“Sir,” the nurse asked me, dropping her tone into a serious whisper, “may I offer my honest opinion?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Between you and me, it wasn’t your son’s fault. I think the other boys were being awful and cruel, I think they instigated it.”
She did not know you as I knew you. How it likely had been your fault. You might be in her office giving her the look you give your mother, your eyes very big and dramatically sad and inspiring compassion.
Still I asked, “They were being cruel?”
“Racist, sir.”
Something in me snapped, or sank, I’m not sure what it was. I told my boss I was leaving to pick you up. He’s hurt, I said, stitches. Anger had always been my response to your antics. And here was another suspension, another fight. But as I drove to your school I was surprised to find that I swelled with a panicked kind of love for you. Your mother was not there beside me, ready to be the one who pulled you into her arms, ready to tell you of course it was not your fault, of course she was not mad. Layla’s love and affection for you expanded so palpably, so without complexity and doubt, that what I felt for you felt small in comparison, as though there were no room for me to have my own love, my own affection, and my need to respond to you another way, to give you balance, became all the more necessary.
I went to the office and said who I was, whose father I was, I signed my shaky signature on a clipboard, and I was not ashamed, I was restless as I touched my eyebrow, looked about the office and noticed your old friend, the boy Mark, sitting there, an ice pack held to his nose, his eyes wide and afraid when they met mine. At first, I was so surprised to recognize him that I lifted my hand to wave. Mark was frozen and expressionless in response except for the ice pack that crunched as he pressed it against his face, and then I knew. The nurse said she would go back to the sick room to call you, and I told her I would wait in the car. For some reason I did not want you to know that I had seen Mark. I did not know if I should say good-bye to Mark and send my regards to his parents, whom I had gotten to know, or if I should ask him what had happened, and so I did nothing, I said nothing. I sat in my car, I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. I turned on the car and switched on the radio, moving slowly between stations, so that the car filled with static, and then words, and then static, and then music, and then static again. At last you appeared. I may have imagined a slight limp as you approached me. You walked staring at your feet. I watched from the open window, taking inventory: a swollen left eye, a tear in your lip, blood dried on your shirt.
And I don’t think I ever loved you more than when you opened the car door and I confirmed your injuries up close. You did not meet my eyes. You quickly buckled your seat belt and sank into your seat and turned to look out the window the way you would when you were a toddler and I was driving you to the barber’s. I began to drive. I thought of your silence, trying to understand it. To know when and how it would be appropriate to break it. Were you embarrassed? Were you ashamed? Were you afraid I would raise my voice? After the last suspension and the school fight we had made it very clear it could never happen again. Your mother had begged you to be better. I wanted to reassure you that I was not thinking of those times, or if I was, I was not mad about the fight. I have never enjoyed meeting another’s eyes, I have always preferred to look elsewhere when engaged in conversation, but on that drive I tried to look and I waited for you to look back but you did not.
We drove down the street I loved and it was autumn so the leaves were reds and yellows and slowly fluttering to the ground. What was it you wanted from me? I wondered. Did you want me to ask why it had happened? You were the kind of quiet that one has to make a decision to uphold. We had not spoken since the incident with your duffel bag. I had made a mistake. Why could I not be like your mother, who could reach over and touch your arm, why was it that before I was about to interact with you I felt a grand, growing desire to approach you in one way, generously, affectionately, but the moment I encountered you in your body I paused, stopped, my own uncertainty, my own stubbornness making it impossible for me to approach you the way that I wanted to. I turned on the radio again and tuned it to a news station and let another voice fill the air and you groaned and crumpled in your seat a little lower, as if that had been the wrong gesture and I had again disappointed you.
“You haven’t left your bag in the foyer for days,” I said, almost cheerfully and softly, when the car slowed to a stop at a red light, thinking of the first thing that came to me that was not connected to the swelling of your face. I wanted to acknowledge that I appreciated you remembering to put the bag away. I wanted to normalize the situation. I wanted to say something mundane so as to tell you: look, we can carry on, I am not mad, this and everything else is behind us. And you looked at me then, the stoniest look I had ever seen, and you held my gaze until I felt chills, and you said, “I really hate you.”
Not in the way you usually said it, in a moment of anger and frustration and therefore easily dismissed, but calmly and evenly, and then the light turned green, and the car behind me honked, and I turned back to the road and continued driving.
* * *
WEEKS AFTER THE fight between you and the other boys, you ran after me as I approached the edge of the street. I was taking a long walk before driving an hour to pick up Layla from the airport. She was finally coming home. I was nervous. I did not know if they would bother her in arrivals, if she would be able to manage the questions without me, if they would treat her roughly. In the sunlight I studied your face as you walked beside me: your lip had healed well but there would be a scar. The swelling around your eye had gone away but there would also be a scar there that flicked through your eyebrow.
“I want to ask you something,” you said.
I stopped to listen, but you kept walking, so I followed. You took a right at the road that would take us to the horses. You were taking a long time to ask me.
“Can you shave your beard?” you said. You were looking at your shoes, then at me for just a moment, then at your shoes again, as your feet picked up the pace.
“Why?” I asked. Though I was afraid I knew.
“You made Hadia and Huda take off their scarves.”
My daughters had not pointed out the hypocrisy of my act, of wanting to follow my faith but wanting them to be safe more, but of course you had.
“Why can’t you change for us? You make them change for you.”
“Watch your tone,” I said, because I could not come up with anything else to say. You kicked a pinecone and it skittered down the street. You were on a mission, you would not retreat, you wanted a persuasive answer from me.
“Baba,” you said, and I was crushed. Even then, you had stopped calling me Baba. You somersaulted through your sentences to avoid calling me Baba and thought I was dumb enough to not realize.
“If you shave, you won’t look like—” You paused, considered your words, then said quietly, “the bad guys.”
It pained me. It was such childish wording, but you could not allow yourself to say anything else. I did not know then, as Hadia knows now, how to be a parent in the face of all this. How to turn the TV off. How to speak to Abbas and Tahira about what they did not deserve to think or hear from the kids in school, even if we could not protect them from hearing it. She reminds them again and again that what might happen in the world, and what they might overhear, cannot reach or alter what is within them, their hearts, their future. We did none of this. It is not that we thought our way was better. It was that we did not know another way.
“But I am not the bad guys,” I said. We had reached the horses. You perked up a bit to see them.