by Eman Quotah
“I wanna go, Mama,” Hanadi says. She wriggles down her aunt’s leg. “Please, please.”
“Never mind. We’ll go for ice cream,” Muneer says. He turns to his sister. “You’ve ruined it. I told you not to say anything.”
“You say ice cream, but I know you’re lying.”
“The shop’s down the street. You know where it is.”
“Don’t fight,” Hanadi says, and Lujayn takes her hand and whispers something to her.
As Lujayn and Hanadi walk across the porch, Saeedah feels her anger like a separate being inside her—a child squirming in her belly or a jinni possessing her. She lunges for Lujayn and grabs her arm.
“Get away from my child!”
Not shocked or scared, Lujayn emanates angry heat. Her full weight rams into Saeedah, who has to catch herself from falling. Hanadi erupts in tears. Muneer takes her in his arms. The meter between them and Saeedah seems like an ocean.
“Lujayn!” Muneer says.
“You saw she came at me. I was trying to take Hanadi from the fighting.”
“Let Lujayn and Hanadi stay outside while we finish talking.” Muneer steps inside, ushering Saeedah into the living room, as though he’s the one who lives here.
Saeedah resents his implication that she’s failed to protect her daughter. Whenever Muneer comes back, these situations slip from her control. Nothing matters but Hanadi’s tears, which sit on her cheeks whole and perfect, tiny reminders of everything Saeedah has ever done wrong as a mother. Through the bay window, she watches Lujayn and Hanadi in the yard, poking sticks in the grass.
“Are you going to keep us from seeing her? The thing we came here to do?” Muneer says to Saeedah. He’s taken his boots off to come inside, left them neatly by the door, their toes and heels lined up perfectly. His socked feet seem too intimate. What’s changed in her? In Jidda, it’s customary to take your shoes off in someone’s home. It’s nothing special. Here, the sight of his shoeless feet on her wool carpet suggests a closeness they’ve lost.
She sits in the rocking chair. The urge to fight has leaked out of her.
“Fine. Take her for ice cream.”
“We’ll be back in an hour.”
She doesn’t believe him.
She has begun to tire of the phone calls. Once a week, during Saturday morning cartoons, he calls, as arranged. Hanadi lies flat on her stomach, legs kicking the carpet beneath her. She keeps her eyes on the black-and-white TV, barely larger than a toaster, that Saeedah bought at Zayre after Muneer took the color set.
Whenever the phone rings, Saeedah gives it to Hanadi without answering it. “Talk to Baba.”
Hanadi hardly speaks. She listens to her father and nods. Saeedah hears his tinny voice, trying to keep the conversation going, like a cold engine sputtering in Ohio in January. In Jidda, engines die of heat, not cold. When she takes the handset from Hanadi, Muneer is always angry because his daughter won’t speak to him.
“She’s four,” Saeedah says. “She’s watching cartoons.”
“Turn the TV off.”
“She’d yell.”
“What are you telling her about me?”
“Nothing. You’ll see when you visit.”
He comes every three months. They have agreed on this arrangement until Saeedah finishes her degree. Muneer has taken Hanadi to Draeger’s, the ice cream parlor on Van Aken Boulevard, during past visits. But Saeedah trusts Lujayn less than she trusts her ex-husband. Lujayn will goad him. She’ll complain about Saeedah’s refusal to let them drive Hanadi to an amusement park. She’ll insist it’s his right to take his daughter wherever he wants.
Saeedah turns on the TV. Nothing but soap operas and Leave It to Beaver. She opens a textbook, reads ten pages, turns back to reread passages because nothing has stuck in her brain. What if they didn’t go to Draeger’s? It would be better to know now, rather than wait for them to be gone for hours.
After a week of thunderstorms, it’s a beautiful, sunny, late August day. The heat doesn’t bother her. She likes to let it soak into her skin, hoarding sunshine in preparation for the long winter that will arrive soon. But her Beetle, which sits in the driveway because the garage houses the landlord’s rusted-out Chrysler, is blazing hot. The vinyl burns the backs of her thighs.
