The Night Counter (40 page)

“That’s it, kids, I’m leaving it up to your father to decide which one of you troublemakers to leave the house to,” Fatima began. “But—”

“Tayta, Jiddo told me to make sure you read this,” Amir interrupted and handed her Ibrahim’s letter. “I think it’s why he kept calling. It’s all in Arabic. So I think he wanted to tell you what it said over the phone, but the FBI jacked his line in Detroit so badly, we couldn’t hear him well enough.”

“Why didn’t you fax it to me?” Nadia said. “I would have read it.”

“Why didn’t you come visit?” Amir answered.

Nadia snatched the letter and opened it. She bit her lip harder and harder as she read. Then she looked at her mother.

“He just wanted to say hi and tell you that he found an old letter from your friend Aida, the one Dina said had died,” Nadia explained. “It doesn’t matter, though, since she’s already gone.”

“Read me Aida’s letter with all the words,” Fatima ordered. “That must be her handwriting, because it is not Ibrahim’s, and it says more than hi.”

Nadia shook her head. “How about I read you one of your mom’s letters?”

“Read it to me,” Fatima insisted. “Show me the education you could have gotten from your father for free.
Yallah
, let’s go. Read.”

Nadia shook her head again. “Do you prefer your FBI student to read it for me?” Fatima demanded.

Nadia breathed deeply and began. It took Fatima a moment to get around the sound of such perfect yet accented classical Arabic coming from her own child.

“
April 4, 1989
. Bismillah al-Rahman al-Raheem,
In the name of God the most merciful. Dear Sister Fatima. I hope God keeps you and your family safe in America. I am writing to you to tell you that I am moving to Beirut. The war was very bad again this year, after a few years of some calm, and my arthritis is also bad. I will go to Beirut to live with my son, who is now a plastic surgery doctor. I think of you every day, my sister, and hope that your daughters and the son that remains with you are in good health. I am sorry you did not see the house again. When Ibrahim came here after your sons died, I had just lost my arm in the bomb blast at the Rashid bakery. Do you remember it, the one across from the old tailor’s shop? It was hard for me to get around then, but now I am used to it. My son tells me of fake arms I could get, but I was lucky enough compared to those who lost two. It was so terrible when Ibrahim came here and found that everyone in both your families had either died or fled. As you know, Ibrahim came in the worst year. He was here just as it was all destroyed, and I’m sure it must have broken your heart more than it already was when he told you Deir Zeitoon was one of the first villages ravaged by the war. But things are better
, al-hamdulilah.
I passed where your house used to be the other day. They plan to build a hotel there. People say that if the war stops, Lebanon will be a tourist place again, especially for the rich Persian Gulf people. They’ll buy beach and mountain villas, like they used to after you left but before the troubles began. Below is my address in
Beirut and my telephone number. When you come back home, please call me and I will talk about the happy days and our departed mothers and sisters. With God’s blessings, I am your faithful sister, Aida.
”

Fatima’s blood chilled across her body. She stared at nothing as Nadia translated for the others. When Nadia finished, Fatima turned her head away from her children and looked out the window, where Scheherazade still had not returned to the eucalyptus tree.

Ibrahim had come back from Lebanon thirty years ago, after going there to escape the death of their sons. He had told Fatima that Deir Zeitoon and the house were unharmed in the civil war. She had remarked then that if the whole family had gone back to Lebanon as they once had promised one another, their boys would have lived. He had told her not to be silly. It was the first time he had insulted her like that. From then on, she had felt that his duty to her—and to Marwan’s memory—should be over. The boys had looked just like her. It was her turn to oblige him for all he had done for her by removing a painful reminder, namely, herself. She had just not known how to end the marriage because he was the only person who was part of her past, present, and future, who could laugh with her about the Sadeq family’s overrun rabbit farm in Deir Zeitoon or commiserate with her about Millie’s husband. She had told herself to stay until Bassam, Lena, and Amir were grown so that they would have a father around. For all those years, Ibrahim had known that all of them—not just the boys—would have perished if they had returned to Lebanon.

His obligation to her had always been love, something she had never acknowledged, perhaps out respect for Marwan, perhaps because words of love were not things Ibrahim spoke and she hadn’t dared presume that the words nonetheless existed inside this man who had rescued her from being a pregnant widow in a country whose language she still did not speak. But most likely he did not say anything because he had not known that she wasn’t just grateful to him. After all, she hadn’t told him otherwise. Still, he had loved her beyond all other truths, so much so that he had built a whole story about the care of a house long gone. She would
not mention the letter when she talked with him next. She would tell him of the fig tree fruiting, no matter how many times the telephone cut out.

Her children had always given her somewhere to focus away from Ibrahim, as they did at this moment. For when Fatima looked up, Laila stood at the doorway.

