I blinked. For a second the screen was dark. Then a string of light appeared, highlighting Europe and North America. The lights flickered. Some faded. Others burned. The Earth cracked. The special effects were cheesy. But the low production value aside, they were no less chilling.
“Evil thrives if we do nothing.”
Another fade to darkness, and the pretty lady reappeared: anxious, stricken. In need of a savior?
* * *
—
I was the last family member to enter the partitioned little area in the ICU: section 43C. The reports I’d heard from my family were consistent, at least: Titi was sound asleep and needed her rest. The nurse who’d escorted us from the waiting room confirmed them. She was competent, a professional—she wore scrubs and carried a clipboard. Not to mention that she was the one who’d advised us to go in slowly and quietly in case Titi was still sleeping. Mom went in first with Hala and Yasmin. I waited in the hallway for a second, bracing myself. I desperately wanted to hug Titi but was still gripped by the all-consuming fear that her being here was 100 percent my fault. I twisted my ring.
“Don’t worry, darling,” the nurse whispered. “Your granny is strong. I saw it in her eyes. She’s going to be home in a few more days, you’ll see.” She slipped her pen over her plastic ID card, dangling from a chain. Lower-self Salma found her annoyingly chatty. But then I chastised myself. She was only trying to comfort me.
“Thanks,” I said.
Mom and the girls returned to the hallway. Their eyes glistened with tears. “It looks worse than it is, Salma,” Mom said. “We’re going to get some cocoa in the cafeteria.” She glanced at her wrist. “It should be open by now.”
I nodded. My throat had clogged, making speech impossible.
“Go on,” she said, patting my back. “Your turn.”
I entered slowly, pausing before the curtain. I’ve been on the other side of that curtain many times over, but not like this. Not as a visitor. I was afraid, too. Afraid of what I’d see. Afraid of losing Titi. Because if that happened, I’d—
“Salma, is that you?”
Dad’s voice.
“It’s okay, pumpkin. Come on in.”
I pushed aside the curtain. Dad sat beside the bed, clutching her hand. His face lit up when he saw me, though his cheeks were damp, too. Titi was motionless. A wide ventilator covered her mouth; several more slim tubes and wires connected her tiny, frail body to an assortment of fancy machines, all beeping and pulsing with different rhythms. Her eyes were closed, eyes that could brighten the room with a single wink. Would they ever open again?
Before I knew it, Dad had swept me up in a great big hug.
“Shhhh…Habibti, it’s fine. She’s going to be just fine.”
I wanted to ban that word—fine—from existence. I sniffed, willing myself not to cry (failing), and stepped away from him. “It’s all my fault, Dad.”
“What?” he said. He wiped a stray tear from my cheek. “Nonsense. This is no one’s fault—”
“But it isn’t,” I interrupted. “You know how Titi wakes up sometimes for tahajjud and prays over our beds?”
“I know, yes,” said Dad, his puzzled eyes searching my face.
“I—wasn’t there,” I stammered. “I snuck out, Dad, to meet Amir,” I finally blurted, avoiding Dad’s eyes. “So what if instead of finding me in my bed, she found me missing? After Hala and Yasmin and everything else, it must have given her a shock….But, Dad, Amir never showed.”
I finally looked up. I stared into Dad’s eyes, expecting him to lose it, to come down hard on me for breaking a gazillion rules. I was about to tell him about the cops, how Mr. Ammouri had been arrested, about everything and anything else when Dad put up his hand, telling me to quiet down.
“Honey, Titi is old. And she’s always struggled with high blood pressure. This is not your fault. And about the rest, we’ll talk later,” he said, kneeling by Titi’s side.
She began to stir. She winced, then tossed her head from side to side. She wasn’t conscious, though. After a moment, her body relaxed and her breathing became even under the ventilator. Even so, something wasn’t right.
“We will talk about this later,” he repeated, his voice grave. “The only thing that matters right now is this family. Your family,” he stressed. He left the room to find the nurse. She immediately came back into the room and checked all the various machines Titi was hooked up to. She turned to my father and smiled. “Don’t worry, sir, she’s doing just fine. I’ve adjusted her meds to keep her a little more comfortable.”
