Teta sets the half-empty cup of coffee on the side table and folds her thick arms over the blanket in her lap. She shifts her weight forward and then back, rivulets of pain cabling her face until she settles into the heating pad. “It was beautiful, the day, until the rain.”
The cup in my hands yields its heat to my palms. “Beautiful.”
“When I was young,” Teta says, and a smile sneaks onto her face, “we used to stay inside and play tawleh when came the rain. My father, Allah yarhamu, when he was alive, all the men in our town used to come to our family café to smoke arghile and talk politics. Immi kept the coffee hot all day. When it rained the men start to come, until we had the place full.”
I want to ask her how my great-grandfather died, but it is one of the stories Teta has never told me, one of the many she keeps in her locked trunk of memories. His death, too, is on the list of things we don’t discuss. “How old were you when he passed away?”
“Seventeen,” she says, and then she drains her coffee and falls silent.
It’s no use. The television drones from the corner, too low to be heard. “Tell me again about the bicycle woman.” I look up from the sludge of coffee grounds at the bottom of my cup. “The one who flew.”
Teta perks up in her chair. She’s always preferred to tell fantastical stories rather than recount the past, and this is one of her favorites, a fail-safe. The first time she told it to me was after Jiddo died. In that first version, Teta spoke of a woman in her village in Syria who built a flying machine out of a bicycle and two sets of linen wings. She peddled hard to gain speed, then hit a ridge and became airborne for a quarter mile before crashing in a field outside the village. The story didn’t bring me any comfort then, but it felt real, and I never quite believed the version she told after that, the one where the woman on the bicycle escaped gravity, never to be seen again. As a kid, it was more comforting to imagine this woman ending up somewhere warm and colorful, like San Francisco or Miami, but it was too easy an ending. Teta never said where the story came from. I knew better than to ask.
“It was my friend saw her go up into the air,” Teta says when she’s finished recounting the story. She’s told it so many times I could probably relate it by heart. “No one else in the village thought she could do it. Immi kept me home that day, but I heard every detail. We were all of us amazed.” She ends with the same bewildered shake of her head and a reminder to believe in the unbelievable.
“They called her Majnouna,” she says, wagging her finger.
“I know, Teta. The crazy woman.” I take our cups and pat her hand. She is cold, has always been that way, and her circulation has gotten worse these past few months. This, too, the myeloma took from her. We don’t get much sun in this western-facing apartment, and the nights are starting to turn cool. I’ve told Teta a thousand times to turn the heat on at night to keep her blood flowing, but she knows how much it costs. In the winter, it will be worse.
I smile to keep Teta from reading all this on my face. “If Asmahan starts drinking our coffee, Majnouna will be the least of our worries.”
After I get up, Teta clears her throat and calls out to my back, “Fifty-four.” When I turn to her, she directs her eyes to her hands. “November,” she says, “she would be fifty-four.”
* * *
I retreat to my room. Your presence is still here, everywhere, your hand on everything. The photo albums I saved, stuffed with pictures, my first days of ninth grade and high school graduation, shots of you braiding my wet hair before bedtime and making goofy faces at the camera. An old, half-empty bag of henna powder in a ziplock bag, the last one you used to make my hair soft and shiny. Your prayer rug that I keep in a place of honor, draped over the bench that sat in front of your worktable where you kept your bird-watching supplies and journals. You always said you’d replace the scarred worktable someday, but here it is, covered in your stray pen marks and smears of acrylic paint. It’s cluttered with the books that were in your study when you died—bird-watching manuals, Audubon’s Birds of America, a few Arabic ornithology texts I can only read the short sentences of. Everything I know of birds, I learned from you. When you were gone, I learned from these pages turned by your hands. These books taught me the names of birds in Arabic, things you must have thought you’d have time to explain. Your last sketchbook sits in the corner, a couple of your colored pencils still lodged inside as a bookmark, deforming the binding. I remove a pencil, and a photograph slips out onto the floor. It’s the two of us posing in front of my elementary school door: me in patent-leather Mary Janes and a polka-dotted dress you’d picked out for me, you with that unguarded grin that showed your gums, your arm pressing me to you as though you could fuse us forever.
When you came with me to first-grade parent-teacher night, I was so excited to have you meet my teacher that I’d begged a friend’s dad to take this picture beforehand. You’d somehow gotten the money together for a private school. You wore your best silk blouse that evening and dressed me in a new outfit, hoping we’d both make a good impression. I had the sense, without being able to name it, that we didn’t quite belong. We arranged ourselves in front of the school’s wooden door, me tugging down my hideous dress while you laughed and hugged me to you, my shoulder curving into the space above your hip. We held the pose while my friend’s dad fumbled with the camera. We pressed into each other with the rise and fall of your breath. Then came the flash, blinding.
I tugged you inside, the warm stripe of your touch still painted on my shoulder. Mrs. Wilson greeted us at the classroom door, the blackboard free of chalk and her can of pencils still full, a pristine leather handbag perched on her desk. Then Mrs. Wilson’s face twisted into shock, and when you started to speak, my teacher frowned and leaned in as though she couldn’t understand your accent. She forced a smile, looking from me to you and back again.
“It’s lovely to meet you,” Mrs. Wilson said. “But I was expecting—well. It’s only that she looks so—”
My fingers twitched in yours, our knuckles interlocked. You pursed your lips and knit your brows. Mrs. Wilson pushed her chin forward above my head and raised her voice, taking your unease for a lack of understanding.
“She must look more like her father,” Mrs. Wilson said, slowing and separating her syllables. “You understand?”
I dropped my eyes to the floor. You tensed and shifted your thumb against my hand, the nail scraping my skin like nicked leather.
Then you smiled without parting your lips. “A colleague told me that once,” you said in smooth English, “when she saw the picture of us in my office, next to my master’s diploma.” Then you squeezed my hand and steered us away.
You said nothing more of Mrs. Wilson that day. You shut the door that night when you ran the water for your bath, and I laid my head on the wood. I listened for the squeak of the faucet turning off and wished I never had to leave this little studio apartment again, tried to imagine a home where other people’s words couldn’t separate us as cleanly as any wall.
I run my fingers over the burnished pine. I vowed I’d paint at this table after that day half a decade ago now, to honor your memory. But the sight of it made Teta cry, and I couldn’t paint at all when I sat down at it. Our sadness had seeped into the wood. Soon I couldn’t paint anywhere else, either. I’d just graduated art school when you died, but your death rendered all those years of planning useless. Art school had kept me away from home in what turned out to be the last years of your life, and though people told me not to blame myself, a dark thought took root: that painting itself had separated us. Every time I lifted a brush, the undertow of my guilt tugged me down. The following year, Teta fractured a vertebra pulling thistles from around your grave, and we discovered multiple myeloma had made her bones weak. Still, I nearly had to confine her to the apartment to keep her from returning to her gardening: she was adamant that the thistles were choking the roots of her roses. It turns out that even when you plant roses, sometimes thistles come up instead.