A Place for Us Read online

  “I want to tell you why I wanted us to come here,” he says. He leans forward and brushes the hair from her eyes. She looks at him and then away every time he does. He has a sudden, sickening feeling that they will not be back here, not together.

  “I’ve come here before, when I was very little.”

  He rises to his feet and asks her to walk with him. She stands and brushes off her jeans, tugs her shirt to straighten it over her hips. Weeds scrape against their legs. Today, the birds circle around the sun and the cold comes sooner than they’d like. He looks to her to commit her to memory: how she hugs her body, how she has pulled her hair back in a tight ponytail that sways as they walk down the hill. Soft dirt comes loose as they walk. They follow a small path and soon they are at the river. The water has risen. It moves forcefully around large rocks and over the surface of others.

  “This is where I remember being the most happy,” Amar says, pointing out at the water. He removes his shoes and socks and rolls up his jeans and steps in. It is cold. It feels wonderful. He looks back at her and she gives him a certain look, a blend of courage and tenderness, a look, he hopes, a woman wears when she is falling in love.

  “I always thought we came here because it was tucked away from the traffic, far from anyone we knew. And because it was beautiful.”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t remember why, exactly, I just know I felt so happy here. This tree,” he points to a tree behind her, then gestures at the river, “this water. I only have a vague memory, but sharp enough to be sure it was this place. In high school, I went to every park near my home where there was a creek, in search of here. I didn’t tell anyone in my family. I asked strangers who might know it. The librarian at my school. I looked at a map. When I finally found it, it was like stepping into an old dream.”

  He is silent then. She watches him. She does not ask any questions. He looks out at the cuts of water, how jagged it is, how fast it is moving, how it gushes around the rocks, how the sunlight catches to highlight every peak.

  “My mother and me. I asked her to join me in the river, and she did. I remember she did.”

  * * *

  HADIA TAKES A break from packing to peek through her window: Amar, the Ali brothers, and some others. The boys have just finished playing basketball. For hours, Hadia listened to the hollow bounce of the basketball on concrete, the ring of metal, the swish of net, while she regarded her shirts, her sweaters, held them up one by one before tossing them or folding them neatly. She itched to join them, to be able to move a basketball from one hand to another, to know how to step around players and when to shoot for the basket. But that was the impulse of another life. She folded her sweater, a pale pink, and packed it into her suitcase.

  She has often felt barred from hundreds of experiences—she has never strummed her fingers on the strings of a guitar, stretched her legs in dance, played a sport outside of PE class requirements, pedaled her feet fast on a bike without training wheels, on an actual street, next to moving cars—but recently the scope of her life has seemed to gasp open just a bit, and she wonders now what she will remain barred from, and what she can pry away for herself. It is quiet now except for the boys’ conversation that drifts up. When she peers down, the boys are lined against the garage door, directly beneath her window. She cannot make out their full sentences, but can tell their voices apart. Abbas Ali’s distinct timbre. His laugh. It is nearly the end of summer. Sun in the sky and sun caught in their stray strands of hair, Abbas Ali’s dark hair transformed into an almost golden-brown crown. Amar has scraped his knee. A streak of skin on his kneecap shines a bright crimson.

  Could she really leave? Earlier this morning, she had begun the task of determining how much to pack, wondering how often she would return. After years of the same meals with her family, the same boys gathering in her front yard, the same community parties and events to attend at their mosque, Amar on the other side of her bedroom wall and Huda across the hall—her window will finally look out at another view, and she will discover what life elsewhere is like, and who she is there.

  When the call from the school’s administration came, she walked out in a daze into the spring sunlight, until she was standing in the street, shaking a little from fear or excitement. All her life she assumed she could only leave the way others had: by marriage. As if marriage were the ticket, not to freedom exactly, but something close to it. Even Baba doubted her ability to make decisions for herself by stating: you are our responsibility until you are your husband’s. Or: no, you cannot do so unless you are married, and then it is up to your husband to decide with you. Which she knew meant for you. Even if all she wanted was something as simple and small as cutting her hair short, standing in line with her friends at the movie theater for the midnight screenings. Then it was fall of senior year and her classmates were in a flurry to apply to colleges, and she watched the green leaves turn red and waver and thought: why not me? I can at least try. She applied to nearby schools but also one program five hours away—a special, six-year program that was both an undergraduate degree and a medical one—a long shot, near impossible to get into, but Baba had always wanted her to be a doctor, always told her she could move away only if she got married or got into medical school.

  Thank you, she had said to the woman on the phone, thank you, and because the rush of emotions made her face fuzzy she gushed to her: you have changed my life. Well, the woman said, I don’t think I had much to do with it, and she might have laughed. How could the woman have known that she was not just conveying the news of acceptance, but also presenting Hadia with the promise of a formerly unfathomable life? One Hadia had worked for and longed for, but never allowed herself to fully picture, never allowed herself to honestly believe that a life where she abided by her rules and hers alone, picked up a guitar if she wanted to, learned a chord to play, could be hers. She would become a somebody—a doctor. She would live a five-hour car journey away from this very street, this little leaf that blew right by her, the sight of the sun setting behind the tips of houses across her street.

