When I asked Teta what love was, she told me a lover was not someone you were willing to die for, but a person for whom you wished good things. The definition was so simple as to be absurd. I had never imagined a lifetime could contain so many different kinds of love. But there it was.
In the last of your jewelry boxes, sealed with peeling tape that has been opened and resealed over the years, is a fat silver locket, dusty and tarnished to a greenish patina. It is like nothing you own, and by far the oldest of anything I have uncovered. No, there is no way this locket belonged to you; it is older than you are, and the way you have hidden it suggests you weren’t supposed to have it at all. I turn, and you are standing in Teta’s doorway. The hummingbirds flutter in after you, inspecting your jewelry, pausing at the dried flowers on Teta’s dresser and Asmahan’s water cup on her nightstand. I open the locket. Inside is a tightly folded square of handkerchief, once off-white, now an aged yellow, embroidered in Arabic with the name Laila. I unfold the square of fabric. It is dotted with brown blood.
When I look up, you and the birds are gone, and I am left with Laila’s handkerchief in my hand. You knew. My entire life, you were obsessed with Laila’s paintings, with her legacy, with the legends surrounding her death. But you must have found this lovers’ token long ago, perhaps hidden in Teta’s things. There is no other explanation: you knew Teta Badra loved her.
By midmorning, the hummingbirds have vanished. People wake and go about their day. I curl up with a heating pad while Sami puts a pot of Arabic coffee on and crushes cardamom. Reem rubs sleep out of her eyes and arranges bread and olives on a dish, swatting away her mechanical birds. Teta wakes and goes to her bedroom to change her clothes. She takes slow steps to her dresser, then picks up the silver locket lying there.
“I was going through some of Mom’s things. Her old photos, her earring museum.” I join her in her doorway. “I thought it was pretty.”
There is panic on Teta’s face. “You opened it?”
I slip my hands into the pockets of my jeans and look down. “No.”
Teta runs her fingers over the locket as though reading the rings on a tree. She slips it into the pocket of her blouse and shuffles toward the closet where Jiddo’s ties lay folded. She has not touched them since his death. I help her off with her cardigan and hang it in the closet. Reem comes in with a cup of coffee, and Teta drops her hand from the sagging pocket above her heart.
* * *
Dusk is falling after a day’s hard work at Abu Sabah’s shop, and the nightjar that has moved in on the gravel-roofed apartment building across the street is being courted by an enthusiastic male. He is doing his characteristic swooping display, making chirps and then a booming by passing air over his wings, lifting up and then diving down again, again, again. From the street, we can’t see the other bird sitting on the roof, waiting. You will be watching the dark falling from your seat on the fire escape about now, your legs pulled up to your chest. Teta will have already gotten dressed for bed. She’ll be murmuring her prayers from her bedroom, counting out the beads on her tasbih.
We’ve been working all day to fit the new glass for Abu Sabah’s display window, repaint the front of the store, and gut the inside of the display case. We work in shifts, elders strolling up to meet Abu Sabah in the morning, kids and their parents stopping by after school or work. Down on Flatbush, another group is doing the same with the upstairs room of the Islamic center. They’ve already replaced the lock on the front door and scrubbed the entrance. During the night, the nearby synagogue has organized a group to stand watch in case the fire starters come back. At the shop, Abu Sabah has fed everyone and made round after round of coffee and black tea. I’ve spent the afternoon being greeted with a clap on the back or cheek kisses by people I haven’t seen since you were alive, women you used to study Qur’an with, aunties who used to give me sweets on Eid.
Now Abu Sabah has laid down in the back of the shop, and Qamar has gone home for the night, so Sami, Reem, and I sit on the bench outside while Reem and Sami smoke a hand-rolled cigarette. I tug off the knit hat I usually wear to hide my haircut at the shop. I haven’t figured out how to explain it to Abu Sabah yet.
Reem says between drags, “I was engaged when Mom died.”
The moon rises behind the nightjars’ rooftop, plump and full, a dollop of fresh labneh.
“I didn’t even know you were dating someone.” I side-eye her. “What do you mean was?”
“He was a real estate agent from Minneapolis. White guy. We met at a mixer for young professionals, one of those things you do when you’re new in a city. I broke it off after Mom died. For a while I thought I was just afraid to feel anything. My friends said I was pushing people away. It was something he said that made me end it. It gnawed at me.”
“What was it?”
“He kept asking what Mom did leading up to her death, like she must have done something to provoke it. He used to say the same thing about gay bashings, deportations, all kinds of stuff. He couldn’t accept that something bad could happen to you unless you did something to deserve it.” Reem does not look at me as she speaks, but her back shudders up and down. I cannot remember seeing her cry since she broke her leg skiing as a teenager, when I was little. Her tears scared me then, because she seemed too strong to suffer. “I stayed with him for three years trying to change his mind. Isn’t that fucked up?”
“I watched Mom die.” Even Teta and I have never spoken of this. “She got death threats for trying to save that building in Little Syria, especially for trying to help the Islamic center move in there. The nest was a sign to her that she was doing the right thing. When the fire started, she put me out on the fire escape for the firefighters to take down first. But the platform buckled while they were coming back up for her. Mom slid off. I looked away before she hit the ground.”
