by Eman Quotah
She tries to put herself in her grandfather’s place. If she were on her deathbed, who would she want there?
“I don’t know if I can get a ticket,” Hannah’s mother says. “I have to go to Washington first, to the consulate, for a temporary passport.”
Hannah had hoped her mother would easily say no. She’d asked to please Randah.
Her mother’s response sets her ears buzzing. Why, after more than forty years, does her mother want to go home? It’s a betrayal. If Sadie goes back, why did Hannah go through everything she went through as a child?
“Do you want me to come?” Sadie says.
Hamza pours tea into glasses.
“OK, Mama, come.” She doesn’t mean it, but she doesn’t want to be the person she is, the person who wants to say no, who wants to keep Sadie from seeing her own father.
PASSPORT
Hannah waits to meet her mother outside a café in Foggy Bottom, blocks from the Washington, DC, consulate, where her mother has gone to renew her Saudi passport. She and Hannah are US citizens, but they never gave up their Saudi citizenship.
Hannah is of two minds about waiting outside the café. Her skin is warmed by the late autumn sun, her bones are chilled by a brisk breeze. She’d rather wait outside though, not be trapped indoors for their first interaction. Washington is ten degrees warmer, at least, than Cambridge, and she’s dressed too warmly. She removes her jacket and hangs it over one elbow.
She has been mentally preparing for this reunion ever since they got off the phone, and the result is a raging headache, constant acid reflux though she eats very little, and ragged nails bitten in private.
Sadie is with a man, a tall redhead. Hannah had worried she might not recognize her own mother. But age hasn’t changed Sadie that much. Gray hair doesn’t change who you are.
“Good to finally meet you,” the man says.
Finally, as though they are a normal family. Hannah wonders what he knows. Her mother leans in to kiss her, and Hannah steps back.
“Were you able to get the passport?”
“They told her to come back tomorrow,” the man says. His name is Glenn.
“I’m leaving tonight,” Hannah says. She can recognize the tourists passing by their look of glazed wonderment. You can see things from far away in this city. The Washington Monument. The Capitol. Virginia.
There’s time to kill before Hannah leaves. They buy cups of coffee and walk to the Potomac, up along the trail to Georgetown, up a hill to the chichi shops. They’re not talking much. The wind has died down and Hannah starts to feel hot in her wool sweater. Sadie mentions church and Hannah realizes she had forgotten the last time she saw her mother, in the airport, how Hannah convinced Hamza they shouldn’t go to the baptism. They turned around and got on the next flight. It had to be true love for him to listen when she asked for crazy things like that.
Hannah’s a more experienced mother now. But she doesn’t understand her own mother better.
Sadie goes searching for a bathroom, and instead of following her into the mall, Glenn and Hannah stand at Wisconsin and M, people watching. It’s mostly tourists here, a few students and businesspeople.
“Can you tell where people are from by looking at them?” she asks Glenn.
“Wisconsin,” he says, laughing, pointing at a middle-aged man and woman in University of Wisconsin sweatshirts.
“Too easy.”
“Iran,” he says, nodding at a group of well-dressed twenty-somethings speaking in a language other than English.
She catches a few words of Arabic. “No, pretty sure they’re Gulfies,” she says.
“Ah, you know the nuances better than I do.”
“She never told people where we were from, before. It’s something that she told you.”
“I wish I could go with her to see her father. But she says no, it would be too hard to get a visa, and too hard to introduce me when she hasn’t seen people for so long.”
It’s weird to hear this confession. He’s in his fifties or sixties, probably. She is not used to people older than she is, her parents’ age, speaking with longing.
Sadie comes back, holding a new cup of coffee. She’s smiling, happy to see them talking.
“We’re guessing where people are from,” Hannah says. “No one could ever guess where we were from.”
Sadie’s face snaps into the serious expression Hannah remembers from her childhood. How she rarely smiled—because she was afraid of getting caught? Hannah doesn’t care why things were the way they were, though. What matters to her is years of not knowing who she was.
