by Tahereh Mafi
“That isn’t fair,” I said, “it wasn’t that simple—”
“We were friends, too, weren’t we? Why didn’t I get a vote?”
I looked up at him then, caught the flash of pain in his eyes before it disappeared. I thought to say something, wanted to say something, and I never had the chance.
Ali laughed.
He laughed, dragged his hands down his face, stared up at the sky. He seemed to be laughing at something only he understood. I watched as his body went slack, as the light left his eyes. He took a steadying breath, stared into the distance as he exhaled. When Ali finally met my eyes again he looked tired. He smiled, and it broke my heart.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll tell my sister that nothing ever happened between us.”
I stared at him. Heat was pushing up my throat again, pressing against my eyes, and I knew I couldn’t take much more of this. I nodded toward the long walk that awaited me.
“I should get going.”
“Right. Yeah.” He clapped his hands together. Took a step back. “Okay.”
I’d just turned to leave when I heard him say—
“Wait.”
It was soft, uncertain.
I turned back around, the question in my eyes.
Ali moved toward me again. His face was different now, worried. “Last night,” he said, “when I asked you if you were okay—you said no.”
My hesitant smile disappeared. My face became a mask. “I’m sorry I said that. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Don’t— Shadi, don’t apologize. I just wanted to know—are you okay now?”
“Oh. Yeah.” I took a deep breath, forced a smile back on my face, swallowed down the heat, willed my eyes to remain dry. “Yeah. Great.”
“Is your mom okay?”
“Yeah, she’s great, too.” I nodded. “So much better. Thanks.”
He was about to say something else, but I couldn’t take it anymore. I cut him off in a rush, terrified the tremble would return to my lips.
“I have to go, actually. I need to get home for dinner. My mom’s waiting for me.”
“Oh,” he said, surprised. “That’s . . . great.”
“Yeah,” I said again, eyes still dry, legs still working. “Really great.”
Fourteen
When I got home, the house was dark.
I closed the door behind me, the familiar whine of an ungreased hinge preceding the heavy close. I leaned back against the door, rested my head against the cheap wood. I smelled new paint, stale air, the faint aroma of Windex. We’d moved into this sterile rental not long after my brother died. It had become impossible to live in a place that housed the museum of his life, the modest bedroom from which my father would drag my mother’s prone, sobbing body every night. I saw her with my own eyes only once, just once before my father chased me out, shouting at me to go back to bed. My mother was curled on the floor of my brother’s room, banging her head against the baseboard, begging God to be merciful and kill her.
Somehow, through the power of violent self-delusion, my parents thought we wouldn’t hear them fighting late at night, thought we wouldn’t have ways of seeing them in the hallway, thought we wouldn’t hear my father begging my mother to come back to bed, begging in a voice I’d never known him to possess. Come back, come back, come back, come back.
She’d slapped him in the face.
She’d thrown feeble, desperate punches at his chest, clawing at him until he finally let go, let her sink to the floor. I watched from a half-inch opening in my bedroom door, my heart pounding so hard I could barely breathe. In the dead of night my parents became strangers, each utterly transformed into versions of themselves I did not know.
I watched my father fall to his knees before my mother, a penitent dictator. I watched my mother reduce him to ash.
On the morning my father announced we were moving, no one even lifted their heads. There were no questions, no discussions.
There was no need.
We left that place behind, did not drive past our old street, did not discuss the hours my mother now spent in her closet. But when I closed my eyes I still heard her voice; I still saw her desperate, inhuman face. Kill me, dear God, she’d cry. She’d slap herself in the chest, drag fingernails down her face. Mano bokosho az een donya bebar. Kill me and take me away from this world.
I turned on the lights.
I dropped my backpack by the door, kicked off my shoes. My chest was tightening like a vise around my lungs, my vision blurring. In my mind I saw a stethoscope, a brown smudge, a scuffed gold wedding band.