I pick at the laces of my sneakers. Sami keeps quiet. Across the street, the male nightjar swoops over his lover, a sharp dive toward the earth.
“I should have been there.” It is the first time since her broken leg that I have ever heard Reem afraid enough to whisper. Beside me on the bench, she smells like detergent and lavender soap, scrubbed clean like an old woman. She has never been good at comforting people. She sets her fist palm-up on her knee and opens it, and inside is one of her mechanical birds, a black-tipped egg of wings and sparks. I take it from her. It twitches electricity into my fingers.
Sami touches the solar panels on the backs of the translucent wings. “You make these?”
“I wasn’t traveling around Europe just to take selfies.” Reem taps the end of the bird’s tail, and it lifts its feet and hovers above my hand, giving off a faint warmth. “I liked the robotics work I did during one of my fellowships. It started as a hobby, but my ex thought it was a waste of time. Now I’ve got the time to do what I want, even if it’s not useful.”
“Why do we have to be useful?” I kick a shard of glass out from under my feet. “Is that what we’re for, our usefulness?”
“Aren’t we?” Reem tucks her hands into her lap, curling her fingers under her thighs. “Everybody tells you to be yourself as long as you’ve got value—for a job, for a man. What? You’re a woman. I’m not saying anything you don’t know.”
“Reem, I’m—not. I’m not a woman.”
I am shaking. Sami reaches over and takes my hand. He doesn’t have to tell me that he knows; it isn’t Sami I have to tell. My sister widens her eyes, and I remind myself that I, too, have failed to notice things because I was too close to them. In the years just after your divorce when we couldn’t afford new clothes, you braided my wet hair at night and then stayed up to sew me my school dresses. You used paisley fabric I thought was ugly at the time, the fabric that would have gone to make couch cushion covers. You never let me see the bandages on your fingers. I hated those dresses. I never knew what they cost you.
I reach for her hand, but she doesn’t take it. “I’m pretty sure I’m a boy.” Pretty sure. I w
ant to tell Reem that maybe I am something there is no word for, but I am afraid that I am already invisible enough to her as it is.
Reem tightens her mouth into a trembling line. “Is that why you cut your hair?”
“Yes.”
Reem sets her hand on my shoulder, touching the strap of my binder. “You’ve been acting more like yourself these past few weeks than I’ve seen in years. But I always thought—”
“I’m still the same person.”
“But you’re not. Look at you. I’m losing my kid sister.” Reem is crying. “You feel like you’re different. Fine. But you don’t have to throw yourself away and start over. This doesn’t have to change anything.”
“But it changes everything, don’t you see that?” I toss the mechanical bird from my hand into the reddish light. Sami grips my hand like a rock face above a hundred-foot drop. “I’m not starting over. You’re not losing me. I’ve been here the whole time.”
Reem looks at me as though I am a wilderness.
Many species of birds have been shown to have memories of their roosting or mating sites that persist over generations. The northern bald ibis, the rarest bird in the Middle East, was once down to just three birds who continued to migrate back to Palmyra from northern Europe each spring before the war drove them to extinction in their native lands. The last bird, named Zenobia after the Palmyrene queen, hung on for a season before vanishing into clouds shredded by bombers. You spoke to me once of the bald ibis. You used to cut out conservation reports and photos of it, had written about it beside your notes in Arabic. Nadir, you wrote: rare. The word is also a masculine name. I picture Zenobia’s final glorious morning of flight, perhaps in a moment of quiet between the shells that destroyed the homes she’d glided over for decades. I imagine her calling to a mate who had been so thoroughly blotted from the skies that it was as though he had never been there at all.
“I love you, Noodle. I know what it’s like to want something people think is wrong.” She averts her eyes. “But I have to mourn my sister.”
Being mourned as though I am dead while I am standing here before her—that, more than anything else, is what lodges the knot of shame behind my chest.
Sami and I walk in silence back toward Teta’s apartment, and Reem walks in the opposite direction toward her station wagon. The pain has started again, low in my belly, the pad between my legs bloated with blood.
At first it looks like the sky is full of tiny, puffed clouds, then feathers. Then the strings appear. The air is full of miniature kites in the shapes of birds, rippling like a wall of white flame over us. Everyone on the street stops, hushed, to watch the procession. The kites have been loosed into the air at sunset. As they ride the breeze, they crack the sun into a mosaic of light. For a few moments the only sound is the distant bark of horns and an ocean of fluttering paper. People slide open their windows and stand on their fire escapes to watch as the kites are carried up by the breeze, disappearing around buildings and wrapping themselves around light poles. An ancient Arab woman, easily in her nineties, stands with a middle-aged woman on a balcony on the fifth floor of an apartment building. She is crying, and the younger woman wraps a shawl around her and rubs her shoulders. In other windows, parents lift their children up to see the paper parade, and the kites cast red shadows over their faces, tiny flashlights seen through skin. I think of the glassblower dipping her rod into a furnace of molten glass and lifting out a perfect white orb, an orchid of flame dripping like a wet fist. Sami slides his hand into mine and interlaces our fingers.