Sadie doesn’t want to talk about it. Hannah can tell by the way she flips her hair back, indignant that her daughter would bring up such long-ago history.
It’s not anything in particular her mother does that afternoon, or says. But Hannah knows, after years of therapy, that she is not to blame for her mother’s mistakes. That’s what she wishes she could explain. How she was affected by the choices Sadie made decades ago, the years of brainwashing, the wrong memories. She remembers grieving for a dead father. She did that. It’s a true memory. But he was not dead. It was grief she didn’t have to experience.
“She shouldn’t come,” Hannah says, keeping her eyes on Glenn. “If she goes, I’ll have to explain to my dad that she’s there. I don’t want to lie to him. I won’t. I’ll have to tell him I saw her. If she doesn’t go, he won’t ask, and I won’t have to lie. I’m done lying. I don’t know what she’s told you about my childhood.”
Is it her place to tell him? She doesn’t have to contemplate the question, though, because he knows.
“I’m sure she had a good reason. I’m sure she felt she had no other choice. You were safe with her.”
With someone else, she might have let it slide. But he belongs to her mother, and she doesn’t want Sadie to think she is forgiven.
“No. There’s no good reason. You don’t understand. I can never trust anyone because of her.” She knows she sounds overwrought.
Glenn’s listening though. “Maybe your mother needs to hear that from you.”
“She knows. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Her mother has stepped away, which seems like a mature, maybe even Christian, thing to do. Maybe Glenn has been a good influence. He’s a nice guy, funny. He holds doors, Hannah’s noticed, for men and women. He holds her mother’s hand. He’s so nice it makes her rethink her views on Sadie. Why would he like Sadie—love her—if there weren’t something redeeming about her?
“Tell her not to come. Convince her. I don’t care what reason you use. You can tell her I don’t want her to come.”
“You reached out to her.”
He’s angry on her mother’s behalf, she can tell. He rolls his eyes, like a twelve-year-old who doesn’t get his way, and reaches into his back pocket for his wallet. She’s about to protest—why on earth would he think it’s appropriate for him to give her money?
What he takes out is not a bill. It’s a faded wallet photo of a little girl with missing front teeth. And another photo, folded gracelessly because it’s too big for a wallet. A family portrait of a thirtyish woman who looks like the girl, with a handsome man and two towheaded boys.
“That’s Jill, my daughter.”
He puts the photo in Hannah’s hand. She refuses to hold it, and it lands on the sidewalk. She’s not that petty, she tells herself, and she picks it up, smooths it out, pretends dropping it was a mistake.
“Beautiful family,” she says.
Sadie returns, fingers on her cross. “Oh, it’s Jill,” she says.
Hannah feels a stab of jealousy.
She wants to be alone. She’s walked down to the canal before, and she likes how hidden it feels, like you’re going back to a time when no one you know was alive. But Glenn and her mom want her to walk to Key Bridge with them so they can set foot, “for a minute,” Glenn says, in Virginia. He was born there, moved to Ohio when he was a baby.
There’s a ho
tel at the end of the bridge. She can catch a taxi there.
They walk past the boutiques and restaurants of M Street, the Dean & DeLuca, a Middle Eastern restaurant, a burrito place.
“Don’t come, Mom,” Hannah says. “What if your dad dies and your brothers won’t let you leave? What if they find out about your cross?”
“Why would they keep me there? I’m old. It’s not like I’m young and they’d want to marry me off, or something.” She laughs and glances at Glenn. “I’ll leave my cross here.”
“Nothing to lose,” Glenn says. He hesitates. “Unless you consider me.”
“I want to go,” Sadie says. But Hannah can tell she’s sown a seed of discord between them. And later, when her mother calls to say she’s changed her mind, and will Hannah pay her respects, Hannah is not surprised.
