Silverworld

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “So you just want to, what? Stick her in one of those places? Where you don’t have to think about her?”

  “Sami.” Now her mother was using her attorney voice. “This is about what’s best for Teta. She’s losing weight; she’s becoming a shut-in. I don’t like this any better than you do. In assisted care she’ll be able to socialize more, get therapy. They’re doing amazing things with dementia patients….”

  “Dementia?” Sami shook her head. “Teta doesn’t have dementia!” She kept her voice lowered, worried her grandmother would hear them, but she couldn’t help the tears that started to well up. “Why do you even listen to Aunt Ivory so much, anyway? Just because she’s Dad’s sister. Sometimes I think you care more about what she thinks than what Tony or I do.”

  “Samara, you know that’s not true,” Alia said sternly.

  “I don’t know anything!” Sami wailed, and ran out of the room.

  Sami sat on the front steps with her chin in her hands and watched her big brother shoot hoops.

  Overhead, the sky was a dazzling, watercolor blue, crisscrossed with squawking parrots, palm fronds, and golden hibiscus flowers. It was just as weird here, she sometimes thought, as in her dreams. Before they’d moved, she’d never imagined a place like Coconut Shores even existed. She was used to cold lakes and old mountains and fireplaces. They’d been here nearly a year, and while she could see how pretty Florida was, she often thought she couldn’t feel it. Not deep down. And why should she? Whenever her mom put on the news, it was all about global warming and how Florida was about to be underwater. Or pollution and toxic algae. Or deadly mosquitoes, or people on drugs. Every day things just seemed to get worse and worse—lately, she’d had the feeling that the whole world was getting out of balance, somehow. But no one wanted to see it. People acted like all that mattered was the blue sky and the beach.

  Tony had waved to her when she came out, but kept dribbling, his hair spiky with sweat—six days past Thanksgiving and still eighty degrees out. Sami pulled her knees up and rested her chin on top of them, eternally grateful that her brother didn’t mind having a kid sister. He had a big, easy smile and a good loose laugh, and there had seemed to be a crowd of teenagers over at the house practically the second they moved in. Sami still didn’t have any real friend-friends here. Not like Tony. Instead, she sent texts to her old friends in Ithaca, about the dumb Coconut Shores girls who only cared about their tans and makeup.

  “Hey, kiddo.” Tony came over, rubbing the back of his neck with a towel. He was just three years older than Sami and it used to be funny when he called her that. Lately, though, it kind of bothered her. “You okay?”

  Sami lowered her face, annoyed. She’d never learned how to control her own facial expressions very well. You must learn how to put on your veil, her grandmother had said, fanning out a hand over her mouth and nose like a belly dancer. “When you need to.”

  “Aunt Ivory was bugging Teta again.” She handed a thermos of clinking ice water to her brother.

  “Hey! Thanks.” He gulped it down, then ran the length of his forearm across his brow.

  “I’ll never get why Mom moved us three blocks away from her. She doesn’t even like Aunt Ivory that much; it’s totally obvious,” Sami groused.

  Tony sat next to her on the cement steps. He shrugged. “Ivory’s family, Sami. You can’t take things so seriously—you’ll go nuts.”

  “I’ve already gone.”

  Tony grinned. “Your words, my friend, your words.”

  “So, guess what? You know how Ivory’s been wanting to stick Teta in a nursing home? Well, Mom was going on about it just now like she’s starting to have the same idea. It was horrible. I wouldn’t let her even talk about it.”

  Tony’s eyebrows rose. Their mother was a defense attorney, famous in their family for never backing off in an argument. “How’d you stop her? From talking about it, I mean.”

  Sami took a sip from her own thermos. “I basically ran out.”

  He nodded heavily. “That works, I guess. It’s not like she isn’t going to keep talking about it nonstop, anyway.”

  Sami sighed, her face against her knees. Then she looked at Tony, frowning. “So, wait—Mom already talked to you about it? About Teta?”

