I try to tell myself I’m just not like that, but I remember my days on the monkey bars as a kid, and every cell in my body is screaming at me. I tune it out and rush to snag the ball from Sami, but he dribbles around me. I’m off-balance. I skid knee-first into the blacktop.
I swear and roll myself over. I’ve ripped a gash in my jeans and stained the torn edges with dark blood. Reem, ever the Girl Scout, pulls out a stack of spare napkins and blots at the wound.
I limp over to the side of the court. “Sorry. I’m not very coordinated.”
Qamar and Sami each give me an arm, and together we make our way under a tree. “I shouldn’t have faked you out like that,” Sami says.
Qamar pulls a Band-Aid from their pocket and hands it to me. “Come on, you got a few good baskets. The rain’s picking up now, anyway.”
Everyone gets quiet. It’s now or never, but I don’t know where to begin: with my mother’s search for a bird that’s not supposed to exist, with Laila’s painting of it, or with my hunch that the same Dr. Young that Laila used to meet at the library is Qamar’s grandfather.
While I chew the inside of my cheek, Qamar says, “I think I know a friend of yours.”
“Really? Who?”
“Sabah and her father. They go to my masjid, the little one on Flatbush and Bergen.”
A flash of color, like a stray umbrella, and the scarlet tanager from Aisha’s window alights on a branch above us.
“Oh. Yeah. She and my mom were friends for like, fifteen years.” I look around for you, but either my voice doesn’t conjure you or the pain in my knee is too distracting for me to notice.
“That’s not the only reason I know her.” Qamar rubs the soreness from their calves. “Part of my thesis was on American bird art from the first half of the twentieth century. My grandfather was an ornithologist who did field studies on a certain species of rare bird. It was only ever documented by one other person. Well, supposedly. I’m trying to complete his work.”
“Benjamin Young was your grandfather!”
Qamar smiles. “Sabah said you might be familiar.”
When I lift Reem’s napkins off my kneecap to bandage it, I’m trembling. I’ve bled through without noticing. “Your grandfather wasn’t the only one who documented Geronticus simurghus.”
Qamar shakes their head. “But I can’t prove that. I’ve scoured his records. He often wrote to an artist named Laila who supposedly made an illustration of the bird, but as far as I can tell, the work is lost, or missing. I’ve got nothing more than a doodle in the margins.”
The rain has stopped, giving way to hesitant sunshine. “So we’ve got nothing.”
“Nothing.”
When we leave the park, the scarlet tanager shakes out its navy wings and cocks its head after us like we’re mad to walk back into the thick of the city, like it is waiting for something to happen.
* * *
At home, Teta complains that her plants aren’t getting any sun. The neighbor upstairs has hung a blanket over her window to block the birds from accidentally flying into her apartment, and the fabric is waving in the breeze, its shadow blocking the sun from getting to Teta’s plants on the fire escape. She asks us to help her take the plants to the roof, where they’ll get more sunshine and the cherry tomatoes she’s planted won’t wither in the shade.
Reem and I carry the plants inside one by one in their pots. Teta insists on coming with us up to the roof, so I take her by the arm and Reem takes the plants up on your brass coffee tray, and we all make our way upstairs together into the milky haze.
We set the plants on the roof according to Teta’s direction. She changes her mind several times, until we’ve got the pots lined up in a constellation of greenery near the old firepit, and then Teta instructs us to get the watering can and plant food and bring them up to tend to her seedlings. I bring up a kitchen chair for her, and Teta plops herself down in the sun, wiping her brow and keeping her back straight as though the rooftop were the throne room of a personal palace. I set to folding the fertilizer into the potting soil while Reem follows me with the watering can. I try not to think about you. I used to water your thyme for you when it was humid and your arthritis was acting up; do you remember?
Before you died, I learned about death from Jiddo, whom I was never close with but whose death taught me that someday even our family will be gone. After that I held each of your hugs just a second longer, even when I would have rather been doing something else, because someday you’d be gone and I would wish I could go back to those moments. But now you are gone, and your absence hurts too much for me to think about those hugs, those games, those afternoons watering your plants. It’s been five years, and time hasn’t healed any wounds. You are all I think about some days, and yet I can’t bear to remember the way things used to be.