She rolls down the windows and drives through the leafy shade of the neighborhood, out toward Van Aken. A family of four walks home from the pool, damp towels hung over the crooks of their arms. Two boys race their bikes down the street toward her, veering over to the sidewalk when they see her car coming. Too late, she realizes she might miss Muneer, Lujayn, and Hanadi driving back along another route. She might as well drive all the way. If they arrive home before her, Hanadi will be home, and Saeedah will lie and say … She doesn’t know what.
In the parking lot of the shopping center, she spots Muneer’s white Chevy rental car. She lets the Volkswagen idle alongside the curb. Should she park at the far end of the lot and tail them back? Or leave, satisfied they are where they said they’d be?
Draeger’s glass door swings open, and Hanadi skips out, a smear of pink ice cream underlining her smile. Muneer takes a napkin from his pocket and carefully wipes Hanadi’s face with its edge.
Certainly they’ll see Saeedah. She’s a beacon of envy. She’s meters from them. But they turn their attention to crossing the parking lot, avoiding a tan Corolla whose driver seems not to see them at first. The car brakes suddenly, and Saeedah’s heart skids in her chest. Hanadi is fine, sandwiched between her father and her aunt, not noticing how they have shielded her. Saeedah smells the rubber of the Corolla’s tires, sees the driver’s stricken face and his shock at having nearly hit a family.
She steps to the curb and balances on its edge on the balls of her feet. Muneer, Lujayn, and Hanadi climb into the Chevy. Its engine growls and it begins to back toward her. It pulls up and passes her, so close she could tap on the window, but she is as invisible to them as a jinni.
GETAWAY
1975
Mama: You stole me. March 25, 1975. My fifth birthday. In broad daylight. You carried me to the car, in my purple giraffe pajamas and suede saddle shoes, through early-spring snow. I put my head on your shoulder. The flakes settled like sifted flour over the hard-packed, dirt-crusted snowbanks. The car’s seat was joltingly cold, the window icy against my fingers. The Bug was noisy, too, backfiring and sputtering. A terrible getaway car.
“This,” you said, and the s went on forever, “is a terrible car. Some people say Beetles are reliable. Hah. A little snow and it falls apart.”
Some people. Were you talking about my father?
I know that you stole me. If we had been moving like normal people do, the car would have been loaded full, the windows obscured by boxes and garbage bags and an overflowing laundry basket. You would have been forced to use the side-view mirrors because you couldn’t see over the crap stacked up in the back. But we weren’t moving, we were running. We had one light blue hard-sided suitcase and matching vanity, as though we were heading off for the weekend.
Once in a while, I’ll have this flash, and an object from the past will be illuminated in my mind. I’ll read about some returning seventies trend—culottes, ponchos, hip-hugger jeans—or I’ll be in a thrift shop and see a wild-eyed baby doll with a plastic head and oblong cloth body, and I’ll remember something we left behind. I’ll wonder, What happened to that oil painting of a crying boy?
You forced me to forget for so many years. I’m trying to remember. In my mind, I see the silhouette of the brick duplex in Cleveland Heights; the screened porch with a patch of mud underneath that never dried out; the rust-blemished, faded-blue swing set in the back; the lilac tree whose blossoms would, a month or so after we left, dangle like bunches of grapes; our down coats and snow boots and hats and scarves and the other odds and ends that might have kept us warm; your dishes and comforters and towels; the tulip-shaped Arabic coffee cups I used as teacups for my teddy bears; my books and Barbies and purpl
e bicycle; the phone my father called me on; our memories of anything that had happened before you turned the key in the ignition that day.
Before I understood what happened, understood that you stole me, before I escaped you, I used to think about riding a purple bicycle. I didn’t know I was having a memory. I thought I was daydreaming. Sitting on the stoop of a suburban Midwest walk-up apartment or the porch of a California one-horse-town bungalow, I’d touch imaginary tassels, flip the nonexistent bell, rest my foot on the back, and push off down the driveway in my mind. I’d peer back at an imaginary brick duplex shaded by maples. The trees’ helicopter pods would twirl, hover, fall.
