She was smiling to herself as if she alone had discovered the secret of the universe. She looked quite beautiful, possessing not only the beauty all women do in their youth, but also something indefinable, a poise that was not yet elegance but the promise of it. She walked quickly and it occurred to me that none of the wedding guests had any business in a place where the elevator was required to take them. Some feeling in my gut told me not to move. That soon you would appear.
And you did appear. You looked around as if you were a guilty man, but as you entered the main lobby you glanced at your reflection in the hotel mirror and your face cracked open in a wide smile, as if you were amazed at what life was about to offer you, and I was also amazed, and in that moment I knew exactly what was happening and exactly what my place in it would be.
I would tell no one. Not even Layla. You slipped into the main hall and had returned to your seat by the time I got back and you even had the audacity to say to me, “Where have you been? You’re missing the wedding.”
You were a terrific liar as well as a terrible one. Terrible in that no one believed you, and terrific because no one minded: you were charming and endearing even as you deceived us.
I let it happen. You were kids, it would pass, or you would change from it. For a while, you did change. In those years we hardly spoke at all but I observed the differences in your demeanor and I was even secretly grateful, I grew fond of the girl when I saw her at mosque or at events. Let their feelings grow, I thought. I was confident you could win her affection. I hoped that she would be a presence that grounded you and gave you a future to focus on. And you did choose the classes in your community college that would go toward a premed course once you transferred, and I was pleased.
“Please,” Layla would tell me, “he’s not made for these studies—they will waste his time and wear him out.”
“I did not make him choose them,” I said to her, annoyed.
“Maybe. But you have never encouraged him in any other endeavor. You have never let him think that any other path would be acceptable to you.”
“That is enough.”
She stepped back. I had yelled often but never at her. I tried to reach out to touch her but she turned from me.
Eventually, when Layla came to me and said what was going on between you and the Ali girl, I did not tell her what I had seen years before, and how I had always assumed it. Layla was determined it would not be good for you, for our family. She was right, if all we considered was right and wrong. But I had found myself in a strange predicament. I had laid the foundation of our family on the principles of our faith and our customs. I had set standards for what we expected of each of you, hoping that you would rise to meet them. In our family, in the culture of our home, and indeed in the texture of our religion, there was the truth and there was the lie. There were sins and there was a steadfast adherence to faith. But when Layla came to me—it was I and not you who was caught. I had created neat confines to help us move through the world, only to see you, my son, disregard them all, and I was finding I did not have the heart to uphold the very standards I myself had set.
You’re right, I said to Layla, because she was. Of every grievance I hold against myself, there are two I have kept against your mother that, even now, I have never forgiven. The first is that she went to Seema Ali and told her. The second is that, when you returned for Hadia’s wedding, she asked me to not go to you, fearing your return was fragile and conditional and that had it not been for Hadia, you would want nothing to do with us. It was clear she blamed me for your departure. And I, also blaming myself, could not correct her or defend myself. I listened and I listened and by the time I went looking for you, it was too late.
* * *
“SUNO,” LAYLA CALLS behind me as I step out to the garden, “you should take your coat with you.”
I continue on, pretending not to hear her—this is the benefit now of my age, I can ignore everything I do not wish to respond to, point to my ear if I am later accused. Garden, trees, grass. Most days I move through the world automatically, on other days I am snapped from the moment and each blade of grass is its own individual blade. People pray their entire lives for things they will never receive. There are people, my friends even, who say maybe there is no soul. Maybe there is no creator. My own son once said as much to me. But I have looked up at this sky since I was a child and I have always been stirred, in the most secret depth of me that I alone cannot access, and if that is not my soul awakening to the majesty of my creator then what is it?
“You can’t fool me. You are preparing to go. You are beginning to accept it.”
It is Layla’s voice behind me. I sigh. I turn to face her. She is holding on to my coat.
“Be calm, Layla.”
“Rafiq, without you, I have nobody.”
She looks around the garden as if nothing there pleases her. She lifts her arm and the coat sways. “I am here because you brought me here.”
“Everyone goes, Layla.”
She nods. She presses her lips tight against each other.
“Hadia told me why you went to her home. I find you in the kitchen or in your study mumbling to yourself. Speaking to who? Hadia says you are fine, the doctor said all tests are normal, but if something is wrong, will you tell me?”
I say nothing. She is right. I have been in a dazed state.
“Can you at least eat the food I make you, drink the water I leave you? Can you remember your medicine? I am finding the pills folded in tissues on your desk.”
I reach out my hand and she hands me my coat. I slip into it.
“Thank you,” she says, and she wipes at the edge of her eye with the side of her wrist and turns around and walks back inside. She closes the sliding door behind her. She takes a seat at the kitchen table and does not know I am still watching. She rests her elbow on the table and covers her mouth with her hand. Who was I thinking of when I moved here? Only myself. I was a man, I thought, without roots. I was thirteen when my father passed, sixteen when my mother followed him, I was not raised so much as funded by my uncle. I was not touched tenderly by anyone all those years until I married Layla. I had no family when I came here and no money and so I thought, nothing to lose. I was unable to get work in my field at first. I worked in a doughnut shop. I woke up at four A.M. to walk in darkness to get there before sunrise. I had a funny hat that folded and I tucked it under my arm as I walked. I practiced my English. Every ancestor of mine was buried oceans and continents away, and though I could not grasp it then, as I walked to work in the middle of the night, in making the decision to come here, I had drastically altered my destiny, and Layla’s, and my children’s and also my grandchildren’s. I brought them here and one day I will leave them here. And what will the world be like when my Abbas and my Tahira are parents of their own children? And will they be welcome in it?
“Layla,” I say when I step back into the kitchen, “I have not been myself, I know.”
“Thank you,” she says again.
“But I am not planning on going anywhere yet.”
She sniffles. Can I tell her.
“It is becoming harder,” I say, “to not think of him.”
I pick up an orange from the fruit bowl and run my thumb along its grooves. I wait for her to say something.
“It is our test,” she says. “It will be hard.”
I nod. I am meant to remain steadfast in my faith. Remain faithful. God does not take from the human what the human heart cannot bear. I return the orange to the bowl and prepare myself to step back outside, but I look up at Layla instead.
“I do not want it to remain a test. I want to do something about it. I have to try.”
4.