IT IS WHEN I am alone that I think of you again. I open the card from Abbas and Tahira that I saved for this very moment. WE LOVE YOU NANA, GET WELL SOON, written in Abbas’s chicken-scratch, the exact kind of handwriting I critiqued you for when you were his age. Tahira has drawn me butterflies surrounding a house on a hill. Abbas is seven, Tahira only four. They have enlarged my life in a way I could not have anticipated and cannot fully express. I have no duty toward them except loving them, and because of this I am only loved in return. I am so unwilling to hurt them in even the slightest way that I spoil them instead. Hadia does not trust me to be alone with them before dinner: the three of us giggle and deny any chocolate consumed, even as Tahira’s teeth and fingers give us away. Perhaps, if we met again now, you would not recognize me: I am calmer. I rarely anger.
Perhaps you would also wonder, after years of silence and the years before in which we hardly spoke, why I now have so much I want to say. Perhaps you would even feel it is too late. That it does not matter what I have to say because it would change nothing for you, for us.
But, Amar, what if I told you that lately, I find myself driving through familiar streets, unaware of how much time has passed since I left home, until it occurs to me that these were the streets I drove to drop you off at school, or the route to our barbershop that has long since closed down. At four in the morning, if I wake alone, I walk until I am at the threshold of your old bedroom, looking out at the barely illuminated folds of the comforter on your bed, the walls so bare now—your room almost entirely stripped of any trace of you, each item packed away in boxes and put in your closet, waiting for another decade to pass before we muster the energy to try and take another look.
And it is in these moments that the fabric of my life reveals itself to be an illusion: thinking that I am fine, we all are, that we could grow around your loss like a tree that bends around a barrier or wound. That I do not need to see you again. That the reality of our life as it is now is the best that we could have done and the best we could have hoped for. Until one Sunday I am parked at your old elementary school, looking out at the empty blue picnic tables, or late when no one is looking, I crumple and toss an old test of yours in my wastebasket only to go back for it, uncrease it, fold it gently, and place it back at the very bottom of my drawer. In those moments no argument I have used to delude myself can comfort me. You may be unwilling to hear me. You may not understand, but please listen. I have told you to listen many times before, I know. But I have never asked you.
I am asking now.
* * *
THE FIRST TWO nights after you were born, you were kept in the neonatal ward. They told us you were all right, but after the brief scare of your birth they wanted to monitor you, assist you with your breathing. I would wait until your mother was asleep to walk the halls until I found myself at your floor, just one above hers, and look at you and the other tiny babies in their clear cribs. The humming of the machinery. The quiet of the night. Some of the lights had been dimmed because it would be three or four in the morning. I would stand in the same spot, at the center of the glass window, my hand closed into a fist and stuffed into my jacket pocket. Focused on the small baby that was you. Your hand rested by your face, your fingers curled, the way you would fall asleep for years to come but I did not know that then. I did not know anything. My feet would ache and I would shift my weight from one foot to the other. For hours I stood. Praying, mainly. That desperate kind of praying, the kind I have little experience with, the kind that cannot wait until I kneel in sijda so instead I speak directly to God: Anything if he makes it through the next few days. Anything for this.
We had named you Amar. As I stood at the glass window I thought of your name until it became familiar to me. If I was not speaking to God I was speaking to you: You’ll be okay, Amar. We’ll take you home soon. Layla had wanted to name each of our children after holy figures—after all, she said, why wouldn’t we want to give our children the best of names? But I had this funny idea that I thought then was noble. That perhaps others could name their children after the Prophet and his family, but how could I, not knowing what my children would go on to do, knowing they might sin in some way and in that way they would bring down not only themselves but a name so holy with them. Now I wonder if that was a mistake. That had I named you Ali or Mohammed or Hussain, maybe it would have been a constant and inescapable reminder for you to hold yourself to a standard they inspired.
Those nights there was a nurse on duty named Dawn. I remember how her name reminded me of a poem I encountered in college, years after the passing of my parents, that had been soothing to me. Dawn had short red hair and little freckles on her face. She had light eyelashes and was kind to me. She told me which floors had vending machines and where I could get a bagel when morning came. She made small talk, which I had never been good at, but perhaps because of the odd hour of night and the strange state of mind I was in, I was all right at talking with her.
“That one is mine,” I said, touching my finger to the glass.
“Beautiful,” she said. “Your first?”
She had a soft, calming voice, made softer by the fact that we were whispering to one another.
“First son. I have two girls too.”
“You’re a lucky man,” she said. “And your son will be just fine.”
There was certainty in her voice, as though it came from somewhere else, as though she had been placed there just to tell me that. I was so terrified. I could have cried when she said it.
* * *
“AND WHAT DOES an MRI reveal?” I turn my head to ask the nurse who is wheeling me down the corridor. I know in a general sense, but I want to hear what he has to say. I want to know if there is anything Hadia has kept from me. I have been hesitant to ask her questions.
“An image of your brain.”
“Do you know what the doctor is looking for?”
I twist the loose plastic bracelet around my wrist and wait for his answer, holding my breath.
“No, sir. I have not spoken with the doctor. But the MRI will be painless.”
I am wheeled into the bright, quiet room. I am given earplugs. Every wall here is too white. The dome and the bed in the center, which must be the machine, and the technician telling me to lie on my back. Telling me not to move.
Then I am alone. The technician is on the other side of the wall. Somewhere in this building is Hadia, comforting a patient, or looking over her notes before walking in to see another one. I realize how lucky I am, that if there is any hint of an issue she can make sense of the tests, easily ask to order others, think of what to do. The bed begins to move slowly back into the tunnel. I close my eyes. The noises are loud and erratic, even with the earplugs. I am very still. When I open my eyes again, a light is moving across the curvature of the tunnel, and I think of how unnatural it is to keep ourselves alive in this way. I want to live, I realize, but the thought that surprises me is the darker one that comes after: that I also want for there to be something wrong, and for it to be serious, and immediately I wonder if God will punish me for the thought. Then the beeping is done and I wait for a cue to move.
* * *
BEFORE YOU WERE born, I thought I knew how to be a father. Hadia was four when we brought you home. Huda only three. Making them smile was easy. Keeping them smiling, simple. Layla would tell me that they would watch for the darkening of the sky, listen for the turning of the key and creak of the door, ready to abandon their coloring books or unfinished bowls of dinner to rush to me, each one holding on to a leg that I had to drag to move, and when I managed to, they laughed and tightened their grip.