The Night Counter (39 page)

“Miriam,” Walt exclaimed, expressing everyone’s surprise.

“You don’t know what he was like,” Miriam said. “You just care that he was a war hero.”

“He willingly married you, Miriam,” Soraya reminded her.

“Don’t be so hard on her, Ms. Abdullah,” Sherri Hazad said. “It’s really no different than you going for gigs in places like Tijuana so you can experiment with and sell antiaging creams that are not FDA approved here. Or like the professor trolling the high-end jewelry websites from her son’s office—and after everything you told us about the abuse of diamond workers in South Africa. And it’s no worse than your brother purposely losing at cards, which is half-assed, backward illegal. Or poor Lena here who ends up lending her last boyfriend money for a pyramid scheme that lands him in jail. At least all of you had your family to support you through that. Me, I’m an only child.”

Sherri Hazad didn’t see that Fatima’s children might as well have been raised as only children for all they knew about one another. Questions punctuated with hurt floated among them.

“Lena, I could have been there for you,” Bassam said. But Lena shook her head.

“You could have relocated to Minneapolis, Miriam,” Hala said. “I would have helped you.”

“But then you would have known,” Miriam answered. The others nodded, for indeed pride and the facades they had put up for Fatima had extended to one another.

“Mr. Abdullah, we’d like to take you to the field office for some questioning,” Sherri Hazad said.

“Jesus Christ,” Amir mumbled, as unaware of his aunts and uncle all looking away from one another as he was of Fatima looking from one of her children to the others and then back again with a heart that suddenly weighed too much. “Jesus Christ.”

“I’m … I’m … dying tonight,” Fatima announced, lying about something that she had thought for the last 1001 days was a truth she was hiding. She suddenly didn’t want Amir to leave her alone with her children and their secrets, these strangers of her flesh. “I want to die in Amir’s arms. It’s the last thing I’ll ever ask him to do, and do you want him to not do the last thing his grandmother will ever ask him to do?”

Bassam turned to Sherri Hazad’s partner. “My mother’s impending death is fucking setting me a little on edge,” he began. Fatima lowered her hearing aid and covered Decimal’s ears until Bassam was done. “Don’t take my goddamn sobriety away from me. I can still fucking blame others, and I will blame you. Do you want it on your head if she dies without the one person she wants near her? The rest of us are just fucking filler.”

“
Ya ibni
, stop,” Fatima begged. She looked at Scheherazade in the tree again to apologize for what she called Bassam’s fucking language. But Scheherazade was gone.

“You can’t know that she’s dying,” Sherri Hazad said. She turned to Amir. “Or can you?”

“Agent Hazad,” her partner cautioned her as he reemerged from the SUV “I just got off the phone with D.C. We’ve got a little bureaucratic snafu here.”

“See,” Fatima said to Darcy. “Go get Amir back his hobby.”

“Tayta, please,” Amir began, but could not continue. What if this really was the end of Fatima annoying him at least seven times a day? Grandson was the only role he played as second nature, a role that had filled up his life. As much as he fantasized about being free of Fatima, she was the only person who had never left him, like it or not.

“You have been destined to be Jesus since before you were born, and it should be yours,” Fatima said. “No Sheikh Sabeer in tights. Go get it for him, miss.”

“I would if I could.” Darcy sighed. “But all this FBI talk got the film a lot of buzz. The whole A-list wants to do the part for scale now.”

“I’m afraid there’s not much we can do about Jesus,” Sherri Hazad’s partner apologized while reading his BlackBerry “But on the upside, it looks like we don’t need to question you any further due to that snafu I mentioned.”

“You better question the hell out of me after costing me that part,” Amir said.

“Sorry, but there’s not much need to,” Sherri Hazad’s partner said. “Just got word that we already had all of you checked out a couple of years ago when a Mrs. Randy Bitar offered to assist us with interviewing the Arab-American community in Houston. Guess you didn’t notice us that time.”

Sherri Hazad turned as red as the stripes of the American flag to which her grandfather the peddler had pledged his citizenship. “I do apologize for any inconvenience to your phones due to an unforeseen glitch we’re having with the phone company involved,” she murmured. “Let’s just let the illegal creams, diamonds, gambling, and what have you go. So you all go inside and have a great little reunion until … well, best of luck to you, Mrs. Abdullah, whatever you decide to do tonight. Good day.”

