Amina reached into her own bag. “One reason I wanted to meet here is that I am putting together information for you—names, dates, and anything I can remember. I created a timeline and used information I found online here at the library. I could only find so much.” And I could not find my people. She pushed forward a folder.
Jessica scanned the typed timeline contained on the first page. “This is perfect. We’ll file it as soon as you get your interview notice. It really could be any day. Do you have any paperwork, letters, something that you or your family mailed to the United States or posted on the Internet somewhere? Photos, videos, anything that we can use to supplement this? I know I’ve asked before, but maybe while you worked on this, some things came to mind.”
Amina shook her head. Jessica still didn’t get it. “I have told you. We did not send anything to America, and when I left, my father packed little. I was to be here only a short time, and my father did not want to raise suspicions. I have some photos, the ones that Conor copied, but I do not think the ones I kept will be helpful.”
Jessica closed the folder and started to put it in her bag. “Wait. What do you mean by ‘the ones you kept’?”
“I had other photos on my flash drive, but I deleted them before I left Aleppo.”
“Where? Where did you delete them?”
“I’m not sure I understand the question. They were on my flash drive, but I deleted them so the wrong people would not discover them. Some were horrible photos anyway. I’m not even sure why I took some of them.”
Jessica had her phone in her hand, typing on the screen.
A loud bang caused both of them to jump. The reverberations in the cavernous room turned heads, and many eyes stopped on Amina. It had only been a book hitting a table, though, and a red-faced woman was the culprit. Eyes quickly returned to their own books.
Jessica’s phone lit up, and she smiled. “I need your original flash drive.”
“Why?”
“I just texted Conor. We might be able to recover the deleted files. Maybe there will be something there that could help your case. It’s worth a shot.”
Amina bit her lip. She reached into her bag and handed a black flash drive to Jessica. “I don’t want to see any of the deleted photos you find.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Jessica felt like a voyeur, scrolling through someone else’s photos. She had already seen plenty of images of Aleppo online and on the news. Whole sections of the city had been utterly destroyed by Assad’s mortars and ISIS’s bombs. Skeletons of exposed concrete had been crushed as though stomped by a giant. Piles of unidentifiable debris clogged narrow streets between hollowed-out buildings. Residents wandered like ghosts among the devastation, gray from the dust, gray from the despair.
In Amina’s photos, however, she got to see the city through Amina’s eyes. The family home had a shockingly purple front door, vibrant rugs, and walls lined with books and abstract artwork, a family’s history. Amina’s brothers, with their million-dollar smiles, athletic pants, and Nike sneakers, looked like collegiate rugby players, ready on a moment’s notice to play ball or party hard. Many of the women in the photos kept to dark-colored clothing. The woman who appeared to be Amina’s mother, however, had a different colorful hijab in every picture.
The front door creaked open, jolting Jessica out of the slide show. Then came sounds of backpacks hitting the floor. All three kids were in the kitchen in a flash, their heads in the fridge, fighting over the last Gatorade.
Jessica zeroed in on her oldest. “Hey, Conor, when you’re done, can you come over here? No rush.”
After Cricket and Mikey went upstairs, Conor approached the table, holding a sandwich and that Gatorade. Just a couple of weeks ago, he would have sulked his way over, whether or not he’d scored the last bottle. Today, he made eye contact and seemed curious.
“Can you help me with the flash drive? I got it from Amina. She said she deleted a bunch of photos, and who knows, they could help her case.”
Conor set the bottle and the sandwich on the kitchen table. The sandwich didn’t have a plate or a napkin, and Jessica could see the crumbs already accumulating on the wood. She stood to let Conor take the chair.
It only took him a few minutes.
“Here you go,” he said, pointing to a new folder on her computer. “They’re all in this folder. I named it ‘Amina.’ All of the files—the ones she didn’t delete and ones she did—are all mixed in with each other. The flash drive still just shows the undeleted ones.”
“Thanks. Oh, um, can you name it something else? And...” She hesitated, hating what she wanted to ask of him.
“And don’t tell Dad? No problem.” Conor’s response was so casual but somehow supportive. Apparently, the kids weren’t completely oblivious to the friction between Danny and Jessica.
Conor picked up his Gatorade and sandwich and was gone. Jessica brushed the crumbs into her palm as she listened to his footsteps going up the stairs. She would have to go through the deleted photos, but she wanted the table to be clean.
The first photo she opened stopped Jessica cold. The young woman looked familiar—the curve of the jaw, the freckle under her left eye. Her black hair was long and full, tendrils flying freely in the wind as she laughed at something happening off camera.
Without the hijab, Amina was a different person, stripped of her Muslimism, her heritage, and her hometown. No. She was the same person. It was Jessica who looked at her differently, Jessica who had cloaked Amina in expectations and limitations unfairly. She tried to read the woman’s mind through the photo. The laughter spoke to a now-abandoned optimism, an optimism left trampled and destroyed like young men and concrete buildings.
