But you do, and I know you’re coming over to me even though I can’t hear your footsteps. When I turn, you are gazing out the window with your hands on the countertop. You’re always smiling, smiling at everything like there’s still too much world to be experienced. I let the ring of electric coolness that surrounds you raise the black hairs on my arms, wishing, as I do every time, for some sign that you are real: a touch, a sound, a shadow. Instead the scent of fresh thyme fills my mouth as though you’re holding a clipping under my nose, and I want to cry. You turn your head and smile at me. I smile back in the tired way the living have of appeasing the dead. How are you supposed to smile at a ghost without feeling lonely?
The coffee froths up, and you wait while I pour off the froth into our cups. You reach down and offer your hand for Asmahan to sniff. I almost put out three cups instead of two.
“You’ve been around more often,” I say, turning my face as though I expect the scent of thyme to weaken. It doesn’t. “Summer must be getting on.”
You look at me—that stricken look. This is our agreement: we don’t talk about the night of the fire, not even as its anniversary hurtles toward us like a planet and you continue your wordless visitations. Every year, the end of summer is the same. You’ll come in the morning and sit in your favorite kitchen chair, the one you always used to sit in when Teta had us over for dinner. Teta can’t cook like she used to, so I’ll be in the kitchen, bringing her spices or making sure the onions don’t burn. It’s been four—damn, five years ago now—since we lost you, and nothing has tasted the same since. You’ll watch me cook, watch me clean or read or make coffee for everyone but you. Sometimes you’ll lean in close to my ear, and the earthen smell of thyme will offer up the names of things in Arabic to me, calling the coffee ahweh and the oil zeit, and in this strange and silent way we’ll talk until it gets dark and you disappear.
The coffee froths up the second time. I shut off the gas range and pour it out into your tiny cups, gentle so as not to slosh them and disturb the grounds. I leave the coffeepot on the burner, avoiding our reflections in the window above the sink. You consider the long handle and the dark liquid in the pot like you want to join us.
“Yalla,” I say, beckoning with my eyebrows toward the living room. It’s no use: outside, dark has fallen. Teta coughs, and Asmahan trots toward her between my legs. When I look up, you’re gone. In your place is that scent of fresh thyme, the kind you used to grow on the fire escape to make za’atar from memory.
I bring the coffee and a diamond of bitlawah to Teta in the living room, setting it on the table beside her armchair. She’s fallen asleep with her favorite blanket folded on her lap, a lavender underscarf wrapped around her head like she always wears in the house, even though we don’t get visitors anymore. She winces and opens her eyes, and I help her sit upright in her chair, arranging the pillows behind the small of her back and her shawl around her shoulders. It’s been a few years since her multiple myeloma went into remission, but she never regained the bone density she lost, and her back is a knot of constant pain.
“Keef halik, Teta?”
“Alhamdulillah.” She squeezes my hand. “Sit, sit. I never see you sleep anymore. Where you go all night?”
I kiss her papery forehead. “Let me get the heating pad.”
When I come back, Teta’s nodded off again with the coffee in her hand. I set it on the table, but my hand slips trying not to wake her, and it spills on my jeans. The cup clatters back onto its dish.
“Storm of the storms!” Teta exclaims while I curse under my breath and wipe myself with a napkin. She’s been calling me that ever since I broke one of her teacups as a kid. She must have heard it on the news at some point, storm of storms, maybe. Somehow it journeyed through Arabic and was resurrected as storm of the storms, and now my clumsiness has its own nickname. Teta means it lovingly, but my face burns. I inspect the cup for chips.
When I slide the heating pad behind her, Teta furrows her brow at me. I bend forward, a force of habit, and hope my loose tee hides the fact that I’m using the shapewear she gave me to flatten my chest, rather than smooth the belly and hips Teta thinks I’m self-conscious of. I take a breath, and the cloth pulls across my ribs. This, too, is a border I am transgressing. Last week, I slashed the polyester at the rib cage to flatten the passengers on my chest that hide the surface of me. I have not told Teta this. I wouldn’t know where to begin.
“Hope I didn’t wake you banging around in the kitchen,” I say before she can question me again. I sit down across from her on the sofa, a gorgeous old Damascene thing with a wooden frame and rolled arm pillows whose damask patterns have long since faded into gold and burgundy splotches, an heirloom from the bilad.
Teta holds my eyes for half a second before glancing away out the window. She laughs, shifting her back against the heating pad. “I sleep heavy these days.”
There’s no way she didn’t hear me talking to you, but this is the response I expect. Though we both see you, we never admit it. You are first on the list of things we don’t talk about, questions we don’t ask, ghosts we don’t count. I’ve never told her about the others, but I know she’s seen you.
The envelopes in my pocket crinkle when I cross my ankle over my knee. This is the second thing we do not speak of: money. I’m Teta’s only caretaker now, the one who pays the bills and the rent, and though Teta often tries to write out checks for birthdays or for food shopping, both our savings are dwindling. It’s an ugly thing, but your social security only goes so far for two people in the city. Teta and I have reversed roles now; when you and my father were still together, she changed my diapers and babysat me until you both came home from work. She cooked meals for us, took me to the playground, quit her odd jobs when the family needed her. Now, long after your divorce, after your death, after my father has stopped even feigning promises of help, I’ve done the same. Though we both thank God for the Medicare that covers the bulk of Teta’s medical bills, we are still paying off the cost of chemo and radiation a year later. I scold myself for it, but I’ve begun to hope Reem will start helping out now that she’s finally taken a corporate job, though I know Teta’s pride would never allow her to accept Reem’s money. Here in this city whose lifeblood is the dollar, our solution to its weight is silence. It’s not that Teta doesn’t think about money—that’s a privilege our family will never know—but to discuss her anxieties with me would be ‘ayb. It would be a mark of shame; she’d feel like she’d failed me. The children and grandchildren of “real Americans,” the ones who made it, shouldn’t need to fear poverty. But Teta has found walls in this country that she never could have imagined.
I drain my demitasse and roll the warm ceramic between my hands. I’m sitting in that way you used to correct me for, legs spread like a boy, elbows on my knees, leaning forward so my hair drops in my eyes. I clear my throat and try to draw myself up, mussing my hair out of my face, but the movements are wrong. They are always wrong: my elephant feet, my way of closing cabinets with a bang, my bad posture. Do you see? I’ve memorized even your comments that used to drive me crazy.
“Mom would’ve been fifty-five this year.” I glance up to meet Teta’s eyes. “Wouldn’t she?”