Silverworld

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “C’mon, we can talk later.” She held the door open.

  In the waiting area, the receptionist lifted a narrow black eyebrow when neither Sami nor Tony had any identification. She tapped and tapped, searching for Serafina Alattar, then finally pointed at her screen. “They’re just moving her in now. But I can’t admit kids without a guardian or some kind of ID.”

  Sami pleaded, “I just got back from a long trip, and I’m super worried about her. My grandmother hasn’t been feeling well, and I know it would make a huge, huge difference to her if she could just see her grandkids.”

  The receptionist looked sternly at Tony, who half nodded and mumbled, “Um, yeah. Yeah, that’s totally right.”

  “Grandkids?” Again, she lifted one pointed eyebrow, then sighed. “Let me call the room.” Holding the phone propped between her ear and shoulder, the woman clicked long, crimson-painted nails on the counter. She tapped her pencil several times more, then put the phone down. “No one’s picking up. She’s probably not done checking in. Why don’t you go home and wait there? I’m sure your mom will be able to bring you by later.”

  “No!” Sami shouted, then she felt Tony’s hand on her shoulder. “I—I mean, I’m sorry. But we just bicycled here from our house. It’s all the way on the other side of town. It took us, like, forty minutes. Almost an hour. We’re so tired and we had to dodge all this traffic! Besides, we’re just super anxious to see our grandma—it would mean so much to us.” Sami made her eyes as wide as she could.

  The woman’s deep green gaze met Sami’s for a moment before lowering. Sami noticed a little silver mermaid pinned to the lapel of the woman’s blazer. “Oh, I love your pin,” Sami blurted. “Mermaids are so cool!”

  “Oh yes,” the woman said with a tiny smile, then frowned, suspicious. On an impulse, Sami tried sending a thought to the woman: Please, please—you’ve got to help us.

  Something seemed to flicker across the receptionist’s face: she blinked. Then shook her head and said, “Well, I must be out of my mind. Come on, while there’s no one around. I guess it can’t hurt to just go take a peek.”

  They walked through a window-lined atrium crowded with jungle-green ferns and waxy flowers. By a potted palm, a woman with flyaway white hair patted a curved leaf as if it were a friend’s hand. The other end of the atrium opened to a long corridor of rooms. A few doors creaked as they walked by and some residents peered out, their lined faces studying Sami and Tony. At the end of the hallway, there was a small heap of suitcases and books. The receptionist stopped, tugged her blazer down, and knocked on the open door. “Hi, hi, anyone home?” she sang. “We’ve got a little surprise for you.”

  The room had a set of French doors that looked out over a garden and the walls were painted a soft watery blue. Sami’s mother was hanging up dresses from an open suitcase and Ivory was either trying to hand a teacup to Teta or take it away. Sami’s grandmother was sitting hunched, nearly swallowed up by an oversized armchair in the corner. Her eyes looked enormous in her shrunken face and the knuckles stood out in her fingers as she gripped the armrests. When Sami and Tony walked in, she stared at them blankly, mute and frightened. Sami could see her grandmother had absolutely no idea who they were.

  “Teta!” Sami ran to her grandmother, threw her arms around her, and gave her three fluttering kisses on each cheek—just the way Teta had taught her to do when Sami was a little girl. It was their special kiss. But now Teta just seemed to be confused by it.

  “Sami—Tony! How on earth did you two get here?” Her mother held a dress and hanger in each hand. Her eyes looked red.

  “Yes, and what exactly do you think you’re doing here?” Ivory put a fist on one hip. “We’re trying to get your grandmother settled in—with as little upset and disruption as possible.”

  “You mean you wanted to sneak her in here,” Sami responded coolly.

  “Ah, I’ll be going now.” The receptionist ducked her head and backed out quickly, pulling the door shut.

  “Samara!” her mother snapped. “Apologize to your aunt this instant.”

