Unbroken Threads

by Jennifer Klepper

  Memories flickered across Amina’s face, memories that softened her jaw and mouth.

  “Finally, he came to my mother and me as we were preparing bread. ‘Mama and Amina,’ he said. He looked very serious, like a doctor delivering bad news. He said, ‘The bird has died. We must have a funeral.’ And so it was.”

  Amina’s deep-brown eyes seemed to plead, “Know my brother.” Her new openness disarmed Jessica, who had come into the coffee shop steeled to be patient and sensitive, to let Amina disclose at her own pace. Now she worried she wasn’t ready for Amina’s pace.

  “We all agreed that, no, the bird did not need to be washed, which is our custom. But my brother wrapped the bird in a white cloth and placed a drop of perfume on the cloth. He then invited all the neighbors to the funeral. My mother was worried. She was traditional. What would they think if we bury a bird in such a way? But they came. All of them. The old men, the old women, the ones who never spoke but looked at you like you were a criminal. They said their prayers and paid their respects to my brother. This was not a custom, to bury dead birds. It was my brother. They loved him and respected him, even as a child.”

  Jessica let herself know Samir and his innocence, an innocence no different from that of Oma with her kittens and Mikey with his Lucky Charms. Jessica’s light smile tasted of sorrow, though, as she recalled images of young children who had fled Assad’s bombs, losing their childhood in the process.

  “That bird,” Amina continued. “He buried that bird beneath the earth by our home. Our home could be gone now, but I like to think that the grave is protected and the bird lies in peace. It is fortunate it did not have to witness what was to come.”

  Amina stopped abruptly, the muscles around her mouth tightening. She inhaled deeply, slowly, and the muscles relaxed. The glow of memory fell victim to an aura of blackest despair. Amina hadn’t provided much detail on her asylum application about Samir.

  “What happened to Samir?” Jessica almost whispered the question.

  Amina’s face flickered, her eyes narrowing as she looked past Jessica’s shoulder. “He was sixteen. The men entered my parents’ home. My father was not there. Even if he was home that day, he could not have helped, but he never forgave himself for not protecting his child. Samir was home, helping my mother. The soldiers mocked him for helping a woman. They said he must do a man’s work and join them. My mother told the men to leave, that Samir was still a boy. They struck her down with the butt of a gun. They laughed like it was a joke and walked away. My brother packed a bag, knowing they would return. He would leave at dark to go stay with my uncle outside Aleppo. But the men knocked down the door before night and dragged Samir away.”

  Jessica’s gasp came with a shudder. She had stopped breathing while Amina spoke, and the sudden influx of air was a shock.

  “After the men took my brother, my mother walked up and down every street, asking if anyone had seen her son. She went alone. No one would talk to her. She searched for days. She hoped he was in prison and would soon come home.” The muscles in the hollows of Amina’s cheeks went taut. “Can you imagine wishing for prison for your son?” Her question, directed at no one, lifted into the air.

  Amina’s faraway look turned ice cold. She was no longer in the coffee shop. She was no longer sitting across from her American lawyer. Jessica felt like an intruder, though if she were to step away from the table, Amina probably wouldn’t have noticed.

  “Three days after they took him, I was baking with my mother. It was the only thing to do.” The statement came out as an apology. “We heard a sound outside the door, like someone had thrown a sack of rice against the house. My mother ran to open the door, and I heard her wail. A thousand birds died of despair on hearing that sound. She fell to the ground, and a crowd of people began to gather. There was no—he was not all there. We knew it was Samir’s body by his yellow football jersey and a scar on his arm from when he was a little boy.”

  Jessica stared at her cup. Looking directly into Amina’s eyes at this point seemed voyeuristic, invasive, and tragic.

  “We saw his head days later, on a fence surrounded by armed men. We saw many heads after the conflict began. Some of them we knew. But a man’s head does not look like the man.” Amina spoke with an air of contempt now, her nostrils flaring barely perceptibly. Jessica was the audience again but also a receptacle for Amina’s rage and pain. “No, it looks like the savages who killed him—empty, lifeless, and inhuman. We did not cry when we saw Samir’s head on that post, for it was not him.”

