He shakes his head, bites the side of his cheek.
“You can’t lie to your mother. You can try to lie to everyone else, but a mother? A mother always knows.”
He smiles.
“It’s nothing, Ma. I promise you.”
“Oh, Ami. There is always something with you.”
“Maybe that makes life interesting?” He shrugs as he says it.
“Living is interesting enough. Don’t make the mistake of confusing a sad state with an interesting life.”
He has grown too old now for her to guess exactly what is bothering him—but the sense of knowing he is bothered has never left her. She runs her hand through his hair. He closes his eyes.
“Ma?”
“Yes?”
“Do you think I’ll be able to transfer?”
“Of course. You’ve been working so hard.”
“Do you think I’ll be able to become a doctor?”
She stops moving her hand, rests it on his forehead.
“Is that what you want?” she asks.
He opens his eyes.
“You hesitated.”
“No, I am only surprised it is what you want. I was just watching you writing in the garden and remembered when Hadia said you wanted to be a poet. Has Baba been talking to you?”
He shakes his head. She has let him down.
“You’d make a fine doctor, Ami.”
He does not work nearly as hard as Hadia. He begins then abandons, gives up easily what he does not care for.
“Are you enjoying the classes?”
He shrugs. She bites her lip, promises herself to be more careful with her words. She will have to ask Rafiq to not pressure Amar too much. Still, she is glad he has told her he is thinking about it. Even though Hadia was their first, even though Huda their heartfelt believer, she has always felt instinctively that she and Amar had their own understanding, one she could never establish with her daughters. If her daughters banished him from their games, it was she who lifted Amar into her arms and distracted him with a walk outside, drew lines with chalk in the cement section of their garden and sang as he jumped from square to square.
Once, when her children were much younger, she had found him sniffling after her girls had shut him out of their room. He refused to tell her what was the matter until she had pried it out of him, and even then all he had said was, “They don’t love me.”
It was this that angered her and she led Hadia by her arm to her bedroom and shut the door behind them, knelt until they were eye to eye.
“Do you think it’s funny to hurt your brother?”
She tightened her grip. Hadia’s eyes widened.
“Right now it is funny to you both to tease him. To leave him out. It’s a big joke you forget about. Maybe he also forgets. But you are his sister. It is your duty to take care of him. If you treat him horribly, Huda will treat him horribly.”
“He doesn’t know the way we play. He’s too little.”
“Then play something else.”
“That’s not fair.”
“One day the joke will not be funny. If you always leave him out, if you always tease him and hurt his feelings, soon you will not know how to be any other way with him, and it will affect his personality. Your relationship. For his whole life, and the rest of yours. Do you understand that, Hadia? Whose fault will that be then?”
Hadia had begun crying. Layla let go.
“Whose fault?”
“Mine.”
She had wanted to have another son to give Amar a brother. She thought that a brother would make him feel less alone. That first week following her miscarriage she was certain he sensed her grieving. He would find her, sitting at the kitchen table, staring out at her garden, unwilling or unable to do the task that was before her—the simple washing of dishes, the preparing of dinner, even eating her own breakfast that Rafiq had so kindly set out for her before going to work—and Amar would wordlessly climb into her lap, rest his head on her chest, and look up at her with his big brown eyes.
“Can you keep a secret?” she asks him now.
“Depends on the secret.”
His teasing smile looks unfamiliar upside down. She tsk-tsks at him. How can she tell Amar in a way that will not cause him pain?
“I was going to have a child once, after you.”
“You wanted to?”
“I almost did.”
He sits up. He faces her.
“I don’t remember,” he says, shaking his head.
“None of you knew. Hadia and Huda still do not know. Rafiq and I kept it a secret the first few months, hoping it would protect from nazar.”
Amar is silent while she explains, he plays with the edge of his shirt as if trying to tear it. She is surprised to find that she is speaking in medical terminology she had not even thought she had grasped when the doctor first told her. Her voice is without any emotion, as though she has stepped aside from her own feelings so Amar can encounter the news unbiased.
“I named him Jaffer,” she says, and that is when the emotion floods back into her voice, when what she is sharing becomes hers again. “I wanted you to know.”
He leans against her shoulder and does not look up when she tells him how Rafiq had left them with Seema Aunty for a few nights, how he assured her that the Ali family had the most children close to their children’s age, and that if they had company they would not miss Layla as much. But on the drive home from the hospital, when Layla looked to Rafiq, she felt no comfort, and in the empty house she longed for her children to be brought home to her, even though Rafiq insisted it would be best if she rested a few days without any obligations to attend to. She tells Amar about the woman in the mosque who calls for her son by that name and how hearing it sometimes shocks her. Or how, at the grocery store, if the clerk asks her how many children she has, she catches herself replying four.
“Your baba has not asked me about it once since,” she says. It is the closest she has come to complaining about her husband to her son, to anyone, and when Amar does look up, his eyes are lit with anger.
* * *
AFTER HEARING OF the eldest Ali boy’s death, Hadia refuses to drink water for the three days leading up to his funeral. It is her only tangible act of mourning, and she keeps it in secret. She does not cry. It would have given it away: that she had loved him, in her own quiet way.
On the day of the funeral she stays in bed and waits for the call to tell her it is time. She is grateful she has been home on break. Just a week ago, Mumma had hosted a jashan in her honor. She would be able to go on to her university’s medical school. After the reciters closed their poetry books, they all gathered in the garden for lunch and it was then that Hadia had seen Abbas Ali for the last time, leaning against the side of her house in his white shirt, laughing with Amar at a joke she couldn’t hear. He had begun to wear his hair long again, the way he had when he was nine and organizing capture the flag and games of tag in their backyards. Today he will be buried. And in two days, she will have to get back in her car and drive the long five hours, keeping her grip steady on the wheel, to return to school, where she will somehow begin another semester. Life will go on normally, and this seems like the most impossible fact of all.