by Nafisa Haji
“It’ll be fine. I promise. No big deal.” He gave me another hug, tight and quick, then looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go pick up Cory from guitar class and Michelle from ballet. I’ll be home soon, Angie. We’ll talk about this some more. But you don’t worry about anything. Okay?”
I stared at him without nodding, not saying a word. I listened to the clink of his car keys, heard him go out the door, start up the car, and drive off. I took deep breaths to calm myself. It didn’t work. Without thinking, I jumped off the couch and ran out after him, knowing he was already gone. After a second, I came back into the house and heard the phone ringing. It was Mom.
“Angie? Oh, baby, come home!”
“What’s wrong, Mom?”
“It’s Dad—your grandfather. He had a heart attack. I—I did CPR, but Angie, he didn’t make it. He was dead before the ambulance came and they couldn’t revive him, either. Will you come home, Angie? You will, won’t you?”
I said I would and hung up. I started to cry. Sandwiched between death and birth—and more death if I did what my father wanted—I didn’t know what to do. I left the house, crossing the street to ring Deena’s bell, thinking of Grandpa all the time, remembering all the things he’d ever said to me, appreciating what a good man he was, now that he was gone, thinking of what a trial I’d been to him. Knowing, without having to wonder, what he would have said about Dad’s idea to get an abortion. Sin on top of sin. The opposite of the path to redemption.
Deena’s daughter, Sabah, answered the door.
“Is your mom home?”
“Yes.”
I pushed my way into the house.
Behind me, Sabah said, “She’s praying.”
That made me stop. “Praying?”
“In her room. She’ll be done in a minute. You can wait in the living room.”
I was already in the living room, standing at the edge of it, at the end of the hallway that led to Deena’s bedroom. Her door was open. I saw her standing on a rug laid at an angle on the floor. She was draped and covered in a big white sheet of cloth. She bent at the waist, stood again, put her hands up to her ears, then folded her body all the way down, touching her forehead to the floor, her lips moving the whole time, her backside in the air. I’d never seen her pray before. I couldn’t take my eyes away. She was my friend, she was Sadiq’s mother, the grandmother of the life inside of me, a stranger, too, with strange, foreign ways—she was all of these things at the same time. I thought of Grandpa—of how he would have seen her. As someone who had to be saved, praying, in this strange way, to the wrong god, not the one I’d just come back to. After a few minutes, she was done. She folded up the little rug, stood, and turned, catching sight of me. She came out of the room, loosening the sheet that still draped her body, smiling like what I’d seen was no big deal.
“Angela!” She was happy to see me. She came closer and saw my face. “Angela? Is everything okay?”
I didn’t say anything for a second. Then I nodded. “Everything’s fine. I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were busy.”
“Oh, that’s okay. I’m done with my prayers. Shall I make us some tea?”
“No, thank you. I—I’ve got to go.”
She frowned. “Is everything all right, Angela? You look—upset. Has anything happened?”
What could I say? I was ashamed of myself. She’d been so kind—this woman with her strange, misguided faith. And I had fallen so short of all that my faith required. I’d had sex with her son, who was younger than me and still in school. I was carrying his child. My grandfather was dead. There was nothing I could say that would express everything I felt. All I knew was that I had to get home. Dad, with his and Connie’s murderous plans for abortion; Deena, with her foreign god and alien prayers—these people were strangers, alien to the way I’d been raised. I had to find my way back home for the same reasons I’d left. To wipe the slate clean and start all over again.
I said, “Everything’s fine. Thanks,” heading for the door. “ ’Bye,” I called over my shoulder, running out of the house.
I ran into my father’s house, got my bag out, and started to pack. I was sobbing out loud, not realizing that someone was in the house, listening.
Footsteps. A mumbled voice. “Are you okay?”
It was Jake. Jake March, the handyman. I saw him, but I couldn’t stop crying. I screamed, “No! No, I am not okay! My grandfather’s dead. I have to get out of here! I have to go home! But I can’t! I’m pregnant! I’m gonna have a baby! And I have nowhere to go!”
