“What are you hiding from me?” Hadia asked her.
“Can you at least try to enjoy the rest of your night?”
Hadia looked at her coldly. Huda sighed. The hall was half-empty, and quieter now.
“He fought with Mumma. It was about Amira.”
“What has Mumma got to do with Amira?”
“Mumma had known. She had told Seema Aunty. He spoke with Amira tonight and was devastated. That Mumma didn’t believe in him, or that if it had been one of us she would have acted differently.”
Hadia told Huda she needed a moment alone and stepped into the golden bathroom light. Her hands shook as she reached into her purse. Gently, so as not to tear the wrapping, she tugged at the tape. She drew her breath in so sharply it startled her. It was her watch. Her Baba’s watch, her Dada’s watch. Not a single scratch, the face spotless as if polished, the tick announcing each new second. She wondered if it had always been his plan to return what was not his and then disappear again. She was shaking. She leaned against the door. She turned the wrapping paper over, then again, held it up to the light, but there was no note. This, more than anything else, upset her.
Does the watch always go to fathers?
Amar asked the strangest questions, the ones none of them thought to.
You mean sons.
She had taken from him what, in another life, would have belonged to him by birth. She had worked hard to be as valuable as any son. Her betrayals to her brother were scattered throughout the years, but perhaps being given this watch was the culmination of them all. No one could see it on her wrist and deny what it meant.
Hadia opened the door and let Huda in. She held up the watch. Huda’s mouth opened in shock.
“Will you tell Mumma Baba?”
She shook her head. “I’ll say I found it when packing to move.”
Huda nodded and said, “It will be as if he never took it.”
Hadia wrapped it again and placed it back in her purse. She did not even want it anymore.
“Do you think this means he was saying good-bye?” Hadia’s voice was small.
Huda did not answer. Without a note she could only guess at what he was trying to tell her: Here, take what is yours, what has always been, what will always be—I am no contender. Giving it back was both admitting he had taken it and attempting to apologize. Hadia had behaved in ways that she not only could not take back, but also could never admit to.
She never told Amar what it was like for her to look up at his test all those years ago, to see his handwriting that was so like hers the sight of it threatened her. Or that she had hinted about Amira and Amar’s affair to Mumma. She did not even know why she had done it. Maybe to distract Mumma from Hadia’s decision, still recent then, to step toward Tariq. Maybe just to disturb the golden lens through which Mumma regarded her cherished son. And she never told Amar that she and Amira had spoken years ago. Hadia had power in that moment and she had done nothing with it for her brother, had made no attempt to steer Amira back to him. Don’t tell, he’d ask her, and what did she do but tell, and tell, and the only thing she kept from telling was her part.
All Amar had done to her was take this dumb watch. He had not even reaped the benefit of his betrayal the way that she had, and would continue to. To be the child her parents could count on. To be the one they were proud of. Any hurt he caused, any disappointment he brought—it only amplified her place in their parents’ life, and their love for her.
In the hall, Baba recited the adhaan for the ruksati, though it was the brother’s duty to. It was this moment she had wanted Amar to come back for. She hugged everyone from the community who had stayed to say good-bye, then her friends, she hugged her sister tight and her mother for so long. She knew there was no point in looking around but still she looked for him: just the empty stage and tables and flower vases lined up on one.
“What will I do without you?” Baba said to her, when she said good-bye to him.
She remembered watching brides cry during their ruksati as a child and fearing her time would come and she would not shed a tear. Now she cried like a little girl. Her shoulders shook and Baba’s hug steadied her. The overwhelming feeling now, as it was almost over, was that she wanted only to love them more, to love them better.
“I’ll be back,” she said. “I will not leave you two.”
She took Tariq’s hand. Mumma held the Quran above them as they stepped out into the night. Everyone clapped behind them. The air was cool. Their decorated car was waiting. Tariq stopped walking. He pointed up at the sky. She looked and saw nothing. Just some stars. She turned to Tariq’s profile.
“Keep looking,” he whispered.
Then there was a hiss, and a streak of smoke in the sky, and Tariq pulled her close and kissed the top of her head, said surprise just as the firework boomed, and the sound drummed in her whole body and the glitter descended and disappeared.
Hadia had told Tariq about the first time she ever saw fireworks. How, even now, anytime she saw them it made her feel the way she had that night, full of wonder and excitement about all the sights life could offer her. There was another and another and another. Her heart was beating very fast. All their faces were lit up by colors: blue and red and green. Once, she had sat at the dinner table and overheard a fight between Amar and Baba. Baba’s voice had shaken the beads of the chandelier. In that moment, Hadia had wished for exactly this, exactly what was being granted to her now: a new family. Her own. A new window from which to look out and think, I am home. A firework that reminded her of a rocket zipped up in coils and exploded in coils. She had seen it somewhere before: Amar was laughing in that memory. When the chandelier shook, this had been her wish. Now everything she had ever wanted had become hers. And where was her brother, and was he close enough to look up and see the rocket firework that somehow she knew he liked? She tightened her hold on her husband’s hand. She loved him. She would start her own family with him. The last of the fireworks dissolved. The sky was all smoke. Had she reached out for Amar’s hand beneath the dining table that night? Had she done as much? She could not remember now.
