A Place for Us Read online

  Layla did not read the project until she was home. She tucked it into her purse so Amar would not see that she had it. Amar asked her a hundred times to repeat everything Mr. Hansen said, then asked her if she thought Mr. Hansen liked him or not. He got a scoop of pistachio and Layla got vanilla, and Amar teased her for being so boring but she just smiled. She said she was very proud of him and Amar kicked his legs back and forth and said tell me why, exactly, and she thought no criticism, never again. They looked out the window at the cars leaving the parking lot, the storefronts on the other side of the complex with the bright red awning flapping away. When she was alone in her bedroom she pulled out his project gently, unfolded it and read Oliver’s handwriting first. Green ink and all uppercase it said, “Wonderful Job, Amar. Great details, great observations.” She smiled. Then began to read sentences from Amar’s writing:

  “Once there was a splinter in Huda’s thumb. She knew what to do. She made Huda speak what she prayed for so it wouldn’t hurt. She never says I am sad! Or I am angry! Or I am sleepy and you are being so loud and annoying! She likes windows. When she puts seeds into the earth the earth grows. She is good at cooking and good at telling stories. Some she makes up herself so she has a good imagination but some she repeats from other people so she has a good memory too. She knows how much we need to eat like a proportion and we never run out of food and feel hungry. She cares about us eating more than her fingers. She cooked even when her thumb was burned. She gives me food first.”

  She stopped reading, holding back tears and unable to continue without having to bite her knuckle—was it because of his words or because of this stranger, this young man, who was kind enough to look closely at her son, and see what she had seen?

  * * *

  THEIR DISAGREEMENT HAS escalated into a fight and Hadia has reached the threshold she knows she should not cross, should instead do as Mumma says: bite her tongue and abandon her protest. But it is Dani’s sixteenth birthday so she yells, “Everyone else is allowed to go.”

  Baba stands from the couch so abruptly she steps back. Amar and Huda watch from the spaces between the banister. Mumma stands in the hallway but she might as well not be there at all, the way she pretends that nothing is happening.

  “You are not everyone,” he yells back. “You are my daughter. My daughter does not go to parties.”

  She refuses to show him any weakness—only wants him to know that she is angry, that he is wronging her, and if there are hot tears welling up she will not let them fall, she will blink furiously. She holds on to her wrist so tightly and pictures the marks her nails will leave when she lets go. She repeats in her mind what she wishes she could utter out loud, but maybe it is the secret of it that gives it power: I hate being your daughter.

  All she asked for was permission to go to her best friend’s home on Saturday night. When Baba pressed her for a reason she was careful to say it was to celebrate her birthday. She did not even use the word party. She had not divulged the detail about Dani’s mom leaving the house, or Dani’s older sister “supervising,” or the other attendees.

  “Baba, please.” She hopes a change of tone might soften his stance. Inspire sympathy for his daughter. But Baba knows the words that will shame her, make her wonder how she could dare to even want this.

  “There is no chance of my daughter going to a party where there will be dancing and boys present,” he is yelling, and she can see Huda and Amar exchange frightened glances. She is focusing on the line of the staircase, blinking fast. She cannot even argue or lie about the boys that will be there, because Baba is the type to check in on the party, call Dani’s mother twice, or pick her up before sunset and before anyone arrived anyway. The light overhead blurs and unblurs.

  Baba points to Huda and Amar and jabs the air. “Look at the example you are setting for your brother and sister. The way you are behaving tonight. How many times have I told you, Hadia? If you are good, they will be good. If you are bad, they will follow you—more than they will ever follow my example, or Mumma’s example.”

  “You’re not being fair.”

  She should not have spoken: the girlish sound of her own voice makes her cry. She has made herself weak in front of him. She has lost. She turns from him and runs past Mumma, who she knows will never take her side, will only harp on the fact that she has been batamiz on a holy night. That she has caused him stress and pain. She runs past Huda and Amar and into her own room, where she slams the door and dissolves into a fit of quiet sobs on her bed, allows the thoughts that anger her and sadden her and frighten her to enter: that she hates Baba, hates her limited life. She only wanted to go to the party to be there for Dani, but now she will meet all the boys in the world just to spite Baba, she will shave half her head and dye the rest electric blue—but even that will not be enough because she will never escape this place unless she runs from it.

  She opens her window wide and lets the cool air in. She will cry until she is tired. Until her face swells and her eyes become as red as her nose. Maybe she will not join them for the nazr. Why can’t she continue to throw a fit like Amar, scream back at Baba until her voice is hoarse, bang the walls and furniture until something breaks. Why instead does she wait, swallow her pride and anger, and return to Baba not hopeful that he will give her what she originally asked for, but that he will not hold having asked against her.

  She takes out the strand of her hair tucked behind the rest that really has been dyed an electric blue, and curls it around her finger. She dyed it with Dani last week, when Dani decided she would no longer go by Danielle and chopped off her hair so it was short like a boy’s, bleached it and then dyed her bangs blue with Hadia’s help in the bathroom after school. Baba had been away on a business trip, and it had been easy to convince Mumma that she had to work on a group project. She could not even enjoy her time in the bathroom with Dani. Her mind had wandered, wondering what the group project could be, what she would say they had accomplished by the end of their time together.

