“Suno,” she said, “will you listen? Can you not say anything that will anger or upset him?”
She always found ways to speak around her husband’s name. First it was out of shyness and then it was out of custom and a deep respect for him, and now it would be unnatural; she felt obliged to avoid his name out of habit. He paused buttoning his shirt and looked at her. It was her right. She had not interfered with his decisions for so long. She pressed on. “Please, for me, can you stay away from him tonight? We can speak tomorrow, but let us have this day.”
The previous night, when Amar first arrived, the two of them had been amicable. Rafiq had said salaam before Layla took over and guided Amar to his bedroom, heated him a plate of dinner.
For a moment, she wondered if she had hurt Rafiq. Carefully he clasped the button at each wrist.
“I will not go near him, Layla,” he said finally, dropping his arms to his sides.
* * *
WHEN HE MET his father’s eyes from across the crowded hall, Amar understood that an agreement had been made between them: they knew who they were there for, and why they would not approach one another beyond the expected salaam. Amar looked away first. He still felt it. His anger, and the distance it caused. It was as if something had clenched in him and could not now be loosened.
Amar had played a game during the first few conversations when asked what he had been doing lately. A painter, he said to one guest, of sunsets and landscapes. The look on their faces amused him. To another uncle he said engineer but was annoyed by how it impressed him. Once he said he was pursuing an interest in ornithology. When the man blinked back at him he explained. Birds, I would like to study birds. Now he spoke without embellishment. He excused himself from conversations shortly after they began.
He stepped out beneath the arched doorway, past the children playing, past the elevators, until the shenai quieted. He had forgotten what it was like to move through a crowd feeling like a hypocrite among them, aware of the scrutinizing gaze of his father, expecting Amar to embarrass him, anticipating the lie he would tell before he even spoke. He walked until he found himself standing before the bar on the other side of the hotel. Of course, no one invited to Hadia’s wedding would dare come here. The sound of the shenai was so far away he could catch it only if he strained to hear. He took a seat beside two strangers. Tonight, even that felt like a betrayal. But taking a seat was not the same as ordering a drink. He leaned forward until he could rest his elbows on the counter, lowered his face into his hands and sighed.
He could hardly believe that, just the night before, he had managed to walk up to the door of his childhood home and knock. What had surprised him was how little had changed—the same tint of paint at nighttime, the same screen missing from his old window on the second floor. There were no lights on. Wide windows, curtains drawn, nobody home. Nobody would know if he decided to step back into the street. It was a comforting thought—that he would not have to face his father or see how his absence had impacted his mother. The moon was almost full in the sky, and as he had when he was a child, he looked first for the face his schoolteacher had said he could find there, then for the name in Arabic his mother always pointed out proudly. Finding them both, he almost smiled.
He might have walked away were it not for a light turning on in Hadia’s room. It glowed teal behind the curtain and the sight of it was enough to make his chest lurch. She was home. He had made his life one that did not allow him to see or speak to his sister, to even know she was getting married until she had called him a month earlier, asking him to attend. He had been so startled he didn’t pick up. But he listened to her voicemail until he had memorized the details, felt sure some nights he would return and on other nights knew no good would come of it.
Her lit window and his own dark beside it. One summer they had pushed out their screens and connected their rooms by a string attached to Styrofoam cups at each end. Hadia assured him she knew what she was doing. She had made one in school. He wasn’t sure if he could hear her voice humming along the string and filling the cup, or carried through the air, but he didn’t tell her this. They pretended a war was coming to their neighborhood. This was Hadia’s idea—she had always been brilliant at thinking up games. They were in an observation tower making sure nothing was amiss. Bluebird on branch, Amar said, looking out the window before crouching down again, over. Mailman driving down the street, Hadia said, lots of letters, over.
That night their father had been furious to find the screens discarded on the driveway, one of them bent from the fall. The three of them were made to stand in a line. Hadia, the eldest, then Huda, then Amar, the youngest, hiding a little behind them both.
“You instigated this?” his father said, looking only at him.
It was true. It had been his idea to push out the screens. Hadia stared at the floor. Huda nodded. Hadia glanced at her but said nothing.
His father said to his sisters, “I expected better from you two.”
Amar had sulked to his bedroom, closed his open window, sunk onto his cold sheets. Nothing was expected of him. And though Hadia never pushed her screen out again, he had, every few years, until his father gave up on repairing it entirely.
“Have you changed your mind?” the bartender asked him.
Amar looked up and shook his head. It wouldn’t have been so bad to say yes. It might have even been better for him and everyone else. A drink would calm his nerves, and maybe he could enjoy the colors and the appetizers and the sorrowful shenai. But he had come home for his mother’s sake, his sister’s sake, and this night was the only one asked of him.
His phone buzzed. It was Huda: Hadia is asking for you, room 310.
All day he had feared his sister might have only called him out of obligation, and suspected that maybe it was that same sense of duty that had brought him back. Now something swelled up in him, not quite excitement or happiness, but a kind of hope. He stood and stepped back toward the music. His sister, surrounded by close friends and family, was asking for him.
* * *
ANY MINUTE NOW Amar would knock and the important thing was not to respond to him the way she had the night before, when she was so stunned she could not speak. She should have been kinder. Three years had changed her brother, lent seriousness to his features, shadows pressed beneath his eyes, a fresh scar on his chin to join the old ones by his lip and eyebrow. He seemed to slouch and she realized that his confidence had left him, as though confidence were a physical feature as much a part of him as his winning half-smile. But what pained her was how small his face had become, the pronounced bone of his shoulder and collarbone visible even through his T-shirt, and the fear that accompanied the sight: he was still trying to disappear. Tonight, she would keep her observations to herself and welcome him with a smile. Hadia sat still as she waited, not wanting to disturb her clothes. The slightest movement caused the pleats to shift and scrape against each other. The ghoongat draped over her head was surprisingly heavy, the teekah moved if she turned her head abruptly, the choker-like necklace pinched her neck. When she looked in the mirror she barely recognized herself.
A knock at the door. Even if she had not been waiting for him, she would have known it was Amar, always hesitant at first tap, a brief pause, and then two louder taps. Huda let him in and Hadia overheard Huda thank Amar in the reserved way she spoke to those she was unfamiliar with. Then the click of the door closing and Amar appeared and he had washed his face and combed his hair, dressed in a black suit and found a tie to match. She patted the space beside her but he stayed standing.