A Place for Us

by Fatima Farheen Mirza

  “Do you really think they will remember it?” I ask.

  My voice feels as weak as my hands, and I hold them together behind my back to keep from feeling it. She reaches out to rest her hand on my arm. I do not pull away. I think of how kind strangers are to me and how maybe I have not been kind enough to other strangers to deserve it. I think of Dawn when you were sleeping in your clear crib in the hospital and how generously she reassured me you would be all right. Years later, I wander down a different hospital hallway with a different cause for the heaviness of my heart, and it is as though we live until we become other people entirely, keeping only that same need for hope, for comfort. And how miraculous it is to me that we receive in this world the very things we need from it, how tonight it is another stranger who has stepped forward to play that same part, help me get through this night until morning.

  “It’s a part of them,” Ida says, drawing her hand away, “even if they don’t know it. It will be there every time they look up.”

  * * *

  MY FATHER DIED unexpectedly late on a Thursday night and was buried early Friday. I wore black. I did not cry—I think now because my mother was crying so much, it seemed like her energy was being drained from her. My love for my father felt small compared to my mother’s. I wondered if onlookers thought I felt nothing. And of course, after that thought entered I could not cry in front of anyone, fearing I would be a hypocrite if I gave expression to my pain only after considering another’s interpretation of it.

  The call for prayer sounded after the funeral. It was a beautiful and soothing recitation, even on that day, or perhaps especially on that day. For as long as it was heard it was the only sound; even the birds quieted, even the shopkeepers had closed their gates. My father would often look at the animals during times of prayer and he would say—look how every creature knows what time it is. He would point up and say, for Him, even the birds and the sheep and the stray cats hush; a calm blankets everything. My father was gone. I was a kind of lonely I did not think anyone could understand. We had not been close in life. I hardly knew him. We had little in common. But every Friday for jummah we walked together the short distance to the mosque and I stood by him in prayer. After, I was in charge of finding our shoes. What else connected us, if not that, and the blood in our veins? That when we heard the adhaan, we went together, the two of us.

  I walked that Friday alone. I tucked my shoes away in a corner by themselves. The men I did not know gathering like a flock about to still, finding a spot in line. Here, everyone had a place. We stood side by side. One man passed me a sajdagah. My father was gone. I was thirteen. Looking back, I was just a boy. And then the second call to prayer, the time to rise. I stood. No one around me knew I had buried my father that day. I lifted my hands, readying myself to focus on the prayer. I could not recall what it had been like to have had a father. I had already forgotten. Then the Arabic verses began, the murmuring of moving lips, the entire hall filling with whisper. We lifted our palms up together, we bent together, and we lowered our heads to the ground together. We were one unit composed of a hundred, all of us moving and trying to think only of God. My lips moved. I was among brothers, I was home.

  * * *

  ABOUT FIVE YEARS ago, Hadia and Tariq got jobs an hour away, in Palo Alto, and moved back. They were lucky. But Layla and I felt luckiest of all: our years of being alone, of spending entire days only occupying our room and the kitchen, were over. By then, Huda had moved to Arizona after marrying Jawad, the grandson of my father’s oldest friend, who had sent the proposal after they met at Hadia’s wedding.

  Layla and I waited eagerly for Hadia to ask us to help her with Abbas. He was only three then. Sometimes he stayed with us for entire workdays. We were getting to know him. We had flown to Chicago when he was born, but after, we had only seen him for a few days at a time. He liked spinach. Pretending bites were airplanes did not work, but if we named each bite after a superhero, he would eat them. He always got full before the very last bite. He preferred rain to strong wind. I was Nana, and Layla was Nani. Layla made up stories that she had never told our own children, playful and funny tales about yellow chicks who were enemies and endlessly plotted pranks on each other, stories that made Abbas laugh and laugh. I laughed too, if only because Abbas’s laughter was a force that caught me by surprise.

  Abbas fell asleep easily with Layla and went to her when he was tired, or if he had hurt himself and begun to cry, but during his unhurt waking hours it was me he wanted, my arms he was always in. It was a mark of that age. I had slept through my children’s childhood. I would not allow that to happen with him. I would hold him anytime he asked, even during the months that Hadia and Tariq were trying to break his bad habit of being held. Everything he did, I told myself to cherish the act, knowing that the age would pass, and he would stop asking me to carry him everywhere, would stop ranking the ones he loved.

  “Mumma number one,” he would announce, holding up a finger. Then, pressing my nose with his finger, “Nana number two.”

  “And what about us?” Layla would ask, and Tariq would ask.

  “Baba and Nani number three,” he would say.

  They would feign hurt and say, “Baba and Nani the same? Can Baba and Nani be number two, too?”

  “No,” he refused them. “Nana number two.”

  I felt for Layla, and I felt for Tariq, but I could not deny it, the enlarging of my heart when I lifted him in my arms and kissed the crown of his head. That’s right, I whispered to him. He did not know how to wink then but he did scrunch his nose and show his two front teeth anytime he knew it was mischievous to agree with me. Never mind number one; I had never been anyone’s number two, and I vowed to do what I could to keep my rank.

