In the Language of Miracles

by Rajia Hassib

  The hum of the moving garage door signaled his children’s arrival. He heard Nagla’s hurried footsteps—she was coming upstairs. Quickly, he slipped into his bed, pulled the covers to shield his eyes from the faint dusk light still seeping through the windows. He heard his bedroom door open but remained motionless. She would not bother him if she thought he was asleep.

  “Samir?”

  He did not budge. He heard her close the door and walk up to the bed, reach out and touch his shoulder.

  “Samir?”

  He pushed the covers away from his face, squinted. “What?”

  “I broke that window.”

  He sat up in bed, staring at her. “What?”

  “I broke it. I threw an ashtray at it and broke it.”

  She stood a few feet away, her arms crossed. A bit pale, he thought—or perhaps it was the early evening light.

  “You used an ashtray to break the window. I see. Must have been a steel ashtray.” He should not be sarcastic. But this was ridiculous. And slightly insulting.

  “It was the crystal one. The heavy one. I broke it, too.”

  He nodded. “Hmm.”

  He waited. She sat down on the floor, hugged both knees to her chest, and stared at her feet.

  He took a deep breath in. “And why did you break the window?”

  “I was upset. I didn’t mean to do it. It just happened.”

  He nodded again. Her distance had been bad enough, but this—this was something else. To think that he would buy such an audacious tale. All one hundred pounds of her, hurling an ashtray—an ashtray!—at the window and breaking it. Preposterous. Even more preposterous was her conviction that he would be that easily fooled. He took another deep breath, tried to steady himself. At least she was not supporting her mother’s story any longer.

  “So why didn’t you say anything when your mother lied to me?”

  She grimaced. “I—didn’t want to embarrass her. Also—” She paused. “I had a fight with her.”

  “What about?”

  She lifted one hand to her forehead, touching it, as if checking for a fever. He wondered whether she was trying to get him to believe she was sick.

  “About several things. Mostly about lying.”

  “You fought with her about lying, but you said nothing when she lied to me?”

  “I told you: I didn’t want to embarrass her.” She sighed. “I’m just trying to be honest.” Her voice broke.

  He got up and walked to the window, looked out into the darkening mass of trees. He had to admit it was clever, making up a story and pretending it was the truth, shooting down her mother’s lie with another lie and hoping he would be satisfied with her admission of her mother’s guilt and not question her own. That she could have truly done it was out of the question, of course: sure, she did have occasional outbursts of temper—like the time she flung herself at that reporter, or the several times she had charged him in the middle of a heated argument—but he knew the extent of her strength. He knew the most force her delicate fists could carry. Besides, the few times she did show signs of a temper were truly exceptional circumstances, not a result of something as pedestrian as a fight with her mother.

  No. She had a motive for lying. He lifted one hand and scratched his chin.

  “You’ve never broken anything in anger before,” he said without turning to look at her. “Perhaps it’s all the stress.”

  She said nothing, but he heard one soft sob. He went on. “Perhaps you still think I should reconsider going to that memorial?”

  Silence.

  “I still think going is a bad idea, yes.” Her voice was fainter than usual.

  He turned to look at her. “So when you could not convince me not to go, you decided to pretend to be losing it, is that it?” He walked closer to her, bent down to look her in the eyes. “You think that making up such a story will get me to back down?”

  “I’m not making anything up!”

  “You expect me to believe you broke that window?” he hissed.

  “I did break it!”

  “You think I’m an idiot?”

  He stared at her eyes, wide with what he hoped was fear. He went on. “You think you and your mother can spin tales and get me to swallow them? You think you can trick me into giving up our best chance yet at beating this thing? At fighting back?”

  “Fighting what back?”

  He straightened up, walked away from her, his hands on his waist. “You need to get your head straight, Nagla. You need to snap out of it. This is ridiculous, what you’re trying to do.”

  “I’m trying to be honest!” She jumped up, walked toward him. “For once in my life, I’m trying to be honest!”

  He turned to look at her, his eyes narrow. “Really? And who taught you this honesty in your old age? Your mother?”

  She glared at him, then walked out of the room. He stood in place, listening to her footsteps as she ran down the stairs. Doubtless to her mother. To complain about him.

  Let her go, he thought as he walked up to his bed and sat down. Let her think about his words. Perhaps she would finally come to her senses.

  He lay in bed, closed his eyes. Too much interference; too much trouble. He needed to concentrate. He needed to think about what had happened and decide what he would do on Sunday. He was not going to accept today’s attack on his house—and he knew it was a hate crime—or the comments and invitations to violence that Angie had shown him on Facebook. He would fight back. He would protect his family, as he should, even if they resisted his efforts. Eventually, they would know he had done the right thing.

  13

  ENGLISH: Ignorance is bliss.

  Saying

  ARABIC: Ignorance is light.

  Often used as a sarcastic twist on the traditional saying: Knowledge is light and ignorance is darkness.

