Alia silently cheered her youngest on, but Riham bore all their comments with that same patient smile.
“He’s a good man,” she repeated throughout the months and again on the evening of her wedding as Alia adjusted her daughter’s dress and cried predictably. Though she wasn’t crying from happiness or because her daughter was leaving, but rather from the dreariness of it all, the white dress stretching around her chubby daughter’s waist, how ordinary she looked as she beamed at people during the wedding. How old and uninteresting the husband looked, the pouting child with his bow tie askew, the life her daughter was inheriting. How badly she wanted to shake her eldest and cry out that you don’t have to marry the first person who likes you or who says he’ll take you away.
Even the wedding had been boring and had dragged on, guests kindly complimenting Riham’s dress and kissing Alia’s cheeks, the dance floor empty until Souad stood up in her fire-engine-red dress, grabbed her brother’s hand, and began to move her hips in a way the guests would talk about for days.
Atef falls asleep on the couch, his head angled against cushions. Alia watches him. Thousands of times she has done this, and she is struck by the thought. He appears older in sleep, the lines between his nose and mouth deepened. It frustrates her, that he can sleep when she is so wound up, but she knows this is unfair. Sometimes she envies his composure, the way he is able to draw the children to him with his stillness. What are you really thinking, she sometimes wants to yell when he smiles mildly at traffic or goes to his study for hours. Once or twice, she has stormed into his study even though the door had been shut, hoping to catch him in the middle of some depraved nameless act—masturbating? Speaking to a mistress?—but all he was ever doing was writing. This would irrationally annoy her sometimes, all those hours, hiding away in his study, smoking cigarettes. What could he be writing? His mother had died years ago; he rarely spoke to his brothers.
A door shuts within the house. Karam appears in the doorway, his tufted hair betraying sleep.
“Still not back?” He stifles a yawn.
Alia shakes her head, glances at Atef. “God knows where she is,” she whispers, her temper rising once more.
Karam smiles at her. “She’ll be fine, Mama.” He gestures at his father. “Should I wake him? Get him to bed?”
“He’ll wake on his own. How is the studying going? You’re going to wear yourself out.”
Karam rubs his eyes. In his sweatpants and cotton shirt, dark hair covering his arms, he looks like a man. “Not great. I’ve still got a couple of chapters left.”
“The exam’s tomorrow?”
He nods, and she makes a sympathetic noise, feels keenly for his tired face. His life is a mystery to her, the architecture classes at the college, sketches of buildings that she sometimes glimpses on his desk. He told her once that he wanted to build skyscrapers in Kuwait City, to make it like Paris or Manhattan. She feels a rush of warmth toward him. Her easy one.
“Good luck, habibi.”
She listens to his footsteps recede. When he hit puberty years ago, it had been awkward, the soft-eyed boy suddenly transformed into a gangly teen. Adam’s apple, straggle of facial hair, the lush, fertile smell of adolescent bodies. She became afraid of touching him for a while, afraid of what would be appropriate and what not. It seemed remarkable that his tall, unfolded limbs had come from within her.
Perhaps that was the divide, always, between her girls and Karam. The girls, in a way, were predictable. Made in the image of her—tiny breasts that grew, blood that spotted their underwear, hair that sprouted between their legs. But Karam, with his masculinity, his foreignness, his otherness—he was the miracle that she had borne.
The music show ends and a sitcom begins, some American program with a family, a husband and wife laughingly arguing. There are Arabic subtitles below, but Alia likes to listen to the English. Her English is decent from years of listening to the children talk but especially strong on the esoteric—gorgeous, mind-blowing, bungalow.
Next to her, Atef shifts, his head falling abruptly on his chest. He blinks awake, disoriented for a moment.
“Who?” He is panicked whenever he’s woken suddenly.
Alia places a hand on his shoulder. “You should go to bed.”
He yawns, shutting his eyes. “Will you come?”
“No.” She keeps her voice light. “I’m going to watch this a little longer.” Atef squints at the television.
“An American sitcom? That’s what we’ve come to?” He laughs fondly. “Ya ajnabiyeh.” A phrase Alia’s mother used for the children when they taught her English and French words during the summer. You foreigner.
The mention of Salma is still sobering, even with the time that has passed, time that Alia counts in pairs. Two summers, two birthdays, two Eids. Atef places a hand on Alia’s forehead, as one would with a child.
“May Allah keep her in rest,” he says, his eyes solemn.
“May Allah keep her in rest,” she echoes and is overcome with that familiar sorrow.
He kisses her before he leaves the room, his breath sour. He has become more chaste over the years, touching her less, and she suspects it has to do with some misguided sense of decorum, as though, now that Alia is nearly forty-five and has to studiously dye the gray streaking her temples, she needs to be treated carefully, as though she is a matron.
She would shock him if she ever said, I loved it when you’d leave marks on my body. It was like touching fire, the heat from those bruises.
He would blink at her, in that good-natured way of his. He would be hurt. Atef probably remembered those nights of lovemaking after his return with shame. Never would he believe her if she told him she has dreamed, in the two decades since, of being touched that way again.
Alone in the room, Alia watches the television family laugh. She feels a heaviness, awakened, she knows, by the mention of Salma. She touches the thin strand of gold she wears around her neck, a gift from her mother at her wedding. Her fingertips still on the metal, pain shoots through her. Like a wave, it passes, the sharpness dulled to an ache.
Salma died in winter, on the eve of a momentous thunderstorm that raged over Amman for three days, three nights. Alia had traveled to Amman the previous week by herself at the urging of her aunts.
“She’s not well,” they said. “It’s getting worse.” For years, Salma’s health had been failing, a mysterious illness that afflicted her lungs, muscles, even her sleep.