The Girl Who Fell to Earth (9 page)

The doors opened, we stepped out to a landing, and he led us to our room. The sandstorm gave a day-for-night quality to our view. All hours seemed the same. There's no way for me to know the duration of our stay; it was probably only days, but it seemed to me like a long time. Ma didn't want us to draw attention by playing outside in the halls or lobby, so she tried to amuse us by making floppy origami cranes out of napkins and reading aloud from the hotel pamphlets on the bedside table. “Listen to this, girls!” she'd begin enthusiastically before sharing some unimpressive piece of trivia. “The American astronaut Alan Shepard was the first person to check in here!”

It was in the liminal hours of what might have been early morning when a soft knock came at our door. Ma opened the door to a black specter. It was Flu. Baba had found us and sent her to apologize.

“
Ecomme. Dawen
,” she said through her
berga
.

“I'm not gonna calm
dawen
.” Ma mocked her. She was about to slam the door, but Flu intercepted it, hennaed fingers in the doorjamb.

“Come. Down.” This time she enunciated. “Matar. Down.”

She pointed downward toward the lobby. Ma let go and released Flu's hand.

“Kittens, I'll be right back,” Ma said, and left with Flu.

I turned to Dima, who had fashioned a cushion-throne for herself at the head of the bed, remote control in hand. We blinked at each other. Dima turned back to the TV. I quietly opened the door and snuck into the hallway. It was empty, and in the near distance I heard the chime of the elevator: aural catnip.

Shuffling down the hall, I pressed my ear to the wall and listened to the hum of invisible machines running the mother ship of the building. I made it to the elevator, where I was conducted safely down the warren of ranked halls and stairwells, descending into the lobby. The cobalt of my mother's
hijab
glinted from under the filigree of a café gazebo. She was smoking and sitting across a table from Baba and Flu.

I ducked low under the window rail so she wouldn't see me. Ma gesticulated at them with her cigarette, bartering for our status as his first family. Her intensity had faded since our first day in the building, but her anger hadn't. She gazed over Baba's shoulder at the player-less piano and dragged long on her cigarette. Just as I landed at l, Ma turned and stared directly at me like an owl spying a mouse. I pressed the highest button I could reach as she stood and mouthed my name. I blanched and then for some reason waved, knowing I was going to get into trouble for leaving the room anyway.

The button I had pressed turned out to lead onto a winding hallway lined with tarnished brassy mirrors. The lights were dimmed, but the same automated rendition of “Bright Eyes” dusted down from the ceiling speakers. Following the hallway to its mouth I came to an empty restaurant, also brass, with a great Fibonacci-sequenced chandelier hanging over the tables. A panoramic floor-to-ceiling view of the sandstorm (now all pink and copper) rimmed the room, something between the grandeur and the emptiness belted together to mute the space, and I stood stunned and disoriented by the mirrors and windows and the wind.

Somewhere beyond one of the mirror panes I heard the scraping of silver on a plate. One seam in the mirror was darker and wider than the others. I pushed it a little and it slid open. This was the private wing of the restaurant. I peeked in, stepped through, and came up behind a row of potted palm trees lining the entrance of a private elevator flanked by two silver oryx. Kids my age were bickering, and I leaned in between the fronds to see an Indian maid standing at the sideboard near a triangulated bay window; behind him hints of coast were visible every few seconds through the continuing storm. A man with a mustache sat at the head of the table,
thobe
crisp and white,
gutra
folded up in the aggressive “cobra” style of the time. To his right sat a fair woman in a silk dress ruched at the neck. To his left sat a distinctly Arab woman with long black hair hanging in a braid over the back of her chair. The adults ate in silence while two sets of children all around the same age tossed saltine crackers like
shuriken
at one another under the table. The two boys to the right of the table had light brown hair like the woman in the stylish silk dress. The three to the right were heavier-set and wearing
thobes
. All five were vying for the man's attention.

Here, in the uppermost cockpit of the Sheraton, was the dream my father imagined for himself: an alternate reality where his wives and children clustered around him on a Friday morning. He wasn't being cruel when he brought Flu to stay with us; he was trying (unsuccessfully) to assume a lifestyle far beyond his means.

I felt Ma's presence behind me before she made herself known. I didn't turn around. I knew she was watching the scene too, making the same assumptions I was about the rich family in the VIP room. Grasping my shoulder, she held tight at first, and then I felt the urgency, the desperation, the anger, and the static all zap out of her in a resigned understanding. When my mother and I finally backed out through the mirrored secret door, my father was waiting for us. Flu stood near the corridor with Dima hitched up in her arms. Ma patted me toward Baba. “It's okay, kitten. We're not angry anymore.”

