She tries to resist images that come to her of her students, arms and legs splayed across the music room. Metal stands toppled over, ballad sheets fluttering to the floor, soaked in blood. How many are still breathing, perhaps playing dead, desperately praying the white man would turn and step out the door?
When she regains her speech again, she tells her husband, “I can’t leave her.”
“Get out now if you have a chance, Afaf. Do not be foolish!”
She isn’t seeking his permission to abandon their daughter. She doesn’t want to be blameless when they can look back on this event. She’d rather die.
But there is no time to negotiate. She hears a deliberate shuffling of feet—it isn’t the sound of a young girl running away. The shooter is outside the confessional door.
If you’re trapped, stay hidden. Silence your electronic devices.
“I love you.” She ends the call as the door suddenly opens. The intruder will not blight their final communication.
The two-way radio. Her leather mules. Her cell phone. The Holy Quran. All in her possession. Afaf thinks about throwing them at the white man who kicked open the door. Throw whatever she can to foil him, like they’d trained her and her staff to do.
Throw anything you can at the shooter, the muscled police officer had instructed them. Don’t hesitate. Startle him and attempt to secure his weapon. But if you’re far enough from him, run away as fast as you can.
The white man stands with a rifle, an object she’s never beheld outside television and movies. She’s never even held a gun before in her life. The man before her doesn’t look powerful—had the sound of his own gunfire scared him, too?
The crisis trainers had referred to the perpetrator as he. Had she imagined anyone else besides a man—a white man—in those scenarios? Did he look like this one, who was aiming a rifle at her now? The truth was Afaf had never imagined it at all. Not even in a nightmare.
How could she or anyone ever fathom such a thing? If she hadn’t been paralyzed by fear, she would be admonishing herself for being so naïve. What unspeakable carelessness. All those bomb threats, those acts of vandalism, had been precursors to this moment, had they not? She was principal of Nurrideen School for Girls: she’d failed at her duty to protect her students and staff.
She follows the white man’s slow movements, her eyes blurring with tears. She silently prays, La howla wala koowa illa bi lah. There is no power or strength except in Allah.
The shooter’s rifle is an extension of his arm, gesturing to her to sit down. And she is glad to sit, before her body collapses on its own. She hopes it will be quick:
There is no power or strength except in Allah.
He surveys the confessional, glances at the ceiling. “What are you doing in here?” His voice sounds raspy, as if he has a sore throat. The butt of an old-fashioned-looking pistol pokes out from his holster. He slumps against the door, the mural of Gabriel and Mary partially obscured by his body.
“I—Nothing.” Should she admit she was praying as she does every day at this time? Or would it further enrage him? Perhaps if she hadn’t been trying to steal a few solitary moments out of her hectic day she might have seen him down the hallway and stopped him, requested to see his work order. Perhaps Lou had taken him for a repairman. He’s wearing a work jumpsuit—it would be easy to mistake him. Or is Lou a part of this heinous plot? Her stomach turns. Has she ever wholly trusted Lou? His expression toward her and the student body has been one of indifference, though she can still see that flicker of disdain when she’d interviewed him. White people would never believe they are the same as them. And yet she had trusted him enough to hire him, inflating his sense of superiority, wielding it over her. So arrogant was Lou, he’d let a killer in without checking his identification and demanding to see a work order. Because the killer is white.
“I was praying,” she finally says.
He nods vaguely. For a moment Afaf imagines him setting down his rifle. But he holds on to it, quashing her foolish hope. Then he asks her about her children. Hope flickers again in her chest.
“You got kids?”
She wants to tell him everything, all the stories of her two sons and daughter up until that point of time. How Ayman had been a fussy eater, and how Akram had stuttered until he turned twelve. And how both of her sons stared at their baby sister Azmia as she slept in her crib, marveling that they could have been so tiny at one time in their lives. These glimpses appear in a montage across her mind, a film reel of their lives speeding up and slowing down all at once.