Just then Mom and the girls entered the room.
“The cafeteria isn’t open yet,” said Mom.
Still in their pajamas, my sisters looked befuddled, exhausted. So did Mom. A sudden faint light appeared on her face, like she had just remembered something. She reached into her purse and handed a small bag over to Dad. It had gold writing on it, in Arabic.
“You remembered?” he said.
She nodded. “Of course.”
I didn’t recognize the bag until Dad opened it up, revealing a small jug. It contained Zamzam water, holy water from the well in Mecca. Mom and Dad had saved it from their long-ago hajj trip. “Good,” he said. “Let’s say a prayer, shall we?”
“But…” My voice petered out. Dad motioned us to step closer.
My sisters huddled around me. We stood over Titi. I felt as if I’d suddenly split in half, as if two entities were now watching each other—Salma Detached and Salma Dihya—wary and at odds. Present and absent. Part of me missing, alongside Amir.
My father recited a Shadhiliyya prayer. The rest of us followed his lead through the Quranic verses. He ended by passing around the sacred water from Mecca, sprinkling some over Titi.
Only then did I feel present. And even though Titi was totally out, something was different. It was too subtle to touch, but too real to miss. And it wasn’t my head voice or my delusions or my weariness. To this day, I’ll swear it: She looked more peaceful. Our love and the barakah-fied water had brought her joy.
* * *
—
It soon became apparent that neither of my sisters was going to last another minute. Everyone needed sleep. Mom and Dad switched car keys so Dad could have his Bolt back, then we said goodbye and headed home. Dad stayed behind, by Titi’s side.
Mom was quiet the entire ride. She only spoke once, at the entrance to Mason Terrace. “Someday soon we’ll discuss what you were doing last night. But now is not the time. I need to sleep. Your sisters need to sleep.” She pulled the car into our driveway and glanced back at my sisters. “Can you get Hala while I get Yasmin?”
I nodded and did as told. Once the girls were in bed, Mom collapsed onto hers, leaving me to myself. I grabbed Thomas and headed to my basement cave.
After lying in my bed for a while, I realized I had entered that hinterland where exhaustion and restlessness are one and the same. My heart squeezed for Titi. It ached for Amir. And every time I closed my eyes, the man in the ski mask glared back at me, reminding me of that YouTube video and Earth imploding and Kate Turner’s tears and Debbie’s scary-ass warning about “what’s to come.” It was too much. Sleep was unreachable.
And then came Dad’s photo texts, three in a row, all Titi in bed. Awake. Giving a thumbs-up. Waving. By the fourth text, the doctors had successfully removed her breathing tube. She was up and smiling, her entire arm wrapped around Dad. I quickly snapped a selfie in return—with Thom, using his big ears to hide my face. I didn’t want her to see me…like this. For the first time in a long while, I truly wanted to bring her joy.
The exchange did the trick, at least. I was able to close my eyes and finally conk out.
SOMETHING WAS BUZZING in my bed. It took several bleary-eyed seconds to understand that it was my phone, lost between the sheets. I was groggy, in a stupor.
My eyelids started to close. The melatonin Mom forced me to take last night because I was so anxious was doing a number on me.
Again. My phone buzzed.
Its soft glare was too bright in the darkness of my room, so I snatched it up and squinted at the screen: 5:02 a.m. All I wanted was to throw the soul-sucker against the wall, smash the thing into a gazillion pieces. That and to wake up to a different world—one in which everything that had transpired over the last twenty-four hours was nothing but a bad dream, like my sisters’ favorite movie, Freaky Friday. What day was it, anyway? I remembered coming home and crashing. I remembered Mom waking me up and forcing me to have dinner, then taking a hard look at my gaunt face and forcing me to return to bed. Hence the melatonin. “I can’t have you getting run-down, too,” she said, tucking me in.
So what day was it now? And where the hell was my sweet Amir?
Phone check: it was Monday, May 19.
I sat up. I had several missed calls from an unknown number and now a text from a second unknown caller. I read the text. It came from a number that made no sense—it was too long to fit on my phone and began with 001971 and ended with eight or so more digits. What was this? I read the cryptic text:
nedruDrelyTmorf.
