The Newcomers

by Helen Thorpe

  Nabiha visited Jakleen; afterward, she called me, devastated.

  “I forgot my job, I forgot my own family, I feel like she is my daughter,” Nabiha said, her voice breaking. “I am so sad, I am just crying. You know—same time interpreter, same time like family.”

  Yes, I did know. Same time journalist, same time like family. Many days elapsed in which Ebtisam kept watch over Jakleen, and I kept watch over Ebtisam, showing up with coffee or magazines. One day in the ICU, I found Jakleen in bed, rocking her knees from side to side, surrounded by flowers. Ghasem had visited the evening before and brought her a bouquet of daisies, roses, and lilies. She looked the same and yet not the same, because her eyes were empty. I did not know whether this was from her brain injury or the eight different drugs she was taking. Also, Jakleen’s memory had holes in odd places.

  “Who is Shani?” Jakleen asked. “Yesterday, Ghasem tell me, ‘She is your friend.’ ”

  I took out my phone and showed her pictures of Room 142 and said we had spent the last school year together in that space. Jakleen reacted with disbelief. She did not remember that classroom. Nor did she remember most of the students in my photographs—though she did recognize Lisbeth.

  “That is Shani,” I told her. “She is Mariam’s friend, and she is your friend, too.”

  “I forget Shani,” admitted Jakleen ruefully.

  I said I liked the way Ghasem’s flowers smelled.

  “I can’t smell,” she said.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” I assured her.

  But in truth, I didn’t know what would happen tomorrow. Would the holes in her memory fill? Would the dancing intelligence return to her eyes? I could handle the fractures and the funny walk, but I missed the silver-bright knowingness that once animated Jakleen’s face. She was suddenly slow and placid, and she had never been either of those things. Strangely, I suspected her of acting. I knew she wasn’t, but I had a stubborn feeling of this-isn’t-her. I kept hoping that Jakleen’s real self would return from hiding. Her prognosis was unclear, the doctors said. Everything depended upon how diligently she worked at her rehabilitation. Jakleen was going to have to work very hard—harder even than she had in Room 142—just to return to the person she had formerly been.

  2

  * * *

  What Is Resolution?

  What is resolution?” Ms. Hijazi asked her students in 2A.

  It was the very last day of October, it was Halloween—that peculiar holiday recent arrivals found so baffling. The newcomers I befriended had spent twelve months living in the United States. Last year, nobody in Room 142 had worn a costume, but this year, both Nadia and Lisbeth dressed up. They were acclimatizing.

  During the ten weeks they had spent together in 2A, Nadia and Lisbeth had grown close, and they planned their costumes together. Both looked like Japanese schoolgirls. Nadia wore a white blouse with a short black pleated skirt and black-and-white-striped kneesocks, while Lisbeth displayed florid magenta hair extensions, magenta nail polish, and magenta lipstick, as well as an alarmingly short black minidress with black kneesocks and black tennis shoes. “Anime is, like—sexy,” Lisbeth boasted in a stage whisper, so Ms. Hijazi wouldn’t hear. Ever since Miss Pauline had included that word among the fifty-eight positive emotions one might feel, “sexy” had become one of Lisbeth’s favorite terms in English.

  I called Lisbeth’s costume a costumbre, but the Spanish-speaking kids corrected me. No, the correct word was disfraz, which means “disguise.” Costumbre actually means “custom” or “habit.” (“Costumbre” and “costume” are examples of what linguists call “false cognates” or “false friends,” i.e., when words sound like cognates but are not genuinely so.)

  Ms. Hijazi did not want the class to be thinking about disfraces; she wanted the class to be thinking about resolution.

  “How do you think this book will end?” she asked.

  The students were reading Hatchet, an award-winning young adult novel by Gary Paulsen. Hatchet tells the story of a thirteen-year-old boy who finds himself alone in the wilderness after an airplane crash and has to figure out how to get by with only a hatchet. One of the book’s themes is the power of positive thinking; the boy learns that the greatest danger he faces is his own despondency. The class talked about how the main character learned from his mistakes. He had made a poor shelter and then he built a better one. He had buried turtle eggs in a shallow grave and a skunk had stolen them, and then he moved his food stores into a crevice in a sheer rock face accessible only by a ladder he fashioned out of dead tree limbs.