He stepped into the den and took me in his arms, less clumsily than my father had done before.
I came home a married woman. After kissing and hugging and fussing over me, saying how worried she’d been, Mom said, when we were alone, still shocked, “Angie. I spoke to your father. This baby. It’s not Jake’s.”
Because she hadn’t asked me a question, I didn’t answer her.
“You married the handyman, Angie. So much older than you.” She’d barely met him and already she didn’t like him, that was clear. “Did you tell him the truth?”
“He knows.”
“And what are you going to tell your baby, when it’s old enough to ask?”
“There won’t be anything to tell it. It’ll grow up with a father. He—or she—won’t ask.”
“And the real father? Who is he, Angie? Doesn’t he have a right to know the truth?”
“He’s nobody. There’s nobody. Just Jake,” I said, and just by saying it, willing it, living it, I made it true. At least until Jo came to me and asked me about the color of her eyes—something I had never considered, something I’d never learned about, even though I went back to school, got my high school diploma, and earned a degree at the college Chris had just dropped out of in what should have been his final year.
When the babies were born—Jo pushing her way out first, big and healthy; Chris, a half hour later, so small that the doctors had worried, frail in every way but will, all through his baby years—Jake was right beside me, praying and holding my hand the whole while.
We worshipped those babies together. Jo, the strong one, who was cautious, not learning to walk until she was fifteen months old. But she never toddled, never fell once she started. Not like Chris, the weak one—always the first to get sick, worse than anyone else, and the last to get well—who was up and off at nine months, before he had any sense of balance, falling and picking himself up before giving a thought to the next step. He willed himself out of the fragile health he started life out with, a football star in high school.
Talking was another story. Jo was communicating before she had the words to do it—babbling out sounds that sounded like questions. She’d point to everything and look at me and say “Ah?” with a question mark that let me know she wanted to know the names of things. Of everything. She couldn’t say anything yet. But she wanted me to name everything—animals, people, colors, numbers. She reminded me of Helen Keller in that old movie The Miracle Worker, when Helen finally figures out what Anne Bancroft has been trying to teach her—that the sign for water means “water.” Then she grabs Anne Bancroft’s hand and points to everything, so she can learn the words. That was Jo. By the time she was two, she wasn’t just speaking in sentences. She was talking in whole paragraphs. All day long. Sometimes, in my less-than-patient moods, it took a lot not to want to yell at her to shut up. She never let anyone else talk! I used to joke about it. That I had to ice my ears at night because they’d get sore from having to listen to Jo go on and on all day.
The one person who never got tired of Jo’s yapping was her father. It was so strange to see. He’s not much of a talker himself and you’d think he wouldn’t have patience with anyone else’s chatter. But Jake came alive when Jo started to talk. As a father. And as a husband. Her voice erased the awkwardness between us. When she called him Daddy, she made our marriage real. He would listen and nod through the whole length of Jo’s baby-voiced monologues. It was a lovely thing, s
oothing away the last trace of any doubts I may have had about marrying him.
Even Mom warmed to him, over the years, never again raising the subject of what we’d spoken of when I first brought him home. Once, in the earliest days, when Jake and I had just handled a loud double-diapering session, working as a team, getting the twins settled down and smiling after they’d both been screaming at the top of their lungs, Mom had let herself in without us noticing, and watched the four of us cuddle up on the sofa. Surprising us, because we hadn’t known she was there, she said, “Treasure these moments, Angie. Don’t let them slip away without appreciating them. Those babies of yours aren’t going to remember any of it when they’re grown. I guess they’re not supposed to. It’s their job to grow up and away from you. And yours to remember.”
I’d bitten my lip, thinking she was chiding me for being ungrateful to her.
