A Place for Us Read online

  “What did he say?” Amar asks her after she calls his father.

  “He just listened.” Mrs. Rose smiles sadly at him.

  When she was dabbing at his eyebrow she kept saying, “Oh, boy, oh dear. What have you boys done to each other?”

  Everywhere she dabbed stung. He wanted to cry but could not. He wanted to bite his lip but that hurt too. Then, when she was done, she dropped her voice into a whisper and pointed at him and she said, “You’re a strong young man. Don’t listen to any hateful voice. That’s what I always tell my son.”

  He nodded at her. And only then did he almost cry. Maybe the principal had told her his side of the story. Mark, Grant, and Brandon just said that he had lunged at Mark, and Grant and Brandon had retaliated to protect him.

  “Deplorable behavior,” his principal had said, after announcing all four of them were suspended equally, “absolutely unacceptable.”

  Grant and Brandon, who had not a single scratch on them, were sent home, and Mrs. Rose separated Mark and Amar. All four of them could not return for a whole week.

  “If anything like this happens again,” the principal warned, “you will all be expelled.”

  He wishes Mumma were home and that she could pick him up instead. Mumma would know what to say and would not get mad at him. But she is so far away and already so worried about them he can’t even tell her what happened. What face will he greet her with when she returns? His eyebrow is split open. His forehead has a bruise so large it pains him to even touch it. His mouth tastes like blood. Mrs. Rose had said, you might be needing stitches, honey. He liked her voice; it was warm and she sweetened her sentences by calling him honey or sugar.

  It has been three days since September eleventh. That morning Amar was almost ready for school, half-asleep and still eating his cereal, trying to remember if he had packed all his soccer gear for practice after school. He dabbed at the surface of his milk with his spoon, watched the little rings of cereal sink and rise up again. It was Mumma who called from India and told Baba to turn on the news immediately.

  The four of them watched as the same image looped, and the newscasters repeated the same lines: Something devastating has happened. Baba took a seat on the floor. The towers and the dark plumes of smoke. Not a normal flight pattern of planes, another newscaster said. Are we going to go to school? Huda asked. They were going to be late. Baba did not reply. They watched for hours. Every time the plane appeared, a streak of dark on the screen, it felt impossible that it would happen, and then it did, and then it kept happening. The president announced it was an apparent act of terrorism. Oh God, Hadia said next to him. She pressed her fingers into her wrist the way he hated, dug her nails like she wanted to hurt herself. Please don’t let them be Muslims, Hadia said. Why would you even say that? Amar wanted to say to her, but when he saw Baba’s nod he knew not to. Soon they saw that all the hijackers were Saudi, that their names were the same names that belonged to people in their community, and Huda just repeated, this is horrible, how could this have happened?

  That night Baba told them that they had to go to school the next day, but that Hadia and Huda could not wear their hijabs. “We don’t know how people will react,” he said. “We don’t know where they will direct their anger if they are afraid.”

  Huda started to cry. Huda never cried. Hadia put her hand on Huda’s shoulder.

  “I refuse,” Hadia said. “What have we done?”

  “Please,” Baba asked her. “Please. Listen to me.”

  He had never said please before. His voice, the expression on his face—he was unrecognizable. None of them spoke. Hadia and Huda went into a bedroom, closed the door. I hate them, Amar thought, picturing the terrorists they showed on TV, I hate them more than I’ve ever hated anyone. The next morning Baba drove them to school. They were all quiet. Huda wore one of Baba’s old, faded baseball caps from a work retreat. Hadia wore her hair in a bun, clipped back so none of it fell into her face. Their eyes had the red and swollen look of having cried the night before. They looked out the window, Huda biting her bottom lip the whole drive.

  But Baba did nothing to change his own appearance. His beard was always kept trimmed and neat, so he would look professional for work but still not break the religious rule of having one. But his beard could make him look like the men on TV who had ruined everything. Amar would ask him to shave it off. It would be no different than his sisters taking off their scarves.

