Today, Muneer writes about the weather, Jameel’s engagement, God, preparations for the baby’s arrival (a classmate of his has offered them a crib, a stroller, boxes of baby clothes). He says Saeedah is in good health. He doesn’t mention how his world seems to shift daily under his feet, like sand. His professors decry any sort of censorship—that of the state, the editor, the journalist himself. But he knows self-editing is sometimes a survival tool when writing to the dead. Why worry his dead father who, in an imaginary aerogram delivered to Muneer’s mind, welcomed the news of Saeedah’s pregnancy with these words: “Daily, I ask God to keep the three of you safe. Remember to observe your five daily prayers.” Why admit to himself the five daily prayers have become 2.3 on average? That he can’t keep Saeedah warm, let alone safe. That this marriage is more difficult than anyone could have warned.
Jameel and Diane are married in early March in the basement of the mosque—not a courthouse—and her uncle throws a small celebration in his living room. Diane wears a white lace minidress and a veil grazes her ankles. About two dozen people sit at card tables set up in the living room: Diane’s aunt and uncle and cousins and a few close friends, Jameel’s buddies from school, Muneer and Saeedah. Neither the bride’s nor the groom’s parents attend. Her mother and father will take several years—until the first grandchild’s birth—to accept her marriage to a Muslim. His family will learn about the wedding in a letter accompanied by a green-tinged Polaroid of Jameel in his suit and tie and Diane in her minidress. For the intimate group assembled on this day, there is roast chicken and wine and the entertainment of Jameel getting a little sloppy. The bride’s uncle makes a toast, and people clink their glasses, and Diane whispers loudly to Jameel that this means they are supposed to kiss. The clinking recurs half a dozen times, and Muneer is convinced there is one person at the other table responsible for instigating. He and Saeedah alone have water in their wineglasses.
After dinner, Muneer sits next to Saeedah on a rickety love seat with wooden legs and leans over to kiss her cheek. It is cold, and her fingers, which he takes in his hand, are icy.
“Do you want me to find you a sweater or a blanket?”
She squeezes his hand, braces her legs, and pushes up from the seat with both hands.
“I don’t think Jameel knows what he’s doing,” she says. “This marriage is a bad idea.”
“You don’t know that,” he says, though he thought close to the same thing when Jameel showed him the engagement ring. Though he, too, doubted this match, he doesn’t want to agree with Saeedah. What is done is done. Jameel and Diane are married.
“She’s Christian. He’s Muslim. What will the children be?”
“They’ll be Muslim, like their father, of course.”
She holds her hair up in the back, twists it around and lets it fall back to her shoulders. “You should have told him not to marry her.”
The girl’s family drinks and gossips and dances. None of them speak Muneer and Saeedah’s language. He is alone with her words.
Snow falls the next week. Muneer is tiring of this white stuff, and March snow seems worse to him than any other kind. It makes him yearn for spring, whereas April snow—that would seem like a fluke. Maybe it’s the cold or the stone-colored sky, some weather-related discontent makes it hard for him to be alone in his annoyance with Saeedah any longer. He makes the mistake of telling Jameel what she said.
They’re working a shift at the pizzeria, which has managed to stay open the past month, and Muneer tosses the elastic dough toward the buzzing neon lights of the kitchen.
“Do you agree?” Jameel asks. “That I shouldn’t have married her?”
Muneer adjusts his plastic gloves and sprinkles flour on the board. He lays the dough on the surface and ladles tomato sauce onto the round.
“You’re married, and God bless you,” he says.
“You’re a coward,” Jameel says. “You won’t tell me the truth.”
“It’s her opinion, not mine.”
“You think marrying your cousin is a better idea than marrying a woman you love?”
Muneer wants to say he did marry for love, but is love what he felt at the beginning? “God knows what’s best,” he says.
Jameel doesn’t talk to him the rest of the shift, or on the way to campus. When Muneer drops him off, Jameel shuts the car door too quietly, draws his hood up, and trudges away.
Muneer has half an hour until class, so he passes by the old yellow mansion that houses the ESL program. He parks the VW on the circle and walks into the wood-paneled hallway of the building. Two of Saeedah’s classmates, Sonja and Weronika, are shrugging into their coats, their backpacks bulging and unzipped on the floor. Their faces are a question: What is he doing here?
He’s not sure. Maybe he wants to test whether Saeedah would be happy to see him.
“If you’re looking for Saeedah,” Weronika says, “she didn’t come to class today. We thought maybe she had the baby.”
Outside, the temperature has suddenly plummeted ten degrees, and the wind has picked up. The top layer of snow swirls and scurries down the sidewalk. He curves his head into his neck and his arms into his torso and runs to the car.
It is barely three o’clock in the afternoon, but the sky has darkened as though night is coming. He pulls up to the house. The windows are dark, and he doesn’t bother going inside. He drives. Something takes him to her. Intuition, love, God, worry—he doesn’t know what to call it.
Today, the lake is muddy, the sky dark and dense like gray felt. The snow on the beach is ashen, and so are his thoughts.
When he sees her, he stops. He can’t move, as though he’s strapped to a chair, like a prisoner in a movie, watching her without being able to lift a finger to rescue her.
She stands at the edge of the water with waves lapping her bare feet. She slips off her jeans and white turtleneck and stands in her white bra and underwear. She walks into the choppy water, pauses, moves forward. As though overcoming the cold. The water envelops her body bit by bit, until it touches her shoulders.
“Come inside,” he says, but of course she can’t hear.
A small prick of shame, like the shock of touching a car door in the dry winter air: here is his wife taking her clothes off in public. But no one is on the beach, and he’s too cold and frightened to care. To warm himself up, he pulls his arms out of his sleeves and into the body of his coat.
He walks to the edge of the lake, his boots leaving tracks in the thick, wet mixture of snow and sand. The air smells woody and wet, and someone must be burning a bonfire somewhere because he smells smoke. He turns toward the parking lot and squints to the left and right, searching for a lit fire, smoke, evidence of other humans sharing this beach with them.
He looks back to the lake. She has reached the sandbar about a hundred yards from the shore, and the water is at her waist.
He drops his coat onto the sand and wades into the water. It is so cold it might as well be a block of ice. He presses on. His jeans and long johns are so heavy. The water stings like peroxide on a wound.
Behind him someone is yelling. “What the hell! It’s fucking cold.”
Muneer looks back to the shore. A man has appeared out of nowhere, walking along the beach holding a metal detector out like a blind man’s white-tipped cane.