Her body jostles him awake at two in the morning. They lie under the electric blanket, back to back, an inch of hot, staticky air between them like an unbridgeable river.
He says in English, “You have to bundle up before you go outside.” Bundle. Is there an equivalent verb in Arabic? There is a noun: buqjah.
She fidgets against him, her feet still ice cold. He shifts his legs up toward his chest and tries again, in Arabic: “We’re not in Jidda.”
“You’ve said that before. We’re not in Jidda. I say, I’m not a child.” Her voice is as icy as her feet. “Maybe you think I should go home to my mother. Maybe I will.”
She’s threatened to go home before. He knows better than to believe her. He knows how she feels about her mother.
He yearns to feel what they share, to reach around her and touch her belly. The child growing. Something stops him, a lack of courage, as though he were eight years old and staring at a villa’s wall. Wanting to climb it, knowing he can get up but not get down. He was that kind of child, one who stopped himself from doing things, who would rather observe. She was the kind of girl who scrambled up and didn’t think twice. No risk seemed to scare her; nothing changed her mind.
Who will the baby take after? He prays for an answer. He prays to strike the hidden word divorce from his head.
GECKOS AND JAM JARS
First cousins by their mothers, Muneer and Saeedah grew up together. When he was six or seven and she was a toddler with springy hair, gazelle’s eyes, and teeny fingernails like colorless pomegranate seeds, she went missing in her family’s three-story villa, in the middle of an evening gathering. Aunt Faizah, Saeedah’s mother, had invited her six sisters and their families for dinner. Before the meal, the children played in the courtyard. When they were called inside, someone noticed that Saeedah had gone missing. For half an hour, they scoured the house. The aroma of roasted lamb followed them everywhere, and Muneer became so overcome with hunger he could barely remember why they were tromping up and down the stairs. Unable to find the girl, the aunties herded the children back outside. The women stood in the walled courtyard and whistled, as though they could call a little girl like a falcon.
Muneer’s mother narrowed her eyes till they were the tiniest bit ajar, like the eyes of the sleepy alley cats they’d passed on their walk to Aunt Faizah’s villa. “Clearly, the girl’s not out here.”
“She’s not inside,” Aunt Faizah said. She held her little twins, one in the crook of each arm, like two melons. Her features were stretched with worry, her gaze tethered to the gate.
“How does a little girl get out the gate? And if she did, she’d never go very far,” Muneer’s mother said.
“Maybe her father left it open. He’s always doing things like that.”
“Say a prayer for the Prophet and go back inside. She’s not outside.”
“How do you know?”
Muneer sidled to the stairs and started to climb, dragging his arm along the wooden balustrade. No one followed him or seemed to notice. Upstairs, a series of narrow green hallways led past spacious, dark rooms with ceiling fans whirring. He stepped into the rooms one after the other and let the cool air ruffle his hair, until he found himself in a rose-colored room on the top floor. A gecko the size of his pinky basked in a single line of sunlight that slashed the wall. The lizard’s stringy tail flicked nervously; its pinpoint eyes were dreamy. Over the fan’s humming he faintly heard a girlish voice singing: “Wazaghah, wazaghah, wazaghah.”
There she was, in a built-in cupboard with a dark green slatted door, her fingertips poking through. He couldn’t possibly have seen her face through the wood and the shadows, but in his memory, he glimpses her gap-toothed smile, and he knows that she is calling, “Gecko, gecko, gecko.”
He thinks of that day in the morning when he finds Saeedah already in the kitchen eating saltines. She’s left the cupboard door wide open and the soup bowl empty in the sink. He can’t tell for sure if she ate the soup or dumped it, but hopefulness tugs at him.
“Let’s go to the beach,” he says.
The suggestion is surprising to him, and last-ditch, he admits. But why not? They spent the best day of last summer at the beach, after they learned she was pregnant. She had been sullen for weeks, ever since they’d decided they couldn’t afford to go home for the summer. Her father would have paid for it, but Muneer wouldn’t accept his offer. One day, he would work at his father-in-law’s newspaper, and he wanted it not to be a matter of wastah—connections—but rather of professional integrity.
But the news of the baby had made her smile, and the mood lasted for days. He was giddy, too. They hadn’t told their families in Saudi or their friends here, and they held hands in the car as he drove through the low-rise suburbs toward Lake Erie, down the greenway, alongside the salt factory, the giant mural of the Morton salt girl in her rain boots. Saeedah loved the beach, though the water was fresh and brown and smelled like algae, not salty and blue and fishy like the sea they grew up with. They tugged off their sneakers and socks, rolled their jeans up to their knees, walked to the lighthouse and climbed on the rocks. They gazed across the vastness of Lake Erie, no shore in sight, as though they were gazing into the future. The wind whispered around them, lifting Saeedah’s nearly waist-length hair like black wings.
Muneer and Saeedah had never seen a lake before. They didn’t know that most lakes don’t stretch to the horizon like the sea. The sky was as blue as the Red Sea, and they fell on their backs looking up at it, letting the sun warm their faces. Ahead of them lay the baby’s birth, Muneer’s graduation in the spring, his yearlong internship in the States before going back to be a reporter for her father.
The waves lapping against the shore sounded like a prayer whispered over and over. The sand felt like a net, holding them. He would like to go back to the beach and recapture the feeling. But Saeedah waves her arm at the window, the porridge-gray sky, and the wiry trees. She smiles a wide, taut smile and rolls her eyes.
“Wouldn’t you say it’s too cold for the beach?”
Last winter—her first—wasn’t like this. She wore her hat and gloves and wound the itchy blue scarf around her neck, and together they complained about the weather. They’d watched the year’s first snowfall, the flakes like thousands of tiny miracles. They’d held out their hands and the snow landing on their skin felt like nothing. “Mashallah,” they’d said together, standing in the driveway. Their tongues stuck out involuntarily to catch the little bits of moisture, and their words came out garbled: “Mathallah, mathallah.”
Neither of them knew how to cook, so they’d spent a month’s rent on phone calls to their mothers. To measure the rice, they’d need a jam jar, his mother had said. He and Saeedah hadn’t hesitated, emptying a whole jar of raspberry jam into the garbage disposal. Saeedah bent her ear to the phone, pulling the cord across the living room so she could relay their mothers’ recipes to Muneer in their kitchen, which was not much bigger than a bathroom. The Bukhari rice came out too moist, stewed with cinnamon sticks and cardamom pods that lay bloated and spent alongside the chunks of lamb. Later, they tried chicken and rice poached in milk. Saleeg was meant to be soggy, Muneer joked, so of course they mastered it easily.