by Eman Quotah
He hears dissembling in her voice, and over-enunciation, as she says, “OK, see you tonight, Jenny.”
She heard the phone pick up, and she’s covering up. She was speaking to some sort of a John, not a Jenny, he thinks.
The dial tone sounds in his ear. He dials the phone card number and calls Lamees. She’s surprised to hear his voice. He imagines she’s eating late supper with her parents, or watching the news, though she doesn’t say. She’s waiting for him to give her some news.
“Alhamdulillah,” he says. “She’s living in Shaker Heights. I spoke to her.”
“Bring her home,” Lamees says.
The next day, Friday, Muneer racks up a dozen hours watching CNN. The jumbo jet does not move. Its doors remain sealed closed, and the hijackers’ requests remain unrequited. Muneer has nothing else to do. He can’t leave the house, because he might miss Hanadi’s call. Jameel takes breaks to run errands, chauffeur his daughters to camp and the mall, but he doesn’t go far or leave Muneer alone for long.
Muneer holds Summer’s secret in his palm. She barely interacts with him, but he senses she’s not wary of him. She thinks she fooled him, or she thinks someone else picked up the phone. The secret seems harmless enough to Muneer. Don’t all American girls talk to boys? But he doesn’t know how Jameel would view the situation. She is his Saudi daughter.
Anyway, she can’t speak to the boy today because her parents shoo her from the phone when she tries to pick it up. The line must be left open for Hanadi.
“What if she doesn’t call?” Muneer says at dinner that night.
“La samah Allah,” Jameel says. May God not allow it.
“Go back to the house,” Diane says.
The girls are reading fantasy novels at the table, pizza limp in their hands, while the grownups eat roast chicken. Muneer wishes he were home eating rice and lamb on the floor with Lamees, his mother, and his boys. Hanadi, Hanadi. His mind can’t fit her into the scene.
After dinner Diane takes the girls to the movies and Muneer and Jameel take a break from CNN to watch a Clint Eastwood western on cable.
At nine o’clock, Diane comes back with Lulu. Summer is spending the night at Jenny’s.
“She doesn’t have her toothbrush or anything,” Jameel says.
“Her teeth will be fine,” Diane says.
“Why do they need to sleep over?” Muneer says.
“There’s not much sleeping that goes on,” Diane says. “They push the boundaries, stay up till dawn, in the safety of someone’s home.”
“It’s not fair I have to stay home,” Lulu says.
“Fair, shmair,” says her father. “You’ll live.”
Muneer wakes up at the break of dawn. The pullout couch’s thin mattress has been poking him in the spine. The basement is cold and moist even in summer, the dehumidifier noisy, the blanket Diane gave him no thicker or warmer than a sheet. Since he’s wide awake, he might as well wash up and pray. With his hands folded over his stomach, he recites Surat An-Nas: Say: I seek refuge in the lord of humankind. The king of humankind. The god of humankind. From the evil of the slinking whisperer. After turning his head right and left to say salaam, he cups his hands before his face and asks God for guidance.
Jameel’s family has not woken up. “Go back to the house,” Diane said last night.
Outside the sky hovers between dark and light. Muneer considers going back to bed or making coffee. Instead, he retrieves the cash and airline ticket from his suitcase. He finds car keys hanging on a hook near the front door, which he opens slowly and shuts as quietly as he can.
As he starts up the Chrysler, he remembers frigid mornings waiting for the VW to warm up. And Saeedah, pregnant with their daughter and already far from him. In this warmer weather, no need to wait.
He remembers exactly how to reach the house where Hanadi lives. The trip takes twelve minutes. The driveway is empty. A deep crack runs up one side of it, and green weeds have filled in the blank. The garage doors are closed. He waits. At eight forty-five, the garage doors slide noisily up, and the Corolla backs down the driveway, listing to one side as it drives along the crack. Two heads are visible in the front seats.
