She is afraid to see his body, to have the news confirmed so irrefutably. The entire community is in a state of disbelief—a death so young, so sudden. Someone so well liked, by both the elders and the children, someone who occupied an unvoiced corner of every young woman’s heart in the community. The fan moves slowly and Hadia tries to focus on a single blade, watching it spin and spin. She thinks of flashing lights, ambulances arriving too late, shards of glass glimmering on concrete, his sister, whose knees collapsed upon hearing the news. She knows the crossroad where people have left bouquets by the stop sign, tied balloons to the pole, left letters on the metal gates nearby, their edges flapping.
There had been four young men in the car, Abbas Ali and his friends from community college, and all were dead now except one who had been buckled in the backseat. If she had been another kind of woman, Hadia is sure she would have had the courage to seek him out, ask him what Abbas spoke of that night. The one who survived is still in the hospital. They say he is not doing well. Hadia wonders what it would be like to enter a car with close friends and be the only one to leave it.
She turns away from the fan, convinced it is making her nauseous, and there it is: that small piece of gum wrapper still taped to her ceiling from when she had stood on her bed on tiptoe as a young girl and stuck it there. She had drawn a small strawberry on the gum wrapper. Almost a decade ago. She had forgotten about it—saw it from time to time over the years and it had always struck her as silly and embarrassing, as if she were no better than the girls who wrote Mrs. next to the last names of their crushes. Still, she had never had the heart to take it down. The events surrounding the silver wrapper are blurred. He had given it to her, she remembers that much, as well as the soft scrape of her fingertips against his palm.
The last time she saw Abbas she had spoken to him. Each time she returns to the conversation the memory loses some of its certainty. He is already becoming a long time ago. Everyone was gathered in their backyard. People eating together, laughing together, lining up to pray together. Hadia sat in the scratchy grass, balancing her plate of food on her leg, and Huda was leaning on her because Huda was always so happy and extra affectionate the first few days Hadia came home. She could see the eldest Ali boy heaping food on his own plate, and Hadia felt surprised the community boys had managed a whole hour without once disappearing—as they always did, and as the girls were always envious they could, even if they rolled their eyes when the boys returned smelling faintly of smoke. Amar had put extra effort into his clothes and hair, and he looked strikingly like photographs of Baba at that age. She remembered thinking: maybe this is what it is like for all of us to be almost but not quite yet adults.
She was climbing the stairs for a break from everyone when she heard the eldest Ali boy call her name. She placed a hand on the banister. She turned on her heel, two steps above him, and smiled at her added height. They were eye to eye.
You’re back, he might have said to her, to which she might have done the slightest of curtsies as if to respond, here I am.
“You made the lassi?” he asked.
“I helped.”
What else was there for them to talk about when they were hardly allowed to? She too could bring up lists and lists of nothings, just to be talking. Hadia debated if she should continue up the stairs.
“Do you remember that day you were about to leave?” he asked.
Of course she remembered. It was the day they had made lassi together.
“That was three years ago,” she said, and he raised his eyebrows in surprise.
“Do you remember what I said that day?”
She shook her head. She moved her hand to hold on to her arm. Then she let go, afraid her posture might appear weak, uninviting.
“I told you that I knew you’d make us proud,” he said. “You’ve always been the best of us.”
“You never said that,” she said, shaking her head and allowing a smile to escape her.
“Didn’t I? Well, I meant to.”
He was smiling wide. She was too. They stood like that for a long moment and she had the sense that they were both aware of some secret. The thought she had pushed aside since she was a young girl rose up one last time—that hope or intuition that he was, in his own way, in the only way he could, courting her by being kind to her brother. Then she blinked and the moment was lost. Not knowing how to offer a response that hummed the way his did, she asked how things had been at home since her last visit.
“Same as always,” he said, and he turned to the framed family photographs that trailed the wall up the stairs, and she looked too, the one of her and Huda in their horrible collared and poufy dresses, the one of them smiling with their blue braces, one of Amar climbing the magnolia tree.
“Still keeping an eye on Amar for me?” she asked, and this seemed to hum just a bit, the way she said for me.
“You know I don’t have to answer that.”
They turned when they heard someone descending the stairs. It was Amira Ali. Hadia tensed to be discovered speaking to Abbas in private, but it was Amira who looked like she had been stumbled upon, and Abbas who handled the moment gracefully.
“There you are,” he said to her, as if he had been searching for her the whole time. “We’re leaving soon.”
Amira gestured behind her. “The bathrooms downstairs were taken.”
He turned to head back outside, and Amira smiled her timid smile when she passed Hadia and followed her brother down the stairs. Just before Abbas turned the corner, he looked back and said, “Congratulations again.” Or maybe it was, “I was right back then.” And he held his hand up in a wave, and maybe she nodded, and maybe she stood still.
There is a knock on the door and she knows by the sound and length of pause before the second rap that it is Amar. When she opens the door to her brother, Hadia looks at him for the first time not as her younger brother, but as the young man he is becoming, the hints in his face and demeanor that allow her to picture what he will look like in ten years, twenty years. Her apprehension rises, unbridled and accompanied by a fully formed fear: she is afraid it is possible that he too could die as suddenly and as young as the eldest Ali boy. It had not occurred to her before this week that one could lose a sibling. Nor had she considered how easily the crash could have happened on one of the many nights Amar was with Abbas. Amar looks at her curiously, possibly mistaking her fear for anxiety over the event they are about to attend, and he softly says, “Ready?”
They follow their parents to the car. Everyone appears to be elsewhere. Amar cannot decide if he wants the top button on his shirt buttoned, so he keeps his fingers there, doing and undoing it repeatedly. Abbas treated Amar like a brother and Amar had reciprocated that tenderness tenfold. He is free to be angry and inconsolable, to invite everyone to sit with him and then to shut them out again, and when he stood in the driveway as he did last night and shot hoops over and over again in the moonlight for hours, when he kicked the basketball against the garage door and it sounded like thunder inside, his reaction was both witnessed and excused.
They drive to the funeral in silence. Hadia rests her head against the window. It surprises her, the little details she can suddenly remember about Abbas Ali, despite having spent a life only in each other’s periphery. It is as though a route of her mind has been uncovered and out march the dizzying sights of him. A shirt he wore the color of leaves, the blackberries he ate from the bowl in their kitchen, the soda he once spilled at a community party, the wooden keychain of a tiger on his backpack from the days she sat behind him in Sunday school, how he asked her once why she liked her plum tree, how he slowed when playing soccer to pass the ball to her, his eyes speckled with orange and gold, telling her Inshallah all will be well.
Just before walking into the wake, Hadia turns to Amar and touches his shoulder as if about to speak. He looks at her, but Hadia does not know what she wants to say. Would it be easier to tell Huda? He raises an eyebrow to encourage her. She wants to tell him she loved the eldest Ali boy. She wants him to know this loss is not his alone, that when she reached out to touch his shoulder it was not just to offer solace, but to ask for comfort too.