A Pure Heart

by Rajia Hassib

  “Emily is taking this to the max, isn’t she?”

  “I think she is projecting her insecurities about her own marriage onto this entire thing.”

  Rose turns to face Mark, folding one arm under her head. “She’s having marriage trouble?”

  “Has been since she got married, according to Mom. She’s probably persevering on the force of sheer stubbornness.” He glances her way. “Don’t tell Mom I told you that.”

  “Like your mom and I ever have intimate conversations.” Rose looks out the window again. Way ahead, a mass of black clouds looms, promising a drenching.

  “Emily is very grateful to you for coming with me. She would have understood if you had stayed home. I’m sure my parents would have, too.”

  Rose nods. Of course she had not liked the idea of dressing up and joining the festivities a mere four weeks after Gameela’s death. But while staying home was certainly tempting, she didn’t feel courageous enough to do so. There was a risk that Mark would bow out at the last moment, use her as an excuse to avoid attending the celebration. She knew how busy he was, how difficult it has been for him to carve out a four-day weekend. If he had not attended, though, his family would have assumed he had skipped to stay home with her. The last thing she needed right now was one more nail in the coffin of her relationship with her mother-in-law.

  “It’s going to rain,” she says.

  “Rain makes me feel at home. It always rains in West Virginia.”

  “It never rains in Cairo.”

  Rose pulls the back of her seat farther up, sitting straight, then puts her feet on the dashboard, trying to find a comfortable position. She ends up sitting diagonally, her back closer to Mark, her feet on the corner of the dashboard, her white socks taking in the bit of sun still shining at their car, despite the impending rain. On the side of the highway, the trees are splattered with leaves that have started to turn, glowing in yellow, orange, and red hues that remind Rose of fire.

  * * *

  —

  ROSE LOVES THE TREES. She loves all trees, mainly because Egypt has so few of them. Not that this is something she complains about: the sprawling desert is, after all, the main reason the temples and tombs of the Pharaohs remained intact, the dry climate of southern Egypt preserving them over millennia. All the palaces, towns, and living quarters that once dotted the humid Nile Delta in the north are eroded now, as her exasperated colleagues working on the new delta excavation projects keep lamenting. But these trees—the West Virginia trees she is taking in as she stands on Mark’s parents’ deck—are different from any other trees Rose has seen: wild, spreading endlessly in waves that hug the curves of the mountains ahead, claiming ownership of the land. The trees belong here with an authority that the Central Park trees can never boast. Rose reaches over and touches the rounded, lobbed leaves of an ancient white oak, its branches extending to within inches of the deck. During her first visit here, Mark dug up a massive folder containing a tree identification project he completed in seventh grade. Flipping through the pages, he acquainted her with trees that had stood in place since his childhood: the white oak to the left; the two sugar maples ahead; the row of thuja trees forming a privacy screen to her right. The backyard sloped down in a neat lawn that eventually gave way to an untamed forest of maples, oaks, and beech trees, among others, many of them overgrown with climbing vines and weeds that rivaled the trees in height. Sometimes, Mark told her, you could see a family of deer strolling out of the forest and onto the lawn. Every time Rose was here, she looked out for deer, almost squealing in delight whenever she saw one. They, too, belonged here in a way that Rose envied.

  She leans against the deck’s railing, watching a pair of squirrels chase each other across the lawn. Now more than ever does she believe Mark’s claim that belonging starts with an identification with the place, not the people. “The natives may take you in, or they may refuse to do so, regardless of how long you’ve lived among them,” he had once told her as they strolled along the Nile. “But places are always more welcoming. Places don’t care where you were born or how long you’ve lived in them. If you like them and make the effort to know them, they make you feel like you belong there. It’s their gift to you. Their way of liking you back.”

