Souad is putting together a dish rack in the kitchen, immersed in the task of metal links clicking into place, when she hears a thud. A string of curses. She follows the sound into the storage room next to the living room.
Alia is sitting on the tiled floor, her skirt bunched up around her knees, surrounded by partly opened boxes. There is a bookshelf against one of the walls, half filled. Strands of hair curl around her face; she’s flushed and huffing. One of the boxes has tipped over, books spilling across the tiles. “I’m going to divorce your father,” she grumbles.
Souad suppresses a smile. She squats down.
“What’s in them?”
“Who knows? Useless things he collects over the years. They’re just sitting in his study in Amman. You could write in the dust. He can’t throw anything away! Look at this.” She plucks a bulky-looking book filled with loose pages from the nearest box. “A Lifecycle of Plants.” The book falls back into the box with a thump.
Souad sinks to the floor next to her mother, suddenly exhausted. Alia looks at her sharply.
“Are you sick?”
“Just tired.”
“I told you not to drink the water here.”
“Mama, I’m not sick.”
They fall silent. It occurs to Souad that she and her mother rarely sit together; one of them is always trying to get away.
“The kids got stuff from Spinneys,” she says. “We got curtains and plates and new sheets.”
“Good,” her mother says. “This needs to start feeling like their house.”
Souad thinks about her mother’s absence at her wedding, how it seemed like a bad omen, as ominous as an evil godmother’s presence at an infant’s cradle. You’re going to remember this, Alia had told her on the telephone when Souad announced her engagement. You’re going to remember this moment and wish you listened.
“They hate it here.” Souad is surprised to hear herself say this. Her throat tingles. “They miss Elie.” She suddenly feels limp.
The air is stiff between them. Alia looks intently at her lap.
“They’re children,” she mutters. “They’ll get used to it.”
Souad feels tears spring. Without looking up, her mother reaches out, fast as a rattlesnake, and takes her hand. She squeezes it, once, hard.
“You will too.”
Once everyone goes downstairs, getting ready for dinner, Souad walks out onto the balcony. The light is the color of chamomile tea, pale against the floors and walls. This is the trickiest hour for her: dusk, the sun already vanished—that halfness. It is the hour she wants to drink the most, before the dark crushes the city, her longing for a finger of vodka, that first sip like stepping into bathwater.
Enough. Enough. She steps to the balcony railing, watches the nearly vanished sun, a pool of red above the water’s horizon, the air salty and moist.
She still loves him. This is the fact she wakes up to each morning. She checks it, sometimes, a tongue probing an aching tooth, making sure it still hurts. This seems most shameful of all, that she would still love someone who didn’t love her, who had left her—sometimes that very word dazes her; she was left—in fact. But she cannot help it. She hates him and she loves him and she will never forgive him. These three verdicts line up for her like soldiers. It is her truth.
She’d never loved him more than when he’d left. Of those days after his departure, she sees only gray—that endless Bostonian winter—and evenings that seemed to last for weeks. She found herself playing old songs, songs from their days in Paris, singing along in French. In the afternoons—those dead, wasted hours, the children at school—she would flip through photographs, tracing the planes of his face. Aware, even as she did, that there was something vaguely ridiculous about the act, filched from the movies. On the rare evenings that she cooked, she made Elie’s favorite dishes and cried as the children ate.
What Souad marvels at most is the time. Squandered. The whirlwind that swept her life since she was eighteen—eighteen, that night at the fountain, and then the hasty marriage and then Manar and those years trying to be a mother, a wife—Time. That is how she thinks of it, as a person, Time, as something terrifying and tremendous. What else could account for it? How the years had spun by, the 1990s in their entirety now one big blur of Paris and Boston, of shitty neighborhoods and cheap restaurants and the kids getting colds—there were certain winters, entire winters, that were captured in her memory as the single, swift motion of swooping down with a wad of tissues and squeezing little noses, squeezing so that the snot ran green and viscous—and the fights, she and Elie yelling for hours. It was Time, whirling her along, spinning, spinning, until it finally stopped, and she looked around, blinking, and she was thirty-two.
Enough. She says it aloud, softly, to herself on the empty balcony.
“Enough.” The word is its own heartbeat.
She walks down the stairs carefully. There is a slight chill in the air. Tomorrow she will swim, she decides, before summer is over. She will wear the black bikini she bought with Budur, will stay until the sun begins to set, then eat those tiny fried fish from a restaurant along the coast.
At Budur’s apartment, she pushes open the door and steps inside, takes off her shoes and walks barefoot toward the dining room. The voices are loud, Karam saying something, Budur laughing. For a moment she pauses in the hallway, watching them—Karam and Budur, one at each end of a table covered with a cream tablecloth on which is a tray of lamb and rice. Her mother sits halfway down, flanked by Linah and Zain; Manar is on the other side, breaking a piece of bread.
Manar says something and Linah laughs, imitating the way Manar brushes her hair out of her eyes, and a smile lights Manar’s face. Souad’s heart swells with gratitude. She feels a fierce urge to tell her daughter how beautiful she is, how beautiful she will be. She takes a breath, suddenly starving for the delicious-smelling meat, and steps into the dining room. There is a clamor, faces turning toward her from the table, hands holding out plates, voices rising, telling her to take a chair, asking if she wants sugar with her tea, telling her to sit, sit and eat.
Linah
* * *
Beirut
July 2006
“We could be back in ten minutes.” On her bed, Linah stretches her leg out toward the window, toward a swath of late-afternoon sun. There is a spider climbing up the curtains. She moves her bare foot; the dust dances.
“They’ll know.”
She sprawls on the pillow, speaking against the fabric. Her voice is muffled: “I’m going to die of boredom.”
“No one dies of boredom,” Zain answers. “It’s not like cancer.”
Linah shoots her leg out and kicks him, sharply, in the shin.
“Ow!”
“Help me,” she groans. She turns over, flinging her arms over her head. “I’m dyyyying.”