Dad and I spend nearly every day of the following week exploring Cairo. Monday, we cross the footbridge into Coptic Cairo, where I show him the Hanging Church and introduce him to karkadeh. We visit Tahrir Square on Tuesday to see the graffiti and I start to feel a little more seasoned. People stare at us, but no one dares say a word. My dad might have a lion heart, but he also has tiger fists. His father taught him and Uncle Mike that they should never start a fight but also never be afraid to finish one. According to the stories they tell when they’re together, Dad and Uncle Mike finished their fair share of fights when they were young but now, not so much. It’s comforting to know there isn’t much that scares my dad.
Midweek we ride Line 1 of the metro to its southern terminus in Helwan and get off the train. It is just as noisy and dirty as the rest of Cairo, but as we look for a place to stop for a cold drink, we come to the entrance of a large Japanese garden.
“Didn’t expect this,” Dad says. “Should we check it out?”
Admission is two Egyptian pounds—the equivalent of about a quarter—so we go inside. The park is filled with bamboo trees, pagoda-style huts, meandering stone canals crisscrossed by Japanese bridges, and a pond surrounded by dozens of sitting Buddhas. Like a lot of things in Egypt, neglect has tarnished the park’s shine, but it’s still peaceful and beautiful. We stay for a couple of hours, taking pictures of some kids climbing all over a jolly-faced Buddha, watching Egyptian families pedal across a man-made lake in little foot-powered boats, and discovering a set of “hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil” monkeys carved into the rock of the pond.
“What an oddball place,” Dad says as we leave the park and head back toward the metro station. “I like it, though.”
The asr prayer is being called, which means it’s probably around three thirty. One of the things I’ve learned since we’ve been here is the names of the prayers and when they fall during the day. They’ve become kind of like the church bells back home. I know what time it is when I hear them. “That’s kind of how I feel about Cairo. It gets under your skin. Kind of like . . . a tattoo.”
Dad nods. “Some places have the ability to do that.”
“You should bring Mom here on your next date night. I bet when the lanterns are lit, it’s romantic.”
The kind of relationship my parents have is the kind that people wish for, but it’s weird for me to be jealous of them. I want to be here with Adam when the lanterns are lit. Sneak kisses under the bamboo. I need to quit thinking about him, but the memory of his mouth against mine is seared into my brain.
Just before the Helwan metro station, Dad stops at a street cart selling coctel, a parfait-like treat with strawberries, bananas, apples, mango, and yogurt. Supertasty. Except as we ride the subway home, the swaying of the car makes me queasy, a feeling that builds until my stomach gurgles and a sour taste rises into my mouth. When the train stops at the next station—I have no idea which one it is—the doors open and I shove my way out onto the platform just as the coctel makes a messy, splashy return. More than one commuter looks at me in disgust as they sidestep my sick, and the subway guard rushes over to scold me in Arabic, as if I puked on purpose. Ignoring him, Dad leads me up the steps to street level and hails a cab to take us the rest of the way home.
For the first several months of my life—while my mom was finishing her residency—Dad was my primary parent. He was working as a mate on a liftboat in the Gulf of Mexico but quit his job to take care of me. From the stories they tell, he sang the lullabies (which is good because Mom can’t carry a tune), walked the floors with me when I wasn’t sleeping through the night, and even took me to a mommy-and-me group at the library. I love my mother, but Dad is the parent I want when I’m sick. Back at the apartment, he doses me with medicine to stabilize my insides and keeps the bottled water flowing until my stomach settles enough to sleep.
“It’s all my fault,” he confesses when Mom comes home to find I’ve burned through an entire roll of toilet paper. My body hurts from heaving, because I still keep throwing up, even though there’s nothing left. “Street food.”
“What did you eat?”
Dad tells her about the parfait and she just shakes her head at him. “Fresh fruit is always iffy. Even if it’s been washed and peeled, you have no idea if the person preparing it has clean hands.”
“Lesson learned.”
That’s easy for him to say. His stomach is lined with cast iron, while mine feels like it’s been turned inside out.
I’m feeling less vomity when Jamie arrives for dinner the next evening. Mom’s assistant looks fresh out of medical school, with a prematurely receding hairline, a toothy smile, and a brand-new wife, Sarah, who has never been outside Oklahoma. Jamie is as thrilled to be in Cairo as my mom was when she was first offered the clinic, but Sarah confesses that she is terrified of basically everything. “It’s so hot and dirty, and just thinking about going outside overwhelms me. Jamie does the shopping because I am afraid to go out there without him. And . . . I miss my mom.”
Dad occupies Sarah with tugboat tales while Mom and Jamie spend the whole dinner talking about eyeballs. I’m still a little zoned out, so I go to bed right after dessert, leaving the adults to linger over coffee. In the morning I feel well enough to go sandboarding. I am dressing for the trip when I receive an e-mail from the Daffodils inviting Aya and me to come practice with the team.
Mr. Elhadad arrives while I’m filling a thermos of coffee, and as we drive to pick up Vivian, I ask him how his family is doing. Subtext: How is Adam?
“Aya told us she would like to join the Garden City Daffodils.” He chuckles at the name. “I will take you both to the practices. And my son . . . well. Sometimes we have to do things we do not enjoy. Life is not always fair. With time I think he will understand this.”
Is Mr. Elhadad talking about Adam’s new job or about me? Both? Unsure of how to respond, I ask him to say hello to Adam and to tell Aya I can’t wait to play soccer with her.
“She is very excited,” Mr. Elhadad says.
We pick up Vivian in Zamalek, a neighborhood on another island in the Nile that is filled with trees and freestanding homes. It feels more like Ohio than any neighborhood I’ve seen so far. Vivian lives in an enormous stone villa with wrought-iron balconies and black-painted lions guarding the front steps. “Palatial” comes to mind, and once she’s in the car, Vivian confirms that sometimes it feels like living in a castle.