He follows the car to University Circle, careful to stay a little ways behind. It is early on Saturday, little traffic on the road. The sun burns in a hazy, no-color sky.
The Toyota pulls into the nearly empty art institute parking lot. Muneer parallel parks on the street. Hanadi gets out of the Toyota. She wears black jeans, a black T-shirt, ugly black lace-up shoes.
The woman in the car, is she Saeedah?
A jolt of anger bursts through his arms, and he tightens his grip on the steering wheel. He recites Surat An-Nas again to calm himself.
Hanadi slings her backpack on one shoulder and trudges inside, hunched over as though it were raining.
He watches the glass doors close behind his daughter and waits for the Toyota to leave.
He could leave the car and follow her, but it seems like a creepy, rather than fatherly, thing to do.
She said she would call, and she didn’t. What does that mean? He lays his head on the steering wheel in weariness, and it accidentally honks. He startles and bumps his head on the ceiling of the car. No one else is on the street or sidewalk to hear.
After about an hour, she comes out, eating potato chips from a small bag. She stands to the side of the doorway, waiting for a ride, perhaps.
He gets out of the car and walks across the parking lot toward her. She recognizes him from the other day. He doesn’t like the look on her face, a panic in her eyes like a child in trouble. Why can’t this reunion he’s longed for be joyful?
This is not their reunion, though, he reminds himself. That was two days ago. Coming back to her is harder than he expected. Like learning a new language. You can’t flip a switch in your brain and understand English or Swedish or Bengali or Swahili.
“I said I’d call you,” she says, defensively, her arms across her chest, chip bag crumpled and mostly hidden in one hand.
“I have to go back to Jidda soon,” he says. But that is not the reason it hurt that she hadn’t called.
She tosses her chip bag toward a trash can and misses. “I knew it. I knew Mom was lying. I knew you weren’t dead.”
The faint sound of geese quacking comes to them from the Museum of Art lagoon. Had she known, or hoped? Either way, the idea that Saeedah could not cover the truth bolsters him. He imagines if his own father came back from the dead, how he would feel. He would be thanking God for blessing him with a miracle.
He picks up the crumpled bag, squeezes it in his fist, and throws it in the bin. The first time in many years that he’s cleaned up after her.
“Here I am,” he says. “Alive.”
Hanadi seems to shake her head, but really, her whole body is trembling. He wants to hold her tight, carry her backpack for her.
A two-door Pontiac pulls up. Hanadi moves to hop in, head bent to avoid looking at him.
“I’ll take you wherever you’re going,” Muneer says.
“My boss will kill me if I’m late.” She’s speaking into the open door of the car and he has to strain his ears to hear her.
“I drive fast,” he says. “Faster than Americans.”
“It’s a long drive,” she says. “I don’t know you.”
“I’m your father.”
She closes the car door. He comes closer and bends a little, like he would have done to talk to her when she was little, but he doesn’t have to bend far.
An American girl in a white polo shirt and khakis gets out of the car, leaving it idling.
“Hannah, what’re you doing? We’re gonna be late.”
“I’m going to ride with him,” she says. “I’ll see you there.”
He puts his hand out to shake the American girl’s hand. She has green eyes and freckles, feathered sand-colored hair.
“Hello. I’m Hanadi’s father.”
Hanadi’s mouth twists, and she see
ms to be biting her own tongue to keep the words inside. He keeps himself from telling her not to do that. She relaxes her mouth and breathes loudly, a swimmer coming up for air.
The American girl holds her car key between two fingers, like a dagger. Her face is doubtful.
“Nice to meet you?” She shakes Muneer’s hand, but doesn’t squeeze back, and turns her head toward Hanadi. “I thought you said your father … I mean, you probably shouldn’t—” As though suddenly remembering he’s standing there, she says to Muneer, “I’m sorry, sir. I’m sure you’re not some kind of murderer.”