Things between Mom and me were never smooth, something we didn’t talk about, not since I’d run away. But her relationship with me had nothing to do with the kind of mother I wanted to be, I’d told myself, shrugging off the distance between us. My babies had a father—a good Christian man, the gentle head of the household we created, slowly, together, quietly providing the strength and guidance that is a man’s duty to give. I had tried my best to be a good wife, too, looking up to him in a way I had not been sure I could when we first met. Only now is the first time we’d ever really been on our own, just husband and wife—apart from those few weeks when the twins went to Africa. But that didn’t count. Then, they were coming back. Now, who knew what would happen?
The doorbell rang. It was Mom, unexpected, home straight from the airport, from wherever the heck she’d been this time.
“Is he gone?” she asked, a little breathless, as if she’d been running.
“To boot camp. He called to say he was okay.” On the phone, Chris hadn’t sounded like Chris. “It was like he was reading from a script. Like a robot.”
Mom nodded. Of course. She’d know what I was talking about. She’d been through this before, with the man who’d been her husband. But that’s not the same as when it’s your baby.
“What about Jo?”
“She’s fine. Worried about Chris, I guess.”
“Has she discussed her plans with you? About what she wants to do when she graduates?”
“Be a missionary. Like you.” I heard the resentment in my voice.
“No. Not anymore.”
I frowned.
“She didn’t tell you about this job she’s got lined up?”
“A job?” I shrugged. “She’s busy with school. She’ll tell me eventually.” I didn’t say anything else, realizing suddenly that the way things were between Jo and me, I had no right to be smug with Mom. Not when Jo obviously talked to her more than she did with me. When she’d told me about the languages she was studying, three years ago, with a lift to her chin, daring me to raise that old subject, I hadn’t said anything. She was learning his languages. Sadiq’s. And I didn’t want to know why.
“Well, I’m worried,” Mom said. “You should talk to her, Angie.”
We were in the kitchen. I was putting on some coffee. “You came back early,” I said, trying to change the subject. “I would have come to the airport if you’d have let me know.”
“Won’t you let go, Angie?” Mom said suddenly. I didn’t know what she was talking about and looked at her, confused. “I don’t blame you for being angry with me. You’ve carried it around on your shoulders since you were a girl—since I went back to school to get my nursing degree, when I finally managed to climb out of the hole of darkness I crawled into when you were barely done crawling yourself, because of your father leaving. Later, when I started going away on my missions, you just got madder and madder. I know you don’t think I was a very good mother, Angie. That may be so. I’m a better one now, but you haven’t let yourself notice in all these years. You’ve been so wrapped up in the role of being a mother yourself that you won’t let me be yours. The truth is, you’ve been a good mom. I know I’ve never said it out loud. But I’ve noticed. You’ve been the opposite of what I was. Focused. Always present in the lives of your children. When they were little, I saw how in the middle of adult conversation, you’d turn and answer a question no one else noticed being asked, tuned into those baby voices, which, for you, always came first. But now—any fool could see it—there’s something wrong between you and Jo. Whatever it is, Angie, don’t let it fester. Not the way things have between you and me for all these years.”
I didn’t say anything, just closed my eyes to try to keep the tears from falling.
Mom sighed. “I didn’t tell you I was coming home because I didn’t have time, Angie. I was in the biggest hurry. I dropped everything, right where it was, as soon as I heard about Chris. I came back for you. I’m here, Angie. I’ll stay for as long as you want. For as long as I’m needed.”
My eyes still closed, I whispered, “I’m scared to death, Mom. I don’t want him to go to war.”
“I know, baby,” she said, turning me around to face her, taking me in her arms, stroking my hair like I had so desperately needed her to do before I ran away all those years ago.
Part Two
Jo
I held my tongue, and spake nothing: I kept silence, yea,
even from good words; but it was pain and grief to me.
Psalm 39, v. 5
By the time I got home from Washington Dulles Airport, it was the middle of the night. I let myself into my condo, dumping my bag just barely inside the door before kicking it shut. I went straight to bed, like I always did, fooling myself into thinking I’d actually be able to sleep when I knew I wouldn’t. Not after the kind of assignment I’d just come home from. After a couple of restless hours, I gave up and made my way into the kitchen to make myself some tea. But I was hungry, too. And there wasn’t any food. I went back to the bag, abandoned at the entrance, and rummaged through it to find myself a granola bar.
