That Thing We Call a Heart

by Sheba Karim

  I decided to wake up sleeping beauty with a passionate kiss.

  But first, a little more Malbec. As I reached for the wine, I noticed Jamie’s phone next to it and checked the time: 10:33 p.m. I had to get out of here, preempt any maternal worries by texting my mother that I was on my way back.

  “Jamie,” I said, shaking him awake. “We gotta move.”

  III.

  The Dawn of Separation

  Twenty-Two

  OMG IT WAS AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I texted Farah.

  good

  Ill tell all about it when I cu. We didn’t do it, but came pretty close. Best night of my life!

  cool

  Normally I would have been hurt at her lack of enthusiasm, but I was still high from last night. I hummed “House of Cards” on my walk to work. I took the long way through the park and skipped across the stone bridge. I sat on Mrs. Joan Milton’s bench and waited for my rose.

  But he was late. Really late. So late that by the time I caught sight of him, dashing up the hill from the parking lot, I wasn’t so high anymore.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I had to drop Aunt Marianne at the doctor’s and we missed it and the next U-turn was like two miles.”

  Why did Aunt Marianne have to see a doctor this week, of all weeks?

  “It’s okay,” I said, even though it sucked.

  “We better unload,” he said.

  By the time we were done, it was 3:55 and the line was already five deep. Word had spread that this was the shack’s last week. Yesterday the pies were gone in half an hour.

  “Let’s do something after work today,” I said.

  “I’d love to hang with you, Morning Dew, but I have to drive Aunt Marianne to Philly to see a dying friend.”

  Damn Aunt Marianne and her dying friends.

  “When do you leave? Saturday?” I asked.

  “Thursday evening,” he replied.

  I assumed he was confused. “Friday is the last day of the shack,” I reminded him.

  “I know. My friends rented a cabin in Tahoe for the weekend, so I’m heading out early. Aunt Marianne will deliver the pies Friday.”

  “And you’re going home from there?”

  “Home, then back to school. When do you leave?”

  “Not till the end of the summer,” I replied, feeling stunned. If he left Thursday, that meant we had only two days left.

  Jamie gripped my waist, bringing me closer. “Hey, don’t look so sad.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  He kissed me. We hugged, and I held him as tightly as I could without cutting off his circulation, but nothing could stop Jamie from moving, except sleep.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.

  But I didn’t want tomorrow. I wanted fall break, I wanted emails and chats and long weekends and summers. I wanted phone calls and sexting. I wanted happily ever after.

  “Okay,” I said.

  The pies sold out in a record twenty-five minutes. I texted Farah.

  Let’s hang out

  Can’t I’m going to see rebel antigone oh yeaaaah

  Your mom is letting you

  Yeah with my cousin Tariq as chaperone. He already told me I’m not allowed to mosh bc some guy will try to grab my tits. Sick.

  guys grabbing tits or him telling you that

  both. u know I don’t mosh anyway. Mosh pits smell like b.o.

  but do they smell worse than my pits after being in this shack for an hour

  haha probably not. U shd come, you’ll fit right in

  with noise canceling headphones and a bottle of aspirin maybe

  hater

  ☺ have fun. don’t do anything I wouldn’t do

  stay cool, qureshi. cu soon.

  Twenty-Three

  “YOU KNOW, I HAD this weird dream last night,” Jamie told me as I lay in his arms, breathing in his aroma of baking and Irish Spring soap, a sweet, masculine scent that reflected the essence of my beloved.

  “What happened?”

  “I was on this high-speed train, going through Transylvania, and the train came to a sudden stop, luggage, babies flying everywhere. Then the train was attacked, except the attackers kind of looked like White Walkers, you know, from Game of Thrones, and they had ray guns, and every time they hit someone the person’s head would explode. I got down on the floor and kept telling myself to stay still like your uncle did, but you know me, of course I can’t, and then someone nudges me and I look up and it’s your uncle, he kind of looks like a White Walker except he’s brown and wearing a turban, and he points his gun at me and says, ‘This is what happens when you can’t play dead.’ And then boom! I woke up and for a second or two I wasn’t sure if I was dead or alive.”

