In the kitchen, my mother is feeding the wood stove with old newspapers. Cats prowl the alley beneath us, snarling over rotten vegetables and rats. My father has his face to the flames. On the windowsill beside me sits my mother’s candle, now lit, and an open copy of a field guide to the birds of the state of New York. Khalti found it lying beside a dumpster one day, its cover missing and its spine deformed, and took it home for us to use to practice our English. I’d learned from this book that the passenger pigeon was once one of the most common birds in North America, maybe in the world, but that the arrival of European settlers, their destruction of the forests, and their hunting caused the species to die out just a couple of decades before we arrived. The passenger pigeon was beautiful, with a powdery blue-gray back and a rosy breast. Now the city is everywhere, and this bird is nowhere, and though I’m glad to see the mountains and forests and cities of this country, I don’t yet know if I want to call it home.
* * *
Little wing,
We left for Toledo today under a pink-and-gold dawn. Our band gathered over the course of an hour, shouting to children or parents from inside the kitchens, laughing with one another on the stoops. People walked by us to their groceries or their factory jobs and wished us well. Most of our traveling group were women trying to make a bit of extra money for their struggling families, along with a few younger men who might have wanted a bit of adventure for themselves or were making their way west anyway and preferred the company of their own neighbors to that of strangers. Khalto Tala and the widow Haddad had just let the pigeons out for the day, and they circled over our heads. It would be the last time Khalto Tala would let her pigeons out of their coops for months.
I arrived downstairs ahead of Khalto Tala to a pair of pickup trucks blocking the road and shouting coming from all directions. A bag of spices had fallen off one of the truck beds and was lying partially spilled in the street, and a round-faced woman in a smudged apron and a rust-colored skirt was shouting at the man who had dropped it, who was making indignant excuses. “Kul hawa!” she shouted, which shut him up, and followed it with a string of reprimands for his carelessness. I stepped in between them and gathered the top of the bag to cinch it shut, but the auntie was angry, and rightly so, since the money from what he spilled could have fed her family for a week.
The argument went back and forth for a few minutes, until the woman told him to go tile the sea, and he sulked off to join the other men drinking the last of their coffee on a nearby stoop. “Tfeh,” she said by way of dismissal. I helped her hoist the sack back onto the bed of the truck. “None of these old gray mountains will move themselves,” she grumbled in Arabic, then wiped the dust off her hands and kissed me on both cheeks. “Maryam Ibrahim. Our papers say Abraham, though, so I suppose you can take your pick.” She set two bags of rosaries into my arms and said, “If a customer asks you, these were made in the Holy Land.”
I fought my way toward the lead truck through the flurry of packing. The pigeons had found their way to the spilled spices and flour, and were now pecking at the cobblestones around us. Then there was a ripple in the sea of birds, and the pigeons shot up into the sky, protesting.
There he was with a crate of dry goods from Abu Hamdeh’s shop: the boy from the boat, his overcoat folded across one thin arm, the sleeves of his linen shirt rolled up to the elbow.
“The boy of the storm petrels,” I said.
“The dresser of dead birds. Ilyas.” He held out his hand for me to shake.
“Laila.”
He pressed his hand to his heart and tipped his hat to me, and then he disappeared into the truck behind us. Before I could follow, Khalto Tala took me by the arm and ushered me into the lead truck with her. It seemed to me the perfect opportunity to ask her about Ilyas, which was how I found out that he worked in Abu Hamdeh’s shop—and that he had no family in New York at all.
Toward the end of the block, a pushcart selling ice cream stopped in the street, and our truck honked. I leaned out the window to look back one last time at our building. I didn’t catch sight of either of my parents. I knew my mother didn’t approve of my going with Khalto Tala, but I was disappointed no one had come down to wish us goodbye.
“Tousalou bi salameh!”
Just then, a lean figure in a driving cap came running up the sidewalk. Panting, Issa reached up and took hold of the truck window. He took my hand and squeezed it, wished me a safe arrival again, and then my brother was gone. The truck lurched forward. Issa had pressed a seed into my hand, one of the seeds he’d been given by the botanist on the boat, the ones that could grow into a huge tree in the soil of their native mountains. I thought of the rocky dirt I’d run my hands through in the park and wondered whether a seed like that could produce anything in the difficult American earth.
* * *
I spotted my first oriole in Pennsylvania today, through a grove of silver birches in the foothills of the Appalachians. We had already made our way through the rocky north of the state, over cliffs and mountains where quarries had been cut into the hillsides. The oriole was little more than a streak of orange through the blur of the trees. May has been warm so far, so the osage orange and apple trees were scarved in their finery, their leaves full and blossoms weighting their branches. We passed the time on the road telling stories and singing songs, and Maryam chattered on to Khalto Tala and me about her village in Syria. She hadn’t been out of the house in months, since before her husband passed away in an accident at the same factory where my father used to work. They had been hoping to start a family, she said, but had never been able to conceive. She even picked out a name long ago in case it was a girl: Sawsan, after her teta. But Maryam blamed her body for not being able to handle the stress of coming here, blamed herself for not eating enough or sleeping enough. Her grief had stopped her cycles for months since the accident, and she told us that maybe it was her body’s way of recognizing that she would never be a mother. She spoke like a woman whose words had been dammed up inside the lake of her mouth. Her cousins had urged her to get out of the house, so she decided to sell imported items on the road—cracked wheat and olives, a few odds and ends. Maryam reminded me of all the women who had come to my mother over the years for advice on what herbs balanced hormones or regulated cycles, how they’d hung on her every word of caution. I realized now why she had been so revered in the bilad.