  Throughout his travels, Mark had made it a priority to know the place that was to become his home. In his first years in New York and, later, in Lebanon and Egypt, he had kept journals with folded-up maps nestled within their pages, had scribbled descriptions of the most random of spots—the corner of Thirty-sixth and Broadway, where he tried honey-roasted nuts for the first time; the brick-paved stretch of Hamra Street in Beirut, where he often stood under the same palm tree and watched the stores light up at dusk; the row of shops bordering the Zamalek Sporting Club in Cairo; the first bench on the right-hand side as one walks off the Qasr El-Nil Bridge; the coffee shop a few steps below the sidewalk on El-Moez Street. The more of these random nooks he could claim an intimate knowledge of, the more he felt at home.

  Now, looking at the forest beyond the deck, Rose understands. She closes her eyes and thinks of her own nooks, the places where she feels the happiest: her desk at the Met; the stoop in front of Mrs. Kumiega’s apartment building, where she keeps her geraniums in the spring; the table by the tennis courts in the Gezira Club, where she used to eat breakfast and go over her course work during her college years in Egypt; the hall at the Egyptian Museum where she often sat, cross-legged, and sketched in front of the statue of Akhenaten, the Pharaoh who called for the worship of one god only and angered the priests. Her places, collected, are as unique and individual as Mark’s. Her places make her who she is. And now, strangely, she realizes that this spot on her in-laws’ deck is one of her places, too.

  “Beautiful out here, isn’t it?” Her mother-in-law steps up next to her, her hand extended with a cup filled with steaming coffee. “Cream, no sugar. Just the way you like it.”

  Rose takes the cup, holds it in both hands, and rests her elbows on the railing. “Thank you, Laura. I needed this.”

  “I figured you did.”

  They stand in silence, looking out on the forest ahead. The sky is streaked pink and purple, the setting sun already out of sight.

  “Thank you for coming, Rose. I know it’s not easy for you. But seeing you all here was the best surprise I’ve had in a long time.”

  Following Emily’s plan, the three siblings had met in the empty parking lot of a nearby elementary school, Mark and Rose arriving there second, after Emily, and then waiting for forty-five minutes for April to get there, Biscuit, her golden retriever, riding in the passenger seat. They had driven to their parents’ home together, a convoy of offspring, and had rung the bell together. Emily’s two girls stood in the front and held a bouquet of flowers as tall as the five-year-old and taller than her three-year-old sister, Biscuit barking happily behind them. When Laura answered the door, she stood in place, one hand on her mouth, and teared up. Rose had never seen her mother-in-law show that much emotion before.

  “We’re happy to be here,” Rose says. “But Emily gets all the credit. She is the one who organized this.”

  “I thought she did. But you had a legitimate excuse not to show up. I just want you to know I appreciate your coming. And your drive here was the longest, you and my New Yorker son.” Laura is looking out at the trees, holding on to the railing with both hands. Slowly, she closes her eyes, lets her head drop back, and takes a deep breath in. “I love this place,” she says. “Never could understand why anyone would want to live anywhere else.”

  “My sister would have said the same thing about Egypt,” Rose says, immediately regretting mentioning Gameela. She doesn’t want to talk about her sister to anyone, let alone to her mother-in-law. The pain she sees in the eyes of those trying to console her often enhances her sense of loss, and their inevitable questions underscore her vexing ignorance. So you don’t know what hap
pened? It couldn’t have been a coincidence, could it? Wasn’t that the same boy Mark interviewed? Do you think she was there to meet him? Better avoid the topic altogether, rather than mumble a string of excuses for her unsisterly lack of information.

  “What I mean is that I know what you’re talking about. It must be hard to imagine anyone choosing to leave a place you love so much. But I think people who move away usually think more about the destination than they do about the place they leave behind. It’s like chasing a dream. You just don’t look back until much later. At least that’s how it was with me.” She takes a sip of her coffee, stops short of explaining how she had been so excited about the move to the U.S. that she had barely given a thought to the ocean that would separate her from her family. On the phone with her parents during her first months in the U.S., she had shed silent tears, marveling at how someone’s voice could be so deceptively close when they were on the other side of the globe. “But it must be nice to grow old in the same town where you were born, so close to your family.”

