Amreekiya

by Lena Mahmoud

  That day, they had all had a close relationship with her when she was alive.

  I slipped out and sat under a tree in the picnic area, crushing some of the dried leaves, mildly enjoying the slight pricks in my palm. Grandma found me out there and kneeled as far as she could to speak to me. She was reconciling with her husband. “I might as well,” she said, tearing up. She always wiped her tears daintily. “Who else will have me at my age? And I can’t live off alimony. I should just pack it in and face reality.” She wished me luck with my father, though she doubted he would be a good one. “I hope he doesn’t send you back to his country, but what can you do?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  They kept me in the hospital for another day for observation and told me what I had heard before: they didn’t know what had caused the two placental sacs to erupt, though having multiple babies at once can increase the chances. The doctor recommended regular visits to my obstetrician to study our case more closely. There were lots of fertility problems that they hadn’t been able to pinpoint or treat yet.

  Yusef drove us back to the house. We didn’t say anything the entire time. We had spent enough time sharing our feelings about our loss.

  Our bedroom wasn’t the same as we had left it. Khadija had come and put the cribs away for us; she even made the bed for us.

  “We’re doing this again,” he said, and sighed deeply.

  He went to all my doctor’s appointments with me. They did every possible test on me, ones to check for diabetes, high blood pressure, sexually transmitted diseases. My doctor questioned me minutely about whether I had been using tobacco or alcohol or drugs during my pregnancy. She even ordered an X-ray on my lungs to make sure I was not lying about smoking.

  That seemed to be a possibility that she couldn’t rule out, no matter how many times I denied it: I must have been smoking or drinking or using drugs. She asked me that same question in a thousand different ways. One of the times, she asked Yusef to step out of the room. She wheeled her chair close to me on the exam table and spoke softly. “I know maybe if you slipped, you wouldn’t want your husband to know. You’re young. Twenty-three. We all make mistakes.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  She took a breath. “Has your husband ever hit you, even early on in your pregnancy?”

  “No.”

  “Never, not even before your pregnancy?”

  “No.”

  She gave me a visual scan and found two old scars on my back, so yellowed you could barely see them. She asked me where they came from. The oldest was from Amu, one of the times he was punishing me, I couldn’t remember when. The other was from Motabel, who dropped a desk on my back when I yanked his balls to the floor. I blamed them both on Amu, though. It was easier.

  “Your father’s cousin didn’t hit you when you were pregnant?” she asked.

  “No.”

  When Yusef drove us back home from that appointment, he asked me what she wanted to know that she didn’t want him to know. “She asked me if I ever did drugs or drank during the pregnancy,” I said.

  His grip on the wheel was so tight his knuckles turned beige, and he shook his head slowly and scornfully. “She asked you four times before that. You know what, I’m not going to let that quack treat you like you’re some crack whore who does that shit while you know you’re pregnant.”

  So we went to another obstetrician for a second opinion. She said the same thing: all the correct tests had been done to identify the cause for the stillbirths of our children, and nothing indicated a reason for that event. She reminded us that multiple births often caused complications like this. “I see from your medical records that you were on birth control at the time you got pregnant,” she said.

  I nodded, a cold wind hitting my body.

  “Do you two plan to try again, or do you want a renewal of the prescription? I would not recommend trying so soon after a stillbirth.”

  Relieved, I realized we hadn’t talked about it. I didn’t think about it. We weren’t having sex. I was still bleeding so heavily that I would have dyed our sheets red if I lay down on them bottomless. Anyway, it felt like a truck had just come out of my vagina.

  Yusef had thought of it, though. “Is there any other method that’s more effective than the pill?” he asked. He looked over at me. “Just until you recover from this more, and we have more of an idea of why this happened so we don’t have to go through it again.”

  She lectured us about how we might never find the cause and how there was a statistically low chance of having another stillbirth, though that chance was higher for people like us than those that hadn’t experienced a stillbirth. She took a very condescending tone, and I could tell she was put off by Yusef’s presence.