  * * *

  THE YEAR ABBAS turned five, the news was constantly playing in the background of our home. That was the year I realized I had stopped being surprised by what people could say. It was the easiest movement, to suddenly feel hated. It was almost as though I had known it all along—so when it came, what surprised me was not the existence of hate, so much as the casual quality of it.

  “Turn it off,” Hadia said one night when she came to pick up Abbas and Tahira. “I want to protect them from this for as long as possible.”

  Tahira was napping on our couch. Abbas was drawing under the coffee table.

  “He will not understand any of it,” I assured her.

  She seemed uncharacteristically worried. I did my best to respect her wishes as a parent. That night, I turned the television off, but the voices did not leave my mind easily. Hadia was right. He was little, but who knew what the effect would be on him? It was 2016, and that year I watched and watched the news as though watching would do something for me, would explain to me what was happening, would prepare me for something, but it only made me nervous and heavy of heart. I whispered to Layla that I was going for a walk. The sun had just begun to set. I kissed the top of Hadia’s head, in case she had left by the time I returned, and I snuck out without telling Abbas, in case he tried to come along.

  I did not walk in the yard but along the streets of the neighborhood we had lived in since Hadia was four and Huda was three. I still remembered the day we first stepped inside as a family. Hadia was so scared when we pretended to sneak in, she had pinched her hands into little fists. Layla and I had always planned on one day moving into a smaller home, to a more affordable area, as ours was expensive because of the good schools we now had no need for. We did not know what our children’s values would be, if they would be willing to live with their parents as I would have had my parents lived, and so we talked sometimes of moving into a bungalow to make it easier for us as we aged, one close to the mosque to make our commutes shorter. But after you ran away we never spoke of it again. We both knew without ever saying it aloud that now we would never. Sometimes, still, if there was an unexpected knock on the door, my heart would qu
icken for just a moment, thinking, what if? But it would only be a family friend dropping by unannounced, a volunteer asking us if we were registered to vote.

  As I walked that night, I waved at each of my neighbors who were out on their darkening lawns. They waved back. Had the way they thought about me changed? I did not think so. I was caught between thinking the world was changing around me and I was a changed man in it, or believing that nothing had changed, least of all my resolve to wave and smile at my neighbors. I walked and walked until the sky turned violet and I reached the field where a horse was kept behind a wooden fence wrapped with barbed wire. The horse had a shiny dark coat and a white splotch between his eyes. Some special evenings, you three would insist on accompanying me on my walk and would ask to come here. You and Hadia liked the horses a moderate amount, but Huda had a tiny figurine of a tan horse she kept on her windowsill. She spoke to the horses in the field and named them Cow or Pinocchio, and I would tease her for it, and you would laugh and laugh. Layla would send us with a plastic bag of chopped apples, and you three would take turns tossing slices into the dirt, squealing when a horse moved to eat it, the breath from its nose disturbing the dirt.

  “Chopped?” I had asked Layla once, when I glanced inside the plastic bag. “What do horses care if the apple is chopped?”

  She had smiled at me in a way that I cannot clearly picture now, as much as I try to, and she gave me that loving look of hers that says to me, oh Rafiq, you have never understood, and you never will.

  “If the apple is chopped then the children get to feed it to the horse longer,” she said, nodding to where you three waited for me at the edge of the driveway, Huda already jumping. She always thought of you three. She always thought of everything.

  That evening, the horse trotted to me as soon as I approached the fence. I reached out and touched the white diamond between his eyes. The horse blinked at me and there was something gentle and almost human about him. A very dangerous anger and ignorance has been unleashed, I thought. My thoughts felt foolish and inadequate against it. I was just one man. My voice would be like shouting into the wind, only for the wind to suck it in and carry it away to nowhere. The horse kicked his hooves against the dirt and dust rose. And all of a sudden I pictured your face from years ago, when you were in seventh grade and I watched you approach me after you had been suspended, your eye swollen and your white shirt stained with blood, and that blend of absolute love and complete terror I had never felt for anyone before that moment. My breath had caught in me. I had not even known I had been capable of such a reaction. I trembled. My Abbas was five years old, he was as confident and curious as any other child, he was about to begin his first year of kindergarten, I was his second-favorite person in the world, and I was not sure what to explain to anyone in a way that would protect him. And you, wherever you were, even though I could not accurately picture your face past twenty-three, I knew the faint scar above your eyebrow, and the fainter one beneath your lip. God, I thought, it feels tonight like the forces of the world are closing in on me, the way darkness closes in to become night, slowly and then all at once, and I do not know what I can do or say so that no one will ever think to strike my Abbas’s face in the future, as my own son’s face had once been struck, by others, by me.

  * * *

  THE MORNING OF the surgery, I wake mid-thought, as though I had spent my sleeping hours asking questions and attempting answers in my mind. What do I owe? Who have I wronged? The surgery will take no more than four hours. Hadia wheels me into a small room and together we wait for the cue from Dr. Edwards. She tells me that as soon as I am settled with Dr. Edwards, she will join Layla and Huda in the waiting room.

  “You won’t be needing me in there as much as Mumma will,” she says with a smile.