The FBI agents and Darcy watched as seven of Fatima’s children— and Walt—shuffled into the house, trying to avert their eyes from one another, particularly Randa.

“I wasn’t really going to go to work for them,” Randa explained to them. “I just didn’t want anyone thinking Bud and I were terrorists, but then I realized by offering to help them I would let the neighbors find out that we were Arabs, and that just was worse than offering to be patriotic.”

Fatima shook her head and looked at her other children. It had taken her impending funeral to bring them together. But there would be no funeral. She hoped they would not be disappointed. She was flattered that they all had wanted to come. But mostly she was sad that they had so many secrets from her—and from one another.

WITH HER CHILDREN
surrounding her, Fatima propped herself on an embroidered pillow, ostensibly to die. Fatima wished they’d all stop looking at what was no longer there: her hair. She reached up to twirl a strand, momentarily forgetting its absence herself, and that was when she decided that she would not tell her children right away that she wasn’t dying. Why spoil the moment by confusing them, especially when their own lives were more confusing than any mother should have to hear about?

“Stop staring, all of you,” she demanded. “I put my hair away for Laila.”

She smiled at her children and kept smiling, which undoubtedly was disturbing to them all. Decimal fluffed Fatima’s pillows for her, just as Scheherazade always did.

“Your dress is very pretty, Mom,” Soraya said. “It’s nice to see you in something other than that dreadful robe.”

“It’s yours when I’m gone,” Fatima told her. Her children shifted uncomfortably, able neither to deny nor to accept her reference to her death.

“It’s from Lebanon,” Nadia finally commented. “I recognize the embroidery.”

“I work with a lot of drivers born all over the Middle East,” Bassam offered. “We all have the same name. How’s that for Arab unity, Nadia?”

“We’ve done some amazing surgeries on injured Iraqi children at the hospital,” Hala threw in.

“Rock is in Iraq building schools and bridges,” Miriam reminded her.

“I worked with Tony Shalhoub on a TV show at the network a couple of years back,” Lena reported.

“If I could almost be Jesus, I could almost be the next Omar Sharif,” Amir said with distinctly false hope.

“Dina sent me pillows like your dress,” Randa added as her siblings took one more step away from her. “I arranged them around the papier-mâché longhorn she made in fifth grade.”

Yes, Fatima thought, Ibrahim and I raised children who only tell us things that make us happy. Her children treated her the way she had treated Ibrahim after the boys had gone, with silence that was supposed to be comforting—supposed to. But as parents, she and Ibrahim had not gone out of their way to make the children happy, as Millie had with her kids. Millie once had said that her children’s happiness was more important than anything else, even more important than their becoming doctors or lawyers. Fatima had not seen the difference.

“It’s only sixty-seven degrees outside, and it’s June,” Hala broke into the dead air.

“I can’t believe Minneapolis is warmer than LA. right now,” Lena ventured.

“When we left New Castle today, the mosquitoes were out in full force,” Miriam added. “They say it might hit a record high this summer.”

“Texas is about the same but humid,” Randa said just as her cell phone
rang. “Hello … Dina … Dina… hello … dang it … I lost her. See, I’m the one—yes, me—trying to get through to Lebanon. I’m the one willing to make a phone call to the Middle East on my tapped phone.”

Randa went to the hallway in search of reception—and in search of redeeming herself.

“The same thing happened when your dad tried to call today,” Fatima told the others. “I tried calling him twice yesterday, but the line kept cutting out.”

“Oh crap. Jiddo,” Amir remembered. “Wait a minute.”

As Amir ran downstairs, Fatima waited for the others to tell her that they had talked to Ibrahim, but they stared out the window instead at the FBI’s SUV Fatima looked for Scheherazade at the windowsill or in the eucalyptus tree, but all she saw was the little fig on the fig tree.

“Vegas had a nice breeze going today,” Bassam said, and Lena nodded.

Fatima’s children began to fidget, devoid of weather reports,
al-hamdulilah
. “The weather in Deir Zeitoon is perfect,” Fatima informed them. “And I’m sure you all want to know who I’m going to leave the house in Lebanon to.”

