THE SKY IS pale by the time she arrives. In a daze she enters her house and at this hour, even the furniture appears at peace. Sofas draped with white sheets. The plants growing in their pots by the staircase. The shoes left by the door. No one knows she has come. Even she had not known she would until after she hung up with Baba, saying to him, well, maybe you should talk to him without anger and he would trust you too, which she regretted saying—not because she did not mean it, but because instead of calling her batamiz, Baba had gone quiet. He had been slow to respond throughout the conversation and then he only said, yes, well, if you could come.
Once she is home she heads straight to Amar’s bedroom, and he is there, fast asleep, his window wide open and cold air rushing in. All night she drove in a steady panic, not knowing what it had been like at home, not knowing if she was arriving too late. She does not know if her body is dizzy from the lack of sleep and excess caffeine or from the immense relief at the sight of her brother. She shuts his window, sits at the edge of his bed. A faint memory: the light gray, and Amar telling her that Hadia would always come for him if he called. Thank you God, she thinks, maybe I have been selfish, but You have allowed me to return before it was too late. She feels strange after the thought: it is how her mother would think to thank God, and Hadia considers her relationship to God to be slightly more sophisticated than her mother’s. But if God is the one to thank, then she will thank Him, and she stands from the bed and kneels on the floor, touches her forehead to the carpet.
* * *
IN THE GARDEN Hadia leans against the plum tree and Amar sits by her, pulling grass from the ground and dropping it like confetti. This time of year the plums are still small and bitter. Every once in a while her mother’s face appears at a window, but when Hadia looks again her mother is gone. Usually, being around her siblings is like returning to her original self, with no need to think of what to say or how to say it, but today she is hesitant. She is trying to get a sense of what the problem might be, or gauge the extent of it, but anytime she circles close to asking Amar directly, she retreats, afraid to anger him or lose his trust.
“I didn’t mean for it to be like this,” he confesses.
“Like what, Amar?”
“I can’t describe it.”
“Try.”
“I know you don’t trust me.”
“I trust you.”
He plucks blades of grass, then lines them up on his palm.
“I owe somebody money.”
“What did you do?”
“I know you don’t trust me, Hadia.”
“I do, Amar. Who do you owe? For what?”
“Five hundred dollars.”
He flips his palm and some of the blades fall to the ground. Others stick to his skin and he shakes his hand. She rests her forehead against her palm.
“That’s a lot.”
“Will you help me?”
He is not looking at her.
“I don’t have that kind of money.”
“You’re a doctor.”
“I’m still a student.”
She tries to hide the hurt from her voice.
“I’ll pay you back. I know you don’t think I will, but I will.”
“I know you will.”
“You do?”
He looks up. His eyes are wide. He is still like a child. He has not cut his hair in months and it falls into his face. She only saw him recently and she is alarmed by how much weight he has lost. His cheeks are sunken and his cheekbones even more pronounced. Is she a fool to trust her brother because he is her brother? Against her own instincts, her own intuition, because she wants to believe him, because she has known him his whole life and cannot fathom a change so drastic he would be made unfamiliar to her.
“I do.”
“Don’t tell Baba?” he asks her.
“Don’t you trust me?”
“I do. I knew I could ask you.”
* * *
A NEEDLE, BABA had said earlier that morning, when she first spoke to him alone in the hallway while everyone slept. Baba hugged her and she braced against his embrace, realized in that moment that she did not trust him when it came to Amar. He agreed, almost too eagerly, to let her speak to him first. He could not control his anger and Amar could not control his reaction to it, and they found themselves in unpredictable territory.
“I don’t understand how he could sin so severely,” Baba had whispered, shaking his head.
“Baba, sinning does not even matter anymore, not in the face of this.”
She was speaking with such little patience. Baba blinked at her. Hadia sensed a new space opening between them—a space in which he looked to her for answers—and realized she could say anything. Was it respect that allowed Baba to listen to her now, or desperation? Right and wrong, halal and haram—it was her father’s only way of experiencing the world. She should do what she could to bridge the distance between his understanding and Amar’s actions.
“Baba, what he is gambling on is not just his standing before God. This is much graver. This is about him surviving this life, here.”
She had never seen her father so bewildered, so helpless. And she found herself not wanting to protect his weakness, as she might have hoped, but wanting to attack it, wanting him to blame himself the way she faulted him.
“You cannot approach him now as you always have,” she said.
“Tell me how.”
“You cannot get angry. It will only make everything worse.”
Baba lowered his face and nodded.
* * *
HUDA IS READING in her bedroom when Hadia steps in. Hadia says nothing as she crawls into Huda’s bed, lays her head in her sister’s lap, curls her legs up close to her chest, and tucks her hand between her knees. Huda rests her hand on Hadia’s shoulder and its weight is comforting. Huda’s breathing somehow calms her. Hadia closes her eyes and listens to the sound of pages turning. It might be just the two of us from now on—the thought comes to her just like that, and the force of her grief at having thought it surprises her.
“Is this what was always going to happen?” Hadia asks.
Huda does not have to ask her to explain. She runs her hand through Hadia’s hair in the exact way she always wanted Mumma to, and what is clenched tight in Hadia breaks and somehow she is crying.
Huda speaks at last. “I think at some point it could have been different, for him, for us, but now I don’t know.”
“What point?”
The sound of Mumma watering the lawn drifts in through the open window and Hadia pictures Mumma covering the green hose with four fingers so the spray fans out.
“I always thought Amar stopped trying after the shoes. His attitude to Baba was different. He stopped calling him Baba. That was the year he was held back, remember? He stopped wanting to want anything at all.”
It comes at once, and so vividly: the posters, the petition, the speech, the spelling test, Amar kicking his legs back and forth seated at her desk, biting the yellow pencil until the paint chipped off, the rest of the house fast asleep as Hadia held the banister, stepped into the dark downstairs and knocked against the door of Baba’s office.
Huda continues, “After that I noticed his pattern: he begins to try, only to feel, at some point, helplessly unable to continue, like he decides for himself there is no point in trying.”
The curtain moves back and forth. The fabric of Huda’s trousers are wet from her tears. Mumma turns off the hose.
“You’re going to make a good teacher,” Hadia says to her, and Huda mouths a thank-you, and wipes Hadia’s cheeks.
How were they to know the moments that would define them? It will affect his personality for his whole life, someone is saying to her, and whose fault will it be then?
Mine, a voice replies, and the voice is hers.
Now her brother was in danger of having nothing. And now she wanted nothing her brother could not have: not the exams her teachers handed back to her winking, not the accolades, not the watch that had been gifted to her—she was glad it had disappeared—not the career she was building or the space opening up between her and Baba that told her he finally respected her as an adult and would rely on her the way a father might a son. What had she done to her brother, so that she could survive, so that she could be the one who thrived?
* * *