DESIRE
My tongue is inside Ian’s mouth, and no one is more surprised than I am.
We’re in the car again. I called him at home to apologize, asked if we could try the driving lesson again, maybe talk a bit. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” I reassured him. “It was just … a bad day.”
He said yes, but when we got to our deserted parking lot, he was formal and too polite—all small talk and the importance of car insurance—and I was feeling too frayed, too raw, to keep up with it. I didn’t have the energy to pretend anymore. I just couldn’t.
At first I leaned toward him, slowly, trying to catch his eyes with mine, because the awkward space that had grown between us felt like something that needed to be filled. Then I moved even closer because something broken needed to be fixed.
Ian pretended not to notice. “Do you want to practice parking again, or do you want to just drive around?” He became very interested in setting the clock on the dashboard while he spoke; the numbers kept flashing no matter which buttons he pressed. “Or we could go over some of the rules—turn signals, yellow lights, that kind of thing.”
I waited until he trailed off. “Don’t worry about the clock,” I said quietly, and pulled his hand away from it.
Reactions flickered across his face. Doubt, first. Of course doubt. I keep changing the conversation on him. I know this. And then there was shyness, I think? Something hesitant, anyway. But then the corners of his eyes crinkled and a hint of a smile set in, and I could almost hear his thoughts. Why not? flashed across his forehead as clearly as if it were written in neon lights.
And then, once his lips were pressed against mine, my reasons changed. I didn’t pull away from the kiss as I swiveled my lower body out of my seat and inched closer to him—as close as the center console allowed. Now I was reaching for him, asking for forgiveness with my hands. Eyes closed, I felt for his arms, then his shoulders, and then my hands were on his face and in his hair, and his were in mine.
I’m sorry I didn’t trust you, my skin says to his skin.
Now I’m even closer, unsteady with one knee wedged against the gear stick, the other on Ian’s seat, in Ian’s space. Our kisses have turned urgent, rough even. It’s not about boredom or awkwardness or forgiveness anymore—now it’s about want. I want this kiss, and I want his hands to continue their gentle, slow journey under my sweater.
He pulls me closer and I topple gracelessly into his lap. We laugh through our kissing, our mouths never parting, and I’m straddling him, on top of him, facing him and kissing him, sometimes gently, sometimes not. Ian tenses and pulls back just slightly. His hands stay where they are. On me.
“What is this, Laila?” he asks in a low whisper, but then he pulls me to him again and it’s impossible to answer anyway.
What is this?
I’m glad we’re still kissing, still breathless and occupied, because I don’t have an answer to give. It is want—yes, mostly want—but also hope. Something about being here with him seems to fill the car with a warm glow of maybes. Does he really think I can go to college here? Stay here, have a life here? Is he a part of it, this impossible future? He tastes like hope, and his skin feels smooth and real, and his touch is so blissfully distracting, pushing everything else out of my head—
“Laila. Laila, wait. Wait a second.” He’s laughing a little, but he’s pushing me away, his hands around my biceps. He holds me at a distance, then puffs out his cheeks and exhales a long breath. “Wow. Okay.”
He shakes his head as if to clear it. “I’m sorry, I really am, but I have to ask. Um, where are we going with this? Not that I don’t like it or anything.” He grins and pushes his hair back. “I definitely do, but I guess … I guess I’m a little confused.”
I worm my way off his lap and back into my seat before I answer; I make a show of rearranging my clothes and fussing with my seat belt so that he can’t see my burning cheeks. “This is how it works here, isn’t it? We just do what we want, right?”
Ian squints at me and tilts his head. And then he laughs out loud. “Dang, Laila. You’re making me feel a little cheap here.”
Heat flares across my face once again; surely by now I’m as red as the devil. “I just meant …” Shame steals the words from my tongue. “I just thought it was okay,” I finish stupidly.
He reaches across for my hand. “It is,” he says. “It is okay. It’s more than okay. But there’s no reason to rush anything.” He lets out another short burst of a laugh, but this time it’s not at me. “God, if any of the guys at school heard me say that I’d lose my dude credentials for sure.”