Humanize yourself, your loved ones.
Where had she heard that? An old movie thriller she’d watched with Bilal one night after they’d put the boys down to sleep. The kidnapper was holding a blond-haired boy hostage and the boy’s mother, her husband’s arm wrapped around her shoulders, was speaking at a press conference, appealing to the kidnapper’s compassion, his humanity.
She’ll call Azmia by her name, but what of the other four hundred girls for whom she is responsible? She wants to recite each and every muslimah’s name, to have the white man hear the life and potential surging through each syllable, foreign as they may sound to his ears.
“Yes. Two boys and a girl. My daughter attends here,” she starts to tell him. “She’s a senior. Her name is Az—”
He swiftly silences her. She wants to ask the white man if he has children, too. Whose father is he? What stories does he have of his son or daughter? How has he arrived at this point? Had he lost and found a sister? Afaf wants to know, though her terror chokes her, threatening to make her pass out. Perhaps that is best. Lose consciousness, cradled by oblivion. She may not feel the bullets then. But she fights to stay focused. If he is here in the old confessional with her, he’s farther away from Azmia, from the other girls.
She wants to know. What has carried this man to this moment?
The school bell rings, jolting her, and she looks at the confessional door. It’s an eerie sound: no thunder of footsteps follow, no chatter of young girls reaching a humming crescendo. Is it already fifth period? Azmia would be in AP psychology—there was a big test today. Azmia’s note cards were scattered across her bed last night, words written in her daughter’s characteristic block letters.
And now here Afaf is, trapped in a room with a menace she hadn’t foreseen.
Or had she? She’s always felt indefensible around white people. Inferiority had slowly fermented inside her, beginning when she was a young girl and teachers squelched her potential because they didn’t believe she was smart enough. In her daily life, white women silently look down on her as though she is a threat to their existence. Men sneer at her, a noiseless storm of violence in their eyes when she passes them in airports, in parking lots.
The shooter shifts his weight on the floor, still pointing his rifle at her. She studies his face: gray, unflinching eyes, the wrinkles in his forehead, the broken capillaries blossoming from his nose. Had his father been an alcoholic like Baba? Perhaps his mother had also suffered some kind of mental illness they did not yet have a name for when he was a child.
The tip of his rifle scratches the floor. Every movement, every gesture is momentous as Afaf tries to decipher his thoughts, gauge his next action. Then his face clouds over, the memory of something suddenly catching hold. What is it? Afaf wonders. Is there a hand pressed on his shoulder, a voice whispering in his ear to go no further? But it passes and he jeers, “What do you know about me? You don’t care a goddamn bit about me or this country. You don’t belong here.”
She swallows a painful lump in her throat. How many times had she heard that? “I was born in this country—just like you.” She leans forward, pleading.
“Yeah? You sure don’t fucking act like it.” The shooter’s eyes flit over her body, rest on her hijab. “Naw, lady, you don’t belong here at all.”
“I’m not your enemy.”
“Yes, you are.”
“How am I your enemy? You don’t know me
. Or any of the girls—” She can’t complete her sentence.
“I know everything I need to, lady.”
Afaf wipes away her tears with her sleeves and they become damp, like the times they slipped back down her wrists as she performed wudu, the seams wet from the cool water she splashed on her face.“I want to know about your pain,” she whispers to the man.
“What did you say?”
“Your pain. Tell me.”
She can see something shift in his composure, as if he’s about to lean forward, ready himself for a conversation.
“What pain?” he sneers.
“I know about losing people you love,” she whispers.
“I don’t give a shit what you lost,” he snaps back. “Take that thing off your head. I want to see your hair.”
She instinctively touches her headscarf as she so often does under the scrutiny of strangers, their disdainful expressions deflating the start of a good day. Sometimes the women are worse, giving her a look of hatred and pity, a question twitching at their lips: Does your husband make you wear that thing?
