LAYLA OPENS HER EYES TO THE SOFTEST MORNING LIGHT AND Rafiq’s face, so close and half obscured by his arm. He will remain asleep until their alarm rings or she reaches out to touch his shoulder. All night she woke to the dark, then blue light and knew there was still time, turned around to try and fall asleep again. But the light that comes through their still curtainless windows now fills their whole room, washes out the shadows. White comforter and white pillowcases and Rafiq’s dark hair and dark lashes and dark skin she often feels affection for—odd, to feel affection for the color of his skin, but it is true, there is something comforting about it. Layla feels nauseous. He is leaving in a few hours. His small suitcase is ready and waiting by the front door. Three days, two nights. The first time he has to fly to another branch, a city six hours away. It was a requirement of his promotion, from now on he would leave for days at a time, every other week almost, and Layla knows she should be proud of him and happy for what it has allowed them: purchasing a used car that would be hers, moving, just a few weeks prior, into their new home, an actual house, still oddly empty and quiet to her, as if it were a size too big, and Layla unsure if her life would ever expand enough to fill it. Soon, Layla will leave the warmth of their bed to pack Rafiq’s lunch, and Hadia’s and Huda’s too, and Rafiq will sweep Hadia off to preschool and Huda to a daycare they are trying for her because she also wants to have somewhere to go with a backpack. Then Rafiq will drive himself to the airport and she will continue unpacking in the empty house, attempting to create a home.
What will it be like for her to fall asleep tonight without him? She cannot remember the last time she slept alone; before Rafiq, her bed had been an arm’s length away from Sara’s. Tonight she will be the one to go from room to room, closing windows and locking doors, checking them twice, turning off all of the lights. She will have to become comfortable driving at night—she has only ever driven in the daytime, when he was not there. She never thought of him as responsible for doing these things until now. She moves closer to her husband, breathes in his scent. So familiar that she never notices it anymore, almost five years into their marriage, unless she seeks it out. His most beautiful face is his sleeping one, no stern expressions, just eyelids, lashes, defined nose, jawline. She pictures those cartoon cottages in shows her daughters watch, where a woman inside the cottage throws open the shutters and appears at the window singing. That is how it feels today to wake up and see his face, like a window in the room of her heart is being thrust open. Rafiq stirs. Layla shuts her eyes, not wanting him to see her looking at him. What is it about caring for another, feeling love, feeling affection, at times desire, that makes one shy? Even in front of her own husband she feels that hesitation of expression.
“Is it time?” he asks.
How he knows she is awake.
“Yes, I think so.”
She rises to wake the girls. Her sight goes black for a moment, and she stands very still, presses her fingers to her eyelids until she feels steady. She must be stressed, which is natural, they are all growing accustomed to the new home and the new city, slowly getting to know the mosque community. Hadia has just started preschool, three days a week for only three hours, but still, the emptiness of her home is new to her. From their doorway she watches her little girls sleeping in their shared bedroom. Who am I without them, she wonders, having become so used to them—her husband’s face in the morning, her daughters’ steps throughout the day.
Her girls are easy to wake. She is a lucky mother. They do not resist or fuss, she only has to walk in and move the blanket off their bodies and they begin to blink, rub their eyes.
“Wake up, wake up,” she sings, and leans in to kiss Hadia’s forehead. She taps her little nose, until Hadia sits up and yawns. Layla reminds her she is in charge of helping Huda with the morning routine: the brushing of hair, of teeth, the changing into clothes Layla will have laid out on their beds by then. Hadia nods. She is Mumma’s little helper. She rises to every occasion.
“Mumma, is Baba leaving today?” she asks, a startled expression on her face, as if she has just remembered.
Hadia looks down at her nails. Layla allowed her to paint them for the first day of preschool a few days ago, and now they are a chipped, bright pink and deep purple. Hadia scratches a nail with another, chipping it even more, and Layla places her hand on hers to stop her.
“It will be okay,” she says, her voice deep and slow to assure her daughter. “We will be fine. We will even have fun.”
