The Sweetness of Tears

by Nafisa Haji

  Ghalib

  Chris was alive. All broken into pieces, but alive. The doctors induced a coma, to keep the swelling down in his brain. They kept him that way for weeks. Mom and I did shifts at the hospital, hoping some part of him knew we were there. Dad didn’t do shifts. He stayed there. Only leaving when Mom or I dragged him out, kicking and screaming, forcing him home to take a shower and to change. Grandma Faith was with us the whole time.

  I kept thinking and thinking, remembering what Mom had asked me. The morning of the accident. She’d known that something was wrong. She thought it was because of something I said.

  We’d been having such a good time. I was scared at Thanksgiving. To see Chris’s face when Grandma Faith and Uncle Ron were talking about the war in Iraq. But everything was fine the next day and the days after. More than fine. It was like going back in time. Like being a kid again, carefree. For both of us, I thought.

  But then, the accident happened and all we could ask ourselves—because we were too afraid to ask each other—was, why? The question presumed something that we all tried to deny, something that became harder and harder to do.

  When the police officer who wrote the report on the accident came to the hospital, he said, “He was going pretty fast. The trajectory—it was straight into the tree. A pretty big tree, too. Hard to get the car untwisted from the trunk of it.”

  I shuddered. And then sat up straight at what Mom asked him next, “Was he drinking?”

  “No ma’am. No alcohol in his blood, according to the doctor.”

  “Mom—why would you even ask?”

  Dad said, “You don’t know, Jo. Your brother was pulled over a couple of months back. For driving drunk.”

  “He what?! And you didn’t tell me?”

  “He didn’t want us to tell you.”

  When the doctor had asked whether Chris had been on any medication, Dad rattled off a couple of names. I hadn’t known about that, either, that Chris was on medication. Again, Dad told me, Chris didn’t want me to know. That he had PTSD.

  I pulled Mom out into the hall. “So— you just don’t tell me? I’m not a part of this family? I get pushed out of Chris’s life? Just like that?” I realized I was shouting, and stopped, stricken, when I saw Mom’s face. I put my arms around her and we both cried. The thing is, all of us suspected. That Chris’s accident wasn’t an accident. That he’d driven into that tree on purpose. And all the facts that we didn’t know at the time, the stuff that we learned, in pieces, over the course of those first few weeks, supported our suspicions. One day, while Chris was still in a coma, Dad went home to shower, shooed out of the hospital by me, Mom, and Grandma Faith. There was a message on voice mail. For Chris. A reminder. They’d called him. That morning of the accident. To say that he was about to get redeployed to Iraq.

  Dad called them back. And explained the situation. Chris wasn’t going anywhere, thank God!

  Then, another day, when I went home to sleep for a few hours, and couldn’t, I got out my laptop and looked up the meds that Chris was on. For both of them, one of the possible side effects was suicidal thoughts.

  Restlessly, I checked my e-mail, which I hadn’t done since the day of the accident. Chris had sent me a message. That morning of his crash.

  Re: For Jo

  I’m sorry, Jo. Tell Mom and Dad I’m sorry. I love you. I love Mom and Dad.

  There was an attachment to the e-mail. A document. When I opened it, I saw that it was a journal. A record of all of Chris’s experiences in Iraq. All the stuff he wouldn’t talk about.

  I spent the next two hours reading. When I was done, when the numbness of shock faded, a fountain of tears sprang open, dripping onto the keyboard of my laptop. Oh, Chris, Chris—why didn’t you tell me any of this? I knew the answer already. To give voice to the words, he would have had to listen to the sound of his own memories. So, none of us knew—not Mom or Dad or me—none of us could see the death you brought back inside of you from Iraq. I would have understood. But Chris didn’t know that. Because I’d stopped talking, too, long ago, never sharing my own doubts with you, the wall of them you helped me climb over, the truth I learned and put away on a shelf before the war even began. Later, I had demons of my own, screaming in my ears, too loud to let me hear that yours were louder and larger—taking the form of friends blown to bits, of children howling, of women sobbing, of old men’s eyes filled with recrimination, the last of these uttered in words I understood and which you couldn’t, because I refused to share the knowledge that was born of those old doubts that I hadn’t managed to overcome.

