A Place for Us Read online

  One by one they will all go and she will be left with Rafiq in this house that is again too big for them, as it first was, when she walked in with Huda just a toddler in her arms and wondered how they would possibly manage to fill the rooms. Amar is in his second year of community college and has been doing well. He is motivated. He is responsible. She is grateful every day she enters the kitchen to see him studying, his books spread out on the table. She lifts the cup of tea close to her face, its steam rising. Amar scribbles in his black notebook, the edges of his pages fluttering. He is hiding something from her. She has suspected it for weeks, maybe even months.

  “You’d let him get away with anything,” Hadia had said recently, when they were arguing about her not answering Layla’s calls. “You have no idea what he does and what he hides. You only care about what your girls do, where they go, and with who.”

  “No idea of what? What does he hide?” Layla had asked.

  “Nothing,” Hadia said. “Forget it.”

  Today marks sixteen years from what would have been the due date of her fourth child. It is her secret. Not in the sense that she is the only one who knows, but that she is the only one who still carries it. Rafiq assumed all sense of loss had left when the reminders had passed but Layla, even now, sometimes removes her necklaces and spare coins from the jewelry box to find the ultrasound photograph. So indistinguishable from any other that if her children were to come across it they might think it was the first image of them.

  Come inside, she wants to say to Amar. It is warmer in here. The soft hum of the heater, her shawl draped over her shoulders, the cup of tea she brings to her lips. She watches him write. He is so serious. She had thought it was another whim. But it has been years and he has not been parted from his notebooks. Back when he was still in high school, he once pulled his notebook out at dinner and wrote a line before returning it to his pocket. She had tried to glance over. Hadia nudged him and sang, “Amar wants to be a poet.” Stretching out the word, smiling. Rafiq had not torn his gaze from Amar. The look on Rafiq’s face soured.

  “My father was a painter,” Layla had said to Amar.

  “He painted some Sundays. It was not his job,” Rafiq said. Then, after some silence, he added, “He knew better than to confuse a hobby with a respectable profession.”

  Amar left his plate untouched and, a moment later, his bedroom door slammed shut. She has yet to glimpse a page. She wonders if he keeps his old journals in the black box that her daughters had dragged her to an antique store to buy years ago. Such an odd birthday gift that she was convinced he would not like it, but her daughters had insisted. Layla had bought him a new net for his basketball hoop and some other, smaller, gifts, had baked him a cake and ordered pizza, but to her complete surprise when Amar ripped off the wrapping and saw the box he had gasped, unlocked the latch so carefully, and ran his hands along the deep-red velvet inside. He hugged Hadia and Huda first, as though he knew they were the ones to thank, before remembering to thank her and Rafiq. He always kept it locked. Her tea has cooled. She sips it, looking up at the framed photograph of her family, which she dislikes because the gap between Amar and Rafiq has always felt too revealing, but today it makes her think of that other child, and what it would have been like for him to have been in their lives, their family.

  From Him we are and to Him we return. A phrase recited in Arabic when hearing of someone’s death. Surely there is evidence for the line present in all aspects of life, not just in the face of death. This house, this table, this teacup she sips from, who is to say one day it might not all be taken? Our children are not our own as our lives are not our own. All are a loan from God, His temporary gift. Amar looks through the glass door at her and she raises her hand to wave at him. He gives her a small smile, then tucks his notebook back in his pocket. Maybe if she shares with him what she has shared with no one else he will open up to her. A friendship will develop between them. After all, she knows her children: knows their habits and tastes, even as she is becoming increasingly aware that they can easily choose to not speak of their lives. It is they who do not know her, who make no attempt to. Amar kicks his shoes on the mat outside and closes the sliding door behind him. Without saying a word he enters and lays his head on her lap, stretches his legs on the couch. The hum of the heater quiets.

  “You are hurt about something.” She says it softly, touches his eyebrow from one end to the other. When he was a boy, this is how she would calm him back to sleep after a nightmare, both eyebrows at once, her thumbs reaching the edge of his face then beginning at the center again. When he got older and his nightmares worsened, he would stumble into their bedroom and in a daze would fall asleep at the foot of their bed. She would cover him with a spare blanket and whisper prayers that she blew on him, before falling back asleep herself. By morning he would be gone, the blanket folded neatly and put back in their closet.

  He shakes his head, bites the side of his cheek.

  “You can’t lie to your mother. You can try to lie to everyone else, but a mother? A mother always knows.”

  He smiles.

  “It’s nothing, Ma. I promise you.”

  “Oh, Ami. There is always something with you.”

  “Maybe that makes life interesting?” He shrugs as he says it.

  “Living is interesting enough. Don’t make the mistake of confusing a sad state with an interesting life.”

  He has grown too old now for her to guess exactly what is bothering him—but the sense of knowing he is bothered has never left her. She runs her hand through his hair. He closes his eyes.

