The Girl Who Fell to Earth

by Sophia Al-Maria

  When day broke we went early to the airport in Doha, where we had reunited with Baba more than a year earlier. Baba entered and, as was his way, found us without looking for us. For the first time he and Ma seemed to understand each other; the naivety of a decade spent coming together and then drifting apart was scrubbed away. All that was left were his obligations and her expectations. He held Dima and me close, taking off his gutra to give us a good squeeze before lifting us around our bellies like a pair of goat kids and handing us over to Ma.

  “Ma’a salama, Matar,” she said, with her learned accent skipping and slurring the phrase.

  He nodded and kissed her forehead in the same gesture of respect he would have given his mother. And like his father at the Doha airport all that time ago, he said a prayer: “Estowda’a Allah al lethi la yethia’a wada’ai.”

  Once we were on the plane, Ma removed her hijab. Dima and I gaped; it was like seeing your mother strip down nude in public. She unclipped the silk triangle from her chin and stuck the safety pin into the foam of our seat. Even with the hack job she’d done cutting her hair, in the dismal light of the cabin it was bright yellow blond. She folded the hijab up and slipped it into her seat pocket with the barf bag and escape instructions. Latched into my window seat, I pressed my forehead to the double-paned glass, wishing it would open like the skin of a soap bubble and let me fall back to Baba. Red satellites blinked above, orange city grids below, as we passed into the blackness of the Empty Quarter. Yellow and blue oil flares blossomed up from the night desert, and that was the last I saw of that home for a long time.

  9

  GAMMA ANDROMEDAE • HUG THE GROUND •

  Little had changed on the farm since we’d left, although the housing developments were getting bigger and the freeway was a lot busier. Ma’s trusty Scirocco squatted over an oil pool in the carport where she had left it, gold paint flaking away to reveal rust patches on the hood and sides. It was berry season and U-pickers had come out to the fields, loading up flats of raspberries and hauling them away. I observed Gramma closely in her daily activities and compared her with our other grandmother, Umi Safya. They didn’t seem so different. One wore a muumuu from Honolulu and the other a jalabiya from Al-Hassa. They both bent the same way at the waist when they rooted along the ground for weeds or truffles. Both of them wore rings that were too tight for their fingers, and both of them knitted for fun.

  I’d been too young when we left to have much conscious memory of the place, but the feeling of familiarity welled up through subtler sensations: for example, the way the soggy blades of grass squelched under my feet, the sonic boom of Fighter Falcons echoing off Mount Rainier, the smell of Gramma’s cold cream. Then there was muscle memory. Out in the desert I’d bounded around with my heels to the ground; here I skidded and slipped on the grass if I did that. Even Dima took ginger steps walking on the lawn. “You making a moon landing there, kid?” Gramma teased from the sidelines as Dima picked her way carefully across the garden.

  By July Baba’s cologne had faded from our clothes and we were settled into American life. But American life was not synonymous with a freer life. Ma was so fearful of strangers that we were effectively under house arrest. Strangers were understood to mean men, who were all wolves to Ma, regardless of whether they were senile veterans or serial killers. “The more harmless they look, the more dangerous they are,” she warned us. I’d press my face up against the windows like I used to in apartment 1303. Whenever a jet flew over from McChord Air Force base I could feel its vibrations in my skull and wished I could go for a ride back to Doha. If I did leave the house, I was to be chaperoned by Gramma’s dog, Alf, and had to promise never to speak to any strangers. So it was that one stir-crazy afternoon, Alf and I were racing each other through the field. We made it up the quarter-mile stretch to the cul-de-sac and were running back up to the house when I saw a stranger smoking on the steps of the front porch. He was wearing an army-surplus jacket over grease-smeared flannel and army boots. He had a mustache and longish hair and dark skin just like Baba. Like a fish tricked by a fly-looking lure, I went for him and inexplicably brayed, “Hi . . . Dad!”