Teta smiles and folds her hands in her lap. “You are sisters. You should spend more time together. Masha’Allah, Reem, you look just like your mother when she was your age.”
Reem kisses Teta’s hands and slips a sprig of purple basil flowers between her fingers. They are the perfect picture of womanhood. You are standing on the roof not far away, lifting your face to the sun, which makes your hijab into a golden halo. You crouch down to lift a leaf to your nose without casting a shadow. I wipe the sweat off my brow with my forearm.
Teta is stroking Reem’s hair. You used to brush my hair and tell me it would be beautiful like hers one day, how the most beautiful women had hair to their ankles. I used to dream about it; it was one of those body dreams that seem so vivid you can’t imagine they’ll vanish. Reem has grown her hair to her waist. I asked her once if she ever thought about cutting it, but she told me it was something the women in our family had always done, that she had never considered doing anything else.
“It must have been hard growing up an only child,” Reem says.
“It was almost that I had a brother.” Teta isn’t looking at either of us, but into the soil of the flowerpot I am holding as though she could dig up the kazbara’s roots with her eyes. “I ran to the midwife’s house, but she was with Imm Shams, she had a baby the same night. The midwife’s daughter came, my friend. My mother, she bled, but she lived. My brother—my brother. Allah yarhamu.”
I look up, startled. I have heard this story before, but not from Teta. There’s a moment of quiet before anyone speaks. I glance at Reem, but her face gives nothing away. I study Teta’s face, her hands, the lines on her forehead. Time hides the people we might have been if things were different.
Reem clears her throat. “Last time I was up here, Noodle was graduating high school. Pretty sure there’s a photo of us on the roof, probably hanging around Teta’s closet in a shoebox. We should dig it up.”
I grimace into my flowerpot. “Let’s not.”
Reem laughs. “You were the cutest little dork in that big gown. There was this one shot, you were so awkward. You looked like a total dude.”
I bury my hands in a pot of yellow cherry tomatoes. “Still my awkward self. Sorry.”
“If you put on a dress once in a while, habibti, you will see the boys come running, eh?” Teta gets up from her chair and bends to tug off my hair tie. She uses her hands to let my long hair roll down over my back, then thumbs my chin to make me smile. “You are a beautiful girl. You never let us see.”
I catch your eye, standing close by her side. And I do smile back, that false smile that I am supposed to make because now, as then, there is no room for me on this rooftop, and neither Teta nor Reem know the difference, because I have not smiled a real smile since the day the crows came to mourn their dead, and even my family no longer remembers the smile I lost.
* * *
Back in the apartment, golden light is sifting through the holes in the threadbare blanket hanging from the window, and the owl is back at the sill. Teta settles into her chair, Reem sinks into the couch beside Asmahan to read, and everything outside of me is as it should be. Teta’s bedroom door is half open, and
inside, her shoeboxes of photographs are piled on chairs and on the floor, her rack of old clothes, piles of socks meticulously folded, her closet with its forty years of memories. Teta’s invited me in on occasion, but she’s always careful about what she wants me to see. Entering her room has always felt like intruding on her private inner world. Lately, she’s been falling asleep in the living room chair, so I rarely find her sitting on her bed or looking at the photographs of you and me that she keeps tucked into her bedroom mirror.
Teta doesn’t like to tell stories quite the way they happened. If I’m lucky, I’ll catch her in an unguarded moment when she’s willing to tell me the story the way it felt to her, or to tell me a fable instead of a memory. I never imagined I could know someone so well and yet know so little about them. You used to tell me about growing up with Teta, about when she was young, but by the time you died, there were still so many things I wasn’t ready to hear. Until Reem arrived here, Teta was all I had left. It sometimes feels as though she holds universes of history I’ll never be allowed to know, as though it’s improper for us to ever really know each other, and sometimes our silences are more than I can stand.
Reem gets up and goes into the kitchen to start dinner. I sit down on the couch beside Teta. “You never told me you had a baby brother,” I say.
