“I’m okay,” Doaa assured everyone huddled in the room, the most response she could manage.
Everyone burst out crying at the sound of her voice.
“Rest, Doaa,” Hanaa told her, promising to call again the next day.
*
Every night, nightmares rattled Doaa awake. She kept seeing Bassem slipping away from her into the sea. As these dreams came to her over and over, she wrestled with accepting them as fact. Slowly, the reality that Bassem was dead sank in, and during the day when Doaa was mainly left home alone, she was consumed by grief.
Some days she would go out on the apartment’s balcony, look up at the sky, and imagine Bassem there. “If only you were here with me today!” she’d say with her face tilted toward the clouds, hoping in vain for a response. “My happiness is broken without you.” Other days, Doaa would pretend that Bassem was still alive. In one daydream, she would imagine meeting him walking down the main shopping street in Chania, where they would embrace and resume their love story where they had left off. She still couldn’t bring herself to admit his death to her family. During one of her phone calls with her parents, Shokri asked how she was coping with Bassem’s death, and Doaa replied without thinking, “He’s not dead, Papa, he’s alive.”
Meanwhile, word was spreading through Arabic social media about the young woman who’d survived one of the worst refugee boat shipwrecks in the Mediterranean and saved a baby girl. Friends and family of missing passengers were anxiously looking for news of their loved ones, and Doaa’s story gave them hope. A friend of her host family’s published their phone number on a Facebook page for anyone looking for information about the wreck. Within minutes, hundreds of messages and calls started pouring in. “Do you know what happened to my daughter?” “Is my son alive?” “Did my mother survive?” “Here is a picture of my sister; did you see her?” “Did you see my father?” “Did you see my uncle?” “Did you see my friend?” The messages overwhelmed Doaa, but she did her best to reply to them, asking people to send photos so she could see if she recognized anyone. How could she tell them all there was no hope? That she knew of only six survivors, including herself, here in Greece, and five others who had been taken to Malta? But that was all. How could she tell them that she did recognize some people, but that it was from when she had watched them drown?
Some of the messages were ugly: “How come you are one of the only ones who survived? You must have been helped by the smugglers.” Reading through the onslaught of messages exhausted Doaa, each one reminding her of the deaths she’d witnessed and reviving her sadness at losing Bassem and Malak. Then one text message, from a Mohammad Dasuqi, caught her eye: “Doaa, I think you saved my niece Masa.” A photo was attached of a baby girl in a blue dress with white pansies. Doaa looked closely at the picture. The toddler smiling at the camera was indeed the same Masa that Doaa had cradled in her arms for four days at sea.
Doaa held out the phone to her host mother and exclaimed, “Masa has a family!” With a huge smile on her face, Doaa felt a surge of happiness for the first time since the shipwreck. She replied to the message immediately, relieved to finally be able to give someone some good news: “Yes, that is the same Masa who was rescued with me!”
Doaa learned that Mohammad Dasuqi was the twenty-eight-year-old brother of Masa’s father, Imad, and was living as a refugee in Sweden with Masa’s oldest sister, Sidra, who was eight. He had only had enough money for the two of them to go to Europe and had applied to bring the rest of the family, including his own wife and infant daughter and Sidra’s parents and siblings, to Sweden through family-reunification procedures. But after a year had passed with no papers, Masa’s father had grown tired of waiting and decided to take matters into his own hands and book passage for his family. He believed that since Mohammad and Sidra had made it safely, the rest of the family was certain to reach Europe as well. Before boarding the boat, he had taken a picture of Sandra and Masa standing side by side, wearing bright orange life vests, Sandra’s arm slung confidently around Masa’s shoulders. He had sent the photo to his brother confident that they would soon be together again.