  “Ma?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you think I’ll be able to transfer?”

  “Of course. You’ve been working so hard.”

  “Do you think I’ll be able to become a doctor?”

  She stops moving her hand, rests it on his forehead.

  “Is that what you want?” she asks.

  He opens his eyes.

  “You hesitated.”

  “No, I am only surprised it is what you want. I was just watching you writing in the garden and remembered when Hadia said you wanted to be a poet. Has Baba been talking to you?”

  He shakes his head. She has let him down.

  “You’d make a fine doctor, Ami.”

  He does not work nearly as hard as Hadia. He begins then abandons, gives up easily what he does not care for.

  “Are you enjoying the classes?”

  He shrugs. She bites her lip, promises herself to be more careful with her words. She will have to ask Rafiq to not pressure Amar too much. Still, she is glad he has told her he is thinking about it. Even though Hadia was their first, even though Huda their heartfelt believer, she has always felt instinctively that she and Amar had their own understanding, one she could never establish with her daughters. If her daughters banished him from their games, it was she who lifted Amar into her arms and distracted him with a walk outside, drew lines with chalk in the cement section of their garden and sang as he jumped from square to square.

  Once, when her children were much younger, she had found him sniffling after her girls had shut him out of their room. He refused to tell her what was the matter until she had pried it out of him, and even then all he had said was, “They don’t love me.”

  It was this that angered her and she led Hadia by her arm to her bedroom and shut the door behind them, knelt until they were eye to eye.

  “Do you think it’s funny to hurt your brother?”

  She tightened her grip. Hadia’s eyes widened.

  “Right now it is funny to you both to tease him. To leave him out. It’s a big joke you forget about. Maybe he also forgets. But you are his sister. It is your duty to take care of him. If you treat him horribly, Huda will treat him horribly.”

  “He doesn’t know the way we play. He’s too little.”
/>   “Then play something else.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “One day the joke will not be funny. If you always leave him out, if you always tease him and hurt his feelings, soon you will not know how to be any other way with him, and it will affect his personality. Your relationship. For his whole life, and the rest of yours. Do you understand that, Hadia? Whose fault will that be then?”

  Hadia had begun crying. Layla let go.

  “Whose fault?”

  “Mine.”

  She had wanted to have another son to give Amar a brother. She thought that a brother would make him feel less alone. That first week following her miscarriage she was certain he sensed her grieving. He would find her, sitting at the kitchen table, staring out at her garden, unwilling or unable to do the task that was before her—the simple washing of dishes, the preparing of dinner, even eating her own breakfast that Rafiq had so kindly set out for her before going to work—and Amar would wordlessly climb into her lap, rest his head on her chest, and look up at her with his big brown eyes.

  “Can you keep a secret?” she asks him now.

  “Depends on the secret.”

  His teasing smile looks unfamiliar upside down. She tsk-tsks at him. How can she tell Amar in a way that will not cause him pain?

  “I was going to have a child once, after you.”

  “You wanted to?”

  “I almost did.”

  He sits up. He faces her.

  “I don’t remember,” he says, shaking his head.

  “None of you knew. Hadia and Huda still do not know. Rafiq and I kept it a secret the first few months, hoping it would protect from nazar.”

  Amar is silent while she explains, he plays with the edge of his shirt as if trying to tear it. She is surprised to find that she is speaking in medical terminology she had not even thought she had grasped when the doctor first told her. Her voice is without any emotion, as though she has stepped aside from her own feelings so Amar can encounter the news unbiased.

  “I named him Jaffer,” she says, and that is when the emotion floods back into her voice, when what she is sharing becomes hers again. “I wanted you to know.”

  He leans against her shoulder and does not look up when she tells him how Rafiq had left them with Seema Aunty for a few nights, how he assured her that the Ali family had the most children close to their children’s age, and that if they had company they would not miss Layla as much. But on the drive home from the hospital, when Layla looked to Rafiq, she felt no comfort, and in the empty house she longed for her children to be brought home to her, even though Rafiq insisted it would be best if she rested a few days without any obligations to attend to. She tells Amar about the woman in the mosque who calls for her son by that name and how hearing it sometimes shocks her. Or how, at the grocery store, if the clerk asks her how many children she has, she catches herself replying four.

  “Your baba has not asked me about it once since,” she says. It is the closest she has come to complaining about her husband to her son, to anyone, and when Amar does look up, his eyes are lit with anger.

  * * *

  AFTER HEARING OF the eldest Ali boy’s death, Hadia refuses to drink water for the three days leading up to his funeral. It is her only tangible act of mourning, and she keeps it in secret. She does not cry. It would have given it away: that she had loved him, in her own quiet way.