  Now the drive she and Baba will make to move her into her dorm is a week away and all she can think of is how nice the sound of a basketball thudding against concrete is, how nice that she can walk downstairs and out the front door to see the boys she has grown with since childhood, sweaty and tired and smiling with surprise at the sight of her waving at them and asking them if they want some mango lassi.

  “I’m making some for myself,” she explains, which is true, but Hadia knows that Abbas Ali loves mango lassi, and the boys raise their hands up so she can count cups, and Abbas Ali hollers a yes and thank you, Hadia, calling her by her name.

  * * *

  SHE HAD COME back inside after the call. Mumma and Baba were in the living room and she began to stutter. What has happened to you? Baba asked as she tried to tell him what the administration had said. They thought she was a good fit. Her application had impressed them. She could be a doctor, begin residency in six to seven years if all went well, Inshallah, it would go well. And before they registered the news, their expressions were confused and there was her fear: that it had been a lie, Baba saying she could study anywhere if she became a doctor, and now it was almost possible and he would say no to this too.

  Instead he stood and wrapped his arms around her and spoke into her hair that he was proud of her. She felt her body was humming from the impact of the news and realized she had begun crying. She couldn’t believe it. So she said so.

  “Can’t you?” Baba replied. “I did not doubt it.”

  Her mother too hugged her, albeit coldly, asking only how far away the program was, and Huda and Amar entered while Hadia’s face was pressed into the coarse fabric of her mother’s shalwar kameez. As if she were overhearing a conversation that was meant to be private, she heard Baba tell Huda and Amar the news, his voice animated, excited even. Huda shrieked and Amar lifted her up
and over his shoulder and spun her around, and she kept saying put me down, put me down, but it was the best, the dizzying feeling, the world spinning and spinning.

  The very next day, when she was called down for dinner, she saw that her family was standing in the hallway dressed in slightly nicer clothes—Mumma had put on lipstick, a very sober pink, Baba had worn his shiny shoes, Amar a button-up shirt—and they explained nothing to her as they got into the car. Huda had started wearing a scarf again and that day she had chosen an extravagant cream silk, wrapped tightly like a work of art around her face, but Hadia had not put it on again, so her hair was piled on top of her head in a messy bun, her sweater an old one for home. She would have to tell Baba that she could not see herself wearing a scarf again, and she imagined Baba would ask her, “Is it because you don’t feel safe?” To which she would respond, with the sharpest honesty she had only recently found the courage for, “It is because I don’t want to.”

  A decision that would somehow be easier to reveal because the path of her life had begun to announce and distinguish itself as separate, as having worth that her parents could understand, respect, and therefore be able to acquiesce to. That afternoon no one replied when Hadia asked where they were heading, and soon the route was familiar to her—the one they took to her favorite Thai restaurant. When they got out of the car she waited behind to walk in with Baba, and half hugged him as she thanked him.

  “It was Mumma’s idea,” he said, nodding to Mumma, who was holding the door open and waiting for them to enter.

  Huda and Baba had asked her questions about the program, the accommodation the school would provide, the breaks she would be given, Baba wondering if she knew what she wanted to specialize in yet, Amar only speaking to say that he would miss her, or asking if he could steal her room despite his being the same size as hers. But Mumma had remained thin-lipped throughout it all, and Hadia was unsure what her mother wanted from her, or if she was even happy for Hadia.

  After the plates had been cleared away and the leftovers packed in boxes, Baba ordered desserts for them all, a rare treat—mango with sticky rice and fried roti and fried ice cream. Hadia returned from the restroom to find an elegantly wrapped box where her plate had been, with shiny gold wrapping paper and a plush bow.

  “Aren’t you going to open it?” Amar asked, when her reaction had been to just stare, to poke down an ear of the bow.

  “Do you know what it is?” she asked him, and he nodded.

  She looked at each face—all four of them eager and excited, even Mumma’s wide smile, how Mumma dipped her head to encourage her. Hadia spoke to herself then: It does not matter what is in this box. Be so happy, so visibly grateful when you open it.

  She did not tear the wrapping but tugged gently until the tape came free and folded the paper to save it. Opened the box and there, elevated on a small stand, was a watch—the watch—Baba’s, her Dada’s. Now, hers. She looked up. Baba was waiting for her reaction. Of course she had seen it before—Baba wore it on special occasions, he had let her hold it when she was a child, and she might have even slipped it over her wrist. The delicate gold rim, the perfect circle, its black hands with tiny tear-dropped ends, its most gentle tick. She had never been gifted something so simple but also ornate, so obviously valuable at first glance, unnecessary and undreamed of until the moment that it was given to her, and she knew then that she would wear it the same way she carried her last name, with pride.