PART FOUR
1.
WHEN YOU WERE BORN, YOU DID NOT CRY. YOUR FACE turned blue, almost purple, and the relief I had felt at seeing you, at realizing you had entered the world, plummeted when the doctors and nurses huddled around your body, separating me from you. Your mother raised her head to ask if everything was all right. Her voice was pitched high but her expression oddly calm, as though she had foreseen such complications. The doctor did not reply. A nurse’s sneaker squeaked against the linoleum floor. The clock ticked. Only then did I realize you had not marked your entrance into this world with the same screams as your sisters before you.
That is how you came into our lives. I held my breath. I did not move. I stood between your mother and the doctor examining you. Unable to look at either, unable to do anything but focus on my gloved hands held out helplessly in front of me. Because you could not breathe easily, I could not either.
Your mother regards it as our miracle from God, that soon your lungs were emptied and you began gasping for air, crying even. And I too thanked God, knelt in sajda-shukr once the nurses and doctors took you and gave us privacy. But when my forehead touched the cold floor, I wondered if it had been an omen, though I have not told Layla this, have not told anyone.
* * *
NOW I AM watching the clouds quicken across the sky from my hospital window, cities away from the one I swear I was just in, pulling tight the gloves over my wrists, slipping my arms through a paper gown, going to Layla to be beside her. In that room I was a young father—I had cut the cord connecting you, my third child, to my wife. You were a boy. It was my one thought that instant before the doctor took you. I was a father to a son. It has been thirty-some years but it has felt like blinking, I am awake in one room, I close my eyes, and by the time I have opened
them again I am here, I am insisting on helping myself when Hadia steps forward to peel back the foil wrapper of applesauce.
“Bas,” I say to her, holding up my hand, “this changes nothing.”
She is not convinced. She raises her eyebrows like she does when she says—okay, Baba—her bad habit of stretching out the okay. But instead of saying it she bites her tongue, and though this is the respect I have wanted, it now makes me uneasy. Her beeper buzzes and she sighs, glances at it and says she will leave me in a minute, and soon after a nurse will take me for an MRI.
This is my first time seeing my daughter at work. She is professional. Her voice, when speaking to other staff members, is commanding. She wears a spotless white coat that seems big on her frame. Her stethoscope is turquoise, curled and tucked into a pocket where our last name is stitched in blue thread.
Recently, I had begun to feel a headache so blinding I could no longer ignore it, and though I told Hadia all was fine, Layla must have described enough symptoms that they alarmed her: how I became disoriented when I stood, how I waited a moment to take a step, afraid I would lose my balance. Hadia told us to drive to the hospital where she worked, so her colleague could admit me and arrange for some tests. She assured me I would be in good hands. That she trusted the staff here. That the neurologist was one of the best in the state. And that way Layla could stay with Hadia and help with our grandkids, and they could easily visit. At this, I relented.
I have been treated well. Which is a relief to me, not necessarily because of the comfort their generosity provides me, but because it has given me a sense of how Hadia treats the people around her, and how she is regarded and respected in return. You must be Hadia’s father, some say when they approach with their plastic water cups and blood pressure machines, and they speak kindly of her qualities or tell me that I have done well in raising her.
“Will you bring them tonight?” I ask, when she stands to her feet.
“We’ll see, Baba. Abbas has soccer practice. First let’s concentrate on getting the tests done.”
I sink back into the uncomfortable bed.
“But that reminds me,” she says, and pulls pieces of folded paper from her pocket and hands them to me. I hold on to them, but do not look down at them; I want to save them until I am alone again. I want to ask her if I can go home after the MRI, but I know what she will tell me: how they are monitoring my blood pressure, which is too high, how they want to “get to the bottom of” the lack of balance, that it is good for me to be here until then, and that I should trust her. She is stern when she speaks with me about all this, but gentle, using a voice I have not encountered. Perhaps she is taking full advantage of this shift, and I wonder if I would not feel as uncomfortable, had I seen my own parents grow older, had I been able to care for them and find there is no shame in the matter.
“If I can’t get away between patients, I’ll be back with the results of the MRI,” she says.
She smiles at me. I am so easily moved these days that I have to steady myself at the sight of her. You would be amazed to see her now. How she has matured, how she carries herself with confidence, how an entire streak of her hair has turned gray and how it suits her. She holds my hand for a minute and kisses its knuckle before letting go—a gesture that is intended to be loving, but I feel less love and more nervous, wondering what her fears might be. When she is gone, the sounds of the hospital return: my monitor reminding me of the beating of my own heart, the rustle of the rough blanket against my papery gown, the nurses talking together in the hallway, the sound of wheelchairs or walkers making their way across the tile.
