by S. K. Ali
• • •
My arms worked, so I pulled myself forward and forward until I got to the chair by my desk. I rested my head on it, trying to figure out how to get to help.
Get myself to the hospital.
My phone.
Zahid’s number for his taxi.
They were both on the desk, but I couldn’t haul myself up.
But I could reach.
I looked at the blurry items around me. Was that my empty guitar case? Right under the bed?
I shifted myself forward until I could grasp it. And then I dragged it along with me as I inched back to the desk.
Lifting the guitar case, I banged it and swept it clumsily along the top of the desk, saying a prayer while doing so, as the case sent pencils and pens and other random things raining down.
The phone fell onto the bed, almost at the edge, and the piece of paper with Zahid’s number fluttered beside me. A miracle, alhamdulillah.
He had written his number so big and clear I could make it out. I closed my eyes in gratitude at this, wondering if the tears prickling them again would ever wash away whatever was blurring my vision.
I held the paper tightly in my hand as I dragged myself back to the bed to get the phone.
What if it’s out of battery?
Please, God, no. Please, please, no.
I spoke Zahid’s number in for voice command to activate.
Another miracle: The phone wasn’t out of juice.
The last miracle, the best one, happened when he picked up.
I lay there waiting for Zahid.
The kindness of a stranger.
• • •
By the time he got to me, some of the feeling in my legs had returned. I knew by the soreness in a part of my left thigh that it had hit something, maybe the leg of the desk chair, or even the floor—a soreness that I started to slowly become aware of, until the throbbing told me I could try standing up, maybe make my way back to bed.
I used the chair again and half dragged, half pulled myself to bed. It did feel like some feeling had come back into my legs, but I wasn’t sure I could trust it.
I’d never forget that fall from the bed. It was like somebody had pulled the plug on the connection between my legs and me.
The sound of keys being fitted in at the front door was as sweet as music.
Zahid appeared in the doorway with one of our compound security guys, Felipe.
“What happened, man?” Felipe said, advancing to help me from the bed. Before he squatted, he fixed stray hairs back into the bun at the back of his head. “You have some kind of fall?”
“Yeah.” It was true.
Between him and Zahid, I was half carried down the stairs.
“Next time buzz me. I’d have gotten the ambulance,” Felipe said as we made our way out. “You’re lucky I hadn’t left yet. I was just about to go home. Samir is not here to take the shift after mine, so I’ve just been waiting.”
“You know how ambulances are here,” I said. “Sometimes it’s easier to get a taxi.”
Zahid nodded, easing me into the back of his taxi. “Thanks, sir,” he said to Felipe.
I was glad Felipe was going home. He wouldn’t be able to bring up what had happened with anyone at the compound.
• • •
At the hospital, once I spoke the truth, my MS truth, everything went fast, the nurses filling in the forms, ordering scans.
Zahid stayed by, asking if he should call someone for me. “What about your family? The security guy said you have a father and sister.”
I hesitated before asking for my phone.
“I charged it in my car. It was at two percent,” he said. “I’ll dial for you.”
He read the lock screen as he came over with it. “There are a lot of messages for you. Connor. Zayneb. Emma P. Connor. Emma Z. Jacob. Zayneb, again.”
At any other time I would have thought he was being intrusive. But now, not one bit.
He was Zahid—the guy who’d been there.
I pressed the button to bring the phone to life.
Zayneb.
Ms. Raymond.
“Can you text Zayneb? Ask her for her aunt’s number?” I sighed, leaning my head back into the examination bed. Weird that Ms. Raymond was the only one who made sense.
She’d been one of Mom’s closest friends and had helped her through the illness from when it got worse until the end.
“Can. You. Give. Me. Your. Aunt’s. Number?” Zahid spoke slowly as he punched the text in. He held the phone out to display his handiwork. “Like that?”
“I can’t see it,” I said, groaning inside as I remembered Zayneb’s message from a couple of days ago. That I’d let go unread for so long. “Wait, could you read me Zayneb’s message first?”
“Certainly. Messages, plural. First she wrote ‘Thanks for today.’ With a puppy emoji. Second she wrote ‘Please disregard that last message thanks.’ ”
“Zahid, I’m so sorry to make you do this. After this, please go back to work. I feel terrible for keeping you away from your taxi.” I closed my eyes. I need to tell Dad what’s going on. You can’t exploit the kindness of people you don’t know. “Can you text her back a thumbs-up emoji and write ‘Great, glad you liked the saluki shelter’? And then text her asking for her aunt’s number?”
“Yes. Done . . . and now done with the request for aunt’s number,” Zahid said. Then his voice dropped to a whisper. “The nurses think I’m your uncle. That’s why they let me stay. So I will stay until your family comes. This is what I would want for my own nephew, you understand?”
I nodded. I wished I could see Zahid’s face clearly. I thought from his voice that he was South Indian, one of the many in Doha. Maybe after this clears, after the doctors help me, I can see him again, thank him properly.
If the doctors help me? No. I shook my head, and Zahid came to my side.
“You need something, Adam?”
“No, just wanted to say thank you, Zahid.” I held my right hand out.