They all mumbled “no” and did not look her in the eye. “Oh, I wish I could give the house to all of you. But I don’t want you to fight when I’m gone,” Fatima said. “A house cannot be divided eight ways. I want you to become friends forever. You are supposed to be friends; you’re supposed to tell each other things. That is why it would be easier for me to give the house to just one of you. Blame me rather than each other for any unfairness. I’ll already be dead.”

“I’d probably be gunned down with my husband.” Nadia sighed. “So you should give the house to someone else.”

“I know,
habibti
,” Fatima said. “But I am leaving you Mama’s letters instead. Maybe you can read one for us today.”

“Sure, and Zade is getting a bride for Amir very, very soon,” Nadia added.

“There is no need,” Fatima said.

“Because I love Tiffany,” Amir told them as he came back in carrying the envelope from Ibrahim.

“And I love Candy,” Bassam told Fatima. “But look, Mom, I’m not marrying her. Haven’t even asked. Just going to try the dating thing for a change.”

“Don’t take too long about it,” Fatima advised. “Otherwise, people are going to think you’re gay.”

Fatima could not take back the word, having spoken it loudly enough that it had shocked her children nearly as much as her purple stubs had.

“Tayta, you said …” Amir smiled.

Fatima held up her hand. “Amir, you cannot have Tiffany or the house,” she said. Those chosen to play a divine prophet do not inherit earthly possessions. Nor do they marry. He belonged to the world, not just one woman. “
Ya Allah
, what has become of my world?”

Her children had no answer to that question. Aside from nice weather reports and Arabic heritage platitudes, none of them had much experience comforting her. They had left that job to Ibrahim and Millie and later Amir, completely skipping their generation. They looked at her purple stubs until Randa returned, ear still pressed to the cell phone.

“Mom, Dina is in Deir Zeitoon,” she announced. “She has a woman with her that was born in the village. Can I tell her where to take Dina?”

“Take her where?” Nadia said, the others not quite trusting Randa, either.

“Tell her she’s looking for the house with the terra-cotta roof, wood-burning stove, the cedar closets, and the four marble steps that lead to the top,” Decimal said. “And the garden with lavender and jasmine and the fig trees all with figs.”

This latecomer in Fatima’s life knew more about the house than her own children did, which made them all bow their heads.

“Yes, the house is three houses down from the blacksmith’s,” Fatima said.

“Mom, he may have gone out of business in the last seventy years,” Randa pointed out.

“No,” Fatima said. “Otherwise, who would sharpen the plow blades and make the pots and pans for the new brides’ homes?”

“Fine,” Randa said. Everyone watched what Fatima thought was the ritual of mother-daughter banter that her girls had not known with her. In reality, Dina was telling Randa that Deir Zeitoon was congested with Internet cafés and beeping cars.

“It sounds so charming.” Randa smiled into the phone.

“Did she find the blacksmith?” Fatima said, anxious.

Randa began to repeat as much of the truth as she could. “The blacksmith closed his shop fifty years ago, when all his sons went to America,” she reported. “They own a hot dog shop in Cleveland.”

“Tell Dina to go to any Abdul Aziz home,” Fatima suggested. “There’s one just past the
ducan:
the vegetable seller’s, opposite the tailor’s place.”

“The lady with her says there aren’t any Abdul Aziz in the village,” Randa relayed.

“What is this woman’s name?” Fatima asked. “Is she the Mansour lady?”

“Reema Jawad,” Randa said.

“There are no Jawads in our village,” Fatima replied. “Is Dina sure she’s in the right village? Can she see the fountain in the town center?”

Randa nodded. It was no longer the town center and no longer had water anyone would dare drink, but Dina had seen it.

“My cousin Jamila Abdullah lives two blocks toward the mountains from the fountain,” Fatima said. “Jamila means ‘pretty’ in Arabic, but she was ugly. She had a black mole on the back of her neck.”

Randa shook her head as she listened to Dina. “I’m sorry,” she said. “There is no Jamila Abdullah there. She remembers an old lady with a wart on her nose who moved away fifteen years ago. Could that be who you’re thinking of?”

Fatima shook her head. “That must have been Aida Dumani,” she said. “Whatever happened to her? And her sister Dalal. I wonder if she ever married. She was jilted by a boy who left her for America.”