* * *
IT IS WHEN I am alone that I think of you again. I open the card from Abbas and Tahira that I saved for this very moment. WE LOVE YOU NANA, GET WELL SOON, written in Abbas’s chicken-scratch, the exact kind of handwriting I critiqued you for when you were his age. Tahira has drawn me butterflies surrounding a house on a hill. Abbas is seven, Tahira only four. They have enlarged my life in a way I could not have anticipated and cannot fully express. I have no duty toward them except loving them, and because of this I am only loved in return. I am so unwilling to hurt them in even the slightest way that I spoil them instead. Hadia does not trust me to be alone with them before dinner: the three of us giggle and deny any chocolate consumed, even as Tahira’s teeth and fingers give us away. Perhaps, if we met again now, you would not recognize me: I am calmer. I rarely anger.
Perhaps you would also wonder, after years of silence and the years before in which we hardly spoke, why I now have so much I want to say. Perhaps you would even feel it is too late. That it does not matter what I have to say because it would change nothing for you, for us.
But, Amar, what if I told you that lately, I find myself driving through familiar streets, unaware of how much time has passed since I left home, until it occurs to me that these were the streets I drove to drop you off at school, or the route to our barbershop that has long since closed down. At four in the morning, if I wake alone, I walk until I am at the threshold of your old bedroom, looking out at the barely illuminated folds of the comforter on your bed, the walls so bare now—your room almost entirely stripped of any trace of you, each item packed away in boxes and put in your closet, waiting for another decade to pass before we muster the energy to try and take another look.
And it is in these moments that the fabric of my life reveals itself to be an illusion: thinking that I am fine, we all are, that we could grow around your loss like a tree that bends around a barrier or wound. That I do not need to see you again. That the reality of our life as it is now is the best that we could have done and the best we could have hoped for. Until one Sunday I am parked at your old elementary school, looking out at the empty blue picnic tables, or late when no one is looking, I crumple and toss an old test of yours in my wastebasket only to go back for it, uncrease it, fold it gently, and place it back at the very bottom of my drawer. In those moments no argument I have used to delude myself can comfort me. You may be unwilling to hear me. You may not understand, but please listen. I have told you to listen many times before, I know. But I have never asked you.
I am asking now.
* * *
THE FIRST TWO nights after you were born, you were kept in the neonatal ward. They told us you were all right, but after the brief scare of your birth they wanted to monitor you, assist you with your breathing. I would wait until your mother was asleep to walk the halls until I found myself at your floor, just one above hers, and look at you and the other tiny babies in their clear cribs. The humming of the machinery. The quiet of the night. Some of the lights had been dimmed because it would be three or four in the morning. I would stand in the same spot, at the center of the glass window, my hand closed into a fist and stuffed into my jacket pocket. Focused on the small baby that was you. Your hand rested by your face, your fingers curled, the way you would fall asleep for years to come but I did not know that then. I did not know anything. My feet would ache and I would shift my weight from one foot to the other. For hours I stood. Praying, mainly. That desperate kind of praying, the kind I have little experience with, the kind that cannot wait until I kneel in sijda so instead I speak directly to God: Anything if he makes it through the next few days. Anything for this.
We had named you Amar. As I stood at the glass window I thought of your name until it became familiar to me. If I was not speaking to God I was speaking to you: You’ll be okay, Amar. We’ll take you home soon. Layla had wanted to name each of our children after holy figures—after all, she said, why wouldn’t we want to give our children the best of names? But I had this funny idea that I thought then was noble. That perhaps others could name their children after the Prophet and his family, but how could I, not knowing what my children would go on to do, knowing they might sin in some way and in that way they would bring down not only themselves but a name so holy with them. Now I wonder if that was a mi
stake. That had I named you Ali or Mohammed or Hussain, maybe it would have been a constant and inescapable reminder for you to hold yourself to a standard they inspired.
Those nights there was a nurse on duty named Dawn. I remember how her name reminded me of a poem I encountered in college, years after the passing of my parents, that had been soothing to me. Dawn had short red hair and little freckles on her face. She had light eyelashes and was kind to me. She told me which floors had vending machines and where I could get a bagel when morning came. She made small talk, which I had never been good at, but perhaps because of the odd hour of night and the strange state of mind I was in, I was all right at talking with her.
“That one is mine,” I said, touching my finger to the glass.
“Beautiful,” she said. “Your first?”
She had a soft, calming voice, made softer by the fact that we were whispering to one another.
“First son. I have two girls too.”
“You’re a lucky man,” she said. “And your son will be just fine.”
There was certainty in her voice, as though it came from somewhere else, as though she had been placed there just to tell me that. I was so terrified. I could have cried when she said it.
* * *
“AND WHAT DOES an MRI reveal?” I turn my head to ask the nurse who is wheeling me down the corridor. I know in a general sense, but I want to hear what he has to say. I want to know if there is anything Hadia has kept from me. I have been hesitant to ask her questions.
“An image of your brain.”
“Do you know what the doctor is looking for?”
I twist the loose plastic bracelet around my wrist and wait for his answer, holding my breath.
“No, sir. I have not spoken with the doctor. But the MRI will be painless.”
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