  “All right, fine. I’m sorry, Aunt Ivory,” she recited. “I shouldn’t have been rude. But, Mom, please—please—just wait a minute. You don’t know the whole story.” She swiveled back to her grandmother. “It’s okay now, Teta—you can talk again! It’s safe to come out. I know what you did—how you were scrambling up your words, trying to protect Ashrafieh. But you don’t have to do it any longer—Silverworld is safe. The Nixie, she’s gone for good.” Sami was about to say a mermaid ate her, but she glanced up and noticed Ivory, her mother, and Tony gaping at her.

  “Sami, please,” her mother said in a too gentle voice. “This isn’t the time for Teta’s fairy stories. You’ve got to accept the facts. Your grandmother isn’t well. In fact, she hasn’t spoken at all since last night—” Alia broke off, her voice cracking slightly, and Sami realized with a shock that her cool, strong mother was on the verge of tears. “This isn’t easy for any of us, believe me. But we’ve decided to go with this facility because—well, I’m afraid for her! And I think they’ll give her the sort of care she really needs.”

  Sami ignored the fearful dropping sensation she felt in her stomach. Instead, she turned briskly toward her grandmother. “Teta, do you hear what my mom is saying? She doesn’t think you should be at home—with us. Don’t you have anything to say to that?”

  Her grandmother’s face was a complete blank. Sami wanted to shake her, stamp her feet, shout WAKE UP as loud as she could. But she realized nothing like that would really work. Fighting off her own tears, Sami remembered how, when something was difficult, Dorsom told her to make her mind quiet. She closed her eyes and squeezed Teta’s hands as she thought as hard as she could: Please, please come back. I know you’re in there.

  Sami opened her eyes. There was a long, awful moment of silence. Alia sighed. Finally, Teta’s lips parted, but she produced only a tiny, grating sound, as if her voice no longer worked at all. Sami’s heart dipped. She heard Ivory saying quietly, “We really should finish moving her in now. She’s probably pretty tired out.”

  “No, you’re right,” Alia said. “It was a long morning.”

  “Everything look okay in here?” An orderly in a white jumpsuit appeared in the door, startling Sami. He had warm brown eyes and a kind smile. Sami noticed his nameplate said DORSEY. “Can I help with anything?”

  “Oh, we’re fine—just sorting some things out—” Ivory started to send him away.

  “Merci…Dorsey,” a voice interrupted from behind Sami. The sound was small and hesitant, yet quite clear. “But that…won’t be necessary.”

  A hesitant smile broke across Sami’s face as she turned around. Teta was sitting straight up with her arms crossed over her plump chest, her chin raised. The bells of her sleeves fell back, revealing the rows of faded, lacy tribal tattoos along the backs of her arms and circling her fingers. “Almost…two years…without putting…two words together. You’d think…I’d get a few seconds…to start speaking again.”

  “Mother?” Alia’s eyes were wide and her lip trembled. “Ummi?”

  Teta smiled wryly. “Yes…daughter. I’m right here.”

  Alia said something in Arabic that Teta answered in Arabic, and Sami realized she’d somehow understood.

  Alia had said, This must be a dream.

  Teta had answered, Not at all, my daughter….You’re wide awake.

  Then she held open her arms and Alia lowered herself into them with a sob. “I don’t understand,” she cried. “How is this possible?”

  Teta faced Sami, her eyes wet. “It was my granddaughter over there….She understood…that…I was in prison. She kept trying…struggling…until she freed me.”

  Shaking her head, Alia held both her mother’s hands in her own. “But we saw doctors, speech therapists, psychologists! Dozens of tests and assess
ments. No one knew what was wrong with you. You mean to tell me that Sami could figure out something that none of the experts could?”

  “Experts!” Teta tossed her head. She seemed to be growing stronger by the moment. “None of them…cared about me…the way Sami did. None of them had the key….But Sami worked on it. She wouldn’t give up…even when everyone else said I’d never learn to speak again.” She gave Ivory a significant look, and Sami’s aunt turned away, scowling, her face reddening. “The only reason…I’m here talking my foolish head off right now…is because my granddaughter freed me.”

  “But—but—what key?” Alia’s face swung from Sami to Teta and back again. “I don’t understand. What did you do?”

