by Tahereh Mafi
My mother sighed.
But when I started putting on my shoes, she sharpened.
“Koja dari miri?” she said. Where are you going?
I knew it was only out of courtesy for her guest that she didn’t rip open my spleen right there on the living room floor, and it filled me with no small amount of joy to see her like this, something like herself. I didn’t mind at all that she would no doubt kill me later.
“I forgot my phone at Zahra’s house,” I said quickly, affecting nonchalance. Insouciance. Indifference. I hated Shayda. “I need to run back and grab it.”
“Alaan?” Right now?
My mother peered out the window, at the increasing darkness. Zahra’s house wasn’t far from here, only about four streets down. For a few months Zahra’s proximity to our new house had been the only fringe benefit in moving. Three months ago, when I’d been sent to the nurse’s office after passing out in the middle of second period, I couldn’t get ahold of anyone. Instead, I called Zahra’s mom, who sent her husband to pick me up. He left work, bought me five different kinds of medicine I didn’t need, and let me sleep in Zahra’s bed. I was so astonished by their kindness I wrote them a letter right there in Zahra’s bedroom, at her desk, using her paper and pen. It was a long letter, the contents of which were an exaggeration of emotion, embarrassing in their sincerity. I’d left the letter in their mailbox. Walked home. Said nothing to my own family about my day.
Zahra told me, when I went back to school, that her parents had found my letter. She told me at lunch. She kept peering at me over her sandwich, looking at me like she’d never seen me properly before, like maybe I was crazy.
“That was a weird letter,” she’d said, and laughed. She kept laughing. My parents thought it was sweet, but I thought it was so funny. It was a joke, right?
My mom didn’t know that Zahra and I were no longer friends.
I never told her what happened, because telling my mom what happened would only cause her to worry about me, which would break my vow to spare her the need to ever worry about me. I didn’t want her to worry. Not about me. Not about anyone. And yet—
Even in this, I was occasionally a failure.
My mother was still staring out the window, and I could tell she was about to forbid me from leaving the house. I could feel it, could see the words forming—
“Zahra’s waiting for me,” I said quickly. “I’ll just run there and be back. Ten minutes!”
I slammed the door shut behind me.
Fifteen
The day my brother died, my mother was making ghormeh sabzi. The kitchen was warm with the heat of the stove, the air heavy with the smells of caramelized meat and fresh rice. I was sitting at the kitchen table, offering no assistance at all as she cleaned up the mess. I was in a daze, watching her with unusual fascination as she took apart the food processor she’d used to mince a half ton of parsley. I’d seen her do this a thousand times before—had done it myself—but that day I felt numb as I sat there. Incomprehensibly paralyzed.
My father was pacing, lecturing the air as my mother worked, as I sat. I’d tuned it out, most of it. I thought about Shayda, who was at the mosque; they had a youth group on Friday nights. I hadn’t gone, despite her insistence that I accompany her, and I was regretting that decision then. I watched my mother place dirty bowls in the dishwasher, watched her shoot my father an irritated look as he stalked across the living room—a look he didn’t catch. I glanced at him, at his two tufts of dark hair, at his salt-and-pepper beard.
He was in a frenzy.
That morning, my father had needed to move my brother’s car, because Mehdi had blocked the garage with his Civic. My dad was in a hurry, running late for work, and asked me to fetch my brother’s keys. I did, because I knew precisely where they were: in a pocket of his discarded jeans, lying on his bedroom floor. It was still early, and Mehdi, who was in college, did not have class for at least another two hours. I snuck into his room while he was sleeping, stole his car keys, crept back downstairs. Placed the keys in my father’s hand.
Too often, my mind stopped there.
I could seldom convince my brain to remember what happened next. I didn’t want to remember. I didn’t want any of these memories, these distorted loops of sounds and images. I didn’t want to remember that it was me, me who betrayed my brother. I handed those keys to my father, my father who kissed me on the cheek and said, Merci, azizam, and promptly discovered a six-pack of beer in my brother’s back seat.
My dad waited all day to lose his mind.
His anger festered while he was at work, his imagination spiraling. He managed to convince himself of all kinds of things, all without my brother’s assistance, without the clarity that might be provided by a single conversation. I’d heard his theories that night, sitting at the kitchen table while my mother stirred the stew with a wooden spoon.
“He’s drinking, doing drugs, maybe selling drugs—”
“Mansour.” My mother spun around, horrified. “Een harfa chiyeh? We don’t know what happened,” she’d said in Farsi. “There’s still a chance the alcohol didn’t even belong to Mehdi.”
My father laughed out loud at that. His eyes were flinty, furious.
My mother was angry, too, but she said she wanted to wait until Mehdi got home, wanted to give him a chance to explain himself.
Calm down, she said.
My dad very nearly exploded at the suggestion.
Let’s talk to him first, she said.
My father went purple.
Talk to him? Talk to him? I don’t need to talk to him. You think I don’t know? You think I don’t know? He thinks I’m an idiot, that he can hide things from me, that I don’t know what he smells like every day, what his eyes look like? Everyone thinks I’m stupid, that I don’t know what’s going on? Talk to him? Talk to him about what?
