“My sister had to take Dad in for a diabetes test,” Sabah says as she lifts an orange cat off the uneven kitchen table, “so I had to cover at the store this afternoon.”
“I figured you might be around today.” I blink in the dark kitchen. In the dimness, I make out the shapes of glass bottles on the counter stuffed with gerbera daisies. Her father has been bringing Sabah fresh flowers for years when she watches the shop for him, a token of affection and a way to brighten up the room, and Sabah changes the water and trims the stems of the daisies, gently, so as not to bruise them.
“Claudia’s watching the gallery for me.” Sabah moves off toward the windows, tying up one of the curtains to let a bit of light in.
“Any news about the spring show?”
Sabah motions to a pillowed chair and clears away a stack of books with one large hand. “I’m doing a studio visit in Detroit in a few weeks with an artist. I saw her solo show in LA a few months back. She makes maps of North American bird migration routes in handblown glass. Not my usual thing, but unique. I could pair her with someone more established. A double solo show, maybe for Frieze next May. People will call me crazy, but I don’t care. I want something different, I want to combine energies. I’d really love to sign the artist who’s doing those pop-up bird murals in Lower Manhattan, but they’re never signed.”
My face gets hot, but I don’t take the bait. Sabah doesn’t know that I haven’t painted anything show-worthy in years; I’ve been too busy with my private experiments. The last time I painted a self-portrait, I tried to face myself in the mirror and paint myself nude. I ended up blotting out my breasts with black paint.
I clear my throat. “Who’s gonna run the gallery while you’re in Detroit?”
“Claudia and Sami can get by while I’m not there.”
My stomach turns at the mention of his name. Sabah hands me a cup of coffee with two crushed cardamom pods floating in the foam. Her pinky finger is too big to fit into the tiny handle. She sets a tray of rosewater Turkish delights in front of us, dusting cornstarch off her hands as she sits down. Sabah used to run a bakery in her previous life, before she became a gallerist, but she still makes desserts for her father’s shop on the odd weekend, especially now that his arthritis has gotten worse. She motions toward the tray, and I take the smallest piece, hearing my mother’s voice in the back of my head, admonishing me to be polite.
“The gallery’s not what I’m worried about.” Sabah taps a tray of cookies cooling on a rack.
I pick at a loose thread in the chair cushion. “Who’s going to fill in with the baking?”
“There’s not many folks I’d trust to help Baba out. But I trust you.”
“Me?” I’ve barely been out of Teta’s apartment in the last six months, and nobody would say I know how to bake. But Sabah’s got my number—she knows I’ve got nothing else to do while Teta is napping.
Sabah pushes her chair back and rises from the table. “I’ve had your teta’s bitlawah. You’ve watched her make it.” Anything Sabah asks is rarely a question. “You can take some ma’amoul home to her.”
I follow her to fetch a pair of aprons from the cabinet. “How did I sign myself up for this?”
“I changed your diapers. You can bake some pastry.”
We wipe down the table, then flour the wood. Sabah uncovers a bowl of dough and pulls it apart while I chop a sticky pile of Medjool dates.
“Listen.” I rock the chef’s knife back and forth. “You’re the only expert I know on Laila Z’s work. Did she ever paint a bird like this?”
I wipe down my hands and open my messenger bag. I’ve brought one of your leather-bound sketchbooks, which I open to your watercolor sketch of the nesting pair from Lower Manhattan. Sabah smears flour on her apron and finds her glasses atop a sack of lentils in the corner. She stares at the bird so hard and so long I’m not sure if she has any idea what I’m asking. Then she takes off her glasses and massages the balls of her palms. Years of touching hot pans has left her with hardly any fingerprints. I wonder for a fleeting moment if Sabah, like me, finds it hard to stand being called a woman.
“I told your mother,” Sabah says into her hands, “if it’s out there, no one’s ever seen it. Somebody may have fallen for a good fake along the way, but no one’s laid their hands on one of Laila’s. Not like this.” Sabah turns away and takes up two paddle-shaped cookie molds, hand-carved, brought over from Syria by her mother. She begins to rub oil into the hollows in the center of the smooth wood. “Anyway, Laila painted real birds.”
I flinch without knowing why. “What do you mean, real?”
“Birds that actually exist.” Sabah nudges her head in the direction of the notebook. “Habibti, I respect your mother more than anyone, Allah yarhama. But she told me herself only one ornithologist had ever actually catalogued that species. He nearly lost his career—his colleagues thought he was inventing it. It’s never appeared in any field guides or surveys, not Audubon’s, not Sibley’s. And you can’t tell me a bird that rare just shows up in the middle of Manhattan fifty years later, just like that.”
“But she wasn’t the first New Yorker to see one.” I draw closer to Sabah, the sketches in my hand. “She was never wrong on an identification. Never.”
Sabah shakes her head. Her hair is pulled into a tight bun, exposing new gray at her temples. “Some of the most well-respected ornithologists checked your mother’s sketches. Wallah, she talked to Aisha Baraka. Most of the bird people said your mother must have seen some common species, maybe an albino, and been mistaken. Or maybe it was a trick of the light.”
I take up the knife again and chop dates, the veins in the backs of my hands pulsing. You follow the sun with your eyes. I could mark the hours by the longing to see you and the ache of waiting for you to dissolve into the dark. “I saw those sketches myself. You know how female scientists are dismissed.”
Sabah says nothing. She doesn’t want to talk about you. You are everywhere in this city: laughing in Abu Sabah’s shop, waiting for a man’ousheh at the bakery, giving an interview for the evening news, sketching in Prospect Park, walking west into the sunset while finches scour the sidewalk for cockroaches and bits of hot dog. Sabah and I divide the dough, and you are there with us whether we conjure you or not, petting her orange cat as she eats Abu Sabah’s tuna, making spirals in open sacks of dried chickpeas with your finger. You have no shadow and no weight to creak the floorboards. I knead the chopped dates into a paste. Your hands are on mine, the smoke traces of your skin leaving the scent of fresh thyme on the hairs on my arms. Then I blink, and you are nowhere.
I set down my towel. “Theoretically speaking, if there were a painting? If I could find it?”
“Could be worth a small fortune.” Sabah presses the dough into the molds and fills them with date paste, then seals them and thumps the mold onto a towel wrapped over the table’s edge to free the molded ma’amoul. “We’re talking orders of magnitude more than her other works. Six figures, easy. No one’s found anything in years. Definitely nothing like that.”
There is a moment in which the weight of this, the maddening simplicity of it, clarifies itself. The largest amount of money I ever had in my bank account—this was before you died, before I moved back in with Teta, back when I still had the time to hold down a job—was $1,500. Beyond five grand, numbers start to lose their meaning. I argue with myself, scold myself, tell myself I am just thinking of what it would mean to me to see an artist like Laila Z represented in a museum. But it’s too late for my excuses; shame runs icy down the length of my back. And yet, living in this country where my friends accrue scars and aches and ailments because they cannot afford medicine or rest or food or heat, I’m not sure what else I should feel. Money and power act on us whether we admit it or not.