A Place for Us Read online

  “You know I don’t have to answer that.”

  They turned when they heard someone descending the stairs. It was Amira Ali. Hadia tensed to be discovered speaking to Abbas in private, but it was Amira who looked like she had been stumbled upon, and Abbas who handled the moment gracefully.

  “There you are,” he said to her, as if he had been searching for her the whole time. “We’re leaving soon.”

  Amira gestured behind her. “The bathrooms downstairs were taken.”

  He turned to head back outside, and Amira smiled her timid smile when she passed Hadia and followed her brother down the stairs. Just before Abbas turned the corner, he looked back and said, “Congratulations again.” Or maybe it was, “I was right back then.” And he held his hand up in a wave, and maybe she nodded, and maybe she stood still.

  There is a knock on the door and she knows by the sound and length of pause before the second rap that it is Amar. When she opens the door to her brother, Hadia looks at him for the first time not as her younger brother, but as the young man he is becoming, the hints in his face and demeanor that allow her to picture what he will look like in ten years, twenty years. Her apprehension rises, unbridled and accompanied by a fully formed fear: she is afraid it is possible that he too could die as suddenly and as young as the eldest Ali boy. It had not occurred to her before this week that one could lose a sibling. Nor had she considered how easily the crash could have happened on one of the many nights Amar was with Abbas. Amar looks at her curiously, possibly mistaking her fear for anxiety over the event they are about to attend, and he softly says, “Ready?”

  They follow their parents to the car. Everyone appears to be elsewhere. Amar cannot decide if he wants the top button on his shirt buttoned, so he keeps his fingers there, doing and undoing it repeatedly. Abbas treated Amar like a brother and Amar had reciprocated that tenderness tenfold. He is free to be angry and inconsolable, to invite everyone to sit with him and then to shut them out again, and when he stood in the driveway as he did last night and shot hoops over and over again in the moonlight for hours, when he kicked the basketball against the garage door and it sounded like thunder inside, his reaction was both witnessed and excused.

  They drive to the funeral in silence. Hadia rests her head against the window. It surprises her, the little details she can suddenly remember about Abbas Ali, despite having spent a life only in each other’s periphery. It is as though a route of her mind has been uncovered and out march the dizzying sights of him. A shirt he wore the color of leaves, the blackberries he ate from the bowl in their kitchen, the soda he once spilled at a community party, the wooden keychain of a tiger on his backpack from the days she sat behind him in Sunday school, how he asked her once why she liked her plum tree, how he slowed when playing soccer to pass the ball to her, his eyes speckled with orange and gold, telling her Inshallah all will be well.

  Just before walking into the wake, Hadia turns to Amar and touches his shoulder as if about to speak. He looks at her, but Hadia does not know what she wants to say. Would it be easier to tell Huda? He raises an eyebrow to encourage her. She wants to tell him she loved the eldest Ali boy. She wants him to know this loss is not his alone, that when she reached out to touch his shoulder it was not just to offer solace, but to ask for comfort too.

  “What is it?” Amar stops to ask her.

  Hadia shakes her head and walks past him, past her parents, past the crowd of solemn faces. She catches a glimpse of the family members once inside. Uncle Ali stands to shake the hand of everyone who has come, and Amira is seated on the floor, her face hidden by her own hand. Hadia is grateful they do not make eye contact, suddenly ashamed of her audacity to think she even has a loss to grieve, when a girl has just lost her brother, a father his firstborn son.

  Her mouth is dry and she walks through the halls and heads straight to the bathroom. She shuts the door behind her and turns to her own reflection. She does not cry. But she does think of how Mumma only knocked on Amar’s door after the news came. How it did not even occur to her to check on her daughters. What she wanted was for someone to know. For her sadness to not go unnoticed anymore. She wanted, more than anything, to lay her head in her mother’s lap the way Amar often did, and tell her she had lost the first boy she had ever loved. The one she had maintained a distant devotion for since she first realized it was possible to feel for another. She wanted Mumma to stroke her hair the way she touched Amar’s after the news, over and over, as if making sure he was really there, so stunned and lucky that he was alive. All these years she imagined her life would one day merge with Abbas Ali’s. Their entangling had felt inevitable to her, and for this reason, and because it would be improper, she had not broken the barrier of silence between them.

