had some very infectious disease (later Zaina would remember the lie). Nadia and her chatter were gone for hours – she was newly-married at the time and had a life with her husband to set up – Baba at work, and Mama puttering around the house, hardly ever cracking the door to my room. Only when my father came home was she constantly in and out. At the time I thought it was me, that she couldn’t look at me after what had happened, that I was wearing it like a facial deformity. Later I realized it was her; she was ashamed, as if I – as if all of us – held her accountable for what he’d done.

  After bringing in my breakfast and begging me for half an hour or so to eat, she would leave and I wouldn’t see her again until three when Baba was due home. This gave me a very large window, which I eventually filled by taking that final step into crazy.

  A fistful of painkillers. From the medicine cabinet. Easy to snatch. Swallowed down, two by dry and bitter two, with glasses of water from the pitcher the maid left by my bed each night.

  There’s a surrealism to this method. When you swallow the pills, even if it’s the sixth or eighth one you’ve downed, your mind doesn’t honestly believe you’ll die. It doesn’t panic the way it would with, say, hanging yourself or slitting your wrists. Those are acts that your mind immediately associates with pain and blood and death. But swallowing pills? It’s so innocuous; something your brain has watched you do many, many times. And though it will partly realize that you’re ingesting far too many of those little white things, the dominant part thinks that it will somehow be all right. That they’re only pills after all.

  I swallowed the pills down like a good patient; that’s not where I went wrong. When I lay down to wait for them to work, I ended up on my stomach with my face to the wall. Vomiting, sobbing, Mama hearing, hospital, a pumping of a nearly empty stomach, back home, cot installed in my room, locks removed, not alone again for a very long time.

  Weeks, or maybe months, later I started speaking in full sentences again. Speaking if only because my family was reaching so desperately for normalcy. First only to Baba, then to Nadia, then to Mama and the outside world. There was still a lack of eye contact. There was still the candle ritual, as though he remained a threat, liable to come bursting through the door at any moment.

  That was my first brush with crazy, the kind they made movies about with wide-eyed bambis who managed to look glamorous hanging over a toilet bowl. Therapy was a no-no; divulge our shame to a stranger? One who might know friends and family? A good dose of denial (apply liberally as needed) would do it. There was no other choice. Well, I suppose there was, but I’ve never been of the ‘If at first you don’t succeed’ persuasion. So, I sailed the world’s longest river; fake it till you make it, and all that. Normal behavior is a language you can learn. Humans are adaptable. It’s one of our selling points. We can survive in most any situation. Blend in with the crowd. See the sheep, be the sheep.

  It’s not difficult to act like a normal person. It is, after all, a ritual like any other. You wake up, and dress for work. Do a caffeine run and complain about the traffic with colleagues. Go through the motions at the office – the filing of reports, phone calls to clients, meetings, and all the rest of it. Then home, and a quiet lunch with family. The evening is for television, friends, the gym (maybe; it depends on the anxiety levels). Dinner then shower then bed. Rinse and repeat, ad nauseam, forever and ever because that’s all there is.

  See? Easy.

  I’d been doing it for fifteen years.

  Was that it, then? My one and only shot at crazy? If I’d persisted, had another go, gone fully mad, been relegated to the loony bin, would I have felt liberated? No one, not even Mama, would expect the certifiable to marry. If something like that had happened, might it have been an attractive option to just let me shove off to some facsimile of a life elsewhere, somewhere I could be anonymous and free?

  Mona and Zaina kept tabs on me with endless rounds of phone tag. It seemed if one wasn’t on the line then it was the other. Our group chat was never silent, one of them constantly throwing out a suggestion to meet
up or an invitation to come over. I dodged a lot of these propositions, telling the one that I was sick, or the other that I needed to stay home with Mama. This was patently untrue; I only saw my mother in passing, as she spent most of the time with her family. Nadia flitted in and out of the house. She didn’t call much, but I did hear Baba on the phone sometimes, and it seemed he was talking to her. I overheard words like ‘doctor’ and ‘coping’ and ‘flashbacks’, all in Baba’s monotonous grumble. He spent most of his time in the garden. His carefully tended trees and plants were bearing fruit: pinkish-yellow corn, bright green cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, and rows and rows of herbs. All of it segmented into neatly labeled plots that he visited daily, cutting a bit of mint for his afternoon tea or a few tomatoes for his salad at lunch.

  Nature was the only thing thriving.

  The flowers in my room had died. Only the lone white orchid Yousef had sent with a blank card survived. Occasionally I’d use a bottle of water on it, without a clue as to whether I was doing more harm than good. I played it music too: blaring tunes from my phone, or old CDs Rashid had dropped off. There had been a note in the bag, with his condolences to me. I didn’t know why I was sure Mona would have told him the truth; it seemed like something she would do. But the note was too formal, the tone too genuine and sincere. I expected if he knew, he wouldn’t have sent anything at all, or maybe just the CDs without explanation. In any case, the music was on repeat, whether I was in the room or not, and the flower wasn’t any more vibrant, but it wasn’t dead either.

  I didn’t know why I was avoiding Zaina and Mona. They hadn’t done anything to warrant it; they’d been supportive, kind … what they’d always been to me. In a creeping, subtle way I felt myself rejecting all that was familiar and safe, everything that I was accustomed to. Before, when I’d been a teenager and this restless, overwhelming anxiety took over, I would yearn for my bed in a way that was extreme and unhealthy. Hibernate is the only word for it. For days and weeks I would come out from under the covers only when I had to relieve myself or when threats and phone calls from officials forced me back to school. Even then, I was back in bed as soon as possible, so many blankets on me that my body was soaked with sweat and I felt permanently faint. Faint, but safe.