  “It is. I grew up two miles away from here, on Loudon Heights Road.” Laura points to the right. Rose can see only more trees in that direction. “My kids went to the same elementary school I went to—a private Catholic school. One of the best in town. Good education, of course, but my parents sent me there for the religious instruction, and I did the same with my kids, even though we’re technically Episcopalian, not Catholic. Now one of my kids is a Muslim, the other an agnostic, and the third is religious but otherwise a mess,” Laura laughs. “So much for planning.”

  Rose doesn’t know how to respond. She focuses on her coffee, gulps it all down a bit too quickly, then holds on to the empty mug. She can feel Laura’s eyes on her but does not look her way.

  “How are your parents holding up?” Laura asks.

  “Surviving. One day at a time.”

  “You talk to them often?”

  “I call them every day.”

  Laura nods. “Good.”

  She is still looking at Rose, and now Rose looks back, examines her mother-in-law: tall, skinny, her hair a short, silver bob, her eyes a piercing blue. She must have been a remarkable beauty in her youth—even now, in her seventies, she looks more put together in her knee-length floral dress than Rose ever does. Rose is irked by how much Laura intimidates her.Much of it is her appearance, which Rose knows is petty, but some of it is Laura’s confidence, the way she fills up the space she takes in the world with the same authority as those trees do, an authority that has given her perfect posture and the impression of a radiating aura, as if her cells exude light. Rose forces herself to hold Laura’s gaze, tries to absorb some of that confidence and reflect it back on her, pulls her shoulders back and reminds herself to stand up straight.

  Behind them, they hear a bang. Through the windows overlooking the deck, Rose sees Mark sitting at the kitchen table with his father. They are both laughing out loud while Emily kneels to pick something up from the floor. Mark moves to help her, bending down and emerging with pieces of a broken mug in his hands—a victim of his father’s renowned gesturing, apparently. Laura watches them and shakes her head.

  “He is a walking hazard,” she says of her husband. “I’m surprised he hasn’t accidentally caused any of us physical harm yet. I can easily imagine him waving a knife around and impaling someone. I bet he’d find even that funny.”

  “He does see humor in everything, doesn’t he? I would love to have that attitude.”

  “You wouldn’t love to live with that attitude for fifty years.”

  Rose looks at Laura, surprised.

  “I probably shouldn’t have said that. Now I’ve ruined your mental image of a perfect marriage.” She smiles at Rose. “I didn’t mean that I don’t appreciate his sense of humor, of course. It was probably the reason I fell in love with him in high school. I just meant that it’s hard to live with someone who has such a different disposition than I do. But I guess all marriages are like that.”

  Laura’s words remind Rose of the first time she met her in-laws—in Egypt, when they arrived to attend her wedding. Jarred, all smiles and ringing laughter, squeezing Rose in a hug so tight it made her ribs hurt; Laura, giving her a firm handshake, looking at her with unabashed curiosity, with fixed, narrowed eyes that as much as spelled out her thoughts—So this is the woman who made my son leave his religion. Of course, Rose may have been imagining things, her guilt about Mark’s conversion mixed with his description of his religious upbringing imposing thoughts on her mother-in-law that she may not have entertained. Then again, Laura had not taken Mark’s conversion lightly, and Rose still does not blame her.

  “So what’s your secret to a successful marriage?” Rose asks her mother-in-law.

  “If I knew the answer to this question, I’d have put it in a book and become rich and famous.”

  Rose glances back at Mark. He is seated at the table again, listening to his father talk, a broad smile on his face.

  “Did Mark ever tell you about our dog Mandy?” Laura asks.

  “No.”

