CONTACT
Bastien has already taken refuge in our bedroom. He’s pretending to be engrossed in putting together a plastic model of some sort, but his little shoulders are tensed practically up to his ears and he’s gnawing on his thumbnail as he reads the instructions. I kiss him on the top of his head, and he acknowledges me with a one-sided shadow of a smile.
Money. Where will it come from? Who will it come from? My options are depressingly limited—grim evidence of my untethered life. Emmy has her own problems, and for once our roles are reversed: I will protect her by refusing to bring her into my family’s mess. I’m sure that Ian would want to help me, but I don’t know him nearly well enough to ask. Morgan and Tori are also off-limits. Their friendship is technical, impersonal, and asking them would be almost as bad as asking for rent money from strangers—humiliating and too easily denied.
I’m left with only the unlikeliest of heroes. Amir.
I have no idea how to contact him, though.
“Bastien?” I call across the room. “Do you know where Mother keeps phone numbers? Does she have an address book, maybe?”
“I don’t know.” He’s still focused on the plastic pieces in front of him. I’ve already given up on him when his head snaps up. “Why? Who do you want to call?”
“Amir.”
Bastien’s face lights up. “I know how you can call him.” I wait for an explanation, but he wants to draw out the mystery.
“How, Bastien?” I indulge him with exaggerated curiosity.
He’s grinning, feeling clever. “Redial. Mother called Amir’s house right before we left for my party. No one has used the phone since then, so just hit Redial.”
I kiss him again. “Smart boy,” I say as I ruffle his hair.
I dart through the living room to grab the cordless phone. Mother doesn’t even glance in my direction. I head back to the bedroom and then stop. Bastien doesn’t need to hear this conversation. He already has more worries than any seven-year-old ought to. I step into the bathroom and shut the door. The harsh overhead light makes my face look sharp and weasel-like in the mirror, so I turn my back on my reflection and hit the button before I can come up with an excuse not to.
My stomach lurches as the call goes through. I haven’t even thought about what I’m going to say. Do I make small talk? Get right to the point? I’m about to hang up when someone finally answers. There’s a clatter and then muted background voices—it sounds as if a hand is being pressed over the receiver. After one more loud crack—was the phone just dropped?—a voice deep with suspicion and fear says hello. I instantly feel sympathy for anyone who finds something as ordinary as a phone call threatening—the person on the other end has received bad news more than once by telephone, I suspect.
I ask for Amir in my native language, and I can practically feel the man relax. His voice is calmer as he yells for Amir. There are more clatters, muffled rustlings, and even a shrill beep as someone hits a button on the phone, and then Amir comes on the line. “Hello?” His voice is so hard I almost hang up for the second time. How can I even think of asking for help from someone who openly despises me?
But I’m out of options, so I begin to speak. I’ve hardly stammered my way through an awkward greeting when he interrupts. “Laila, we’re waiting for an important phone call here. An international call. So I can’t stay on the line. What do you want?”
I go mute with embarrassment, and Amir softens his tone. “I’m sorry. But I really do have to go. You can come here if you need to talk.” He rattles off an address and then hangs up without saying goodbye.
I look up the address online. It’s not far, but it’s in a part of town I haven’t visited before. I curse, yet again, my lack of bus fare as I pull on my shoes. This new life of mine is hard on the feet.
NEIGHBORS
The address is on a different planet. Or it might as well be. Our apartment may be small, but it’s clean and quiet. Amir lives in a building that looks like a grimy patchwork quilt. Various shades of paint have been slapped on, then abandoned, and cardboard is taped under broken glass panes. It’s a house crookedly subdivided into apartments, and names are handwritten on strips of masking tape stuck to dented mailboxes. Each of the boxes has a thick layer of these makeshift labels, evidence of the rapid turnover of the building’s occupants. In the entranceway, a damp smell bubbles up from the warped floor tiles.
