She has Hadia’s slightly mischievous streak. It is something she has been doing all weekend: announcing I want Nana to tell a story, I want Nana to help with my shoelaces. Had Layla not seemed so pleased at the sight of me “cooking” by stirring the ingredients she had put in the pan while Tahira was occupied, she might feel I was stealing her weekend.
Abbas brought his basketball from home and we can hear the shots he misses that hit the garage door. He is eight now, and not nearly as good as you were at that age. I finish stirring the khorma and think I might have liked cooking had I ever tried it properly. When Layla calls Abbas in, we eat together. The sun sets pink and I do not step out for a walk. After dinner, Abbas teaches me what his classmates have taught him about reading palms. I stretch my palm open and he tickles me with the movement of his finger.
“This is your life line,” he says, and I don’t know if he is making things up. “You will have a long life.”
He folds my hand into a fist and studies the grooves beneath my pinky.
“It says you will have four kids,” he says, then looks up at me and twists his mouth.
“That’s enough,” I say. “It’s maghrib time. Do you want to pray with me?”
I never asked you to pray with me. We always told you what to do. I watch Abbas do wudhu after me. He does it correctly. He cups water in his little palm and washes from his elbow to his wrist, washes his face, does each step methodically and carefully.
“Did your mumma teach you?” I ask, when we dry our faces with towels.
“And Baba,” he says.
“You are very good. Not a drop spilled.”
He smiles. I lay out our prayer rugs. He straightens them. I recite the adhaan. I concentrate on looking ahead of me but I can sense his focus. He is listening. I had recited these very verses into his ear when he was a newborn. They were the first words he had ever heard. I wonder if his soul recognizes what his mind does not remember. We pray together and when it is time for us to ask for what our hearts desire, my first wish is that he remain steadfast in faith, and then, if he does not, that he never believe that God is a being with a heart like a human’s, capable of being small and vindictive.
Later, I tuck Abbas in to sleep in Hadia’s old bedroom, even though he is too old to be tucked in. He likes sleeping in Hadia’s old bedroom. He likes going through her things and finding what she left behind from when she was his age, school projects and stuffed animals and books and porcelain figurines I once gifted her. The light by the bed is on and the room is warm and golden. I point at the window.
“When your mother was little, she and Huda and Amar made a phone out of Styrofoam cups and a string. They pushed out the screens and somehow connected the rooms from the outside.”
Abbas laughs.
“I was very angry with them,” I say.
“Why?” he asks.
“I don’t even remember.”
“Did the phone work?”
“Yes.”
“Could we make one?”
“Yes.”
“Was it Mummy’s idea?”
“I think so.”
“It sounds like Mummy’s idea.”
“Abbas,” I begin, not knowing how I will say what I am desperate to, “am I still your number two?”
He stopped ranking us when he turned four. He smiles widely.
“Yes,” he says, then lowers his voice to a whisper, “but don’t tell Baba. And don’t tell Nani.”
He has learned how to care for others’ feelings. How to have a secret.
I look around the room. Then out the window. Bismillah, I think, I begin in the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.
“Can you keep a secret for me?” I ask.
His eyes widen with excitement.
“Can you memorize it?”
“I memorize a lot of things really fast,” he says.
“You get that from your mumma.”
The comment has pleased him. I search my heart and then I say, “Maybe sometimes you get a phone call from a secret friend.”
He moves his body away from me a little. His back touches against his pillow. He does not say a word. He’s so clever.
“Maybe you don’t, maybe you do, I’m not asking you to tell me anything,” I say quickly. “But I have an important message, just in case you do, to pass on from me.”
At first, he does not change the expression on his face. Then he nods very solemnly.
“?‘There is another way. Come back, and we will make another path.’ And if he says no, and if he says nothing, will you say this: ‘I used the wrong words. I acted the wrong ways. I will wait, until you are ready. I will always wait for you.’?”
Abbas is quiet. He scoots close to me, his eyes very big, reaches over and touches his palm to my face. He wipes my cheeks dry.
“I memorized it,” he whispers.
“Don’t tell your mumma?” I ask.
“I won’t,” he promises.
I kiss his forehead. I stand to leave. Outside in the hallway, where he cannot see me, I kneel on the floor and I touch my forehead to the ground, overwhelmed by my gratitude to God.
* * *
I SUPPOSE WHAT I need is for you to know these things. That I am sorry about the shoes. That I remember those drives we took to the barbershop. That we did not even realize how good you were at basketball. That I should have encouraged your habit of keeping a notebook. Maybe the two of us can go for ice cream alone, and I can try again to strike up a conversation with you. I’ll prepare a list of the things I can talk to you about casually. And when we reach the ice cream parlor, I can pretend to peruse the cartons of ice cream flavors. I will nod at you to order first and wait to see what you ask for. I want to know if you still ask for pistachio ice cream. I want to know what kind of clothes you wear. If you still keep a notebook. What your job is. If you have a family. What they are like. I want to know if you still do that thing when you lie, if you still press your tongue against your cheek, twist your lips a little. And what that looks like on a man’s face.
* * *
BECAUSE YOU WERE born as you were born. Because neither I nor your mother could hold you immediately, and the doctor advised that though all was well, it was best to take you to the neonatal ward to be observed, to monitor your body and your little lungs, because we could do nothing but agree, I could not do what all fathers must do for their newborn children: hold you up until your ear was right by my mouth and whisper to you the adhaan. The first sound we want our children to hear is the voice of their father, telling the child where it has come from, who its creator is, and whose care it will be in now. Telling the child, there is no God but God, and God is Great. Instead, you heard the patter of footsteps and the rolling whoosh of wheels, doors opening and closing, the ticking of a clock, voices of people who were not your father or your mother. I was not there at the beginning for you. We were separated by a sheet of glass. And maybe this is why I fear you won’t be there for me, when it comes time for my end. Because instead of holding you and delivering that message, I paced the hallway in front of the room where you slept, having already failed you in that first and crucial way.
* * *