by Eman Quotah
In Aspiration, a landscaper named Chris Tanaka steals her heart.
The town is home to a grocery store, a department store, an army surplus store, three bars, a Greek pizza place, a drugstore, two Mexican restaurants, Jimmy’s Nursery, and a vacant elementary school. Aspiration enjoys 269 sunny days a year, according to a sign outside town. It has one radio station and no banks, but that doesn’t matter to Lara, because she keeps her savings in cash in an envelope in her sewing hamper.
In Aspiration, she realizes it isn’t her black hair and brown skin that has invited men and women to speak Spanish to her at city bus stops and in the aisles of grocery stores and in doctors’ waiting rooms, but also the way she rolls her Rs. Redondo, Aspiration, RC Cola. She used to resist the identification, but here she goes with it, not letting the fact that she doesn’t speak Spanish impede her. She nods yes, as though she understands. This gesture of acquiescence gets her in trouble one time, when a woman thinks Lara has agreed to bum her a smoke. Lara sticks her hands in her pockets and takes them out, empty. Shakes them. The woman angrily walks off.
Sometimes white men in Aspiration and nearby towns whistle at Lara, and she ignores them. Sometimes they ask if she’s a Native American. Sometimes they catcall when she is walking to or from the bus stop alone on her way to work and call her “mi corazon” and chuckle and say, “Talk to me, beautiful. No habla Englais?”
She never tells Jimmy, the nursery’s owner, about the idiots at the bus stop. He must explain to customers and delivery people ten times a day that he is Indian-from-India.
He looked at her funny when she asked for the job and first told him her name.
“You look Indian, like me. I guess Lara could be Indian.”
His brother teaches at San Francisco State, and Jimmy could, too, he says—he has a PhD in linguistics—but he prefers to be in the middle of nowhere with dirt under his nails.
“I much prefer plants to people, as you can see.”
She never finds out if his name is adapted to English, shortened.
Letting people come to their own conclusions, rightly or wrongly, is the best way to hide. Whether or not she’s Indian doesn’t entirely matter; she senses Jimmy hires her because of some sort of affinity he feels.
Six months pass quickly, a long time for her at any job. Jimmy’s a kind boss. He lets her leave for fifteen minutes in the middle of her shift to pick Emma up from the school bus stop, and he doesn’t mind if Emma roams the rows of indoor and outdoor plants like a shop cat. He lets Lara take home finjan-size pots of cacti with delicate spikes and six-packs of waxy begonias for her yard.
“I thought you hated plants,” Emma says one day while Lara lets her water a row of Jimmy’s herbs with a long wand-like hose. Lara breathes in mint, sage, cilantro, basil. Citronella tries to crowd out the other scents. She’s surprised Emma remembers such a small detail from five years ago. It had been true that Lara had no appreciation for greenery. It had been true that she didn’t understand why W cared for so many houseplants in Toledo.
In this desert world, different than the one Lara grew up in, she craves the tiniest, crankiest bit of green, of life.
EVERYTHING
Once a month, while Emma is at school the next town over, Lara calls her parents from the phone booth on the corner of Main. Rolls of quarters weigh down her purse, and the booth heats up like the inside of a greenhouse. She’d stay cooler using the pay phone tucked inside the grocery, but this one is more private. These phone calls to her parents are less frequent than her haircuts and often a waste of money. Nothing said. She can’t let them know where she is, can’t trust them with her secrets.
The pattern has persisted for years: For months she won’t call them. One morning, without fail, she wakes up barely able to breathe, needing their voices if she is to go on.
Today was one of those mornings. Emma didn’t want to go to school. She refused to get up from the floor in front of the television after Lara switched it off. Minutes later, she put on her shoes and backpack and walked out of the house in the opposite direction from school.
“I’m running away!” She slapped her backpack as she walked. “I’ve got clothes in here.”
