Amina’s suspicious look reemerged. “You are not an attorney anymore?”
“No, I am an attorney. I just took time off, and now I’m volunteering with IAP, which has experience and resources to support me and the person I’m working with. I will have only one case. One. Yours.”
Amina’s eyes darted to Jessica’s left as a shop employee set a still-sizzling breakfast sandwich on their table. The grease oozing from the pressed sandwich puddled on the brown plate, turning Jessica’s stomach and disrupting her mental flow.
“How old are your children?” Amina asked, taking advantage of the breach in Jessica’s monologue.
Jessica’s serious lawyer face gave way to a smile, and she felt her neck muscles loosen and her shoulders soften. She hadn’t realized she was so tense or that the thought of her kids would be soothing rather than stressful.
“Sixteen, fifteen, and eleven. My oldest is Conor.” Jessica hesitated to divulge too much. This wasn’t about her. But Amina’s newly receptive demeanor encouraged her. “He’s a junior in high school, and boy, he is testing the limits these days. But he’s a good kid. Looks just like his dad did at his age. Cricket is fifteen. She’s whip-smart and so confident. My other son, Mikey, is eleven. He’s the baby of the family, but I’m not sure how much longer that will last. He has more energy and happiness than the rest of us combined.” Hissing followed by a whistle sounded from behind Jessica, indicating someone had just ordered a latte or maybe a cappuccino. Jessica dropped her smile and mindlessly rubbed the pendant hanging from her necklace. Raving about her family to a woman who’d left hers behind seemed insensitive.
Mercifully, Amina changed the subject again. “It’s a beautiful necklace. It looks very old.”
Lifting the cross with the tips of her fingers, Jessica admired the patina and the texture of the green stones. “Thank you. Cricket found it in my grandmother’s things. My grandmother passed away earlier this year, and we’re just now going through the things she left behind. She got this from her own grandmother.”
“A lovely family treasure.” The silence at their table grew contemplative, soft. “I will use you as my attorney. I can change my mind later?”
Jessica let out a laugh.
Amina didn’t smile. She wasn’t kidding.
“Yes, you can change your mind later.” Pressure lifted, but it was time to move on. Amina was checking her watch. “We’ll have to go over your application in detail. We don’t need to do it all at once or even today, but we will need to get the details down and then see what kind of documentation we can pull together to support your claim. Are you okay to do a little now?”
“I have some time.”
The door to the shop opened with a jingle. Jessica glanced over to see two young women, likely college students, carrying backpacks. They were chattering and waving their hands about emphatically as they walked into the shop.
Jessica turned her attention back to Amina and her application, starting with the easy stuff—where she was living and making sure she had the resources she needed. “We’ll first want to confirm everything in your application is accurate—”
“It is accurate.”
Okay, then. “So you are still living in Baltimore.”
“Yes.”
“Are you living with anyone?”
“Yes. I live with my cousin, Fayiz Darbi, his wife, Sama, and their two sons.” Her dark eyes softened.
Having family here already was good. That meant Amina had a support system and stability. “Great. How long have they been in the US, and what is their immigration status?” Jessica kicked herself. That was rather presumptive, or racist, or something bad, she was pretty sure.
Amina didn’t seem to take offense. “They are US citizens. I do not know exactly the date. Fayiz came to America before the events of September 11. Sama followed several years later. Their children were born in America.”
An immigrant family growing in their new country reminded Jessica of some of the “soft” advice she’d learned in training. “As you know—painfully, I’m sure—the asylum process is a waiting game. IAP urges our clients to live life as though they will be here permanently. Jobs, housing, life in general.” She shuffled the application pages to the employment section. “You were an accountant in Syria. What are you doing at a restaurant?” She regretted the wording as soon as she’d asked the question. She should have used “the” instead of “a” to avoid sounding condescending or making it sound as if she didn’t realize that educated immigrants had trouble finding jobs in their chosen fields.
Amina didn’t pick up on the nuance in Jessica’s article misselection. “I work in the office with the phone and other things, including the books. I work in the front if they need me. Even before I got my work permit, I helped. Now I have my work permit, and Sama is pregnant, so I am working every day.”
Jessica wanted to make a joke about Amina being so wordy all of a sudden but decided against it. “I don’t understand. Why does Sama’s pregnancy mean you need to work more?”
“She cannot work the hours at my cousin’s restaurant she worked before, so I am helping more.”
Jessica nodded in realization. The pregnant waitress was Sama. The owner with whom she’d spoken must have been Fayiz. The cousin. They would have known all about Amina’s status and probably that Jessica was not the friend she’d claimed to be.
Amina continued. “I will need to find another job for after the baby arrives.”
“Why is that? Won’t Sama be spending a lot of time with the baby?”
“The townhouse is not big enough for all of us and a baby. I must leave, and Fayiz cannot pay enough for me to rent an apartment.”
Jessica made a note to talk to Rosalie about IAP housing and employment resources. “Now could be the time to look for a job that fits your education and what you want to be doing going forward. We have employment resources at IAP.”
“I will let you know if I need assistance.”