The pain in my belly is a sword. I double over on the sidewalk, dragging Sami down by his hand. I lift my fingers and show him the speckle of blood between my legs.
* * *
Neither of us can afford an ambulance or an emergency room visit, so somehow Sami helps me onto the subway to get to a women’s health clinic that takes walk-ins. When we’re almost at the entrance, a series of strong cramps makes me sink down where I stand, and Sami picks me up and carries me inside, my face pressed to the flowers on his pink T-shirt.
He sets me down in a chair in the waiting room and consults with a receptionist, then a nurse, who informs us of what I already know: my uterus is raging against the device inside. Sami sits down beside me to wait for the doctor. We are seated across from a couple of pregnant women and their partners, who glance at us over their magazines. I can imagine that we make a strange pair, but it’s the way they glare at me that makes me pause, as though I’m rude for appearing this way, with my square jaw and unreadable face, in a space where they had expected someone legible.
I lean over to whisper to Sami, who has never let go of my hand. “Ten bucks says they think we’re a gay guy and the butch girl he got pregnant.”
Sami pretends to be mock offended. “They think I’m pregnant?”
I muffle my laughter in his shirt, and he cracks up into the buzzed back of my head until we’re both in tears. By the time we compose ourselves, the waiting room is empty. Sami wipes a tear from the corner of his eye.
My smile dissolves on my face. “Reem is probably halfway back to Boston by now.”
Sami rubs my back. “Your mom would be proud of you. She wouldn’t have compromised herself, either, not for anybody.”
“She paid a price.”
“And you’ve been paying yours for twenty-eight years.” Sami searches my face. “Which reminds me. What do you want me to call you?”
The northern bald ibis was one of the first birds you considered when you were trying to put a name to the mating pair in Lower Manhattan. But they had never been seen west of the Atlantic, and you couldn’t match their physical description to the species: the iridescent black feathers and the naked head, the red and yellow eyes. At first, this disappointed you. Looking back, maybe you wanted to believe you could save something you already loved, something you already knew to be in danger of being lost. Instead you came to love something you had never considered, and still you gave your life to protect it.
“Nadir,” I say.
Sami flicks his thumb under my chin. “It’s perfect.”
I think of the bald ibis when I put my feet into the stirrups in the gyno’s office, when I’m tempted to discard my body and never come back to it, when the doctor’s gloves on my skin make me want to crawl out of myself. My blood is a fact, like my body, in a conversation that I will not always be a part of. But I hold on to my name and turn my face to the window, and trapped against the glass is the red chest feather of a ruby-throated hummingbird.
SIXTEEN / LAILA
LITTLE WING,
After a few weeks of rest here in Dearborn, my cracked ribs have begun to heal, and I’m now left with a nasty, painful bruise that’s turning green on my left side. Abu Majed has brought me a good doctor who lives here in the neighborhood, a man who was a surgeon in Syria and is still practicing medicine. Though the other families have left to return to New York, Khalto Tala and Ilyas have pledged to stay until I’m well enough to travel, and Abu Majed has welcomed us.
Being unable to leave the house to play with the children or walk down to Dix has turned me into a bit of a recluse, I’m afraid. I’ve become accustomed to the way the light falls on the windowpane and the view from the window in the room where I sleep, which faces the back of the house. It overlooks a small field and a shallow pond where birds like to wade, and in the mornings the long yellow grass is laden with hoarfrost, and the red-winged blackbirds call in the sedge. I wouldn’t have expected such a sanctuary so close to the factory, but now I see that this place is full of pockets of greenery I overlooked.
The doctor has confined me to my bed for three weeks to let my ribs heal. He warned me that if I do too much, I risk poking a hole in my lungs, which has scared me into listening to him. That first week, when the other families from New York were still here, the other women fussed over me, feeding me and asking me about potential suitors back home, exchanging stories and news from the neighborhood while eating the leftove
rs of the men’s meals. The women didn’t trust the doctor. They brought me home remedies to supplement his pills, traditional medicine from the bilad: black seed oil for the stomach and for inflammation, chicory to boost my immune system, mallow poultices for the healing of the wound. In times of need, all of us—even Khalto Tala—trust in the remedies of our mothers and our tetas who survived by caring for one another.
Since the others left, Khalto Tala and Ilyas have been taking turns caring for Sawsan, though Ilyas often falls asleep beside me above the blankets with Sawsan on his chest, and I like to wake up to her warm body nestled in the space between us. For propriety’s sake, I have to be careful to wake him before anyone comes. Here in Dearborn by our little pond, we are so far from the bustle of downtown Detroit that it’s hard to imagine it even exists. After a week of this solitude, I just watched the birds calling to one another from the corners of the field: sparrows, flycatchers, and crows, and, on the pond, ruddy ducks and canvasbacks. Occasionally I catch a bobwhite quail calling from the copse of beeches at the field’s edge. Ilyas has been bringing me my inks and my paints, and will even sprinkle sesame and watermelon seeds on the windowsill to attract the chickadees and thrushes, the nuthatches and the wrens, and even, once, a single purple martin.
The Thirty Names of Night Page 20