  Once again, we had reached the time of year when teachers at South caught the brunt of the annual rush, those weeks in late September and early October when refugee resettlement agencies hurried to place large numbers of new arrivals. That year, the Democratic Republic of Congo sent the largest number of refugees to the United States, followed by Syria, Burma, Iraq, and Somalia. As usual, the new arrivals at South reflected national trends. When students from Syria began arriving in greater numbers, they were situated all around the building, depending on their level of English. At the beginning of October, a seventeen-year-old named Marwan had appeared in Ms. Hijazi’s 2A room and chosen a seat at the front of the class. Tall and rangy, with movie-star good looks and a fetching black leather jacket, he had an engaging the-world-is-my-friend personality. One day, I caught him asking Mariam for her phone number in a bustling second-floor hallway, much to Mariam’s embarrassed delight.

  At the end of his first week at South, Ms. Hijazi told the class that they were going to read a short story called “The Necklace” the following week. On Monday, when Ms. Hijazi asked the students to open their textbooks to that story, Marwan announced, “I went to the library this weekend and I read the story already.”

  Ms. Hijazi stared at him in astonishment. “Well, what the heck are you going to do now?” she said, her tone conveying, underneath the sarcasm, both awe and praise.

  “I am prepared!” Marwan responded.

  After escaping the wreckage of Damascus, Marwan had spent several years living in Turkey, where he had worked to help support his family and had not been able to attend school. The joy he felt at finding himself back inside a classroom was obvious. A few weeks later, I overheard Marwan ask Ms. Hijazi, “How do I get into AP classes?” Marwan was a superstar—he was the Methusella of 2A. On the day when Nadia and Lisbeth wore their disfraces, when the kids were several chapters into Hatchet, and the question that Ms. Hijazi wanted them to think about was how this book was going to end, the class paused to go over the meaning of the word “poverty.” Ms. Hijazi asked the students to use that word in a sentence. Marwan said astutely, “War leads to poverty.”

  Indeed, the U.S. invasion of Iraq had impoverished millions, in both that country and in Syria. That day, Marwan happened to be wearing a white dress shirt, navy chinos, and a red-and-white kaffiyeh, and his clothing seemed like a red-white-and-blue statement about dual identity. Because the clangorous presidential election was thundering into its final weeks, I could not help but think, as I sat in the back of the classroom, Oh, America, land of the brave, here is the Syrian refugee of whom you’ve been so afraid, and he is nothing more than a kid who goes to the library on the weekend so that he can prepare for class.

  Ms. Hijazi brought the subject back to resolution, back to how the story might end. Marwan wanted to address this matter, but he had been speaking a lot. Ms. Hijazi growled at him—literally, made a grrrrr sound.

  Marwan flashed an I-can’t-believe-my-teacher-is-growling-at-me face at his teacher. Ms. Hijazi flicked a hand in his direction. “Somebody else talk, please!”

  Another student said the resolution of Hatchet would probably have something to do with the main character feeling safe. The class concurred; they decided Hatchet would end when the reader knew for sure that the protagonist was going to make it out of the wilderness alive. Then Ms. Hijazi said something about handing in an assignment on Friday. Kids chorused, “Miss! No sc
hool! Miss, no school on Friday!”

  “Really?” said Ms. Hijazi, puzzled. “Why not?”

  “You have the day off from teaching,” Marwan told her, “because you have parent-teacher conferences from three to seven P.M. that day.”

  Ms. Hijazi swung around to stare, rather imperiously, at the brand-new, terribly good-looking Syrian.

  “How do you know everything?” she marveled. “I mean, seriously! How? Didn’t you just get here, like, last week?”

  * * *

  Across the stairwell, in Ms. Hopkin’s 1B class, everybody was missing Jakleen. Students were asking when she might return, and teachers wanted updates, too. One day, while I was giving Ms. Hopkin the latest news from the hospital, I noticed Grace standing stock-still two feet away, wearing a peach-colored minidress, holding open the door to the room where 1B met. She was pretending to be a peach-colored statue. Realizing that Grace was eavesdropping, the teacher said, “Sugar, please, would you get inside the classroom?”