“Oh, my Laila,” Fatima breathed.

Laila slowly absorbed that she was the last of her siblings to walk into this room in Los Angeles. “You are all here?” she said.

Randa not so subtly mouthed, “Mom’s very, very sick.”

“Don’t listen to them, Laila,” Fatima said. “You just take care of yourself. How’s Detroit? Your boys? Anyone getting married?”

Laila shook her head, and Fatima knew that for all her children would tell her, all of Laila’s sons could have gotten divorced last week. Bassam grabbed a chair for Laila and Amir led her to it, but Laila chose to sit on the bed. She took Fatima’s hand, which was nearly as sinewy as Ibrahim’s had been when she had held it in her hand a week before.

“Mama,” Laila said. “Baba has been visiting me almost every other day for the past week.”

“Oh,” Fatima said. She was glad he was making an effort to visit his one daughter still in Detroit. “Does he know about your … you know …”

“No, Mama,” Laila said. “I’m fine. Really. So fine that he even encouraged me just the other day to come visit you.”

“Oh,” Fatima said.

“Anyway, every Wednesday and Friday afternoon, Baba takes a nap and then goes to the airport,” Laila continued.

“Yes, I know,” Fatima said. “To see the passengers from Lebanon.”

“Last night he did not come to our house for dinner on the 8:22 bus as he said he would,” Laila told her. “I called him at home, but he did not answer. I drove to the house and could not find him. I waited and waited until a bus driver named Dwayne came to my house and told me that Baba had fallen asleep on the bus and never gotten up.”

Fatima’s children’s eyes welled with hers, but no one let out loud sobs,
not even Miriam. Just as Ibrahim had not made many waves in their lives when he was living, he had passed out of them like a calm storm, easy to avoid but still powerful. His children’s sadness was as deep as if he had been close to them, as if he had been Randa’s typical American dad fantasy. Her husband had been loved by so many children yet left alone on a bus at the end, a bus that took him twice a week to a place where he once imagined his children would have stayed near him, even lived next door, if not in the same house. For 1001 days and nights she, too, had left him alone.

“Remember how Baba called Mr. Ford a VIP? That’s what Ghazi is at the mosque,” Laila said. “Ghazi wants to bury him the Muslim way.”

Fatima nodded. “You must bury him tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Laila said. “Ghazi will do it right. Next to the boys.”

“
Al hamdulilah
,” Fatima said.

Fatima looked at Amir’s chrome clock. It read 11:05
P.M.
In less than an hour, 1001 nights would have come and gone and her pulse felt stronger than ever. When she had thought that it was she whose days were literally numbered, she had felt strongly that she should not go back to Detroit, not force Ibrahim to take care of her as she died. But she had let him die alone. Why had she never even told herself that she felt more than gratitude for Ibrahim? It hadn’t happened in one moment, but she had begun loving him a long, long time ago, of that she was sure.

“I will come home with you,” Fatima decided. “I got this dress for his burial.”

“I found this in his pocket,” Laila said. She held up a rusty skeleton key.

“The key to my house,” Fatima said, finally allowing herself to cry. She took it from Laila and slowly rubbed the cold metal in her hand, as if shining it. Some of the rust stuck to her hand, almost burning her palm. She stopped stroking it and held it still in her open palm. Her children looked at it with her. But the key did not do anything: It did not jump, it did not speak, it did not cry with her. It was warmed by her hand, and she felt all the power it had held over her. But it did not compare to these people she had nursed and fed.

She closed her fist around it. She knew that it was indeed her house that had been lost in Deir Zeitoon, not her children’s, not even Ibrahim’s. Her life as far as they were all concerned had begun in Detroit, just as theirs had. That was where she would let it end. It was where her funeral instructions had said she was to be buried all along.

Her children whispered to one another, all saying how they were going to go to Detroit the next day. Ibrahim must have wondered, as she had of her own postponed death, if any of their children would walk in his funeral in light of how little of their lives he had walked with them. She heard them making flight arrangements through the crackling phones. Yes, she and Ibrahim had been mostly lucky with their children. Luckier, she thought, than their children had been with their parents. Or maybe not. Who knew how they would have fared with different parents?

“Mama, one more thing,” Laila said. “The other day Baba and I were eating grape leaves, and he told me that if anything happened, his will gives everything to you, including the house in Detroit, and it would be your choice what to do with it when your time came.”

WITH HER CHILDREN
downstairs eating kibbe, Fatima hobbled to the dresser and opened the underwear drawer. She put the key to the house in Deir Zeitoon in with her hair for Laila, Mama’s Koran for Randa, the key to the Mercury for Bassam, and Mama’s letters for Nadia. Before they all left for Detroit, she would give them their inheritances. Lena also could take her wedding dress. Miriam would have to wait for her grandfather’s cane until she was dead. Until then, she
could use Ibrahim’s. After Ibrahim’s funeral, she would put on her pink robe again and give Soraya the dress.

