A Place for Us Read online

  “Mumma, is Baba leaving today?” she asks, a startled expression on her face, as if she has just remembered.

  Hadia looks down at her nails. Layla allowed her to paint them for the first day of preschool a few days ago, and now they are a chipped, bright pink and deep purple. Hadia scratches a nail with another, chipping it even more, and Layla places her hand on hers to stop her.

  “It will be okay,” she says, her voice deep and slow to assure her daughter. “We will be fine. We will even have fun.”

  Hadia searches her face as if she is trying to sense if Layla is being honest or if she is only trying to comfort her. She is smart for her age, perceptive and easily affected. Layla has to be careful. Finding what she was looking for in her mother’s face, Hadia nods, hops out of bed to wake Huda.

  Downstairs, Layla listens for the sounds of her family’s movements as she fills clear plastic bags with slices of pear or bunches of grapes and a handful of Goldfish crackers. She packs juice boxes, makes wraps of roti filled with fried okra and carefully covers them in foil, rough and silver. That is Huda jumping off of the bed onto the floor, she must be dressed, she likes putting her clothes on while standing on her bed, and Layla often admonishes her. It is so easy to lose balance. The distant rush of water on its way to the shower slows and stops. Rafiq must be stepping out. Three brown bags of lunch, all in a line, sliced pear for Huda, grapes for Hadia, almonds for Rafiq, and she pauses to look out the window, at their garden—a square of cement where the girls play jump rope, then lots of long and unkempt grass, and at the far end a lone plum tree. She had liked the plum tree when they first moved in, had warmed to the idea of owning land which contained a tree that would bear fruit. Pounding footsteps on stairs and she knows that Huda and Hadia are racing to her, and she turns just in time to see them, Hadia in the lead, Huda trailing after her, out of breath and already unhappy, a defeated look on her face.

  “No running,” she reminds them, but there is no point, the race is already over, they are clambering into their chairs. Hadia has won again. Layla wishes she would let her sister win once in a while. Layla pours cereal into their matching pink bowls and sets it before them. Huda complains. Hadia spills some milk on her shirt. Layla just concentrates on slicing a banana into Rafiq’s cereal bowl. Every time the dull blade of the butter knife reaches her palm, she pushes softly into her skin, feels its ridges.

  When they first bought the home and walked through it as a family, Rafiq pretended that they had come upon the house by complete accident. Do you think the door will be open in this house? he asked Hadia as they pulled into the driveway. They had just listened to their Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan cassette, and Layla loved the way it lightened Rafiq’s mood. Hadia looked at him from her booster seat, skeptical and excited, old enough to understand his game, young enough to be fooled by it. Rafiq lifted Hadia up and onto his shoulders. Hadia adored when he did this. Her face all love and wonder. This time, some fear too. Baba—don’t, what if you get in trouble? Don’t become worried, he said; you trust your Baba, don’t you? And she paused for a long second before she nodded and what a surprise—the door opened, and look how silent and empty the house was. No one lives here, Hadia whispered, tense but intrigued. You’re exactly right, Hadia, he said. Smart girl. And she beamed. Rafiq paused in every room: kitchen, he said to Hadia, and she nodded; space where the kitchen table would be, he said to the emptiness beneath a light fixture, and Huda, almost three years old, looked at it all with boredom, a thumb in her mouth that Layla kept pulling out. He led them straight to the backyard—their old apartment only had a tiny balcony—and Layla thought to reach out and hold Hadia as he twisted the lock to open the sliding door, but he was careful, balancing her with one arm. Layla followed them closely. Hadia’s arms were wrapped tight around his neck. They trudged through the grass and Rafiq spun once, and Hadia giggled, and it was possible that Layla wished, for a moment, that he were leading her with as much care through their new home as he was Hadia. But this was silly—to give her daughter love was a way to give her love. When they reached the farthest end of the backyard and turned to look at the expanse before them that would be their grassy yard, and the two-story house, Rafiq paused, looked up at Hadia, and asked, “Do you like this house?”