“Habibti, he was gone before he was here. What is done is buried.” Teta shifts her weight in her chair, and I lean over to adjust the heating pad at her back. She turns her face to the window where the owl waits. It would be easy to fall back into our usual pattern, stirring a cup of tea or chuckling at Asmahan licking the water from the rim of a plastic cup, letting the drone of the television put us to sleep. But when my gaze drifts to the shoeboxes lining the walls of Teta’s room, I think of the robin’s eggs and wonder what hidden things Teta has been telling me all along that I’ve never bothered to hear.
I curve my chest over my folded hands and smell the faint scent of my own blood. My body is tired, my belly swollen after three weeks of bleeding. You would probably tell me I should have spoken more sharply to the doctor, or maybe tell me to go to the hospital. You were a lion when I had appendicitis, when the nurses were late with my pain medication or when I threw up from the anesthesia. You learned this from Teta. When Jiddo was in the hospital, Teta never left his side. She slept sitting up in a hospital chair for three weeks before he was sent home with palliative care. But I never saw in Teta’s eyes that wild love, the desperation of impending loss. That was the way I felt when you died, the way Sami felt when we found his mother lying in the garden with a flower in her open hand. Teta mourned Jiddo, but not like that. I had never considered that there might have been someone else, a first love, a haunting of which I knew nothing.
“You said there was someone else.” I hesitate. “Before Jiddo.”
She gives me a long look, as though I have broken our rule of silences. “Not all love is the same, habibti.”
“But there was someone.”
Teta fumbles with the remote to turn on the television, but I know she’s heard me. “Whoever they were, you loved them. Right?”
Teta looks up at me with a sharpness I am not expecting. “I loved them both the best I could,” she says, “but less than they deserved.” Then she lifts her curled hand to her mouth and inhales. “There is nothing to say. An opened scar doesn’t heal.”
“But Teta—”
“Give us a moment.” Her voice is sharper now. I have gone too far. “Please.”
In the kitchen, Reem hums to herself. Asmahan chases one of Reem’s mechanical birds across the tile floor, batting it like a translucent cockroach. You are seated at the table again, watching Reem’s back this time as she shakes garlic in hot oil. I close Teta’s bedroom door.
* * *
I can’t sleep, so when the tapping comes at my window, I look over and see the owl that has been coming every day to visit Teta, the same owl that led me up the stairs and into the darkness of the community house in Lower Manhattan. As soon as I crack open the window, it flees, and the sound of the oud appears.
“Hey.” On the street, Sami is calling to me. “Get down here. Yalla.”
I step over Reem and Asmahan asleep on the air mattress and slip out of the apartment. Outside, the night is warm for September. The fist of summer has yet to open. Sami is a spirit made of starglow and smoke, strumming his oud in the middle of the street.
His mood is heavier than other nights. He leads me without speaking, his music guiding us. When I look back, the single owl at my window has become dozens. We amass a cape of a hundred owls gliding behind us like a procession for the dead. I don’t speak for fear of unraveling this enchantment. We continue down Atlantic in the middle of the empty street, and the white bellies of the owls are brighter than the streetlights.
We walk for what feels like hours, but time has no meaning. We march on in silence until we enter the Brooklyn-Queens borderlands, and the arrow of zodiacal light appears on the horizon. We enter a neighborhood where the streets slope downward into lowlands, and in this triangular neighborhood near Ozone Park we find pools of stagnant water in the streets and empty lots. No one’s awake. We pass twisted rust-lined fences with the owls at our back until we stop at a house that’s sat empty for some time. The owls follow us until we reach its front steps, where they stop, too. They perch everywhere, maintaining their silence, on the uneven roofs of the houses, the side mirrors of rusted cars, and the iron scrolls of stoop railings.
In the vacant lot beside the house, sunken into the earth at least three or four feet, there was once a garden that now sits untended and overgrown. What were once plots of moonflowers have become a carpet of white buds and bells. There in the sunken garden are more owls than I can count, as though they’ve arrived for a great council of which we know nothing. Night-blooming cereus once planted here has now grown wild, exploding in luminous bursts over broken glass and rusted metal. As the owls keep watch over the carpet of bone and pearl, I think to myself, Who is to say this city doesn’t hold greater mysteries than we ever imagined?