He sees that I don’t understand. “You’re gorgeous, Laila. Any guy would be crazy to turn you down.” He squeezes my shoulder once with his free hand. “And I’m not turning you down. Trust me. I’m just saying … I’m just trying to do the right thing here. Because I thought that in your culture this was, like, a huge deal. I thought in your country girls couldn’t—” He frowns, and then starts again. “I mean, I thought guys weren’t supposed to— Shit. You know what I’m trying to say, right? I thought this kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen?”
“It wouldn’t happen. Of course it wouldn’t.” Now I’m the one fiddling with the damn blinking clock.
“Then why?”
“For precisely that reason.” My answer is sharp with embarrassment. “Because it would never happen back home, and because here, it can. Because here, for the first time in my life, I’m allowed to want. And I do.” I turn my face to his and swipe at the tear that has managed to escape my eye. “I want to do this. With you.”
Ian’s eyes go wide. “Wow,” he says again. “Okay. Good answer.” He rakes at his hair with both hands now, and I squirm in the itchy silence. And then his voice is measured. Careful. “I want this too. But I don’t want you to regret it. I don’t want to be the one to make you regret anything. So let’s just take things one step at a time, okay? There’s no rush.” He brings my hand to his mouth and kisses it once, quickly, before setting it down in my lap.
I nod, but I can’t look at him anymore. I can’t meet his eyes. This feels like one more example of the extremes in my life. The all or the nothing. My inability to find my way into the space between, the place everyone else here seems to inhabit. I’m either frozen or I’m exploding, when all I want to do is simmer gently and happily along.
“Are you going to practice parking, or what?” Ian is trying to pull me out of my embarrassment, so I nod again and reach for the door handle so we can switch places. Outside, the air is crisp, and as he walks around the back of the car, I walk around the front. Ian slides into the passenger seat while I pause outside. The windows are so fogged I can’t even see him sitting inside.
I wish I could just vanish, be gone before the steam on the windows clears. But I’ve already done that once, vanished from a broken life, and how many times does someone get the chance to disappear?
I take one more gulp of the cold air before getting into the car. “Okay,” I say with as much brightness as I can fake. “Let’s try this again.”
FLAMES
Two days later, I wake to the sounds of home. Gunfire and shouts echo through our apartment.
“Turn it down!” I close the bedroom door behind me so Bastien doesn’t have to wake up to the same feeling of panic that I did. “It’s early. Why do you have the volume up so high?”
Mother shush-flaps at me with one hand, her eyes never leaving the TV. “I understand the reporters better when it’s loud.”
Her English is fine, but she still has trouble understanding American accents. I join her on the couch as she adjusts the volume slightly.
She’s hunched forward, still in her bathrobe, and her hair is a mess. This unlipsticked, anxious woman barely resembles my mother. “Look. It’s the capital.”
It is, but it isn’t. The news report flashes images of a government building. The Ministry of the Interior, I think. I was there just a year ago for some sort of ceremony that involved lots of foreigners jumping into showy poses of handshakes and back claps whenever a photographer came near. But now it looks different, like someone gave it a good shaking and then dusted it with black powder.
The camera pans left, and everything it shows is scorched and pockmarked. The corner of one building has been sheared away, revealing a conference room left eerily intact—a long table still surrounded by chairs and a telephone still on the desk, as if the ghosts of the dead were still hard at work amid the ashes. The camera moves on to show a street lined with overturned cars that look like they’ve been trampled by elephants. Everything that isn’t blackened is sooty gray, except where the glass from broken windows sparkles in drifts like a nightmarish version of fairyland snow. The city looks as if it has been roasted on a spit—spun over a hot flame until everything is burned and broken.
Hundreds dead in overnight fighting, says the khaki-clad foreign correspondent. He’s just disheveled enough to be credible, but his silver hair is neatly combed perfection. The latest clash between government and opposition forces began when troops loyal to the newly installed regime fired on protesters yesterday, killing dozens of civilians. Antigovernment rallies have been increasing as many grow disillusioned with the country’s new leadership. Now the small skirmishes that have long been a way of life here have given way to a series of far more organized—and far more deadly—attacks as the fragmented opposition groups join forces against the General, as he is still called.…
My mother is leaning so far toward the TV it looks like she’ll tumble off the couch. She’s struggling to understand the words—I can tell by her slightly open mouth and concentration-pinched eyebrows—but the pictures tell enough of a story that there’s no need for me to translate. The footage dances from the damaged government buildings to a more gruesome scene—an open-air marketplace shelled during the crowded evening shopping hours. Mundane items, dented cans and wilted produce, are scattered on blood-shiny pavement, and distraught relatives wail and cry in muted background agony as the report goes on and on.
