53 Letters For My Lover (37 page)

“Shayda.”

I stop. “Hafez?”

He straightens from the light post he’s leaning on.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

His cheeks are wind-whipped and dry, like he’s been in the cold for way too long.

“I had to see for myself.”

That look. The look he’d given his father the day Pasha Moradi died.

Do you think I didn’t know?

“I came after you,” he says. “How many new years have we rung in together, Shayda? Did you think I wouldn’t miss you?”

I feel my world tipping over, the porcelain family he gave me slipping over the edge and smashing, like a shattered snow globe.

“I saw him follow you into the restroom,” he continues.

“Hafez, I tried to tell you. I wanted to tell you—” I reach for him, but he steps back.

His eyes are dull and tortured. A double betrayal. First his father. Now me. We were supposed to love him, but we crushed his soul.

“Go back inside, Shayda. Consider yourself free.” He starts walking away from me, walking away from the pain, too broken and battered to stand and fight.

“Hafez. Wait!”

He starts walking away from me, walking away from the pain, too broken and battered to stand and fight. He turns, in the middle of the street, and gives me a bitter smile. “I didn’t forget, Shayda. I told you I would do whatever it takes to make you happ—”

The loud blare of an air horn sweeps the rest of his words away. His body catapults into the air as a truck screeches into him. He lands, several feet away with a sickening thud, his blood spilling like black ice on the asphalt.

It’s only when the truck comes to a screeching halt and the driver jumps out that the reality of the collision sinks in, and I race to his limp form.

January 10th, 2001

I’ve learned to block
out the incessant beeping of Hafez’s monitor, the shrill announcements over the intercom, the chatter of food trays on a cart. I wish I could do the same with the constant screaming that’s going on inside of me, the kind no-one can hear.

Torn.

This is what it feels like—like every fibre of my soul is being ripped apart, limb separated from limb, all my insides being scraped out.

My heart is breaking for Hafez, lying on the hospital bed.

My soul is bleeding for Troy, waiting in the wings.

It’s been a week since the accident, and every day, every hour, has put my new found bravado to a gruelling test. On the one hand is the ‘me’ who responds automatically to all the years of conditioning, of doing the things I’m supposed to do, and feeling the things I’m supposed to feel; and on the other is the ‘me’ who refuses to live a lie.

I dial Troy’s number again.

The first night he called, I flung my phone across the room. We had done this to Hafez. Troy and I.

It was so easy to slip into that dark, sickening spiral of guilt, to punish myself by pushing Troy away. Because I felt I deserved that awful, searing pain it brought, to push away the one person I wanted to be the most with.

But when Hafez opened his eyes for the first time in days, I realized we had both been touched by death, and we had both been given a second chance. It was time to release ourselves from from this constant cycle of pain, to stop holding on to ideals we both yearned for, but that always remained out of our reach.

I hold my breath as the Troy’s phone rings.

No answer.

I debate about leaving a message.

Hey. Sorry I haven’t called. Hafez was in an accident. I’ve been camped out at the hospital. The doctors say he’ll be fine, but he has a concussion and a fractured femur. I haven’t abandoned you. I’m yours—bound to you, tied to you, just like I promised. I just needed to be here for now.

No. I hang up. No message. I need to see him, tell him face to face.

I call his office.

“Mr. Heathgate is out of town on a personal leave of absence. Would you like me to direct your call to his assistant?”

“When will he be back?”

“He didn’t say.”

I twist the rosary around my wrist. Then I try his cell again. I could listen to the sound of his voice over and over again.

“Call me back, Scary Cherry.”

My phone remains silent.

March 21st, 2001

“When are they coming?”
asks Zain, plucking his guitar strings.

“Soon,” I say. My voice sounds distant and removed.

In some ways, Hafez and I have spent more time together in the last two months than we have in our entire marriage. Helping him get back on his feet, driving him to physio, sitting together quietly in the evenings, we’ve come to realize what we have. And what we never will.

“I should have told you the truth about Troy before I got involved,” I say.

“I should have told you the truth about Pasha Moradi before I asked you to marry me,” he replies. “I should have told you about my past, given you the choice, Shayda. Neither one of us was an innocent party.”

The accident enabled Hafez to re-evaluate life, to move past the hurt and see the real issues in our relationship. We’ve come to a mutual understanding, that it’s time to let go of all the things that have crippled us. It’s a move in the right direction, for both of us, but it means nothing to me without Troy. 

There’s no way to track him down. No one knows where he is or when he’s coming back. He’s cut himself off, and I burn in a private hell, day after day, hoping he’ll show up soon.

Natasha turns the TV off. “I still don’t get why.” Her voice is hoarse with frustration.

“Mum and I decided it’s for the best,” says Hafez. “When I’m settled in my new place, we’ll see each other all the time.”

“But why today? It’s Nowruz!”

I think she made some kind of a pact when Hafez came home—to revive a discarded tradition. She spent days setting up the Haft Seen table. How could she have known the ghosts that her beautiful arrangement dredged up? She gave up when the movers dropped off empty cardboard boxes. The candles on the table remained unlit.

“I think the movers are here,” says Zain, peering out the window.

I pull the curtain aside as a wheel-trans bus parks by the curb. The attendant lowers the ramp and wheels an old man out.

“It’s not for us.” I let the curtain fall.

A few moments later, the doorbell rings.

“Yes?” Hafez opens the door.

“Hafez Hijazi?” inquires the man.

“Yes.”

“Your father asked to see you.” He wheels a living skeleton into the living room.