  Her reflection. Her tired face. She touches her dry bottom lip and thinks of how odd it is to experience a secret loss. A loss without a name. The loss of a potential version of her life. Of what she never had, and now never will. The realization that, in her own small and sustained way, she had loved someone for years that she had only looked at in glimpses, only spoken to in passing, only thought of in secret, only ever touched when they passed a cup of lassi or a stick of gum between them.

  * * *

  WRITTEN AT THE top of the spelling test in red ink is 100%. Amar’s teacher even wrote a little note: Good job, Amar. Wonderful improvement! Amar is ecstatic. He waves the paper in front of Hadia’s face like it’s a flag, points at the number as though the red were not enough to draw her attention to it.

  “You did it,” Hadia tells him the first time he shows her.

  The second time she only nods. But Mumma acts like every time she sees it is the first. She tapes the test on the refrigerator door, even though they are not like other families with magnets and photographs on their refrigerator. Mumma leans in to kiss Amar’s cheek. She tells him that as soon as Baba comes home, she will show him the test, and that no one is more deserving of the shoes he will get.

  At night, Amar comes to Hadia’s bedroom to thank her. His pajamas are dark blue with planets and white stars. Hadia tells herself to hug him. That he does deserve it.

  “I wouldn’t have been able to do it without you,” he says, and she can tell from the look in his eyes and the tone of his voice that he means it.

  “It’s not a big deal,” she says. She had meant that helping him was not a big deal, but her voice has a sharpened edge to it she did not intend, and he flinches a bit to hear it.

  Downstairs in the closet his white shoes have the word written in black ink. When she first studied his test taped on the refrigerator door, she saw that each letter was written with so much care, so unlike his usual scribbles, that at first glance Hadia confused his handwriting with hers. It occurred to her that Amar could do anything if he tried. Maybe even better than Hadia could—he had only studied two nights.

  After he leaves, she opens her bottom desk drawer, where she has kept all of her important tests and papers, and all of them are A’s, and none of them have been seen by anyone but her.

  Amar was the one they loved the most. He was the one whose picture Mumma kept in her wallet behind her license. Him smiling with a toothless grin. Mumma ran her fingers through his hair as if it nourished her. A painting he did of a boat on the ocean was tacked above Baba’s office desk when she visited him at work. Once Hadia spent an entire afternoon counting the faces in the framed pictures, and Amar had beaten them all by seven. Hadia and Huda were a two-for-one deal: if there was a framed picture of them, they were likely together. Mumma served food for Amar first, and then Baba, and she always asked Amar if he wanted seconds. She was not even aware of doing it. Hadia’s daily chore was washing the dishes and Huda’s was sweeping. If Amar was asked to help, the two of them would shout and cheer to mark the day. Sometimes this made Hadia so angry that if she was left in charge of the cleaning while Mumma and Baba were out, she would delegate ev
erything to Amar. He was the only one Mumma had a nickname for. His favorite ice cream flavor was always stocked in the fridge; if Hadia helped unload the groceries and saw a pistachio and almond carton, she reminded Baba that Amar was the only one of them who ate that flavor.

  “You don’t love it too?” Baba would ask her distractedly, every time.

  “No,” she’d say quietly, thinking there was no point in correcting him at all.

  Once, only once, had she confronted her mother about this, after her mother had taken his side during a fight that he was clearly to blame for.

  “You love him more,” she had shouted. “You love him more than all of us.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  Her mother was calm, as if she was bored by Hadia’s tantrum.

  “You think about him more. What he needs and what he wants.”

  Hadia had turned to run back into her room.

  “We worry about him more,” her mother had called after her, so gently that Hadia had wanted to believe her. “We don’t have to worry about you.”

  She had sniffled, and locked her bedroom door, embarrassed by her outburst. She plotted to do something that would make her parents worry about her, as if their worry would prove the depth of their love. But she was afraid. They had endless patience for Amar’s antics. She feared the only thing worse than wondering if they loved him more was testing their patience, proving it to be thin, and knowing for certain.