  I clapped my hand over my mouth. It had come out so loud; the word “Dad” echoed off the mountainside, taunting me. I wanted to throw up right after I said it. I didn’t even know why I’d done it. The stranger paused in the drag off his cigarette and squinted long and thin at me. I wanted to disappear, dig a hole to Doha and then never come back again. The stranger knocked Alf’s head away and stood up to step out his smoke. I watched him as he disappeared through the fields and down the path that led to the river. Ma pulled in just as he passed beyond the property line. She slammed the car door, made a few steps as if she would go after him, and then turned and grabbed me by my shoulders, “Did that man try to talk to you?”

  “Nope,” I answered, hoping she hadn’t heard the terrible echo of my mistake.

  Shortly after the “Dad” incident with the stranger, Ma started nighttime vocational school. This was the early ’90s near Seattle, so mastering C++, Pascal, and other computer languages seemed like a very viable skill to develop. This meant she was gone every night until eleven, which also meant Gramma, Dima, and I were left alone in the house. This not only made her feel guilty, in typical single-mother fashion, but made her become deeply paranoid. After my encounter with the stranger on the porch steps, she saw the specter of pedophiles and burglars and child abductors everywhere, and fair enough—the farmhouse was isolated at the end of a private road in the middle of several high-traffic routes for the homeless and hobos. The river running south of us had overgrown orchards where the trunks were marked up with the obscure codes and warnings for the transients who passed through. The highway to the north was a regular route for hitchhikers. The trailer park to our east, with its aluminum-sided trailers of daiquiri- and sherbet-colors, was mostly full of senior citizens—but Ma’s guard remained up, whether a man was eighteen or eighty.

  One evening toward the end of the summer, we were watching an episode of Unsolved Mysteries about Sasquatch in Gramma’s room when there was a yelp and crash against the front screen. It was Alf letting out an odd tremolo, a high-pitched cross between a whimper and a scream. Another smash! In seconds I was crawling out into the dark of the living room. As my eyes adjusted to the dark I saw Ma standing in the middle of the front parlor with the shotgun.

  “Gale—what the hell’s going on out there?” Gramma yelled.

  “I don’t know,” Ma hissed back over her shoulder in our direction, then turned to the door. “Go wake your dad up, boys!” she yelled for the attacker’s benefit.

  “But he’s not here!” I squeaked, hopping from foot to foot in a panic.

  “Not really!” she hissed back. “So they think we’ve got a man in here with us.”

  Another crash against the screen. She flinched and backed up a pace. It was so blindingly black outside.

  “I’ve got a twelve-gauge Remington Model Eleven semiautomatic shotgun, pal, and you better believe I’ll use it!” she bellowed.

  The barrel was so long it looked like a broom handle from where I was. Seeing Ma with the huge weapon was almost as distressing as the idea that one of the many male specters she had conjured up for us was now really outside trying to get in.

  “Sophia. The phones,” she said without taking her eyes off the door. I tried pulling the phone out to her but the cord was too short. “Stay back, stay back,” she ordered me. “Leave the phone on the floor and back up.” She was afraid I’d get too close to the gun, like in a hostage-trade situation.

  She kept the gun trained on the door and inched back to where I’d placed the phone on the floor. She dialed 911 just as Alf let out another horrible cry. “Yes, hello! Someone is trying to break into our house.” There was a kick at the door. We all jumped. “Yes, it has five shells and one in the chamber,” Ma answered. “Myself and my mother and my children.”

  The drapes were starting to shake now,
the screen door had been broken through, and now the inner door’s handle started to jiggle. A flashlight beam was shining through the keyhole, and, eerily, we could see no shadow.

  Ma addressed me—“Sophie! Take Gramma and Dima into the bedroom and hide”—before turning and issuing a threat in the direction of the door: “The sheriff’s on the way, buddy!”

  She sat in the living room in wait in a rocking chair, listening to the creaking of the busted screen door, shotgun up on her knee and the phone stretched as close as she could get it. She continued her loud bluff for the intruder. “The good thing about a shotgun is you can get ’em at close range!” But the sounds outside had stopped.