  Yusef wasn’t any happier about hers. He sat back in the chair, impassively listening to her. “There is a statistically low chance of a healthy man and woman in their twenties having a miscarriage and a stillbirth in two years, but it happened to us, and if there’s any chance we can find out why this happened, we will look for the answers.”

  Her lips were pinched, and she pushed her glasses up. “Well, the pill is effective, but I suppose you could try and pair it with the use of condoms to have more security.”

  He had taken a week off from work, but he had to go back because finals were approaching. Though going to see doctors twice in that one week was depressing, it might have been the highlight. We stayed in bed late and rarely talked, and when we did, somehow it always reminded us of the twins, and one or both of us ended up crying. For two weeks I had to key myself up to get out of bed, drag myself to appointments with Yusef, and do the housework. I would wake up crying most days, the quiet, heart-pinching tears I wouldn’t let him see. After those first couple of weeks, I did my best to keep myself busy. I cleaned the garage, rearranged the hall closet, and shampooed the carpets. I needed to find some work, not just to occupy my time but for the money. My medical bills were getting hefty. I had quit my job to stay home with the babies, figuring I could at least give them a couple of years. Even Mom stayed home until I was two; she and Baba were still together. Look what it got her. Look what it got me.

  Yusef took it more stoically, but he concentrated on preparing for the end of the semester and keeping himself busy in any way he could. “I need to find a tenure-track position,” he said. “Enough of this slaving away for these fucking places.” He was also on a mission to find the cause of the stillbirth and miscarriage before he would take another chance on my womb. He talked to colleagues, old professors, doctors he knew. No one had any answers.

  Hanan and Sana visited often, and Yusef’s family came by almost every day with food, so I was expecting one of them when the doorbell rang in the middle of the day.

  But it was Amu. He hadn’t visited me since I married Yusef. He was wearing his long black overcoat that he had made me press meticulously for years. Like a spot of sunlight in the middle of my sorrow, I thought about how glad I was that I didn’t still have to live with him.

  I reluctantly invited him in. He went right to one of our chairs and made himself comfortable. “I’m so very sorry for what you and your husband have lost,” he said. “Is Yusef home?”

  I shook my head. “He’s working.” I took a seat on the couch, close enough to him but still keeping my distance.

  “You must have many troubles in your life right now,” he said. He reached into his big pocket and took out his checkbook and filled out a check.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. He handed me the check: $3,000. “You and Yusef are a young couple, and I know this must be a great blow for your expenses as well as your hearts,” he said. “Take it. Even if Yusef does not want to take it, I want you to keep it and use it for whatever you need.” If Amtu Samia’s father had tried to pull this—giving her money, trying to suggest that Amu couldn’t handle their expenses—he would have hit the roof. I handed it back.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “We’re fine.” I had to use some of th
e money I had earned from working before, the money Yusef didn’t want me using, but I didn’t want us to be in debt forever.

  “Don’t be ashamed. You are like a daughter to me. You helped Samia with her responsibilities and cared for Hanan. You have done much for me. Take this.”

  I was more baffled by what he said than the money he was trying to give me. A daughter. I had never been a daughter to a man, and I hadn’t been a daughter to a woman in a decade and a half. But it was too late to make much of a difference. He never said those things while I lived with him. I supposed this year and a half without me showed even him all that I’d been doing for his family with no thanks.

  I took the check.

  Because of Abu Yusef’s health problems, Imm Yusef cooked steamed vegetables and poached chicken breast when she had us over for dinner. Though it was bland, she kept trying to spoon more food on our plates, especially Yusef’s. He knew what kind of food she had to make now, and he always ate before he left our house. “No, Mama, I’m fine. I don’t have a big appetite.”