  They loved Hadia because she did well. Her grades were good and her teachers said kind things about her. She was not sure if Baba would even notice her at all, if she did not work hard to distinguish herself academically. The only compliment Mumma ever gave her was that when Hadia cleaned the stove, it always sparkled.

  “Even I can’t clean like that,” Mumma would say. And there would be actual awe in her voice, and Hadia would never know if she should feel glad for the compliment, or annoyed that it was the only thing that Mumma valued enough to note.

  Amar was their son. Even the word son felt like something shiny and golden to her, like the actual sun that reigned over their days.

  Baba would sometimes say to Hadia, “One day you’ll live with your husband. You’ll care for his parents. You’ll forget about us.”

  It was meant as a joke, “you’ll forget about us,” or “we will no longer be responsible for you.” But it was never funny.

  “Amar will take care of us, right, Ami?” Mumma would squeeze his cheeks. Amar would nod.

  “Why can’t I?” she would say.

  “Because the role of the daughter is to go off, to make her own home, to take her husband’s name—daughters are never really ours,” Baba would tell her.

  But I want to be yours, she’d want to say. I want to be yours or just my own.

  “I won’t take anyone’s name,” she’d vow aloud, but he would have stopped listening.

  Everyone important was a boy. The Prophets and the Imams had been men. The moulana was always a man. Jonah got to be swallowed by the whale. Joseph was given the colorful coat and the powerful dreams. Noah knew the flood was coming. Whereas Noah’s wife was silly and drowned. Eve was the first to reach for the fruit. But Hadia liked to keep her examples close. It was Moses’s sister who had the clever idea to put him in the basket, and the Pharaoh’s wife who had the heart to pull him from the river. It was Bibi Mariam who was given the miracle of Jesus. Bibi Fatima was the only child the Prophet had and the Prophet never lamented the lack of a son. And she liked to think that there was a reason that one of the first things the Prophet ever did was forbid the people of Quraysh from burying their newborn daughters alive. But still, hundreds and hundreds of years had passed, and it was still the son they cherished, the son their pride depended on, the son who would carry their name into the next generation.

  * * *

  SHE HOLDS ON to the banister to guide her. Everyone but Baba is asleep. She is supposed to be asleep too—but she is thirsty, and has dared to tiptoe downstairs for a glass of water. Amar’s test dominates the refrigerator door. In the blue light the ink of the 100% appears purple. She is not sure what to name her feeling, but she knows she does not like it—the way it shrinks her heart. That there could be a limit to the happiness she could feel for Amar. Earlier that night, Baba came home and he and Amar had shaken hands like businessmen. But when Baba told him they would go that weekend to the mall, Amar became again a boy who could cheer hurray and hug his arms so tightly around Baba’s legs that Baba started to laugh. Mumma had reached out and touched Baba’s arm, and smiled at him when he looked at her. Baba had been generous: he said that Amar could customize his shoes, which they knew from the posters cost extra. Amar was grateful, but when he spoke to Hadia and Huda he was arrogant: his shoes would be better than anything they owned.

  After Amar’s test was posted on the refrigerator, she asked her mother if she could buy eyeliner and begin wearing lip gloss like the other girls at school. Maybe even wear it to Sunday school sometimes. There was a boy in her mosque that all the girls talked about, and they gathered in the bathroom and leaned toward their reflections in the mirror, their mouths little O’s, to apply lip gloss with an expertly steady hand, and if he happened to walk by they always laughed loudly. Hadia did not want to laugh when the eldest Ali boy walked by for no reason and did not want to wear makeup just so he would look at her, but it would be nice to not be the only girl in her grade who was plain, who was dressed by her mother in oversized clothes. Mumma told her it was wrong to do things intentionally to attract attention.

  “Don’t be childish, Hadia,” Mumma said when Hadia reminded her that she had gotten A’s on her recent tests. “It doesn’t suit you. This was a special thing for Amar. You know that.”

  She knocks so quietly on Baba’s open office door it takes him a moment to look up from his paperwork.