  Khaled sat on the floor in his bedroom, his back pushed against the wall, the moonlight shining through the window by his shoulder and painting checkers on the floor. For the previous hour he had crawled from wall to wall, restless, trying to find a comforting spot but failing to do so. He could not stay in bed, the upper bunk more claustrophobic than ever. He tried sitting at his desk, but that faced the wall that separated his room from his parents’, where Nagla’s and Samir’s muffled voices had ebbed and flowed the whole evening. He did not want to listen—not out of respect, but out of an aversion that added guilt to his torments. He had walked over to the opposing wall, only to hear Fatima’s and Ehsan’s whispers through the Sheetrock, their voices low, stifled, and invading his space even though they never rose in the sharp whispered outbursts that peppered his parents’ conversation. From there he had crawled to the outer wall, taking his laptop with him, getting up only once to grab his iPod and shove the earplugs in, letting them scream the music of Matchbox 20 and Jay-Z as loud as he could bear. He sat, his legs stretched out before him, his laptop by his side and opened to Brittany’s Facebook page.

  Facebook had turned against him again. For one thing, he had not known Summerset had its own page. How a page devoted to a town as small as Summerset ended up with 1,736 likes was beyond him. How he had missed it for so long was equally puzzling, considering that news of Natalie’s planned memorial service had dominated the page for the previous week, a copy of the flyer serving as the page’s cover photo, Natalie’s eyes peering through the upper banner. Now a picture of him and his family took center stage, a trail of comments multiplying underneath it like some out-of-control bacterial strain. News of this renewed interest in his family had reached him through Garrett, whose text message he received sitting on the train back from the city, and who, he found out, was one of the 1,736 people who liked Summerset’s page. He wondered when he would have found out, had Garrett not told him. Would he have walked around his town not knowing that half its inhabitants had logged on to their computers today and taken the time to voice their thoughts on his family’s accountability for what Hosaam had done?

  His ig
norance sparked a revelation. How had he never realized how little he knew about his own life? He counted the things he had not known, limiting his survey to the previous year:

  He had not known his brother left home that day with a gun in his backpack, a gun that must have been hidden in this very room for at least one night, if not longer.

  He had never imagined his brother had stolen that gun from Ned Taylor’s home, even though the news of the missing gun had spread through the town the day after Hosaam had visited Ned.

  He had not known his brother was that sick. Sick, yes. But not that sick.

  He never knew who would bring up the subject of his brother. He counted the times he had walked into the school cafeteria, his eyes downcast, fearing that someone would comment on his brother’s crime but having no one challenge him, and compared these times with all the other instances when he had walked into a store or down the road and had been assaulted with a reference, a shouted name, a fake gunshot, a racial slur, or, on at least three different occasions, a flying object (a baseball, a notebook, and, of all things, a can of tuna that hit him on the shoulder and left a crescent-shaped bruise).

  He had never considered the possibility of a memorial service for Natalie. He had stood in front of that flyer in utter bewilderment, even though, in retrospect, he felt he should have anticipated that.

  He never imagined his father would insist on attending the service. That, also, should have been predictable, considering Samir’s character, which Khaled prided himself on having figured out years ago.

  He was stupid enough to think that his trips to New York took him away from all this.

  He was even more stupid to think that he could conceal it all from Brittany, that he could be honest with her about everything but exclude his brother, as if he had never existed.

  He was an idiot to think that creating a Facebook page with his initials instead of his full name provided him with anonymity.

  Thinking of the Internet and anonymity as synonymous proved his idiocy.

  He was apparently the last one in Summerset to know that the town had its own Facebook page.

  He had never considered that telling Brittany so much about himself, including where he lived, would inevitably lead her to find out about his brother.

  He had browsed Brittany’s page daily for months now, and not once had he noticed that she, too, was one of the 1,736 people who liked Summerset’s page.

  • • •

  He glanced at the screen, waiting for a comment, a message, or, to his utter panic, the moment when Brittany would unfriend him in punishment for his deceit. He calculated the possibilities: she could see the post about his family and recognize him at once, read the comments underneath and learn of his brother. If she did so, she would probably never speak to him again—and he wouldn’t blame her. She would know his brother had killed a girl. She already knew Khaled was infatuated with her; even if she did not take him seriously, she knew of his crush. He was certain of that. Learning about Hosaam would doubtless make her fear him. Anyway, who wants the attentions of a young man whose older brother killed his beloved in cold blood?

  Then again, she might not visit that page—she was a digital hoarder, accumulating Facebook friend after friend and liking page after page, and chances were she had subscribed to this particular page only after finding out that Summerset was his hometown and had forgotten about it ever since. On the other hand, Facebook sometimes pushed such high-traffic posts right up to your face, and she might be alerted one way or the other.

  Even if she did find out—would she blame him? She might not. She was too understanding, too kind to ostracize him. She might understand. Then again, she might not.

  No one was to blame except him.

  He read through some of the comments, sighed, and closed the laptop, too weary of waiting for the one misfortune he now saw coming, for the moment when he would lose her friendship. His head throbbed and, getting up, he pulled the earplugs out, only to be assaulted with one of his mother’s louder outbursts, incomprehensible and angry. He groaned, looking up to the ceiling. He was trapped in his own room. He would go downstairs, but the broken window (one more thing he didn’t anticipate, know about, or understand) was depressing, and the living room held the constant threat of unwanted company, if Ehsan or Fatima chose to walk downstairs. He was angry with both of them, but more with Fatima, who had walked in with him and, seeing the broken window, had directly shut herself up with their grandmother, shutting him out, not even bothering to exchange a few words or to convey whatever information she got from their grandmother to him. He did not want to talk to her now. There was nowhere to go except leave the house, but he did not know where he could go at midnight. There was nowhere to go. Except—he suddenly realized, staring at the ceiling—up.