  “Your turn?” Dani asked, when they were seated on the edge of the bathtub. Dani’s hair was wrapped in foil because they had seen that done in salons and thought it might help.

  “Just a little bit,” Hadia said. Not that anyone would see, tucked beneath her scarf as it would be. At home she wore her hair down. But there, behind her left ear, visible only if pulled out or if her hair was lifted up, was her secret strand of electric blue. She showed only Huda. She could not trust telling Amar, who was in trouble so often he might blurt out the incriminating evidence to barter his punishment. Hadia loved to look at it before she fell asleep, loved twisting it around her finger and letting the dim light make it appear a beautiful, magnetic blue.

  Dani’s sweet sixteen is an event they have spent lunchtimes brainstorming plans for. It will be terrible if she cannot go. Their friendship had been through various transformations since elementary school, but each time they emerged even closer. Now Danielle is changing again: throwing out her old clothes and wearing dark eyeliner, confessing to getting drunk with some of the other girls from school, but Hadia doesn’t care—Dani can change into any version of herself and go by a new name and she will still be the one Hadia looks for in the lunchroom.

  Hadia waits until her thoughts slow into sounds: Mumma in the kitchen preparing for the nazr with Huda, Amar bouncing his tennis ball against the wall, a car passing too fast. She waits until Baba is in his study to tiptoe downstairs. The night air is cold and Hadia is careful when releasing the handle of the front door behind her, so slowly it makes no click as it closes. Wind rustling the leaves. And all the stems of the flowers bent, their buds closed to brace themselves. She is wearing a thin cotton shirt and jeans. She should have worn a sweater, so she could camp out longer, but when she looks down at the goose bumps on her arms, she thinks: good, now they will know how I would rather shiver than come back inside.

  It is pathetic that leavin
g her home without telling anyone is a thrill. She is fifteen. Standing in her own front yard should not give her that fleeting sense of freedom her friends have begun to enjoy—from attending parties she is not allowed to go to, skipping classes she does not miss. She inhales the cold air. She steps out until going any farther means crossing the indent that marks the end of the driveway and the beginning of the sidewalk. Here she stops. The indent is filled with dirt and fragments of twigs and shriveled-up weeds. Barefoot, she presses her toes against the line. She looks back at her house: her bedroom light left on, Amar’s too. Bright, big moon. Sky dark with patches of lighter blue. And gray clouds, thin streaks of them. Innumerable tiny stars. How can she be upset when the world looks like this?

  She sits on their driveway and then lies down, her head against the hard, rough pavement. She has lived here as long as she can remember. This is her patch of land on this big Earth. There is comfort in the feel of her entire body stretched out against the cool concrete. How furious Baba would be if he looked out a window and saw her. What would the neighborhood think of him, for having a daughter who did something like that? She smiles a little. But he won’t come for her. Not after they have fought. He won’t try to appease her. He will wait for the apology that is his right, simply because he is older, because he is her father, and a father is deserving of respect regardless of how she feels about his rules and the logic he uses to arrive at them.

  But tomorrow, after she has apologized, she knows Baba will come straight to her room after work and he will close the door behind him. He will present to her a blended ice drink he knows she loves that costs almost five dollars each, or a book she has not yet read, or a porcelain figurine of some kind that has less to do with her and more to do with what a girl might expect to want—a girl holding her puppy, two children sitting back-to-back reading with their knees up on a bed of grass. The figurines are not inexpensive, but they are also not necessary. What good does it do to give me a gift now, she will think, when all I wanted was just for things to be another way yesterday. Still, there was always a reluctant delight in rising from her desk to claim her frozen drink or little figurine. In part, her delight came from knowing that Huda was not getting one and Amar was not getting one, nor would he. Baba loved him in ways Amar was blind to.

  Baba always looked relieved when she complimented the figurine or took a sip of the drink. He would ask, “Is it the flavor you like?”

  Even if it wasn’t she would nod and thank him. She wanted to be firmer, or stay angry like Amar, without letting it so easily dissolve into guilt. But when she pictured her father stopping off at the store on his way home from work, wandering the aisles searching for something that he thought she might like, feeling bad for what had passed between them, though he would never be able to tell her so—she could not do anything but accept the gift, despite knowing her place in the transaction, knowing what fight she was giving up on completely.

  “Drink it secretly,” he’d remind her. “Don’t tell Mumma I am ruining your appetite, or giving you caffeine at night.”

  A plane passes in the sky. After a few minutes, another one. They hum as they move, a tiny red light blinks on one side, a white one on the other. The stars take turns brightening. Her calming voice inside rises to comfort her: It’s okay, it’s okay, you will be all right.

  Lately, in school, Hadia has felt herself losing some of her old motivation. Paying attention in class, doing well, they felt like old habits. She catches herself wondering what the point is—a question that has never occurred to her before. All anyone talked about was where they dreamed of going to college. Her friends had a reason to work hard. She would always stop before the indent in the pavement. The map of her life would never extend beyond the few places her parents dragged her to. She was fifteen already, soon she would be eighteen, she might attend a local university or community college, but either way, a proposal would come, and she would pack her bags and abandon her credits, live with her husband wherever he was, have her own children to drag from family friend’s house to mosque to home again.