  Tony jerked and turned away. “Uh…”

  “And…you didn’t say anything to me?” She frowned at her brother. “Whoa. Hold on. She’s already decided, hasn’t she? She just wanted to ‘talk’ so she could tell me what’s going to happen. That’s it, isn’t it? Why didn’t you warn me?”

  “Jeez, Sam.” Tony glanced at the basketball. There was a deep V between his eyebrows. “Sometimes there’s just no way to talk to you about stuff—you figure things out before I even know what I want to say.”

  “But this is Teta we’re talking about! It’s not like Tumble.”

  A few weeks after their mother had put the house on the market, Sami and Tony came home to discover that not only were they moving to Florida, but their mother had given their dog away. She’d done it without saying a word beforehand. “He’d be miserable down there in that heat—all that fur,” Alia had pleaded. “And it’s just too much—to try to move an old dog like that. It isn’t fair to Tumble.”

  “What about to us?” Sami had cried, tears streaking her face. It was one of the few times in her life Alia had done something huge that Sami hadn’t been able to sense coming. She’d never imagined such a thing. As bad as the move was, losing their dog was even worse.

  Now Tony’s face turned red. He was still upset about it, Sami knew. “Sami, I know this isn’t like Tumble.” His voice was stiff and strange—a deep sort of grown-uppy voice he’d started to have lately. Sometimes he almost sounded like a sad version of their father—at least of how Sami remembered him sounding. “But did you ever consider that—well, what if Mom and Aunt Ivory are actually right? I mean, Teta doesn’t even make sense anymore—she’s not acting normally—no matter what you say. Maybe it’s not really that important how you feel about it. Believe it or not, maybe this is more about what’s best for Teta.”

  Sami stood up then. Even though Tony was nearly a foot taller than her, she glared into his eyes, anger making her whole body hot. “She doesn’t have dementia now, Tony. But if we stick her in one of those places, she really will get messed up.”

  Tony shook his head. “This isn’t like one of Teta’s fairy stories. I know you think you can get inside her brain and see her hiding in there—or something. But you can’t. That isn’t the way this stuff works, Sami. She needs professional care and stuff. Doctors. Not make-believe.”

  Sami pulled back. She’d never before heard Tony make fun of Teta’s stories—real or not. She glared at him for a second before she said in a low voice, “You’re not one of the grown-ups, Tony. Not yet, anyway. And I wish you’d quit trying to be. I wish you’d just—like—be a kid again. Or my brother. The way you used to be!”

  Tony shook his head and dribbled toward the basketball hoop, saying as he went, “Yeah, and I wish you’d try growing up.”

  The house was quiet and empty when Sami went back inside. A note on the kitchen table said that her mother had taken Teta to a doctor’s appointment. It didn’t matter, Sami thought despondently. She just wanted to hide in her room, anyway. There, she pouted at her mirror, scowled fiercely, hands on her hips.

  After a moment, her shoulders lowered and she plopped on her bed. Tilted against the wall and framed by a frill of silver waves, the mirror gazed back at her. Its glass was so old, it looked blue and weathered in long strips across its surface. Teta said it was created by mermaids, before the creation of glass itself, and had been handed down through the family from an Ifrit, courageous Magali of Palmyra—that it was an enchanted mirror, a doorway to other lands. And, Teta always added, it must never, under any circumstances, ever be covered up.

  “They br
ought it for me on an airplane,” Teta had said, lifting her knobby hands in the air. “All the way from Lebanon. Three strong men carried it in a big crate right up to our house.” She smiled. In those days, her teeth were magically white, her skin still smooth. “That was your father’s idea. Joe knew how much it meant to me. He found a way to save it.”

  A couple of years after Joe died, Teta told Sami she wanted her to have it. “When you miss him, you look right here.” She’d pointed to the silver surface. “You can talk to him and he will hear you.”

  Sami was only six at the time, but she had still wondered how her daddy could be in the mirror. She kept thinking: He’s just gone.

  Teta had hugged her and said, “Think of it as a window. He’s not in the glass, but you can speak through it to wherever he is.”