What was I thinking? How self-centered to imagine for even a moment that I could ask Amir and his family for money. Compared to them, we still live like royalty.
Shamed, I start to leave when a middle-aged couple walks in the building. She’s unsteady on her feet, and her hair—yellow-blond with two inches of dark roots—hangs in her eyes. The man’s face is pitted and pink, and he grins an unfriendly sneer at me. “Surprise, surprise, it’s another one. It’s like a goddamn clown car in that unit. How many are they up to now?”
I back against the door. I can’t tell if he’s talking to me or the woman.
She stumbles closer to me. “Where’s your thing?” she asks, pointing to my head, then drawing an air circle with her finger around her own head. “Your head thingy. The scarf, or whatever it is you people wear.”
I haven’t worn a veil since we stepped off the airplane. It wasn’t even a conscious decision—more like an assumption: that was how I dressed there, and this is how I dress here. These people, these lurching, bloodshot giants, make me glad for it, glad that I have managed to avoid this ugly scrutiny up until now.
I whirl back toward the door and knock sharply, the decision to stay made simple by my sweatshirt-clad tormentors. Amir answers and I shove past him. “Say hi to the rest of the terrorists in there,” the man calls out, and Amir slams the door.
“Sorry about that,” he says.
“Friendly neighborhood.” I try to hide the fact that my voice is shaky, that I’m shaky, from the encounter, but I fail.
“Come in.” He leads me down the short hallway to a sparse, windowless room. Several chairs are arranged in a circle, as if a meeting had just disbanded. It occurs to me for the first time that my mother’s little gatherings may not be the only game in town.
I hear voices and clattering sounds coming from the kitchen, but Amir doesn’t seem inclined to make introductions, so I choose a chair and sit.
“Do you want something? Tea? Water? I think that’s all we have.” He’s almost polite. Apparently my status as a guest trumps my status as an enemy.
I shake my head. “Where did you go?” I blurt out. “You left Bastien’s party in a hurry.”
It’s the wrong thing to say. Amir’s temporary civility vanishes. “It was a child’s party, and I’m tired of being treated like a child.”
I scurry back to what I hope is less controversial territory. “So you live with your cousins? How many do you have here?”
He raises an eyebrow; it seems I’ve offended him again. “According to the neighbors, we’re like a litter of rats living here, too many to count.”
My eyes drop. Every possible topic is a cliff, and every word out of my mouth is a leap. I get the feeling that even talking about school or the weather would somehow have an unintended double meaning. There seems to be no room for casual conversation between us, and I’m failing before I even get started.
Amir must have the same thought, because he relents. “There are twelve of us here now. In a three-bedroom apartment. Sometimes there are six, sometimes twenty. Someone is always passing through; someone always needs a place to stay.”
“They’re all your relatives? Your cousins?” I’m a rare specimen in my country—someone without a large extended family—so I find it difficult to comprehend this revolving door type of a home.
Amir sighs and then sits down, finally resigned to having this conversation with me. “They’re cousins in a loose sense of the word. We come from a small village, so almost everyone has someone in common.”
“And your parents?”
He stares at the floor in silence for so long that I’m about to change the subject when he finally answers. “Back home. I think they are, anyway. They were supposed to call today. That’s the phone call I told you we were waiting for. They didn’t, though.”
The need to reassure is reflexive. “Oh, I’m sure they’re fine. You know how bad the phone service is there. They probably just can’t get through.”
Amir shrugs off my comment. “Yeah, probably.” He is unconvinced.
There’s no opening, no invitation for me to enter his life, but I jump ahead anyway. “Why are you here, Amir? In this country? In this apartment?” I steel myself for rejection before I even finish.
But this time he doesn’t reject me. He leans back in his chair, eyes closed and hands to his temples, and he thinks for a moment. After a few seconds he leans forward and stares me in the face. “Do you really want to know the answer to that question, Laila? Really?”