  Eyes welling with tears, Jessica could barely say “I’m so sorry” without choking. Amina’s face was expressionless. No tears, no fiery anger in her eyes.

  Jessica drove home in silence, feeling small and inconsequential but letting herself cry for Amina.

  JESSICA walked into the kitchen, still feeling the heavy weight of Samir’s story. It took her a few moments to notice she had walked into a standoff of sorts.

  Danny faced Conor, slowly shaking his head. Conor seemed to be trying hard to look as though he didn’t care.

  Jessica sighed. “Hi. What did I miss?” Whatever it was, it had to be better than the conversation she’d just had with Amina.

  “You can tell her,” Danny said.

  “What.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement. It was Conor being a stubborn ass again.

  “You need to own it, Conor. Make decisions for good reasons and stand by those decisions. A good life compass is whether you’re comfortable explaining why you made a decision. If you have solid reasoning that you can stand behind, that’s great. If you don’t, you need to rethink things.” Again, Danny was the reasonable analyst.

  “Fine.” Conor turned squarely toward Jessica. “Mom, I’m not going out for basketball.” He pivoted back toward Danny. “There. Happy?”

  Jessica moved to Danny’s side. “What do you mean? Did you get cut?” Conor was a solid player. Maybe there had been a mistake. Jessica looked to Danny for reassurance. He simply raised his eyebrows noncommittally.

  “I didn’t sign up for the team,” Conor said.

  “I don’t understand. You did so well last year. I thought you were looking forward to playing varsity.” Basketball was the solution to the Conor problem. Jessica didn’t have the emotional energy to find another fix right now.

  “I changed my mind. I don’t want to play anymore. It’s not like I’m going to play in college or go pro. God. Get over it.”

  “We know you’re not going to be a pro athlete. That’s not why you do sports, son.” Danny seemed disappointed that Conor didn’t understand why a person would do a sport, when what he needed to be was disappointed that his son was disconnecting from everything and everyone.

  Jessica pursed her lips and clenched her hands. She could feel her fingernails digging into her palms. “Conor, I’m just... I don’t know what to say. That was your last sport. Your last anything. You stopped playing piano, you quit sailing, you won’t sign up for any clubs. You don’t do drama. You don’t do student government. What are you going to do?” If he didn’t do anything, he couldn’t go anywhere.

  “I don’t know, Mom, okay? It’s not a big deal. God, just leave me alone, and I’ll be fine.” Conor swung his backpack over his shoulder.

  “Are you doing drugs?” She didn’t intend it as an aggressive accusation, though it came out like one. But if Danny wasn’t going to say something, she was. Conor’s lack of involvement, his cold shoulder, and his all-around attitude just didn’t fit her image of him. Maybe she was overlooking something like drugs, depression, bullying, or one of the other thousand things she was supposed to be worried about as the parent of a teenager.

  He turned back, and she searched his face for answers. What she saw was that Conor didn’t take her question as one born of concern. “God, Mom. No. I’m not doing drugs.” He pushed up his sleeves. “No track marks, see?” He unzipped his backpack and thrust the open top toward Jessica. “Wanna go through my backpack? Have you
already gone through my room?”

  Conor’s accusation targeted her, not Danny, not even both of them. Once again, she was the shrill parent, pigeonholed as the bad guy. “Conor, we haven’t gone through your room. Not that your dad and I wouldn’t if we got concerned or thought something was going on. But you have to talk to us. We can’t just watch you wander silently around this house and let it go. We’re trying to respect your privacy and give you your independence, but at some point, you need to let us in. Especially if you’re doing something that you don’t want us to know about.”

  “Yes, you can. I’m fine.”

  “No, we can’t. We’re your parents.” Jessica put her hand on Conor’s.

  He flinched but didn’t pull it away.

  “We love you,” she said. “We’re here for you. Always. No matter what it is, you can talk to us.”

