She shook her head. “Vida is all alone,” she said. She swallowed hard and whispered, “Badri will make her life a living hell!”
“Not if I’m alive!”
“Oh, Papa, what could you possibly do across the miles?”
“What miles? I’ll go to Shiraz if necessary. As long as I have taken time from my work, who’s to say your mom and I can’t pay our little girl a visit?” He forced a smile. “I don’t know what exactly that boy has told Farhad, but it’s all talk. He has no proof.” He gave her shoulder another gentle push. “Go on, sweetheart. Listen to your old father and do what’s right. I will call your Aunt Malak right away and ask her to meet you at the other end.”
Yalda started to wiggle and Rana gently rocked her back to sleep.
A second announcement came through, calling London passengers to gate B1.
“Go on, my dear. If you miss this flight it’ll be hard to find another good connection to New York.” He held her head between both hands and kissed her forehead. “May God keep you safe.” He bent down and kissed the top of the baby’s head before taking a couple of steps back.
“I can’t leave her like this,” Rana said, yet the resignation in her tone indicated she had already agreed to do just that. “At least, let me say good bye.” And she moved toward the exit.
“There is no time for that,” her father said and held her arm. “Stop tormenting yourself, my dear.”
“Just leave her?” Rana whispered, more to herself.
Tears dripped down her father’s quivering chin. “I will give her many kisses from you,” he said and wrapped both arms around the mother and child. “Go on. Go before it’s too late.”
Rana watched him pull back and walk away and before she could say another word, the door had closed. A lone in a crowd of strangers, she was reminded of her first day of school, when a tall wooden door had closed behind her father. Once again, she stood there with the feeling that her single connection to humanity had just been severed and that by walking away from that door, she would enter a world that offered no guarantee for being rescued.
Approaching her gate, she looked out the window and saw the bus waiting to drive the last passengers to the huge plane sitting in the middle of the hazy runway. Now the sound of jet engines could be heard and she saw a plane take off in the distance. As her eyes followed the soaring jet, her mind raced. There was still time to run. She could go to Shiraz and make sure her daughter wasn’t harmed more than she already had been. Or should she go forward, knowing she’d soon be back? Would she see Vida again?
Outside, the summer air felt heavy with the oily fumes of engines. Before boarding the transit bus, Rana stopped to look back at the large windows and imagined her little girl standing somewhere out there, waving good-bye. She brought her fingers to her lips and blew a kiss to the dark windows. “Mommy will be back,” she whispered and turning to the bus she nearly missed the steps through a flood of tears. Someone took her arm and helped her up the stairs while another offered her a seat. Yalda woke up and started to cry. Rana pressed her face into the baby’s gown and her sobs were drowned in the engine noise as the bus drove away.
“Please secure the baby in that bassinette before doing your own seatbelt,” a British hostess instructed Rana while closing the overhead bin with a loud thud.
Rana went through the motions and was sure none of this was real.
As the plane took off and soared, the blurry city lights sank into the darkness below and Damavand became a magnified silhouette in the chain of mountains. Rana felt numb, as if she had left all her emotions in the darkness below. Why did she continue to stare out the window when there was nothing to see? She recalled a verse from an old poem:
They describe in many ways, how a soul leaves one’s body to fly
But I witnessed my own soul depart, I saw this with my very eye.
Part Two
Yalda
Chapter
Eighteen
CHICAGO, AUGUST 1997
I TELL MY NAME TO THE WET LEAVES on the sidewalk of Sheridan Road, I shout it to the cars that pass by, churning up rain, but what I really need is to pound it back into my own head. “My name is Yalda Ameli. It is Yalda Ameli.” I know what’s happening is not a nightmare, but it has all the right elements of one. This time, the storm has damaged more than a few trees in our backyard, it has uprooted my family tree.
A fierce Chicago wind crawls under my skin and the drizzle has glued my shirt to my skin. Did I drop my jacket or have I rushed out of Mom’s apartment without it?