  Carefully, he opened his door and looked out. Both Fatima’s and his parents’ doors were closed. He tiptoed into the hallway, reaching up to grab the pull-down chain that released the stairs to the attic. Someone had looped the chain up, attaching its end to a hook on the ceiling to get it out of the way. Failing to reach it, he walked into his room and back out a moment later, a clothes hanger in hand. Threading the loop of the hanger into the metal link, he released it from the hook, and the chain came rattling down. He looked around, waited, and when the constant hum from both rooms continued uninterrupted, he slowly pulled the hatch down and released the ladder.

  He had not been in the attic for more than a year. Reaching the top of the ladder, he put one hand on his mouth, muffling his cough, waiting to get accustomed to the stale air. Stepping up and into the attic, he grabbed around for the light chain, turning the single bulb on. The light, a hazy yellow, combined with the moonlight that the attic’s one circular window let in and showed him his way. Turning around, he knelt down and tried to pull the ladder back up, but managed to do so only halfway. He considered tugging harder, but feared the metal might creak, alerting everyone to his whereabouts. He let it be. After all, no one was likely to step out again tonight.

  He made his way past plastic containers, a discarded floor lamp, a few black garbage bags, filled and tied, and stood in the only clear spot, in the center of the attic. His brother’s drum set still stood with its back to the window, its silver rims glistening in the low light. On one side of the drum set stood Hosaam’s old boom box, a black monster of a machine surrounded by piles of CDs. On the other side stood a large easel that Hosaam had used to support a tackboard. On the rare occasions when Hosaam had allowed him in the attic, Khaled had stood by the board, marveling at the staff paper covered in music, at the various posters ripped out of magazines, at the verses that Hosaam or one of his bandmates had composed for a song. By the time the police had made it up to the attic, the only pictures covering the board were of Natalie. Now the board was bare.

  The silence unnerved him. Having climbed up here to shut out the rumblings of his family, Khaled found his head buzzing with echoes of his brother’s sounds. Stretches of drumbeats. Music booming so loudly it made his entire bedroom underneath vibrate, the ceiling fan shuddering in rhythmic outbursts. Khaled was almost never allowed up here, and, years ago, he had stopped pleading his case for the unfairness of devoting such a large space to his brother when he had no similar place of his own. Once, during the last year, his mother had sent him up to try to coax Hosaam down after an alarmingly long stay in the attic. He had made it only halfway up the ladder before Hosaam looked down through the rectangular opening: Stay the fuck away from my attic.

  His presence here felt like an invasion of his dead brother’s privacy—and the feeling thrilled him. Perhaps he could add this to the list of things he did not know: how vindictive he could be, how angry. Perhaps he had been angry for a long time, or perhaps he had found his anger the moment he saw the picture of his family on Facebook. He liked this new version of himself, his anger implying a power he had never claimed before. Looking around, he imagined what he could do to the place. He could clean it
up and take it over. He could have it all to himself, set up a lab or fill it with his own music. He wondered whether he could use any of his brother’s CDs. Walking up to the table, he shuffled through them, his heart racing, as if touching his brother’s belongings were sinful.

  Almost a year earlier, he had felt the same way when Ehsan, summoned by tragedy, had arrived and questioned, on her first day there, why no one had cleared his room of his brother’s belongings. She had stood, hands on her hips, and looked over the room, her lips twisted in silent disapproval. Hosaam’s things had lain scattered, as if he were away on a short trip and would return and make his bed, organize the CDs on his desk, pick up the clothes he had taken off and thrown on the back of his chair. Nagla would not enter the room, but Khaled had seen her pause by the door, one hand resting on the frame, and look in. For her sake, he would not move any of his brother’s stuff, not until enough time had passed.

  As far as Ehsan was concerned, enough time was exactly two weeks into her visit. On her third week in Summerset, she had locked Khaled up with her in the room and gone through everything, separating his things from his brother’s and sorting all of Hosaam’s belongings into two piles: give away and throw away. As far as Khaled could tell, there was no “keep” pile.

  “Mama might want some of this stuff, Setto,” Khaled had said, watching her stuff clothes and shoes into garbage bags, throw the contents of all the desk drawers into cartons. He looked at the cartons, feeling guilty, almost blasphemous. On top of one of the boxes sat a letter, handwritten, bearing Natalie’s signature. An actual letter, not an e-mail or a note, written in blue ink on sepia paper. He looked away.

  “If she wanted something, she would have taken it by now.” Ehsan did not look at him. He watched her take each shirt, each pair of pants in her hands, and look at it for a moment before tossing it in one of the piles. He would have thought she did not care for any of this stuff, had he not heard her prayers, a constant hum under her breath, only occasionally interrupted by a sniffle.