The white man’s face is impassive. Her stomach churns with horror and shame. So is this what it comes down to? A piece of fabric? And yet what power it had held from the first time she’d slipped it on at Kowkab’s house, a stranger in the mirror staring back at her. And when Mama had tried to tear it off her head before attempting to take her own life with a bottle of Drāno. Her hijab had become a thing that attracted sheer hatred, fear. And yet where would she be without it?
She’s devoted herself to being a good muslimah, fulfilling each pillar and raising her children to be devout and moral beings. Betrayal stabs her gut: Is this how Allah would let it end? She feels suddenly duped by her complacent submission, Mama’s wicked grin searing her brain. What if she’d refused to follow Baba that day over twenty years ago, climbing the stairs of a decrepit building to a floor full of blithely waiting believers? She could’ve run off instead with the first boy to offer her an escape after graduation from Hoover High School. Like Nada. It would’ve been easy to toss a garbage bag full of her clothes into the backseat of a car and drive away without saying goodbye—not even to Majeed. Perhaps she would’ve crossed the state line into Wisconsin, or driven east toward Indiana, never looking back.
And today she might have been spared. Today would play out in someone else’s nightmare.
Or has Allah decided this would be Afaf’s fate—if not here, in some other place? A car crash on a congested highway. A fatal fall outside her residence. The end of an agonizing bout with cancer.
She clenches her eyes shut. There is no power or strength except in Allah. She will not falter. Her faith is all that remains to her, something still palpable, though it has momentarily fumbled from her grasp. It’s in Allah hands, her own words echo back to her from only a few days ago, when she’d reassured one of her teachers that life would go according to a greater will beyond their own. No matter how hard one tries to circumvent destiny or to run away.
When Afaf opens her eyes again, a peculiar calm settles in her bones. She looks at the shooter and demands, “Will taking it off save my life? Will it make me a human being?” These words numb her present fear like frostbite after hours of severe cold.
The white man is silent, still pointing the rifle at her head. “That rag makes you evil. You don’t belong when you choose to wear it.”
“I was born in this country,” she tells him again. “Like you.” Anger shoots through her veins. He hasn’t killed her yet—she pushes on, challenging this white man, though these may be her final moments.
He shakes his head, a slight swaying that turns into vehement jabs back and forth. “No. We’re not the same.”
“Is this what separates us?” She tugs at the folds of fabric around her neck. “Does this stand in our way of understanding each other?”
“We’re not the same,” he repeats, though Afaf can hear something relinquishing in his voice. His rifle leans against his leg, his finger still on the trigger.
Throw anything you can at the shooter.
Before fear returns to her, Afaf flings herself at him, the mural behind him a blur.
His rifle drops to the floor. He punches her shoulders, the side of her head. She claws at his face, knees him in his groin.
There is no power or strength except in Allah.
He grabs her by the throat and thrashes her body. She kicks and slaps, but he grips her more tightly. He throws her against the chair, toppling the table. The holy book falls to the floor beside her. Time slows, and she feels as if she were underwater. She sees him pull the pistol from its holster, point it at her.
She raises her hands before the bullets tear through her skin like white-hot surges of electric voltage. Flecks of blood splatter against Gabriel’s wings.
No power or strength.
She feels each bullet penetrate her stomach, the pain so severe she ceases feeling it, like she’s being plunged in fire. Then, gratefully, numbness.
Except in Allah.
Bursts of light follow, each like a star exploding and releasing a dormant memory: The first time she sees her mother. Raising her tiny, infant fingers to Mama’s lips.
More bursts of light, these revealing mysterious truths: Azmia is still alive.
She’s certain now. It comes from some primordial place inside her, beneath layers of skin, tissue, organ, bone. More fundamental than her cells, their nuclei.
There’s no image, no vision, only an indecipherable sense of peace and safety she’s never experienced before, like deeply exhaling after holding your breath for a very long time.
She can let go now, and let the light enfold her.