  * * *

  AT HOME, HE allows Hadia to enter only after her hundredth knock. He had been lying under the covers with the blinds closed, a pillow over his face. Maybe for hours. His father drove him home and Amar said almost nothing the whole ride. He felt like a shell that had snapped shut. His father knocked immediately after he had locked himself in his room, barricaded the door with a chair in front of it, but Amar ignored him. He did not want to see his father.

  But when Hadia says, “It’s me, Amar. Let me in?” he goes to his door, moves the chair, unlocks it, and rushes back to his bed and puts the pillow and blanket over his face again before he replies, “Fine.”

  Soon he feels Hadia’s weight on the bed as she takes a seat on the edge. She does not say anything. He does not want to explain, though Baba has probably already told her. There is another knock and before he can reply he hears the door open and Huda whispering, “Is he okay?”

  Beneath the covers he smiles. The corner of his lip feels ripped, it stings to move his mouth. He keeps touching it with the tip of his tongue, tasting that bitter, coppery taste.

  Hadia’s voice is saying, “Amar? Do you want anything?”

  Her voice is soft. His head is pounding. He wants more painkillers. He took four even though the directions said to take two every four hours. It was so painful he did not care. He lifts the pillow from his face and sits up.

  “Oh God.” Hadia flinches. She looks like she is going to cry.

  “That bad?” he asks.

  “No, not bad at all,” Huda says quickly.

  Hadia shoots her a look. The kind of look he has always been bothered by, the look of their secret language, but right now it does not annoy him and when they turn to him again they both look a little like their mother. Hadia asks what happened. He thinks of the gray light. Of Grant’s smile with his head tilted back. And how he could not break free of Brandon’s grip on him. How there was a moment, after kicking and kicking, when he relaxed, let it happen, how it was easier after that exhaling, after telling himself to allow anything. Grant’s bruised fists and Mark’s bloody mouth. And how Amar threw up after they dropped him, and kicked him, and walked out, how he was shaking as though a violent wind had passed through the room, how he kept spitting blood, tiny bubbly pools on the cement floor. How he thought he was going to cry. But he did not cry, not until Mrs. Rose pointed a finger at his chest, where it did not hurt, and said, you are a brave young man.

  “Who did it?” Huda says. Her eyes burn like she is ready to fight.

  “Three boys from my school. I don’t know them that well.”

  “Why?”

  Amar tells them they told him to go back to his country. He does not say that he threw the first punch. Or that Mark was among them. He especially does not say what was suggested about their father. It would make it all worse somehow. Huda leaves to get him ice. Something makes Amar feel as if they are all young again, as if they have come together to play a game.

  * * *

  THAT SUMMER THEY meet in places enchanted, if only because there they are alone. Some afternoons on nearly empty library floors, in sections hardly frequented, paused between shelves, Amira holding a book in her hand so no one would doubt she was there to research for a project. They discover bridges where no cars they know cross, and the tunnels below them with their long shadows and walls covered in graffiti. If they are feeling particularly bold, they meet in a booth at a restaurant no community me
mber would visit—not many vegetarian options and a too-large bar. Each place becomes their place, their secret, imbued with the tenderness and excitement of knowing this is the extent they will go to just to see one another.

  On rare days, when they have hours to spend, Amar suggests a meadow near a secluded park. Their spot is past the swings and monkey bars, past rows and rows of trees; beneath a sycamore tree that looks out at a stretch of grass that eventually descends to reach a small river. They compose excuses for their families, bring food to offer one another, sweatshirts to sit on, stories they have saved and are now eager to share. Amira’s mother is on a day trip to meet with vendors who sell her clothes, so no one will know Amira is not home until just after sunset, when her father will return from work. Amar thrives on the thrill of approaching their meeting spot and the magic of being by her that never dulls. The park was a long and winding bike ride for her, but she was happy when he suggested it. “I love watching you here,” she had said to him once, “the way you carry yourself. The way you speak. The things you think to speak of. You’re happy.”