Based on the dismissiveness in Amina’s voice, Jessica wouldn’t hold her breath. She returned to the application, opting to skip over some mundane items in the interest of time. “I’d like to talk to you about your family. Your father, mother, siblings. Your husband.”
Amina rose in a single fluid movement. “I must leave now. I must be at the bus stop to go to the restaurant.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought we had more—” Jessica fumbled reaching for her purse, nearly knocking over her coffee in her haste to keep up with Amina. “Can I give you a ride?”
“No, thank you.” Her response was terse but polite. Amina started to turn away but stopped and looked over at the two young women at the counter then back at Jessica. “After the fighting began and the extremists came in, the buses stopped running. I could not go out alone.”
The door jingled as Amina left the shop. Jessica took a sip of her coffee, promptly searing half of her taste buds and setting off a new round of pounding behind her eyes, reminding her of the wine, shrinking women, and the fact that she still had so much more to do.
CHAPTER TWELVE
AMINA
A fall breeze ruffled Amina’s scarf against her cheek as she waited for the walk signal to turn white. She would never have imagined that abrupt exits would come to define her, but she had made two with the lawyer, and the greatest abrupt exit of all had brought her to this country in the first place.
She’d surprised herself with her reaction to the lawyer’s question about her family and her own inability to answer or even remain at the table. Maybe the upwelling of suppressed emotion came from sharing the pictures of home with the boys or the new prospect of permanency or a relative stranger asking personal questions. Or maybe she simply wasn’t ready to process everything that had happened.
The bus stop was just a block down to her right. Instead of turning, she clasped her bag and followed the crosswalk straight ahead. She would walk to the restaurant today. She had time due to that early exit, and she doubted the
lawyer would see her and question why she wasn’t taking the bus. Jessica had probably never even ridden the MTA and wouldn’t know where the stops were. Amina certainly had never seen anyone dressed like the lawyer on the bus. Though she had to admit that today’s outfit was a strong improvement over the American TV lawyer look the woman had worn the day of their first meeting.
What a woman like the lawyer would never understand was the tense instability of life as a refugee. It was like sitting at a bus stop in a barren desert for years, staring at the horizon and not knowing if a bus would ever even arrive. The sense of hopelessness that brought was overshadowed only by the sense of fear that when a bus finally did arrive, it would take her back to where she’d started, with no opportunity for a return pass.
Amina knew she was fortunate in her situation, which made leaving behind others to face the horror more shameful. She had shelter, food, income, and family, distant though that family may have been. So many million others did not. But as with those millions, she craved security. Everything she had could once again be taken from her.
Despite that hopelessness, Amina had begun to see dust billowing on the horizon, a bus possibly in the distance. She didn’t know what had prompted the vision. Maybe it was instinct or perhaps just baseless optimism. Either way, the dust had already prompted her to do exactly what the IAP and the lawyer had advised.
She stepped out of the pedestrian flow and into the recessed area near a bank entrance then reached into her bag. She unfolded what was merely an internship flyer but what could be a ticket to her future.
A trip to the Enoch Pratt over the weekend to return the travel guide had led her to the Job and Career Information Center, where she’d found a notice for an accounting internship program starting in January. She met—no, exceeded—the requirements of experience and education. A preference for traditionally underrepresented minorities made the opportunity seem perfect for her. A Syrian woman in Syria was traditionally underrepresented in accounting, after all. She’d submitted her application just yesterday. An internship would be a step down from her blossoming career in Aleppo, but it would give her a foundation on which to build.
A steely pride filled her chest. She hadn’t needed a lawyer to tell her to pursue a fitting job. She still was not sure about needing a lawyer for the rest of it, but with so much at stake, it couldn’t hurt to have good people on her side. She had been foolish to trust the first attorney, an immigrant from Lebanon.
It had seemed prudent to use a lawyer who spoke her language and knew her culture, who wouldn’t look at her the way so many Americans did, like an apparition that could be wished away or a creature untamed. But he had treated her with condescension. He’d flashed an expensive-looking watch and bragged about his law practice, how successful he was, and all the immigrants he had represented. She should have followed her instincts. She didn’t have to come to America to know that lying and cheating transcended borders, cultures, languages, and religions.
Amina’s mother had always told her, “You can tell if you can trust a man by how he talks about his family.” Amina hadn’t heeded that message when she’d hired the first attorney, who had dismissed his “foolish” daughters for marrying imbeciles. “But they never were very smart, just like their mother,” he’d said. On the other hand, the woman lawyer’s face had softened and glowed when Amina had asked about her children, triggering a painful longing in Amina. Gaining asylum wouldn’t cure that pain and the guilt that accompanied it, but going back wouldn’t, either.
Amina’s mother was the wisest person she knew. She spoke little but always with gravity. Amina refolded the flyer and stepped back onto the sidewalk, edging along the curb to avoid passersby. Her bag thumped against her hip with each step, reassuring in its regularity.
A desire to feel her mother’s hands rubbing her back and to hear her mother’s soothing words overtook her and wouldn’t succumb to the distractions of the city. She reached into the bag to pull her phone out from beneath the internship flyer. It was an old model, the one she had purchased when she first arrived. Accessing her saved messages, she took a deep breath before clicking to listen to the last message from her mother.