  I didn’t tell Mom what Chris had sent me. I didn’t have to. She knew. So did Dad. They didn’t need that final confirmation, the final proof. That Chris had attempted suicide.

  Dan came down to visit. A couple of times. The last time, I broke up with him, knowing that he was ready to move forward and admitting, out loud, that I wasn’t. I don’t think he was surprised.

  I also called Deena, to tell her I’d changed my mind. “I won’t be going to Pakistan. Not now, at least.”

  Before she hung up, Deena said, “Jo? Please. Will you stay in touch?”

  “I will. I promise I will,” I said, and meant it. I didn’t tell her what had happened to make me put off our trip. For a million reasons, most of them having to do with what I hadn’t told her, what I hadn’t told Sadiq. That he had a son, too. As well as a daughter.

  I never prayed so hard in my life. All of us did. It must have worked, too.

  When the doctors decided it was time to bring Chris out of his coma, they were hopeful. We waited for him to wake up for what felt like forever. When he did, it was hard not to shout and dance with joy. The doctors came rushing in, right after the nurses, to check the extent, if any, of the brain damage they’d warned us was possible.

  They asked him his name. Right answer! They asked him to count backward from ten. Again, full points! And then, they asked him if he could remember what year it was.

  In his weak, groggy voice, he said, “Nineteen ninety-seven?” with a question mark. The doctors asked him what he remembered happening to him last. What he described—a concert he and his band, Christian March, gave in high school—confirmed his first answer. He’d lost memory of more than six years of his life. Then, with a weak smile—oh, how good it was to see—Chris said, “Tired.”

  “Yes. You rest now, Chris. You’re going to be just fine,” the nurse on duty said. “You’re a lucky guy.”

  The neurologist, my favorite doctor out of the crew that had worked on Chris over the past few weeks, an Indian woman with an accent like Deena’s, said, “As he gets stronger, you’ll want to fill him in on what he’s forgotten. To try and jog his memory. It will help. But I want to warn you, he may never recover it fully. So it will be especially important for you to explain what he’s lost.”

  When she left, Mom turned to Dad and said, softly, with a look at Chris’s bed, to make sure he was still sleeping, “I want you to disconnect the cable out of that TV,” pointing to the set mounted on the wall.

  Months passed before Chris was ready to come home. During that time, I went back to D.C. and put my place on the market, packing up and having everything moved to San Diego, to put in storage. I was happier than ever about having quit my old job. I kept in touch with Cheryl, the lawyer. Her clients’ cases were moving forward at a snail’s pace, my services still unneeded.

  In one conversation I had with Cheryl, she brought up the subject of Fuzzy again.

  “I’ve got some new information for you. About that—uh— situation that you were asking about?”

  “Yes?”

  “I think that particular case has been handled.”

  “Handled?”

  “Mm-hmm. At first, like I told you before, it seemed like no one had even heard of him. Then I got word that someone had hired a lawyer for a client who met the description you gave me. The lawyer’s a friend of mine. I’m pretty sure it’s the same case you were asking about.�
�

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Anyway, before the case could go anywhere, my friend said the matter was resolved.”

  “Resolved?”

  “Resolved. As in home.”

  “Oh. Gotcha.”

  “Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean the bird’s out of the cage.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A lot of times, that’s one of the requirements for—uh—release. It’s more like a transfer. Of custody. The child goes from his father to his mother. But he’s still treated like a child, subject to guardianship. If you get what I mean.”

  “I think so.”

  So Fuzzy had been sent back to Pakistan. I could only hope he wasn’t locked up in some jail there. In the meantime, the job I’d signed up for in search of redemption wasn’t even close to starting. I had all the freedom and time in the world to be with Chris.