Neither of us says a word, even as the report ends and the news anchor switches jarringly to a story about a famous teenage actress’s latest trip to rehab. I take the remote control from Mother’s hand and mute the volume, and for a second the two of us stare at the silent image of a posh mountain lodge sitting amid impossibly beautiful trees. The contrast is strangely hurtful—my home looking like hell on earth compared to this heavenly resort for drunks and addicts.
“It’s never been this bad before. Has it?”
Mother frowns and shakes her head. “Not in the capital.”
Not in the capital. Meaning it was that bad elsewhere. Like in Amir’s village. “What happened?”
“The General happened.”
The jagged scorn in her voice would be comforting if I hadn’t heard her pleading with him just days before. Now her contempt lacks credibility. She continues, still staring at the TV, seeing or not seeing the Technicolor orange juice commercial that has replaced the news. “He made a lot of promises to a lot of people, but look what he did. He just brought the war closer to home.” She sounds dazed.
“But there’s always been fighting. Right?” My grasp on reality has been so shaken that I can’t trust my memories. I remember gunfire, bodies, death. But I also remember my father as king. I still don’t know how much of my history is invented.
“Always.” Mother pulls her robe tighter. “But when your father was alive, the deaths were few. Fewer, anyway. Now there are hundreds dying every day, and it’s getting worse.”
“Why do you want to go back there, then?” My voice is a small, hopeful whisper. Surely she has changed her mind after seeing our burned and ruined city?
But my question only hardens her. She sits up, her spine stiff and straight, and looks at me with cold eyes. “It’s ours,” she says. “It’s our burden, our responsibility, and our right.” She sounds deranged and heroic all at the same time, a modern-day twist on Joan of Arc—maybe mad, maybe inspired.
“But Bastien is a child. What can he possibly do?” I look over my shoulder to make sure our bedroom door is still closed. This is a conversation I don’t want my brother to hear.
Mother shakes her head and answers me slowly, carefully, as if I were incapable of understanding. “Bastien is his father’s son, so the country is his to lead. That’s the way it has been for a very long time. But no one expects him to actually do anything, Laila. There are many people who will be making the decisions for him. His only job is to be.”
“Can’t we just walk away from it? Can’t we just stay here?” I hate the whine in my voice, the fearful, weak sound of it.
She clenches her jaw, and I see that she’s losing patience with me. “Do you remember when I told you the story of your name? Of how you came to be called Laila so many weeks after you were born?” She waits for me to nod. “Well, Bastien’s name also has a story.” She settles into the cushions, and I lean in, already captive. Storytelling suits her.
“When Bastien was born, your uncle demanded he be given a religious name. He claimed it was important that a future leader have a pious start in life. Your father didn’t see the harm, but I did. I wasn’t about to let that horrible man control me through my children—I wouldn’t allow him that grip on my son. I named your brother after my grandfather because he was all things your uncle is not. He was French, first of all, and he was generous, kind, and worldly. I named your brother Bastien because I wanted to be sure that he always knew that there was another life, another world, than the one handed to him at birth. I wanted him to have one foot at home and one foot free. Does that make sense, Laila?”
“No.” I’m being petulant now, but I can’t stop myself. “If you really want him to be free, then you’d never send him back there, back to that. You’d never turn him into a puppet.”
“Don’t you want to honor your father?” She reaches over and gently lifts my chin. “What would your brother be if he couldn’t take his rightful place?”
A little boy, Mother. He’d be a seven-year-old boy. I want to say it, but she’s already standing up.
“Achh. Someday I hope you’ll understand, Laila.” She’s done explaining for now. “I’m going to get dressed.”
The doorbell rings at that exact moment—so perfectly timed that I assume the sound is coming from the TV. But then I see the look on my mother’s face. Pure dread. She pulls her shoulders back and smooths her bed-ravaged hair. “It’s starting,” she says under her breath, and opens the door.