A man passes me on a bike and I shout after him, “Moradi is a pretty weird name, isn’t it?” He turns his head, but is fast gone. I’ll never get used to this. Moradi? What happened to Ameli? It hasn’t been the easiest, but I’ve worn the name proudly. I feel lost without it.
A car honks. I move back to the sidewalk from the middle of the street and shout at the driver. “I am Yalda Ameli.” He sticks his middle finger out the window and speeds by.
I repeat my name to the tiny drops of rain dangling from branches, to a young boy who passes by. He’s wearing a hooded coat and turns back to stare at this talking lunatic. It’s hard to think straight, but there’s no doubt that I heard my mother correctly and that she meant what she said.
I’m walking, walking, endlessly walking. I must have gone down every block in north Evanston, talking to myself, shouting my questions and crying like a mad woman. I pass Central Street and am now heading north toward Gilson Park. It is late afternoon and though it has stopped raining, the wind stings.
At the park, I sit under a tree near the shore and try to picture what I don’t know. We moved from downtown to Evanston when I was in third grade. I know this park well. Mom used to watch me play here. But all of a sudden it is no longer filled with good memories, nor is it the place where I come to compose letters to my late grandfather. Today the park looks more like a graveyard and even Lake Michigan has turned black. Did Mom bring me here so I wouldn’t care about not having a family? Was the love I received from her nothing but a bribe?
Who is my father?
In second grade, I once came home crying because a kid told me I had a weird name, but Mom said some people were just stupid. To this day, if someone raises an eyebrow at my name, I try to think of Mom’s response. Now all of a sudden I’m the one who feels stupid.
In all these years, I’ve never seen Mom cry. So this morning when I walked into her apartment and found her crying, I feared for her life, or my own, and prepared for the worst. I dropped my heavy bag of books and ran to her. “What’s the matter, Mom?”
Cupping her face in both hands, she leaned further onto the kitchen table. “Sit down, Yalda. We need to talk.” Her muffled voice was heavy. Different.
What was wrong? A million questions raced into my head, but horror wouldn’t let me ask. Maybe something had happened to Grandma?
I plopped into the nearest chair.
“I have waited your whole life for the right moment to share what I’m about to tell you,” Mom said this formally. She had the look of someone about to admit guilt in court.
I waited patiently, like the lawyer I am about to become, then suddenly had a feeling I didn’t want to hear what she was about to say. I studied her white roots in need of coloring, her clipped nails, her trembling clasped hands.
She took in a deep breath and said, “I realize I may have waited too long, but at some point I had to beg for your forgiveness.” She sounded sadder than I had ever heard her.
So it had nothing to do with Grandma, or her own health. I exhaled hard. Forgiveness? This must be the moment she would reveal the secret I had suspected. I wanted to shout, “Finally!” but needed to stay neutral and let her talk without worrying about how I’d react.
“Don’t worry, Mom. I’m a gown up. This is the right time.”
She cried harder. “Right time? No, my love, I’ve done so much wrong that no time will ever be right.”
I patte
d the back of her hand. “Come on, Mom. What can be so bad that you can’t tell your own daughter?”
“You had a right to know who you are, Yalda. Now I don’t even know where to begin.”
“W ho I am? The suspense is killing me!”
“Maybe I was right to take you away.” She buried her face in her hands. “But I shouldn’t have separated you from your sister.”
I have a sister? Too stunned to respond, I held my breath. Mom lifted her head and her worried eyes met mine. I saw deep fear in them, as though she expected me to strike her.
“I had a phone call today,” she said, but seemed unable to finish her sentence.
I rubbed the back of her cold hand. Whatever this phone call had been, it must have shocked her enough to make her talk nonsense.
“I don’t have a sister,” I said as calmly as I could.
She looked down at her hands and nodded repeatedly. “You do.” Something in her voice rang too true to be dismissed.