  On the day of the funeral she stays in bed and waits for the call to tell her it is time. She is grateful she has been home on break. Just a week ago, Mumma had hosted a jashan in her honor. She would be able to go on to her university’s medical school. After the reciters closed their poetry books, they all gathered in the garden for lunch and it was then that Hadia had seen Abbas Ali for the last time, leaning against the side of her house in his white shirt, laughing with Amar at a joke she couldn’t hear. He had begun to wear his hair long again, the way he had when he was nine and organizing capture the flag and games of tag in their backyards. Today he will be buried. And in two days, she will have to get back in her car and drive the long five hours, keeping her grip steady on the wheel, to return to school, where she will somehow begin another semester. Life will go on normally, and this seems like the most impossible fact of all.

  She is afraid to see his body, to have the news confirmed so irrefutably. The entire community is in a state of disbelief—a death so young, so sudden. Someone so well liked, by both the elders and the children, someone who occupied an unvoiced corner of every young woman’s heart in the community. The fan moves slowly and Hadia tries to focus on a single blade, watching it spin and spin. She thinks of flashing lights, ambulances arriving too late, shards of glass glimmering on concrete, his sister, whose knees collapsed upon hearing the news. She knows the crossroad where people have left bouquets by the stop sign, tied balloons to the pole, left letters on the metal gates nearby, their edges flapping.

  There had been four young men in the car, Abbas Ali and his friends from community college, and all were dead now except one who had been buckled in the backseat. If she had been another kind of woman, Hadia is sure she would have had the courage to seek him out, ask him what Abbas spoke of that night. The one who survived is still in the hospital. They say he is not doing well. Hadia wonders what it would be like to enter a car with close friends and be the only one to leave it.

  She turns away from the fan, convinced it is making her nauseous, and there it is: that small piece of gum wrapper still taped to her ceiling from when she had stood on her bed on tiptoe as a young girl and stuck it there. She had drawn a small strawberry on the gum wrapper. Almost a decade ago. She had forgotten about it—saw it from time to time over the years and it had always struck her as silly and embarrassing, as if she were no better than the girls who wrote Mrs. next to the last names of their crushes. Still, she had never had the heart to take it down. The events surrounding the silver wrapper are blurred. He had given it to her, she remembers that much, as well as the soft scrape of her fingertips against his palm.

  The last time she saw Abbas she had spoken to him. Each time she returns to the conversation the memory loses some of its certainty. He is already becoming a long time ago. Everyone was gathered in their backyard. People eating together, laughing together, lining up to pray together. Hadia sat in the scratchy grass, balancing her plate of food on her leg, and Huda was leaning on her because Huda was always so happy and extra affectionate the first few days Hadia came home. She could see the eldest Ali boy heaping food on his own plate, and Hadia felt surprised the community boys had managed a whole hour without once disappearing—as they always did, and as the girls were always envious they could, even if they rolled their eyes when the boys returned smelling faintly of smoke. Amar had put extra effort into his clothes and hair, and he looked strikingly like photographs of Baba at that age. She remembered thinking: maybe this is what it is like for all of us to be almost but not quite yet adults.

  She was climbing the stairs for a break from everyone when she heard the eldest Ali boy call her name. She placed a hand on the banister. She turned on her heel, two steps above him, and smiled at her added height. They were eye to eye.

  You’re back, he might have said to her, to which she might have done the slightest of curtsies as if to respond, here I am.

  “You made the lassi?” he asked.

  “I helped.”

  What else was there for them to talk about when they were hardly allowed to? She too could bring up lists and lists of nothings, just to be talking. Hadia debated if she should continue up the stairs.

  “Do you remember that day you were about to leave?” he asked.

  Of course she remembered. It was the day they had made lassi together.

  “That was three years ago,” she said, and he raised his eyebrows in surprise.

  “Do you remember what I said that day?”
/>   She shook her head. She moved her hand to hold on to her arm. Then she let go, afraid her posture might appear weak, uninviting.

  “I told you that I knew you’d make us proud,” he said. “You’ve always been the best of us.”

  “You never said that,” she said, shaking her head and allowing a smile to escape her.

  “Didn’t I? Well, I meant to.”

  He was smiling wide. She was too. They stood like that for a long moment and she had the sense that they were both aware of some secret. The thought she had pushed aside since she was a young girl rose up one last time—that hope or intuition that he was, in his own way, in the only way he could, courting her by being kind to her brother. Then she blinked and the moment was lost. Not knowing how to offer a response that hummed the way his did, she asked how things had been at home since her last visit.

  “Same as always,” he said, and he turned to the framed family photographs that trailed the wall up the stairs, and she looked too, the one of her and Huda in their horrible collared and poufy dresses, the one of them smiling with their blue braces, one of Amar climbing the magnolia tree.

  “Still keeping an eye on Amar for me?” she asked, and this seemed to hum just a bit, the way she said for me.