“Amina, it will be hard to reach us. The bombs are falling again, and services are unreliable. We take comfort that you are safe. Your father—”
The hit felt slight, but Amina’s hand whipped forward, empty. She yelped a pitiful cry, unnoticed by the people passing her on the sidewalk. A young man, newly possessed of her old phone, was already at the next block, pedaling fast as he dodged parked cars. He would be disappointed with the early-model Samsung littered with Arabic, perhaps even a little scared by that latter fact. Amina’s despair merged with a grim recognition that her status could be snatched away just as that phone had been.
Her scarf fluttered again, and she reached to hold it still against her jaw. She had despaired back then, when she’d seen she missed her mother’s call and was unable to reach her parents again. The recorded voice had sustained her since, but now it was possible her mother’s voice could only be heard through Amina herself.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Jessica pushed back from the dining room table, silently cursing Rosalie.
A few days before, her former classmate had been blasé about Jessica’s success in convincing Amina. “Of course she’s going to use you. You’ll do great.” Then she’d handed Jessica a stack of black, numbered binders and pointed at a larger stack of even more. “Read through these. Let me know if you have any questions.” Jessica had had to make two trips to haul the stacks out to her car in the lot around the corner.
Those binders now lay splayed out in front of her. Reading through laws and government regulations two days in a row would be mind-numbing under any circumstances, but scouring through old cases detailing humiliations, imprisonments, rape, torture, and death and attempting to parse how those details did or did not lead to a grant of asylum made the research exhausting.
Jessica’s subconscious began to weave the anonymous images from her earlier Syria research with the more intimate, personal stories of former IAP clients in the binders, creating a tapestry of terror in her mind. She had barely scratched the surface of Amina’s own personal story but was starting to gain a better understanding of the woman’s situation.
Jessica’s own insensitivity came into focus. Her judgments about Amina’s attitude and demeanor hadn’t been terribly kind. The trauma of Amina’s story—not bitterness or arrogance—and being disconnected from the people she loved could explain both Amina’s reticence to speak and her swift exit from the coffee shop. Jessica closed the binders, stacked them, and placed them in boxes under the table.
More boxes. Just what I need. What she did need was some balance among the chaos and some progress.
“C’mon, Gracie. Let’s do something easy before I go get groceries and the kids get home.” Gracie gamely trailed Jessica into the parlor.
She scanned the labels on Oma’s boxes: My Mementos, Mother’s Dishes, My Glassware.
My Quilt. That looked simple and sweet. No beheadings there. Jessica sliced cleanly through the tape and opened the box. The now-familiar lavender note and scent of White Diamonds instantly separated her from the stress of her research, the ruminations on her relationship with Amina, and even the piles of boxes that continued to taunt her.
She unfolded the note.
“Enclosed is an antique quilt. The design is ‘double wedding ring.’ It was made especially for me for my Hope Chest. Hope Chests were usually cedar at that time, but my Gr. Margarethe gave me the trunk that her parents brought to America. The blocks in the quilt were made from scraps of material left from flour-sack dresses and aprons of mine and my mother’s. As you will see, all the tiny, even stitches are so delicate. Gr. Margarethe was known for her fine workmanship.”
The note continued with washing instructions. Surprised Oma hadn’t enclosed a coupon for detergent, Jessica double-checked the envelope just in case. Wh
ile she couldn’t recall a “double wedding ring” quilt at Oma’s house, the promise of more of Margarethe’s artistry piqued Jessica’s interest.
She folded back the tissue paper that surrounded the quilt. One side of the quilt was solid yellow. The other side had colorful squares stitched together to create a design of interlocking rings on a background of white. A different fabric made up each colored square. There were pale-blue leaves on white, bright-yellow lemons on orange, and cottony-white flowers on lavender. Jessica felt an unexpected flash of regret that she hadn’t kept any of the sweet gingham jumpers Cricket had worn before she’d insisted on choosing her own clothes.
“Tiny and even stitches...” Oma hadn’t begun to describe what Jessica saw. The stitches were almost microscopic—thousands and thousands of them. And they weren’t just utilitarian, connecting the squares and attaching the front of the quilt to the back. They were mathematical, like something that might have been graphed from Cricket’s equations.
Jessica ran her finger lightly along a line of stitches, randomly following the left then the right branches as the stitches created a complicated yet perfectly symmetrical repeating design. A starburst of patterns with lines radiating from center points and intersecting with what looked like a Spirograph design of interlacing arcs covered the entire queen-size quilt. She flipped the edge of the fabric and couldn’t spy a single knot. It was as though it were sewn with a single thread.
This. Was. Done. By. Hand. Jessica admired this woman, who had spent unknown hours of labor and love to add such beauty to discarded scraps of fabric. The wood surrounding Jessica represented endless hours as well, but she hadn’t created anything. The ship table she’d made for Danny came close. But her joy with that project wasn’t so much from creating something new as it was from bringing the history of the piece to life.
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