“Okay, time to go,” Riham says soothingly.
Alia makes a sudden, violent sound and they all turn to her. She is standing by the doorway, her head ducked forward. Atef can see pink scalp beneath her thinning hair. When she lifts her head, there is a flash of teeth. She is laughing.
“Mama,” Karam says. She turns to him, smiling girlishly.
“I hated the movie,” she says brightly in Arabic. “It was outrageously dull.”
“Let’s go,” Atef says.
In the car Atef sits up front with Karam, Alia and their daughters in the back. Atef fiddles with the car radio, finds a station with Ziad Rahbani singing. Static crackles every few seconds. Atef can feel Karam steal glances at him as they drive, Riham’s voice audible as she speaks with Alia.
They pass the storefronts on Mecca Street, street vendors shaking bags of dates at cars, a boutique bikini shop with mannequins wearing ocean-colored spandex. Atef doesn’t look out of the windows, not at the restaurants or pretty coeds walking on the street, the girls who get younger and younger every year. Atef looks straight in front of him, at the windshield, staring at everything and nothing at once.
Beside him, Karam opens his mouth, then shuts it. Atef knows the boy wants to say the right thing. There is no right thing. Atef wants to tell his children that they don’t understand, that their view from the sidelines is incomplete, that somehow in the murky cave of his marriage—not exactly happy but not unhappy either, given to strain, months at a time when Alia retreats into her fury and Atef into himself—is a miraculous conch of love, something unpolished but alive, pulsing.
The specialty clinic is attractively built, spare and white and sunny. They register in the atrium and Atef thinks about the people who come to these offices and hear horrible news, of brain tumors and cancer, then have to walk back out into the atrium. The beauty of the space, he thinks, must be devastating. As for the rest of the patients—merely brushing a close call, nothing but migraines, clean blood tests—they must be dazed with relief, suddenly grateful for every dust mote.
Please, Allah, let us be among the dazed.
The prayer is shoddy and shameful. Atef is a man of makeshift faith, at best, lacking his own mother’s quiet belief or Riham’s tenacity. He wants a God who coolly pats his hand, a God who has better things to do. Riham and Souad talk to the receptionist behind the desk, Riham carrying the photocopied pages of her mother’s medical file. Bless her, Atef thinks. The women in his life are more efficient than the men. Atef thinks of Manar and Linah. In a hospital, they would take brisk charge.
“I’m going to be late for Sima’s.”
“Alia, Sima will wait.”
“How do you know? I said I’d be there at six.” Sima had been a neighbor of theirs in Kuwait.
“I already called her, said we’d be a little late. She said not to worry, that you should see the doctor first.”
“You did?”
“Yes.” Atef tries to make his voice reassuring. He talks to Alia with the tone he used when the children were young, a voice that reemerged when his grandchildren were born.
“Mama, this is Dr. Munla.” A short, balding man in khakis. He smiles and shakes Alia’s hand.
“Madame Yacoub, it’s a pleasure.”
“I’m late for Sima,” Alia informs him.
The doctor is unruffled. “Then we’ll make this as quick as possible.” He turns to the others. “We can go to my office.”
“I hate seeing her like this,” Atef hears Souad whisper to Riham. “It’s like watching a lion caged.”
They follow the doctor down a hallway decorated with landscape paintings. His office is painted a bright robin’s-egg blue, diagrams of brain anatomy covering the walls. There is a plastic model of a brain on the doctor’s desk, different sections in pastel colors. They sit around the room, Souad perching on the exam chair. The doctor sits at his desk and lifts his arms, as though performing for them.
“We’re going to do several tests today,” he begins. He speaks for some time about machinery, the validity of MRI imaging, measuring brain fluid, testing reflexes, cognitive assessment—vague, ominous-sounding tasks that they don’t understand.
“For brain imaging?” Riham asks.
“My brain is fine,” Alia says.
“I’m sure it is, madame,” the doctor says. “It’s just routine.”
Atef desperately likes him, in that way one likes people who carry tremendous power to bring bad news. He can envision the doctor after work, sitting on some balcony somewhere as he pours a glass of arak, touching his wife’s hair, telling her of the terrible ways the human body can betray.
“I’ll take you in now,” he says to Alia. “We’ll start with some basic tests.”
“I’m late for Sima,” she says once more. She chews her lower lip and looks adrift.
“We’ll be done before you know it,” the doctor says.
The four of them return to the waiting room. Half an hour passes by; an hour. There is a television mounted on the wall and they obediently watch what’s playing, a movie that’s halfway through.
“Is that woman his wife?” Karam asks.
“I think she’s a police officer,” Riham says.
Souad leaves twice to smoke. She barely glances at the television, instead texting on her cell phone. Every now and then, the corners of her lips twitch up. There is a man, Atef intuits, has been for some time. But in this way his youngest is oddly private. She hasn’t mentioned anyone since Elie.
When he and Alia go to Beirut, they stay with their daughter. After the war, she redecorated the apartment, painted over the walls. Souad filled it with black and white—black couches and tables, white walls and rugs. Even the curtains were black, lacy like a widow’s veil.
Atef couldn’t imagine living with all that monochrome, but Souad always seems happy when he visits—this, too, hints at a romance—mocking him, morbidly funny. She shows him around Hamra, pointing out places that have changed, taking him to the small boutique shop she and her friend opened a couple years ago.
“It’s the most impractical thing to do in this economy,” she said cheerfully, walking around the closet-size space, one wall made entirely of glass and overlooking a busy street where college students scurry by. Unusual, pretty things fill the store, mirrors and coral necklaces and leather-bound notebooks.
But she must be onto something, because people want beautiful things even in hard times—perhaps especially in hard times—and the store keeps her afloat. Atef ends each trip feeling wistful, watching his daughter living the life she has foraged, like an island survivor in a palace of shells.
The movie ends and another begins, a thriller with an elaborate car chase in the first five minutes. “It’s taking long,” Atef finally says.
Riham checks her watch. “We want him to be thorough, Baba.”
“She’s going to be frantic.”