My brother hadn’t been home all day.
My parents were still waiting for him to get back, waiting to ambush him. I’d let him know, of course. I’d texted him. Told him what happened.
I’m so sorry, I’d written.
I’m so sorry
I didn’t know
Baba had to go to work
I didn’t know
I’m so sorry
I’m so, so so so sorry
Mehdi, I’m so sorry
It’s okay, he’d written back.
It’s not your fault.
I’d stared at that message a thousand times, pressed the screen to my throat on desperate nights. I could never have known how things would escalate. Could never have anticipated the proceeding argument, the explosive screaming match that met my brother’s reluctant arrival back home.
It was late.
I remember, when my dad threw open the front door, that the crickets would not quiet. Streetlamps were bright and blurry, streaking the sky in the distance, cold air piercing everything. I remember, when my father told him to get out, Mehdi did not hesitate. My mother screamed. My brother shoved on his shoes, his face grim with determination, and though my mother begged him to be reasonable, begged him to come back inside, Mehdi did not hear her. He wasn’t looking at my mother. He was looking at my father, my prideful father who did not seem to understand that he and his son suffered from the same affliction, that my brother would not break.
Mehdi left.
My mother chased her firstborn child into the dark, chased him barefoot down the driveway. My mother, for whom propriety and privacy meant a great deal, ran through our neighborhood screaming his name. If Mehdi was the sea, my father was an immovable object, human stone standing in the living room, unwilling to be eroded.
I retreated to the stairs, sat on the narrow, carpeted step with my arms wrapped around my shins, cried with my head buried in my lap.
Mehdi was killed, not ten minutes later, by a drunk driver.
I came back to my body with a sudden gasp of awareness, startling at the cold drip. Tentative raindrops tested out the sky, the trees,
the slope of my nose, made way for the others. It wasn’t much, just a drizzle. Still I shivered, violently.
I didn’t know where I’d left my phone.
I had no intention of actually looking for it; I just wanted an excuse to walk, clear my head, think in peace—and I hoped that the mehmooni taking place at my house would be diverting enough to buy me some time. My feet walked a familiar pattern, a pattern my feet knew but my mind could not remember. I stared occasionally at the sky, searching for the moon.
It was true, I thought. I did want my father to die.
My heart sagged a little more in my chest.
I realized, when I was suddenly blinded by a dot diagram of lights, that I’d walked into a local park. I’d been to this park a hundred times with Zahra, the two of us pretending to be children, sitting on swings and climbing backward up the slide. We sat in the sand and discussed school and boys and minor social dramas that held critical importance in our lives. We’d spent days here. Weekends. Untold hours of my life, gone up in flames.
My friendship with Zahra had long been imperfect.
She’d been cruel to me in a thousand small ways for years, had proven herself a fickle, disloyal friend many times over. I should’ve been the one to walk away, should’ve done it long ago. But she’d been one of the few solid things in my life, and I hadn’t been ready to let go. I clung with the tips of my fingers to the fast-crumbling cliff of our friendship, and when she finally kicked me down, into the chasm, I experienced a strange, disorienting relief.
Part of me missed her fiercely.
A greater part of me did not.
I shuddered as a gust of wind tore through the park, whipping at my body. I was naked underneath this hoodie and I suddenly regretted my haphazard choices. I wrapped my arms around myself. Held on tight.
This graveyard of memories was nearly empty now, save a distant soccer field still dotted with players. The streetlights were unnecessarily aggressive, and I sat away from one, atop a bench, my legs curled under me. The bench wasn’t wet, exactly, but damp with drizzle and fog, and the cold seeped through my clothes, chilling me further. A child’s swing swayed gently in the breeze; I stared at it. I clasped and unclasped the old, loose cigarette rolling around in my pocket.
I’d been trying not to think about this cigarette.
I’d known it was here, tucked away in a zippered pocket; I’d known, because I left cigarettes everywhere. It was a stupid, reckless indulgence, but I couldn’t seem to help it; I liked finding them in my clothes. I carried them around like some kind of talisman, smoking them only occasionally, and at first only because I was curious. I’d since developed a dangerous taste for the poison, which worried me. But I couldn’t part with them.
Mehdi had stashed two large cartons of cigarettes in his closet, a bulk quantity I can only assume he purchased through a third party. I’d tossed his dirty magazines, disposed of the weed, destroyed the glass pipe, chucked the condoms into a massive garbage bin behind a grocery store.
The cigarettes, I kept.
I sighed, tucked one between my lips and left it there. I found a lighter in the pocket of my jeans, weighed it in my hand.
I knew I couldn’t smoke this cigarette, no matter how much I wanted to. I had to get home soon, before my mom came looking for me and unraveled a long string of lies I did not want to acknowledge. But I wasn’t ready to leave. I spun the spark wheel a few times, stared at the flame.
I thought often of the stupidity of man. One, in particular.
