In the Language of Miracles (4 page)

Samir brushed her hair away from her face.

“I tried to get up . . . on a chair, to see how to turn it off. It was very loud and . . . Hosaam . . . was sleeping. I could not, and I went to ask for help . . . I went to Mrs. Russell. When we came back . . . I forgot, you see, I had the oil on the stove,” she said, sobbing again. “It was on fire. I grabbed the pot and threw it in the sink, threw flour on it, and put it out. When I turned around, Mrs. Russell was not there. She called 911. She said . . . she said . . .”

“Shushhh,” Samir said, pulling her closer to him.

“She said this is not Africa, you don't do that, you don't set fires in the house,” Nagla said.

“Shushhh, it's okay,
habibti,
it's no big deal. It's okay.”

“I was so embarrassed, Samir! I was so scared and so embarrassed. I mean, Hosaam was here alone, when I went to get her,” she said, pulling away from him and looking him in the eyes. “I felt so, so stupid! What if something had happened to him?”

“It's okay,
habibti,
nothing happened. It was only an accident.” He pulled her arms away from his neck and reached for her hands.

“Ouch!” she said, snatching her hands away from him.

Only then did he see her hands wrapped in kitchen rags, the palms burned where she had held the hot skillet, both hands peppered with already-swollen blisters.

Hours later, as he sat in the emergency room waiting for other doctors to treat his wife, Samir had thought about that apartment, that small apartment belonging to strangers who could tell him and his wife what they could and could not do, and he had thought of how miserable Nagla had been. He would, he promised himself, holding Hosaam tight, make it up to her. She would have her own home.

 • • • 

That thought was the one comfort he held during his three-year residency. Every trouble Nagla faced, he blamed on that apartment. Every time it snowed while he was at work, he would look out the window and think of her, trapped in a claustrophobic apartment with Hosaam, alone and undoubtedly weary of the boy's understandable whining as he, too, suffered from loneliness and boredom. If they had been in a large house, things would have been easier for everyone. Hosaam would have had more room to play, maybe even a backyard with a swing set, and Nagla would not have had to feel, as he suspected, that the move from Egypt had been a downgrade. The house would also be something concrete she could report back to her family; she could send pictures, show her mother and brothers that she was living well, that
he
had provided for her well, just as he should.

They started house-hunting a year into his residency. Samir would have started earlier, if he could, but it took him months to convince his father to sell his share of the family's automobile dealership to his brothers and wire him the money.

“Selling out now will cost you in the long run,” his father had cautioned.

“I need this money now,
Baba
,” Samir said, vexed that his father interfered in his plans.

“But how will you know where to buy? Why New Jersey? You'll have to commute for the next two years. And what if you decide to move to another state after you're done with your residency?”

“I won't commute for that long. I'm sure it will take us some time to find a good house, and by then I'll be closer to the end of my residency. I just need to start looking. And I like New Jersey. I've been researching the job market there. There is one small town I'm particularly interested in, a place that could definitely use another internist. I'm sure I'd be able to set up my own practice there in no time
.”

“
Insh'Allah
you will be able to,” his father corrected him.

“Yes,
insh'Allah
I will,” Samir said, irritated. His father, who had met Ehsan only a handful of times, sometimes acted so similar to her that Samir wondered if he should encourage the widower and the widow to spend their final years together, walking around their apartment, burning incense and reminding their offspring to say “God willing” whenever they spoke of their futures, lest they jinx the whole thing.

Samir, pacing the kitchen of his apartment, had heard all of this before, all his father's arguments against buying a house, all the precautions and what-ifs. But his father was talking to him from the balcony of his apartment with the Mediterranean view, sipping Turkish coffee his maid had prepared while he read the morning newspapers. Meanwhile, Samir was pacing a nine-foot-square kitchen, whispering so that he would not wake Nagla and Hosaam, wondering why he had to talk his father into sending him his inheritance, which he'd signed off to him already.