  She tilted her head in concern. “Habibi, you are becoming so very skinny now,” she said. “Wallah there is nothing more sad than the death of children, but you must survive.” She turned to me and asked me about our eating habits. She noticed that I was losing weight as well, very rapidly. Yusef ate enough, from what I saw. He ate breakfast with me, and he ate the plate I saved him from dinner. He stopped working out, though, and seemed to be losing all the muscle mass he’d worked months to gain. I had lost fifteen pounds in the five weeks since I was discharged from the hospital, the first time I had ever lost a significant amount of weight without trying. My gynecologist said it was probably because the weight I had gained was for my pregnancy, and now that I didn’t need it, my body knew to shed it. I thought it was more likely that most of the time I would be so absorbed in cleaning something or reading that I would notice at seven in the evening that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and I would prepare a late dinner for Yusef before I went to bed. This was unfathomable for me before, the idea of starving myself by choice, but it didn’t feel that way. I didn’t feel hunger pangs.

  Abu Yusef was the one whose appearance was alarming. He was paler and more haggard than when I had seen him a week ago, and halfway through dinner he was exhausted and wanted to lie down. Imm Yusef took him to bed and talked to him for a while before she came back out to tell us, “You both are young. You will have many children. Do not be too much sad for what has happened.”

  “We’re not having children soon,” Yusef said calmly. “We’re waiting, trying to see if we can find out what’s wrong.”

  She nearly collapsed into her chair, her hand on her heart. “What, Yusef? This makes me almost as sad as when you lose your children.”

  “This is what’s best for us now, and Isra agrees with me, so that’s what we’re doing,” he told her.

  “Isra, you want this, too? This is crazy. You cannot do this.”

  “I can’t stand to lose any more children, Mama!”

  We left early that night. Another first. The whole car ride back he ranted about his mother. “You know why I told her? Why? Because I know that she’ll be fucking relentless until you get pregnant again, and I want her to know I don’t want it to happen. Not now, but she wants it right away.” His eyes had a strange intensity that made them a paler green these days.

  He had more to say when we got home and were getting ready for bed. When I lay down, I wanted to tell him to come to bed and cut his mother some slack, but it was better to let him blow off steam. He was so irate that he went on while he was undressing. “She’s done this my whole life, put all these expectations on me. ‘Yusef habibi, I want you to be doctor or engineer, we come to this country for that.’ ‘Ibnee, I want you to marry and have many sons to make your father and I habby.’” That last one really set him off. He pulled up his pajama bottoms. “I don’t know why that burden’s gotta be so heavy on my shoulders. Maybe I’m not able to do it. I’m not man enough for it.” I heard his voice break. “Look at my sisters’ husbands: they’re doing plenty good having children, even Lubna’s shitty husband. Maybe they’re better than me.”

  He was crying at the foot of the bed. I put my arms around his waist. “You’re a way better man than those guys,” I said. “It doesn’t say anything about how good a man you are, having a child.” Just look at my father. He had at least one surviving child. “Anyway, it could be me, too. It’s likely it was me.”

  “Baba’s going to die, Isra. I know it.” He sniffled and sat up straight. “I spent my whole life not wanting to be like my father. I was going to have more than a shitty store my wife practically ran by herself. The whole time I just put him down in my mind, and now I don’t know what I’ll do if he dies. That’s what I get for being such an ungrateful son. I won’t get to one-up my father. I won’t even get to be a father.” His eyes now dark, distant.

  I was at a loss for words. “Yusi, your mother thinks it’s the end of the world if we don’t try now, but she’s too … She doesn’t get it, I know, but she cares.”

  His eyes were so blank I wasn’t even sure he was listening to me, just looking past me. His full lower lip trembled. “But I want to be a father, Isra. I want to be one right now,” he said quietly. “I don’t know how our grandparents could stand to see their own children die and suffer, but I … I can’t do it. I can’t lose one more thing. I loved them so much, and I didn’t even get to hold them until they were dead.”

  I told him we needed time to get through this, and there was nothing wrong with taking that time, if that’s what we needed right now. But I was speaking like a detached third party, and I didn’t believe the words that came from my mouth.