  “Yes,” Hadia said, and she leaned her chin on his head. Her hair fell just above his ears.

  “Could you live here?” he asked, and Layla thought it was sweet: they had already bought it weeks earlier, had just gotten the keys that day, but he was presenting it to Hadia as if he would make it hers in that instant if she said yes. Layla hoped she would say yes.

  “I guess so,” Hadia said.

  Rafiq lifted his shoulders and lowered them abruptly, just as he had when she was a little younger and he was pretending to be a horse or a helicopter, and Hadia started laughing her uncontrollable laughter.

  “You guess so? You guess so?”

  Rafiq stretched for one of the plums on the plum tree and plucked it for her, passed it into her hands.

  “It’s yours.”

  “Plum?”

  “All of it.”

  He spun her. He nodded at the empty house. He put her down and lifted up Huda and said, “Did you hear that, Huda Jaan? This house is yours.”

  And Hadia just stood there, stunned, holding on to that little plum and looking up at Rafiq with big eyes and her mouth a little open. Huda looked like she did not understand but Rafiq looked happy and Hadia seemed happy so she smiled too, then put her thumb back in her mouth.

  Now Rafiq has taken his seat beside the two of them at the table and is scanning the newspaper as he eats. The girls are not allowed to speak when he is reading the paper, they know this. They listen to him without even being told. They give each other looks and Layla wonders what they communicate to each other. Why is he not talking to her, if this is his last morning with them, with her? She is too nauseous to eat with them, so she stands at the counter and looks for reasons to stay in the room. Clears the surfaces, wipes them down with a sponge, looks up from time to time at the morning sunlight on the page of Rafiq’s newspaper, and the light in his dark hair, the light catching the curve of the silver spoon he holds away from him.

  Then he pulls back his sleeve to look at his watch, and it is his father’s watch. He had worn it on their wedding day. And on the day they had flown together to America. Her heart pinches to think she has glimpsed what he did not verbalize: that this is not nothing to him either, that perhaps he is nervous for the new position or wants to take a piece of his father with him. Rafiq rises from the table with his empty bowl in hand, gathers the girls’ bowls too, tells them to grab their backpacks, it is time to go.

  Will he pause to embrace her, will he look back from the doorway, lift his hat or nod his head before leaving? Layla hugs the girls before she remembers the Quran, how Rafiq should walk beneath it if he is going on a journey, and she tells him this and he appears agitated, there is not much time, so Layla rushes up the stairs to the empty room next to their daughters’, which they have been using as a prayer room: two prayer rugs, each with one corner folded over, and a tiny bookshelf with all their religious texts—and she grabs the Quran she likes with the blue cover and golden pages. Downstairs, Rafiq is waiting in the doorway, the girls presumably buckled into the car, and she holds the Quran up with one arm and instructs him to walk back and forth beneath it five times, as her mother taught her, as her mother had done for her on every first day of school, and on the day after her wedding, when she was taking off to fly to America, and by the fourth time Rafiq walks beneath, her stretched arm begins to ache, and by the fifth he pauses, looks up at her, and she holds the Quran up to his face and leafs through all the pages at once, its breeze causing the hair falling onto his forehead to tremble, and he leans in and kisses the cover with closed eyes.

  There is a pause. Layla does not know what to say or ask for.

&nb
sp; “Make sure all the windows are closed when you leave to pick up the girls, and check at night too. And the doors.”

  “I know.”

  “Even the garage door.”

  “Yes.”

  “Khudahafiz,” he says, which is good-bye, but literally it means in God’s protection I leave you. In His care I trust. And it is that meaning she intends when she responds in kind.

  “You will be fine,” he says.

  She nods. How she appreciates that he knew what she needed, and acknowledged it. He kisses her, ever so softly, on her forehead, and steps away. Layla lifts a hand in good-bye. The door closes, the house empty, the sound, after a few seconds of the car turning on, of the tires pulling away on the cement.