  I had no idea what to make of this dream. “My great-uncle doesn’t look like a White Walker. Or a brown version of a White Walker, or whatever.”

  “No need to get defensive, MD,” Jamie said, stroking my hair. “Dreams are supposed to be screwed up. But it made me think, you know, I’ve done a lot of things, jumped off cliffs, drag raced, stuff that could have killed me, but that was my choice. I’ve never had death come at me like that, like it did to him.”

  It wasn’t death that came at Chotay Dada, I thought, it was a mob of men, fueled by a long, brutal history of colonization and subjugation. Farah would have given him one of her lectures, but I wasn’t her, and anyway it was too complicated to explain, and I didn’t know enough about it.

  “And then I was awake for a while, thinking,” he continued, “and I started wondering, do they still drink the water from the well?”

  “What?”

  “The pregnant woman, your uncle’s lover, she killed herself by jumping into the well, right? Do the people keep drinking water from it, or is it considered cursed or something?”

  “I don’t know, I guess they kept drinking it,” I answered, trying not to sound as annoyed as I was. I didn’t want to spend our second-to-last day talking about Chotay Dada, or Partition. I didn’t want to talk about the past. I wanted to talk about the future—our future.

  “So when’s the last time you jumped off a cliff?” I said.

  “I cliff dived last year,” Jamie said. “Do they have some kind of ceremony, to make the well clean again?”

  “Like do they wear scary animal masks and dance in a circle around it, chanting?”

  “Is that what they do?”

  “No. I was kidding.”

  Jamie grinned, kissed my nose. “Funny. I’m going to miss our talks. I’m going to miss you.”

  He checked his pocket watch.

  “Ten minutes,” he announced. “Better make the most of it.”

  We started making out, but I was too distracted to enjoy it. I knew I ought to stop waiting passively for him to say something, and instead share my feelings, tell him I didn’t want time or distance to determine the end of Jamie and Morning Dew. That was the brave path, and the one that would leave me most exposed. I didn’t know what I’d do if he didn’t want to be with me. I didn’t know how my heart could recover from such a blow. The status quo seemed easier, but it was also driving me insane.

  I promised myself that if he didn’t bring up our future before he left tomorrow, I would.

  “Are you all right?” Jamie asked. “You seem a little off today.”

  “I’m sad you’re leaving,” I said.

  “I’m sad I’m leaving, too.”

  So do something about it, I thought.

  “How many people do you think are waiting outside?” he asked.

  “Six.”

  He jumped up, leaned over the display case, looked through the gap in the shutter. “Eight! I should go. Stay clear of White Walkers, brown or otherwise.”

  “I’ll try.” I got up to open the shutter, a big Welcome-to-Andromeda’s-Pie-Shack smile plastered on my face. How did Dino manage to be so damn pleasant every day?

  When the pies were gone, I texted Farah.

  Jamie’s leaving 2morrow! so d
epressed.

  Farah responded with a meme of a guy eating a hot chili, his face turning crimson as the spice hit him, tears spraying out of his eyes. No Chili, No Cry, it said underneath.

  It didn’t make me feel any better.

  When I got home, my father was making chai, one of the few domestic tasks he not only did, but did well. He was still dressed in his sleeping outfit, a shalwar and a stained undershirt. The ring of hair around his head hadn’t been trimmed in ages, the humidity making his curls spool outward.

  Sleep is his, pride is his, the nights are his / On whose shoulder your curls lay tangled.

  The day of union with Jamie was ending, and I might have to endure the feverish night of separation, desperately yearning for a beloved who was unreachable, wondering if someone else’s curls lay tangled across his shoulder.

  Shit. My life was on the precipice of becoming an Urdu ghazal.