“Uncle Zahid,” he reminded me, taking my hand in both of his. He shook it, then let go as a ding sounded from my phone in his pocket. “Ah yes, your friend Zayneb wrote back. Just a number. No emoji this time.”
“Can you dial it for me? Put it on speaker, please?”
It rang and rang and then went to voice mail.
Oh yeah, Ms. Raymond was probably at school teaching. “Hanging up is fine. Thanks.”
A doctor came in then, clipboard in hand.
“I will try your aunt again, Adam-nephew,” Zahid said, walking away. “I am outside, Doctor.”
“Thanks, Uncle Zahid,” I said, dropping back on the hospital bed, fear descending again.
• • •
After a round of tests—vitals, blood, X-ray—I was ordered an IV of steroids to treat the inflammations taking over my body.
As a nurse set it up, the doctor wrote on his clipboard and then addressed me. “What you’re experiencing is an attack on your immune system. In order to arrest it, we’re going to prescribe you a course of IV treatments for the next few days. We’ll start the first treatment here now. But your subsequent treatments can be done at home with a visiting nurse or at a clinic we can recommend. It takes about an hour, but schedule time to prep, too. About an hour and a half.”
The door creaked open a small increment.
“Doctor? Can I come in?” Ms. Raymond asked. “I’m his aunt.”
The doctor nodded and gestured with his hand. “Your husband can come in too.”
“Uncle Zahid,” I said quickly, knowing Ms. Raymond would be perplexed.
She went out and brought Zahid with her.
The doctor repeated the things he’d told me, using the words “nervous system,” “myelin,” “attacks,” “immune suppression.”
“Multiple sclerosis.”
“Nerve degeneration.”
I kept my eyes closed throughout his entire explanation.
When he got
to the part about my IV treatments, I opened them.
Ms. Raymond came over and picked my hand up. The one free of the IV needle that had just been inserted. She rubbed this hand between her own hands and spoke to the doctor. “So he can get it done at home? The IV treatments?”
I went back to closing my eyes. Dad.
Why am I still so reluctant to involve him?
“If it’s suitable. You would just need a space for the nurse to come and set up the IV apparatus and for Adam to be comfortable.”
“We have a large apartment, Doctor. I could take tomorrow off from work to be at home with Adam. And then it’s the weekend. You said two more days of treatment, right?” She stopped rubbing my hand but continued holding it, and I felt strangely happy she did.
It made me feel like someone was going to take over now.
I wasn’t on my own with this. For the first time.
I let the tears fall, surprised at the intensity of the relief washing over me.
It wasn’t just my problem to figure out.
For the first time since the attack started, I had something other than pain to concentrate on.
I was also relieved, tentatively, for another reason: Did Ms. Raymond mean that I could get the treatments at her place?
Did she know somehow that I didn’t want to involve Dad?
MARVEL: STUBBORNNESS OR, MAYBE, TENACITY
I think I’ve called it tenacity in my journal elsewhere. The not-letting-go of something you believe in.
I’m pretty good with that. Once I believe something is worth not letting go, I can hold on for years. Maybe even forever.
But it can also be seen as stubbornness, the unwillingness to see things in a different way from what you believe.
Is my refusal to involve Dad in my illness tenacity or stubbornness?
I like to think it’s tenacity, because I have a strong reason for not telling him.
He’s still having trouble dealing with Mom’s death.
It will send him spiraling if he finds out about this.
I’ve seen that happen once before. When Hanna got a high fever when she was three and was lethargic and couldn’t hold up her head, and the doctors said they couldn’t rule out meningitis.
Dad went almost comatose. He wouldn’t leave her side at the hospital. He took a two-week leave from work, but that was just to sit by her hospital cot, watching Hanna almost sleeplessly.
I, at eleven years old, kept things running at home until I couldn’t anymore, and Marta, who’d come twice a week to clean since we’d moved to Doha, began checking in on me every day.
I don’t even know if Dad realized that Marta had done that for me.
He can’t handle more grief. Why would I tell him something that’ll shatter him further?
My reason is ironclad, something to believe in, to not involve Dad in my MS for now.
But there’s a part of me that knows I have a stubborn streak.
That once I make up my mind about something, I refuse to budge, even if it makes sense to do so.
Is it right that Ms. Raymond is being my guardian instead?
Is it right that Dad will be hurt when he finds out what I’ve kept from him? That I didn’t want him to care about me?
I don’t know, but I do know this is me.
• • •
Ms. Raymond agreed to drive me to Connor’s house.
Before I left the hospital, I texted Dad that I would be staying over at Connor’s, that he was having the guys over.
Then I told Connor the truth.
The long version of it.
He listened surprisingly well before saying, “Yeah, you’re chilling here.”
• • •
When we got to the car in the parking lot, with Ms. Raymond pushing me in the wheelchair the hospital had lent, she broke the comfortable and safe silence she’d granted me before.
“I need to know something, Adam. Before I drive you.” She opened the front passenger door.
I reached for the edge of it, to get myself up. My legs were almost back to normal, back to how I knew them, but my vision continued to be blurry.
