“What is it?” Amar stops to ask her.
Hadia shakes her head and walks past him, past her parents, past the crowd of solemn faces. She catches a glimpse of the family members once inside. Uncle Ali stands to shake the hand of everyone who has come, and Amira is seated on the floor, her face hidden by her own hand. Hadia is grateful they do not make eye contact, suddenly ashamed of her audacity to think she even has a loss to grieve, when a girl has just lost her brother, a father his firstborn son.
Her mouth is dry and she walks through the halls and heads straight to the bathroom. She shuts the door behind her and turns to her own reflection. She does not cry. But she does think of how Mumma only knocked on Amar’s door after the news came. How it did not even occur to her to check on her daughters. What she wanted was for someone to know. For her sadness to not go unnoticed anymore. She wanted, more than anything, to lay her head in her mother’s lap the way Amar often did, and tell her she had lost the first boy she had ever loved. The one she had maintained a distant devotion for since she first realized it was possible to feel for another. She wanted Mumma to stroke her hair the way she touched Amar’s after the news, over and over, as if making sure he was really there, so stunned and lucky that he was alive. All these years she imagined her life would one day merge with Abbas Ali’s. Their entangling had felt inevitable to her, and for this reason, and because it would be improper, she had not broken the barrier of silence between them.
Her reflection. Her tired face. She touches her dry bottom lip and thinks of how odd it is to experience a secret loss. A loss without a name. The loss of a potential version of her life. Of what she never had, and now never will. The realization that, in her own small and sustained way, she had loved someone for years that she had only looked at in glimpses, only spoken to in passing, only thought of in secret, only ever touched when they passed a cup of lassi or a stick of gum between them.
* * *
WRITTEN AT THE top of the spelling test in red ink is 100%. Amar’s teacher even wrote a little note: Good job, Amar. Wonderful improvement! Amar is ecstatic. He waves the paper in front of Hadia’s face like it’s a flag, points at the number as though the red were not enough to draw her attention to it.
“You did it,” Hadia tells him the first time he shows her.
The second time she only nods. But Mumma acts like every time she sees it is the first. She tapes the test on the refrigerator door, even though they are not like other families with magnets and photographs on their refrigerator. Mumma leans in to kiss Amar’s cheek. She tells him that as soon as Baba comes home, she will show him the test, and that no one is more deserving of the shoes he will get.
At night, Amar comes to Hadia’s bedroom to thank her. His pajamas are dark blue with planets and white stars. Hadia tells herself to hug him. That he does deserve it.
“I wouldn’t have been able to do it without you,” he says, and she can tell from the look in his eyes and the tone of his voice that he means it.
“It’s not a big deal,” she says. She had meant that helping him was not a big deal, but her voice has a sharpened edge to it she did not intend, and he flinches a bit to hear it.
Downstairs in the closet his white shoes have the word written in black ink. When she first studied his test taped on the refrigerator door, she saw that each letter was written with so much care, so unlike his usual scribbles, that at first glance Hadia confused his handwriting with hers. It occurred to her that Amar could do anything if he tried. Maybe even better than Hadia could—he had only studied two nights.
After he leaves, she opens her bottom desk drawer, where she has kept all of her important tests and papers, and all of them are A’s, and none of them have been seen by anyone but her.
Amar was the one they loved the most. He was the one whose picture Mumma kept in her wallet behind her license. Him smiling with a toothless grin. Mumma ran her fingers through his hair as if it nourished her. A painting he did of a boat on the ocean was tacked above Baba’s office desk when she visited him at work. Once Hadia spent an entire afternoon counting the faces in the framed pictures, and Amar had beaten them all by seven. Hadia and Huda were a two-for-one deal: if there was a framed picture of them, they were likely together. Mumma served food for Amar first, and then Baba, and she always asked Amar if he wanted seconds. She was not even aware of doing it. Hadia’s daily chore was washing the dishes and Huda’s was sweeping. If Amar was asked to help, the two of them would shout and cheer to mark the day. Sometimes this made Hadia so angry that if she was left in charge of the cleaning while Mumma and Baba were out, she would delegate everything to Amar. He was the only one Mumma had a nickname for. His favorite ice cream flavor was always stocked in the fridge; if Hadia helped unload the groceries and saw a pistachio and almond carton, she reminded Baba that Amar was the only one of them who ate that flavor.
“You don’t love it too?” Baba would ask her distractedly, every time.
“No,” she’d say quietly, thinking there was no point in correcting him at all.
Once, only once, had she confronted her mother about this, after her mother had taken his side during a fight that he was clearly to blame for.
“You love him more,” she had shouted. “You love him more than all of us.”
“Don’t be silly.”
Her mother was calm, as if she was bored by Hadia’s tantrum.
“You think about him more. What he needs and what he wants.”
Hadia had turned to run back into her room.
“We worry about him more,” her mother had called after her, so gently that Hadia had wanted to believe her. “We don’t have to worry about you.”
She had sniffled, and locked her bedroom door, embarrassed by her outburst. She plotted to do something that would make her parents worry about her, as if their worry would prove the depth of their love. But she was afraid. They had endless patience for Amar’s antics. She feared the only thing worse than wondering if they loved him more was testing their patience, proving it to be thin, and knowing for certain.
They loved Hadia because she did well. Her grades were good and her teachers said kind things about her. She was not sure if Baba would even notice her at all, if she did not work hard to distinguish herself academically. The only compliment Mumma ever gave her was that when Hadia cleaned the stove, it always sparkled.
“Even I can’t clean like that,” Mumma would say. And there would be actual awe in her voice, and Hadia would never know if she should feel glad for the compliment, or annoyed that it was the only thing that Mumma valued enough to note.
Amar was their son. Even the word son felt like something shiny and golden to her, like the actual sun that reigned over their days.
Baba would sometimes say to Hadia, “One day you’ll live with your husband. You’ll care for his parents. You’ll forget about us.”
It was meant as a joke, “you’ll forget about us,” or “we will no longer be responsible for you.” But it was never funny.
“Amar will take care of us, right, Ami?” Mumma would squeeze his cheeks. Amar would nod.
“Why can’t I?” she would say.
“Because the role of the daughter is to go off, to make her own home, to take her husband’s name—daughters are never really ours,” Baba would tell her.
But I want to be yours, she’d want to say. I want to be yours or just my own.