  “Why aren’t you asleep?” he asks, and he invites her inside by folding his fingers toward him. Baba removes the glasses from his face and sets them down.

  “I have to tell you something,” she says.

  Baba asks her to sit in the chair in front of his desk, and she sits. Baba has a paperweight on his desk that Hadia made in the fourth grade, fat and finished with glittery glaze. When the teacher first handed it back to her she was so proud of how beautiful it was. Now it looks like a blob she wishes he would throw away. But he has kept it, and Hadia thinks that maybe she has been mistaken, maybe she should count again the faces in the framed photographs, ask Mumma for what she wants in another way.

  “Amar told me you helped him a lot,” Baba says to her. “I’m proud of you.”

  It is exactly what she had wanted to hear but now that she has heard it she only wants to cry.

  “What did you have to tell me?” he asks.

  “Nothing, never mind,” she says and shakes her head, but Baba knows she is lying.

  “Tell me, Hadia.” He leans forward. He uses his about-to-be-angry voice. He looks impatiently at his watch and says, “It’s late.”

  Baba is wearing his father’s watch. It is old but so nice and it makes Baba’s wrist look important. The watch has passed from father to son and one day it will be Amar’s. He does not even have to do anything to earn it. All he has to do is exist.

  And Hadia thinks of Mumma leaning in to kiss Amar. How Mumma always says to Amar, mera beta, my son, but never says meri beti, to Hadia or Huda, as though daughters are unworthy of being called mine.

  “Amar cheated. Look at the soles of his shoes,” she blurts, and the words sound ugly as soon as they escape her mouth.

  Baba sits back in his seat. She had thought he would be instantly angry—this was the worst thing Amar could do, because it was a double lie, first to the teachers and then to his parents, but Baba just looks very tired.

  “Go to sleep, Hadia,” he says finally, and his voice is very thin.

&nb
sp; Earlier that evening, Amar had said to her, “You know, Hadia, I always thought that you were the smartest one. I thought that because you were so smart maybe Allah didn’t give Mumma Baba’s other kids as much brains. But it’s not so bad, not so hard to try.”

  Now the thought occurs to her: what if she had not even wanted him to succeed all along? What if she liked being the smart Hadia, the responsible Hadia, the we-are-leaving-the-house-in-your-care-while-we-go-out-okay Hadia?

  She turns around in the doorway. “Baba, you will still buy him the shoes, right?”

  Baba runs his hand along his eyebrow and does not look up to answer her.

  “Go.”

  She begins to cry. She does not move. She does not know what she expected, but it was not this feeling—that she is the one who has done something very wrong.

  “Will you tell him I told?” she asks, her voice so small.

  He shakes his head.

  “He really did study, Baba. He didn’t do anything else for two days.”

  “Now,” he barks at her, pointing out the door. “I won’t tell you again.”

  7.

  LAYLA WAITS UNTIL HER CHILDREN ARE SEATED ON THE PADDED puzzle-piece mats in the children’s nook before wandering the aisles. She likes how tall the shelves on either side of her are, likes the look of the dust suspended in the afternoon light. Her children seemed at peace and occupied—Huda lying on her back flipping through a book, Hadia reading aloud to Amar, and Amar half leaning on her arm, trying to look at the pictures. A pile of books are stacked by his knees from when they first arrived and ran around in a frenzy pulling far more books than they would get through in a single sitting. What exactly is she looking for, she wonders, her fingers trailing spines.

  It is a Sunday. They are in a public library near their home, where Layla brings them on some weekends, especially when Rafiq is away. He left for a business trip earlier this morning and will return Thursday night. It is odd to her, how used to his absence they have all become, and odder still that she does not mind it. When she speaks to her father on the phone now she does not tell him when Rafiq is gone. Her father still worries for her in a way that he does not have to worry for Sara, who has stayed in Hyderabad, who has never driven a day in her life, who lives in the apartment complex next door and has someone to help her with the groceries and the cooking and cleaning. She realizes that her life has grown, and what she can now do with ease has expanded. Just years ago, Layla panicked at the thought of having to manage without Rafiq, but now it seems that her house is relaxed when he is gone and cautious when he is not.