  My children have been shielded from aging. I am impressed by them now, by their maturity, by their seriousness, by their consideration to care for me in ways I have not asked them to.

  “Are you nervous?” Hadia asks.

  I shake my head. The room we wait in is bare. Nothing about hospitals is designed to comfort the patient.

  “Hadia,” I begin, before I realize what I am trying to say. “I let my anger control me too often.”

  She opens her mouth to interrupt me but I raise my hand to stop her.

  “Let me say it. I know I had a temper. I know it hurt you.”

  Hadia is still, and then, she thanks me. “Anything else you want to get off your chest?” she jokes. She takes a sip of her coffee, which battles with the disinfectant to be the strongest smell in the room. Then she reaches over and places her hand over mine. “Just focus on getting better, Baba.”

  She glances at her watch. When I first saw her wearing it again, years after it had gone missing, she explained its reappearance before I even asked. Still, I’ve wondered.

  “Have you heard from Amar?”

  I say it out loud. Just like that. As though only a week or two has passed, as though I failed to reach you on the phone after trying a few times and thought to ask if she has had any success. Any lightness that was in the air between us a moment ago vanishes. She does what she does now that she has become self-conscious of how much her hair has grayed; she runs her hand through it as if to comb it. My heart begins thudding.

  “Are you feeling all right?” she asks me in Urdu.

  “Does he know I’m here?”

  I didn’t expect my voice to break. But it has taken years for me to draw up courage to ask. She shakes her head. Wraps both hands around her coffee, cradling it.

  “Do you know where he is?”

  Again she shakes her head. When she finally looks at me there is fear in her eyes—of what, I’m not sure.

  “Are you in contact with him?” I ask.

  She sighs. I watch her as though any action of hers will give me a clue to unpack later. Her pager beeps. It is time to wheel me into the room where Dr. Edwards is waiting, but I have not taken my eyes off her.

  “No,” she tells me finally, “we are not.”

  I feel my shoulders relax, or maybe they are sighing, or maybe they are collapsing. Maybe they are just giving up. I was not afraid before but now I am afraid. Afraid that if I wake in a few hours or do not wake, if I recover for years or just for a few more months, I will not be any closer to knowing if you are well in the world. Hadia stands. She reminds me again of the plan and procedure and I nod along. This is the easy part. This is nothing. Before she takes the handles of the wheelchair, she kneels in front of me so we are face-to-face. An entire streak of her hair is gray. We have changed. Now she knows I think of you, now she knows I wonder. I have given away the only power I had in this situation at all, the power of appearing unaffected. She seems aware of this as she studies my face, her eyes very big, copies of your mother’s, ready to welcome anyone they look upon. One side of her mouth lifts into a smile so she looks like she almost pities me. She leans forward with her index finger and begins to trace a shaky Ya Ali on my forehead, as your mother would do for each of us, when we were vulnerable and in need of reassurance. She means to prepare me for what I am about to face, to give me a shield of protection and strength. But instead of strength I feel a wave of gratitude so overwhelming I am weakened before it, and I know that I did try my best to be a father to my children, I did, and I did fail, in some instances so completely that I do not know where my own son is, and he does not know I am here, moments away from being wheeled into my surgery, but I have also been successful, I have passed down to Hadia what I have known to be valuable, and when she pulls away her finger I open my eyes and blink at my own hands, so helpless in my lap, unable to look up at her.

  3.

  TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY SINCE THE SURGERY I HAVE TO MYSELF. Layla has been relentless in her care for me during the months of recovery: she has come along on every walk, accompanied me on every errand, interrupted any stretch of sweet silence
to ask how I am, no matter how clearly Dr. Edwards and Hadia assure her that all is well. But she had been invited to a ladies’ jashan today and I urged her to go, and the moment she drove away, I snuck from our home as well. The sun is setting when I turn onto Hadia’s street. Soon, I will have to explain my absence, but for now I enjoy the freedom, the familiarity of the route, and the promise of seeing my grandchildren and presenting Abbas with the gift I bought him earlier today.

  You would like Abbas. He looks like you. Sometimes the resemblance is so striking I can’t take my eyes off of him. It is not just his features that alarm me, but his mannerisms are also shockingly yours, though he has never met you to copy you. I know your mother realizes it too. I can tell by the way she reaches out to touch his hair. How she glances over at him when he has fallen asleep on the couch.

  He asks about you sometimes; he is the only one who does. He will point to photographs of you that your mother, years ago, insisted on leaving there, untouched unless to be dusted, and ask a question. Only if he and I are alone will I attempt an answer for him. He asks the kind of questions you used to ask me, odd and pointless, questions I would often be too busy for, or find too silly to answer. But I’ve found my patience for him is boundless.

  When Hadia opens the door she is surprised to find me. She glances at the box but says nothing, invites me inside, and while Abbas and Tahira gather around me I hear Hadia’s voice from the hallway, telling someone on the phone, “He’s here. Don’t worry. I’ll call you soon.”

  By the time she has come back I have presented the box to Abbas. I tell Tahira, who sulks in my arms, that I will be back next week with one for her as well. She makes little animal noises to tell me that my promise is not enough.