  In the last weeks before Chris finally came home, I began to understand what Mom was thinking when she’d asked Dad to disconnect the cable in the hospital. Before they discharged Chris, his broken body having healed itself one bone at a time, Mom got rid of the TV at home. She unsubscribed to the newspapers. Got rid of Internet access. She went through Chris’s room, removing all evidence of the last few years of his life—his uniform, his laptop, his cell phone with the numbers of the friends he’d fought with in Iraq. She called all his old friends and gave them strict instructions on how to deal with Chris. She contacted his newer ones, Marines, and told them not to call at all. She scrubbed his life clean of anything that might remind him of the things that drove him into that tree.

  I understood her instinct, shared it at first. To protect Chris from remembering. But I knew it was wrong. That to be whole again, someday, Chris would have to remember. And assimilate all he’d gone through with who he was going to decide to be. Like Dad had, with such success, when he met Mom. I told Mom, the day before Chris came home. I told her what he’d written in his journal. Familiar stories—of house raids and checkpoint shootings, of buddies shot and killed and blown up by roadside bombs—the kind of stories that only made it into the periphery of the way the war was covered in the news, without any mention of its long-term effects, on soldiers and civilians. There was just no room for that kind of reflection, not on television, with its occasional rah-rah stories, pretending to honor the troops without wanting to understand what they’d gone through. By telling Mom, I think I only managed to strengthen her resolve.

  “It won’t last,” I told Mom. “This bubble you’re building. Sooner or later, he’s going to find out. And it’ll be worse if it’s not from us.”

  “No. I won’t let that happen. I’ll protect him. The way I should have before. Can’t you see, Jo? That it’s back? The light in his eyes? Even with all the pain he’s in, it’s there. And I can’t let it go out again. Which it will. If he remembers the reason it died in the first place.”

  “It won’t work, Mom. You have to see that it won’t work.”

  But she didn’t hear me. I appealed to Dad.

  He shook his head, deferring totally to Mom’s judgment. “Angela—your mother—she knows what’s best for Chris. Better than any of us.”

  Grandma Faith agreed with me. But she didn’t do anything about it, supporting Mom by just being there, keeping silent. I stayed and celebrated Chris’s homecoming, participating in the blackout, the willful state of amnesia that Mom made us all assume for Chris. For his own good, she insisted. All he knew was that he’d been in an accident and had lost six years’ worth of memory, from high school until the day he woke up in the hospital. When he asked questions about what he was missing, Mom would put them off, telling him not to worry, that what was important would come back, all the while praying that it wouldn’t.

  A year after Chris’s accident, he was physically almost back to normal. Mom’s plan worked very well, at least at first. Chris was inwardly focused, he had to be, too busy with physical therapy, getting his body back into the shape it was in before the accident. But as time went on, the dam Mom built began to spring leaks. And she didn’t have enough fingers to plug up all the holes in the dike.

  Once, after a ride in the car with Dad, Chris came home and said, “Hey! I didn’t know we were fighting in a war.”

  “What?” Mom asked.

  “I just heard it on the radio.”

  Dad got in big trouble for that—letting the radio play in the car was something Mom had avoided, keeping plenty of Chris’s favorite CDs ready and on hand whenever she took him back and forth to the doctor’s.

  Another time, it was one of Chris’s friends, Sean, that incurred Mom’s wrath by talking about a ball game on cable, which whetted Chris’s appetite for television, something he hadn’t had time to think about for a long while.

  “Why don’t we have cable anymore?” he asked, after that visit from his friend.

  “We—uh—we just don’t,” Mom said, while Dad and I got suddenly busy with clearing the dining table after dinner.

  “Why not?”

  Mom shrugged. “We didn’t have it before. When you guys were little.”

  “Yeah. But then we got it. When Uncle Ron went on the air.”

  “Well, we don’t have it anymore.”

  “Uh—do you think we could get it? ’Cause the TV doesn’t pick anything up as it is.”

  After a few desperate seconds, when you could almost hear Mom scrambling for something to say, she said, “Look, Chris, I didn’t want to have to say anything, not wanting you to feel bad about this. But we’re really strapped for cash. We just can’t afford cable right now. All the medical bills—from your accident—they’ve been adding up, and—”

  Chris interrupted her, his eyes full of remorse. “I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t realize.”

  It took a few hours before Dad and I could meet Chris’s eyes that night.