Has she ever said anything to make you think she might be a danger to herself?
I felt heavy and cold.
I stared at an ancient, painted nail buried in the wall by the door, stood in the entryway staring at it for what felt like forever. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was hungry, I had homework, I needed to shower, I had to find my phone, I wanted to put on a sweater, and I needed to change the bandage on my knee, the wound of which had been throbbing since yesterday. I was cold and damp and shivering, my head hot, my hands unsteady. I had a thousand human needs that needed tending to and I felt paralyzed by the weight of those needs, felt impotent in the face of all that I required. I’d been starting to scare myself lately, worrying that I perhaps I wasn’t eating enough or sleeping enough. I couldn’t afford to fall apart, which meant I needed to do better, but my heart and mind were so full these days they were stretching at the seams, leaving little room for the efforts I’d once made to participate in my own life, in my own interests.
Somehow, I dragged myself upstairs.
I locked myself in the bathroom and tugged off my scarf, stripped off my clothes, stepped into a scalding shower. I stood under the water until my legs could no longer hold my weight, sat down on the shower floor until my head grew heavy. I pressed my forehead to the tile, the rough grout abrading my skin. I breathed deep, inhaling water. Closed my eyes.
Dear God, I thought. Help me.
My tears made no sound.
I didn’t know how long I spent there, my body poorly heated by a weak showerhead, didn’t know how long I’d been crying. I’d gone back in time, turned into a fetus, laid there on the shower floor like an infant unclaimed. Soundless sobs wracked my body, tore open my chest. I did not know what to do with all this pain. I did not know whether I wanted to be born.
I was startled suddenly by a sharp knock at the door.
Another knock—no, a heavy pounding—and I was upright so fast I nearly slipped in the tub. My mind had grown accustomed to panic and went there easily now, with little encouragement. My heart was racing, my eyes felt swollen. I scrubbed violently at my face, made a concerted effort to remain calm. When I felt ready, I turned off the water.
“Yes?”
“You’ve been in there for like two hours,” my sister said. “I need to use the bathroom.” I marveled at the exaggeration. Then, distracted, I wondered when she’d arrived home, what time it was, whether my mother was back from work.
“You can use the other bathroom,” I said, clinging to the plastic shower curtain. “I’m almost done.”
“Let me in,” she said. “I don’t want to keep shouting.”
That was unusual for Shayda.
Gingerly, I stepped out of the shower, grabbed a fresh towel, and unlocked the bathroom door. I’d just jumped back into the tub and pulled the shower curtain closed when I heard the door rattle and swing open.
“Okay get out, right now,” my sister said sharply.
“I’m about to,” I said, hastily wrapping the towel around my body. “Why? What’s going on?”
“Hassan’s mom is here.”
“So?” I said. And then: “Oh.”
“Yes. Exactly. So get your lazy ass out of the shower and come make tea.”
I frowned, about to argue, then changed my mind. I realized that, in her own weird way, Shayda was asking for my help. She wanted me around for
support during a stressful situation.
I was touched.
I felt it in truth, like a finger of heat pressed to my chest. But when she left half a second later, slamming the door so hard I felt the shower rod shake, I was decidedly less enthused. Still, it was something.
Shayda really seemed to despise me most days.
It was easy to dismiss our strained relationship with a shrug and a platitude about how she and I were just different, but I knew it was more complicated than that. We’d never been very close, but our paths had only recently split in earnest, and only because we couldn’t agree on a single matter of great importance.
I blamed my father, unequivocally, for Mehdi’s death.
Shayda did not.
I’d been stunned by her position on the matter. I’d never before had cause to know, in detail, our many differences, hadn’t reason to ask Shayda what she considered most important in life, faith, family. I’d never known exactly how she felt about dogma, or our parents, or even how harshly she’d judged our brother’s life. But when Mehdi died, the four of us left behind were forced to tear ourselves open, to examine the innards that made us tick. Death demanded we question the privately held, still-forming philosophies that shaped our hearts. We studied one another’s weak flesh and festering minds in the harsh, unflattering light of a midday sun, and when the moon rose, we’d found ourselves alone on different quadrants of the earth. I stood as far away from my sister as my mother did from my father, and I’d spent the last year trying and failing to bridge those distances.
