They are silent for a moment, thinking of the woman.
“I wish Teta were here,” Linah says suddenly. She pictures her grandmother sweeping through the apartments, snapping at the adults to buy something other than stale chicken, complaining about the heat. Her prickliness would be a tonic. There were certain things her teta understood wordlessly, like the Eid she told Budur to let Linah wear jeans for dinner if she wanted. Linah wants to tell her grandmother about the woman at Abu Rafi’s, to hear her say something smart and sharp and perfect.
Zain tosses something at her, and she catches it instinctively. A matchbox. He grins. “Bad-word club.” He holds his palm out, the cigarette pack slightly bent. “I found them in your shorts. On the bathroom floor.”
“What about the ash?”
“Fuck the ash.”
Zain lights an unbent cigarette for Linah. She holds it, smoke trailing the tip, with a sort of wonder. She remembers the girls on the railing, how they held the cigarettes with their two fingers sticking pertly up. Linah mimics the gesture and takes a drag. The smoke scorches and she coughs. Zain does the same.
“It burns.” He gasps.
“But it gets smoother.” Three, four, five drags, and the smoke goes down more easily. She parts her lips and watches it drift from her mouth. Zain clears his throat. “I think Jiddo wrote the letters. He was writing to someone named Mustafa. Do you know who that is?”
Linah scans her memory. The name is dimly familiar, but she can’t place it. She shakes her head.
“Well, he was someone in Palestine. Jiddo sent him the letters. I started reading one of them. He wrote something about a house.” Zain unfolds a paper from his pocket and reads, stumbling over the Arabic. “There are rooms for each of us here, and even more. It reminds me of your mother’s house, how you always said it felt too big after she left.”
“If he sent them, why were they in the storage room?”
Zain shrugs. “I don’t know.” He seems uninterested and Linah understands why. The letters suddenly seem far away, something that happened years ago. They aren’t now, like the bombings or the woman’s voice breaking in the store.
“Abu Rafi is a motherfucker.” Linah says the word slowly, cautiously. It is the first time she has fastened any of the bad words onto a person.
“Look,” Zain whispers, gesturing at the scene in front of them. Even with the explosions and ambulance sirens wailing in the distance, the air so thick with smoke it tickles her throat, it is somehow enchanting. The missiles roar white and dazzling, like comet tails.
The colors, the brilliant light. It reminds Linah of when she was younger, years ago in Boston, one summer night when their families went to a carnival. It had rained earlier and the air was sweet and damp, the grass still dewed with water. Her sandals made a squelching sound, and, later, when her father washed her feet in the bathtub, streaks of grass and soil circled the drain.
There had been a Ferris wheel and they all rode it together. While they inched toward the top, fireworks exploded above them, marbling the sky with color, aglitter like rock candy. Look at that sky, she heard her mother call to her father. You could just eat it up.
Watching the water burn, Linah remembers her mother’s voice, the way her hair had whipped around, dark, beautiful, a memory she’d entirely forgotten. She remembers how Elie bought them all ice cream, her fingers sticky afterward, remembers Souad kissing his neck. Linah thinks of how she misses him, how he is halfway across the world, and she feels sad for Zain and even Manar. The memories fill her with longing, the way memories of her childhood leave her wistful. Make her feel as though she is spinning, bursting out of her skin, the world around her lunatic and whirling, the world hers—even the burning buildings, even the bombs, even the sounds of people crying on the street—but it is moving fast, so fast, her childhood receding while she is still trying to catch her breath.
“Khalto Riham was saying the Israelis won’t stop bombing for weeks.” Zain’s voice startles her. Linah tries to shrug, though Zain is looking away. The smoke is hurting her lungs less and less. She attempts to make a smoke ring, but it comes out wobbly.
“It’s sweet,” Zain says.
“Menthol.”
“My dad hit my mom once.” Zain speaks musingly. The words hang between them. Linah wants to say something, something about adults being flawed, or how they break things without meaning to, but then she changes her mind. Suddenly, all she wants to do is see Zain smile. She jumps to her feet in one swift motion, holding out the cigarette to him.
“Hey!” Zain’s face is startled as he takes the cigarette.
Linah steps back and shuts her eyes. She counts to three and flings her body forward, her hands obediently catching her, hoisting her into a handstand. She can hear the smile in Zain’s voice when he speaks.
“Wow,” she hears him say, “how do you do that?”
Linah keeps her eyes shut, her body vertical. In a moment, her arms will begin to ache. But for now, she feels light as air. She wants to do cartwheels. She wants to find the wiry-haired maid and ask her to move in. She wants to hug Zain, to show him how her heart pounds out of her skin sometimes. She wants to run inside, throw her arms around her father, and kiss his cheek. Whisper into his ear, There’s a lovely lady here for you, Karam.
“Amazing,” Zain says.
Linah opens her eyes, keeping her body straight as an arrow, her breath coming fast, not wanting to speak and spoil things, the world upside down. For a moment the tiles of the balcony are her roof and the stars wheel past her feet like some mossy, glittering carpet.
Atef
* * *
Amman
June 2011
It began with her forgetting the word pomegranate. “Hand me a—” Alia said one evening last year. The most peculiar expression spread across her face, like she was a sleepwalker awoken too soon. She blinked.
Atef waited. “What?”
“One of the, ah . . .” She began to look afraid. “The red one,” she’d finally muttered, pointing at the fruit. Small incidents followed: her wandering around the neighborhood, the misremembering of Atef’s birthday.
“Something’s not right,” Riham finally said weeks ago as the two of them sat in the garden. “This thing with Mama. Something’s wrong.”
Atef averted his eyes. “She just gets that way, Riham.”
“She’s getting—” Riham hesitated. “Worse. More confused. Mixing things up.”