  Jakleen had moved recently to Children’s Hospital, where she was in acute rehab. Physical therapists were helping her regain the ability to walk and to write. All her injuries were on the right side of her body, and she was right-handed; at first she had not been able to hold a pen, but within a short time she progressed to the point where she could write three sentences. She still listed when she walked, but no longer needed the big black belt or the two nurses. Her fifteen-year-old body was healing at an astonishing pace, but the big question remained what effect the traumatic brain injury might have on her mind. In speech therapy, hospital staff activated her brain with various tasks and then insisted that she put down her phone and turn off the TV and do nothing but let her mind rest. Alternating periods of mental activity with periods of total rest was the latest technique for healing the brain.

  I visited again and found Ebtisam depleted. It had been twenty-one days since the car accident, and she had not slept in her own bed once. That evening, I drove Ebtisam home, so that she could spend the night at Pine Creek. She found it hard to separate from Jakleen, and we did not make it past the nurses’ station without Ebtisam pausing to ask a nurse if she would sleep on the pull-out bed in Jakleen’s room. The nurse explained there were many patients on the ward, and she could not devote herself entirely to Jakleen. But her daughter would be well cared for, she assured Ebtisam.

  The following weekend, Mariam stayed at the hospital in her mother’s place, and the sisters acted like kids having a sleepover party. The next week, Lisbeth visited, then Ghasem and Shani. Afterward, Jakleen announced to me, with great feeling, “I love Ghasem.” The young man from Afghanistan had been courting Jakleen with ardor for months, and in all that time he had been unwavering. I admired him for working two jobs so that he could help support his mother even as he went to school full-time. Ghasem was compelling. Before the accident, Jakleen had kept Ghasem at a distance, but now, in her impaired state, she wanted to pull the boy close. I worried whether her feelings would endure, or wane as she healed. Clearly the idea of being in love was an enjoyable distraction, however, for we talked about Ghasem for quite a while. Then we leafed through some magazines that I had brought, looking at pictures of clothes, makeup, recipes.

  “I want go home,” Jakleen said.

  “I bet you do,” I said.

  The following week, Ebtisam called: Jakleen had been released from the hospital. Despite the severity of her injuries, the doctors wanted her to return to school, because it was critical she activate her brain. Ebtisam had no car, no money, and no job (she had quit the factory job so that she could care for Jakleen). She also faced two pending jury trials, one about the alleged assault on her neighbor’s child and one about the car accident. Ebtisam could not drive Jakleen herself and did not want to put her daughter on a city bus, which would have involved walking three-quarters of a mile to the bus stop, with all those still-healing bone fractures. I heard myself say, “Well, I’m headed to South now. If you want, I could come and pick her up.”

  It was a leaf-spinning, windy day with no clouds and the trees ablaze with color. Jakleen applied her cat-eyed makeup and ironed her hair straight. She put on skinny jeans, a black sweater with a large gold zipper down the front, and black suede moccasins, and when she finished she looked more like her old self than she had for weeks. At South, we were told to see the school nurse. The nurse’s office was located on the same hallway as Mr. Williams’s old classroom, just a few doors away. The nurse, José Espinosa-Santiago, was a chatty ex-Marine in camo scrubs. He knew all about head injuries. He had been expecting Jakleen—he had already spoken with her doctors. The nurse got up from behind his desk and walked around to sit down next to Jakleen. He went over all the negative symptoms she might experience and said if she felt any of those things, she should see him right away. “We are going to take care of you like you are a baby,” he crooned.

  Upstairs, Ms. Hopkin was conducting a writing assessment. When Jakleen walked tentatively into the room, she cried, “You’re back!” in a tone of clear delight. The windows were open and the wind made a shushing sound like the ocean as it moved through the trees outside. Jakleen set to work immediately, writing sentence after sentence. Mariam, who sat beside her, could not think of anything to write in English. Then I saw Mariam lean over, peek at her sister’s work, and copy down every word that Jakleen had written. I had been afraid it would be the other way around—that Jakleen would have to rely on Mariam—but the familiar setting of the classroom had brought back half-forgotten habits. I understood then why the doctors wanted to get Jakleen back to school so quickly, for as soon as she returned to South, the high school setting called up dormant aspects of her old self. Being back at school transformed her into a student again.