Fear paralyzed me. Has my mother suddenly gone mad? “What’s wrong with you, Mom?”
“I’m not crazy, if that’s what you’re thinking. You need to know your true identity.”
I sat there, numb, confused even, and began to listen to a bizarre story that made no sense, a tale about how she abandoned her other daughter, husband and home, a soap opera I had no desire to hear.
Her husband?
My head was spinning. I have a sister and a father? There were no words to react with and no sound came through my throat.
Most people like to talk about their roots, but not my mother. Except for the fact that I was born in Iran and that she was widowed when I was an infant, Mom hasn’t shared much. My last name doesn’t have a significant story behind it, at least it didn’t till now. A single parent in a foreign country, my mother did her best to give me a normal life. I’ve always been curious about her past, about who my father was and why I have never seen any pictures of him. Knowing that she married a cousin—or so I’d been told— explained why our last names were the same as her father’s, but she never answered all of my questions. Her story about burning my father’s pictures so she’d forget the tragedy of his loss had always sounded strange. I’ve taken every chance to drill her about the past, but all she ever told me was that a bad car accident took my father. The lack of an extended family wasn’t unusual for an immigrant, but all along I’ve had a feeling there was more to Mom’s story. What was in her past that made her so reluctant to talk?
I don’t know when but at some point the sounds in my head prevented me from hearing her words. She was talking about my sisters. Now there were two? No. One is dead. Suddenly I was enraged and had the unbearable urge to get out of that place, to be as far from my mother as I possibly could. Did I say anything before leaving? Did I slam the door?
I must still be in shock. This isn’t like me to walk aimlessly, talk to strangers or shout in public. I’ll soon be a lawyer and that alone has taught me enough about order. I had two sisters? I repeat their names, “Vida. Marjan. Which one did she say died? Mom has been married for all these years! She must have told me a lot more, but at this point those are the big facts that stick out. What made her keep this from me? And more importantly, why didn’t Grandpa Ameli tell me while he had the chance? Grandpa was the closest I ever came to knowing a father. He was a physician back in Iran and the best grandfather in the universe. I remember his visits vividly as those were the only times I came to sample having a father. I remember our trips to FAO Schwarz downtown Chicago and coming home with practically half the toys in the store. On two of his trips, grandma accompanied him. She was nice, but our relationship didn’t come any where close to what I had with Grandpa. He was the only person who spoke at length about my father, or at least the father he invented for me out of kindness. “Mommy will be sad if you ask her such questions, but I’ll tell you anything you want to know.” Some days, we walked around Gilson Park and he painted the most beautiful pictures for my young mind to keep. He told me my father loved having a brand new baby girl and how proud he would have been to see me all grown up. When I questioned Grandma,, she said she didn’t remember. We didn’t believe her, not until she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. When my aunts called, they spoke Farsi to Mom and if I answered the phone, they only asked, “Ha arr yoo?” Mom tried to teach me Farsi, but once I started kindergarten, I forgot the few words I knew. As a teenager, I used to imagine all kinds of dark secrets, and didn’t even leave out the horrible possibility of being an illegitimate child.
Just as I was forming more detailed questions to ask my grand-father, he had a heart attack in Iran and died. His loss broke my heart and I am not sure I grieved for him any less than Mom did. I don’t think I’ll ever stop missing him. Mom was a mess for a year, so I grieved alone. I found a semblance of comfort in continuing to write to him even though he was gone. I still do that and it helps me to unload my problems. Grandma never visited after that and now she doesn’t even know any of her family. She lives with one of Mom’s sisters. I doubt I’ll ever see her again.
Once my awkward teens were behind me, I relaxed about the past and decided to leave the matter for a time when I would be rich enough—brave enough—to travel to Iran, see Grandma, meet my aunts, and visit Grandpa’s tomb. All along, I knew that if my mother were to tell me more about the past, it would have to be on her terms.