I thought often of my father’s self-righteousness, his self-assured certainty, his unequivocal conviction that his thoughts and actions were sanctioned by God. It was perhaps true that my father had never had a drop of alcohol. I knew he regularly gave charity, never missed one of his daily prayers, fasted during Ramadan. My brother, on the other hand, had done none of those things. And yet I felt quite certain that, in the eyes of God, my brother was the better person.
I didn’t mind dogma. I liked guideposts, appreciated a little structure. But I could not understand those people who disregarded the essence of faith—love, compassion, forgiveness, the necessary expansion of the soul—in favor of a set of rules, a set of rules they declared to be true divinity.
This—this—
I did not think Shayda and I would ever agree on this. Here was where we diverged, where our lives tore on a perforated line. She felt that my father had been right to be angry with Mehdi, that Mehdi had broken the rules, had made poor choices, had angered my father when he should’ve been repentant, and deliberately disrespected my mother, who begged him to stay.
He made his own choice, she’d said.
I thought it was the job of the parent to be smarter than the child, I’d said. I thought it was the job of the parent to protect their child from harm, I’d said. I thought it was the job of the parent to lead by example, I’d said.
She’d screamed at me. Thrown me out of her room. We’d never talked about Mehdi again, not until tonight.
I sighed, ran my thumb over the top of the lighter. Spun the starter.
Spark and flame.
Spark and flame.
And what about me? I thought. What did it make me, if I sat around, cold and without compassion, hoping for my father to die? Did that make me any different from him?
Or just worse?
I sat up suddenly, startled free of my reverie by a sharp motion, a blur of movement. A body sat down heavily on the seat beside me, and I turned to stare at it. Him.
Ali was holding my cigarette, which he’d snatched from my lips.
“Give that back,” I said quietly.
He laughed.
I’d wondered, when I saw the brilliantly lit soccer field, whether Ali might not be out there tonight. He lived close by. He played soccer. I didn’t know exactly what he played—it was some kind of local, intramural team—but my thoughts ended there, did not build a bridge elsewhere. The field was situated far from my bench, and I’d not determined there to be a high probability of our worlds colliding.
So I was surprised.
He took the lighter from my limp hand, his fingers grazing my palm in the process. I held my breath as he lit the cigarette I would not smoke, put it between his lips. It was all I could think as I watched him smoke it, that the cigarette touching his mouth had been touching mine not a moment ago.
“This is so bad for you,” he said, exhaling with an elegance attained only with practice. “You shouldn’t smoke these things.”
He offered me the cigarette without turning his head, and when I whispered, “No, thank you,” he smiled.
He still wasn’t looking at me; he was staring into the darkness. I found his silence fascinating. His appearance, here, confusing.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“What are you doing here?” he said, and laughed. “I live here.” He gestured, generally, at nothing. “You know. Around here.”
“Right.” I took a deep breath. “Yeah.”
He took another drag on the cigarette. “So,” he said, exhaling a neat line of smoke. “You want to tell me why you’re stalking me?”
“What?” I said sharply. I felt my face heat. “I’m not stalking you.”
“No?” He turned a little in his seat, looked me up and down. He was almost smiling. “Then why do you look like you’re undercover?”
I shook my head. Looked away. “It’s a long story.”
“I’ve got time.”
“It’s a stupid story,” I amended.
“Even better.”
“My sister is getting married.”
Ali choked, started coughing violently. He tossed the cigarette to the ground, stamped it out with his foot. Kept coughing. Ali was about to die of asphyxiation, and I was suddenly very close to laughing. I also noticed, for the first time, what he was wearing: cleats and shorts, a blue soccer jersey. It was freezing out, and his arms and legs were bare and he didn’t seem at all bothered by the temperature. The
streetlamps bolstered the wan moonlight, sculpting his body in the darkness. I watched him press the heels of his hands to his tearing eyes, watched as the muscles in his arms tightened, released under his skin. When he finally sat back and took a normal, steadying breath, my head felt uncomfortably hot.
“Oh my God,” he said. Another cough. “Is your sister insane?”
I was fully smiling now, rare for me. “She’s not getting married this second. But she’s on her way, I guess. Picked out the guy.”
“Picked out the guy? What does that even mean? And what does any of that have to do with you looking like a”—he gestured at me, my face—“getaway driver?”
I laughed. I missed this version of us, the easy conversations we’d once had. Ali and I had always been so comfortable together, and remembering that now—remembering what I’d lost—made my smile feel suddenly brittle. I shook my head to clear it.
“He came khastegari,” I said. “She accepted. And tonight h—”
“Wait, what’s khastegari?”
I frowned, turned to face him. “Since when do you not know how to speak Farsi?”
Ali shrugged. “I always spoke Farsi like a child.”
“Oh.” I was still frowning. “Well, it just means he proposed.”
“But you said she picked him out. Like a peach at the grocery store.”
“Well, yeah, I mean, lots of guys propose,” I said, squinting up at the blinking light of an airplane. “But she picked him.”
“Shadi, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t know any guys who propose.”
I laughed again.
He didn’t.
“I’m serious,” he said. “This sounds fake. It sounds like you’re describing The Bachelor in reverse.”
“The Bachelorette.”