  “I know, Mom. I just don’t have anything to talk about, okay? I’m fine.” He pulled back his hand.

  “It’s just that you used to be so involved,” she said. “And then, you wouldn’t take the internship at Binnacle, which I—we—don’t understand. You’ve always wanted to be just like your dad.”

  “No, Mom. You wanted me to be just like Dad.” His glare sliced deeper than the hinge on the trunk had. “Am I free to leave now?”

  Jessica turned to Danny, who looked up from checking his phone and shook his head to indicate he had nothing to add. Jessica waved her hand toward the doorway. Conor moved out of the room with a calm that contrasted with Jessica’s frustration but mirrored his father’s even keel. Maybe she was overreacting.

  His footsteps up the stairs and down the upstairs hallway pounded at Jessica’s patience. She was rather privileged to be so outraged by her son quitting a sport, and her solitary stance intensified her discomfort. But she couldn’t stop feeling the loss of the little boy who once had tagged along with his father to mend sails and who’d spent entire weekends taking apart his dad’s old computers and putting them back together.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  AMINA

  Amina tiptoed down the stairs into the dark living room after the house had slipped into silence. The old computer booted reluctantly, slowly filling the corner of the room with blue light. She tilted her head from side to side, feeling the tension in her neck pull through her body then slowly release as she came back to center.

  After a full day of working tables, punctuated by the visit with Jessica between shifts, her body simply wanted to go to sleep. But Amina welcomed the pain in her feet and the ache of her back, wanting to feel each pang of hurt intensely. She wouldn’t have been able to do that if she were asleep.

  Amina slid her thumb drive into the USB port, her heart stuttering with irrational fear that the faces would stare back at her accusingly when she clicked on the photo folder. She always kept the drive with her, but she hadn’t looked at the pictures since... She couldn’t even remember. It was one of the only things she had of home. But even after she had deleted so many of the pictures, she was still afraid to look at the ones she’d kept. They were people she hadn’t protected, people she’d left behind.

  Amina had steeled herself before telling Jessica Samir’s story and bringing that memory into the present. She’d feared it would bring back the terror while pushing Samir even further away, highlighting his death and his absence. She’d been closed off and hard to talk to about her parents, but it had finally felt right to talk about Samir.

  She pushed aside the apprehension and clicked the folder.

  She saw her mother’s hands—hands that cooked and cleaned and sewed, hands that held a child’s face between them when something important was being said. In the picture, her mother’s able fingers were stained with pomegranate juice. The shadowing of the black-and-white photo highlighted both their strength and their tenderness.

  She saw her father’s eyes. A hint of a promise beamed from the deep-brown pools, boring into her very being. They were not judging her as she sat there, safe in the dark corner of the Darbis’ tidy living room. No, the love was still there. She remembered the moment she’d taken that photo, when the sun was rising over the ancient city, the first rays of light meeting her father’s approving gaze. This one was from before the conflicts had begun. “Baba, I wish for you that we find that promise again,” she whispered, violating the stillness of the dark room. She chastised herself. She couldn’t make any promises.

  She saw a photo of Samir, radiating with joy while juggling a soccer ball in front of children in the street. She traced his form on the screen with her fingers, lingering on his laughing smile.

  She saw a wedding. A proud groom, more beautiful than anyone or anything she had ever known, gazed at a smiling bride whom she no longer recognized as herself and who may, in fact, have disappeared.

  There were others whose pictures were no longer there, others who might be gone forever. It was not right. She should not have left. Her father had convinced her in a moment of weakness to flee, and she had only thought of herself instead of all those who might never have the chance.

  She’d told Jessica about Samir because she believed she owed it to her lawyer, to her case. Maybe she did. But in truth, she owed it to Samir to tell his story. She owed it to all of them.

  She pulled the thumb drive from the USB port. It was warm between her fingers. She closed her hand around it and absorbed its energy. Reluctantly, she opened her hand again and placed the drive in its pocket in her bag.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  A cool breeze rustled the dried leaves sprinkled on the lawn, whipping them in a spiral before smashing them against the fence.