  Sami opened her palms as if to show she didn’t hold any magic tricks. “We worked on it together, me and Teta, step by step. At first, I thought Teta was sick or something was, like, broken in her body. But then I realized she was fine—that it was more, like, a decision she made, in her head. She didn’t think it was safe to talk—not out loud, not even in her thoughts.”

  “A…decision?” Alia looked so baffled, Sami decided to take a different approach.

  She laced her fingers together, saying, “Maybe, even, it was sort of like the way I felt about moving to Florida? Okay, I know that sounds weird, but wait. It was like, I used to tell myself there wasn’t anything good here—that I could never love it like New York or feel like it was home home, or whatever. I didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t help it. I needed time to find out that it really was okay here too. Like, sort of to let myself be happy here? So, it’s like once Teta felt like everything was safe, I knew she would start talking again.”

  Ivory stared at Sami, incredulous. “You mean—all that time—your grandmother could have spoken?”

  Teta cut in with her delicate smile. “Physically, yes. But it wasn’t a choice—there were people I had to protect. I couldn’t even think about them.”

  “People? In Lebanon, you mean? Memories from the war?” Alia asked softly.

  “In both worlds,” Teta said, and raised her eyebrows at Sami.

  “So you pushed them away. Suppressed everything…” Alia shook her head. “I’ve heard of people doing that. I mean, after Joe died, I couldn’t even—” Her voice trembled. Sami held her breath, gazing at her mother—it was the first time in ages she’d heard her say Sami’s father’s name. “Oh, I just miss him, that’s all.” Alia smiled then and pushed a stray hair behind Sami’s ear. “Still, it’s amazing. Really, for you to be speaking again? To reverse all of that silence, after so long? I can hardly believe any of it.”

  Sami knew her mother’s powerful litigator’s mind was at work—smart and skeptical, filled with questions and interrogations. In the long run, Sami knew, Alia wouldn’t be satisfied with this answer. She would have to tell her the whole truth someday. And she did want to explain Silverworld to her mother, she realized, but not just yet.

  Still, at that moment, all her mistrust seemed to subside. Alia laughed and hugged her daughter. “Oh, who cares! Your teta is talking again. It’s a true miracle is what it is. Explain it to me or don’t explain it to me. I don’t think I’ll ever understand what happened in a million years.”

  The orderly in the doorway cleared his throat discreetly and said, “So, will you all be needing help packing everything back up again?”

  Sami smiled at him and nodded. “Teta is coming home.”

  That night, as she changed into her pajamas, Sami glanced at the mirror at the foot of her bed, its silver frame like the curling white waves on the ocean. Tonight, the glass was calm and silent—nothing called to her from within its center, and Sami wondered if anything ever would again. She tossed her clothes into the hamper with a sigh, catching a last faint whiff of the airy Silverworld ocean on her T-shirt. Good night, Dorsom, she thought, looking again at the silvery mirror.

  A few minutes earlier, she’d said good night to both her mother and grandmother, who were sitting together in the living room, laughing and sighing, catching up with each other, talking like two people who’d been separated for a couple of years. Which, Sami supposed, they kind of were.

  Now she could just make out their voices through her bedroom wall. Her bedsheets were cool and delicious as she stretched out, enjoying how good it felt to be home again. Really and truly home. Though she already missed her Flicker friends. She thought about Bat and Natala and Ashrafieh, their dear faces reemerging in her imagination. Then she let herself think about Dorsom. She missed him in the way she missed a best friend, wishing he were right there, the two of them laughing and whispering about their adventures, and she wondered if there wasn’t some way to bring Dorsom back to the Actual World for a visit. Sami closed her eyes, and images rushed back to her of waving to Rotifer, of flying and breathing in the Silverworld Sea, of falling into the void and slowly rising out. She recalled a moment in the grayness when her grandmother’s Flicker told her, Never be anything less than you are.

  “Sometimes I’m not sure who I am,” Sami had said.

  Ashrafieh had gazed into Sami’s face as they floated together in that endless void, before they began their escape. Not-knowing is the question for all Actuals, Sami, she’d said. But it’s a good question—to wonder who you are—because it means you have the ability to grow, change, and explore. The most important things are freedom and courage—whether you are Actual or Flicker. Never let go of your freedom or your courage, whoever you become.