The car engine turned over for several minutes while you cursed. I put my fingers in my ears, and when the engine caught hold and sputtered to life, you had to repeat yourself several times and lean your whole upper body toward the back of the car to pull my fingers out of my ears as you waited for the car to warm up.
“For your birthday, we’re going to McDonald’s,” you said.
“No friends?”
“This is better.” The snow had stopped, and the windshield wipers squeaked against the salt-streaked glass. McDonald’s was on the way to the freeway. We passed the big yellow M and the brick building and pulled onto the on-ramp.
“There it is! Mama, we passed it.”
“For your birthday, we’re going to Cedar Point. OK?”
You sped up to merge onto the freeway. I tensed my body and gripped the passenger seat in front of me to keep from falling. My stomach ached, like there was a big rock pressing against my insides, and the pain migrated into my muscles, and my arms and thighs began to ache, too. The achiness would stick with me, stuck with me more than anything or anyone except for you. In the years ahead, my stomach would learn to always brace itself against sudden disappointment, suck itself in so far it might have grazed my spine. With you, everything was always changing in an instant. I could never feel settled.
“But I’m hungry.”
“We’ll eat there.”
I napped on the back seat. When I woke up, we were driving along the edge of the empty amusement park parking lot, as though you didn’t see the vast space to our left, the faded lines of the parking spots.
The Bug swerved, though there was nothing to steer clear of, and I nearly fell off the seat.
“We’re here,” you said. “Look.”
I sat up and fingered my cheek, where the seat cushion’s patterned vinyl had left an imprint. I knelt at the window and pressed five fingertips against the glass. In the distance, Lake Erie shook its brown-gray fists against the color-leeched sky. We sputtered to the front gate.
You parked across two parking spaces, turned the ignition off, and got out, letting a frigid draft into the warm bubble of the car.
I put my whole face against the glass, felt the pressure against the bones of my nose and forehead. You walked past the ticket booths and up to a big gray gate. You shook the padlock and grabbed the bars of the gate, like a prisoner trying to break out. You walked back to the car, your mouth a straight line, your face a locked gate. Your hair had frizzed, and you held it behind your head with one hand. You wore jeans and a denim shirt buttoned to your neck, and sneakers that slid along the icy ground. You righted yourself, bent your knees, and held your arms like a surfer, gliding till you hit the car with your hip to stop yourself. You laughed, like you couldn’t help yourself—it was funny, and you were going to laugh.
The laugh made me feel safe, and the memory of that feeling makes me realize how scared I was, how I must have known something was wrong.
You got inside the car, bringing the cold air with you. I crossed my arms tightly for warmth. You chewed your thumbnail for a minute, put both hands on the steering wheel. You didn’t start the car.
“We can’t have the heater, Mama?”
You faced the gates, relaxed and patient. As though you expected someone to come out at any minute and invite us in.
“I guess it’s closed,” you said.
You rested your forehead against the steering wheel, like you were so, so tired.
“I’m hungry, Mama.”
My words animated you. You lifted your head slowly, at the same time reaching into a paper shopping bag on the passenger seat and taking out a plastic baggie of Fritos.
Accepting that bag meant giving up on my birthday. I didn’t want to. I put as much perkiness into my voice as I could. “I know! Let’s go to McDonald’s.”
You put the Fritos back and rummaged around for another baggie. “Grapes?” Like you’d prepared for a picnic.
You put the car into gear and swung back the way we had come. I climbed into the passenger seat, and you didn’t stop me. Tapping the window with four fingers, I mouthed “Goodbye” to the roller coasters’ prehistoric skeletons, the giant eye of the Ferris wheel, and the rocky shores of the lake.
The wooded back road leading from the amusement park was dark with mist, which hung like a curtain dividing where we’d been from where we were going.
“When are we home?” I said. And when you didn’t reply, “When are we home, Mama?” As though the addition of that one word might make you answer.
Somewhere in your silence, I must have heard how alone we were.
“How will Baba know what number to call us?”
“Your father is dead,” you said.
That was the first of many times you told me that lie. You insisted, many years later, that you never told me he was dead. But you did. You tried to kill my memory of him.