  How could I ensure Jamie stayed mine?

  “Ah, Shabnam,” my father said, as though I hadn’t already been in the kitchen for five minutes. “I found a ghazal of Ghalib’s that might be easier for you to comprehend.”

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  “Sorry?”

  How many times had Jamie asked me for a ghazal? Maybe a ghazal could save my life from resembling one.

  “Dad, listen. This is important,” I said. “I need you to explain to me the form of a ghazal, right now. I need to write one, in English, tonight.”

  My father, being who he was, didn’t ask why, or for whom, but happily launched into a lecture as I scribbled down notes on the back of the class schedule from my mother’s gym.

  BASIC NOTES ON THE GHAZAL

  Usually 4 to 9 verses (ideally an odd number)

  Each verse is 2 lines. Each 2-line verse is thematically independent, can stand on its own.

  Closing verse usually mentions the poet’s pen name

  Common rhyme syllable (fearless, hopeless, heartless, stinging, running, mourning) followed by the refrain

  Rhyme scheme:

  aa

  ba

  ca

  da

  ea

  My father gave me an English example of a ghazal that he invented in a matter of minutes, but it took me all night to write mine. I wanted the ghazal to be a poignant expression of my love, I wanted it to speak what my tongue could not. I wanted it to move Jamie so much that he couldn’t bear not to see me again, and again, and again.

  GHAZAL FOR JAMIE

  The nightingale, she lost her voice, calling for you

  She gave up on the garden, searching for you

  I thought the garden had nothing but thorns. They said,

  Stop, wait, because your flower, he’s coming for you

  Winter will end, summer will bring you your rose

  Wild and red, scarred and perfect, unfolding for you

  The Theater of Dreams will host your debut

  In every chair a ghost, sighing for you

  A chemical reaction, an afternoon monsoon,

  Every cell in my body, yearning for you

  Let’s stay out super late, making music, making pie

  Watch me naked in the moonlight, dancing for you

  I am the nightingale and you are the rose

  Come close to my lips, hear me singing for you.

  Twenty-Four

  JAMIE WAS LATE, AND I’d barely slept, though I was wide-awake and fidgeting from the three cups of coffee I’d had before leaving for work. I’d attempted to mask my exhaustion with literally every item in my make-up bag, but it had proved too much. I wished I could wash my face, start over. I wished I’d had the guts to have this conversation days ago. I leaned against the display case, rubbing excess blush off my cheeks with a worn tissue, picking at the mascara clumps in my eyelashes, the notebook burning inside my back pocket.

  This was not the way I wanted to be at our last meeting, jangly and wired and cake-faced.

  The door swung open.

  Jamie, holding a single bamboo basket.

  “Sorry I’m late. I was almost here when I had to go back for this.” He handed me the basket.

  “Should we get the rest now?” I said.

  “No—I mean, yes, we probably should, but this pie’s for you.”

  “Me?” I said.

  “I realized we never ended up eating pie that time you came over, so I baked one for you last night. Blackberries, your favorite.”

  “It’s my father’s favorite—but also mine,” I added quickly, not wanting to seem unappreciative, touched to think that we’d both spent last night creating things for each other.

  “Race you,” he said.

  I chose to walk, my stomach roiling from nerves and caffeine overload, and he ran in circles around me. When he started to sing “The Sound of Music” in a falsetto voice, I laughed. It felt good to laugh. It made it harder to be scared.

  Fifteen minutes later, the pies were in the display case, their names written on the giant notepad, the notepad on the easel. Jamie had his arms around me, his lips in my hair.

  Everything in its right place.

  We started making out, his hand sliding around to the small of my back, but once again I was too distracted to enjoy it. The notebook in my pocket burned more than his lips; I wouldn’t be able to relax until I gave him my gift, until I knew its outcome.

  As he kissed my neck, I said, “I brought something for you too.”

  “You did?”