Natasha and Zain stare, open-mouthed. They have never seen their paternal grandfather. I try to look beyond the oxygen mask and tubing, but all I can make of Kamal Hijazi are his watery, cataract eyes. Hafez has turned white, his feet rooted to the floor.

Pedar gazes at Natasha and Zain before moving on to me. Then his eyes settle on Hafez.

He says something, but his speech is garbled and his body jerks to one side.

“He had a stroke a few years ago,” says the attendant, leaning lower so Pedar can speak in his ear.

They exchange some words.

“He wants you to have this.” The man unclenches a brown paper bag from Pedar’s fingers and gives it to Hafez.

Once again, Pedar says something to his attendant.

“He wants you to open it.”

Tense seconds pass as Hafez looks at his father. All the times he imagined Kamal Hijazi over the years, I know he could not have pictured this—this trembling sack of skin and bones, an oxygen-pumped collection of wrinkles and veins and shriveled mass.

Hafez reaches into the bag and pulls out a set of figurines. The base is broken, but the three silhouettes, worn and faded, are still intact.

Me, Kamal and little boy Hafez,
Ma had said.

The father figurine is chipped, but that isn’t what catches my eye. Pedar has blackened its face, with paint or a sharpie or a crayon. I can’t tell.

Hafez’s grip tightens. His father is saying he is sorry. In his own way.

Pedar makes another sound. He lifts one hand off his knee and holds it there with tremendous effort, looking at his son.

Hafez nods and accepts his gift.

Then the attendant wheels Pedar back out of our lives.

The four of us watch him get back into the van. When the ramp is raised and the door slides shut on Kamal Hijazi, Hafez reaches for my hand.

“Zain, put this on the Haft Seen table, next to ours.” He hands over Ma’s figurine. “Natasha, go get the matches.” Then he turns to me. “I think it’s time we lit the candles.”

His smile is thin but free, as if the muscles holding it have become unshackled, and his face must learn how to wear it anew. It’s an echo of that first smile, the one that’s always stayed with me. I see a lifting of the gates again, a slow release of the dark things that have plundered his soul.

We gather the children, Zain on one side and Natasha on the other. One by one, Hafez and I light the candles, watching as the wick catches fire. With each flame, a lightness grows, bit by bit, between us.

“Nowruz Mubarak, Hafez,” I say. “Here’s to new beginnings.”

“Nowruz Mubarak, Shayda,” he replies. “To new beginnings.”

The elevator can’t get
me to Troy’s loft fast enough. I feel like a bubble of joy, about to burst into rainbow sparkles.

“We just got back from lunch with Troy,” said Jayne when she called.

“He’s back?” I asked.

“For a bit. I think he’s heading back soon.”

My hands shake as I fumble with the keys to Troy’s place. I know he stormed off because of me, because he thought I’d shut him out yet again. I have so much to explain, so much to make up for, but he’s back and that’s all that matters. I can’t wait to tell him how much I’ve missed him, to shower him with all the mad, irrepressible love fizzing inside me, to tell him I’m his—free and clear.

“Troy?” He’s left the door unlocked. I step inside and freeze.

The place has been stripped bare. All the furniture is gone. His TV, shoes, pots, pans—everything.

No. Not everything. I walk into his bedroom and feel a hard punch to my gut. He’s left the South Pacific, the dreams he gave me, as though he had no more room to carry them. They stare at me through square black frames, hollow and colorless without him.

I make my way through the emptiness, clutching at the walls in the hallway.

No.

I’ll find him. I’ll make this right.

I straighten and start heading for the door when it opens.

And there he is.

He sees me and halts.

Relief washes over me. “I thought I’d missed you. I thought you’d gone.”

He picks up the last box in the living room and starts walking out again.

“Troy.” I race after him. “Troy, wait!”

But he’s already out the door.

I spin him around and reel from the look in his eyes.

Troy’s eyes, yes, but without any of their bright, brilliant warmth, still blue, but frozen like the arctic wind. Locked down, impenetrable; every door, every window, nailed shut. I feel a howling in my soul.

“Troy, I’m sorry. Hafez was in an accident. I—”

“I know. There’s always something, Shayda. You
promised
me, you bound yourself to me. And all that changed the moment you stepped out of that room. I get that you wanted to be there for him, but you turned me off—like a fucking switch. Just like that. I’m done, Shayda.”

How different it sounds. Shayda without the ‘ahhh’.

I stagger back from the pain of it. He might as well have ripped out a chunk of my heart and crushed it with his bare hands.

“You don’t get to yank me around anymore,” he says. “Not after everything I’ve laid bare for you. I don’t want you or your dead promises or your mind-fucking, poison kisses.”

“I can explain—”

“Get out of my way, Shayda. I have a plane to catch.” He storms past me, into the elevator. His face is all angles, harsh and drawn out, and his breath smells of tobacco and booze.

“Troy, I—”

He stops me. With a single look. His face hardens, cheekbones locked in tight rage. A nerve leaps in his cheek.

I always thought I’d be the one to get hurt. Troy Heathgate, my strong, invincible lover, could never break. The veils are gone. I see myself now. I am Jerry Dandridge, the vampire from ‘Fright Night’. I have been feeding off him and now he’s shutting the door on me.

“Goodbye, Shayda Hijazi,” he says as the elevator closes on him, blowing out every window in our borrowed house, built on borrowed time. It collapses around me, a cloud of dust and shattered glass.

Goodbye, Troy Heathgate.

I lean back against the door, knowing I’ve broken something deep and precious, something beyond repair. I double over and crumble to the floor.