  “I know,” Sami said. “And never, ever give up.”

  Never, ever, ever, the Flicker agreed as the two of them looked up toward that very distant opening.

  Sami scanned the room sleepily. It felt like things were right in the world. The sky beyond her window was so deep, the stars seemed to pop. For a moment, in fact, she thought she saw, just beside the moon, the outline of a person drifting within the night. Inside that outline, a constellation appeared to glow with blue light. And one red star.

  As the night hung over the house, the memory of Ashrafieh’s words shimmered all around her: ever, ever, ever, ever.

  Sami, the main character of Silverworld, walked into my imagination about five years ago. Like me, Sami is a child of an immigrant parent, someone who lives between cultures, between an American identity and a sense of an elusive—almost magical—old world.

  On that warm spring afternoon, I was visiting my family’s village outside Amman, Jordan, when I was stopped and “recognized” on the street by a total stranger, an elderly Arab man, who walked up to me and said, “Anissa?” That was my grandmother’s name. This moment felt deeply mysterious to me: I’d never met my grandmother.

  Anissa had lived in another country, years before I was born, yet I couldn’t help wishing for a magical door that would let us find each other. Silverworld is, in part, my attempt to write that door into being, to peer between generations, countries, and realities.

  Stories were Anissa’s hedge against loneliness and isolation. She’d left Nazareth as a young girl. In her adopted country of Jordan, books became her refuge. She collected them, gradually amassing a library in her home. If anyone came to visit, my uncles said, Anissa would ask for a book; and she sent her guests home with books. I believe the presence of stories gave her a sense of comfort; the continuity of narrative became another kind of homeland.

  My father, who immigrated to America, continued his mother’s literary tradition, weaving stories for his American children about his travels around the world. He’d always assumed that his time in the States would be temporary and he tried to relocate our family to Jordan more than once. But each time he returned to his native country, he became restless and discontented: within a few months, we’d be on our way back to New York again.

  I inherited a touch of this same restlessness and I sometimes refer to myself as a genetic nomad: I’ve traveled through much of the Middle East, to Lebanon, Syri
a, Egypt, Dubai, the West Bank, and the UAE. As an adult, I lived in Jordan for a year, trying it on for myself, trying to figure out where in the world to call home. Like my grandmother, I’ve come to believe that stories can offer an important homeland.

  There’s a lot of me in my character Sami—both of us torn between identities. Silverworld is the land that reflects the known world, just as, for so many of us in this country, the children of immigrants, we live between the present and the magic of faraway places and times. Up until now, I’ve written books, like my novel Crescent, and memoirs, like The Language of Baklava, geared toward adults. But with the birth of my daughter ten years ago, I began to feel the need to tell another kind of story. This is the book that I wish I’d had when I was her age—a journey through the experience of being in between and a celebration of the power of self-acceptance.

  I hope you’ll find something to connect to here as well. As book lovers, you have one of the greatest magical powers of all—the ability to travel to different worlds and to share them with others. Thank you for being my heroes.

  With special thanks to Phoebe Yeh and Joy Harris, who made it happen. To Andrea Gollin and Cristina Nosti, who read various versions of this book and helped me to understand it. To Scott Eason, who makes it possible.

  And extra-special gratitude to the people who shared their childhood with the adult me: Jacob App, Jordan App, Lauren Bare, Grace Abujaber-Eason, Alec Effinger, and Katie Effinger. Thank you for reminding me of the importance of stories, creativity, and magic.

  Diana Abu-Jaber has written four award-winning novels for adults: Birds of Paradise, Origin, Crescent, and Arabian Jazz. Her memoirs, Life Without a Recipe and The Language of Baklava, have been published in many languages and taught around the world. As the daughter of a Jordanian immigrant, Diana spent much of her childhood in the Middle East and especially loved listening to her relatives’ folktales about the jinn and the ifrit. After her own daughter was born, Diana began weaving her a bedtime folktale that became the basis of Silverworld.