Lara followed her down the sidewalk. She glanced over her shoulder. Behind them a few kids were gathering at the bus stop. She couldn’t make a scene. At times when she is losing control, the words accumulate in her brain in Arabic, but she can’t speak them out loud. In the process of translating her anger, something gets lost. Maybe that’s a good thing. In English, she sounds more reasonable than she feels.
“Come back. Emma.”
Emma stopped. “No.”
“Go to school please.”
“Never.”
“They’ll take you from me if you don’t go. They punish the parents when children don’t go to school.”
“I don’t care.”
“Come on. Please, habibti.” She let herself say that one word in Arabic; the likelihood any of the bus stop kids would recognize the language was slim.
And it worked.
Whenever Emma melts down, Lara has to try a different method of calming her. Promises of ice cream, television, a new Barbie they can’t afford. Nothing works twice. This morning, a simple endearment.
They held hands walking to the bus stop, and they were a block short when the bus slammed its doors shut and rumbled off. They ran-walked back to their car, Emma crying the whole way. Late again.
The hanging phone book knocks against Lara’s knees. Black blotches of chewing gum mar the metal writing surface. The phone booth is a space where she can speak Arabic safely, but she feels exposed speaking whole sentences of it. She wonders if anyone looking in through the plexiglass could lip-read and realize she’s not speaking English.
She doesn’t need to say her name. They recognize her voice.
Talk of God flows from her mother’s mouth. God protect you, God assist you, God keep you and your girl.
Mama says, “Saeedah. Darling. Where are you?”
Habibti her mother has called her.
“We’re here.” She wishes those words were enough.
Baba asks more insidious questions. About the weather. About what they do on the weekends. Trying to trip her up, solve the puzzle. She never tells him about the man looking for her.
“Thank God, we’re fine.” Her hand is sweaty on the handset. Her mother rattles on like a child learning to talk, infatuated with the sound of its own voice. Getting off the phone is like cracking ice cubes out of a tray. It takes three or four tries to find an opening to hang up.
Chris strides by, a bag of groceries under one arm. She’s learned enough in her ten years in America to look for a ring.
Chris Tanaka is a regular at the nursery. He comes most often for mulch, loading the bags into a black Chevy pickup. He tells Lara about a customer of his who looks like Jimmy Stewart.
“It’s not him, of course.”
“Who’s Jimmy Stewart?”
“Don’t you watch TV at Christmastime? It’s a Wonderful Life?”
Lara rings up the mulch. No reason to explain why she’s never watched a classic Christmas movie. After Chris leaves, the shop interior smells like his aftershave. She rushes outside to escape the scent, pretending, for Jimmy’s sake, that she’s worried about having left Emma alone for too long.
Emma has opened a bag of gravel and is leaving rocks in a trail along the aisles of plants.
“I’m being Hansel and Gretel,” she says.
Lara doesn’t know what that is.
When Chris comes back, he says, “When are you going to let me take you out?”
She doesn’t have a babysitter. She’s never been on a date.
“Never?” His smile is somehow both dazzling and shy.
“I’ll tell him to leave you alone,” Jimmy says after Chris leaves. “Next time he comes round.”
Jimmy reminds Lara sometimes of her father, the way he has made the nursery his kingdom, as the paper i
s for Baba. His crown is his thick black hair, barely graying despite his age, maybe five years younger than her father.
“You don’t have to say anything,” she says. “I can handle him.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Jimmy says.
Jimmy knows what he’s talking about. The next time she sees Chris it’s on Main Street again, and he’s walking toward the drugstore. His hair curls against his shoulders and his clean-shaven face reminds her of velvet. He sees her and she is overcome by a feeling of want. She’s never been surer of anything.
“Everything OK?” he says.
She straightens her spine and her lips, offering him an almost-smile. She and Emma have been arguing about sleepovers. Emma has to explain this tradition to her; it is not something Lara grew up with. And Emma won’t take no for an answer.
Lara asks Chris what he thinks. Emma rolls her eyes, pulls one foot out of its flip-flop, and drags her toes back and forth along the sidewalk.
“Put your shoe back on,” Lara says.
“I can’t quite place your accent,” Chris says.