Sami stops his playing. He walks to the edge of the lot until pale blossoms overflow the toes of his sneakers. He stands silhouetted against the lot as though over a pool of milk, poised to dive.
“This was where it happened,” Sami says.
After you died, Sami and I were inseparable. It was his mother who took care of me when I couldn’t face the mirror of my grief in Teta’s eyes. Imm Sami was a kindhearted woman who never had to ask me if I was all right. She would feed me and sing me songs to cheer me up, and let me stay for days and nights without asking questions. She must have taken in half the city over the years. Sami brought home needy friends like strays, kids with cruel parents or no parents, undocumented kids, gay kids, bullied kids, kids missing months of dreams. It was a heart attack that took her in the end, here at the house where they lived in this triangle between Brooklyn and Queens without drainage or subway stops, while she was weeding her garden. It was a death that could have taken anyone on an afternoon when no one was around to call an ambulance, leaving Sami and me nothing to blame but our own clay bodies.
Sami turns and looks at me. I take his hand. We move heavy through the field of white flowers until we are surrounded by them. The vines are up to our knees in places, and the lot is thick with the fragrance of them. We stretch our bodies without letting go of each other’s hands; we exorcise our grief. We twine and bend while the owls look on. I am reflected in Sami’s eyes. I am not a girl in that moment, or a boy, but a person-shaped beam of light, and we see each other as we are, as energy that has willed itself into these bodies because the desire to dance is the first kind of longing.
When Sami pulls me to him and wraps his arms around me, we are brothers. He is weeping. The birds around us, who know what it is to grieve, hide us under their wings.
“Why do you play the oud in the street?” My feet tangle themselves in a moon-white patch of morning glory, wet with dew.
/> “So she can hear me,” Sami says, and I know exactly what he means.
* * *
After we get home and Sami goes to bed, I lock myself in the bathroom with a set of clippers. Since you died, my life is full of illusions and unbroken spells. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to go to Beirut with a friend, with the promise of a possible trip to Damascus. I hadn’t been back to Syria since I was there with you when I was five years old. I remember Teta wore dark sunglasses and carried an umbrella the entire trip because she’d gotten Lyme from a tick picked up in Central Park, though the cousins just thought she was being vain.
I opted not to go to Beirut. I refused to admit it, but Damascus was the last place I wanted to go. It was as though as long as I didn’t go back, I could pretend that you would be there waiting for me, having a coffee on my auntie’s patio and bouncing her baby on your knee. Going back to Damascus meant facing your absence, dispelling the illusion.
Facing myself in the mirror is like that. If I never cut my hair, if I don’t acknowledge that I’ve never allowed anyone to really know me, I can pretend that a perfect road awaits me. I can pretend there’s some medicine that will magically allow me to see myself. But going down that road might mean discovering that there is no magic strong enough to bring me into harmony. Breaking the illusion means acknowledging the parts of myself that will never be visible.
I raise the clippers to my skull and carve an undercut around the sides of my head, two arrows of gray skin. Hiding beneath fantasies has not brought you back, has not protected Aisha’s sanctuary, has not stopped the birds from arriving. As I cut, I can see my father’s face in my own. If I turn to just the right angle, I can see my first awful blueprint of masculinity.
I have never known men to be gentle. Once, when we went on a family road trip to Pennsylvania, we passed through mining country, then vast fields of high corn and yellow tobacco gathered into neat rows of hand-tied cones. Our car got stuck behind a line of horse-drawn buggies bearing a single reflective triangle for caution, and you pulled off into a gas station in the middle of nowhere to look at a map. The foothills of the Appalachians were flooded, the scarred terraces of old quarries slurried with mud, and the mesh netting lining the sides of the highways bulged with water-loose rock. The music had turned to country long ago. Night was falling. We were lost.
The Thirty Names of Night Page 15