Jessica clicked through the familiar smiling faces, the purple door, those photos she’d viewed before Conor did his magic. Then came more of the recovered, never-before-seen photos. Amina stood in front of a man who must have been Mohammed. He was not as tall as Jessica had imagined, but she could almost see his eyes dancing. His arms were wrapped around Amina, their hands intertwined at her waist.
In the next photo, Amina sat among a group of women. They were young and old, covered and uncovered. Unsmiling faces didn’t tell the whole story. A middle-aged woman rested her hand on the shoulder of a younger woman with glistening eyes. A blue-eyed woman held the hand of the woman next to her. Amina sat in the middle, daring the camera to capture the moment with accuracy.
Continuing to scroll, Jessica found fewer and fewer images that she had already seen. The sorority appeared a few more times, with some changes in the faces. But quickly, the purple doors and smiles gave way to crumbled concrete and faces buried in hands.
One photo showed a body covered in a white sheet, a crowd of mourners surrounding it. Amina’s father stared into the camera with despair.
Jessica dropped her head to the table and groaned.
“What’s up?” Conor’s voice jolted Jessica upright. “Were you able to see all the pictures?”
“Yes, I think they’re all there.” She shivered at the sadness of seeing ghosts on her computer.
“Are they going to help her case?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t know what I’m looking for, to be honest.”
Conor sat in a kitchen chair and set his phone on the table, pushing it away just a bit.
Jessica checked her watch. It would be quite a while before Danny got home. “You see, to get asylum, Amina has to present her case in an interview. She has to demonstrate that she’s been persecuted or has what they call ‘a well-founded fear of persecution’ based on one of five grounds—race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. A lot of that will be telling her story, which is pretty horrible, but which is also pretty common. When you think about it, anyone could put together a story of persecution. Just go online, and you can find all sorts of material you could work into your own narrative.”
Conor hadn’t moved and hadn’t glanced
at his phone, which had buzzed twice already.
Jessica continued. “Amina also has to provide documents and evidence to help support her claim. When Amina left Syria, she didn’t exactly bring affidavits attesting to all of the things that happened to her and her family—where things happened, when they happened, stuff like that. She has no documentation, no evidence. It just makes the process more difficult for her.”
“What about the pictures?” Conor asked.
She didn’t think he was looking at her as though she had stupidly missed potential evidence, but his tone said otherwise. “Well, photos are great, and we can definitely use them, but they just prove that she has pictures of people who look like they are of Middle Eastern descent in a place that looks like it’s probably in the Middle East.”
Conor nodded anxiously. “Okay, but what about the metadata?”
She didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. “Go on.”
“Well, there’s going to be EXIF data associated with each image. Of course, depending on what device they used to take the pictures, like a DSLR versus a cell phone, the data will be different. But there should definitely be time and date, and probably a lot of them have geotags, so we can know where they were taken. It’s how people can stalk you online, Mom.” There was a little bit of playful condescension in that last comment, but he was on to something, so Jessica let it slide.
“That could be helpful.” Understatement. “Can you show me how to access this, uh, stuff?”
“Metadata, Mom. Jeez. You are so old. Here, I’ll show you.”
Danny’s admonitions not to get the family involved in Amina’s case fought to change the direction of the moment, but Jessica brushed them aside. Her son was working with her, and that was a good enough reason to make an exception. Plus, it was just for a minute as he showed her how to do something on the computer.
Standing behind Conor as he started in on her laptop, Jessica saw a young Danny tapping away, making the laptop do his will.
DANNY had gotten home after she’d fallen asleep and was out the door before she rolled out of bed the next morning. She wouldn’t even have known he’d been home if Gracie hadn’t sounded the alarm when Danny creaked up the stairs around midnight. But his late night had allowed her to go through the files without fear of confrontation, though confrontation might have been better than the lonely chill.
Conor had been right—there was data. But the blur of numbers and meaningless file extensions meant little to her. Jessica didn’t know how Danny and his team could stand looking at computer screens of code day after day. It would take a lot of searching and tracking to match up times and places to Amina’s history, not to mention ibuprofen for the headaches likely to result from staring at the screen. She would dig into that today.
Conor sidled up next to Jessica as she poured her second cup of coffee.
“So I was wondering...” Conor stared at the counter.
She watched him fidget, seeing a rare glimpse of the little boy who still resided within. “Yes? What were you wondering?”
Conor stretched out his fingers, clenched his fist, then did it again. Looking right in Jessica’s eyes, he asked, “Can I help with Amina’s case? I mean, I can help go through the metadata. Maybe do some Internet searches to try to get the evidence you need.”
Jessica was dumbfounded. And torn. But the sincerity softening his face softened her. And he hadn’t looked her in the eye like that in she didn’t know how long. She would love for him to help her with something, but this? Confidentiality, beheadings. Danny.
“There are some things I’ll need to investigate. There are confidentiality issues to consider.”
Conor’s expectant expression began to morph into one of defeat.