“We’re from Ohio,” Emma says. Exactly what Lara has told her to say.
Chris’s laugh pulls Lara closer to him. “Well, OK,” he says. “Let her go to the sleepover.”
Emma steps so close to him her fingers nearly touch his arm. “Listen to Chris, Mommy,” she says.
It’s like they’re both taking sides with him, when they barely know him.
She wishes they hadn’t left the hippies, who would have agreed to watch Emma for an evening. They would have been pleased to hear Lara was going on a date, would have said, “That’s great,” as though she’d done something worthy of congratulations. Who else can she ask but Jimmy? She lies and says she’s going out with “girlfriends.”
“No problem,” Jimmy says.
His wife, Sima, is a pharmacist with henna on her nails. The orange dye has faded from her palms, but Lara knows it must have been there a few weeks ago. She has memories of afternoons with her mother and sisters, sitting on the carpet grasping thick, cool handfuls of henna and scraping it off later, after it had dried. She’d hated the smell, but today she feels an unexpected nostalgia. Jimmy and Sima’s house smells like onions in the pan and something else Lara can’t place. Coming out of the kitchen, Sima asks Emma if she’s hungry.
“Not really.”
“She could stay home alone, but I don’t like the idea of it,” Lara says. “At night.”
“I could have slept over at Jennifer’s. But you wouldn’t let me.”
“Our children are grown,” Jimmy says. “We’ll let her watch something on TV.”
“We’ll play UNO,” Sima says. “Or do you want Scrabble?”
“I guess,” Emma says.
Lara meets Chris at a roadside bar near town. When he kisses her on the cheek, the smell of that aftershave defeats the beery, smoky atmosphere and any hope she has harbored of not wanting him. It’s the first time she’s ever left Emma, outside of school or work hours, and the fear of what might happen while she’s gone sits on her shoulder whispering into her ear. It’s always there, the fear, urging her to move on rather than be found. But it’s louder tonight, bolder, than it has been in at least six months. She’s never had anyone she trusted to watch her daughter, never left Emma at other kids’ houses. Her fingers drum against the menu; Chris thinks she’s nervous about the date. She can tell by the way he asks what she wants and offers her a beer.
“I don’t drink,” she says, and regrets it. She’s never met an American who didn’t drink.
“You a Mormon or a Lutheran?” Chris says.
“I don’t think so.”
“I like your sense of humor. I’ll drink for both of us.”
They order wings that burn her fingertips, and he says how impressed he is with a woman willing to eat with her fingers.
Should she worry that she’s revealed something, about who she is and where she’s from? She picks up a fork and knife, wanting to prove she knows how to use them.
For the first time in her life, here is someone she wishes she could tell everything.
They kiss outside in the milky moonlight, serenaded by the sound of cars crunching through the parking lot gravel. She wishes she could tell him everything—she’s not ashamed of any of it—but she has seen parked across the lot a man wearing mirrored sunglasses, reading a paper. It’s like something out of a detective show. A realization hits her: it can’t be a coincidence that she called her parents a few days ago and here he is. Does it always happen that way? She’d thought the men were sent by Muneer.
She tells Chris she’s not ready for the night to end and they go inside. She leaves him at the bar, saying she needs to use the ladies’ room. Her nerves are elastic pulled tight, by her need for him on the one side, by her fear of losing her daughter on the other. If her parents and Muneer find Emma, they’ll want her back in Jidda. And that will mean Lara will have to go, too.
She’s tasted too much freedom to go back to Jidda, or to share her daughter with Muneer again.
She walks out the back door, drives home, packs the car. She drives to Jimmy’s praying the whole way that the man hasn’t arrived there first, vowing to do a better job of disappearing.
FOUND
1987
APPARITION
When Jameel calls to say he’s seen Hanadi in Cleveland, Muneer is in the Akhbar al-’Urus newsroom. He grips the phone uncomfortably between his neck and shoulder, to keep his hands free, though he’s not taking notes on this call and questions evaporate from his brain.
