Next to her, Budur bites her lip, looking as though she might cry. “I’ll go to the room.”
Alia softens toward Budur. Poor thing. Souad is perpetually the culprit in that relationship, Alia knows. The one that pushes her to do things. When they were twelve, she’d caught them smoking cigarettes in the yard. Budur had instantly begun to cry, saying, Sorry, sorry. Souad had taken another puff before she stamped the cigarette out with her sneaker.
“Go, Budur, habibti,” Alia says.
“No, you stay,” says Souad.
Both of them speak at the same time, then glare at each other. Budur hesitates for a moment before retreating, her footsteps quiet and light in the hallway.
“I want you to be happy.” Alia changes tactics. “Acting this way isn’t good for you.”
Souad snorts, and Alia wants to slap her. “Happy?” She drops her purse onto the floor with the languor of the unaffected, but Alia sees her daughter’s jaw tensing and it satisfies something small and petty in her. “You mean like Riham’s happy? Or like you’re happy?”
“Oh, oh, this again? It’s like living in a theater. You want everyone to be unhappy so we can be like one of your American films.” In recent months, Souad’s disappointment with the family has been a keen, living thing.
“Don’t talk to me about living in a fantasy.”
“What—”
Souad smiles like someone about to sweep a poker table.
“You’ve been pining over Amman like some jilted lover.”
This halts Alia. “I’m waking up your f-father,” she stammers. “He’ll deal with you. He should know what time his daughter traipses home.”
It is an empty threat, and they both know it. Atef is a tepid disciplinarian at best, too soft with the children. Souad arches an eyebrow.
“Wake him up.”
“I’m happy,” Alia shouts. The childishness shames her.
“No.” Souad speaks slowly, picking up her purse. “You’re not. You’re a liar, and you’re always lying. And you’re just angry because I can see it.”
Souad walks out of the room. She switches off the light as she exits—a final insult—leaving Alia in the dark, with a slack mouth and anger pulsing through her rib cage.
It takes Alia a while—ten, fifteen minutes—to calm herself down. She fights the urge to follow Souad into her room, to yank her by the shoulders and demand, if not an apology, then more fight. The urge to scream, to say terrible things, lances her. Her entire life, she has been denied a good fight; Widad too mild, Salma too good, Atef too kind, Karam gentle, and Riham withdrawn.
Only Souad has the ferocity. And her daughter is a smart girl—funny, how bitterly one could think such a thing about one’s child—who knows perfectly well the potency of walking away.
There are times when Alia cannot bear to look at her daughter. Not only out of anger, but also out of the peculiarity of recognition. No one had warned her of this, that she would see herself so brazenly in her child. It is alarming, watching Souad filch her gestures, the scowls and hair flicking and lopsided smile. Alia can see her own spitefulness in the girl.
There is, of course, the other likeness, the shiver of someone darting across her daughter’s face. Mustafa in the dark limbs. Mustafa in the twitch of her mouth, the lips pulled downward when she is impatient or afraid.
Watching a news report years ago, a newly adolescent Souad cursed at the television, her brows drawn in a glower. Salma had shaken her head, marveling. She spoke so quietly Alia barely heard her:
“Allah have mercy, she has your brother’s blood in her.”
Across the room Alia winced, watching her daughter, all those likenesses, those hurts—scrawled plainly on her pretty face. Mustafa, whose name they go entire years at a time without speaking. It became a tacit rule between her and Atef: If it hurts, leave it. Their marriage had a glove compartment, a hollow, cluttered space where emotional debris went—Mustafa, those first months in Kuwait, Nablus. Palestine tossed in there like an illegible receipt, keys that no longer opened any door. Why would we, Atef seemed to beg her silently in those early years after the war, his face tightening with pain when she spoke of Nablus, when she cursed Meir and Rabin and the day they’d been born. So she spoke of it less and less, everything they’d left behind, her dreams of walking into her childhood bedroom, the way her entire body drummed when she thought of the place that was, suddenly, not hers anymore. She folded it away.
Souad’s Amman remark was a punch in the face. So Souad knew.
If Alia put her discontent away, it wouldn’t stay. Her wanting disobeyed her, needling over the years, nudging her awake. If not Palestine, then Amman, it whispered. Anywhere but this hot, unwelcome country. Alia’s one wicked secret, the one she thought she’d hidden from the family—that on each of those summer trips, finding herself surrounded by friends and family, the same thought pinched her.
I could stay.
It was not in and of itself a betrayal, but the implications were. Stay here and what? Be with my mother, my cousins. And my children? So it would go, the silent argument, back and forth in her mind until she loathed the sight of herself in the mirror. What kind of mother, or wife, would consider such a fate—living apart from her children, moving to Amman.
“Atef wants you to be happy,” Mimi argued with her once. Only she knew everything; Alia had broken down one summer and told her. Late into the night they’d talked, the children asleep in their rooms; Mimi thought Alia should stay even if Atef kept the children. “He must know how miserable you are there.”
“But he would hate me.”
“No, he wouldn’t. He’d forgive you.”
She was right. The simple truth was that Atef would’ve forgiven her if she remained, the same way he would’ve forgiven her if she divorced him or fell in love with someone else. Because his love for her—and her understanding of this was tenuous, the way one snatches at the wisps of a memory—had always been straightforward. Uncomplicated.
That summer, she’d spent long hours with Mimi smoking cigarettes and crying, nearly telling her mother about it. While Alia fed the children, while she combed their hair after baths, her mind churned with plans.