 

When day broke we went early to the airport in Doha, where we had reunited with Baba more than a year earlier. Baba entered and, as was his way, found us without looking for us. For the first time he and Ma seemed to understand each other; the naivety of a decade spent coming together and then drifting apart was scrubbed away. All that was left were his obligations and her expectations. He held Dima and me close, taking off his
gutra
to give us a good squeeze before lifting us around our bellies like a pair of goat kids and handing us over to Ma.

“
Ma'a salama
, Matar,” she said, with her learned accent skipping and slurring the phrase.

He nodded and kissed her forehead in the same gesture of respect he would have given his mother. And like his father at the Doha airport all that time ago, he said a prayer: “
Estowda'a Allah al lethi la yethia'a wada'ai.
”

Once we were on the plane, Ma removed her
hijab
. Dima and I gaped; it was like seeing your mother strip down nude in public. She unclipped the silk triangle from her chin and stuck the safety pin into the foam of our seat. Even with the hack job she'd done cutting her hair, in the dismal light of the cabin it was bright yellow blond. She folded the
hijab
up and slipped it into her seat pocket with the barf bag and escape instructions. Latched into my window seat, I pressed my forehead to the double-paned glass, wishing it would open like the skin of a soap bubble and let me fall back to Baba. Red satellites blinked above, orange city grids below, as we passed into the blackness of the Empty Quarter. Yellow and blue oil flares blossomed up from the night desert, and that was the last I saw of
that
home for a long time.

9

GAMMA ANDROMEDAE  •  HUG THE GROUND  •   

Little had changed on the farm since we'd left, although the housing developments were getting bigger and the freeway was a lot busier. Ma's trusty Scirocco squatted over an oil pool in the carport where she had left it, gold paint flaking away to reveal rust patches on the hood and sides. It was berry season and U-pickers had come out to the fields, loading up flats of raspberries and hauling them away. I observed Gramma closely in her daily activities and compared her with our other grandmother, Umi Safya. They didn't seem so different. One wore a muumuu from Honolulu and the other a
jalabiya
from Al-Hassa. They both bent the same way at the waist when they rooted along the ground for weeds or truffles. Both of them wore rings that were too tight for their fingers, and both of them knitted for fun.

I'd been too young when we left to have much conscious memory of the place, but the feeling of familiarity welled up through subtler sensations: for example, the way the soggy blades of grass squelched under my feet, the sonic boom of Fighter Falcons echoing off Mount Rainier, the smell of Gramma's cold cream. Then there was muscle memory. Out in the desert I'd bounded around with my heels to the ground; here I skidded and slipped on the grass if I did that. Even Dima took ginger steps walking on the lawn. “You making a moon landing there, kid?” Gramma teased from the sidelines as Dima picked her way carefully across the garden.

By July Baba's cologne had faded from our clothes and we were settled into American life. But American life was not synonymous with a freer life. Ma was so fearful of strangers that we were effectively under house arrest. Strangers were understood to mean
men
, who were
all
wolves to Ma, regardless of whether they were senile veterans or serial killers. “The more harmless they look, the more dangerous they are,” she warned us. I'd press my face up against the windows like I used to in apartment 1303. Whenever a jet flew over from McChord Air Force base I could feel its vibrations in my skull and wished I could go for a ride back to Doha. If I did leave the house, I was to be chaperoned by Gramma's dog, Alf, and had to promise never to speak to any strangers. So it was that one stir-crazy afternoon, Alf and I were racing each other through the field. We made it up the quarter-mile stretch to the cul-de-sac and were running back up to the house when I saw a stranger smoking on the steps of the front porch. He was wearing an army-surplus jacket over grease-smeared flannel and army boots. He had a mustache and longish hair and dark skin just like Baba. Like a fish tricked by a fly-looking lure, I went for him and inexplicably brayed, “Hi . . .
Dad
!”

I clapped my hand over my mouth. It had come out so loud; the word “Dad” echoed off the mountainside, taunting me. I wanted to throw up right after I said it. I didn't even know why I'd done it. The stranger paused in the drag off his cigarette and squinted long and thin at me. I wanted to disappear, dig a hole to Doha and then never come back again. The stranger knocked Alf's head away and stood up to step out his smoke. I watched him as he disappeared through the fields and down the path that led to the river. Ma pulled in just as he passed beyond the property line. She slammed the car door, made a few steps as if she would go after him, and then turned and grabbed me by my shoulders, “Did that man try to talk to you?”