The trouble was, I was often the only one making the effort.
I tiptoed to my bedroom in a towel, combed my fingers through damp, clean hair. The bandage on my chin had come off in the shower, and I was happy to discover the wound beginning to heal. Gingerly, I touched the cut with the tips of my fingers, tapping at the pain as I slid open my closet door, studied the contents within.
Unlike me, Shayda was eager to get married.
She’d fought with my mom over this, insisting it was something she wanted. She’d already picked out the guy, had accepted his hand, had a five-year plan. Shayda was nineteen, in her second year at the junior college, but she was going to transfer to a local university soon, and she wanted to be engaged for the next couple of years. Her plan was to get married just after graduation. She did not want to have children, not ever. She just wanted the husband.
This plan struck most non-Muslim people as either stupid or bizarre, but within many religious communities, it wasn’t uncommon. A lot of people got married relatively young, or at least got engaged young. They’d get engaged for a couple of years, spend time together with the express purpose of marriage, then get married. There were happy and unhappy couples. Divorce was not taboo; we had plenty of that, too. Which—not for the first time—made me wonder about my own parents.
A single knock on my bedroom door was my only warning before Shayda barged into my room, looking overheated.
“Why aren’t you dressed?” And then, taking a long look at me: “Why are your eyes all red and puffy?”
I startled, glanced in the mirror. “Oh,” I said. “Allergies?”
“You don’t have allergies.”
“Maybe I do.” I tried to laugh. “Is it really bad?”
“Whatever, I don’t care,” she said, distracted. “Just get dressed, please. I can’t go down there without you.”
“What? Why not?”
“Because,” she said. She narrowed her eyes, pinwheeled her arms like I should understand.
I did not.
And then she shook her head, shook her head like she was talking to an idiot. “I don’t want to look too eager, okay? I’m trying to be—” She waved her hand around, searching for the right word.
“Nonchalant?”
“What? Why can’t you talk like a normal person?”
“I do talk like a nor—”
“God, I don’t care, okay?” She cut me off. “I don’t care. How do I look?”
I took a deep breath and thought of my mother, my mother, my mother. And then, carefully, I processed the scene in front of me.
Shayda was wearing a dress—long and frilly and glittery—with a shiny hijab to match. She looked nice, but extremely overdressed, a truth I wasn’t sure I should impart. I didn’t know how to tell her that it didn’t matter how many people accompanied her as she descended the stairs; her outfit screamed the truth.
She looked too eager.
“You look really nice,” I said instead.
She rolled her eyes and shot me a look so scathing it scared me a little. “Forget it, I’ll go without you.”
She was already at the door, turning the handle, when I said:
“What is your problem?” I could no longer keep the anger out of my voice. “I just told you that you look really nice. Why is that a bad thing?”
“I said forget it, Shadi. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I was stupid to even ask you to care.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What do you think it means?” She spun back without warning. “It means you don’t care. It means you don’t give a shit about anyone but yourself.”
I stepped back like I’d been struck.
“That’s not true,” I said, but I was stunned, which made me sound uncertain, which only proved her point.
She laughed, but the sound was hollow, angry. “You don’t care about anything. Not about us, not about Baba. You never talk to Maman, you never ask me anything about my life.”
“I didn’t know you wanted me to ask—I didn’t even know you wanted to talk to me—”
Her eyes went wide. “Shadi, you’re my sister. Who else am I supposed to talk to?”
I took a step forward and she drew suddenly back, her face flushing.
“Don’t you dare try to hug me. Don’t you dare try to patronize me.”