“I was actually considering waiting a bit,
Baba
, only things have changed now. I have some good news,” he said, waiting for effect.

“What?”

“Nagla is pregnant.” He tried to sound as cheerful as he could, pressing one hand hard against his forehead.

His father's exclamations of joy he had anticipated, of course. One more grandchild, one more heir, one more grandson (hopefully), one more human being to carry on his father's genes. Soon, Samir explained, Nagla would be too tired to house-hunt. If they could find a house now, he would have enough time to renovate or paint or change the carpets, so that Nagla and the kids (plural) would be able to move in as soon as he was done with his training, if not before that. Summerset, only an hour away from New York, was a small town where good houses were not abundant; if they found one, they would need to snatch it up before it was gone. “All I'm trying to do,” he told his father, “is make sure my kids have a good home to live in. I only have your grandchildren's best interest in mind.”

They found the house a couple of months before Khaled was born, just when they were both ready to give up house hunting in anticipation of the arrival of their second child. They had both gotten out of the car, stood in front of the white house with green shutters, and looked at it for a while before going in. Samir saw Nagla's face brighten up in a way he had not seen since Egypt, and he knew that this was their home. The wraparound porch. The red door. He did not care that it was four decades old, that three of the upstairs bedrooms shared one small bathroom, nor did he care that the carpets needed to be changed or that the porch awaited repainting. That the kitchen needed to be remodeled. Nagla stood in the breakfast-area bay window and looked at the backyard, a sunny patch of flat grass that faded into a forest of trees.

“This looks like something I've only seen in movies but never imagined I'd own!” she said.

“You like it?” Samir asked.

“Like it? I love it! It's a bit expensive, though, don't you think?”

Samir wrapped his arms around her protruding belly, rested his chin on her shoulder. “Don't worry about it,” he assured her. “I told you I'd let you pick the house, and if this is the one you want, this is the one it'll be.”

 • • • 

They closed on the house thirty days later, partly because he had told Nagla he would, partly because he had loved the house, too, but mainly because Ahmed had told him not to.

“Are you crazy?” Ahmed had asked. He and Loula had stopped by the apartment, as they often did when they were in town. Loula was in the bedroom, where her two kids played with Hosaam as she and Nagla talked. Samir and Ahmed sat at the kitchen table. Samir, usually embarrassed by their visits, which only reminded him how poorly he was providing for his family, had welcomed this one. He had printed out pictures of the house to show to Ahmed.

“What do you mean?” Samir said, irritated.

“For one thing, this house is
huge
! What do you need such a huge house for?”

Oh, so you don't like it because it's bigger than yours?

“It's not too big,” Samir said, smiling. “I didn't want anything too small or too confining. Nagla will be staying home with the kids for a long while, and I want her to have a house she can enjoy.”

“She could have enjoyed a house half this size, if you ask me,” Ahmed said, pushing the photos back across the table to Samir, who picked them up, arranged them neatly in a pile, and said nothing.

“Besides,” Ahmed added, “why don't you just rent? Give yourself time to see if you'll be able to set up your practice there. Also, give yourself time to save up, you know, before you spend every last penny you have on that house.”

“I've already found a good place to set up my practice. And I'm
not
spending every last penny,” Samir said through his teeth.

“It's your funeral,” Ahmed said, shrugging.

Samir, blushing to his ears, glared at him.
Wait and see,
he thought.
Just wait and see.

 • • • 

For months before they moved in, Samir and Nagla spent every weekend renovating and painting, tearing out old kitchen cabinets and countertops and replacing them with new ones. As they worked, Hosaam would trot from room to room, running in the freedom the large house afforded, while a newborn Khaled napped in his car seat or, later, sat in his stroller, watching as his parents worked. Whenever Samir would finish one room, Nagla would take it over, painting with all the windows open. He loved to see the smile on her face as she pulled her roller down each wall as if her stroke imprinted every section that she touched with magical protection and promises of prosperity. Once done, she would hang curtains, move in their belongings a little bit at a time, clean and organize and then reorganize as she learned the house's every little nook and cranny.

