“Allah keep him,” Riham murmurs automatically. They lapse into silence, the only sound insects buzzing and, far off, cars rushing along the main road.
Riham thinks of her brother, how his knuckles must have whitened on the telephone, hearing his mother speak that way about Budur. He wouldn’t have said a word, she knows; she and Karam are alike that way. Only Souad ever speaks up, yells back. Karam would have listened, then gotten off the phone and smiled at Budur, pretended all was fine. Poor gentle Karam, mild-mannered like their father. Years ago, when he’d announced he was going to marry Budur—they’d gotten engaged quickly, within weeks—her mother had been inexplicably furious.
“I don’t understand you children!” Riham heard her shout over the phone. “There’s a war, and suddenly everyone has to get married? Look at Souad! Look at your sister, Karam. She’s raising an infant in an attic. Is that the life you want for yourself? What did we send you across the world for? God, at least if you married an American, you’d get the passport.”
It was the greatest insult. Only Karam’s love for his mother kept him from responding. He politely got off the phone and did not speak to her again for a month.
Riham makes a mental note to call him tonight or tomorrow. Their telephone conversations are always brief, Riham muttering platitudes about faith, coming off as vacuous and dowdy. She feels dwarfed near her brother and sister, small and pudgy and boring, even though they are kind to her, as one is to the slow or elderly. She knows her life is dull to them. She sees her life, sometimes, the way an eagle would, circling overhead—herself a tiny dot, moving predictably, making to-do lists, laughing, pouring cups of tea.
“Can you imagine,” Riham once overheard Souad saying to Karam, “that sort of life? The doctor’s wife. Spending your days doing laundry and cooking.” She sighed. “I’d kill myself.”
Karam and Souad, by contrast, are their own worlds. Cavernous, chaotic, beautiful. All she knows of her siblings are her memories of them as children and then, abruptly, snapshots of adults whom she sees every couple of years. Listening to conversation between those two—living minutes apart in Boston, sharing their lives and children—is like listening to a foreign language. When they attempt to include Riham—explaining their work or the city, with its college bars and bookstores—it feels wooden, forced, like they’re trying to help her understand something she simply cannot.
Connecting with the children is easier. Manar and Zain and Linah. Like a charm said thrice over, darlings, all of them, with olive skin and unruly hair. They look like siblings. Riham sees the children in snapshots as well, as infants, then chubby toddlers, then young children. They love her guilelessly, wholly. She holds for them the allure of the exotic; she’s the aunt whose veil they can unfasten to play with her long hair, the aunt who feeds them zaatar, takes them through her garden as though it is a magical land.
With them she is transformed, buoyant, playing with dolls and singing aloud, all of it threaded with jealousy, reaching for the children with a longing closer to hunger than love.
After a while, her father rises. “Don’t forget the pruning. And water them a little more.”
“And tonight?”
He sighs. “We’ll come. She may be a bit much to handle.”
“I’ll make maqlouba.”
“Ah!” Her father laughs. “That might do it.”
She watches him walk, his shoulders thin against the linen of his shirt. “Wait!” she calls out, remembering. “Abdullah. Did you speak with him?”
Her father pauses. “I did,” he says. He seems reluctant to say more.
“And?”
Atef runs a hand through his silver hair, a nervous habit all three children inherited. “The boy is lost, Riham.”
“Did you ask him about the men?”
“He says they’re just friends. That he met them at university. When I pushed, he admitted they were political. That’s who he’s been spending his time with.”
Riham had asked her father to speak with Abdullah. The boy has been staying out late the past couple of months, since he began university. Another mother might suspect girls. But several times, she has glimpsed older men dropping him off at the house, found political pamphlets in his clothing. With Latif’s father dead and his mother’s family in Syria, the boy’s only grandparents were Atef and Alia, who—after their initial bewilderment with Riham’s marriage—loved Abdullah fiercely. But it was Atef the boy seemed most connected to, becoming attached to the man who was around while his father worked endless hours. They walked to the library together, went to Petra. Riham knew it was unfair, asking Atef to speak with Abdullah, taking advantage of the boy’s love and respect for her father. But she was afraid.
“Why is he doing this?” she wonders aloud. “What does he need that we don’t give him?”
“It’s not that simple.” Her father looks pained. “Those sorts of men, those meetings, they give you something that can’t be replicated.”
“So what can I do? I worry about him. Latif worries about him.”
“There’s nothing to do, Riham. He has to learn on his own.” He starts to walk, then pauses. “Those gatherings, they make boys feel like giants.”
She remains in the garden for a while, thinking about Abdullah. When she goes back inside, she crosses chicken off her list and writes maqlouba.
“We’ll need to soak the rice,” she tells Rosie in the kitchen. “And defrost the lamb.”
Rosie raises her thin eyebrows. “No chicken?”
“Maqlouba. Mama’s coming tonight.” Rosie shrugs, not particularly interested. Riham likes her indifference. She finds it liberating, a relief from the false cheer and formality of previous maids.
“Please make sure the meat isn’t overcooked. I’m going to Madame Farida’s house in a bit but will be back in time.”
Riham gathers the soft nest of yarn and needles from the basket in the living room. Knitting calms her, reminding her of her grandmother. She turns the television to a popular Turkish soap opera, the voices dubbed in Arabic. While she knits, Riham shakes her head and talks back to the characters.
“He’s going to leave you,” she says to the starlet, blond and slate-eyed. “He’s in love with your sister. He’s just after your inheritance.”
But still the starlet rushes forward, gasping at the crimson flowers, saying yes when he pulls out a ring. The camera zooms in on the ring, alive with sinister sparkle. I’ll love you until the sky is no more.
“Stupid,” Riham says to the screen. “Stupid, stupid girl.”