“Yes,” I said. “Go.”
And I squinted as you stepped, it seemed, toward the sun.
* * *
AT A WEDDING many years ago, you told me you were going to say hello to the younger Ali boys—Kumail and Saif. At this time, Abbas had recently passed away. I made small talk with the person seated next to me and eventually realized that a long time had passed and you still had not returned, and the Ali boys had taken seats by their father. I was suspicious and slightly worried, and I excused myself and went looking for you. You were not in the parking lot. You were not in the bathroom. And then, as I took a glass of mango juice from the drinks tray and scanned the hall while sipping it, the elevator door that led to the rest of the hotel opened and out stepped Amira Ali.
She was smiling to herself as if she alone had discovered the secret of the universe. She looked quite beautiful, possessing not only the beauty all women do in their youth, but also something indefinable, a poise that was not yet elegance but the promise of it. She walked quickly and it occurred to me that none of the wedding guests had any business in a place where the elevator was required to take them. Some feeling in my gut told me not to move. That soon you would appear.
And you did appear. You looked around as if you were a guilty man, but as you entered the main lobby you glanced at your reflection in the hotel mirror and your face cracked open in a wide smile, as if you were amazed at what life was about to offer you, and I was also amazed, and in that moment I knew exactly what was happening and exactly what my place in it would be.
I would tell no one. Not even Layla. You slipped into the main hall and had returned to your seat by the time I got back and you even had the audacity to say to me, “Where have you been? You’re missing the wedding.”
You were a terrific liar as well as a terrible one. Terrible in that no one believed you, and terrific because no one minded: you were charming and endearing even as you deceived us.
I let it happen. You were kids, it would pass, or you would change from it. For a while, you did change. In those years we hardly spoke at all but I observed the differences in your demeanor and I was even secretly grateful, I grew fond of the girl when I saw her at mosque or at events. Let their feelings grow, I thought. I was confident you could win her affection. I hoped that she would be a presence that grounded you and gave you a future to focus on. And you did choose the classes in your community college that would go toward a premed course once you transferred, and I was pleased.
“Please,” Layla would tell me, “he’s not made for these studies—they will waste his time and wear him out.”
“I did not make him choose them,” I said to her, annoyed.
“Maybe. But you have never encouraged him in any other endeavor. You have never let him think that any other path would be acceptable to you.”
“That is enough.”
She stepped back. I had yelled often but never at her. I tried to reach out to touch her but she turned from me.
Eventually, when Layla came to me and said what was going on between you and the Ali girl, I did not tell her what I had seen years before, and how I had always assumed it. Layla was determined it would not be good for you, for our family. She was right, if all we considered was right and wrong. But I had found myself in a strange predicament. I had laid the foundation of our family on the principles of our faith and our customs. I had set standards for what we expected of each of you, hoping that you would rise to meet them. In our family, in the culture of our home, and indeed in the texture of our religion, there was the truth and there was the lie. There were sins and there was a steadfast adherence to faith. But when Layla came to me—it was I and not you who was caught. I had created neat confines to help us move through the world, only to see you, my son, disregard them all, and I was finding I did not have the heart to uphold the very standards I myself had set.
You’re right, I said to Layla, because she was. Of every grievance I hold against myself, there are two I have kept against your mother that, even now, I have never forgiven. The first is that she went to Seema Ali and told her. The second is that, when you returned for Hadia’s wedding, she asked me to not go to you, fearing your return was fragile and conditional and that had it not been for Hadia, you would want nothing to do with us. It was clear she blamed me for your departure. And I, also blaming myself, could not correct her or defend myself. I listened and I listened and by the time I went looking for you, it was too late.
* * *
“SUNO,” LAYLA CALLS behind me as I step out to the garden, “you should take your coat with you.”
I continue on, pretending not to hear her—this is the benefit now of my age, I can ignore everything I do not wish to respond to, point to my ear if I am later accused. Garden, trees, grass. Most days I move through the world automatically, on other days I am snapped from the moment and each blade of grass is its own individual blade. People pray their entire lives for things they will never receive. There are people, my friends even, who say maybe there is no soul. Maybe there is no creator. My own son once said as much to me. But I have looked up at this sky since I was a child and I have always been stirred, in the most secret depth of me that I alone cannot access, and if that is not my soul awakening to the majesty of my creator then what is it?
“You can’t fool me. You are preparing to go. You are beginning to accept it.”
It is Layla’s voice behind me. I sigh. I turn to face her. She is holding on to my coat.
“Be calm, Layla.”
“Rafiq, without you, I have nobody.”
She looks around the garden as if nothing there pleases her. She lifts her arm and the coat sways. “I am here because you brought me here.”
“Everyone goes, Layla.”
She nods. She presses her lips tight against each other.
“Hadia told me why you went to her home. I find you in the kitchen or in your study mumbling to yourself. Speaking to who? Hadia says you are fine, the doctor said all tests are normal, but if something is wrong, will you tell me?”