  Today, she peeks her head out from behind their tree as he approaches. He does not call out her name, she would be angry if he did, so he lifts his hand to salute her, and her laughter catches on a breeze to reach him. She has set up a fleece blanket, placed rocks on the four corners to keep it from lifting, a plastic container full of blackberries and green grapes, another one of baby carrots. There is a drop of blackberry juice beneath her bottom lip. He grabs a baby carrot and sets down his own contribution: two plastic forks and a pasta salad he spent an hour making after reading three different recipes and combining what seemed like the best parts of them.

  “Mumma and Baba came to me with a proposal last night,” Amira says when there is a lull in their conversation. She looks down at her hands, rolls a grape between her thumb and index finger.

  “I said no, of course.”

  She looks up at him quickly and then away. It isn’t her first proposal and it won’t be her last. She is young—only seventeen—but it was not unusual for a girl like Amira to have a future spouse secured by eighteen. The proposals were usually from young men older than Amar and much more accomplished—doctors or lawyers—from wealthy and well-connected families with untarnished reputations. He knew how it worked. His sisters had spent years thwarting their own proposals, Hadia excused now only because she was in medical school, and Huda because she insisted on waiting for Hadia. He lifts a nearby twig and snaps it in two, and then in four, and tries to snap it into eighths but it is too small.

  Amira offers him a palmful of blackberries but he is no longer hungry. He catches a falling leaf in his hand, tucks it into his pocket. He will put it in his antique keepsake box when he goes home. Once the box was filled with basketball cards and his journals, but now it is filled with mementos of Amira, all her letters and some photographs. It is a risk to keep any record. But the box has a lock and he has hidden it deep inside his closet.

  It is terrifying to be reminded that the only thing standing between this moment—where his whole body still buzzes just from having walked up to her—and that blow—her life with another person, her destiny determined so irretrievably—is her continued decision to refuse these proposals.

  Every time Amira came to him with news about a suitor, he grew quiet, regardless of whether she was complaining or joking, or describing the disorder that ensued when she said no. When they first began meeting regularly, deepening the way they felt about each other, Amar promised her he would come to her doorstep when he had made himself into the kind of man her father would seek for her.

  “I will do it the right way,” he told her. “It will be right for you, for us, and they won’t suspect we have loved each other.”

  She sometimes felt that they had made a mistake—rushing forward into their secret the way they had—that it would have been better not to sin, not to deceive, and that God might have looked kindly upon them if they kept Him and their parents in mind, and would have bestowed on them a good qismat, a happy destiny. She was betraying her parents by being loyal to him, risking their dishonor by joining him here. But he assured her it would all be made right, wanting only to have as much time with her as he could. She looked at him with an expression of such certainty, such belief, even though he was not sure he could pull it off—go through community college, transfer to a good school, force himself to study something he did not want to and did not know if he could do well at, get a promising and respectable job. But he would try, because it would be his best chance at winning her parents over, because then it would mean he had not broken his promise to her.

  “I don’t know how others do it,” she was saying now. “I would never want to get married like that. To someone who just saw a picture of me and sent a proposal—who has already made his decision and it doesn’t matter what I do or don’t do, what I say or don’t say, he’s just going to accept it. I want it to be me because of me. Me because of what I have said and done and thought. I want it to be him not because of his job or good family but because of how he thinks about the world, how he moves through it. And how we feel about each other.”

  Amira because of how she thought. Amira because she was capable of being wildly goofy one moment and poised the next, and he could never figure out how she moved from one self to the other so effortlessly. Amira because no room was lit until she entered it. Amira because if it would not be Amira, it would be no one. She had the aura and confidence of someone who was so beloved by all who knew her that it emanated from her even when she was alone, and any stranger who came across her could not help falling under a spell she had no awareness of casting.