There’s no one in the park today. It’s too cold and I feel utterly lonely. Even Paul wouldn’t understand how I feel. I don’t have my watch, but the darkening sky tells me it’s time to go back.
Like a solved riddle, now that I know the truth everything seems too simple, too clear. Mom never went back to Iran, not even for her father’s funeral. She didn’t have much contact with her sisters, except for a call at Persian New Year and occasionally on her birthdays. Why wasn’t she in touch with old friends? Surely there were people in Iran who could have visited. Even here, she knows few people and mostly keeps to herself. Just last month I jokingly asked if she’d met any handsome guys at the clinic. I should have wondered why such an innocent question made her so angry. Anyone with half a mind would have seen beyond her bogus tales, but I grew up with her stories and through repetition, they became my reality.
As I near Mom’s neighborhood, I realize that the only remaining truth is her immigrating to the US, where I saw specialists and later received treatment for my weird leg. I feel pain just thinking about it. Surgery after surgery and the long nights when pain kept me awake. As I learn more about a lifetime of deception, her loving support and constant rewards lose their value. For years, the only life I knew was going from town to town, hospital to hospital, all in hopes of being normal. Normal? How many normal people have a father they don’t know about? How many of them don’t even know their own last name?
Where was my father when they cut open his little girl’s leg to install screws in her bones?
I try to invent a face for the man. But how? I hate him, so why should I care that someday I may see him? But as much as I want to deny myself any positive thoughts, the fact remains that, loving or not, there’s a father out there, a big sister, and a whole other family. As a child, I used to imagine a crowd around our Thanksgiving table, a Christmas tree with many presents under it, and all the similar scenes I had seen on TV. I invented relatives who could remember Mom’s house in Iran, had saved pictures of her wedding, and knew the father I had lost. I even tried to love the ghostly images of the man I didn’t know. Why is it so hard to feel anything for him now that I know he exists?
Rush hour traffic interrupts Sheridan Road’s calm. It’s getting colder and I wish I had my jacket. I pull down the sleeves of my sweater and bunch it in my fist. What is it like to have a sister? The only other relative I know is Mom’s aunt in New York, who now lives in a convalescent home. As I near my mother’s apartment, I feel the resentment rise within me. Whatever her reason might have been for such vicious secrecy, I don’t believe she was ever planning
to come clean. What was in that phone call that made her change her mind?
I find Mom in her kitchen, exactly where I had left her. The faint light coming through the window defines her silhouette. As I turn on the bright fluorescent light, she squints and looks up from the table where she has surrounded herself with crumpled tissues. She wipes her red nose and looks at me. Her eyes are bloodshot, her lips swollen and the sight is more heartbreaking than anything I have prepared for. I’ve gathered all my strength for an argument, but what could I possibly say to this broken woman who seems so bitterly lonely? Instinctively, I rush over and wrap my arms around her.
“I have no hope for redemption,” she says under her breath. “And I can’t possibly expect your forgiveness.” She is now sobbing.
Her trembling body feels thinner than it looks and as I hold her tighter, I think this must be how it feels when picking up an injured bird. “Please don’t cry,” I say and sound silly. Her cold hands grasp mine and for some time we both just rock and shed silent tears.
I wait for some time before gently unlatching her fingers from around mine. “Let me make some tea.”
She only nods and holds her head in both hands.
As I fill the kettle, I can’t help but wonder about all the broken hearts that a good cup of tea must have soothed. Forgiveness? W here should I begin? I light a match but forget to use it until the flame reaches my finger. I throw away the curled-up match and light another. My thoughts aren’t about whether I can forgive any of this. The woman I’m about to have tea with is no longer just “Mom”. Tonight I’m meeting the real Rana, the fugitive wife, the struggling immigrant, and the lonely woman, who has been hiding behind a graceful smile. She’d better prepare to tell me the real story of my life.
Moon Daughter Page 22