I say nothing. She is right. I have been in a dazed state.
“Can you at least eat the food I make you, drink the water I leave you? Can you remember your medicine? I am finding the pills folded in tissues on your desk.”
I reach out my hand and she hands me my coat. I slip into it.
“Thank you,” she says, and she wipes at the edge of her eye with the side of her wrist and turns around and walks back inside. She closes the sliding door behind her. She takes a seat at the kitchen table and does not know I am still watching. She rests her elbow on the table and covers her mouth with her hand. Who was I thinking of when I moved here? Only myself. I was a man, I thought, without roots. I was thirteen when my father passed, sixteen when my mother followed him, I was not raised so much as funded by my uncle. I was not touched tenderly by anyone all those years until I married Layla. I had no family when I came here and no money and so I thought, nothing to lose. I was unable to get work in my field at first. I worked in a doughnut shop. I woke up at four A.M. to walk in darkness to get there before sunrise. I had a funny hat that folded and I tucked it under my arm as I walked. I practiced my English. Every ancestor of mine was buried oceans and continents away, and though I could not grasp it then, as I walked to work in the middle of the night, in making the decision to come here, I had drastically altered my destiny, and Layla’s, and my children’s and also my grandchildren’s. I brought them here and one day I will leave them here. And what will the world be like when my Abbas and my Tahira are parents of their own children? And will they be welcome in it?
“Layla,” I say when I step back into the kitchen, “I have not been myself, I know.”
“Thank you,” she says again.
“But I am not planning on going anywhere yet.”
She sniffles. Can I tell her.
�
��It is becoming harder,” I say, “to not think of him.”
I pick up an orange from the fruit bowl and run my thumb along its grooves. I wait for her to say something.
“It is our test,” she says. “It will be hard.”
I nod. I am meant to remain steadfast in my faith. Remain faithful. God does not take from the human what the human heart cannot bear. I return the orange to the bowl and prepare myself to step back outside, but I look up at Layla instead.
“I do not want it to remain a test. I want to do something about it. I have to try.”
4.
WHEN YOUR MOTHER SHOOK ME FROM SLEEP AND TOLD ME about the small bruises that lined your arms, I was so disoriented, I felt, at first, as though you were still a baby who had just begun to crawl, and she was asking out of casual concern, and not looking to me, bewildered, to answer the questions she did not yet have the courage to ask.
Why did I choose to look closely then? I waited until it was obvious, until everything that came before aligned with such striking clarity, it felt as if the darkness of the world was lit at once. The money that had gone missing from my wallet. You smelling strongly of booze. Your eyes so red, or else the dark of your eye a tiny speck. How you would not come home for days. How Layla would say you would be speaking to her and then, in the middle of conversation, fall asleep. Layla insisting her gold earrings were in the house somewhere, maybe sucked up by the vacuum cleaner, and when I went to check she told me she had not liked them that much anyway.
I stepped into your bedroom. You were sleeping so deeply. Your hand curled and tucked beneath your chin. Anything for this, I had prayed once, standing so still in the hospital hallway. Here you were, years later, fast asleep and breathing. I shook you and still you did not wake. It smelled strongly of a body unwashed, a body that slept for hours, and something else I could not name, vinegar or the scent of an animal. I lifted your heavy arm from beneath your blanket and searched your skin until I found it, that black dot in the soft inside of your elbow, and another one a bit below it, the bruise surrounding them both, and I heard your mother’s voice from years ago, holding you, a baby in her arms, and pointing to the bruise on your thigh and saying, “This, how did this get here?”
I looked through your belongings until I saw the irrefutable glint of light on the tip of the needle. And every excuse I had given myself before—it was not so bad, my son might sin now but would repent later—was rendered mute.
“Well,” Layla said, when I stepped out into the hallway, “what do you think is happening?”
It occurred to me for the first time that we really had no clue. I had never sipped alcohol in my life. When I first moved to America, I lived with four boys I hardly knew, and once they had handed me a can they had just opened. I waited until they were talking with one another before going to the bathroom and pouring out the contents, yellow and fizzy and smelling quite horrible, and I said to God, I am sorry, forgive me, I did not have the boldness to say no thank you. It was a story I thought I would tell you one day, and we could bond over a common response to the world. We were so very different. Now, in my own home. Now, my own son.
What was unfathomable to me was possible to you. I told Layla to sleep. I told her I would be back, not to worry. I sat in my car. I did not know what to do. I called Hadia. She did not pick up. I panicked, not knowing what my children were capable of, having been made aware suddenly that the limit of their behavior was nothing my greatest fears could even conjure. We raised them here hoping. Now it was out of our hands. They would do what they liked. Maybe it had always been out of our hands. Maybe anything we could have wanted to instill in them was, at best, a hope.
