by Eman Quotah
She barely knows how to pray. “I want him to be safe,” she says. “I want him to come home. Is that a prayer?”
W
1987
Twelve years after we left W’s house, I went back. You didn’t expect that, did you?
Before my senior year started—you know this part—I left. Maybe you know why. Baba found me. It was like being visited by a ghost. My grief over his loss unburied itself and I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I couldn’t be under the same roof as you. Never again.
The part you don’t know is that I took a Greyhound bus to Toledo and W picked me up. I’m sure the reason she recognized me was because I was the only Arab chick waiting in the station, or maybe because I looked like you.
Her hair was in the same short, grandma-ish style as it had been when we stayed with her. She’d come straight from work, in Peanuts scrubs and white sneakers.
She hugged me and kissed me on one cheek, held me at arm’s length by my shoulders so she could look at me. I sensed people staring at us. A teenaged girl with pink hair, a young kid sitting on his mom’s lap, a beardless old guy in the corner. I tried to stop caring about them by looking at her. Her eyes were as sardonic as ever—a word I didn’t know when I was five, but I always knew she had no bullshit about her.
“What do I call you, honey?” she said.
I guess, when I’d phoned her to tell her I was coming, I hadn’t called myself by name. I’d said I was the daughter of a friend of hers, and we’d stayed with her a long time ago. She’d told me of course I could stay with her, and she’d given me her address. She hadn’t asked why I needed a place to go.
It wasn’t shelter I wanted. It wasn’t answers, either. Though I was going to ask her if she knew why you stole me.
“I’m Hannah,” I told her that day she picked me up.
What I was looking for was something I could barely name. I hadn’t expected to feel the way I did when I saw the smile rise in her face at the sound of my voice. She’d never heard me called Hannah before, but she recognized my voice.
I was home, for once. I was in a place where I belonged.
Toledo itself was unfamiliar. You and I had driven in and out, and the rest of the time we were holed up at W’s. But her house … She hadn’t moved, and seeing the stoop and the oak tree standing sentinel brought a flood of relief, because W was real and her house was real. You’d pretended plenty of times over the years that W didn’t exist, like we’d never stayed with her. You didn’t want me to be connected to anything we’d left behind.
I’d remembered anyway, but seeing for myself where we’d been was vindication, proof of what I already knew: how much you’d lied. How you’d tried to erase my memories but hadn’t fully succeeded. I don’t know why, but more than meeting my father, going back to W’s taught me this: if I could hang onto memories of W, if I could find her again, I could escape you and your version of reality.
The inside of the house was not exactly as I’d remembered it. She’d painted the living room dove gray; pulled out the blue shag and refinished the wood floors; replaced some of the old, secondhand furniture with trim Scandinavian pieces; and sold the barber’s chair or donated it to Goodwill. In its place in the basement was a treadmill facing a brand-new television. But the bay window was full of greenery. And the house was full of ghosts. Like, I could sense the presence of the barber’s chair whenever I went down to the basement to wash my clothes or jog on the treadmill. I could feel myself passing through the specters of us—us on the day we arrived, us on the day of the haircuts, us on the day we left. Frozen as if in amber.
The memories are painful. Writing this is painful. But the memories and the pain are mine. The story is mine.
I spent my senior year at W’s house. I slept in the room I’d slept in before. The walls were repainted dark purple, and W asked if I wanted to hang up posters, “like teenagers do.”
I had a couple Matisse posters from the Cleveland Museum of Art. I’d brought them with me in a poster tube. I put them up with sticky putty and thumbtacked some of my own drawings to the wall. I didn’t care if those got holes.
I had a suitcase of clothes—not that old blue one; this was my own, tweedy brown—and I never unpacked it. One day, I came home from school and W had put everything in drawers. She stashed the suitcase in the basement, next to the treadmill.
“I don’t want you to think you can up and leave,” she said.
