The green apartment feels empty, deflated, though Linah can hear plates clattering in the kitchen, Tika’s steps. She wants to run to her, embrace her.
Her bathroom is colorful, the only room her parents let her decorate. There is a mirror over the sink with soccer decals from when she was younger framing it. A shaggy, rainbow-colored bath rug on the floor, the bottom of the bathtub covered in stickers.
Linah turns on the hot water, pulling the handle all the way to the left, to the very hottest. She removes and drops her clothes on the bathroom floor and stands for long minutes in front of the mirror, steam beginning to billow around her, examining her body. This seems to her a necessary task, something she must endure. Her body is fascinating. In the past few months, she has secretly peeped through the keyhole and watched the women in her household as they prepare to shower, inspecting their bodies: Manar with her excess flesh and a triangle of dark hair between her legs; Souad small-breasted, hairless everywhere; and her mother, a trimmer patch of hair and with bigger breasts than the others.
Her own body is predictable, unchanging. Skinny. Flat, flat, flat. Like the landscape of tundra that they studied in geography class.
“Miss No Tits,” she says aloud. She heard an eighth-grader say it once, when the boyish gym teacher walked by in the hallway.
When she has used up the hot water, Linah walks to her bedroom, leaving a trail of wet footprints in her wake. From her closet, she chooses a nightgown her grandmother brought her from Amman.
“They left,” she says aloud, echoing the maid’s words. She wants to go home, although the thought makes her feel babyish. Why do the adults like this city? If it were up to her, she’d never come back. She would go to summer camp with Susan in the Berkshires, where the girls stay up late telling scary stories and make friendship bracelets. There’s horseback riding and theater and water-skiing; Linah stole one of the brochures from Susan’s house last summer and read every page.
Instead of going upstairs, Linah walks down the hall into her parents’ room. Like the rest of the apartment, the walls are painted green, and the ceiling has a white, curling trim. A Persian rug the shade of persimmons spans the room in front of the bed. This is where they used to rehearse their plays, she and Zain and Manar, the space perfect for jumping and dancing around. Above the bed, there is a painting of an Iraqi souk with stalls of silver jewelry and spices, one man holding out a palmful of fruit.
Linah walks through the room, lifting things and returning them—the jewelry box, a small wooden bird her father made years ago. She feels hungry for touch. She opens her parents’ closet and trails her fingers through the clothing, her father’s khakis and T-shirts, the two silk ties he brings every summer, her mother’s dresses. She ducks her head to the turquoise gown her mother wears to parties, inhales. Gardenia, a tinge of sweat. The smell makes her sad, as though her parents were in another country instead of just upstairs.
When she was a child, she used to wear her mother’s dresses. She would mimic the things she overheard her mother saying on the phone about work and the family. Sometimes her mother would help, on rainy weekends when they were both bored, draping pearls around Linah’s neck. Her mother would dab her Dior perfume behind Linah’s ears, calling out, There’s a lovely lady here for you, Karam, and her father would come into the room. He would always stagger and clutch his heart when he saw her, pretend not to recognize her, until they all laughed, and she would twirl, feeling beautiful.
She steps onto the balcony of her parents’ room barefoot, the night air warm and heavy. There are several potted plants with large, purplish leaves that her father waters every morning. Souad never remembers to water the ones upstairs. Her balcony is strewn with dead plants.
Her parents’ balcony is large, with an iron rod railing that overlooks the traffic and slivers of sea between buildings. There is a chair and table with someone’s empty mug on it. Next to the table is a jasmine plant, her mother’s favorite. Something about those eager, white-faced flowers makes Linah’s chest ache.
She sits next to the plant and lowers her face into the tangled leaves as though into a pillow. It hurts, a branch poking her in the ear. Still, she stays like that for a moment, breathing in the sweet scent.
Eventually she disentangles herself, leans back against the wall. She tilts her head up, sees the night sky. It occurs to her she hasn’t been alone in the past two weeks. The sky is clear tonight, a crescent moon shining. A reverberating sound rumbles from the distance. Bombing, from the south. She remembers the world outside, the burning. They’re slaughtering us, a woman had said into the news camera. A lone siren rings out.
A part of her hopes they will come looking for her, the adults, their faces anxious. It was something she used to do as a child, though her mother would scold her: She would hide in closets or under the bed and hear their voices break with fear until, finally, she’d appear. She never understood the anger that would bloom then, the yelling. I’m giving you a gift, she always wanted to say. You thought I was lost, but I never was.
Something is different. There are streaks of light cleaving the night sky, punctuated by low rumbling that feels close. Linah stands transfixed, feeling the ground around her quiver. From the balcony, she can see hooks of smoke begin to rise between the buildings, from the south. After fifteen, twenty minutes, the balcony door slides open.
“Finally,” Zain says.
Linah sighs. “Found me.”
Zain looks confused. “Were you hiding?” He slides the door closed and sits opposite from her, his bare feet dirty. “They bombed another building. The newscaster said so. Everyone’s freaking out upstairs.”
“Do you think we’re going to die?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Zain says but his voice trembles. In the moonlight, his eyes are huge and shiny.
They watch the lights arch across the land, like fireworks in reverse. From here, the entire skyline is lit up, smoke billowing, covering buildings and sea, as though the earth has been replaced with fire and smoke. Are the woman’s children waiting for her call? Linah wonders. What does she do in that large apartment once the sun sets—for Linah imagines a marbled, stuffily decorated apartment, old Beirut style, sprawled with uncomfortable, gilded furniture, a guest living room, large bay windows—now that she is no longer waiting?
“We’ll take Tika with us if we leave,” Zain says. This is how they are sometimes, intuiting each other’s thoughts.