  Jessica shielded the photos on the floor in front of her from getting flipped by the draft, but she didn’t shut the windows. She had another hour or so before the kids came downstairs to scavenge for some dinner. She would close up then.

  Black-and-white photos lay on the wood floor, arranged like a game of Memory. She had only glanced at the photos when she’d first opened the box after the sidewalk incident, but hearing more about Amina’s irretrievable past had made her think about what she had left behind.

  In one photo, a family—clearly her mother, her uncle, and her grandparents—stood in front of a movie theater. Oma looked jarringly like Jessica’s mother, including the slight smirk that highlighted her apple cheeks and the thick wave of dark hair tucked behind her left ear. The title of the movie was outside the frame of the photo. It was something starring Gregory Peck. The theater had still been in town when Jessica had left for college, but it had soon become one of many casualties of the attrition endemic to rural towns.

  She had been part of the exodus. Not that Iowa City was that far away, but it was exactly that—away.

  Jessica crisscrossed her legs and placed a photo album from the box on her lap.

  Twelve inches tall by eighteen inches wide, the album had a leatherlike cover with the word “Photos” embossed in gold vintage script. Inside the cover, “Our family” was written in Oma’s careful hand in white ink on black paper. The brittle paper, faded at the edges where it had been exposed to light over the years, stiffly resisted then succumbed to Jessica’s fingers. As she turned the first page, tiny bits of black paper crumbled and fell unceremoniously onto the wood floor.

  Each page had a collection of photos, or in some cases just a single photo, with captions written in white script. An austere couple posed joylessly in chairs in front of a farmhouse. A smiling farmer flung hay with a pitchfork from atop a towering haystack.

  Turning a page, Jessica caught her breath. An old woman with bright eyes sat on an uncomfortable-looking wooden chair and stared back at her. She had that old-lady matronly look about her. A shapeless homemade dress gave no indication of the figure hidden beneath. Strands of hair resisted her attempted bun and formed a rough halo around her face. It was Oma, but it wasn’t. The photo was too old for it to be Oma. Jessica examined the photo, hiding the caption with her hand. The woman’s round face, almond-shap
ed eyes, and the way she looked at the camera with utter confidence betrayed her genetic tie to Cricket. Jessica moved her hand to uncover the white script. “Gr. Margarethe,” it read under the photo. So this is you, Grandma Margarethe. Your embroidery and the quilt are beautiful. And I love your cross.

  A set of small boxes held the rest of the photos, each snapshot with writing on the back. Favorite Uncle Carl stood on his head. Dowdy Aunt Patty was dolled up like a pinup girl in her graduation photo. A lot of shots included people—relatives, presumably—she couldn’t place.

  Some pictures stood out more than others. In one, Jessica’s mom and uncle as kids were setting off a rocket. So very Sputnik of them. Her uncle grinned for the camera, while her mom’s eyes were locked on the rocket in her brother’s hands.

  Her mom would know who some of these people were. Jessica gathered the loose photos she had set aside, shuffling them into an approximated chronological order. That would be a good excuse to get in touch, especially since her mom had sent multiple messages asking about her progress on the boxes.

  She heard footsteps behind her and turned to find Cricket, or perhaps a ghost of Margarethe’s teen years. She studied Cricket’s face, curious how a face could be so young but have so much history in it. Cricket knelt by the photos, scanning a selection from a pile Jessica hadn’t gone through yet. She picked up a snapshot. “Is this you?”

  Jessica expected to see a baby photo of herself, but instead she saw an image of her mother standing behind a four-year-old Jessica along the curb of Main Street as a parade marched by. Her mother smiled for the camera, but little Jessica’s eyes were glued to the troop of men leading the parade. The men wore suspenders and beards from a different era, far removed from the 1970s. The beards were long and short, bushy and scraggly. Some men were dark haired, but their beards were gray. Some men were bald, with thick beards that, to a four-year-old, made it look as if their heads were upside down.