  I slept more than six hours that night, the most I had in one interval since we lost the babies. Yusef was snoring on top of my breasts, holding on to my belly when I woke up. I gently nudged him off me and went to the kitchen. The rest must have made me hungry, because my stomach was growling right from when I woke up, so I decided to start breakfast. I took out three pots and boiled a couple of potatoes and fava beans while I washed up and kept myself from crying. I had to get over this. I couldn’t wallow in it.

  He woke up while I was mixing tahini into the fava beans. “The noise woke you?” I was trying to be quiet. He needed to catch up on his sleep.

  “The smell did.” He walked over to the bowl and tasted some ful from his finger. He kissed my cheek and said I spoiled him. “I guess you’re feeling better today.” Lately he’d been telling me just to stay in bed for breakfast and relax while he made bowls of cereal for us.

  “Yeah. I am.”

  We ate quietly. He kept his arm on the back of my chair once he was finished eating. He took a long gulp of guava juice from the bottle, finishing it off. “Is this our last bottle?”

  I nodded. “I should stop by your parents’ store and get some today.” We still called it his parents’ store, though Khadija had basically taken it over and had her older sons doing most of the labor.

  He stared at the wall. “You drank it so much when you were pregnant,” he said with a sad smile.

  I squeezed his hand and sighed. He leaned closer and kissed me hard. I tasted the guava on his lips and his mouth. His back was warm and strong, and he held me tight. We both could barely catch our breath, but breathing didn’t seem important at that moment. I was already wet, and I put my legs in his lap, used them as leverage to push myself up on top of him. He was hard. I wasn’t on contraceptives yet. We might have had some old condoms in our bedroom.

  He pulled away from me, panting. He moved me back to my chair and held my face in his hands. “Isreenie, you don’t know how much I want this, but …”

  I stopped by his parents’ store after he went to work. His nephew Muhammad was stocking one of the refrigerators right in front of the door. He looked up and smiled at me. “Isra!” He stood, his arms full of cheese and yogurt containers. A couple of them spilled over onto the floor,
and he put the rest of them down in the box to pick up his mess.

  Khadija came from the storeroom, tying her hijab in the front. “‘Isra’? This is your uncle’s wife, and she is older than you, show some respect. ‘Khaltu Isra,’ at least. Auntie Isra.” She stopped glaring when she gave me a hug. “How are you feeling?” She looked up at me with pity in her eyes.

  I shrugged. “I’m fine. We’re fine.”

  “Is there something you need?”

  “I just came to pick up some of the guava juice.”

  She nodded. “Today we just got a lot of cases. Take a case.”

  “We only need a few bottles.”

  She brushed that off with the wave of her hand. “It’s no problem. You can have a year’s supply if you want, and it won’t go bad in the cupboard.”

  “I can take the box out to your car,” Muhammad offered. “It’s heavy.”

  Khadija shot another suspicious look at her son. “Be polite,” she said. Everyone could tell he had a crush on me. Sana heard through the grapevine that Yusef’s middle sister Fatima attributed it to how provocatively I dressed. “She’s just way uglier, so she thinks that makes her more modest,” Sana said. “Her ass is huge, and not in the attractive ‘Bubble Butt’ way.” If Yusef’s crush was embarrassing back when I was a teenager, Muhammad’s was painfully so. My being married made it much juicier for people to talk about.

  I was surprised he was still interested. I was still ten pounds heavier, with a stretched-out stomach that would never snap back, frizzy hair I didn’t care to fix, and dark circles under my eyes. “I can take it out,” I said.

  Khadija waved her hand again. “No, let him. He will be a good boy. I’ll get you a bag of some other things to take home.” She took me aside. “You know how teenage boys are. His father and I have talked to him a thousand times. It is … innocent, I think.”

  He followed me out to my car with the heavy box. I kept a bit ahead of him. “My uncle is a lucky man,” he said.