  * * *

  AT NIGHT, THE girls brush their teeth together in front of the bathroom mirror, balancing on their individual stools. Huda is always in a rush to spit out the toothpaste, but waits for Hadia to be done before she lowers her own brush, and Hadia nods her head slowly as she counts to a hundred in her head. Layla hates how night looks outside windows without curtains. She is exposed. She avoids going near them. She turns the lights off downstairs and finds she is a bit out of breath by the time she reaches upstairs. Hadia and Huda are getting into their pajamas. They are what fills her life, they really are, she thinks. What would life be like with another child? When Rafiq called earlier, she did not tell him that she threw up twice after he drove away. Or that she lay in bed for an hour absolutely miserable before the queasiness passed. She doesn’t know if it could be true—that after a year of trying she might have another child soon. But instead of the immediate excitement she had felt with her girls, the news, the possible news, made her feel even lonelier as she went about her day, picked up her daughters from school, cooked dinner, no hope of seeing Rafiq for three days, and what if she was carrying a child again, and he was so often away?

  Hadia and Huda crawl into their beds and she notices for the first time that the tree outside their bedroom scrapes against the window when it is windy. She begins to read to them, but stops, tries to keep her voice even when she asks, “Do you girls want to do something fun tonight?”

  “Yes, yes!” Huda says, so excited without even knowing what.

  “Do you want to camp in my room?”

  “Yes!” Huda stands up in her bed and jumps up and then onto the floor.

  Layla follows as the two of them race into her room. They climb onto her bed. Instinctively, they know to scoot to the side that is Rafiq’s; their small heads share his pillow. They look at Layla, as if waiting for instructions, waiting to see if there is a next part to this spontaneous plan. But there isn’t. Layla says good night to the two of them, then moves her prayer rug into her own room, and she prays in the corner while the girls try to sleep. They shift around. She did lock the front door, and checked twice, she does not need to go down again. She will ask Rafiq to install curtains when he returns. She is a little thirsty but she can cup her hands and drink from the sink. She catches her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Her face is older now but still young. She is twenty-six. Young enough to carry another child, without complication, if she is lucky, if God wills it. Old enough to be able to do this: spend this night beside her girls who are warm and full of life. It is to be expected that the first night apart from Rafiq would be a bit difficult, that she would feel uneasy when she looked out the glass to the dark night sky and saw only her reflection, expected that she would be startled, while reading the girls to sleep, by the sound of a passing car, its lights curving up and across their walls. She climbs into bed quietly, thinking her daughters are asleep. Hadia opens her eyes.

  “Awake?” Layla whispers.

  Hadia nods. She looks up at the ceiling. Her nose looks so blue and small in the dark. Her tiny hands beneath her cheek, her palms together, like a photograph of a child resting.

  “Mommy,” she says, pausing to sigh, “I really love school.” She says it all in English and like she is confessing, like she is attempting to make conversation, or is surprised it is this way for her when she did not expect it to be.

  “Mommy?” Layla says. She is startled to be called that.

  “Mummy,” Hadia corrects herself, embarrassed.

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Layla says. They always speak in Urdu. She might have to make a point to enforce it as a rule now. Should she call Rafiq tomorrow, tell him this? That their daughter was speaking like an adult too.

  “Did you like school?” Hadia asks. Outside, the wind whips through the trees. Layla kisses her cheek, moves Hadia’s hair around gently. All praise to God, she thinks, as she looks at her, all thanks to Him, for the gift of my daughter sweet, and I having the privilege of being her mother.

  “Shh,” she says into her daughter’s hair. “Sleep. I did like it. I liked it a whole lot. We can talk about it tomorrow.” Hadia nods and closes her eyes. Layla leaves her arm over her daughter’s body. It feels safe, and comforting, just to have her there.