  It had all lasted only about ten minutes, though it seemed as if it had been an hour when the phone rang. It was the operator: “Put the gun away, ma’am. The sheriff’s outside now.”

  Ma unloaded the Remington and put it away, opened the front drapes, and switched on the lights. The screen door was ripped to shreds; Alf was shaking, and as soon as the door opened he bolted inside, claws clacking on linoleum as he came scuttling back to where we were hidden. Ma went with the sheriff and his men to make double-sure whoever it was was good and gone. She led them around the side of the house where their spotlights shone into our bedroom, casting a thick circular light on the curtains like the eye of a giant squid. They checked the shed and all the hiding places Ma could think of and followed the berry tines all the way down to the river, but found nothing.

  That night Ma called Baba for the first time since we had left. His voice was deeper than I remembered, more like the voice of a stranger. He was at Umi Safya’s crowded house; it was Friday there and the room sounded warm and festive. Bright sounds of children crying and women bantering came over the line, in sharp contrast to the dark silence of our living room. As we listened, I yearned for the safety that came in those numbers. Of how secure I had felt when I was with the larger pack. Only then did I realize I might be missing that other home, only then did the farm start to feel lonely.

  10

  EPSILON ORIONIS • THE STRING OF PEARLS •

  The portrait of Baba still looked straight at me from the mantelpiece. No matter where I moved, from the davenport to the TV to the hearth, he was watching me. The news at the time was preoccupied with another omnipresent face with a mustache—Saddam. Every weeknight we sat together in the living room with Gramma and watched the five o’clock news, mostly illustrated with stock footage of fighter jets and green night-vision desert. Whenever a map of the Gulf came on-screen, it had topographical features rather than political borders. Despite being a distinctive part of the Arabian Peninsula’s geography, Qatar was often left off the map altogether, so Dima and I would race to mark it on the television with a little extension of Silly Putty, which would stick to the screen throughout the broadcast like a saggy pink blemish on the anchor’s face. The absence of borders on the maps made everything seem extra close together, and the fact that our family was there somewhere between the cartoon barrel of the tank gun and the cyan blue of the “Persian” sea was hard to comprehend.

  Feeling it was her civic duty to correct the local news, Ma called in to the station to ensure they knew it should be referred to as the Arabian Gulf. And yet the news anchor persisted in calling that little nubbin of water on his map the Persian Gulf. However, he wasn’t the only one who kept stubbornly to his mistakes. “Is old Hoodam Sudain at it again?” Gramma would say apropos of nothing when we turned on the TV. It didn’t matter to her whether it was “Hoodam” instead of Saddam, “AbiDabbi” instead of Abu Dhabi, or “old man Jibber Jabber” instead of our grandfather Jabir.

  We all watched together as the news anchor forecasted the Iraqi army’s movements like a weatherman, moving little tank icons around the cartoonish map like thunderclouds. Despite the fact that we lived only a few miles from the U.S. Air Force base and were used to seeing huge hawk-like Stealth bombers and strange lights filling the sky on summer nights, the scenes of air raids alarmed Ma. She kept in close contact with Baba on the phone during that time, calling him to overreact every time they showed laser-light footage of air raids more than a thousand kilometers away. He always knew the appropriate reaction, to shrug them off as blithely as if they were scattered showers.

  Before school started, Ma got a new job at a software company called Helden Systems. Dima and I spent those first days on our own sneaking all the things we’d never been allowed to watch: the loving, wise fathers on shows like The Cosby Show and Full House made our own home feel empty, whereas Carl Sagan in his polystyrene cockpit had always filled us with wonder. Ma didn’t want us to watch those shows for a reason; they gave us ideas about what we might be missing. We did our best not to voice our dissatisfaction. Whenever she came home proudly bearing reams of dot-matrix printer paper and dry-erase markers salvaged from a Dumpster at work for us to play with, we pretended to be thrilled, wishing all along Baba would come to visit and take us to Toys “R” Us to buy My Little Ponies. Ma did her best to entertain us with cheaper pursuits like making cornstarch “moon mud,” and took time away from programming for some flow-chart fun, teaching us how to make process diagrams.