Easing myself into the seat, I waited as Ms. Raymond folded up the wheelchair and hoisted it into the trunk.
It was obvious she was going to ask about Dad, so I had to brace myself.
Then I remembered something. Two memories that I’d always tried to push away.
Two memories that merged into one.
But now I needed them, so I let them flood my brain.
I let them collide.
• • •
Memory one:
We were at our house in Ottawa. We’d come back for the summer when I was eight, would be going back to Doha at the end of it.
At our house in Ottawa, there was a door to go outdoors, and when you went through it, it was . . . the outside. There were no concrete compound walls that you had to further cross to get to the outside outside, like at our apartment in Doha.
Here, the rest of the world was waiting right there when we stepped out of our house.
That, to me, was freedom. And what made me feel great about being back home when I was a kid.
My grandparents lived in our house, Mom’s parents. They kept our home and garden and backyard waiting for us. They kept it the same, except for the guest bedroom, permanently theirs, and the basement—where Grandpa had built the best workroom, large, clean, and organized, with the biggest table in the world (in the eyes of eight-year-old me) taking over the center, ready for any projects I wanted to do with him.
On the day of my memory, I’d been working on making a castle while Grandpa had been making something with bars on it.
“What’s that, Grandpa?” I put the gray Lego roof piece in my hand down.
“It’s a crib. For your sister.”
Watching him push the bars into the holes he’d made on a long rectangle of wood was the moment I realized that Hanna was going to be a real person, not just something inside Mom’s body, an unseen being that I was told would be my sister.
“I’m hungry.” I attached the final piece to complete the roof of the castle.
“Go up and eat lunch then. Grandma went out, but she left some food on the table for you.” Grandpa picked up a mallet and began banging the bars in. “If you need help, ask me, okay? Your mom’s sleeping.”
I went upstairs and didn’t even look on the kitchen table, at what Grandma had left for me, and just went straight up to Mom and Dad’s room.
I wanted French fries. Mom’s French fries.
Which were the opposite of all the other French fries I’d ever eaten in my life. They weren’t crispy, they weren’t straight, they weren’t thin.
They were soggy and lumpy and chunky and steamy.
They were so good, like a hug for your mouth.
“Mom?” I knocked lightly at first, then harder when I heard no reply. “Mom?”
“Come in, sweetie.” She was sitting up in bed, under the bedspread, a book resting on her round stomach. She patted the bed beside her.
I leaned forward at the foot of the mattress, put my elbows up on it, and propped my face on the fists I’d made to cradle it. Someone, my sister, was going to come out of that stomach and sleep in the crib Grandpa was making downstairs.
“Can you make me French fries?”
“Grandma left lunch for you on the table.”
“But it’s not French fries.”
“Maybe it is. Did you check?”
“But it wouldn’t be your French fries.”
She closed her book. “Do you want to know the secret to my French fries?”
I nodded. “Can you tell me when you make them?”
She smiled, took the bedspread off her stomach, climbed out of bed.
And almost fell to the floor, something red trickling under her.
Her face, distorted and scary, looked at me.
The moan that came from within her told me it was pain that twisted her into
a mother I didn’t recognize.
I sprang back, stricken, and then ran down two flights of stairs to get Grandpa.
Hanna was born that evening.
Prematurely, after a lot of pain. Pain I saw through the bars on the stairs I’d sat on while Mom and Grandpa waited for an ambulance.
I didn’t ask for French fries again for a long time.
Then Mom’s MS took a turn for the worse.
• • •
Memory two:
We were at our house in Ottawa. We’d come back for the summer when I was nine, would be going back to Doha at the end of it.
At our house in Ottawa, the kitchen was tiny, just two counters running parallel to each other, one bookended by a stove and a fridge, the other housing a sink. A small round table stood at the entrance.
On the day of my memory, I was in this kitchen, opening the freezer to get a Popsicle. When I closed it, Mom was standing there, leaning on her walker, smiling.
“Guess what I feel like eating,” she said, opening her eyes wide, her way to let me know it was something special.
“A Popsicle?”
“No. French fries. My French fries.” She turned the walker round and sat on it. “So, Adam, can you make them for me? If I teach you?”
I stood there for a second, pretending to work hard at unwrapping the banana Popsicle, picking at the wrapper like a scab. The seam on the plastic tore at once, and the frozen bar almost slipped out of my hands—as the image of Mom’s twisted, pained face the day Hanna was born invaded my thoughts.
“Hello? Earth to Adam?” Mom tilted her head. “The best French fries in the world?”
“Okay, just putting this away. I don’t need it anymore.” I opened the freezer door and hid my face behind it. I twisted and wrapped the clear plastic as tight as I could around the Popsicle. Then I left the door open, a barrier between Mom and me, as I moved to the drawer beside the fridge to get a rubber band to fasten the wrapper tighter, keep it secure.
She wasn’t allowed to see the tear rolling down my face.
Grandpa and Grandma had told me to make sure Mom knew I was going to be okay. Even though Mom wasn’t going to be okay.
By the time I put that Popsicle, secured with three rubber bands, back in freezer and closed the door, Mom saw me and my face ready to learn to make the best French fries in the world.