2
A WHIRRING din. Like hundreds of tiny flapping wings. Then the sounds break apart: a siren squealing, metal wheels rolling against pavement, a young girl’s voice.
Mama.
No pictures, only sounds. Some are hushed like whispers, others are piercing like shrieks in a still forest.
A heartbeat. Is it hers?
Mama.
There’s light, but she can’t see anything. Only sounds.
Mama.
I want to go home. Familiar words she’d heard a lifetime ago. And others drift toward her in the light:
You should take comfort in the fact that she’s still out there.
See what happens when you give your daughter too much freedom. This country will snatch her up.
I want my life to begin again.
It’s in Allah’s hands, habibti.
We’re not the same.
Explosions again. Pressure builds inside her skull. Heat sears through her abdomen. She’s floating while air leaves her body.
Mama.
Afaf. Can you hear me?
Her lids are heavy, like sandbags. There are obstructions in her nose, her throat. How can they expect her to answer?
IVs running through her wrists, Afaf moves through a new kind of consciousness, rediscovering the most familiar things: the sound of her own voice, the taste of chicken soup.
Her family hovers over her. She’s never alone, it seems, between waking and sleeping. Ayman and Akram are like giants looking down at her, their eyes wary of all the tubes running through her body. Azmia removes the thick hospital socks, massages her legs and feet, keeps Afaf’s chapped lips moist with balm. At first she watches them through narrow slits of her eyes, her limbs weighed down to the bed like they’ve been pumped full of lead.
Her sister Nada flies in from Florida, caring for Azmia and keeping her company, while Bilal sits beside her bed reading the Quran and caressing her bare arm.
She hears Majeed speaking to Mama overseas on his cell phone as he stands by the window. His voice breaks and recovers. Even now, he’s the only one who could ever console their mother, reassure her that everything will be fine.
In the corner of her hospital room, a mounted flat-screen television is never turned on, silent like a black hole against the taupe-painte
d walls.
Bilal won’t tell her anything. “In time. When you have found your strength again. You must focus on yourself, draga moja.”
What they do tell her in precise terms, a band of surgical doctors and revolving nurses, is everything her body has endured. Three bullets to her abdomen, one through her left hand, between the webbing of her thumb and forefinger. Hemorrhaging, two blood transfusions.
She slowly absorbs their terminology like the drip of an IV: primary and secondary fragmentation. She learns the latter is worse: it’s very difficult to predict what complications might arise from damaged organs.
Only time will tell, one of the doctors tells her. Fortunately, your liver and colon are fine.
Elhamdulillah, Bilal breathes.
But what she wants to know they won’t tell her.
Have they saved the others? Her girls? Those who had tried to escape in the music room as she listened to their screams above her—are their young lungs and hearts still whole and untainted, free of the vicious fragments of bullets? And Miss Camellia, the music teacher?
Kowkab, her dearest friend, visits her every day and Afaf finally whittles down the woman’s resolve. Kowkab offers her small pieces of the aftermath, feeding her bitterness like bites from a sour plum. And still Afaf demands more.
“How many?”
“Fourteen girls and Miss Camellia, Allah yarhamhum.” Kowkab sniffles into a tissue paper.
Afaf imagines the other girls crawling out from under the cafeteria tables, others bursting from washroom stalls and from behind gymnasium bleachers. They find their sobbing parents waiting anxiously on the curb. The parents sweep their daughters up in their arms and never let go.
And she sees the other parents, waiting and waiting, praying that God has spared their children, that they’d get to hold them again, and forever.
But their daughters never emerge from the building. Fathers and mothers cling to each other as the gurneys roll out of the exit doors one after another, carrying bodies wrapped in plastic bags.
And the shooter? Afaf wants to ask, but can’t bring herself to say it. She’ll find out later from the relentless news reports that the shooter tried to kill himself when the SWAT team closed in.
The Beauty of Your Face Page 22