  “You start with a problem and you end with a solution. So you link the question and the answer through steps you represent with these little boxes.”

  She waggled the transparent stencil at me. “Go ahead. Just think of a problem,” she coaxed. “And answer it.”

  Then she swiveled back to her black DOS screen.

  I looked down at the disordered chaos I had been scribbling, the beginnings of a house with trapezoid windows. The only problem I could think of to fix was our family. So I began plotting out my lineage, taping two pieces of computer paper to the kitchen wall beside each other. Starting with two end points—triangles representing Dima and me—I worked up. The problem burst backward from the fix. Men were represented by parallelograms, women by ovals, and kids by diamonds. I traced red lines between men and women who were married and stenciled blue lightning bolts off these to link kids to their parents. The paternal side of the chart quickly filled up and refused to fit onto the page neatly like my mother’s family. On my fifth try I became so frustrated by the lack of symmetry caused by multiple wives that I wadded both sides up and stuffed them and the flow-chart stencil into the garbage, and returned to my aimless doodling.

  After she received her certification, Ma’s continuing obsession with ensuring we had American teeth led her to take a temp job at an orthodontist’s office over a higher-paying entry-level position at Boeing. She was relieved to finally be able to afford to get us into braces and headgear. “This is for your own good. You want the other kids to make fun of your buckteeth?” But Ma’s plan to spare me the scorn of my peers had one central flaw—headgear. Despite the orthodontist’s instructions stipulating that I should only wear the full-skull scaffolding at night, Ma affixed them to my face during the school day as well, in order to ensure we got our money’s worth.

  I was entering third grade now, and our mornings started with squabbles over what to wear. I’d emerge from our jumbled closet in Baba’s old OPEC sweater, and Ma would reprimand me, “You want everyone to think we’re poor? That I can’t dress you in new clothes?”

  Ma ripped the sweater off over my head, snagging the headgear on the way off, then stuffed me into a Blue Angels F-18 sweatshirt and gray sweatpants ensemble. She failed to notice the jets on the shirt, which meant it was for a boy, but no matter, it had been on sale and was enough sizes too big that I could grow into it. If that wasn’t bad enough, she hiked the bottom half of the outfit to my bellybutton and tucked the sweatshirt in to give me what she referred to as a “tidy” appearance. To complete the indignity, she matched a pair of fresh white socks and penny loafers, then stepped back to observe her styling. She nodded approvingly, apparently pleased with herself.

  I turned reluctantly to the vanity mirror and burst into tears. When someone says they were a homely child, they never sa
w me. I had beady eyes behind bottle-cap glasses, a monorail of headgear, and a nerdy boy’s sweatpants outfit on.

  “At least take the headgear off!” I groveled.

  Unmoved, Ma sent me down to the bus stop at the end of the road anyway. I waddled the whole way, trying to calm my overexcited waistline. If I’d been the bus driver that day, I would not have stopped for the misshapen, angry little person waiting under the “No Trespassing” sign.

  Dread filled me on the approach to school. I wore my hood up through the hallway and entered my new classroom, ready for a hail of laughing sounds. But the principal came on the intercom and asked us all to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance before anyone noticed me. I shuffled up from my seat and moved my mouth, pretending I knew the words to what everyone was saying. Crystal, my desk buddy, pinched me and showed me how to hold my hand over my heart. After the pledge, Mrs. Newton pulled down a world map in front of the chalkboard and affixed its hook to a nail. She then pointed out the fat boot next to Africa. “This is the Persian Gulf,” she said, circling the Gulf with her finger, “and this is Kuwait.” She pointed at a shape on the map, meaningless to her and everyone else in the room but me. I squirmed in my desk, trying to stop my hand from shooting up to correct her. Mrs. Newton glanced at me and then smiled around the room, not wanting to draw more attention than necessary to the scaffolding on my face.