  Still, she tries. Maybe only out of a fear of disappointing Baba, maybe a desire to make him proud. But there is also that singular pleasure of receiving her projects and tests and seeing that A+ next to her name, reading comments from her teachers in the margins. And nothing compares to the promise of stepping into a classroom knowing she will step out a different person. That she could learn something that would change the way she saw the whole world, and her place in it. There is even the private hope that if she does work as hard as she absolutely can, there is a chance she will be able to sway the outcome of her life, and maybe one day a door will be presented to her, and an opportunity to walk through it.

  Behind her there is the creak of the front door opening. She hopes it is Baba. That Baba will sit next to her without getting angry at her for lying barefoot on the pavement. She does not want it to be Mumma. She has begun to expect nothing of Mumma, who would only make her apologize to Baba. But the footsteps are quick and uneven and soon Amar is standing over her, blocking the moon from sight with his upside-down face.

  “Why are you such a weirdo?” he says.

  “Go away,” she says, but when he steps away from her she realizes she does not want to be left alone. Amar walks to the magnolia tree, and Hadia sits up to watch him stretch and climb onto a branch and tug at a blossom until a few petals fall down. He half prances as he walks back to her, takes a seat beside her, and sprinkles the petals on her. She flits her hand in front of her face and ignores him. When she lies back down he lies down too. They watch the sky. Another plane passes.

  “How do they know to avoid one another? It is so dark up there.”

  She does not answer him. He continues, “Do they plan schedules months in advance when people buy their tickets? And what about unexpected storms?”

  “Stop it,” she says.

  “Stop what?” He turns to look at her.

  “Trying to make me talk to you normally.”

  She waits for a while before saying, “How did you know I was here?”

  “Window.”

  “Did you tell anyone?”

  “No.”

  She looks at him and narrows her eyes.

  “Huda.”

  They turn to the stars again. She has those shuddering after-crying breaths, but they are becoming less powerful. She senses him look at her anyway. The plane has passed almost completely, and he points to it as it goes, its little blinking red light, its hum.

  * * *

  THE EVENT IS under way. Amira will arrive, possibly soon. Amar scratches off a speck from the face of his watch, a gift from his father for his eighteenth birthday, a decent brand, but one bought in a store. He imagined his father letting the salesclerk pick it out for him after he realized on his way home from work that he had forgotten to buy him a gift. His father sits beside him, busy with his appetizer. Amar only touches the yogurt chaat dish to move it around in circles with the tip of his spoon. They are at the nikkah of someone from their community, and Amira confirmed that her family would be attending. By now he could not even note the way the hills greened in winter without wanting her there to note it with him. He is no better than those terrible clichés in books and movies and Bollywood songs, the people doodling in the margins, getting lost on their way home, staring up at the sky instead of sleeping.

  He has good news he is saving to tell her in person. He had been in danger of failing high school and in all honesty had begun to entertain the idea of dropping out, doing something else for a change. He had gone as far as to research a list of successful people who had not made it to college, and was going to present it to his mother if his classes continued as bleakly as they had been. When he told Amira this, she sent him the longest e-mail he had ever received, explaining why he had to make an appointment with his counselor and stay in school. The reasons were numbered un
der three different headings; CONSIDER YOUR FAMILY, she wrote, CONSIDER YOUR PRESENT MOMENT, and lastly, CONSIDER YOUR FUTURE (OPPORTUNITIES, ETC.). He could not argue. She made a fair point. And besides, he did not want to argue. She had never articulated how she felt about him, but how thoughtfully she imagined his predicament was proof she cared.

  It has been months since the death of Abbas Ali. There were times when he rose in Amar’s thoughts as though he were still alive, as though he had just not seen him in a few days. Other times the remembrance of him always carried that sense of loss. He and Amira had written e-mails back and forth every few days since he knocked on her bedroom door. They had yet to speak on the phone or meet in private, and if they saw each other it was only in the moment before the partitions went up in the mosque. Last week, her letter confessed how her family was not sure if they wanted to attend the wedding of the community member. It felt too soon. Her mother was especially affected: Amira described her mother’s grief like a spell, conjured up without warning in the midst of a conversation or a simple task. My eldest son, she would overhear her say sometimes, my first, at which her father would remind her, yes, but not our only. They had a family meeting to discuss it and in the end it was her father who told them that the forty days of mourning had long passed, and they had to be brave now, and being brave looked like resuming their old life, its celebrations as well as its obligations.

  Amar looks up as the two Ali boys enter—still odd, to remind himself not to look for the third—and he looks back at his own father, until his father nods to him and Amar knows he is free to go greet them. He extends his fist to Kumail Ali and Saif Ali, and they pound theirs against it. Then, moved by the memory of Amira’s letter describing how they had to discuss if they were ready to attend tonight, Amar hugs each of them in turn, taking them both by surprise.