RETURN
At the Jidda airport, her father is waiting. He asks about her grandfather, about Fareed and Hamza. He hands her two hundred riyals “in case.” The darkness they drive through, before they reach the city, feels different yet familiar. She has not been back since before Fareed was born. Every time she returns, it’s to a place she remembers, like a favorite tourist destination. With family baggage.
Her father drops her at the hospital, where the Saudi and Filipino front desk workers speak English. They send her upstairs, to a suite of sorts. Her grandfather has been downgraded from intensive care—though the brief interlude of healing will not last. In a small sitting room attached to her grandfather’s hospital room, members of her mother’s family are taking tea. Without asking if Hannah wants any mint, Randah stirs sugar, hot water, and mint in a finjan. She knows how many spoonfuls of sugar her niece prefers. The crystals and leaves swirl in the tiny glass. Hannah doesn’t want the hot liquid, but saying no would be rude, so she accepts the mint tea and sips. A young man in a crisp white thawb and well-ironed shimagh comes in with steaming bags of muttabbaq, ful, and tamees. Most likely he’s a cousin who was little the last time she saw him. Teenage girl cousins in tarhahs, tittering around her, look like colorful birds.
“How was your flight?” one asks in English, the consonants emphasized. Hannah’s heart flutters at how the words sound heftier, more earnest, when spoken this way.
“Good, alhamdullilah,” she says, and wonders how flimsy her Arabic sounds to them.
Randah lets Hannah’s grandfather know she’s there, and gestures for her to come into the room.
“You came,” he says in English. Her grandmother Faizah, who speaks only Arabic, sits at his bedside and smiles.
Grandfather Fareed’s face is puffy, his hair whiter than Hannah remembers—and sparer. His teeth are hanging on for dear life in his gums. She holds his soft hand.
“I have a picture of my son Fareed for you.”
He brings his hand to his heart. “Very handsome.”
They sit quietly for a while.
“In a few weeks, women will be allowed to drive here. June 24. My daughters and granddaughters are getting their licenses. Alhamdulillah, it will be a great day for them.”
“Yes, it’s wonderful news.” How different would her past visits have been if she had been able to drive?
“Those women and men activists, the ones arrested for colluding with enemies—too many Saudi papers called them traitors. Innocent until proven guilty, I say.”
“I don’t follow the news much. That’s terrible.”
“We don’t want the unrest of other countries. Remember the Arab Spring? But small social changes—we need those. What does your father say?”
“I didn’t ask him that.”
Randah called her to eat before they put the food away. But she was hungry for this, sitting with her grandfather, not for street food.
She watched saline drip from the bag. He fidgeted against the raised back of the bed.
“Where’s your mother? Randah said she was coming. Did she fly with you?”
She can’t tell him the truth: that she, Hannah, denied him the possibility of seeing his daughter.
“Do you remember what she looks like anymore?”
“Of course I do.”
“I don’t have a photo.”
“I don’t need a photo.”
He seemed wide awake when she came in, but now he seems a bit groggy. It would make her feel better about her dishonesty to know the answers to some of her questions.
“When I was a child, did you know? Where she was? Where we were?”
“I didn’t know. We had—what do you call it? A private investigator. I wanted to know where she was, but I couldn’t bear to make her come home. Her mother would have wanted me to. Randah knew. Randah got the reports. She never told me. I paid for the PI. Your grandmother thought you should be here, with your father, but I couldn’t cause you to be taken from your mother.”
They could have brought her home. Maybe her isolation from her family could have been briefer, a blip she would barely remember.
Or maybe nothing would have changed the fact that her mother had stolen her.
Several family members have left the sitting room—she feels bad she doesn’t know their names, but how can she be expected to keep track of so many? Randah and Riham are packing the food back into its bags and tying the plastic into tight, nearly impenetrable knots. A plate of food they made for her sits on the coffee table.
She eats so she won’t have to talk.
When she finishes, the words gush out. “Randah, you knew where we were.”
“We found her, and she begged me not to bring her back.”
“Found her where?”
“When you were in California, before she moved you back to Ohio. I don’t understand why she did that.”
