“I am,” she said, and then she twisted again the row of bangles on her wrist. “I am content. My parents are happy.”
He was a dentist, a few years older. What would Amar become then to Amira? Oh, she might tell someone one day, that was my brother’s friend. Or even less spoken: she would keep it a secret. One day she might push her son in the swing and look up to two kids sitting beneath a tree, too shy to scoot any closer, and she might remember herself at seventeen, defying everyone, risking everything, just to meet the boy from her community everyone warned her about.
Before she left, they stood face-to-face. She returned the jacket he had draped over her shoulders.
“I may not see you again and we may not speak again,” she said, “but whatever comes, I want you to know there is a part of me that will always be who I was when I wrote that note and left it on your pillow. I never regretted that. I will always hope that you are happy, and safe, and healthy. I will pray you keep your promise. And that wherever you are, you are at home there.”
He thought if he were to speak his voice would break.
“What’s it like?” she whispered, their old game, that first question she had written him, and she looked up at him with her big eyes. He had no answer. He allowed himself to hold her in his arms and she rested her head against his chest. They stayed like that. His whole body was alive. He cast a shadow over her face when she lifted her face to his. He moved her hair from her eyes and he looked at her for one long moment, then kissed her forehead.
Now he crossed the street. The light in the liquor store window blinked OPEN, a bell sounded as he stepped in.
* * *
THE BOTTLE HE bought was the smallest one they carried, and he was proud of himself when it was the one he reached for. He knew his limits. It fit in the inside of his jacket pocket but was clunky. He needed to rest for just a minute before he could step back inside the main hall. He sat alone in the courtyard. He felt dizzy if he tried to stand. He should have eaten, he couldn’t remember the last thing he had eaten or when. People were lining up to take pictures with the bride and groom when he snuck past. Soon it would be his family’s turn. He would tell Mumma he was very sorry. They had been right about him. Eventually Amira would have realized it on her own too, so it did not matter how. It was inevitable. He was better off in L.A. He rested his head in his hands. And then a memory presented itself to him at so strange a time and so unvisited before, he wondered if it could even be true: he has thrown a tantrum at maybe eleven and has left his house to sit on the cement driveway beneath his basketball hoop. The sky draining of its color but not before filling first: with pink, orange, indigo, and violet clouds. When the door opens it is his father and not his sister or his mother that has come after him. And even though his father’s kurta-pajama is white and easily dirtied, he takes a seat beside him on the ground and Amar still thinks of him then as Baba. He moves his basketball from one hand to the other, its rough orange surface, and he is not speaking, and Baba looks at the street and the cars passing and maybe the people in the cars wondering what is wrong with them.
“Amar,” his father is trying to talk to him, “why do you think like this, these foolish thoughts, that you don’t belong?”
He holds the basketball close to him, rests his chin on its curved surface. Another car passes and the person inside not looking at them. When it becomes clear that Baba is waiting for an answer, that the sky will turn black before he is satisfied with the silence, Amar shrugs. If only he could remember now what the hurt was about. Maybe that he does not want to pray and maybe that he does not want to sit still when their mother makes them listen to the duas, and he gets in ear-twisting trouble for making it into a joke, for trying to make eye contact with Hadia or Huda until one of them starts to laugh. Maybe just that everyone is good except for him, everyone has a lock in them that they have found a key to, and he is all shut up and closed with no key so he looks to each of them when they are listening intently to the duas thinking either there is no key or that he was created without one. And maybe he does not really believe in angels but maybe the ones on his shoulders look at each other and they shake their heads and shrug, saying, well, we don’t know what to do with this one, even if God were to show him signs he would not listen because that is the way it is with some kids, when their hearts are just stained black.
He must have said something because Baba pokes his shoulder and says, “Don’t you know—that’s the thing—everyone is not just good. Everyone is trying to be good. And everyone feels this way sometimes, that they are not good, and not good at trying either.”
“That’s not true,” Amar remembers saying to his father. “You are good.”
* * *
HADIA AND TARIQ smiled and posed as family after family lined up for the photographs. She was ready for the night to end. When the Ali family approached, Hadia saw at once that Amira Ali’s face was flushed and her hair down and a little windswept. The photographer arranged each family member on the stage and Amira was directed to sit by Hadia. Amira congratulated her. Hadia thanked her and looked at her for a second longer than she might have—Amira Ali’s eyes were bright green, and Hadia could not decide if her face had that raw look of having just cried.
Wonderful, the photographer said. Hadia did not look into the lens. She swept the hall for Amar and could not find him. Mumma sat alone at a far table, watching the hall empty of guests. From this distance she could not see Mumma’s expression. Huda was near the stage, talking to Dani, but Hadia sensed right away that Huda was anxious, she crossed her hands in front of her as if she were guarding herself.
Hadia sometimes still returned to that conversation with Amira in the mosque parking lot years ago. It was just months before Amar was to run away, but of course Hadia had not known that at the time. She remembered being surprised when Amira had asked to speak with her. She remembered how Amira nervously looked around the ladies’ hall filled with women mingling and whispered, “Privately please, ten minutes, near the basketball hoop.”
By then Hadia had glimpsed the contents of her brother’s box. She had not told her parents, but she had told Huda: no details, just that they had formed some sort of relationship.
“I know this is strange,” Amira said when they were alone, “but I needed to speak to you. I don’t know if Amar told you about us—”
Hadia shook her head no, then said, “But I had guessed.”
Amira sighed. “We were so foolish.”
Hadia remembered thinking that Amira was too young to look that sad, only eighteen.
“My mother found out about us,” Amira said, “just three weeks ago. Amar and I have not really spoken since.”
“I’m sorry,” Hadia had said, and she meant it. She found, in that moment, that she felt great affection for the girl, and oddly protective of her.
“Mumma and Baba forbid it. I wake up every morning just wanting to fall asleep. There is a part of me that knows all I want is this. All I want is to fight my parents for him.”
Later, Hadia would look back on that night and tell herself that Amira Ali had sought her out on purpose, to be someone who could listen to her as a sister, but could also hold in her heart love for Amar, and look beyond the limits of propriety that their parents could not. Hadia had hugged Amira, and Amira had leaned into the hug, let herself be consoled. It occurred to Hadia that in another life, in a life where her girlhood dream or her brother’s dream came true, the two of them would have become sisters.
“They say he drinks, they say he is no good, that I am better off.”