Now I was wide awake. And I was scared shitless. Who had called me? Who’d texted me? Was it a message from the Mr. Gun-Toting Ski Mask? Was it from one of the Kyles? I kept studying it. It didn’t look like encryption. It looked like nonsense. Which might mean that someone who didn’t know a thing about coding could have sent it…someone, say, like Amir. I squashed the flicker of hope. I forced Salma Detached to take charge. I turned on my bedside lamp and grabbed a pen. Since the message made zero sense at face value, I would try various permutations.
First: backward letter by letter. f-r-o-m-T-y-l-e-r…Holy Sherlock.
Well, that was easy. In an instant the grouchiness turned to elation. Who else would contact me as Tyler Durden? I wasn’t that crazy. Not yet. I pressed the number to call him back, but couldn’t. It went straight to a recording, something about how I couldn’t dial internationally on my current plan.
Where are you, my prince?
I probably shouldn’t call Amir back from my cellphone anyway. I copied down the number on my sticky pad and then deleted all traces of it from my phone. After that, I threw the covers aside. Mom and the girls were sound asleep, so I left a note. It was the least I could do for stealing one of their cars again. There was a 7-Eleven just two blocks away. I pulled away in the clunky minivan intent on calling Amir. All consequences on the table.
* * *
—
“A FIGO Orbit, please?”
The clerk looked at me for a long time. He said nothing. I repeated my request, wondering if he had a hearing issue. Or if I had simply spoken too fast. “That one,” I said, pointing to the nearest phone. Guess he wasn’t used to teenage girls rushing into his store at five a.m. and asking for a burner. I handed over the bulk of the cash Mom and Dad had paid me for babysitting Yasmin and Hala.
A few minutes later I was standing outside. My fingers shook as I punched the digits scrawled on my crumpled Post-it. At long last, I heard a bzzzt-bzzzt, then a crackle.
“Hello? Salma?”
A tsunami of joy coursed through my body. “Amir…Amir. What’s going on? Are you okay? Where are you?”
“I’m in—” I lost the rest. He was barely audible.
“Amir!” I shouted. “Mouth to receiver. I can’t hear.” I cranked the volume as far as it would go.
“Dubai. I’m in Dubai.”
“What?”
“DUBAI.”
I’d heard him the first time, actually. Unbelievable. Dubai had stolen my soul sister; now it had stolen my boyfriend. I felt myself sinking—literally: I slid down against 7-Eleven’s storefront window and plopped on the dirty sidewalk. Right next to the trash can. Whatever. There was so much I wanted to say, to ask. Instead I started bawling.
“Hey, look…I’m okay, really. Please, shhhh,” Amir begged. “Don’t.”
I couldn’t help myself. The two people closest to me outside my family had ended up in the same place, halfway around the world. And here I was alone, at the butt crack of dawn, sitting beside a stinking heap of trash. Waiting for the Crusaders to finish their five-hundred-year war for this very land. It was tragic and fitting and symbolic and just plain gross—on all sorts of levels.
“Salma, just look at the sky, please? We can see the same sky, remember?”
Fine. I sniffed and looked up. The sun was up now.
He started to hum “No Woman, No Cry.” His voice, naturally low and earthy, cracked when he tried to hit the higher notes. Unlike his previous rendition, this was downright awful. I laughed and wiped my eyes. “Okay, okay. I’m here. But I don’t get it, Amir. Why didn’t you reach out? My world is upside down and Titi’s in the hospital and—”
“What? When? Why? What happened?”
“She had a stroke.” As I blurted out the words, more tears came streaming down.
“Shh…love, it’s all right. She’ll be all right. Titi’s crazy strong. And I did, Salma. I tried to reach out.” He stopped, drew in a sharp breath. Like he was about cry.
“Through Epstein,” Amir continued. “His house is on the way to the airport. I left him instructions in his mailbox. I tried. Salma, I really did. It was brutal. Leaving without you. But I had to—to keep you safe.”
I exhaled. “Okay, go on,” I said. “Tell me what happened. I need to hear this.”
