WHEN THEY REACH their street it is packed with cars from the community. Amar looks over to Malik Uncle, who said when he picked them up that their parents had to tell them something. The look on his face suggests he did not expect the cars either. Amar turns to look at his sisters in the backseat. What Hadia sees in his face makes her immediately straighten her posture and lean forward, look out over the dash at the cars parked on their street, and before Malik Uncle has even found a spot, she has taken off her seat belt and jumped out of the moving vehicle. Amar follows her lead. He hears another door slam and he knows Huda is running with them too. He knows it is not Mumma. He knows it is not Baba. Malik Uncle said that Mumma and Baba had news for them. But still. Let them both be all right, he prays. Their home is filled with people he recognizes who try to hug him, but he drops his backpack by the door and maneuvers through them. His mother is in the living room, her face hidden by her hands. People surrounding her read from religious texts. Please don’t let it be Baba. Please let it be anything but him. An aunty who is next to Mumma sees them and touches Mumma’s shoulder. Mumma looks up. She has been crying. She holds her arms out for him, and he goes, and she begins to cry when he hugs her, her shoulders shaking, her face pressed against his neck.
“It’s Nana,” she says, and she shakes her head. “I was waiting for you three to come. I have been waiting for you all afternoon.”
When he looks at Hadia’s face he sees not only grief but also guilt, that they had stolen an afternoon for themselves, spent hours exploring under the sun, going against Mumma’s and Baba’s wishes, while at home Mumma waited for them to comfort her.
* * *
LAYLA WATCHES HER son shiver through the sliding glass door. His hands in his pockets, his shoulders raised. How he likes to complicate what is simple—warmth easily acquired, an argument easily avoided. She smiles. He is focused on something in the dirt of her garden and presses the toe of his shoe into it, as though he is a child of seven again and not a young man of twenty. The two of them are home alone. Rafiq has taken Huda to visit the graduate school she was accepted in, a university two hours away. Huda will be a teacher. It is a good profession for her. Layla has observed her in Sunday school classrooms, how Huda knows when to be stern or gentle, how she is attuned to what each student and situation demands. Layla is not worried for her. Not as worried as she was when Hadia first left, and, watching Amar pull his notebook from his back pocket, she realizes not nearly as worried as she will be when he too goes.
One by one they will all go and she will be left with Rafiq in this house that is again too big for them, as it first was, when she walked in with Huda just a toddler in her arms and wondered how they would possibly manage to fill the rooms. Amar is in his second year of community college and has been doing well. He is motivated. He is responsible. She is grateful every day she enters the kitchen to see him studying, his books spread out on the table. She lifts the cup of tea close to her face, its steam rising. Amar scribbles in his black notebook, the edges of his pages fluttering. He is hiding something from her. She has suspected it for weeks, maybe even months.
“You’d let him get away with anything,” Hadia had said recently, when they were arguing about her not answering Layla’s calls. “You have no idea what he does and what he hides. You only care about what your girls do, where they go, and with who.”
“No idea of what? What does he hide?” Layla had asked.
“Nothing,” Hadia said. “Forget it.”
Today marks sixteen years from what would have been the due date of her fourth child. It is her secret. Not in the sense that she is the only one who knows, but that she is the only one who still carries it. Rafiq assumed all sense of loss had left when the reminders had passed but Layla, even now, sometimes removes her necklaces and spare coins from the jewelry box to find the ultrasound photograph. So indistinguishable from any other that if her children were to come across it they might think it was the first image of them.
Come inside, she wants to say to Amar. It is warmer in here. The soft hum of the heater, her shawl draped over her shoulders, the cup of tea she brings to her lips. She watches him write. He is so serious. She had thought it was another whim. But it has been years and he has not been parted from his notebooks. Back when he was still in high school, he once pulled his notebook out at dinner and wrote a line before returning it to his pocket. She had tried to glance over. Hadia nudged him and sang, “Amar wants to be a poet.” Stretching out the word, smiling. Rafiq had not torn his gaze from Amar. The look on Rafiq’s face soured.
“My father was a painter,” Layla had said to Amar.
“He painted some Sundays. It was not his job,” Rafiq said. Then, after some silence, he added, “He knew better than to confuse a hobby with a respectable profession.”
Amar left his plate untouched and, a moment later, his bedroom door slammed shut. She has yet to glimpse a page. She wonders if he keeps his old journals in the black box that her daughters had dragged her to an antique store to buy years ago. Such an odd birthday gift that she was convinced he would not like it, but her daughters had insisted. Layla had bought him a new net for his basketball hoop and some other, smaller, gifts, had baked him a cake and ordered pizza, but to her complete surprise when Amar ripped off the wrapping and saw the box he had gasped, unlocked the latch so carefully, and ran his hands along the deep-red velvet inside. He hugged Hadia and Huda first, as though he knew they were the ones to thank, before remembering to thank her and Rafiq. He always kept it locked. Her tea has cooled. She sips it, looking up at the framed photograph of her family, which she dislikes because the gap between Amar and Rafiq has always felt too revealing, but today it makes her think of that other child, and what it would have been like for him to have been in their lives, their family.
From Him we are and to Him we return. A phrase recited in Arabic when hearing of someone’s death. Surely there is evidence for the line present in all aspects of life, not just in the face of death. This house, this table, this teacup she sips from, who is to say one day it might not all be taken? Our children are not our own as our lives are not our own. All are a loan from God, His temporary gift. Amar looks through the glass door at her and she raises her hand to wave at him. He gives her a small smile, then tucks his notebook back in his pocket. Maybe if she shares with him what she has shared with no one else he will open up to her. A friendship will develop between them. After all, she knows her children: knows their habits and tastes, even as she is becoming increasingly aware that they can easily choose to not speak of their lives. It is they who do not know her, who make no attempt to. Amar kicks his shoes on the mat outside and closes the sliding door behind him. Without saying a word he enters and lays his head on her lap, stretches his legs on the couch. The hum of the heater quiets.
“You are hurt about something.” She says it softly, touches his eyebrow from one end to the other. When he was a boy, this is how she would calm him back to sleep after a nightmare, both eyebrows at once, her thumbs reaching the edge of his face then beginning at the center again. When he got older and his nightmares worsened, he would stumble into their bedroom and in a daze would fall asleep at the foot of their bed. She would cover him with a spare blanket and whisper prayers that she blew on him, before falling back asleep herself. By morning he would be gone, the blanket folded neatly and put back in their closet.