  Mom wasn’t fazed at all. She just worked harder than ever at making sure that Chris was busily entertained, being more careful about keeping up the ban on TV and news. It had been a challenge, holding all the news of Iraq out of his reach—the first flare-up in Fallujah; the Abu Ghraib scandal; contractors beheaded, burned, and hung from bridges; the second, bigger battle of Fallujah—none of it good, but Mom managed somehow.

  Instead of television, our family watched a lot of movies. Even those, Mom carefully vetted. No war movies or violence of any kind were allowed. With one exception. One night, we rented The Passion of the Christ. It was Mom’s idea. We all joked about it—about being the last Christians in America to see the movie that whole congregations had waited for eagerly, going to see it by the busloads in theaters, or at private, church screenings around the country.

  We watched it twice, back to back. I was amazed. At how much of the Aramaic I understood. It shouldn’t have surprised me. Aramaic and Arabic are related, along with Hebrew. Aramaic was the ancient ancestor, old and dying, Arabic the young descendant, still alive and dynamic, vibrantly varied in its vocabulary and dialects. I didn’t share my thoughts with anyone, or the words that jumped out at me, the ones that were so similar to words I knew in Arabic. But I wrote them down in my old notebook.

  Wa for “and.” La for “no.” Abba for “father.” Anna for “I am.” Be layla for “by night.” Malika and malikin for “king” and “kings.” Shahadu for “witnesses.” Mowth for “death.” And what Jesus said on the cross, when he asked God if he had been forsaken: he called God Illahi—also a variation of the word Allah. Illahi, a word I’d heard in songs of praise and prayer, in Arabic and Urdu.

  I also didn’t share any of the blasphemous comparisons I couldn’t help making—noting the tortured, pained, and shackle-bound way that Jesus walked, burdened with the weight of the cross. Remembering other people, who suffered far less, of course, but who were also shackled at the waist, the hands, the ankles, walking with a grimace, in a lesser way of pain, taunted, too, by guards who refused to recognize the vulnerability of their humanity, the way the Roman guards
taunted Jesus.

  Chris, too, was very quiet throughout the movie.

  The next day, he said, “Jo. The scenes in the movie—of Mary—I—I feel like they’re familiar. Not in some religious way. Like I’ve seen her. In real life. Her clothes. The way she’s dressed, shrouded in black. From head to toe. The expression on her face, in her eyes, when she’s watching the way the guards treat her son. I know that expression. I’ve seen it before. I feel like I’m remembering something that I forgot. But— that can’t be? Can it?”

  I couldn’t answer Chris. I wasn’t allowed to. Not by the rules Mom had set up for him, for all of us, to follow. I went back and watched the movie again—without him—trying to see it through his forgetful eyes, remembering the things he’d written about in his journal. About a woman he’d met, known, in Iraq. This time, when I saw Mary, I, too, was reminded of grieving Iraqi women that I’d seen on the news, which I only watched when I went to Grandma Faith’s place.

  It took me a while, but when it happened, it was sudden. To know, abruptly, one day, that I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t. Not this way. Not anymore—with these new secrets on top of the old ones I’d kept from Chris. I had to find a way to deal with the inevitable. The day that was coming. When Chris remembered, I wanted to have something to give him. To help him cope with the grief of what he’d seen and done. My own redemption was no longer enough. I had Chris’s, too, to seek. I had no idea how to do that. I thought starting with my own might be a good way to begin. But the wheels of justice were turning too slowly. Now that I knew that Fuzzy was back in Pakistan, there was another way to go, tracing the connections to those other stories, Deena’s and Sadiq’s, which I had kept from Chris. Even those might mean something to him when he recovered.

  I called Deena. And told her I was ready to go with her to Pakistan. She arranged a leave of absence for herself for the spring quarter, made all the travel arrangements, and called Sadiq to tell him we were coming.

  Mom was furious. She didn’t understand why I couldn’t stay and keep lying to Chris. That’s what I was doing—with every word I didn’t say, with every smile I gave him, encouraging him to get well, when there was a big chunk of him that Mom hoped would never recover. Through my teeth, through the lids of my eyes, through every pore of my skin, I was lying.