If she eventually died in her robe, that would be fine, but she would not wear it or her usual funeral clothes to the farewell for her husband. She rarely had dressed up for him in this life, but she would now.

Fatima went to her underwear drawer and pulled out the only other house key whose grooves she could re-create without a locksmith.

“To whom will you leave this house in Detroit?” Scheherazade asked, perched on the windowsill for the 1001st time. “How about—”

Fatima held up her hand. “Someone,” she said. “Anyone.”

“
Inshallah
,” Scheherazade said.

“I thought he was best left with strangers’ faces on the bus rather than endure my death—or presence,” Fatima explained. “My face reminded of him of things he lost.”

“And things he loved,” Scheherazade said.

“Like me,” Fatima said.

“I waited 1001 nights to hear you say that.” Scheherazade smiled. “Sometimes love becomes an obligation, and at its best an obligation becomes love. Even to a house. But immortality—and what is immortality if not the continuation of our stories?—does not live in a house. People move on, and neighborhoods move with them. They don’t exist without us. If we do bloom elsewhere, what stays behind is not home after so many years have passed.”

“Why didn’t you go to him for your stories?” Fatima said. “At least I had Amir’s company. But he did not have me by his side, as he should have.”

“Some people are storytellers, and some people, like Ibrahim, are story keepers,” Scheherazade answered. “What would he and I have talked about all this time?”

Scheherazade heard attractive laughter outside and stuck her head out the window. She beckoned Fatima to join her. The homeless man with the dimple was dragging a garbage bag clanking with glass bottles as he talked and walked by himself past the house. Tomorrow, with her
Avon, he could peddle something besides loneliness. She would leave the Avon at the MTA #4 bus stop for him in the morning.

Fatima looked across the fig tree at her children’s parked cars. “They all came in American cars,” she noted. “Ibrahim would have liked that.”

“I wanted you to look at the laughter,” Scheherazade said, and shifted Fatima’s focus to Decimal as she watered the yard while Amir pruned the fig tree. Decimal squirted Sherri Hazad’s SUV as it finally drove off.

“I would have spoken to Ibrahim again if it wasn’t for that woman,” Fatima said. “
Ya Allah
, at least someone protects this country.”

Across the way, the ex–soap star slammed his door shut. “Kid, never screw over your neighbor,” Amir advised Decimal. “It’s just not nice.”

“I wouldn’t screw you over if we were neighbors,” Decimal promised. “Gosh, I hope when I get back Dr. Wang’s not going to be hanging around too much on account of Gran crying on his shoulders about me.”

“You know how you feel about Dr. Wang, that he doesn’t like you? Well, that’s how I felt about my grandfather, but I wouldn’t be tough enough for Hollywood if it weren’t for him because he just knew how to be tough about life,” Amir told her. “Maybe your gramps is teaching you things, too, but you just don’t know it yet. Not that my grandfather would have been proud of me today.”

“I bet Jesus will come back to you,” Decimal said. “You just got to have faith. And maybe your grandfather was proud of you. You don’t know.”

“That’s the problem with dead people,” Amir agreed. “It’s too late to ask them. But kid, if you ever need to get away from your grandpa, just come hang out here with me for a few days. Bring the munchkin with you when it gets here.”

“So who should I tell my kid we’re visiting?” Decimal asked. “My first cousin once removed or my second cousin?”

“Beats me.” He shrugged. “Amir will do. You know, kid, give me some time and I bet I could find you a really great guy.”

Fatima shut the window. “
Inshallah
, they will stay friends, and she will come over sometimes for glassy mole, and they will talk and eat.”

“Family lines are not as straight as they could be, but they are continuous,”
Scheherazade said. “Eventually enough generations pass through life and death that everyone’s story begins
kan ma kan
, once upon time. When your story starts with that, your life becomes a fable to those with only a trace of your blood.”

Scheherazade stood up and took Fatima’s hands. She reached up for a moment to remove a smudge of Avon. She looked into her eyes long enough for Fatima to understand that it would be the last time. Then she kissed Fatima gently on both cheeks.

“You have revealed to me a story that is not the world’s greatest story,” Scheherazade said. “It was your collection of your greatest stories. May I share them with others?”

“
Inshallah
,” Fatima said.

“
Inshallah
,” Scheherazade replied.

Then, as suddenly as she had come into Fatima’s life, Scheherazade departed from it. She tossed her maroon veil around her shoulders and disappeared out the window she had entered 1001 nights before. For the last time, she flew over the blossoming fig tree, her eyes and hair still as rich and deep as those of a virgin bride, her bangles clanging, her rings shining, her smile sometimes wavering, her heart eternally beating.