I open my mouth to answer, the word yes forming on my lips without consideration. But there is something about his question that makes me pause. He’s not being difficult or evasive. I think that he’s offering me an out. A chance to remain unaware. I see in his eyes that he intends this gift of ignorance to be an act of kindness.
“I want to know.” I say it firmly. I look him in the eyes and I repeat myself. “I want. To know.”
Amir blows a long exhale out his lips. I’ve given him permission to shred any fantasies I may still be holding on to from my life back home, and we both know it. He slaps his hands down onto his knees and stands up. “Then stay here; I’ll be right back. We’ll need that tea. We’re going to be here for a while.”
POISON
Amir comes back with two cups of tea and a young girl.
I’d spent the last few minutes trying to ignore the sweat seeping through my shirt under my arms and glancing around the spartan room. No one had bothered to decorate; there was no pretense of beauty or permanence. My first thought, then, when I see the girl, who looks a few years older than Bastien, is that this would be a dreary place to be a child.
She’s wearing a pink dress, oddly long. It’s not a style from home, but it doesn’t fit here, either. She looks old-fashioned and prim, a strange choice for a girl her age, but as she comes closer, I understand. She walks with a twisting limp, as if she were dragging something heavy by the ankle. She obviously wears the long dress to disguise whatever is underneath, whatever is making her steps so labored and contorted.
“Is this her?” The girl whispers her question to Amir, but I hear it.
Amir nods. He hands me a cup of tea and then places his arm around her shoulder. He’s gentle with her—tentative, even—as though she might break. “My sister,” he says to me.
Her face is pale and expressionless as she stares at me. She does not return my smile or my greeting. She is the icy counterpart to Amir’s fiery hatred. And somehow the cold absence of emotion on her face—it’s a beautiful, doll-like face—feels far worse than open scorn or loathing. There’s no child left in this child.
“Shall I show her?” She’s no longer whispering, but her voice still sounds breathy. Raspy. Like a heavy smoker, which can’t be possible—she’s far too young. She starts to lift the skirt above her ankle, and already I can see that the line is all wrong, that her two feet are a grossly mismatched pair. Amir shakes his head, though, and she drops the long dress back into place.
“That’s enough,” he murmurs, along with something else I can’t understand, and then kisses the top of her head as he guides her out of the room.
When he returns, Amir moves one of the chairs so that it’s directly across from mine. He sits with his knees mere inches from my knees, a distance both intimate and accusatory. I tense and shrink back, remembering the way he recoiled when I sat too close to him outside the school dance. He sees my surprise, but he doesn’t retreat. Whatever he’s about to say, he wants to be sure that I hear him. That I see him. Whatever he’s about to tell me falls outside the confines of etiquette.
“It happened three years ago,” he says. “We found out later that an informant had pointed to our village on a map, made accusations. But no one told us that at the time. We had no idea our village had been declared a rebel stronghold, which was ridiculous anyway, since every city north of the capital was just as full of rebels as ours. But somehow ours was the only one targeted. That day, anyway.”
He radiates anger as he continues. “No officials ever came. No one investigated; no one bothered to ask even a single question to see if the accusations were true. They just took one man’s word for it, and then they dropped things from the sky. Bombs and mortars and canisters full of poisonous chemicals. They hit our school, Laila. Right in the middle of the day. A school.”
His hands are fists.
“There were eighteen of us there that day, and not a single one was spared. Two of my friends were crushed to death in the rubble. Four died in the fire. All of us were cut by flying glass.”
His eyes lock on mine as he fingers the scar on his face, and I can’t move as he continues his horrible countdown.
“Most of us at least got out of the building. But it took only a few seconds to realize that we couldn’t breathe any better outside than in. The yellow mist from the canisters was mixed with black smoke from the burning school, so we couldn’t tell what was stinging so badly, why our throats, our eyes, our lungs, felt like they were on fire even after we had escaped. It felt like the air itself was attacking us.”