Hadia searches her face as if she is trying to sense if Layla is being honest or if she is only trying to comfort her. She is smart for her age, perceptive and easily affected. Layla has to be careful. Finding what she was looking for in her mother’s face, Hadia nods, hops out of bed to wake Huda.
Downstairs, Layla listens for the sounds of her family’s movements as she fills clear plastic bags with slices of pear or bunches of grapes and a handful of Goldfish crackers. She packs juice boxes, makes wraps of roti filled with fried okra and carefully covers them in foil, rough and silver. That is Huda jumping off of the bed onto the floor, she must be dressed, she likes putting her clothes on while standing on her bed, and Layla often admonishes her. It is so easy to lose balance. The distant rush of water on its way to the shower slows and stops. Rafiq must be stepping out. Three brown bags of lunch, all in a line, sliced pear for Huda, grapes for Hadia, almonds for Rafiq, and she pauses to look out the window, at their garden—a square of cement where the girls play jump rope, then lots of long and unkempt grass, and at the far end a lone plum tree. She had liked the plum tree when they first moved in, had warmed to the idea of owning land which contained a tree that would bear fruit. Pounding footsteps on stairs and she knows that Huda and Hadia are racing to her, and she turns just in time to see them, Hadia in the lead, Huda trailing after her, out of breath and already unhappy, a defeated look on her face.
“No running,” she reminds them, but there is no point, the race is already over, they are clambering into their chairs. Hadia has won again. Layla wishes she would let her sister win once in a while. Layla pours cereal into their matching pink bowls and sets it before them. Huda complains. Hadia spills some milk on her shirt. Layla just concentrates on slicing a banana into Rafiq’s cereal bowl. Every time the dull blade of the butter knife reaches her palm, she pushes softly into her skin, feels its ridges.
When they first bought the home and walked through it as a family, Rafiq pretended that they had come upon the house by complete accident. Do you think the door will be open in this house? he asked Hadia as they pulled into the driveway. They had just listened to their Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan cassette, and Layla loved the way it lightened Rafiq’s mood. Hadia looked at him from her booster seat, skeptical and excited, old enough to understand his game, young enough to be fooled by it. Rafiq lifted Hadia up and onto his shoulders. Hadia adored when he did this. Her face all love and wonder. This time, some fear too. Baba—don’t, what if you get in trouble? Don’t become worried, he said; you trust your Baba, don’t you? And she paused for a long second before she nodded and what a surprise—the door opened, and look how silent and empty the house was. No one lives here, Hadia whispered, tense but intrigued. You’re exactly right, Hadia, he said. Smart girl. And she beamed. Rafiq paused in every room: kitchen, he said to Hadia, and she nodded; space where the kitchen table would be, he said to the emptiness beneath a light fixture, and Huda, almost three years old, looked at it all with boredom, a thumb in her mouth that Layla kept pulling out. He led them straight to the backyard—their old apartment only had a tiny balcony—and Layla thought to reach out and hold Hadia as he twisted the lock to open the sliding door, but he was careful, balancing her with one arm. Layla followed them closely. Hadia’s arms were wrapped tight around his neck. They trudged through the grass and Rafiq spun once, and Hadia giggled, and it was possible that Layla wished, for a moment, that he were leading her with as much care through their new home as he was Hadia. But this was silly—to give her daughter love was a way to give her love. When they reached the farthest end of the backyard and turned to look at the expanse before them that would be their grassy yard, and the two-story house, Rafiq paused, looked up at Hadia, and asked, “Do you like this house?”
“Yes,” Hadia said, and she leaned her chin on his head. Her hair fell just above his ears.
“Could you live here?” he asked, and Layla thought it was sweet: they had already bought it weeks earlier, had just gotten the keys that day, but he was presenting it to Hadia as if he would make it hers in that instant if she said yes. Layla hoped she would say yes.
“I guess so,” Hadia said.
Rafiq lifted his shoulders and lowered them abruptly, just as he had when she was a little younger and he was pretending to be a horse or a helicopter, and Hadia started laughing her uncontrollable laughter.
“You guess so? You guess so?”
Rafiq stretched for one of the plums on the plum tree and plucked it for her, passed it into her hands.
“It’s yours.”
“Plum?”