Of course, I believed you.
SUITABLE GIRLS
1975–1985
YA‘QUB’S BLINDNESS
From the first Saturday afternoon Muneer hears “This number is no longer in service,” it takes months to understand Hanadi is truly missing. Still, he knows something is different, wronger than usual. Saeedah has ignored his calls for weeks, and whenever he dials, his stomach clenches tighter with each ring. Now, Saeedah and Hanadi aren’t there. His stomach has twisted so tight, he could pull it through a ring. Kneeling in his mother’s sitting room after lunch has been cleared from the floor, with the ceiling fan spinning overhead, he swallows the bile in his throat and calls Saeedah’s sister Randah.
Groggy from her afternoon nap, Randah swears to God she knows of no other number and asks if he’s sure.
“Try it.” His voice leaves his body calmer than he expects.
She calls him back.
“Wallahi, you’re right. I’ll try again tomorrow.”
In a week, the number remains disconnected, and Randah has not heard from Saeedah.
“I’m sure they will call soon.” She sounds uncertain.
“Has she called your parents?”
“No, they’re worried. We’re worried.”
Muneer is holding the handset up for Bandar to hear. They huddle close and strain to listen to the tinny voice. He needs his brother as his witness.
“She’s lying,” Bandar says when the call is done. “How could Saeedah’s father not know where they are? Go see him.”
Muneer slams his fist into a cushion. How does a father lose his daughter as though she were a pair of socks under a bed, a toothbrush left behind in a hotel? No one asks the question out loud, but Muneer knows they think it, too. When his mother rails against Saeedah—“God damn that girl to hell”—and frets about her granddaughter surrounded by unbelievers in an unbelieving country and wonders why Saeedah would not want to come home where Hanadi could be near her father until she is old enough to live with him at age seven, he hears unspoken criticism of his own actions. Everything is in God’s hands, but Muneer did not do enough to bring his daughter home.
Hanadi could be anywhere—anywhere in the States, anywhere in the world. She might be here in Jidda, hidden by her other family behind the mirrored windows of an apartment, though he doubts Aunt Faizah would be that bold.
Soon, his family’s advice descends on him like Jidda rain—always a downpour.
Salem offers to call the minister of the exterior. “I gave him the answers to our mathematics final in high school,” Salem says. “He owes me a favor.”
But what can the minister of the exterior do, says Lujayn. “You’re better off calling the American Embassy. It’s America’s fault a mother and daughter can disappear. Why would a Jidda girl do such a thing?”
Bandar, on thinking longer, advises Muneer to hire an American lawyer and a private investigator. A few days later, he tells Muneer to fly to the States to look for Hanadi himself.
Mama says simply, “Make your family whole.”
So much advice from so many people. It will be a full-time job to find his daughter. It will be expensive. His journalist’s wages at Akhbar al-’Urus, the paper his high school friend Imad started to rival al-Sharqiyah and other bastions of Saudi journalism, are good but not lavish. Like his brothers, he helps support their mother. It was his idea to pay a double share on her rent because he lives with her. His brothers agreed reluctantly, and he has to insist monthly when the rent is due. The building is new, but the gated lift is rickety and smells like stray cats. His sisters sew curtains for the flat on their foot-powered sewing machine. On Fridays, he goes to prayer with his brothers and to the halaqah afterward for cartons of fruits and vegetables. They split up the contents in his mother’s small tiled kitchen, a share for each sibling with a family, a share for Muneer and Mama and Lujayn, the last unmarried sister. His brothers refuse to take his money, insisting on paying for him and the women. Accepting gifts hurts his pride, but he’s not the oldest brother, so his pride can withstand a little pain. He saves his money at the national bank, for a future trip to find his daughter in America.
He starts with the easiest, most logical, most inexpensive step. He calls Fareed and asks to visit on a Thursday evening.
“Of course, my son, you’re always welcome,” Fareed says, as though nothing unusual has happened, as though a hole has not been torn in their family and two people fallen through it. On the phone, he sounds like a radio announcer: in control of his words, on top of the story.