Jessica couldn’t let that happen. “But I think we can work it all out. Let me talk to Rosalie and Amina, and we can figure out what you can do to help.”
The hug caught Jessica off guard. She hadn’t realized how tall he’d gotten, but she softened into his six-foot frame, the frame of a young man.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Jessica handed Amina the flash drive as though it were a precious family heirloom, which in a sense, it was, one probably more valuable to Amina than any of the items from Oma’s boxes were to Jessica.
“Thank you.” Amina squeezed the drive and placed it back in its refuge. “And please thank Conor for his help.” She didn’t ask about the deleted photos.
The coffee shop was busier than usual, but the elevated lunchtime chatter blended with the smell of roasted coffee to create a comforting buffer around the two women.
“Amina, I’m curious. I saw photos of you without the hijab.” She motioned toward Amina’s red headscarf. “Why... I mean, when did you start wearing one? Or stop wearing one?”
“I did not always wear a hijab in Syria. It was my choice. We had that freedom until ISIS invaded and extremists started beating women with bare heads.”
Jessica wanted to ask, Why, then, when you’re living in America, would you wear something that you wore in Syria to avoid getting beaten? Something that, in America, almost got you beaten? But damned if she was going to be Claire.
Amina seemed to read her thoughts. “My family. My past.” Her fingers graced the fringe of the scarf, which surrounded her face with elaborately embroidered black flowers.
The realization struck Jessica like a jolt of caffeine. The scarf was Amina’s mother’s, the one from the photo she’d seen on the computer on Thanksgiving. Amina’s photos and Jessica’s meetings with Amina flashed like a slideshow in her mind. All of the scarves were her mother’s, and scarves in a suitcase leaving Syria wouldn’t raise suspicion.
The drone of the coffee grinder overwhelmed the background noise. The two sipped their drinks, gazing out the window at the pedestrians rushing past in the pre-Christmas craziness.
“There were some other photos,” Jessica said. “Women.”
Amina set her cup down. Her deep breaths slowed. “Those women, those photographs, must be protected.” She searched Jessica’s eyes, securing another promise, like she had on the night of the attack.
“Who are they?”
Amina folded her napkin and pressed the crease before folding it and creasing it again. She had deleted those photos for a reason, even though they weren’t horrific photos of the aftermath of bombings or beatings, nor were they photos of the dead. At least she hoped they weren’t photos of the dead.
“I was part of a group of women. It was... a study group.”
Jessica pictured the women from the “study group,” the wide range in ages, the different dress, the apparent bond. Amina had mentioned the study group on her original application, and only now did it trigger Jessica’s lawyer impulses and the reference to “groups” in the asylum rules. She’d written it off originally as a school thing, nothing of importance. She was an idiot for not asking about it earlier. “Can you tell me about it?”
“There was a bookstore near my home. We met there. The owner let us use a small room. There were university students, a pharmacist, an engineer, women who did not work but were intelligent and wanted to challenge their minds. Sometimes we would discuss a book. My father read a lot, and we would sometimes try one of his books, but they were usually so boring.” She placed her hand across her face and laughed then sighed. Her hand fell to her chest, rising and falling with each breath.
“We talked about our lives. We talked about what lives we wanted for our children. We talked about how we could continue to work in our professions or continue our educations when the fighting came and it became dangerous. Some women were afraid to speak. I learned from my father, so I spoke extra loud to speak even for those who were afraid. We trusted each other.” Amina’s burst of words stopped abruptly.
“It sounds like more than just a study group.”
“We were there for each other and helped anyone who came, in the time we had.”
“What kind of help?”
“Some women wanted contraception when medical services were disrupted. Other women just needed someone to listen to them. You have to understand that the Assad regime does not allow private organizations, only government. Maybe a study group is accepted.” She twisted her mouth as if to admit even this must be approached with paranoid discretion. “But not what we were doing. After the fighting began, what we did was against what the strict Islamists were trying to impose in areas around us. Our study group was something these two opposing groups would have been happy to destroy together. But that is the story of what is happening in my home. Many opposing factions. And their common ground is that they want to destroy everything in their path. But we still did some important things.”
Amina paused for what appeared to be an internal debate as she unfolded her napkin. “My friend Najlaa. She was a doctor. Her husband beat her. And then he began to beat their older daughter. War brings out evil in men, even in their own homes. She did not gather clothing or any other items. We prepared a suitcase for her. Each of us put in some of our own things. Some put in some of their daughters’ things for Najlaa’s girls. We each gave some money, even from the little we had. One in our group had a relative in Lebanon. Najlaa was a doctor, so the village would welcome her. Another woman found transportation. We were so careful. If anyone found out, it would mean death for Najlaa and maybe all of us. The day came, and Najlaa and her two daughters went in the back of a truck.
“The next day, the husband and a group of men ran down the street. They were yelling and pounding on doors. They were polite to the men they encountered but rough with the women. ‘Where is she? Where did she go?’ It was frightening, but the flames in the husband’s eyes and the hard words from his mouth made me know we had done the right thing.”
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