  “You told me you wanted a ghazal,” I said as I handed him the Moleskine notebook. “The first few poems are my father’s translations of Faiz, and the last one is a ghazal. I wrote it for you.”

  “You wrote a ghazal for me? Awesome.” He flipped to the final poem, and read, ‘Ghazal for Jamie.’”

  He read it to himself as I watched, terrified. By the time he was done, I’d be stripped of pretense, the lover lying naked and shivering and hopeful at the doorstep of her beloved’s heart.

  Jamie looked up from the page, stricken. “Wow, MD. I don’t even know what to say.”

  Say you love me. Say you want to be with me. Say you are my rose.

  “It’s the nicest thing anyone’s written for me. I love it.”

  “Good,” I said, pleased, waiting for more.

  “I’m really gonna miss you,” he said.

  He leaned in for a kiss, but I turned my cheek, determined to continue the conversation.

  “We could see each other again,” I said.

  “We will see each other again,” he replied.

  “When?”

  He shrugged, twirling one of my curls. “I don’t know. I leave those things up to fate.”

  “But maybe we could . . . plan something, you know, like I could come visit you in Madison.”

  “Oh. Okay.” He nodded, as if to indicate he understood, then palmed my face, tilting it upward. “Hey, I loved being with you this summer. Listening to you and learning from you and holding you, it was like a rush all the time. But I’m going back to school, and you’re moving to Philly. It’s always better to end things on a high note, don’t you think? The Theater of Dreams, that was our night.”

  What the hell did that even mean?

  It meant he didn’t want to see me again. It meant he’d always thought of us as a summer fling.

  The lover reeled back as the beloved slammed the door in her face.

  I was so stupid to think a poem could make him love me.

  “Hey, hey, don’t be so sad,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” I exclaimed. “Are you sure you want this to end?”

  “Nothing really ends,” he said softly.

  I could kill him. “It will end if we don’t see each other.”

  “I’ll always carry the memory of you with me.”

  “Wow,” I said, and then I couldn’t speak.

  Don’t cry don’t cry don’t

  Jamie wiped the corners of my eyes. “Hey, beautiful, you’re killin’ me with these tears.”

&nb
sp; “Please please stop talking,” I said, and spent the next five minutes weeping on his bony shoulder. He held me, stroked my hair, whispered hush and it’s going to be all right and don’t cry, my sweet girl, which only made me cry harder.

  The whole while, the voices outside increased, became louder. Is this really the shack’s last summer? I heard someone ask.

  “Morning Dew?” he said gently. “It’s after four.”

  Fuck four, I thought. Fuck love, fuck all of it.

  We parted, still holding hands. The cut he’d gotten breaking the window was starting to scab over. Soon it would be an old wound, and I’d still be bleeding.

  “Thank you so much for the ghazal, the poems,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I get a kiss before I go?”

  He kissed me, the kind of sweet, tender kiss that reeks of goodbye.

  Then he left and I sold pies, smiling so hard it hurt, scraping my nails into my palms to keep from crying.

  Twilight on the night of union.

  The dawn of separation begins. The nightingale loses her rose.

  Twenty-Five

  I WENT HOME, LOCKED myself in my room, called Farah. She didn’t pick up. I couldn’t even cry, because when my mother returned from work she might come up and say hello, and if she realized I was upset, she’d never leave me alone. No tears, no best friend. I was in breakup purgatory.

  My mother did come to my room but I was able to act normal enough to keep her visit brief. My phone rang at last. “Father and Son” by Cat Stevens, aka Yusuf Islam. I’d never heard of Cat/Yusuf until Farah introduced me. Mushy singer/songwriter tunes were her dirty secret.

  “Where have you been?” I demanded.

  “Salaams to you, too. Everything cool?”

  “No! Today I gave Jamie a ghazal I wrote basically telling him I loved him, and he said he loved the ghazal, but that he didn’t want to see me again. He said if we did see each other again, it would be because fate brought us together. He said he’d always carry the memory of me with him. The memory of me.”