  “Are you sure?” she could not help but ask.

  It was his most cherished possession. Baba was never sentimental, but this watch he would draw from his desk drawer, polish, and return to its box again. She had never imagined it one day being hers. Amar was smiling softly at her and tearing his tissue into small squares.

  “For all you have done,” Baba said, and it was clear by the look on his face that he was happy with her reaction, that she did not even have to pretend.

  “But, Baba, isn’t the watch for a man?” she asked him later, when they were alone in his study.

  “Who says it is for a man?” Baba asked her. He straightened his papers by hitting them against the desk.

  She thought for a moment.

  “Men?”

  Baba laughed.

  “Exactly,” he said.

  She had worn the watch at dinner and had not taken it off since. Baba held her wrist up. It was a little big on her, but in a way that she liked, a reminder of what it signified.

  “It’s yours now,” he said to her. “It was always going to be yours, Hadia. The only thing I did not know was when it would be the right time to give it.”

  * * *

  IT IS COOL inside the kitchen, and the light too is cool, the sun having moved its way over the house. She brings down the blender from the cupboard and the yogurt, milk, and mango pulp from the fridge. She sets them on the counter, all in a row, by size. She likes to set out all the ingredients and pause before she begins to mix them up. And then Abbas Ali is in the hallway entrance, his hair damp, half sweaty still in his white shirt.

  Her mother is upstairs napping and Baba is out of town and her sister is volunteering at Sunday school, her brother and all the other boys outside. She pours milk with a slightly shaking hand, she can feel the glugging of the milk from the flimsy plastic handle, and droplets fly from the spout to speckle her arms and shirt.

  “Amar says you are leaving in a week.”

  She just smiles and manages a quick nod. She measures sugar into a cup. Abbas will not be going away for college. He will be going to a community college nearby until he can transfer. There is something about the boys from their community that disappoints her: they do not work as hard as they could, there is a listlessness about them, a lack of longing for another kind of life. They could be anything, go anywhere. With no one to deny them. Any word that is said against them is only to ask: where have you been, and why did you go? How lucky to have a question like that directed toward you. They are the young men of their families. They carry the family name. Everything is designed to cater to them, to their needs, to bend to their wishes. But they just gather in each other’s front yards and reenact the same summer afternoons.

  “I didn’t congratulate you,” he says. “Is it odd to say I was really proud of you when I heard?”

  “No, it’s nice. Thank you.”

  She is so shy, so spare with her words. He will think she does not want to speak with him. She begins to blend and they can’t hear each other anymore anyway. The blender hums and her hands shake with it. She hopes her mother will not wake. Abbas stands in the hallway still, his head tilted, a hand in his hair, not looking at her but also not turning away. She will have to leave him too. A small departure. But still one. When she is done she begins to pour the lassi into little plastic cups. He steps into the kitchen and takes the blender from her.

  “I can help,” he says. “Let me.”

  Afraid to be in the same small tiled space with him, she steps quickly to the refrigerator, touches the side of her arm that he knocked when reaching for the blender, then busies herself by freeing tiny ice cubes from the ice tray, plops them into the cups he has filled. They work in silence. She feels heat, beneath her cheeks, spreading to her neck, a heat from the awareness that they are creating something together. How they are both aware. He is so meticulous. He pours the lassi and then bends down to examine it at eye level, as if he is in chemistry class and checking if they are all equal, and he nods to himself when he decides they are. She laughs and he looks up with a half-smile, knowing she is teasing.

  “Which one will be yours?” he asks.

  She points to one and he pours a little extra.

  “This is my absolute favorite,” he says when he is done pouring the drinks, and he places them on the plastic floral tray she hands to him.

  “I know,” she says, and she knows her face must certainly be red. But h
e is not looking, he is concentrating on balancing all the little cups of lassi, even hers, on the tray and carrying them out with great care. He watches the cups with every step, and nods to her in a way that tells her to follow him, and she follows, of course she follows.

  “Will you visit?” he whispers, because they are in the hallway now and their voices can easily drift to her mother’s bedroom.

  She looks at the straight line of his neck as they walk, the vein that might always be there or might just be there after playing in the heat, the rise and dip of his shoulder. She likes that her sight expands when she is looking at him, likes that she is capable of feeling affection for something as small and specific as a bloom like a berry on the back of his neck.

  “Every long break,” she whispers back.

  Then they are outside and surrounded by others. In the sunlight Amar takes the tray from Abbas and Abbas reaches for the cup that is hers and hands it to her. Hadia looks back to the door. She presses an ice cube down until it is submerged, then tastes the sweet, sticky lassi left on her fingertip. She has done well. It is delicious.

  Abbas Ali asks, “Stay for a minute?”

  As though he knew what she was debating—to do what is proper or to do what she wants, a little longer with him, given that their time together is already so short. And Amar has not registered anything, he is just chugging his lassi as quickly as he can.