  Now Sami glanced at herself in the mirror. Did her face seem brighter? Was there an unusual sort of gleam on her skin and hair? She slid off her bed, crouched next to the mirror, and whispered to her grandmother’s double, “Ashrafieh, why can’t I have someone like you? Someone who would make me strong or smart or something?”

  For a moment, out of the corner of her eye, she seemed to see reflected blue dots twinkling in the air. But they vanished as soon as she turned. Sami closed her eyes and shook her head, trying to clear out all the shadows and cobwebs. Seeing things. Teta often talked about spells and trances, people who were haunted by genies. She knew all the ways someone could be inhabited or spellbound. Born into a Bedouin tribe, Teta said she had sand and sunlight in her blood, that she’d been a desert dweller for many, many lifetimes. She wore a necklace of silver coins and told her grandchildren that she’d grown up crossing the desert, learning about potions and herbs.

  But then everything changed. The magic stopped. A handsome man from Beirut had won her heart and moved her to his house. Her daughter, Alia, was raised in the city, and then Teta’s grandchildren were all the way Americans. Sometimes it seemed as if Teta was still back there, crossing the desert in her mind, living among the Bedouin legends and charms, while the rest of the world had moved on. In fact, Sami wasn’t always sure if her wonderful grandmother really was still entirely there—inside her body, still the Teta she had always known. She’d gotten shrunken, secretive, her eyes full of a mysterious fear.

  Worrying, Sami felt her own breath catch in her throat. She looked up again at the mirror and this time she felt distinctly as if her reflection was gazing at her. It wasn’t just the reflection of her eyes, but more as if there was someone else inside there, looking back. That’s when she had a new idea: what if Teta believed she was under one of those Bedouin spells? There were the princesses mesmerized by their own reflections in gazing pools, young sailors who fell under the whispered incantations of mermaids, entire families lost and wandering in the wilderness of the genies.

  Sami got slowly to her feet. She didn’t necessarily believe in magic, but Teta surely did. What was that old quote her grandmother loved? There is far more unseen than seen in the natural world. And hadn’t they learned in health class just last week that a person could make themselves sick simply by thinking they were sick? Psychosomatic, the teacher had written on the whiteboard. It was sort of a weird idea, but maybe, she thought…just maybe…Sami could convince Teta that she knew how to break the hex.

  She put her hands on her hips, thinking and pacing. If there was one thing she knew for certain—Teta’s charm book was the one source of all things enchanted. Sami had to find it. It was an old book with a cracked leather cover that Teta had brought with her from Lebanon. She told people it was just a diary. But she’d admitted to Sami, with a finger to her lips, that it was really a book of great and magical powers. She kept it hidden away, and she had instructed Sami that she must never touch or even look at it if Teta wasn’t with her. Teta promised that once Sami turned twelve, she’d begin revealing the book’s secrets to her. But her birthday was still weeks away, and judging by her mother’s determined expression, Sami sensed there was no time to spare: Sami would have to search for the book. And she would have to do it quickly.

  Back in their house in Ithaca, the book’s hiding place used to be under her grandmother’s pillow. But now, sliding her hand under the thin, jasmine-scented pillow, Sami found only prayer beads. Luckily, Teta didn’t have a lot of furniture or possessions, so the hiding places were limited. Sami moved quickly and carefully, trying not to leave any trace of her hunt. She looked behind the painting of the Virgin Mary—which Teta sometimes called “Fatima” and sometimes “The Goddess”—hanging over the bed. She rummaged through colored jars of myrrh and sandalwood oil and other murky potions on Teta’s dresser, green and amber and sea-colored glass jars labeled in smudged Arabic. A single clear vial said MAGICK WATER. In the closet that Teta liked to call her “memory cabinet,” there were olive oil soaps, Teta’s fortune-telling cards, ointments from the Dead Sea, a whittled caravan of camels linked by silver chains. But no spell book.

  Bookshelves? Check. Bed stand? Check. Under her rocker, her floor lamp, her jewelry box? Check, check, and check. Sami stood in the middle of the room, frowning, hands on her hips. She hadn’t seen the old book in a long time—certainly not since they’d moved. Yet Teta had to still have it. The book was as prized as the mirror, possibly more so. That was, she supposed, why her grandmother hid it so well. Too darn well.