We stopped to rest our legs in a clearing by the road where picnic tables had been set up. This stretch followed a railroad cutting through the Pennsylvania farmland, and at the crest of the hill, you could hear the train whistle echoing around the bend in the valley below, as though there were both a train and its ghost. The patchwork farms stretched out beneath us, cones of tobacco gathered and dried last fall hanging in the doors of barns, the Pennsylvania Deutsch farmers riding their plows behind their horses to prepare their fields for corn and summer squash. We were headed to Toledo, a city near the shores of Lake Erie, I’d been told, where there were glass factories and a large community of Syrians who ran dry-goods shops and restaurants. We could sell our wares, restock, and be given beds for a few nights before moving west.
I found a shady spot under the trees and was sketching my oriole when footsteps approached through the grass. Ilyas sat down beside me. I went on sketching, adding the orange in spurts of my pencil.
“You don’t have to say why you lied to me,” I said to him. “But if you’re going to go on doing it, I’d rather not be your friend.” I hope I sounded as sure as this seems on paper.
Ilyas turned his whole body to face me. He admitted he’d lied to me on the ship, that his parents weren’t waiting for him in New York. He had made the crossing alone, twice, and been lucky the second time. He hadn’t heard from his parents in almost a decade, he told me, and he didn’t know where they were or if they were living or dead.
Ilyas got up and brushed himself off. “It’s nobody’s business but mine, and I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. “But I�
��d still like to be your friend.”
I got up and followed Ilyas to the railroad tracks. The rest of the group was beginning to pack away their blankets into the trucks and toss their apple cores into the woods for the squirrels. Ilyas infuriated me in that moment with his turned back, his defiant stare, the way he pretended he needed to retie his boot rather than look at me and wait for my answer. I turned in a huff and fixated on a coil of steam rising up in the distance from an approaching train, and in that moment it seemed to me that all the people Ilyas and I were missing were on that train headed away from us into the green Appalachians, and soon the both of us would be left alone with our wounds whether we talked about them or not.
I opened my tin of colored pencils and showed him your wing. He picked it up and held it in both hands. He had an artist’s hands. I didn’t tell him it was yours, little wing, though I did tell him it was made by somebody very dear to me, back home.
* * *
Today seemed like it would never end, taking the trucks around all afternoon selling to the folks on the outskirts of the city. The women in our group split off from the men to sell to the wives of the farmers. The wives are more likely to buy linens, lingerie, and rosaries from other women—they feel more comfortable inviting us into their homes. The uncles say that people who live outside the cities depend most on people like us, who come to them and save them the trek into town, or at least they used to before the automobiles and the railroads came and changed things. Twenty years ago, they say, going door to door with your boxes and notions was a booming business. People still return to it when they get desperate, of course, as the past few years have made us all. But I feel ashamed for it sometimes because of the way people look at you and the things my mother said about women on the road. Sometimes I don’t feel respected by anybody but the other folks I came here with. The Americans never offer you water, let alone something to eat, never mind that you’ve been on your feet all day and your face is dirty with the soot from the trucks or the factories or God knows where you’ve passed through. The Americans don’t usually want us in their houses long. Maryam always bemoans the lack of hospitality here, wagging her finger. She’s right. My mother used to come out with trays of coffee and bread for the men who worked in the fields near our house. No one I know would let a person leave his door hungry.
The brothers hosting us were kind, even if a lot of us were down on our luck with our first day of selling. They own a grocery store in downtown Toledo. It seems everybody knows somebody here, a cousin living in the North End who runs a movie theater or an uncle a trolley ride away whose wife makes the most delicious kunafeh. It turns out that even here in the North End, which is full of Syrians, there are lots of things we brought with us from New York that you can’t get in Toledo: olives, burghul, za’atar, good olive oil, the things from the bilad that people miss. I asked Maryam why we don’t sell Syrian bread as we were driving toward the house this evening, but the others laughed at me. “Who do you think these women are?” Maryam said between guffaws. “They bake their own bread, and sell it, too!”
Now my belly is full of shish barak and I’m too full to sleep. The daughter of one of the Khoury brothers made the meatballs for the shish barak, and her mother made the yogurt sauce, and I have to say, from the first bite it was better than my mother’s, though I’d never tell her that. Or maybe it was something that happened in the kitchen. Ilyas and I cleaned up after dinner, which I wasn’t expecting because I thought Ilyas would disappear into the sitting room to talk with the other men. The women tried to shoo him out, but he said he didn’t want to listen to all the politics, and besides, the faucet was leaky, and he offered to tighten it. It seemed a little suspicious to me, and a little strange to the other women, too, but no one said anything, aside from a few clucked tongues.