In Egypt, they had never done manual work, mainly because labor was so cheap it was easier to hire professionals. But here, in New Jersey, Samir had learned that homeowners did all the renovating themselves. He had listened to his colleagues' conversations about remodeling with a newfound fascination. There was pride in their talk, a sort of boastfulness inherent in ownership, in the fact that no landlady would walk up and tell them what they could and could not do.

Samir had assumed he would learn renovating just as he learned anything else: from books. When he found himself standing in the middle of a half-demolished kitchen, however, he realized the amount of information he did not know was overwhelming. What was he supposed to do first, put in the new cabinets or the new tile? Did he have to replace entire cabinets, or just the cabinet doors? If he wanted to tear the cabinets down, how was he supposed to do it without damaging the walls? He felt overwhelmed. Suspicious by nature, he was afraid to hire contractors to finish a job he had started. He needed help, he knew. But he
knew no one who could help him. More accurately, he knew no one he was willing to ask.

Ehsan would have said it was providence, because help did come his way, in the form of a six-foot blond young man with broad shoulders and an even broader smile. He literally stepped across their adjoining backyards and into Samir's kitchen one day, introduced himself, and within an hour was giving Samir much-appreciated advice. The young man was their new neighbor, Jim Bradstreet, and he was going to help him remodel the entire kitchen.

“Are you sure, Samir?” Nagla had asked when he later told her the news. “That's a lot of work! You really think he would want to help?”

“Of course he would! He's the one who offered. He literally was on his knees peering under the countertops before I even got his name!”

“But are you sure he was not just offering out of politeness?”

“This is not Egypt, Nagla,” Samir said, waving an impatient hand. He was sitting on a stool in the apartment's kitchen as Nagla prepared dinner. “It's not like home; people here don't make offers like that unless they really mean it. And besides, it's still up to him. If he wants to, he'll show up. If not, he won't.”

The following weekend, Samir took Nagla and the kids to Summerset. Only half an hour after their arrival, Jim stepped from his backyard into theirs. Samir, smiling broadly, looked at Nagla.
I told you so.
Jim was followed by a woman and a little girl close to Hosaam's age with white-blond curls that glittered in the sun. She ran right up to Hosaam and handed him a stuffed bunny with a blue bow tied around its neck. Hosaam took it, and both kids darted across the yard, following a white butterfly that the girl had spotted and pointed out to Hosaam.

Cynthia, a chubby brunette, had brought a plate of pastries. She handed them to Nagla.

“Welcome to the neighborhood!”

Nagla looked at the gift and smiled, murmuring thanks. She turned
around to walk into the kitchen, realized the countertops had been removed, and stopped in place, pastries in hand.

“What was I thinking!” Cynthia said, laughing. “You don't even have a kitchen to eat them in. Come over to our place; I'll put on some coffee.”

“I can't,” Nagla said, looking at Samir.

“Of course you can!” Samir said, giving her an encouraging look.

“But, I mean, I don't want to be heavy,” Nagla said.

Cynthia's brows scrunched together.

“She means she doesn't want to intrude,” Samir said. Nagla blushed, and Samir strapped his arm around her shoulder. “It's difficult to translate from Arabic, sometimes.”

“At least you can speak two languages!” Cynthia said. “The most I can say is
no hablo español
!”

“Seriously,” Jim said. “Just go spend some time with her. It'll keep her out of our hair. She's such a chatterbox.”

“I am,” Cynthia admitted. She nodded at Hosaam and Natalie racing around the yard. “Besides, it'll be good for the kids.”

Samir watched Nagla push Khaled's stroller across the lawn, nodding as Cynthia spoke to her.

It was at that exact moment that he felt the pieces of his life falling into place at last. As he and Jim walked inside to construct his new kitchen, Samir knew he was building not just a house, but his home, surrounded by good American neighbors, where his children would flourish and he and Nagla would grow old together.