He concentrates his thoughts into the front of his forehead, and the din of the newsroom recedes. As Jameel relates how he saw Hanadi sitting shotgun in a rust-colored Corolla—how he saw a girl he’s certain is Hanadi—Muneer’s heart stops. His vision falters. He can’t handle the stress of uncertainty, but he finds himself wanting to believe.
“Black hair with dyed-blond streaks. A nose with a bump like a knuckle. That’s your nose.” Jameel recites the details and analysis as though reading from a journal. She wore a black T-shirt. The fingernails that came up to brush the hair behind her ears were painted black. Jameel says Hanadi hovered in his vision as the cars moved in tandem for long enough for him to paint her face in his mind before the Corolla sped up and she was gone.
“Are you sure? She was in a moving car. You haven’t seen her in sixteen, seventeen years.” In a way, Jameel has never seen her because when he did, she was a baby Muneer transferred into his arms.
She is seventeen, old enough to drive in the States, nearly old enough for college. A different child than she was the last time either of them saw her.
Jameel swears to God it was Hanadi. “I wouldn’t call you if I wasn’t sure. I know the mother”—he doesn’t say Saeedah’s name throughout this whole conversation—“she was driving. And the girl in the passenger seat was your daughter. I told you. She had your face.”
Jameel admits he hesitated. It was a strain at first to see who drove the other car but he kept looking till he could be sure. His wife, Diane, was at their rented Chrysler’s wheel, they were en route from Hopkins Airport to his mother-in-law’s duplex, and he was jet-lagged. His eyes felt like someone had poured sand into them. He hadn’t gotten any rest so far this summer.
Muneer already knew the story: To everyone’s chagrin—except her younger sister’s—Jameel’s fifteen-year-old, Summer, had flunked one of her religion exams at the end of the school year in Jidda. Which meant she’d needed to retake it and pass to avoid repeating tenth grade. Diane had refused to stay while their daughter studied. She’d gotten on a flight back to the United States with Lulu, the twelve-year-old, leaving Jameel to deal with Summer.
Jameel hadn’t had to tell Muneer why. It was an unspoken agreement between Diane and Jameel: school months in his country, summers in hers. Diane never stayed in Jidda longer than she had to. Muneer had teased her about it once, years ago.
“I miss my mother,” she�
�d said. “You should understand that.”
He’d swallowed the words he wanted to say to her. How she had her daughters, and he …
Muneer brings the phone close to his lips. “You’re sure it was her?”
He would have preferred Jameel not call him at work—in the past, he’s asked people to relay messages through his brother Bandar. But here is better than home. He doesn’t want Lamees to know about this tip until it’s more certain. She’s not back at the newsroom yet, after the latest baby’s birth.
“One hundred percent,” Jameel says. At the time, he rubbed his eyes, he says. Maybe his grogginess had made him see something that didn’t exist. Maybe Hanadi wasn’t in that car.
But in case, Jameel sat bolt upright and peered around the driver’s seat. And wouldn’t you know, at the stoplight, they came upon the Corolla again.
“We don’t believe in coincidence, right?” Jameel says. “God put me on that road at that time to find her.”
Muneer fishes in his pockets and scans his desk for a misbahah but comes up empty. “Subhan Allah,” he says out loud. Like Jameel, he believes in messages from God, and clearly, God is telling him something.
“Tell me the rest. Where did the car go?”
Jameel says the Corolla zipped ahead, merging into the left-turn lane. He told Diane, “Follow that car,” like he was in a cop show, but Diane drove along like she hadn’t heard him. Maybe she hadn’t. He pulled himself forward with his hands on her headrest. “That car, the orangey-red one. Follow it.”
“She said, ‘What the fudge—Jameel, you’re going to make me crash,’” Jameel tells Muneer.
“Thank God you’re fine,” Muneer says.
“The girls asked what the heck we were doing. I screamed at Diane, ‘Turn left!’”
Jameel thought for sure the girl and the car had disappeared. But miraculously, Diane made the left turn, and up ahead was the Corolla.