She will have to keep this secret. She won’t tell her father. She won’t feel bad that she convinced her mother not to come.
When her father comes for her, it’s late. They head to his villa. For at least ten years he’s lived north of town, in an area that was probably empty desert the first time she visited. Fouad and Hatim live in the same neighborhood, with their own families. The sea is ten miles away.
Her father’s villa has a big, tiled yard with flowering bushes that overpower her with their scent. Lamees is inside, laying out Broasted chicken takeout. Hannah feels most guilty about not having seen Fadi in so long. He’s a grown man. He lets her hug him and sits next to her at the sufrah, eating fries. His mother pretends to add salt, and he puts one in his mouth.
After dinner, she shows Fadi her sketchbook, the drawings he made nearly thirty years ago. She puts a pencil in his hand and they draw together, a self-portrait of the two of them.
Outside, on a small patio attached to the family room, her father smokes shisha. When Lamees takes Fadi to bed, Hannah joins her father. He hands her the nozzle and she sucks the hot smoke deep inside. He’s wearing a white T-shirt and a plaid foutah wrapped around his waist. His skullcap blends into his white hair. He looks relaxed. He’s going to retire from journalism soon.
“I’m going to leave it to the bloggers,” he says.
She hands the shisha back. He leans elbow against knee with the nozzle in his mouth. He seems calm, at peace. It’s late and the full moon is high in the sky. At least, that’s how she will remember it later. A bright light, quiet talk with her father, the voices of children playing in adjacent yards at an hour when American children would have been fast asleep for hours.
“I miss my boys,” she says. “Fareed and Hamza.”
“Of course you do. Inshallah, you’ll be reunited with them soon.”
Inshallah—God willing. It sounds like a fudge to her, something that should make her worry. Maybe you’ll see them, maybe you won’t. Who knows? God decides.
But for her father, inshallah expresses the most certainty a person can have. Because God is good. And with God’s will, you will be with the people you love.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Family first: Thank you to Andrew Chen who always knew I could do it. My parent
s and brothers who were there in the beginning and who taught me faith. My grandmother, who is all over this book even though she couldn’t read. My kids, for whom I try to be better every day.
Thank you to Sarah DeWeerdt for being my reader from way back. Sarah Schmelling, Sara Gama, Majda Gama, and Janelle Rucker kindly read an early version. Danzy Senna and Justin Torres’ workshop at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference gave feedback on an even earlier chapter.
Thanks to the Maryland State Arts Council and the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County.
Like most writers, I juggle novel writing with a day job. While working on Bride of the Sea, I was blessed to have two bosses—Jennifer Rich and John Siniff—who wholeheartedly supported my creativity and my need for time.
Thank you to Steven Chudney for being my tireless advocate. And to Laura Chasen for pushing me.
Finally, thank you to Masie Cochran for seeing straight through to the heart of my novel, and to the other members of the Tin House crew—Craig Popelars, Elizabeth DeMeo, Alyssa Ogi, Diane Chonette, Nanci McCloskey, Molly Templeton, and Yashwina Canter—whose enthusiastic work made my book dreams come true in the midst of a pandemic.
PHOTO: © ANDREW CHEN
EMAN QUOTAH grew up in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, and Cleveland, Ohio. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, USA Today, The Toast, The Establishment, Book Riot, and other publications. She lives with her family near Washington, DC.
READER’S GUIDE
1.The novel opens with Hanadi having a dream about Saeedah’s funeral. Why do you think the author begins the story with this imagined loss?
2.What do you think of the rotating points-of-view in the novel? How would this story be different if it were told entirely from Saeedah’s perspective? Or Muneer’s?
3.Describe the various portrayals of marriage in the novel. What are some similarities or differences you see across generations?
4.The plot hinges on Saeedah’s decision to take Hanadi without Muneer’s knowledge. What does Saeedah willingly give up by staying in the United States and disappearing, and what does she lose despite herself?