  Abruptly, Jakleen was exhausted. All the sparkle left her face, she closed her eyes, and she laid her head down on the desk. The 1B class met for two full periods, and she had intended to stay for both, but when the bell rang marking the midway point, Jakleen asked groggily if I would take her back home.

  The following day, however, Jakleen successfully spent two full periods in Ms. Hopkin’s room. The nurse conferred with her doctors, and the following week they upped her schedule from two periods a day to four. The medical personnel marveled at the speed of Jakleen’s recuperation. At one point, the nurse said, “She is healing very, very fast. I’ve seen people take a full year to get where she is right now.”

  At the same time, Jakleen remained fragile, and it was hard for her friends to comprehend this. She had no casts, no scars, and no stitches, and she always arranged her beauty with care, so there was no outward sign of the collision.

  One day, Jakleen and Mariam were walking down the hall on their way to see the nurse when they passed by Shani, standing in front of her locker. When the girl from Tajikistan saw Jakleen, her face fell.

  “No remember,” Shani said in a sad voice.

  “You are Shani!” Jakleen told her, with that knowing, amused look.

  Shani threw herself at Jakleen and began rocking her back and forth exuberantly. Mariam exclaimed, “Shani! Be careful!”

  Even Ghasem had no idea how badly Jakleen had been hurt. One day, I tried to enumerate her injuries by pointing to corresponding parts of my body as I spoke, in case his English wasn’t good enough to follow along. “She has a fractured skull,” I said while pointing to my head, “and broken bones here” (pointing to my clavicle), “and here” (my ribs), “and here” (my pelvis). “Also, bleeding in the brain” (pointing to my head again).

  “Bleeding in the brain?” he said, to double-check.

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t know,” Ghasem said in an unsteady voice. “Nobody told me. Jakleen, her English isn’t good enough to explain. She just point to here” (he gestured to his collarbone) “and here” (his rib cage), “but I didn’t know about the rest.”

  One afternoon that week, Mariam and Jakleen and I visited the nurse again. Ghasem, Rahim, and Shani converged on us in
the hallway beside the nurse’s office. Rahim bent over a water fountain, as Ghasem glued himself to Jakleen’s side. I glanced over at the door to Room 142, where we had spent so much time talking about qalb. The nurse emerged from his office and surveyed the boisterous group animating the hallway. Clearly, they’d been friends for a while.

  “You all speak the same language?” he asked curiously.

  “Well, these two are sisters.” I pointed to Mariam and Jakleen.

  “Yeah, you speak the same language,” teased the nurse.

  “And these two are in love,” I added, pointing to Ghasem and Jakleen.

  “Aha!” the nurse exclaimed.

  Ghasem wore a possessive look, while Jakleen appeared more vulnerable. Maybe she was wondering exactly how far to take this experiment. Ghasem approached to negotiate which of us would get to take Jakleen home.

  “I can give her a ride,” Ghasem announced, full of fiery pride at having both a girlfriend and a car.

  “Her mom said you drive too fast,” I countered.

  “I don’t drive fast!” he objected.

  Ghasem glowered at me. Then he phoned Ebtisam and reported that she had given permission for him to drive her daughter home. Jakleen wanted to go with him, that much was clear. I thought it might do her some good, after so much adult supervision. The nurse seemed to feel the same way, but before he let Jakleen get into Ghasem’s car, he got a little parental.

  “You have a license?” José asked Ghasem.

  Ghasem withdrew his license and thrust it at the nurse.

  “Car insurance?” asked the nurse.

  “Yes!”

  “It’s not expired?”

  “No!”

  “Drive slowly,” instructed the nurse. “Don’t stop like this”—he jerked his body forward and then back. “Because she can’t sustain any impact, okay?”