He remembered every question. He remembered how many birds sat on the line and how many took flight.
“My friends had dared me,” she said, and even though it happened so long ago, he felt crushed, that she had not walked up to him of her own accord. “All the mosque girls thought you were something strange, always so quiet and by yourself, but I knew you from when you came over and I’d liked you for years. How you were good in a way unseen to them, to yourself, even. They didn’t think I’d have the nerve but I knew they’d given me a gift—under the guise of a dare I could do what I wanted to: just talk to you.”
“A lucky dare.”
“Even knowing all of what we know now?”
“Especially knowing.”
She smiled at him sadly.
“You know my Mumma saw us that day. In the car on the way home I was scolded in front of my brothers, my father, I was so mortified. Abbas Bhai spoke up for me then, and he told Mumma to calm down. He said to her: of course they can talk to each other. You all are the ones who make just talking such a sin—and what do you expect? We see each other all the time and can’t even act human? Leave her alone, he said. Amar’s a good kid. He didn’t mean anything by it. Let her talk to him if she wants. So Mumma relented—she always listened to Abbas. Abbas was her moral compass when she wasn’t sure what to do. But I was still so embarrassed. I thought I’d never speak to you in person again.”
“Until I came to your door the night—”
“Yes. And you were the only one who comforted me even a little. I thought of how Abbas Bhai had defended you, defended us. Hearing the knock and seeing you of all people, and realizing how reassured I felt at the sight of you, even at that horrible moment, I thought it was some kind of sign.”
They fell silent. She was going to break his heart when she got up to return to the wedding. He already felt it coming his way.
“You know, Amar, our sadness might have looked different, but I was affected too. They didn’t want me to come tonight, did you know that? Mumma has often mentioned you over the years. To try and explain why she had been so harsh with me, or to point out how well I was doing now and wasn’t I glad that things worked out the way they had? But even if she was right, I’d still dissolve into tears. I’d hate her again like I hated her the first time she said I had brought shame to our family, and how that shame was worse than grief because I had chosen to bring it upon them.”
He could not reach out to comfort her, even as it pained him to watch her bite and release her lips in the way she would when she did not want to be upset. He could only keep his hands at his sides, clenched into fists.
She continued, “Once, Mumma told me you were my ‘open vein.’ You were the wound that, no matter how many years passed by, how much healing had been done, if prodded would open and bleed fresh again. But I assured her tonight not to be silly, that I could come. And no one knew if you’d be here anyway.”
She looked down at her bangles, spun one around. He was starting to feel at the edge of a desperate sadness. He had already lost her. Seeing her now was like losing her all over again.
“After they found out about us, Mumma and Baba took away my phone and my computer. They told me every rumor they had heard about you and I wasn’t sure anymore if what they said was true or a lie. ‘Do you want a husband who drinks?’ they would yell at me. ‘Do you want a husband who lies to you? How can a man who does not respect his parents ever respect you?’?”
She paused and looked at him, as if to see if her words had hurt him. Then she smiled to herself and continued, “Once I had loved you in such a way that even if it were all true it still wouldn’t change anything. If they were right—that you were headed nowhere good—that’s where I wanted to be too. You say that there is an entire year of your life you don’t remember, and I feel the same. They took me on a long trip, Syria, Iraq, then India. I felt calm on ziyarat. I felt, for the first time, that all was working out like it was meant to, that we were meant to part. But every time I held the zari I’d think of you and pray for you. That you were happy and doing well. That you’d gone to school and that you’d stopped drinking. I had no idea that it was much worse. I already felt so terrible, I don’t know what I’d have done if I had known. I stayed in India for a month. There, my life in California felt so far. I watched my cousins as they married suitable men and I noticed how there was peace between them and their parents, peace and unity that came from their listening. I wanted that peace. And I thought that maybe they would never feel for their husbands the way I felt for you, but theirs wouldn’t be a false life either, just different, and easier in many ways, and that is what Mumma had wanted me to understand.”
She released the hair from her bun: her nervous habit, any lull in a conversation and she would take her hair down or tie it up again.
“What had we been thinking?” she said quietly, leaning her head back and speaking to the sky, her neck stretched in the moonlight. “Approaching one another so openly, just asking to be seen. We should have never spoken to each other, if a proper way is what we wanted, we should have just waited for each other in silence.”
He followed the curve of her neck until it plunged into her shirt, then looked away.
“No one saw us. I just needed more time.”
“You still don’t know.”
“Know what?”
Again she looked at him as though the sight of him pained her, and he was suddenly afraid to know the answer.
“I didn’t know how Mumma found out either. How she knew details. How she could describe a moment between us at our park and then strike me across my face.” Her voice was shaking. “I didn’t know until a year ago and Mumma finally told me, thinking that the vein had closed, but again I just wept.”
She glanced at the door that led back to the wedding and then down at her arms that cradled her knees, still deliberating telling him. The wind lifted her hair. Amar held his breath.
“Your mother knew, Amar. She came to mine. She told her to end things between us, for both our sakes.”
* * *
WHERE WAS HE? Her entire experience of the wedding was being overshadowed by worry for Amar. Dinner was done and all the plates cleared, Hadia and Tariq had cut the cake and it was being served, and still he could not be located. She had not seen him since the nikkah and that was almost an hour ago. What was most important to her was that he be there for the family photograph so she could finally replace the framed one that hung above their fireplace.
“I’m going to go look for him,” she told Huda.
People had just begun to dip their forks into their cake slices.
“Mumma,” Huda said, “it’s your daughter’s wedding. Can’t you focus on that?”
But Layla was already walking out the hall and into the lobby, where the appetizers and drinks had long been cleared away and now children from the wedding were playing. Layla stepped out of the hotel into the parking lot. She shivered. Nothing about the parking lot told her to look there. It occurred to her to look in the hall to see if she could find the Ali girl. Layla stepped back into the lobby and just when she decided she would go to Rafiq, she saw Amar walking down a long hallway and she rushed forward to meet him. The look on his face unsettled her. Something was wrong. She slowed her step. When he was almost in front of her, Amar looked up from the ground and lifted his hand, as if to stop her from coming any closer.
“Don’t,” he said.
“What happened? You were doing so well.”