Hanadi does a half shrug, rolls her shoulders forward. Muneer is surprised at how attuned he is to the two girls’ movements, the way he pays attention to his sons’ pouts and stomps, their smiles and quietudes, the tiniest signals they give of distress or contentment.
The American girl stands with one hip out, rolls her eyes at Hanadi. “So, like, I came over here to pick you up for no reason?”
“Buy you a Coke?” Hanadi seems ready to hug her friend, but instead she stuffs her hands into her pockets.
“Never mind,” the friend says. “See you there.” She stands straighter, puts her keys in her pocket, takes them out again as she gets into her car.
On the drive, he has so much to say that there is nothing to say. Hannah—she asks him to call her that—directs him to drive north, through Little Italy, out of the city, farther than he expects, though she warned him it would be a long drive. She turns on the radio, as though they were cruising together in their own family car, and expertly tunes it to something loud and thrashy, adjusting the balance for maximum thump. The whole routine involves her for a minute or two.
“Could you turn it down?” he says.
She turns the music off, and the silence is worse than the noise was. He keeps waiting for words to come out of his mouth, but he feels like the Prophet Zakariya, ordered by God not to speak for three nights.
Hannah punches the radio back on and tunes it to classical. She doesn’t adjust the volume. Chords swell between them.
Twenty minutes in, at a stoplight, he forces words out.
“What do you want to know?” he says.
“I didn’t ask you to come here. I mean, I’m glad you came, I think. But I don’t want anything from you.”
She speaks above something that sounds like Beethoven, but he can’t be sure. Mozart, that’s the other one. Jameel would know, but Muneer has never known too much about European composers. The drama of swelling violins fits.
“You’re my daughter.”
“I don’t know you. You’re not going to try to take me with you or something? I’m tired of moving. I want to stay here.”
It puzzles him that she wants to stay with the mother who lied to her, dragged her from place to place, robbed her of everything. The envelope and the ticket are in the glove box, but he truly doesn’t know the answer to her question. He’d thought he would find her when she was little. She’s nearly grown, and he hasn’t come up with a different plan than to bring her home. What will she do in Jidda? Study at the American school?
What will her mother do to keep her here?
“What should I do?” he says. Words that have been stuck in his throat for years tumble out like a confession, as though he were the one who’d done something wrong. “Your mother took you from me. She made up a story that I was dead. She tricked you.”
“Stop the fucking car. Pull over.”
“Watch your mouth,” he says, and immediately regrets it.
“I will jump out of this car and walk home.”
He pulls into a strip mall parking lot. “You’re going to be late.”
“Don’t talk about my mother. You don’t know anything about us.”
He begins to swear in Arabic, and he can’t stop the torrent coming from his mouth. “God take her, God damn her, God forgive me.”
Tears coat her cheeks in a sheet. “Stop yelling at me. I don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the years we were apart.”
“Why now? Why did you come back now?”
“I prayed to God to bring us together. I looked for you. Your grandparents looked for you.”
There’s no box of tissues in the car to hand her. No way to change this series of events that God wrote for them. But God brought them back together, and Muneer has to be thankful for that.
He asks if she wants him to drive her the rest of the way or find her a taxi.
“Drive,” she says.
He thinks of her mother and the fateful drive that led to their marriage.
“I’ll understand if you don’t want to see me again.” Though he wouldn’t understand. He would truly go blind with sadness this time. After seeing her, nothing in life will be enough without her. Not his wife and sons. Not the paper. He’s sure of that. He puts the car in gear, backs up. “I hope you’ll let me stay in touch.”
“The store manager’s gonna dock my pay,” she says.
He lets her out at a convenience store that sits alone on an island of concrete. He has a hundred-dollar bill in his wallet, and he tries to hand it to her. She slams the door behind her without saying goodbye or taking the money. As she walks from the car, she pulls a polo shirt out of her backpack and pulls it over her T-shirt, shifting the bag from one arm to the other so she doesn’t have to set it down or stop.