  Laura turns and points to a large oak standing at the end of the lawn. “She is buried under that tree. She was a rescue, a cute puppy that grew into a fairly obnoxious beast. Never friendly, hiding from everyone, scared of her own shadow. She fell ill one day when she was about seven years old and died a few days later. We buried her there, held a ceremony and everything. Emily and April both cried their eyes out, but Mark just stood to the side, totally silent. I didn’t think much of it—he rarely ever played with that dog anyway, and he was what—twelve, maybe?” She glances at her son, smiling. “That evening, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking I heard a sound. I stayed in bed for a while but couldn’t go back to sleep, so I walked around the house checking on the kids and saw that Mark was not in his bed.” In the kitchen, Biscuit barks, and Rose looks at her husband, who is holding a treat up high, teasing the dog before feeding him and petting him on the head. “I woke Jarred up and we searched the entire house—nothing. I was about ready to call the police, when Jarred stepped outside and found Mark in his sleeping bag, next to the dog’s grave, fast asleep. In the middle of the night, out in the backyard.” Laura pauses and looks at the oak again. Rose watches it, too, tries to imagine a young Mark lying down by its trunk.

  “Now, I’m as much of a country girl as anyone, but I still have great respect for the wildlife,” Laura continues. “We have everything here: bears, raccoons, even coyotes, sometimes. Naturally, I freaked out and ran outside and wanted to wake him up and take him indoors, but Jarred stopped me. Guess what he did?” She looks at Rose but does not wait for a reply. “He went to the garage, got his camping tent and his own sleeping bag, set up the tent around Mark as he slept—just a cover, of course, no ground cloth or anything—got in there with him, and they both slept through the night together by the dog’s grave.”

  Now Laura is watching her husband. He seems to be in the middle of telling a story, too, but his story has him agitated, his hands waving in the air until he drops one hand and pounds three times on the tabletop. Mark, Emily, and April, who is now standing next to her father, erupt in laughter again.

  “He does have the most contagious laugh I ever heard,” Laura says, smiling.

  Rose watches Mark. All that laughter has relaxed his face in a way she has not witnessed in a long time, and he now looks so much like the Mark she first saw in Egypt, all wide-eyed and joyful, that the association makes her nostalgic. Mark, perhaps sensing Rose’s prolonged examination of him, turns toward her. For a moment, he, Rose, and Laura silently observe one another, until Laura moves closer to Rose and wraps an arm around her shoulders, pulling her in, squeezing her tight.

  Laura’s embrace is as assertive as everything else about her. Rose feels she is fixed in place, anchored, contained with such protective force that before she can see it coming or stop herself, she starts to cry. Ma
rk walks up to her. Only when he has wrapped his arm around her, too, does Laura let go of Rose’s shoulders. With two quick taps on Rose’s back, Laura walks inside, leaving Mark and Rose alone on the deck.

  * * *

  —

  ROSE DOES NOT WEAR the peach dress. Instead, she chooses black slacks and a light gray top with minuscule blue flowers, form-fitting but not too tight, something she feels comfortable in. From her jewelry box, she pulls out the necklace Gameela gave her for her birthday years ago. The turquoise stone falls perfectly in the center of her V-neck. Rose watches it. She wonders if she ever told her in-laws the meaning of her original name—Fayrouz—but she can’t remember. For a few weeks now, she has been suffering from an onset of regret, often wishing she had not officially changed her name—she could have kept Fayrouz but gone by Rose—then reminding herself how much this would have complicated things, from her byline on her published research papers to her relationships with colleagues. She lifts her hand and adjusts the pendant. The gold wires wrapped around it remind her of Laura’s hug of the evening before.

  They are all gathered in the living room—all except Emily, who is on the phone with the caterer, giving him directions, pacing the narrow walkway cutting through the front lawn as she waits for the food delivery. Rose watches her through the living-room bay window. Yesterday’s rain has drenched the lawn, but the walkway is dry. Emily stands at the end of the footpath and looks out to her left, one hand holding the cell phone up to her ear, the other shielding her eyes from the sun.