ABOUT FIVE YEARS ago, Hadia and Tariq got jobs an hour away, in Palo Alto, and moved back. They were lucky. But Layla and I felt luckiest of all: our years of being alone, of spending entire days only occupying our room and the kitchen, were over. By then, Huda had moved to Arizona after marrying Jawad, the grandson of my father’s oldest friend, who had sent the proposal after they met at Hadia’s wedding.
Layla and I waited eagerly for Hadia to ask us to help her with Abbas. He was only three then. Sometimes he stayed with us for entire workdays. We were getting to know him. We had flown to Chicago when he was born, but after, we had only seen him for a few days at a time. He liked spinach. Pretending bites were airplanes did not work, but if we named each bite after a superhero, he would eat them. He always got full before the very last bite. He preferred rain to strong wind. I was Nana, and Layla was Nani. Layla made up stories that she had never told our own children, playful and funny tales about yellow chicks who were enemies and endlessly plotted pranks on each other, stories that made Abbas laugh and laugh. I laughed too, if only because Abbas’s laughter was a force that caught me by surprise.
Abbas fell asleep easily with Layla and went to her when he was tired, or if he had hurt himself and begun to cry, but during his unhurt waking hours it was me he wanted, my arms he was always in. It was a mark of that age. I had slept through my children’s childhood. I would not allow that to happen with him. I would hold him anytime he asked, even during the months that Hadia and Tariq were trying to break his bad habit of being held. Everything he did, I told myself to cherish the act, knowing that the age would pass, and he would stop asking me to carry him everywhere, would stop ranking the ones he loved.
“Mumma number one,” he would announce, holding up a finger. Then, pressing my nose with his finger, “Nana number two.”
“And what about us?” Layla would ask, and Tariq would ask.
“Baba and Nani number three,” he would say.
They would feign hurt and say, “Baba and Nani the same? Can Baba and Nani be number two, too?”
“No,” he refused them. “Nana number two.”
I felt for Layla, and I felt for Tariq, but I could not deny it, the enlarging of my heart when I lifted him in my arms and kissed the crown of his head. That’s right, I whispered to him. He did not know how to wink then but he did scrunch his nose and show his two front teeth anytime he knew it was mischievous to agree with me. Never mind number one; I had never been anyone’s number two, and I vowed to do what I could to keep my rank.
* * *
THE YEAR ABBAS turned five, the news was constantly playing in the background of our home. That was the year I realized I had stopped being surprised by what people could say. It was the easiest movement, to suddenly feel hated. It was almost as though I had known it all along—so when it came, what surprised me was not the existence of hate, so much as the casual quality of it.
“Turn it off,” Hadia said one night when she came to pick up Abbas and Tahira. “I want to protect them from this for as long as possible.”
Tahira was napping on our couch. Abbas was drawing under the coffee table.
“He will not understand any of it,” I assured her.
She seemed uncharacteristically worried. I did my best to respect her wishes as a parent. That night, I turned the television off, but the voices did not leave my mind easily. Hadia was right. He was little, but who knew what the effect would be on him? It was 2016, and that year I watched and watched the news as though watching would do something for me, would explain to me what was happening, would prepare me for something, but it only made me nervous and heavy of heart. I whispered to Layla that I was going for a walk. The sun had just begun to set. I kissed the top of Hadia’s head, in case she had left by the time I returned, and I snuck out without telling Abbas, in case he tried to come along.
I did not walk in the yard but along the streets of the neighborhood we had lived in since Hadia was four and Huda was three. I still remembered the day we first stepped inside as a family. Hadia was so scared when we pretended to sneak in, she had pinched her hands into little fists. Layla and I had always planned on one day moving into a smaller home, to a more affordable area, as ours was expensive because of the good schools we now had no need for. We did not know what our children’s values would be, if they would be willing to live with their parents as I would have had my parents lived, and so we talked sometimes of moving into a bungalow to make it easier for us as we aged, one close to the mosque to make our commutes shorter. But after you ran away we never spoke of it again. We both knew without ever saying it aloud that now we would never. Sometimes, still, if there was an unexpected knock on the door, my heart would quicken for just a moment, thinking, what if? But it would only be a family friend dropping by unannounced, a volunteer asking us if we were registered to vote.
As I walked that night, I waved at each of my neighbors who were out on their darkening lawns. They waved back. Had the way they thought about me changed? I did not think so. I was caught between thinking the world was changing around me and I was a changed man in it, or believing that nothing had changed, least of all my resolve to wave and smile at my neighbors. I walked and walked until the sky turned violet and I reached the field where a horse was kept behind a wooden fence wrapped with barbed wire. The horse had a shiny dark coat and a white splotch between his eyes. Some special evenings, you three would insist on accompanying me on my walk and would ask to come here. You and Hadia liked the horses a moderate amount, but Huda had a tiny figurine of a tan horse she kept on her windowsill. She spoke to the horses in the field and named them Cow or Pinocchio, and I would tease her for it, and you would laugh and laugh. Layla would send us with a plastic bag of chopped apples, and you three would take turns tossing slices into the dirt, squealing when a horse moved to eat it, the breath from its nose disturbing the dirt.
“Chopped?” I had asked Layla once, when I glanced inside the plastic bag. “What do horses care if the apple is chopped?”
She had smiled at me in a way that I cannot clearly picture now, as much as I try to, and she gave me that loving look of hers that says to me, oh Rafiq, you have never understood, and you never will.