  She looked at Teta’s little table clock with the Indian numbers and the bent hands that seemed to move backward. Teta and her mother had been gone for over an hour and could be back at any time.

  Under the bed, she was startled to discover a half-filled suitcase. Perhaps this was just extra storage, she tried to reassure herself. Perhaps Teta had packed it herself, planning a trip? Not likely. These were all of Teta’s clothes, folded in her mother’s neat piles. They were already getting her ready to go, Sami thought darkly. Maybe Alia was even planning to move Teta this week.

  Never.

  Sami couldn’t accept that. She would not. Her father used to tell her, Don’t you ever give up on anything important, Sami. It hardly even mattered how things turned out—just as long as you tried your hardest and never quit. It was a feeling she’d sensed inside herself for nearly all her life—especially when her teta told her stories of the ancient beings, the Ifrit, and the Flickers who stood up against demons. She felt it when she heard about the ruined castles and giantess princesses, women generals and warriors her grandmother was descended from.

  Sami folded her arms tightly, which had always been her best thinking position. It felt like she could pull the energy from her heart right into her mind that way. She took a couple of deep breaths, looked back at Teta’s pillow—the place the spell book should have been—and tried to clear her mind.

  A glimmer started to tickle the back of her thoughts. She blinked at the door and the hallway beyond. Slowly, Sami went out and walked back to her own room. She looked in her closet—almost as orderly as Teta’s. Sami kept things so neat, it was hard to imagine anything stashed in her room that she wouldn’t notice immediately. Still, a little premonition, like an itch between the shoulder blades, kept her looking. She poked through her desk and dresser, all around her bed, under the mattress. She pushed aside stacks of textbooks for school, the unstarted project for social studies class, pre-algebra homework—then she looked under the bed. Their new Florida house had so few closets, Alia stored odds and ends down there—Christmas decorations, some cleaning supplies, a stack of her old Law Review journals, and a small rolled-up carpet. Sami was about to stand, then thought better of it, and reached over and pulled out the carpet. It was the kind that Muslims knelt on to say their prayers. When Teta and her daughter immigrated to the States, Teta had brought one small suitcase and the prayer rug on the plane. She said she liked to “pick and choose” her beliefs, and frequently mentioned that she had her own private faith. Even so, the rug was a rare and beautiful memento of her Bedouin childhood—
an item, like the mirror, that had been handed down through her tribe. As a little girl, Sami had liked to run her hands over its silk threads, vibrant whorls of blue and red, and pretend she was on a flying carpet.

  The rolled carpet was held in place with a piece of twine. She unknotted it and opened the carpet, and the scent of lemon, sand, and sunlight filled the air.

  Lying in the center of the carpet was the spell book.

  Sami sat back on her heels, breathless.

  She admired her grandmother’s forethought. Teta had probably guessed her daughter was planning to do something drastic—maybe even send her away—and decided to hide the book here for safekeeping. It was slightly curved from being rolled up, and its leather cover was battered and worn, but it was in surprisingly good shape, Sami thought, for something that looked about a zillion years old.

  She ran her fingers over the book’s nubbly surface, then carefully turned the gleaming, gilt-edged pages. The paper was so thin, it barely made a wisp of a sound as she leafed through. There were diagrams and drawings of things that looked like mysterious inventions, with arrows and circles and dotted lines, but whenever she tried to look closely at an illustration, it seemed to shift slightly out of focus. A light herbal scent of flowers, lilacs and geraniums—and different sorts of unidentifiable fruits and spices—seemed to waft up as she turned the pages, then vanish just as quickly. Everything was written in thin black pen strokes, a flowing, perfect penmanship. Again, Sami ran her finger along the pen’s faint indentations—nothing like her grandmother’s handwriting—and tried to read, but almost none of it was written in English. She thought she could recognize bits of French and Arabic. At least she thought it might be, as these letters, too, seemed to slightly bounce and jiggle whenever she tried to look directly at them.