“Nope,” I answered, hoping she hadn't heard the terrible echo of my mistake.

Shortly after the “Dad” incident with the stranger, Ma started nighttime vocational school. This was the early '90s near Seattle, so mastering C++, Pascal, and other computer languages seemed like a
very
viable skill to develop. This meant she was gone every night until eleven, which also meant Gramma, Dima, and I were left alone in the house. This not only made her feel guilty, in typical single-mother fashion, but made her become deeply paranoid. After my encounter with the stranger on the porch steps, she saw the specter of pedophiles and burglars and child abductors everywhere, and fair enough—the farmhouse was isolated at the end of a private road in the middle of several high-traffic routes for the homeless and hobos. The river running south of us had overgrown orchards where the trunks were marked up with the obscure codes and warnings for the transients who passed through. The highway to the north was a regular route for hitchhikers. The trailer park to our east, with its aluminum-sided trailers of daiquiri- and sherbet-colors, was mostly full of senior citizens—but Ma's guard remained up, whether a man was eighteen or eighty.

One evening toward the end of the summer, we were watching an episode of
Unsolved Mysteries
about Sasquatch in Gramma's room when there was a yelp and crash against the front screen. It was Alf letting out an odd tremolo, a high-pitched cross between a whimper and a scream. Another smash! In seconds I was crawling out into the dark of the living room. As my eyes adjusted to the dark I saw Ma standing in the middle of the front parlor with the shotgun.

“Gale—what the hell's going on out there?” Gramma yelled.

“I don't know,” Ma hissed back over her shoulder in our direction, then turned to the door. “Go wake your dad up, boys!” she yelled for the attacker's benefit.

“But he's not here!” I squeaked, hopping from foot to foot in a panic.

“Not really!” she hissed back. “So they think we've got a man in here with us.”

Another crash against the screen. She flinched and backed up a pace. It was so blindingly black outside.

“I've got a twelve-gauge Remington Model Eleven semiautomatic shotgun, pal, and you better believe I'll use it!” she bellowed.

The barrel was so long it looked like a broom handle from where I was. Seeing Ma with the huge weapon was almost as distressing as the idea that one of the many male specters she had conjured up for us was now
really
outside trying to get in.

“Sophia. The phones,” she said without taking her eyes off the door. I tried pulling the phone out to her but the cord was too short. “Stay back, stay back,” she ordered me. “Leave the phone on the floor and back up.” She was afraid I'd get too close to the gun, like in a hostage-trade situation.

She kept the gun trained on the door and inched back to where I'd placed the phone on the floor. She dialed 911 just as Alf let out another horrible cry. “Yes, hello! Someone is trying to break into our house.” There was a kick at the door. We all jumped. “Yes, it has five shells and one in the chamber,” Ma answered. “Myself and my mother and my children.”

The drapes were starting to shake now, the screen door had been broken through, and now the inner door's handle started to jiggle. A flashlight beam was shining through the keyhole, and, eerily, we could see no shadow.

Ma addressed me—“Sophie! Take Gramma and Dima into the bedroom and hide”—before turning and issuing a threat in the direction of the door: “The sheriff's on the way, buddy!”

She sat in the living room in wait in a rocking chair, listening to the creaking of the busted screen door, shotgun up on her knee and the phone stretched as close as she could get it. She continued her loud bluff for the intruder. “The good thing about a shotgun is you can get 'em at close range!” But the sounds outside had stopped.

It had all lasted only about ten minutes, though it seemed as if it had been an hour when the phone rang. It was the operator: “Put the gun away, ma'am. The sheriff's outside now.”

Ma unloaded the Remington and put it away, opened the front drapes, and switched on the lights. The screen door was ripped to shreds; Alf was shaking, and as soon as the door opened he bolted inside, claws clacking on linoleum as he came scuttling back to where we were hidden. Ma went with the sheriff and his men to make double-sure whoever it was was good and gone. She led them around the side of the house where their spotlights shone into our bedroom, casting a thick circular light on the curtains like the eye of a giant squid. They checked the shed and all the hiding places Ma could think of and followed the berry tines all the way down to the river, but found nothing.

That night Ma called Baba for the first time since we had left. His voice was deeper than I remembered, more like the voice of a stranger. He was at Umi Safya's crowded house; it was Friday there and the room sounded warm and festive. Bright sounds of children crying and women bantering came over the line, in sharp contrast to the dark silence of our living room. As we listened, I yearned for the safety that came in those numbers. Of how secure I had felt when I was with the larger pack. Only then did I realize I might be missing that other home, only then did the farm start to feel lonely.