Atef thought of his wife, her tea with two and a half sugar cubes every morning, the little rituals of her life. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Getting older. Happening to all of us. Just yesterday it took me twenty minutes to find my keys.” His chatter is telling. Over the last few years, Alia’s eccentricities had flared up—how she puzzled over directions, her confusion with names—but they were always cloaked in general cantankerousness.
“Baba.” Riham took a long breath. “Yesterday, when she came over for dinner, I left her for a minute because I got a phone call. It took me an hour to find her afterward.”
Atef’s heart stilled. “Where was she?”
“On the balcony.”
“Oh.” Relief emptied his lungs. “She’s always liked the view.”
“No.” The faintest impatience rose in Riham’s voice, so rare it silenced Atef. “You know those aluminum latches, the ones we used to lock when the children were babies? Well, they were open. She was trying to climb down.”
“What?” He thought, uselessly, of the pale windflowers in the garden, an argument he’d had with Alia months ago, when she’d called his love of flowers hopeless. “Why would she do that?”
Riham sighed, and it was in that small exhale that Atef understood he’d been protected, that Riham had been shielding him as much as she could.
“She says it’s the war. That Saddam is coming and she has to escape.”
That evening, he had watched Alia as she ate dinner, washed her face, got into bed. And suddenly he saw. Like the optical illusions his grandchildren loved, once the image emerged, he couldn’t return to not seeing it. There was his wife, her skin ashy, her hair frizzed and white.
“That girl,” she pronounced before bed, “is stealing my lipstick.” Atef didn’t ask which girl.
Smoothing her hair back from her face, Atef’s hand slid over her thin, mottled scalp, the delicate bone of her skull.
“She won’t let us dye it,” Riham told him later. “She thinks the hairdresser is trying to poison her.”
He realized that, for once, he was seeing Alia as she was. That, for the past decade, he’d seen his wife made up, never without perfect hair and manicured fingernails, layers of foundation powdered across her skin, the lips outlined and filled in with her coral lipstick. That beneath it, all along, was this frailty.
From the kitchen there is the sound of female laughter. Souad, Atef thinks. But when he walks in, Linah and Manar are sitting at the table sprinkling zaatar on pita bread spread thick with strawberry jam. They are both wearing gypsylike dresses of gauzy fabric. Linah has woven sea-colored glass beads through her hair, which is gathered atop her head; the beads scatter in every direction like fireworks. Their chatter stops at the sight of him.
“Hi, Jiddo,” Manar says, her voice bright.
“Is Teta ready for the doctor?”
Atef hesitates. “We’re working on it. Riham and Umm Najwa are talking to her now.”
“She’ll go,” Linah says softly, and Atef knows someone has already told them about Alia’s outburst this morning, how she refused to get dressed, yelling at him that she didn’t need to see a doctor.
“Seen your father?” he asks Linah.
Linah shrugs. “Maybe outside.”
“How is it possible,” Manar begins, “in this day and age, that everyone is always looking for someone in this family? Everyone has a cell phone.” She turns to Atef. “Mama was just asking about you.”
“It’s a post-tech metaphor,” Linah quips, “for how alone we all are.”
“Please. It’s textbook narcissism. Assuming people need to appear at our whim.” Manar snaps her fingers. A speck of zaatar dots her chin. Atef is enjoying listening. He likes the girls, their wit, their deadpan.
“True,” Linah says thoughtfully, waving a piece of bread around like a wand. “Look at how Mama panics when one of us doesn’t answer the phone, like, immediately.” She still has the choppily cut hair, the lip and nose piercings, from her early adolescence. There were rumors, last year, of drugs. He overheard a conversation she and Riham had once, a reference to an arrest, some boy she ran away with for a few weeks.
He is touched that they’ve all come. The grandchildren, especially. He expected excuses, begging off. Souad still in Beirut; Karam and Budur in Boston; the grandchildren all over. For the past few years, they’ve visited less and less, and Alia is too unwell to fly herself.
But there had been a cascade of phone calls all day—Zain, Linah, Souad. They called with their flight information, times of arrival, soft words of concern.
The grandchildren spoke in faltering Arabic when they arrived, leaving their lives—Abdullah from university in London, Manar from an internship in Manhattan, Linah and Zain’s summer camp in Vermont. It didn’t matter what they were doing. They came.
Riham strides into the kitchen, her face tired. “She’s coming. Umm Najwa’s getting her dressed. Morning, girls.” Umm Najwa has been Alia’s nurse ever since she broke her hip years ago.
“Morning,” they return.
“Baba, you should get the files ready.” The pile of medical records, from doctor visits in Beirut and Kuwait, that he keeps locked in his study alongside passports, his diploma, the children’s birth certificates. My husband, the hoarder, Alia used to say. It’s come to good use, he returns silently now. I’ve kept your whole history. As Atef leaves the study with the stuffed manila envelope, he finds Abdullah in the hallway, looking hesitant.
“Jiddo,” he begins. “I wanted to see how you were doing.”
Atef feels a startling lump in his throat. “I’m—” There doesn’t seem to be a word convincing enough. “I’m just waiting on your grandmother.”
“It’ll be good to know,” Abdullah says softly. “Whatever it is.” His grandson’s starting to get wrinkles around his eyes, his hairline receding. He resembles his father more and more. For a long time, they worried about Abdullah, with his piousness and rigidity, the afternoons he spent yelling about politics with older men from the neighborhood. Atef tried to talk with him, but the boy remained unreadable as stone. Then the towers fell in America, and the war started in Iraq. Suddenly, something within Abdullah eased, seemed to snap awake.
Now he pulls his grandfather to him, abruptly, surprisingly—the boy is usually more restrained—muffling the word as Atef says it.
“Inshallah.”
Everyone is in the kitchen when Atef returns, Karam and Souad standing around the girls at the table. Riham is adjusting Alia’s blouse, pulling a loose thread from the fabric. Zain is stirring his coffee, raising his eyebrows at Manar while Souad speaks.
“We don’t know how long we’ll be gone,” she is saying. “Make sure you baste the chicken, do not forget to take it out at seven . . . Zain, are you listening? Manar, make sure to take it out at—”
“Mama, okay!”
“We’re not six,” Zain says.
“The chicken needs to be basted in lemon juice,” Souad continues, undaunted, “and then put some salt—”
“Oh my God.”
Karam tugs at Souad’s sleeve. “Come on.”
“Yes, Jesus, please. Get her out of here.”
“Manar, hush.”