“But the suitcase is downstairs. I don’t have much stuff. I can pack anytime, if I want to leave.”
“Tell me you’re not going to leave till you graduate high school.”
“I’m not going to leave,” I said. “I’m not my mother.”
“I’m still mad at your mother, but you’re not allowed to talk about her like that.”
I told her that was a deal breaker. If she wanted me to stay, she had to understand that if anyone should be mad at you, it was me. That she couldn’t take that from me.
We were standing in the basement.
“OK, honey,” she said.
With those words, she was the first person—not including Baba—to acknowledge everything you took from me.
The year went by fast. W made me go to the movies with her on Friday nights. She cried when I left for college and made me promise to call her weekly.
When I started thinking about going to Saudi junior year, she didn’t like the idea. You had gone through so much trouble to keep me from there.
I told her while I stayed with her the summer before I went. It was days before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, so we didn’t have war to worry about yet. She was watering her plants. Midday light flooded the living room. It was so bright I shaded my eyes.
“Maybe your mom didn’t do the right thing, but she had her reasons. It’s a hard place for women.”
“How do you know?” I told her. “I have to see it for myself.”
“Fine. Don’t tell me when you go so I won’t worry. Don’t tell me till you come back.” She’d spilled water on the hardwood floor but she didn’t rush to wipe it up.
“That’s silly. You’ll know I’m there because I’m not calling you like I usually do.”
“I’ll pretend I don’t know.”
So, I went radio silence while I was in Saudi, except for one answering machine message. But when I came back to Ohio, she was the first person I called.
CONVERT
1998
SANCTUARY
Coventry Second Church of Christ sits on a leafy triangle of land, surrounded by brick and wood colonials but a place apart from them. It is not near Coventry Road, and Sadie often wonders why it bears that name. Did the congregation move? Is there a Coventry First Church of Christ? Who are the people kneeling in the building’s stained-glass windows? What would it be like to stand on the other side of the glass and have sunlight cast those greens and blues and reds onto her body?
After nearly thirty years of living in America, Sadie knows next to nothing about Christians. They have their Christmas and their Easter. Some of them are Catholics and some of them are Protestants and a few of them are other things, but she doesn’t know what makes these groups different. Long ago she accidentally memorized the words to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” when Hannah learned it in school. The same year—or was it?—she bought a fake three-foot-tall Christmas tree from Kmart because Hannah wanted a tree. The box fit in the trunk of Sadie’s car. As easily as buying groceries, she could bring Christianity into her house.
Oddly, her parents had had a Christmas tree in their formal salon before she left them, handed down to them by American neighbors who were returning to the United States. Sadie’s mother thought the tree was beautiful, and hadn’t cared about the religious symbolism.
Her father, on the other hand, questioned the tree in his pragmatic way.
“We are different than Christians,” he said.
Sadie hadn’t asked how, besides not celebrating Jesus Christ’s birth.
She can’t remember, but perhaps her father’s mild objection years before was the reason she refused to buy ornaments for Hannah. They decorated the tree with crafts Hannah made at school: a popcorn-and-cranberry garland, green and red paper chains, tissue-paper snowflakes. They made gifts by hand and opened them Christmas morning. She’d embroidered flowers on a T-shirt for Hannah. Hannah had taped tissues into a ball and used a black permanent marker to write “I love you” on it.
The tree is in Sadie’s attic; she hasn’t set it up in years. She has long given up her own faith, lost it so gradually that only now, contemplating the beauty of a church, does she realize it evaporated years ago.
She moved to this neighborhood a few months ago, her first move in more than a decade. When she walks past Coventry Second Church of Christ during her morning walks, or drives by on her way to work at Dillard’s, she feels a tiny flash of warmth in her sternum.
Her new place is a tiny purple bungalow amid Tudors and colonials. When she moved in, the lilac tree near the screened-in back porch dripped with blooms that blended into the siding. She clipped a dozen branches and stuffed the flowers into vases, water glasses, mason jars. The bush looked no less lush than it had before she took out her gardening shears.