Amir spoke in a rush. “So I was with Mr. Epstein at the Black Box, right? And literally right after I got off the phone, I practically bumped into Kyle Jr. He was coming into the bathroom as I was leaving. I asked him what he was doing there. He told me he loved the band Mr. Epstein loved, that Mr. Epstein told him to check them out, too…and he was heading home soon, but he acted all surprised that I was there…said he didn’t see my Jetta. I didn’t think much of any of it—not even him sort of following me out of the club after I left, I just thought it was a nervous-white-boy-walking-late-in-DC sort of thing. Anyway, I was on my way to meet you but I needed gas. That’s when I realized that Kyle wasn’t heading home at all. He was following me. I knew it was him because of the bumper stickers. He parked at the 7-Eleven on Washington Boulevard, next to the Shell station.”
My chest tightened. The 7-Eleven on Washington Boulevard was exactly where I happened to be standing at this exact moment. I glanced to my right at the Shell station, envisioning the story as it unfolded on the other end of my burner.
“He was sitting in his truck, window down, talking on the phone,” Amir went on. “I decided to go and listen. Your paranoia was starting to rub off on me. So I left my car at the pump and pretended to go inside to the Mini-Mart, then I went out the back and snuck up on him from behind. He was on the phone with his dad….Hang on a minute, it’s—here. I wrote it down. Uh, let’s see. He was arguing with his dad, reassuring him that he had his eye on me. Asshole. Serves him right that I was hiding behind his truck with my eye on him. Anyway, he mentioned you, that you weren’t there, something about Podrasky Eight-Eight and a clown. No. A clone. I think. I’m not sure, his truck was insanely loud…but Kyle Jr. made it very clear to his father that he had his eyes on the both of us.”
Amir kept talking, but I no longer heard him. Podrasky Eight-Eight? That must have been Pulaski88. Suddenly I’d been plunged into a new abyss, another whirlwind of unanswerable questions. How did Kyle know about my Dark Web friend? Not even Amir knew about him. Was Kyle “the heat” that Pulaski88 had mentioned?
“Salma?” Amir asked. “Can you hear me? The line is fuzzy.”
“Yeah, sorry—go on. I’m listening.”
“Anyway, he said he’d call his dad when I was close to home. But what he said after that, that’s when things got r
eally creepy.” Amir paused as though he was remembering Kyle’s face. I could hear his breathing; it was labored. “He said our last names.”
Our last names. I stared across the street at the empty gas station. Part of me didn’t want to hear any more. My own definition of strange had changed so much these last few weeks that change itself was the only constant. Everything fit into a catchall phrase: strange and getting stranger.
“Kyle was straight-up bragging to his dad. ‘See how easy it is to pin it on Bakkioui and Ammouri? The third, and this? But first that Ammouri boy. First him. We’ll deal with her during phase two.’ Then he told his dad not to worry, that he had his sights on me and would leave the package in my car as soon as I got home. He said that last part a few times.” Amir paused, catching his breath.
I pulled my knees close to my chest. My head ached with confusion. The third? The bombings? The Turners did that?
Amir drew in another long breath. “It was that last part that scared me. So I ran to the Jetta. That’s when I finally read all of your WhatsApp messages. I was in the middle of responding to you when my father called. He told me that the cops were there. He was really panicking. And it wasn’t just a knee-jerk reaction because he grew up in Syria where everyone fears the cops, especially the mukhabarat….No. It was Ummi’s work with PANDA.”
Amir paused.
I stared at the red and yellow neon lights that lit up the word Shell. I had totally forgotten that Mrs. Ammouri volunteered for PANDA, a nonprofit. When Amir and I first started dating, I thought the organization had something to do with the adorable Asian cuddle bear; turns out it’s a civil rights watchdog. The first time my parents met his parents, they had a long discussion about politics, the Japanese American internment camps, and the post-9/11 War on Terror. Apparently our government can label people enemy belligerents and detain them indefinitely, so they could disappear overnight and their families would have no idea where they were. And there were recent laws, based on older precedents, that made this all legal.
No True Believers Page 18