She is everything he sees until the sliding doors close behind her. His vision expands, and he sees the haze has lifted and the sky transformed into a bright ocean blue that reminds him of home. There’s a rainbow of spilled motor oil on the asphalt ahead of him. He pulls ahead, repeating God’s name over and over: Allahallahallahallah.
He’s left without her again.
WHERE DO WE GO
Muneer chooses prayer as his coping mechanism. He unrolls one of the prayer rugs Jameel never uses and spreads it in a corner of the basement. Lulu’s on the sofa. She seems to migrate from space to space in the house, even though she has her own bedroom. Her headphones are clamped on, her eyes closed.
The air smells like dryer lint.
After he prays, he sits for a while, hands before his face but no request for God on his lips.
Footsteps come down the stairs.
“Oh,” Diane says. She’s carrying a basket of dirty laundry. When she discerns he’s done with his prayer, she apologizes. “I didn’t know you were praying down here.”
“I saw her again.”
Diane’s eyes flit to Lulu. “That’s wonderful.”
“I don’t think she wants to see me.”
“That can’t be true.”
“It’s been too long.”
“We’ll help you figure this out. We’ll find you a lawyer.”
She puts the basket down and says, “Lulu.”
Lulu moves her head to the music, seemingly unaware of the adults. Her mom taps her legs. The girl brings her knees up so the mother can sit.
Muneer stands and begins to roll up the prayer rug. Diane’s hands are flat on her thighs, as though she were kneeling in Muslim prayer, paying her respects to Abraham. But she’s Christian. He doesn’t know how or if she prays.
“I need you to help me convince Meel of something,” she says. “I think Summer and I should stay here when he takes Lulu back to school.”
“You told him that?”
“I will.”
Summer has two years left of high school, Diane says. She isn’t being prepared for college well enough by her school in Saudi. Diane has done the legwork. She has school brochures hidden in her nightstand. She talks about the SATs and college admissions. She says the people at the private school love Summer, and she could learn French there.
“When did you take her there?”
“Last summer.”
“When she wasn’t flunking yet.”
Diane starts folding a T-shirt, returns it to the basket. “These are dirty. I’ve got to throw them in the washer.” She lays her hands back on
her thighs. “I don’t know where to go from here, Muneer. It’s not a new problem. The school in Saudi is OK for Lulu, but Summer won’t learn anything if she goes back. Your kids aren’t old enough yet, but you’ll see. Can’t you talk to him?”
He hopes she can’t see how the empty chasm of lost years has opened up in his chest. Other people can forget Fouad was not his first child, but he never does.
“I don’t think Jameel will listen to me,” he says. The words come out lullaby-quiet, and he realizes he’s holding the cylinder of prayer rug in his arms as gently as an infant. “I’m not the one to tell him not to keep his babies close to him for as long as he can.”
Diane squeezes Lulu’s ankle, leans over, gives the girl a hug that isn’t returned, rises from the couch, and steps toward Muneer.
“I’m sorry.” She carefully removes the rug from his grasp. “You should go tell Meel you saw Hanadi. We want the best for you, and for her.”
The next day, Muneer looks up the convenience store in the Yellow Pages and dials the number on the basement telephone. He asks for Hannah. She’s not there, but the voice on the line sounds young and female.
“Are you the one who drives her to work?” he asks.
“Who’s this?”
“You saw me yesterday. Her father.”
“She didn’t show up today.”
“You didn’t drive her?”
“I’m sorry, sir. My boss is calling me.”
He replaces the handset on the phone and lies on the couch, stiff as a board. He feels old. Through the windows up near the ceiling he hears rain. The basement mildew stokes an itch in his eyes and throat. Diane and Jameel are at the mall with the girls. When they come home, they’re carrying big paper bags full of clothes for Lulu and Summer, a bread maker some relative in Jidda asked for, and a red Michael Jackson jacket with many, many zippers for one of Jameel’s nephews.
Muneer wonders if Diane has talked to Jameel.