The house before this one was her then-boyfriend Jim’s—he was the reason she’d settled down for so long after years and years of constant motion—and he let her garden one small section of border alongside his vast Shaker Heights lawn. She grew snapdragons and carnations in the summer, easy things. She never got any better as a gardener over the years. When she first started buying flats of flowers from the garden center, she chose based on the colors and the smells. Not all flowers smelled like perfume, she learned. Some gave off the fragrance of cinnamon, others the odor of a skunk or the basic scent of soap.
She kept gardening at Jim’s because she liked separating the roots of a plant with a trowel before she set it in the soil, setting it free from the strictures of the pot. She liked rising from the ground with damp, muddy knees. She liked smacking her gloved hands together to let loose the dirt that had clung to her.
Jim recently sold the house and moved from Ohio to North Carolina, where his daughter and grandchild live. He asked her to move with him, but she didn’t want to move anymore. She didn’t want a long-distance relationship, either. So they broke things off. They’d never talked about marriage.
Drifting apart seems like a natural end to things, but she misses him.
To put him out of her mind, Sadie wants to create her own world in her smallish backyard, dig up the grass, eat flavorful zucchinis and tomatoes, grow glorious wildflowers, learn to cultivate intoxicatingly fragrant roses.
She’s going to people her life with plants.
The former owners left a rusty old hoe with a splintery handle in the garage and a sage-green wheelbarrow resting upside down against the back fence. Sadie buys a spade and a fork-tongued weeder, an edger, a lawn mower, thick gardening gloves, and rubber clogs.
The next weekend, buckets of rain fall from the sky. She can’t garden, but she wants to be outside. She wears her rubber clogs and looks through her unpacked moving boxes for an umbrella. When she can’t find one, she pulls on a hoodie. The downpour has let up briefly. She steps out into drizzle. Lots of rain will make it easier to dig up the lawn, she tells herself. That’s what the lady at the gardening center told her, anyway.
She strolls down the block with rain in her face. The stately red-brick church’s lights are on and its bells are ringing. Cars pull into the parking lot and men in slacks and women in skirts awkwardly push their umbrellas out the car doors and angle themselves out. The rain starts to fall harder, and Sadie puts her hands in her pockets. She’s underdressed and wet, but she walks inside and sits on one of the long wooden benches, toward the back of the big, high-ceilinged hall. She rubs her hands together and tries to catch the warmth of the room, like cozying up in front of a fire.
The hall fills up a little more than halfway, with most people sitting toward the front. Empty seats surround her. The white walls of the church open her mind, and the stained glass comforts her. Someone is reaching a hand out to someone else in every scene.
When the service begins, she watches the congregants. She stands when they stand, picks up the hymnbook from the little shelf on the seat in front of her when they do, and sings when they sing—quietly, so no one can hear.
Later, if anyone asks her about her first time at the church, she will not be able to tell them what hymns were sung, what sermon was given, who attended that day in the sanctuary.
She will tell them, instead, how she never knew before how alone she had been.
FORGIVENESS
For months, Sadie reads King James and goes to Bible study and drinks instant coffee and asks God for guidance and helps sort donations for the annual rummage sale. She thinks about the Virgin Mary, alone with a child.
The pastor, Stuart, is a young man with amber eyes and hair. Like almost everyone at the church and in the neighborhood, save a few black families, he is white. He plays the guitar. Somehow, he gets the idea that she’s a Catholic considering converting, and she goes with it. She never lies, but she never reveals the truth. She works hard not to let slip that she’s never heard of Saul or Paul or Mary Magdalene or the Ecclesiastes or Psalms.
