A Place for Us

by Fatima Farheen Mirza

  “Hadia? It’s all right. I’m not asleep. Come in,” Mumma says, even though her eyes are closed.

  Hadia joins her. Mumma opens her eyes and stares up at the ceiling. When Hadia saw her mother cry as a little girl, she would begin to cry instantly. Even if it was a scene in a movie that had touched her mother—it did not matter. Mumma is quiet in a way that tells Hadia not to speak. The bedcovers rustle under the movement of her head and she is aware even of the scrape of her eyelashes against the pillowcase.

  “I did everything right,” Mumma says.

  Hadia does not ask her to clarify. She is nervous—Mumma spoke in English. Not that she could not, but that the language between them, the casual and comfortable one, when they were at home or in public, was always, unless Hadia did not know the right words, Urdu.

  “I married when my parents said it was time to marry. I prayed almost every single prayer. Even the ones I missed I made sure to make up later. I never said no to my parents. Not once, not even ‘uff.’ They said he lives in America. I said, whatever is your wish, whatever you say is best.

  “I could have gone—like you—to more school and more school. I could have said this is my life. This is my room. My privacy. My business.

  “I did not get one job. Your baba said, ‘If I can support you, Layla, why don’t you stay at home with the kids?’ And I agreed. I would stay with you three. I wanted to. I was lucky; other mothers cannot even if they want to, but I wanted to. I was with each of you every day you were home. Never let any of you sleep over at a friend’s house. Never left any of you in a park alone. Do you know what happens to children in this world? What this world is like? When you played outside I listened for cars—to make sure they did not, what’s the word—screech. Some parents go together—do you know that? They go on trips or to the movies. Not us. We never. Let’s go as a family, your baba and I always said. Let’s go to a movie the kids will enjoy. Put you three in Sunday school. We only missed a weekend if one of you was sick. Drop and pick and drop and pick from school. Three times a week I drove you to Quran class. I waited for two hours in the car because the Arabic teacher lived far away. Every time Amar began to hate one of the Quran teachers, I found a new one, we drove even farther. We went to ziyarat. Every week we went to mosque. We were never a family that came only once or twice a year. There are families like that. Tell me, did I ever give you or Huda anything I did not give him?”

  She stops speaking and Hadia is so still she can’t exhale for fear an answer will be asked of her. Then Mumma says, in Urdu this time, “Everything. Everything we could think of doing that was good, we tried to do.” And Hadia relaxes to hear it in Urdu: it doesn’t change the words but it does change their effect, and Mumma covers her eyes with her hand again and whispers, “He hasn’t woken up all day. When I go into his room and shake him, when he opens his eyes to mine—it’s like he’s not even there. It is like there is no one behind his eyes.”

  Mumma is not crying. So why is Hadia? After she leaves Mumma, she steps straight into Amar’s bedroom. He is asleep, his curtains drawn shut. She is smarter than this. She did not study so seriously just to miss a symptom in her own brother.

  “Amar,” she whispers. No response. He was gone all night again, so it is not so alarming for him to still be sleeping. She tries to remember what he was wearing last night, but it had been dark. A jacket dropped by his bed. She lifts it, goes through the pockets, nothing. Sets it down again. She sits at the edge of his bed. He sleeps on his side, with his hand curled under his face like a boy. She lifts his jacket again, turns it inside out, uses her hand as sight and there, by the breast pocket, she catches a clean rip. Inside, her fingers brush against a plastic bag, and she knows that this is what she has been looking for. Four identical pills, round and white. In the hallway light she examines them. She tries to tell herself it could be anything. But he had hidden them in the seam of his jacket. Last fall, she had taken extensive notes on opiates, in a spiral notebook she kept on a shelf with her other old notebooks. For a moment she considers returning the pills but she goes to the bathroom instead, drops them into the toilet, flushes them before they begin to dissolve. A knot tightens inside her as the pills, swirling separately, converge, then disappear from her sight.

  8.

  AT DINNER TONIGHT NO ONE IS SPEAKING. MUMMA PUSHES the bowl of saalan toward him, asking him to take more, but he does not want to eat. If it were not Hadia’s last dinner home, he would not be sitting with them at all. He moves the food around his plate. Hadia can come and go as she pleases and she is supported. Welcomed home and bade farewell extravagantly: the Quran held above her as she passes beneath it, the bag of frozen food packed for her to defrost later, long hugs and will you please call us more often? It should be a joke, he thinks, but it isn’t—how different it is for you if you stay in line, keep your head down, do as you’re told. It is as though to be loved at all you must be obedient. To be respected you must tame yourself. Usually, the night before Hadia left, he felt the same anxiety one felt as a child during the last hours of Sunday, but tonight he feels nothing.

  Hadia asks if anyone has seen her watch. No one needs to ask which one. Amar leans forward for a bite but can feel his father watching him.

  “Now your watch is missing too?” his father says.

  Amar does not look up. He is not at all hungry but he chews slowly. His father speaks again, louder this time, each word delivered slowly and deliberately. “Has anyone seen Hadia’s watch?”