I could not face your mother. I could not bear to pray in my own home, knowing Layla would be frightened that I was driven to kneel not out of obligation, but something else, something much more desperate and unfamiliar. Layla’s faith came from her own heart—she would turn often to the text, she would weep listening to duas, she told you three stories of Imam Ali or Abraham as if she had been the one to come up with them. Amar, I know I must have struck you as a religious man, a man of faith. And I have fasted and I have prayed and I have gone to Mecca and Karbala and I have worn black and bent my head in mourning every Moharram and I have given money to the needy and I have taught my children to stand when the adhaan is called. I believe, sincerely, that eating non-halal meat is a sin, backbiting is a sin, drinking is a sin, not praying is a sin, and defying one’s parents is a sin.
But what I never told any of you, never even explored within myself, is that it has been a habit, my faith, a way of living I never questioned, and once you three were born it was for you all that I adhered to it as I did. I wanted you three to grow with an awareness of God, with that order and compass and comfort it provided, safe from the dangers I could not imagine and could not protect you from.
That night, I drove to the empty mosque. I had the keys from my efforts volunteering. It was dark and it was quiet and I was alone there. I could hear the beat of my own heart and it sounded like an animal inside my chest. I stepped out of my shoes. I walked until I reached the large hall with the high ceilings, where vines and verses had been painted, elaborate calligraphy I sometimes stared up at while I listened to speeches. I took a seat where we gathered to stand in prayer, where you also stood beside me on some nights. I knelt, I rested my forehead against my cold hands, the way I had in the hospital room after you were born and I only wanted to give thanks. And I thought, God, what do I do? What have I done? What is required of me as a father in this moment? My son has turned his back on You. He has learned nothing I wanted him to, he has followed nothing, he has descended in such a way that I am afraid not even You will forgive him.
Why am I telling you this? I know you think I was only angry that night that I confronted you.
* * *
THE DAY YOU were to run away I had gone to the library to do my research. Hadia had surprised me in the early morning. I was so relieved to see her I did not even scold her for driving all night. I hugged her very tight. I felt as though she was no longer just my daughter, but that she had also become my friend; I wanted to protect Layla, who would be devastated, but Hadia was wise and mature and when I hugged her I knew I could lean on her, trust her. I told her what I had found. She was silent.
“Have you known about this?” I asked.
“Not this.”
She was very pale. I knew then I was not overreacting.
“What did you know about?”
She opened her mouth and then closed it, bit the bottom of her lip.
“Tell me,” I said.
“I can’t.” She crossed her arms.
“Hadia, now is not the time to protect him.”
“You’ll just get mad at him. Let me try to talk to him first, when he wakes up.”
I felt powerless. Everyone thought so little of me I was beginning to wonder if they were all justified and I was the delusional one to think otherwise. She made me swear I would not get mad and I promised.
“Hadia,” I called after her, “I’m not angry. I’m not.”
She stood in the hallway. She watched me. I deserved every unkindness they might accuse me of. But I was not mad at my son for this. I was too terrified to react in any way that was not the best way for you. I needed her to know that. Her eyebrows came together, she was either frustrated with me or felt sorry for me, I could not tell.
In the library I read article after article. I stayed away from the books. The pictures of the needles and spoons and bruised arms made me queasy. I rushed once to the bathroom and knelt on the tile floor by the toilet seat, thinking I was about to throw up, but I only breathed heavily. But this was very new behavior, I told myself. We had noticed just in time. I researched facilities that could help us. I even imagined that if you did not trust us, we could send you to live with Hadia. I could give up all hold over
you, all expectations, just to keep you. I wrote a list titled PLACES, I did not want to think of it as rehab. The best ones closest to us. I called after a price. It would be a dent. One that made me sweat. Layla and I could sell the house earlier than we intended. I could keep working for a few extra years. Fine, it was all fine, it would all be well.
That night, that last night, Hadia told me she would call her attending to say she would miss Monday and Tuesday. She would tell them she was having a family emergency. The word emergency made me again feel as I had in the library, like the world was spinning around me and I was going to be sick. I told her my idea. She did not agree with me right away, but she did not disagree either. I could tell she could not decide if I was a part of the problem or trying to solve it.
“You didn’t knock,” you said, when I went to your room. I had knocked. I took a seat on your bed and watched you look for something.
You raised your eyebrows. There was something harder about you. We had often disagreed, but now there was a layer of coldness, a shield you had formed against me. It was as if you were not there, or the part of you that was there was not affected by anything I could do or say. I would be careful about this, I would not, as Hadia expected, get angry. I had spent my life getting angry at you and look at where that had gotten us.
“Mumma’s making dinner,” I tried, wanting to offer something neutral.
“I’m not hungry.”
You had your back to me.
“Amar, can you sit next to me?”
It was the last thing you expected. You paused your search, considered my invitation. You were still there, I thought, I could still reach you, you took a seat by me. I took out my paper. My hands shook.
“We do not have to talk about it. But we can send you here, it can help you stop.”
“Stop what?” you said. You glanced over the list.
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