Mumma is not crying. So why is Hadia? After she leaves Mumma, she steps straight into Amar’s bedroom. He is asleep, his curtains drawn shut. She is smarter than this. She did not study so seriously just to miss a symptom in her own brother.
“Amar,” she whispers. No response. He was gone all night again, so it is not so alarming for him to still be sleeping. She tries to remember what he was wearing last night, but it had been dark. A jacket dropped by his bed. She lifts it, goes through the pockets, nothing. Sets it down again. She sits at the edge of his bed. He sleeps on his side, with his hand curled under his face like a boy. She lifts his jacket again, turns it inside out, uses her hand as sight and there, by the breast pocket, she catches a clean rip. Inside, her fingers brush against a plastic bag, and she knows that this is what she has been looking for. Four identical pills, round and white. In the hallway light she examines them. She tries to tell herself it could be anything. But he had hidden them in the seam of his jacket. Last fall, she had taken extensive notes on opiates, in a spiral notebook she kept on a shelf with her other old notebooks. For a moment she considers returning the pills but she goes to the bathroom instead, drops them into the toilet, flushes them before they begin to dissolve. A knot tightens inside her as the pills, swirling separately, converge, then disappear from her sight.
8.
AT DINNER TONIGHT NO ONE IS SPEAKING. MUMMA PUSHES the bowl of saalan toward him, asking him to take more, but he does not want to eat. If it were not Hadia’s last dinner home, he would not be sitting with them at all. He moves the food around his plate. Hadia can come and go as she pleases and she is supported. Welcomed home and bade farewell extravagantly: the Quran held above her as she passes beneath it, the bag of frozen food packed for her to defrost later, long hugs and will you please call us more often? It should be a joke, he thinks, but it isn’t—how different it is for you if you stay in line, keep your head down, do as you’re told. It is as though to be loved at all you must be obedient. To be respected you must tame yourself. Usually, the night before Hadia left, he felt the same anxiety one felt as a child during the last hours of Sunday, but tonight he feels nothing.
Hadia asks if anyone has seen her watch. No one needs to ask which one. Amar leans forward for a bite but can feel his father watching him.
“Now your watch is missing too?” his father says.
Amar does not look up. He is not at all hungry but he chews slowly. His father speaks again, louder this time, each word delivered slowly and deliberately. “Has anyone seen Hadia’s watch?”
No one answers. Amar stares at the shiny rim of his glass and then he can’t help himself, he looks up to meet Hadia’s gaze. She has been watching him too. Her focus on his face feels like a betrayal. He glimpses a flash in her eyes, quick like the shade of a cloud passing over the sun, and then she looks down at her own plate, as if she were the guilty one. His father slams his hand against the table.
“That was my father’s watch. That was the one thing of his I had.”
No one moves. Amar experiences the moment as if from a distance, he notes how strange his father’s voice is, how the hurt in it sounds coarse. Amar does not have to sit through this. He owes them nothing. He stands with his plate.
Behind him, he can hear his father’s chair scoot back and he begins to yell at Amar. “You have no respect for anything, not even yourself. You will lose yourself and be forever blind to what you have lost.”
“Baba,” Hadia is shouting too, and Amar glances back and sees that Hadia is holding on to his father’s arm to stop him from stepping any closer to Amar. “Baba, I probably misplaced it. I will check my suitcase. I will check my apartment too.”
Amar scrapes his food into the trash.
“But you never misplace anything,” Huda says. Amar looks up. He has the odd sense that he is not in the kitchen, but watching the scene unfold in a memory or a movie, someone else’s life. Mumma presses her hand against Huda’s arm as if to silence her.
* * *
“AND WHAT HAPPENS when you sin?”
“You get a speck on your heart, a dark, small speck.”
An ink-dark heart. He’s lost his pills. He needs more. Simon is out of town. Before Amar steps outside in his driveway, he pulls the bottle of vodka from his laundry basket, takes three big gulps, and then, when he feels nothing within a minute, drinks it like water until it is gone. An immediate rush is more thrilling than a slowly increasing sensation.
“A permanent stain. So heavy and black it cannot tell good from evil.”
Cool outside and cricket sounds. Hadia is leaving in the morning. Even though she is being horrible, home is home when she is in it. He sits just past the driveway, at the edge of the sidewalk. The world trembles but only slightly. Simon said he would be back in a few days but what if he does not come?
“Of course, there is always the opportunity of asking Allah for forgiveness.”
What had they been speaking about? It had something to do with wolves. Joseph and his brothers who threw him to the wolves. His coat torn and covered in sheep’s blood. Or was it the boy who cried wolf, wolf, until no one came?
“Why is it too late?”
“Nothing can be done.”
His head is throbbing. He rubs his chest. He sins and sins and does not hesitate before sinning again. His ink so permanent. There is a presence behind him and then it is Hadia. It is Hadia taking a seat. She leans her head against his arm and he tries to steady himself. He breathes through his nose in case she can smell it on his breath.
“Amar, I need you to listen to me. You have to be careful with pills. They are not like drinking. They are no joke. You could open a door you don’t know how to close.”
So she took them. A hundred fucking dollars at least. At least. He will not react at all. He will not even move. She could have found anyone’s pills. Maybe even the pills for Mumma’s tooth that was removed months ago.
“You would turn on me too? Spread lies about me?”
He would have more respect for her but he pulls a cigarette from his pocket and lights it. He even offers one to her. She stares back at him. Just when the drag hits he closes his eyes and tries to let the feeling calm him but it is not enough anymore and with his eyes closed he realizes how much he has had to drink, how he should be careful when he stands, and the entire world feels like it is churning in circles.
“Hadia, do you think what Mumma said about the heart has already happened to me? So many black stains that now it is just a dark seal? Like nighttime descending and never lifting. Like nothing can be done.”
She is shaking her head and his arm and is saying, “Forget your soul, Amar. I am worried about your body.”
The first time he took a pill he did so because he thought it would numb his problems, soften the edges of his thoughts or at least slow them from racing: that he had lost Amira, lost Abbas, and any day now would lose his father’s and mother’s love for him, each loss reaching back to the one before. He had told himself it was just one night he needed help getting through.
Now the pendulum swung in extremes. The glow from the pill so warm, even his insides were coated in warmth. And Amira’s face far away. Baba’s disgust and disappointment in him far away. Mumma saying, but, Ami, if you love us why can’t you listen, far away. Then he was returned to his body and in terror, thinking only of how badly he wanted that warmth again.
Are you listening? Hadia is asking him, her hand on his shoulder. The moon is so small he wonders why it ever awed him. Why he ever hoped his hunch was true: that it followed him home, every time he looked up and out the window of a moving car. It still says Ali in Arabic. And there is still the face of a man laughing at him. He lifts up his thumb and covers it. He closes one eye and it’s gone.
* * *