  No one answers. Amar stares at the shiny rim of his glass and then he can’t help himself, he looks up to meet Hadia’s gaze. She has been watching him too. Her focus on his face feels like a betrayal. He glimpses a flash in her eyes, quick like the shade of a cloud passing over the sun, and then she looks down at her own plate, as if she were the guilty one. His father slams his hand against the table.

  “That was my father’s watch. That was the one thing of his I had.”

  No one moves. Amar experiences the moment as if from a distance, he notes how strange his father’s voice is, how the hurt in it sounds coarse. Amar does not have to sit through this. He owes them nothing. He stands with his plate.

  Behind him, he can hear his father’s chair scoot back and he begins to yell at Amar. “You have no respect for anything, not even yourself. You will lose yourself and be forever blind to what you have lost.”

  “Baba,” Hadia is shouting too, and Amar glances back and sees that Hadia is holding on to his father’s arm to stop him from stepping any closer to Amar. “Baba, I probably misplaced it. I will check my suitcase. I will check my apartment too.”

  Amar scrapes his food into the trash.

  “But you never misplace anything,” Huda says. Amar looks up. He has the odd sense that he is not in the kitchen, but watching the scene unfold in a memory or a movie, someone else’s life. Mumma presses her hand against Huda’s arm as if to silence her.

  * * *

  “AND WHAT HAPPENS when you sin?”

  “You get a speck on your heart, a dark, small speck.”

  An ink-dark heart. He’s lost his pills. He needs more. Simon is out of town. Before Amar steps outside in his driveway, he pulls the bottle of vodka from his laundry basket, takes three big gulps, and then, when he feels nothing within a minute, drinks it like water until it is gone. An immediate rush is more thrilling than a slowly increasing sensation.

  “A permanent stain. So heavy and black it cannot tell good from evil.”

  Cool outside and cricket sounds. Hadia is leaving in the morning. Even though she is being horrible, home is home when she is in it. He sits just past the driveway, at the edge of the sidewalk. The world trembles but only slightly. Simon said he would be back in a few days but what if he does not come?

  “Of course, there is always the opportunity of asking Allah for forgiveness.”

  What had they been speaking about?
It had something to do with wolves. Joseph and his brothers who threw him to the wolves. His coat torn and covered in sheep’s blood. Or was it the boy who cried wolf, wolf, until no one came?

  “Why is it too late?”

  “Nothing can be done.”

  His head is throbbing. He rubs his chest. He sins and sins and does not hesitate before sinning again. His ink so permanent. There is a presence behind him and then it is Hadia. It is Hadia taking a seat. She leans her head against his arm and he tries to steady himself. He breathes through his nose in case she can smell it on his breath.

  “Amar, I need you to listen to me. You have to be careful with pills. They are not like drinking. They are no joke. You could open a door you don’t know how to close.”

  So she took them. A hundred fucking dollars at least. At least. He will not react at all. He will not even move. She could have found anyone’s pills. Maybe even the pills for Mumma’s tooth that was removed months ago.

  “You would turn on me too? Spread lies about me?”

  He would have more respect for her but he pulls a cigarette from his pocket and lights it. He even offers one to her. She stares back at him. Just when the drag hits he closes his eyes and tries to let the feeling calm him but it is not enough anymore and with his eyes closed he realizes how much he has had to drink, how he should be careful when he stands, and the entire world feels like it is churning in circles.

  “Hadia, do you think what Mumma said about the heart has already happened to me? So many black stains that now it is just a dark seal? Like nighttime descending and never lifting. Like nothing can be done.”

  She is shaking her head and his arm and is saying, “Forget your soul, Amar. I am worried about your body.”

  The first time he took a pill he did so because he thought it would numb his problems, soften the edges of his thoughts or at least slow them from racing: that he had lost Amira, lost Abbas, and any day now would lose his father’s and mother’s love for him, each loss reaching back to the one before. He had told himself it was just one night he needed help getting through.

  Now the pendulum swung in extremes. The glow from the pill so warm, even his insides were coated in warmth. And Amira’s face far away. Baba’s disgust and disappointment in him far away. Mumma saying, but, Ami, if you love us why can’t you listen, far away. Then he was returned to his body and in terror, thinking only of how badly he wanted that warmth again.

  Are you listening? Hadia is asking him, her hand on his shoulder. The moon is so small he wonders why it ever awed him. Why he ever hoped his hunch was true: that it followed him home, every time he looked up and out the window of a moving car. It still says Ali in Arabic. And there is still the face of a man laughing at him. He lifts up his thumb and covers it. He closes one eye and it’s gone.

  * * *

  WEEKS PASS AND his father comes home with a large box. He hauls it up the stairs, his forehead gathering beads of sweat. He does not ask Amar to help. Amar stands in the darkness of his bedroom and watches through the open door. His father drops the box with a thud when he reaches the top step and his mother emerges.

  His father pushes the box into their bedroom. He does not close the door behind him. Amar listens. Hears the sound of the box being ripped open carelessly, as though his father were certain it would never need to be returned. Then the sound of Styrofoam pellets shifting and being thrown onto the floor. Amar steps into the hallway, on tiptoe; night has long set and the hall is dark.