While I waited for the kettle to whistle, I went to the dining table to sift through the mail that the woman next door had collected for me, neatly stacked, and looked around at the plants she’d watered while I was away, green and thriving. Colleen was a wonderful neighbor—a retired secretary who had worked for years for various congressmen, up on the Hill—quietly vigilant on my behalf. She spent more time in my apartment than I did.
The kettle whistled. I left the mail where it was, went back into the kitchen, dunked a tea bag into a mug of steaming water, and carried the mug and the granola bar into the living room. I clicked the television on. And swore. Nothing but snow. I must have missed the cable bill. I kept forgetting to set up the automatic payment online. This wasn’t the first time this had happened.
I leaned my head back on the couch and thought about the movie collection in the cabinet next to the TV. In my bag, there was an Urdu television drama I’d picked up at the Karachi airport. But that was work—more useful for keeping up my command of Urdu than anything I encountered on the assignments they sent me on. High-quality Urdu, no subtitles. And they were good, too. Hours and hours of drama, heavy on the dialogue and light on the action. One I had enjoyed in the past was an adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead. I had some Arabic TV shows on DVD, too. But I wasn’t in the mood for either.
I looked at the clock. It was 4:45 a.m., 1:45 on the West Coast. Dan would be fast asleep. Last time I’d called him in the middle of the night, he was mad. Not like when we’d first started dating, when he’d wake up to talk and listen, in love with the sound of my voice. After college, I’d come to Washington, D.C., and he’d gone back to California, to L.A., which made our relationship a long-distance one, still nice and chaste and Christian, with hardly any physical temptation to get in the way of our plan to really get to know each other. In the last year, he’d tried to make things more serious between us, even mentioning marriage a few times.
His timing was terrible, pushing for commitment right when work was cau
sing me to lose all perspective. I didn’t know how I’d lasted as long as I had. I sighed with relief. At least it was over. I took a bite of the granola bar and a sip of my tea, my mind still floating around, landing on scenes from the assignment I’d just come home from.
When Artemis Intelligence Services, the private defense contractor I worked for, had recruited me through Professor Crawley, I thought I would be one of the good guys, helping to catch terrorists bent on killing Americans. I would aid and assist in the investigations and interrogations that would prevent those bad guys from ever hitting us again. I didn’t know what I knew now—that the line between good and bad would get so blurry. That other line—the one between us and them—getting more distinct. It had to be, for us to be able to do what had to be done. But there were visceral moments that stayed with me, fueling my imagination, disorienting me, making it hard sometimes to remember the role I was assigned to play, to stay detached from the things I had seen—the things I had been a part of.
In those moments, I saw men in hoods or goggles, the snip of the scissors sharp in their ears as they were shorn of their clothing, before their hearing was muffled. Deprived of sight and sound. Before that, beaten, bound in shackles and chains. Drugged with tranquilizers, administered roughly, through the rectum. Diapered.
I only really saw this a few times. The initial softening-up process, when I was an unnecessary appendage, there only in case I was needed. The loud noise and music, the orders to stand or squat or hang from the bars of a cell. Pain and humiliation need no translation. Sometimes, the team’s assignment was just to pluck men off the street and fling them into prisons in places they’d never been and would never see. Other times, our assignment was only a transfer. Picking up detainees from one level of hell and delivering them into another. Often, too often, the target was already broken before we got him, at the hands of those who had him before. Sometimes I witnessed the breaking myself. Once, we picked up a detainee from a place to which I had been a part of delivering him only months before. The man we’d handed over and the man they handed back were not the same. And the differences—mental and physical—were shocking. The team took pictures—they always took pictures. The marks on his body were in places that made me shudder. Cuts and burns.