  “Maybe it’s not a flawed system—just one that will not work for me.”

  “Has it caused a fight?” he speaks at last.

  She looks down at her hands and reaches for another grape. She bites only half and wipes away the juice on her lip with a knuckle, and he can tell she is being careful with her words. “Baba is hurt because it is his oldest friend’s son, and I am not even considering it.”

  “Did they ask why?”

  “I told them I am not ready. I am not at a place where I can decide.”

  She turns to him and gives him a wistful smile.

  “Have you signed up for your classes yet? Do you know how many credits you need this semester to transfer quickly?” Her voice is lighter, there is a strained hopefulness to it.

  He has not. He nods yes. His fourth lie that summer. But it wasn’t a lie—or at least not a malicious one. And it did not count as a lie if he simply withheld information. Like the nights he still snuck out to go to parties at his friends’ houses. She would be hurt if she knew. She never judged him or admonished him but she did express wanting a future in which he wouldn’t, and she had begun to assume, and he allowed her to continue to believe, that since they had become more serious he did not really drink and did not smoke anymore either. In some ways that was true. In the months after Abbas died, before he and Amira acknowledged what was happening between them, he would leave the house in the middle of the night with only the intention of altering his state as quickly as he could, any way that he could, anger driving him there, God knows what pulling him back. Now, he seldom drank and weed was just a way to feel how his mind zipped through a moment or slowed to focus in on it.

  There is the sound of a branch snapping and she turns. She is skittish whenever they are together, even when they know no one will come. The repercussions are always worse for a woman. He decided long ago that he did not care who he disappointed, how tarnished his reputation was, or even how it would reflect on his family. If it was between his reputation and another afternoon by her side, he would choose the afternoon. But he waited in fear of the moment it would occur to Amira that for her the stakes were different, that the community gaze would not be as forgiving.

  This is the summer Abbas has been
buried for over two years, but Amira’s loss still strikes her and there is nothing he can say, nothing he can do but give her space to speak of it.

  “I cheated in Scrabble,” she had said once, “and swore I hadn’t, and Abbas Bhai held me down as a joke, because Saif and Kumail were so mad I won, and he said, swear you didn’t cheat? Swear? I had been careless and stupid, I had picked the q and the z and the k and the x and the j too, I think, and I said I swear I didn’t I swear I didn’t, and he believed me and released me. Do you think he knows now that I lied to him? That he has access to knowing things like that wherever he is?”

  “I don’t know,” Amar had replied. “But to be honest, I’m sure he knew it as you were denying it. No one can get the q and the z and the x and the j.”

  She laughed. Only when she spoke of Abbas did she avoid looking at him. And only when seeking to comfort her could he look directly at her. He shares with her too. She has become the one to whom he confesses the fights with his father, the fights that make him want to leave, to forget that he ever came from this family, and she quiets his anger with a brief touch of her hand on his arm. She tries to tell him that what he feels is not all anger, that one day that anger will burn out and he will be left with what he can’t see right now: a sadness, an ache. Amar dismisses this, even as he hopes it might be true.

  Loving Amira was not just loving a young woman. It was loving a whole world. She was of the same world he had been born into but had only ever felt himself outside of, and sitting by her was the closest he came to feeling harmony with his own home.

  Their bodies are so close, their arms almost touching. And if they do touch it is accidental, or it’s a hug to comfort her or say good-bye or move the hair from her eyes—he never dares ask for more. Once it occurred to him that she was not ready, that she was not used to thinking of her body as hers, he made a point to not extend even the slightest touch that might cause her sadness or guilt later. She had had years of being told that there would be nothing more shameful than to follow the desires of the body, that any impulse was the devil’s temptation. She would have to decide what she believed for herself, what she wanted for herself. He would never ask her to think about it for him, never even try to reach over and kiss her. He would wait, follow her cue.