Someone must have put a second pot of coffee on and forgotten about it. As Ilyas was finishing with the faucet, there was a sizzle, and the pot of coffee overflowed onto the gas. Something must have sparked, because in half a second the dark foam was burning, and then the flame caught the grease Maryam had yet to scrub off the stovetop, and pretty soon the range was on fire. I grabbed a rag, soaked it in cold water, and tossed it over the burner to smother it. Ilyas tossed white powder over the remaining grease—bicarbonate of soda, he told me later. We tamped out the fire until the air was smoke and dust, scrambling over each other in a flurry. At some point I realized our hands were touching. Ilyas had placed his hand on mine on the edge of the stove while he leaned over to mop up the powder.
In the moment we became aware of it, something about the touch changed. I felt his breath in the length of his arm, the tiny olive wood cross batting the bone in his chest with each movement of his hand. He didn’t look at me, but I knew that he had noticed, and a full second passed before I closed my hand over the rag and pulled away.
ELEVEN /
THE DAY AISHA’S FUNDING runs out, Sami, Reem, and I go up to Queens to help her move her equipment out of the old house in Forest Hills. She’s been winding down her patients for weeks, so the cages are empty. We load chicken wire and potted plants into the back of her station wagon. As Aisha locks the door of the house, the birds fill the sky as though drawn to our sighing. They’ve been arriving every day from nowhere: orioles roosting on fire escapes, stray jays clinging to box air conditioners, dozens of ravens walking the shop awnings. People harbor different theories about what’s bringing the birds to New York. They congregate like white blood cells to a wound, drawn to arson and eviction notices, to a pig’s head hurled at a masjid door, to the murder of a Black trans woman deadnamed in a police report or the white man who set fire to a woman’s blouse on Fifth Avenue for wearing hijab.
One thing everyone’s agreed on since the goldfinches arrived: never before has New York been so full of birds. A neighborhood petition’s been started to get someone to come in and clean up their droppings, which are everywhere. A week ago, some of the gentrifiers blamed a pair of brothers, whose family had been in the neighborhood almost eighty years after moving from Barbados, who’ve got a pigeon coop on the roof of their building. But it isn’t only pigeons that are filling the streets. Hordes of sparrows block traffic, circling the Brooklyn Public Library and soiling the gilded entrance. Snowy owls arrive out of season and roost in the rooftop gardens of brand-new apartment buildings, spoiling evening soirees with their swooping and screeching.
In the station wagon on the drive to Yorkville, Sami and I crowd the windows with our faces, trying to count the wings. Blackbirds and wrens flank our car, and we glide toward Aisha’s apartment in silence. We unload the crates and the cages, the mesh and the bandages, the empty filing cabinets and the boxes of records. When we’ve deposited everything into Aisha’s storage unit in the basement of the building, she locks the door and we head back upstairs for one last cup of coffee. The lotto numbers come on the radio. We sit around the table, and I think of all the things I’d do with half a million dollars: I’d cover all of Teta’s co-pays, rent and electricity, health insurance for Reem and Sami and me, funding to keep Aisha’s sanctuary going. Growing up, those of us who had to put a hyphen before “American” got scoffed at for sending money home to cousins in the old country or supporting aging parents here on green cards. But you used to shake your head and tell me how, back home, nobody put their parents into nursing homes or let their kin go hungry. The same thing lives on among Sami’s queer and trans friends of color, he tells me, crowdfunding for medical care and housing online, or in the group chats he tells me about where friends help one another escape abusive relationships or housing crises with safety planning and couches to sleep on. We take care of one another because no one else will, he says. But every time is a gamble.
Aisha won’t let us help her unpack, but we insist on washing our cups for her. As we exchange cheek kisses, a scarlet tanager perches on her fire escape like the curve of a shut tulip.
After, Sami gets a text from Qamar, and we meet up with them
at the basketball court in Carl Schurz Park. We exchange salaams. An afternoon drizzle has started, the kind that often precedes summer afternoon downpours, so we’ve got the court to ourselves. I’m anxious to ask Qamar about their relationship to the Dr. Benjamin Young Laila once knew, but before I find the words, Qamar challenges us to a pickup game, two on two.
I haven’t played in years, and as they check me the ball, I remember why. If my body disappears in water, it’s twice as awkward on the court. The binder makes it hard to get a full breath; even playing a half-court game, I quickly find myself struggling to fill my lungs, straining to yawn. Qamar notices but says nothing, and I notice them noticing. My friends move slower to accommodate me, but my chest is heavy, my legs leaden. My skin feels like a shoe three sizes too small. I begin to dissociate from my body. I grow heavier, sleepier, far away. Qamar makes a basket, and we return to the top of the key, panting. They say nothing, but they give me an extra moment to breathe before we start up again, which I’m both embarrassed by and grateful for.
“When I really need to think something out,” Qamar says to me, wiping the sweat from their eyes, “I gotta move.”
The Thirty Names of Night Page 14