“Dina says Aida died at her son’s house in Beirut five years ago,” Randa reported after hanging up with her daughter. “And her sister Dalal finally married a man who worked in Sierra Leone and moved to Africa. Dina needs to go back to Beirut. She has work tomorrow.”

“She’ll find the house next time,” Fatima said. “Remember when they put in the Fairlane Mall and your father got lost in the snowstorm because the new bus routes blocked off his usual roads? Well, it’s like that. Oh, my poor Aida. She was such a nice girl. Like Millie, but without the cigarettes and English.”

The only person who laughed was Walt. “You must be the Jewish man,” Fatima said, and turned to Miriam. “Marry him and be happy for just once in your life.”

“I would never never marry someone Jewish, as long as you live,” Miriam promised. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“Miriam, stop making me tired. You think I have to be dead for you to be honest—and happy? Is that your excuse?” Fatima said, and looked to her other children, who all looked at the floor.

“The weather here is so darn sunny, even if it is colder than Minnesota,” Hala offered.

“No mosquitoes,” said Miriam. “Cool and …”

Miriam tried to find more weather words and looked to Walt for assistance. “Did you tell her about how low the pollen count was this spring?” he suggested.

“
Ya Allah
, who will you keep abreast of the weather when I am gone?” Fatima asked her somber children. “And when I’m gone, will you ever laugh when you think of me?”

“We never laugh at you, Mom,” Soraya vowed.

“I meant laugh in a good way,” Fatima said. “Like before. Do you remember before?”

She did not have to tell them that she meant before the boys died. She reached for a purple stub as she waited for one of her children to speak. At last, one did.

“Remember, Bassam, how we took Amir with us to the zoo and pretended he was our kid so we could get in on the parents and kids free day but we told Mom we were going to the library?” Lena said.

“Hala and I used to do that all the time with you and Bassam,” Nadia said.

“Or remember when Laila used to use my limp to get people’s sympathy to let you into places for free?” Miriam sighed.

“How about the time Millie told Mom that she was taking us all to the drive-in, but she actually took us to the school dance so that I could slow dance with Jack Kelly?” Randa laughed.

That Millie, Fatima thought. I’m going to kill her when I do get to heaven.

“Remember how Dad used to buy Mom a new pink robe every few years and then switch it out when she wasn’t looking? When she’d figure it out, she’d tell him that we weren’t the Rockefellers and want him to take it back.” Nadia smiled. “He’d tell her we might not be Rockefellers but she didn’t have to dress like their laundry woman.”

“Randa, remember how we would be pretending to write sonnets for homework, but we were actually writing love letters to Mr. Johnson, that dreamy drama coach?” Nadia giggled.

“The best was when we stole Mom’s Avon samples,” Randa said, and bent down to wipe the flaking makeup off Fatima. “Then we’d put the makeup on at school.”

“And Mom told us that if we kissed a boy, we’d get pregnant.” Nadia smirked. “So we all vowed that if we accidentally kissed a boy, we would marry him.”

This sent them all into laughter until they remembered that Fatima still believed this of them.

“Remember when Laith and Riyad pooled their money together with the Greek kids down the block and got the old Mercedes to impress the
chicks?” Randa said, imitating teenage boys. “Dad got all union on them about how German cars were destroying American jobs.”

They all laughed until they recalled Fatima was in the room while they had spoken of the twins.

“Remember when Laila made us turkey for Thanksgiving?” Bassam blurted out. “It was so dry, but we all kept chewing it because that’s what Randa told us real Americans do.”

Her children laughed again, extra hard to compensate for having mentioned the boys. But Fatima did not mind hearing her boys’ names. She was glad that these living children seemed to have gotten away with some happiness and that today they could recall that it had been with one another. Bassam’s laughter echoed Ibrahim’s rolling chuckles, which barely had been heard in decades. Fatima pictured Ibrahim sneaking in the pink robes, the way he always warned her that Millie was working against them, and the way he had gnawed his way through Laila’s turkey.

Fatima joined her children in laughing and couldn’t stop. It had been too many years since they had let the worst day of their lives separate them. This would be as good a time as any to tell them that she wasn’t going to die today, that they had more time together.