“I’m not trying to patronize you, I just—”
“You have no idea how hard it’s been for me this last year,” she said, her eyes shining with sudden emotion. “You have no idea, Shadi.” She shook her head, looked around. “Who do you think keeps the house running these days? Who do you think makes sure we have food in the fridge? Who do you think takes out the trash, cleans the kitchen, brings in the mail, sorts the bills, makes sure Maman has gas in her car, cashes her checks, makes sure Baba’s insurance is going through?”
“Shayda—”
“Me, Shadi.” She stabbed a finger at her chest. “It’s me. And you don’t lift a finger to help. You don’t even pretend to give a shit. You have no idea what I’ve been going through or how much I have to do every day or even this”—she waved her hands around—“this, today, with Hassan.” She laughed, suddenly, sounded hysterical. “You don’t even know what’s happening, do you? You’ve never asked me a single question about him. You know literally nothing about my life, and you couldn’t care less.”
“Of course I care. Shayda, I want to know—please, listen to me—”
“No—I’m sick of how selfish you’ve been. I’m sick and tired of it. You’re out doing God-knows-what with Ali, of all people, who treats the rest of us like shit, who hasn’t even talked to us in like a year—and you never, ever want to know how Baba is doing. You never visit him at the hospital. You don’t even care about him. You want him to die. Don’t you? Don’t you?”
She was just screaming at me now, her painted lips curving around the awful sounds. I’d frozen in place, my compassion turning to dust as I imagined my mother sitting downstairs, pretending not to hear some distorted version of this in front of her guest. I was picturing her mortification, her horror.
“Please,” I said quietly. “Please stop shouting.”
She would not.
“You want our family to fall apart. You want our parents to get a divorce. After everything we’ve been through—after everything, you just want it all to get worse. Why? What the hell is wrong with you?”
“
Shayda,” I said desperately. “There are people downstairs. They can hear you. Maman will hear you.”
“So you’re not even going to answer my questions?” She shook her head, disgusted, and with that movement the fight left her body. She looked bereft in the aftermath. Bereft and cruel. “You’re not going to answer my questions, but you’re going to stand there and pretend to be righteous, pretend to be better than me, than all the rest of us?”
“Shayda. Stop.”
“You didn’t even cry at his funeral,” she said, and I heard her breath hitch. “Sometimes I think you don’t even care that he’s dead.”
I was suddenly breathing so hard I thought my chest would explode. I stared at the carpet under my feet, tried desperately to keep my anger in check. This time, I failed.
“Get out.”
“What?” She startled.
“Get out. Get out of my room. Go get married. Good luck.”
“I’m not getting married,” she said, still confused. “I’m just—”
I looked up, locked eyes with her. She visibly flinched.
“You don’t know anything about me, Shayda. You don’t know anything at all.” I walked past her, yanked open the door. “Now leave.”
She wouldn’t.
So I did.
I pulled on a pair of jeans and an old hoodie, tugged a wool beanie over my wet hair. Shayda was telling me that I’d lost my mind, that I’d officially gone insane, that I couldn’t go downstairs looking like that without embarrassing her, and that I couldn’t leave without saying hello to Hassan’s mom or else disrespect their entire family, and that this—this—was only further proof that I didn’t care about anyone but myself, that I was a monster, a monster of a human being who didn’t care about anyone, didn’t care about anyone—
These were the words she shouted at me as I barreled down the stairs.
My mother stood erect, waiting for me as I entered the living room, the look on her face violent enough to commit a double homicide.
I’d missed that look.
“I’m sorry,” I said breathlessly, and forced a smile.
I did my best to make quick work of the extremely polite and overly formal hellos and apologies necessary, my stilted, accented Farsi making the scene even more ridiculous. I thanked the woman I assumed was Hassan’s mom for honoring our home with her presence, for being gracious enough to overlook my appearance, and to please, please sit down and make herself comfortable. Her lips kept twitching as I talked, as she took me in, staring at me as though she were trying hard not to laugh.
