“I’m not,” she said quietly, stirring her straw. “I think you can do it.”
Her words felt false then and she was sure he took them as so. Amar was turning twenty soon and was about to begin his second year of community college. As far as Hadia could tell he was far from being on track. He had gone through his entire education doing the bare minimum. His high school graduation had been a kind of miracle. When he had been in danger of dropping out of high school, she had tried to convince Baba that there were other kinds of intelligence. Did I come this far, he said, did I work this hard, for you to all waste your lives? Make nothing of yourselves. She did not say to her father: but I am making something of myself, and only for you. She did not tell him that since beginning med school it had become clear to her that she had no personal interest in the subject, that she was only pursuing it for him, pushing and pushing herself and resenting how one decision made at eighteen would now determine the shape of her life.
After her conversation with Amar, she could not silence her suspicions about the sudden change in him, the way he’d pulled himself together. She had stepped into his closet looking for his keepsake box. It felt wrong, but she only wanted to know if her hunch was true. When Amar was much younger and they had first gifted him the box, he had only trusted Hadia to help him figure out how to set the combination. He had chosen his birth date and his jersey number from the jersey Abbas Ali had given him, a combination he did not realize Hadia caught the significance of, and likely thought she had forgotten. Over the years she very rarely indulged in a cruel curiosity, and allowed herself to peek in his box.
In photographs held together by a plastic band she saw the face of Amira Ali. So he loved her. She had wondered when she had caught Amar looking in Amira’s direction at parties. She had once walked in on them risking a conversation in the mosque lobby. Amira had blushed immediately, offered up a flimsy excuse, and walked away, leaving Hadia free to tease Amar, but instead she gave him a grim look. Of all the girls? she wanted to say. He should be careful. But why wouldn’t he love Amira Ali? She was easy to love. Something about her stood apart from the other girls. Judging by the stack of letters addressed to him (To: A, From: A), perhaps she loved him too.
What surprised her most that night, though, was not the photographs of Amira Ali, but one of her father, young and handsome and so serious. He looked exactly like Amar did now. She held it in her hand like a prize, considered knocking on her parents’ bedroom and saying: look—he saved this. But what would it prove? There was another photograph she had not seen before, at a park, their mother wearing a bright yellow shalwar kameez. Mumma looked radiant and astonishingly young. Baba was missing from the picture. Hadia tried to recall the day but could not. Tangerines in her hand and Huda’s. In the picture Amar was looking up at her. Then there was a photograph of Abbas Ali and she stopped, having not seen his face in years, and she realized she had almost forgotten its disarming effect on her. Her throat closed shut. It was taken at a camp their families had gone to years ago; Amar’s arm was around him. For years she had been too shy to say his name, but alone, under the yellow light of her brother’s closet, she spoke his name aloud.
Amar loved Amira Ali. And she could not help but admire how he had done something about it: he had lifted a camera and focused it on her face, he had written her letters, sat by her in a sunny place. Hadia had loved Abbas Ali and had done nothing; the love story that existed between their families was not, as she had imagined as a girl, between her and Abbas Ali, but a story that now belonged to her brother. She had been alone with Abbas in the same kitchen and had barely spoken to him. She had kept her hands dumbly at her sides.
* * *
THE NIGHT OF the eighth Moharram majlis, Amar comes to Hadia’s bedroom. He shakes her a little to wake her.
“I’m heading out,” he says to her. “I’ll be back before morning.”
“Where are you going?”
She sits up. Even in the moonlight, even through the fog of her sleep, she can sense that he moves strangely, unsteady on his feet.
“It’s good to have you home,” he whispers. “I’m leaving my window open. Cover for me in case? Don’t tell, yeah?”
He leaves. After he has walked away she catches a smell she cannot quite place. At least he still tells her before he goes. A horrible thought twists a knot in her stomach: what if something happens to him, what if her parents find out she had known and did nothing? The thought wakes her. She goes to her window and looks out. He is the figure jogging across the street and getting into a car. Navy blue, four-door, a license plate she can’t make out. Please God, let him come back before Mumma and Baba wake for fajr. The magnolia flowers glow in the moonlight, white as bones.
Once they have driven away, she steps into his bedroom on tiptoe. It might just be an invitation to a party he does not want to refuse, a young man acting like one, which would not be a problem in any other household, had their family not been their family, their faith not their faith, their father not their father. She closes Amar’s bedroom door behind her. Earlier that night, in the mosque parking lot, Amira Ali had pulled Hadia aside. Amira had had the audacity to ask after Amar, and had she not seemed so genuinely blue, Hadia might have bristled at her boldness. Whatever might have existed between Amira and Amar was over. She felt for her brother but was hardly surprised. Now she lifts up his sheets. Runs her hand beneath his mattress. Lifts his pillows and shakes them. A small green case falls out and bounces off the mattress and onto the floor. He is so reckless. Baba could easily follow the same trail. It is almost as though he wants to be caught. She unscrews the lid, sniffs it: just weed. She had guessed as much. She returns the canister to his pillow. As long as Mumma Baba didn’t find it and overreact, all would be well. Baba would be unable to tolerate or understand it. The longer she searches, the faster she moves: his laundry basket is heavy for just clothes and she rummages until she finds two water bottles, one clear and one honey colored. She twists the cap open and scrunches her nose from the strong scent. She considers tasting it but could never. Not on the eve of ninth Moharram, not on any other day. She is a little proud of herself: that, even in the dead of night, with no one to watch her, even while holding the alcohol in her hand, she still has no intention of acting on her curiosity. Maybe a better sister would have drained the contents into the bathroom sink but she knows it would be no solution. It is not the drink but the impulse to seek it out that is the problem. She sprays his room with freshener, wipes down the surfaces of his desk and drawers. Tired, she sits on his bed. The breeze from his open window gets caught in the curtain like a ghost’s dress. She thinks of the stacks of letters and photographs she found in Amar’s box months ago, and her conversation with Amira tonight, and feels deeply sad for her brother. He should have known better—there was no way her parents would think to marry her to Amar. Amar, who liked to stoke the disapproval of everyone in the community like a man fanning flames. Amar never tried to be anyone other than himself, but now she sees that perhaps, this past summer, when they were sitting on that patio squinting from the sunlight, he had been trying, for Amira Ali, to become the kind of man who could send a decent proposal. Before leaving his room she looks out the window at the empty street and trembling magnolia blossoms. The curtain fills with air before dragging back and she tries to push the uneasy thought from her mind: of how well she knows her brother, of what he is like when his desire escapes him.
* * *