Amir’s voice sounds strangled. He’s taking loud, jagged breaths, and his eyes look wrong, the pupils dilated. He’s reliving the experience right in front of me, practically gasping for air. I want to reach out to him, to soothe him, but I can’t. I’m frozen.
“The gas they use burns you inside and out, Laila. Did you know that? Your skin and your lungs. Your throat fills with blisters. It can make you go blind, but not right away. Not until after you’ve seen things that your mind will never let you forget. It takes a few hours for your eyes to swell shut, and then another day after that before you know whether the damage is permanent.”
For a moment he looks at me with such rage that I’m afraid of him. I tense in my seat and start to rise, ready to flee. He catches himself, though, and leans back. I do too, but I’m wary. Scared. I don’t want this to continue.
He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. His voice is calmer when he speaks again. “The lung damage can be permanent, too. Nadeen, my sister”—he nods toward the hall—“she was trapped in the building, pinned down by part of a wall that collapsed onto her leg. She couldn’t escape the gas. She had to just lie there and breathe it in, one lungful of poison at a time, wondering whether she was going to die from the blood loss, the fire, the smoke, or the gas. She was still wondering when she passed out.”
Amir’s eyes are red and brimming. So are mine. A tear runs down the crooked path of his scar. “She wakes up screaming. Still. Sometimes not for weeks at a time. Sometimes two, three times a night. I didn’t get to her in time then, when it mattered. So here, I try to get to her fast, to hurry in to convince her that she’s alive. That she can breathe, that the air won’t kill her. She screams and screams until she believes me, but sometimes she doesn’t believe me, and then she screams until she’s choking. The damage to her lungs is so bad that it doesn’t take much, and then there’s nothing I can do to convince her it’s okay, because it’s not. She really can’t breathe, she—” He swipes roughly at his face with a fist and then stops. Breathes.
“They arrested my father at the hospital. Can you even imagine that? He was sitting by her bed, not sure if his daughter would live or die, and they came and they dragged him away. No trial. No chance to see him. We’re not sure if he even knows she survived.”
He has more to say—I can practically feel his need to continue—but instead he just stares at me, a new expression on his face. Regret? Remorse? I can’t tell. But his voice is strangely gentle when he speaks next.
“My mother used every bit of money she had to send me and Nadeen here. She was supposed to come for us as soon as my father was released. But as you can see, we’re still here”—he gestures at the sparse room—“living with cousins two and three times removed.
“You want to know why I’m here, Laila? I’m here because of your father. Because he’s the one who ordered the attack. He destroyed my home, he destroyed my sister, and he took my father. I’m here because your family ruined mine.”
I feel a splash on my foot and realize I’ve spilled my tea. My hands are shaking; they won’t stop, so I set my cup on the floor.
Reactions swirl around in my mind, forming a nauseating cesspool of contradictions.
I don’t believe you.
I believe you.
There’s another side to this story.
I’m sorry.
It’s not my fault.
It’s not his fault.
I’m sorry.
I didn’t know.
He’d never. He couldn’t.
I’m so, so terribly sorry.
My thoughts ping and crash against words that I’ve heard before, in a different context. Hushed conversations between my father and my uncle. Brief messages delivered by hard-soled aides. Stronghold. Arrested. Informant. These snippets of conversations meant nothing to me then; they were tiny pieces of a complicated puzzle kept out of my reach.
I didn’t know.
My mouth fills with bile—I’m going to be sick. For a split second I wonder if Amir has poisoned my tea, and for another split second I think that maybe he should have. But I haven’t taken a single sip—the cup was nothing more than something to cling to while I listened.
“You should go.” Amir helps me up, guides me out of his home. Why is he being so gentle?
“Will you be okay?” he asks from the doorway.
I nod, silent and ashamed.
He glances into the foyer, but the neighbors have gone. Now there is only me. I am the enemy standing outside his home.
Amir gives me a sad smile, and softly closes the door.