Suddenly he is asleep. He accepts this fact, understands it as he understands that where he is now—standing on a sunlit street corner, cars honking around him—is a perfectly reasonable place to be. Of course he is here. He looks down and sees his hands are unlined. The hands of a young man.
“Atef.” The voice is low and soft and laughing. It is Alia. She is impossibly young. She looks almost like a child, wearing a long swirling skirt, her black hair cut close to her chin. This is my life, he thinks, this street corner. He remembers the skirt. He recalls his wife walking toward him, smiling, music drifting from the open window of a car. Looking around, he sees the grocery store, the familiar lot. Kuwait.
“Out of oranges again.” That voice once more, almost seductive. “I’ll bring you some back from Amman.” She takes his hand in her own.
The oranges. Atef remembers abruptly, violently. He hasn’t thought of them, he knows, since that day. He remembers the glowing spheres, Alia pulling them out of her suitcase after a summer with her mother, packed between socks and bras, but he knows, even as he clasps her hand, that the memory is false. A lie. She never brought any back. But he remembers the promise, his heart light to hear her laughter, even as he dreaded her trip. All this time, a part of him was waiting for the gift.
“You’re going to forget.” He hears himself speak. Immediately her hand goes slack and Alia stops. Her expression is a mixture of admiration and pity. She places a hand on his cheek and he is overpowered by nostalgia. For this. For this moment—for those years, his young wife’s hand. For Kuwait. For everything as it used to be. Because he knows that the dream is about to end, that it will all be over in a minute.
She keeps her hand against his cheek. Speak, he wants to scream, quickly, there is no time left.
“Habibi,” she says. Dark hair perfectly coiffed, plum lipstick, those beautiful legs. “I can’t stay.”
Atef wakes with a jolt, like someone being shaken, but when he looks around, there is nothing of the dream. Everything unaltered. Just him on the swing, the swish of traffic from the distance, the stars threaded between telephone poles. The road, the honking, Alia—he can still feel the heat of the Kuwaiti sun. He touches his face and it is wet. It feels like he has been crying for days. He rubs at his eyes, embarrassed.
He expects to find Souad and Riham in the living room. But there is no one there. Bedrooms, he thinks. He wonders where the grandchildren have gone.
The house, slapped silent after the earlier fight. From the hallway Atef can hear muffled tones and the sound of the mournful, folksy music Manar prefers. He moves in that direction.
“Allah.” The word pops out of his mouth.
Alia. Slumped on the armchair. She must have come back out by herself. There is a dusting of egg yolk on her chin. Only the lamp is on, grotesquely shadowing her face. For a moment he is still, cannot bear to touch her. He moves slowly toward her. She is dead, he realizes.
Suddenly there is a rustling sound; it takes a few seconds for him to understand it is coming from his wife’s throat. Not dead. Asleep. Her chest is moving, he sees. As if to punctuate her aliveness, she lets out a long snore.
Atef feels oddly let down. He had prepared for an epiphany. He reaches down and strokes her hair, but the gesture is forced. He knows if she wakes, she will snap at him.
The only light comes from the kitchen. From that room he can hear voices calling out. Laughter. He walks toward the noise hungrily. At the edge of the hallway, he stands still, peering through the door. The door is slightly ajar and the voices of the grandchildren are audible.
“. . . so fucked.”
“She called me Yasmin this morning. I don’t even know who that is.”
“It’s probably a dead friend of hers. So fucking morbid.”
“Remember how she used to scold us? Earlier I set a mug down and jumped, thinking she’d come out.”
“‘Don’t they use coasters in Amrika?’” Their laughter is kind.
“God.” Manar’s voice sobers. “This house feels like a mausoleum. I told Gabe last night, if he got sick I’d burn the house down. It’s just too sad. It’s like she’s this living ghost, moving from room to room. I don’t know how he stands it.”
They are talking about him, Atef realizes.
“He loves her,” Abdullah’s voice reproaches.
Manar falls silent with the rest. Atef can hear them thinking about his love.
“But doesn’t it feel”—here a long pause—“so small?”
Atef hears the tremor in Manar’s voice. He remembers an argument years ago, between her and Abdullah, when she’d stood up during dinner and yelled at him, Even a saint can be a dick. Alia had told the story over and over, laughing.
“Maybe it’s not about being small or big.” Linah takes a breath, then exhales; Atef can smell a cigarette. “Maybe it’s like becoming part of someone. Like there’s no you that exists without them.”
“She’s right.” Zain pauses. “It’s what he always wrote about.”
Atef shoots upright, his ears burning. He cranes forward to hear his grandson’s sentence.
“. . . He has to remember for the both of them now.”
He flees to the garden, the familiar maze of shrubs and trees, stumbles in the dark for the familiar dip of land that leads to the fig tree, where he sits.
Of course he’d known about the letters. After the boxes went to Beirut, he’d realized too late the letters were in them. He’d stopped writing them years before, but the proximity was comforting, finding the brown spine of that book every now and then, knowing the life housed within.
He kept reminding himself to check the boxes when they visited Beirut, but the summers were always whirlwinds, a hurricane of arguments and children running around, protests and roadblocks in the city. He’d remember on the plane home, vow to check the next time.
Years after the war, he finally did, quietly sneaking into the blue apartment’s storage room while everyone went to the beach, going through every single box. It took hours, the air filled with dust and mold. He eventually found A Lifecycle of Plants, but it lay limply in his hands, flat. Just a regular book. The letters were gone.
His mind spun through possibilities. Alia? Oh God. Oh God, please. But no, she would’ve said something, would have thrown every single page in his face. His own children were unlikely culprits: Souad too uninterested, Riham too deferential, Karam too respectful.
The grandchildren, then.
He was stunned to find himself smiling. Slowly, then laughing, harder and harder, alone in the small room. It was the oddest thing: he didn’t mind. It was like dropping the weight of a planet. Like finally stepping back.
What had they thought reading them? He will never know. To ask would be to spoil the whole thing, he thinks now. Better to give the world over intact, let them speculate. They know him. Yes. He is glad.