  “What’s this?” he can hear his mother ask.

  “A safe,” his father says. Then there is silence. He imagines his father flipping through the instruction manual, the way he did whenever he opened a new appliance. There is a beep. Amar opens his mouth to silence his breathing, presses his back against the wall, until he has no shadow.

  “I can see what it is. I am asking why.”

  “Precaution,” his father says. “For safety.”

  Mumma does not ask safety from whom. He feels it in his stomach: the humiliation. He can’t stay here. Not tonight. He is grateful Hadia is not home to see it. He moves to the staircase. A rectangle of light shines from his parents’ bedroom. At the top of the stairs he looks back at his mother’s pale face. She is watching his father, seated on the floor, setting up the safe, the instruction manual laid out exactly as Amar pictured.

  His father has lowered his voice and Amar can only make sense of snippets of his sentences.

  “Enough,” he catches him saying, and then, “your wallet in here at night.”

  Mumma’s eyes darken.

  “No,” she says. “No, no.”

  She is like a child in her defiance. His father stands and steps toward her.

  “Layla, we cannot pretend anymore.”

  Amar steps down a stair. Mumma refuses again, louder this time. If he had not been there to witness it he would never have believed his mother could raise her voice like this against his father.

  “How much has to go missing?”

  “I want that safe out of my house,” she says. “Nothing of mine is going in there. Not one necklace. Not one penny. Nothing.”

  He can sense that something has broken in her; her face is contorted in a strange expression, there is a shrillness to her voice.

  Huda’s door cracks open but she does not emerge. His father tries to place his hand on Mumma’s arm, to calm or comfort her. But she pulls away from him, enters the hallway and stops when she sees Amar.

  “Oh,” she says, and wipes at the edge of her eye. Even in the darkness her face is pale and stretched tight. It is she who says she is sorry. She whispers it to him, and he feels so angry at himself, so angry that he could strike the wall the way he has before when fighting with his father. But he cannot move. Mumma crosses the space between them and wraps her arms around him. She is at the top of the stairs, and he is one below, so they are almost the same height. He does nothing. He does not lift his arms, does not even thank her. Nothing in his body feels a part of him. Behind her, his father comes to the door, sees the two of them at the stairs, and closes it. The rectangle of light narrows into a thin line.

  * * *

  BABA CALLS WHEN Tariq is at her apartment for the first time. They have just finished dinner. She does not want to ask Tariq, who has a cough, to be quiet while she is on the phone with Baba, does not want to explain how even a casual dinner at her home could anger her father, so she silences the phone. To explain would be to point out that she is a woman and he is a man. That it is a Friday night. That they are alone.

  What she first liked about Tariq when they met semesters ago was how she did not feel self-conscious in his presence. He had taken a seat next to her by chance, glanced over at her notes, and commented on how they were unreadable to him but clearly organized. He studied her face for a moment. I know you, he said then, you’re the one with the sharp questions. When he asked her if she wanted to meet outside of class it was not for coffee or dinner, but to study together at the library. It was never easy with men, not easy talking to them, not easy thinking she could love them. Any interest made her nervous, mistrustful even. But she and Tariq had been friends for months before Hadia decided it was in her hands to reach for more if she wanted it, to call him over for dinner, to make plans intentionally once their excuse of studying together was gone.

  Baba calls again, and again she does not answer. Tariq stands to clear the plates and Hadia tries to concentrate on the story he is telling her, but she pictures Amar the last time she saw him months ago, that tear in the seam of his jacket, his incoherent mumbling at the edge of their driveway. It could be bad news. She tells Tariq she will be right back, steps into her bedroom and closes the door behind her, takes a seat on the floor of her closet, surrounded by clothes that will muffle her voice.

  “Hadia,” Baba answers right away.

  Something in his voice. How a voice
is different if one has just woken up or is lying down—but it is not that. She sits up straight.

  “When are you coming home?”

  She does not have a trip planned. She has been trying to assert herself by setting the pattern of her own life, hoping her parents will grow to accept it.

  “I’m not sure yet, Baba. Why?”

  “Can you come soon?”

  “My next break is in three weeks.”

  Baba is quiet for so long she wonders if he has heard her.

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  His voice quavers. She digs her nails into the carpet of her closet. He has never spoken this way, not these words and certainly not with this tone.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something has happened. He’s not going to his classes.”

  “This is normal for Amar, remember? He’ll sign up again next semester.”

  Her delivery does not even convince her. She stares up into the dark sleeves of her hanging shirts.

  “He never leaves the house. Or he goes missing for days. And then he is back, sleeping in his bedroom again. I try to wake him at midday and he does not wake up.”

  The four pills in his jacket pocket. She closes her eyes, leans back against the closet wall.

  “Have you searched his things?”

  Silence, and then, “If you can come home.”

  “What would I do, Baba?”

  “You could talk to him. He trusts you.”

  After she hangs up the phone she steps into the living room. Tariq looks up at her.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks immediately.

  She has never lost her composure in front of him before.