“What the hell are you doing?” the man says. In his other hand, he holds a rusty tea tray—an odd thing to have found on the beach.
Muneer turns to his wife. She hasn’t moved from the sandbar.
When he reaches her, her body is purple. He lifts her. He isn’t sure he can reach the shore. Next he remembers, they are lying on the cold, cold ground.
The man is standing over them. He wears a ski mask, folded up to reveal a face that resembles Johnny Carson with a salt-and-pepper beard. His metal detector and tea tray lie on the ground, and he’s holding Muneer’s coat and a sand-colored blanket—pilly and rough, but better than nothing. He hangs the coat on Muneer’s head by the hood and wraps the blanket around Muneer and Saeedah. They are too cold to warm each other.
“Do you need a ride?” the man says, picking up his things. He dangles the tea tray from one hooked thumb. “You’re not from here, are you?”
Muneer rubs Saeedah’s hands between his. He rubs her feet, her arms, her legs. She’s made of chilled rubber, not flesh and blood.
“No, thank you,” Muneer says. He doesn’t think the second question deserves an answer. “Can we keep the blanket?”
The man shakes the tray in lieu of a nod and continues down the beach.
Muneer bundles Saeedah in the blanket and scoops her up. She feels heavy as anything.
This experience binds them together—or should. Because he has saved her and the baby, and tonight, she will be OK. The child will be OK, will be born beautiful and whole, will be named Hanadi. He will pray two raka’ahs in thanks tomorrow morning, and another two daily for a month. He will beg his professors to give him extensions on his coursework and to let him graduate if he finishes by the end of the summer, and they will agree.
But doubt will return bit by bit, like the whisperings of a devil. Aunt Faizah, who will need no convincing to fly across the world to help take care of her baby granddaughter, will yell at him for failing to prepare and boss him while he sets up a crib from Sears in the spare bedroom she and Hanadi will share. His mother-in-law will guide him toward the things Saeedah did not: blankets and onesies and tiny caps and socks with yellow ducks on them. Bottles and nipples and pacifiers and canisters of formula and boxes of diapers.
“Good God, the two of you, both so ignorant,” Aunt Faizah will say. “Didn’t you take care of your younger brothers and sisters? It never occurred to you that you needed these things?”
“The baby was not supposed to come for a month,” he will insist, and in his mind he will place the blame on Saeedah. If she had been willing to talk to him these last months and weeks, she might have told him what they needed.
Aunt Faizah will wrap the baby so tightly the little thing can’t move, can do nothing but sleep, and Muneer will wish he could be swaddled and kept safe from the world. He’ll spend most of his time at the library, and when he returns home, Saeedah will usually be sitting in the rocking chair, holding the baby when her mother lets her, looking always like she is in shock. Jameel and Diane will come to visit, and the pity in their eyes will tell him the shell-shocked look is on his face, too.
After his mother-in-law leaves, he will muddle through the year of his internship, writing for a little local paper in Beachwood, covering shopping mall Santas and fire department fundraisers. He will inhale the fragrance that emanates from the top of his daughter’s head, the essence of her, and watch her shove her fists in her mouth and grab her mother’s dangling gold earrings so that Saeedah has to carefully extract them before Hanadi can tug them straight through her earlobes, as a thief once did to Saeedah’s sister at the Haram Mosque in Makkah.
Muneer and Saeedah will sleepwalk through the year. One day, near the end of his internship, something in them will snap decisively, and the state of their marriage will revert to exactly what it was before Hanadi was born. Saeedah will say she would rather stay in America—a place she has never been drawn to, has not always seemed to like—than stay married to him.
He will feel the knife of her disdain turning in his stomach, though he feels the same. He will grant her wish of divorce and move back to Jidda without them, intending to find a way to bring his daughter home.
But he won’t. Saeedah will shatter Muneer’s life as though she were smashing through a sheet of ice. She will hide his daughter from him so well it will be as though the child were back in the womb, unreachable.
Leaving the beach with his wife asleep in the back of the VW, speeding to the hospital with the heater turned up so it whooshes and rattles, Muneer is blind to the future. He prays, “Oh, Protector, protect them. Oh, Protector, protect them.”
God alone knows what lies ahead.
“YOU ARE DIVORCED”
1974–1975
WITNESSES
If anyone aims the sentence “You are divorced” at Saeedah three times, she is not there to hear it. Spoken or unspoken, the words must travel to her across continents, from Jidda to Cleveland Heights, as though transported by jinns or the world’s most muscular carrier pigeons. The men of her family go about the official business of nullifying her marriage without her, same as they signed her marriage contract six years ago at the neighborhood mosque while she sat on her mother’s bed with three sisters curling her hair and kohling her eyes for the wedding celebration.
“Your brothers Hazem and Mohannad were with me in the judge’s chamber,” her father says on the phone, describing the divorce proceedings. Three of Muneer’s brothers were there, too, though the names go in one ear and out the other. Baba is trying to reassure her that the divorce has truly happened: male witnesses prove its reality.
Thank God? Thank you? Neither sounds correct.
“OK,” she says.
Saeedah’s mother takes over the phone with a rush of habibtis and God protect yous, and Saeedah wonders how vigorously she has pushed Baba aside with her hennaed palms, what kind of side glance he is giving her from under his shimagh, which he hardly ever takes off, even at home. Always professional, always ready for a journalistic scoop.
“When are you bringing my darling home?” Mama says, speaking of Hanadi.
“Maybe next summer, inshallah.” Saeedah is finishing her psychology degree, paying for Hanadi’s day care with money her father sends. After her long maternity leave, her grade point average suffered from the everyday skirmishes with Muneer in the final days of their marriage. She has had to retake courses and endure endless conversations with her advisor, Dr. O’Rourke, an Irishman with six children, a penchant for mixing plaid and tweed, and hair like streaks of rust combed over his bald head. He seems befuddled that a woman of her nationality could ever sit alone in a room with him and often wonders aloud if she might be more comfortable studying in her home country.
“Hanadi should be here,” Mama says. “In her country, with both her parents.”
Saeedah’s temples throb because she knows she should agree with the divorce, but Hanadi’s seventh birthday lies two and a half years away, a sinister finish line when Saeedah will be expected, by religious custom, to hand Hanadi over to her father.
“A mother is the best to raise a young child,” Mama says. “Her father should finish raising her so he can fulfill his duty to find her the best match.”