In early October, she plants bulbs in her front yard. They are plants that don’t yet exist, a dream of orange and yellow daylilies, Purple Dream irises, Lilac Wonder and Spring Green tulips. She plants purple and white hardy mums to brighten the fall. She rakes oak and maple leaves. Among the rummage-sale loot she finds an old Burpee catalog. She takes it home and reads it. In the spring, she’ll plant petunias, purple sage, cherry tomatoes, summer squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, peppers, lettuce, parsley, basil. She wants to plant everything.
When she decides to go through with being baptized, she calls Hannah. Hannah has never been as good as Sadie was at hiding. For six or seven years, she hasn’t wanted to talk to her mother or see her—she says so whenever Sadie finds her. But Hannah lets the phone company list her number. Her Seattle law office website features a photo of her, in a sleek bob and a navy-blue suit. Her husband, Hamza, a Syrian guy, leaves voice messages on Sadie’s answering machine, gently telling her Hannah will call her soon, and though Hannah never does, Sadie believes Hamza would persuade her in an emergency. He tries to be kind. When he intercepts Sadie’s phone calls, he speaks to her in Arabic. She answers in English. He says he’s sorry they’ve never met.
Hannah’s unwillingness to communicate is like a sty that won’t heal, no cure for it but hope. Sadie wishes Hannah had never gone to Jidda; ever since, Hannah has taken Muneer’s side.
Sadie wants her daughter back. The years that have passed since they lived together have not changed that.
A month before her baptism ceremony, which will take place at the start of the Christmas season before things become too hectic, Sadie leaves a well-practiced message on Hannah’s voicemail. She doesn’t know how Hannah and Hamza will take the news that she’s converting. So she says she’s receiving an award at work. She would like them to be there.
A day later, Hamza calls her home phone while she’s at Dillard’s. She plays the answering machine message over and over: Thank you for inviting us, Sadie. We’ll be there.
When she thinks ahead to the baptism, Sadie feels a sense of calm, like floating in a swimming pool with her eyes closed. When she thinks about Hannah, her stomach heaves. She tries to avoid picturing what their meeting will be like. But she needs to take control. She switches shifts with her coworker Aida and makes an elaborate plan to go to the airport gate to meet Hannah and Hamza.
If she welcomes them with the baptism invitation in hand and explains her white lie without hesitation, they’re sure to forgive her.
She prays on the matter.
Hamza doesn’t respond to her requests for their flight number. There are few flights from Seattle on the Friday they ar
e flying in. Sadie drives to Hopkins at seven in the morning, gets the airlines’ schedule booklets from the departure desks, and makes her way to the gates, one after the other.
The airport is quiet and nearly empty. Thanksgiving has barely passed, and the airport is already decorated for Christmas. The Christmas tree in the corner of the security hall rises up to the ceiling, strung with lights and silver and gold tinsel. Underneath are large wrapped boxes. This tree belongs to me, she thinks. This place belongs to me, and I belong here.
As the day goes by, the hallways fill with people rolling their suitcases and tugging their children. Christmas Muzak plays. She hopes for Rudolph; when she hears the familiar tune, she sings along under her breath. The rest of the day the song’s in her head through the maddening waits for the planes to disembark. Her eyes bounce from person to person, straining not to miss Hannah behind someone taller. She eats a Cinnabon for late breakfast and Burger King fries for lunch. She can’t imagine Hamza is religious—Hannah was not raised that way, and like marries like. She hopes he will convince Hannah to accept Sadie’s conversion. She practices the words she will say to her daughter: “I am repenting for what I’ve done wrong. I will be wiped clean. Will you forgive me?”
She spots them at four o’clock, disembarking a flight that connected in Denver. She has resorted to standing on the black faux leather chair to see over the tall crowd of people greeting their families. These hours of waiting, she has seen the faces of joy as passengers recognize their loved ones and convinced herself she will receive such a look from her daughter and son-in-law: smiles that bathe her in love.
Instead, Hannah reprimands her.
“Mom. We’ll see you tomorrow at the thing. You could have sent us the address.”
She wears a loose black knit dress over black tights. Her long hair is in pigtails, like a child.