  * * *

  HADIA IS THIRTEEN and sitting on the top of a picnic table painted red, loosening the knot of her scarf and watching the boys from her Sunday school class play basketball during their lunch break. Amar is among them, despite being much younger. She focuses on him from time to time, to make sure he is keeping up with them, that they are not shoving him or denying him the ball. But her brother holds her attention only briefly before she returns to follow the movement of the eldest Ali boy, who weaves through the rest of the boys with an ease that looks graceful to her. From where she watches, it appears that the others are afraid of him or in awe of him—they seem reluctant to steal the ball, they cheer louder when he scores.

  And he scores often. She tugs at the knot of her scarf again. It is a hot day. Abbas Ali, the eldest Ali boy, is the only one in the entire community Hadia has spent years maintaining a secret admiration for. She is not alone. The other girls have not been nearly as reticent. Already, he has a reputation in the mosque among the girls. He is kind to the youngest girls, pathetically adored by the girls his age, and even the older, teenage girls tend to comment on how incredibly good looking he will be when he grows up—sometimes to his face, because he is thirteen and so much younger than them, and that kind of compliment is not yet inappropriate. Hadia is among the adorers his age, and her mosque friends share anecdotes about him in the bathroom, magnifying his inconsequential actions: Did you see how he asked Zainab if there was any tea left in the ladies’ section?

  She finds them foolish. She has no interest in engaging with the other girls and their childish fervor, their embarrassing giggles and obvious whispering. She refuses to add to his awareness of the effect he has on girls, refuses to speak out loud her thoughts on the matter—she has not even told Huda, with whom she shares everything. To speak of it would be to lessen what she is beginning to feel.

  She is ashamed by how she watches him. By the details she notices. The sweat that glistens on his neck. The way he wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. His voice commanding the other players on the court. How they listen to him, and how, when the voices drift toward her, she knows which one is his. The few seconds when he lifts his shirt to wipe his face. She looks away then, before looking back, despite herself, a heat rising to her face. He is still young, skinny, she thinks. She is still just a girl, crooked teeth and bushy eyebrows, dressed in loose clothes her mother picked for her, a shirt that falls just above her knees, jeans a size too big, to ensure any hint of her body is hidden. Not the kind of girl a boy like the eldest Ali boy would ever notice. But still. The boys stop to take a break; some head for their water bottles and others lean forward and rest their hands on their knees, breathing heavily. Amar picks up the basketball before it rolls off the court and stands beneath the hoop, begins to practice. The eldest Ali boy looks over at the picnic table. At her. She looks away.

  After the bell rings, she takes her
time walking into the mosque where their classes are held. The other girls go on ahead, their steps quickening from the awareness that Quran class is next and the Arabic teachers are all so strict and punctual. Hadia fiddles with her scarf, untying it and retying it again. The knot under her chin feels heavy whenever she thinks of it. In the lobby that contains cubbies for all the shoes, she removes hers slowly, loops two fingers in the straps and tucks them away. The lobby is the only section of the mosque, besides their classrooms during Sunday school, that isn’t segregated. Everyone seems to slow when they are in the lobby, linger, wanting to take advantage of the brief moment when the veil between the genders is lifted. The boys who played basketball file in, sweaty and playfully shoving one another and kicking off their shoes before running to class. They do not notice her. The eldest Ali boy enters and next to him walks her brother. Amar is looking up at him in the way he would often look up at Hadia, when they were younger and her ability to make up new games mystified him. He has not looked at her that way in months, has stopped hovering in her doorway before his bedtime to tell her some trivial detail of his day.

  As they approach, Hadia is suddenly more aware of herself, if only because of the eldest Ali boy’s presence in the room. This is my body, she catches herself thinking for the first time as he walks toward her, her heartbeat quickening and a drum gently throbbing in her ears. These are my skinny arms, my limbs, my skin he sees. It is thrilling—the sudden realization that beneath the layers of cloth, she has a body, a beat, a drum.

  He gives her the kind of smile that girls gather in the bathroom to talk about, hooks his arm around Amar’s neck and says to her, “Your brother’s not so bad, you know.”