“Whatever it is, it’s going to be okay,” I whispered, and she flinched. Jerked back. Became a stranger.
“Why do you smell like cigarettes?”
Panic rioted through me.
Lie, I screamed at myself. Lie, you idiot.
“That’s my fault,” Ali said, and I spun around, stunned. His anger was gone, but in its absence he looked wrung-out. Run-down. “My bad.”
“You smoke now?” Shayda again. “That’s disgusting. And haram.”
“Really?” he asked, eyebrows up. “I thought it was a gray area.”
Shayda’s eyes darkened. “Whatever. You can go now.”
Ali didn’t move. He looked away from Shayda, his eyes glancing off the wall, the ceiling, the floor. But he didn’t move.
He looked at me.
“Are you sure you want me to go? Do you guys even have a ride home?”
“Shayda has her car,” I explained.
“What about your dad? Do you want me to call him?”
I was still processing that, still trying to find a tidy way to explain that my father was likely sleeping in a room not unlike the one my mother currently occupied when he said—
“What about Mehdi? Did h—”
Ali froze, as suddenly as if he’d been struck by lightning. Slowly, he dragged both hands down his face.
“Fuck,” he breathed. Squeezed his eyes shut. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Shayda walked away.
She left, left without a word, the lines of her lean form rippling in the distance. Me, I’d fossilized in place. I stood staring at a single flickering bulb in the brightly lit corridor long after she disappeared from sight. My sister was wrong about many things, but she was at least partly right about one: Ali didn’t associate with us anymore.
It was surreal how it happened, surreal how different my life had become in his absence. Ali and I, Shayda and Zahra—we used to see each other every day. My first year of high school we’d all carpool, our moms taking turns driving us to and from campus. Once Ali and Shayda got their own cars they tore free, only too happy to break up the band, pursue their independence. Still, my life kept colliding into his. His life kept colliding into mine. Ali and I had been fixtures in each other’s lives for five years until one day, a week before my brother died, everything between us broke. We stopped talking at the beginning of my junior year, his senior year.
Overnight, we’d become strangers.
“Shadi.”
I looked up.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m—”
I shook my head too fast. “Oh, Ali. It’s okay.” I smiled and realized I was crying, my eyes bleeding slow tears that made no sound. My emotions had finally boiled over. I didn’t know why they chose that moment, didn’t know why they were directed at him; but I knew, even then, even as I could do nothing about it, that the picture I made must’ve been terrifying.
Ali looked struck; he stepped forward.
I walked away.
Eight
The teakettle was screaming.
I stared at it, the steam curling, silver body shuddering on the stovetop, demanding attention. We had an old electric stove, its white paint chipping in places, burned-on grease splattered across the steel drip-bowls within which sat lopsided heating elements. The lopsided heating elements made it so that nothing heated evenly, which made it impossible to cook anything properly on this stove, which was one of the quiet shames of my family. The only thing this stove ever did well was bring water to an acceptable boil.
I turned down the heat. Poured the hot water from the kettle into the waiting belly of a porcelain teapot, brewing the leaves within. I wrapped the whole thing in a hand towel, set it aside, let it steep. We didn’t have a proper samovar, so this would have to suffice.
I heard murmurs of conversation coming from the living room, where my mother and my sister were waiting. I did, did not want to join them, did, did not want to know what they were discussing. I lingered in the kitchen too long, arranging cookies on a plate, selecting glasses for our tea.
My mother had thought she was having a heart attack.
Shayda was at the house when it happened, called 911. She’d called me, too, apparently, several times, but my dying phone had connected only once. The ambulance came, drove straight to our home for the third time in as many weeks, strapped my mother to a stretcher, and wheeled her away. A lamp had been knocked over, small things had been disarranged. There was dirt on the rug from their boots, the paramedics, dirt from their boots and their equipment.
The sight had sent a cold shudder through my body.
My mother had thought she was having a heart attack, and I could see why. My father had just had two, both of them in the same month. She’d seen and heard him describe, at length, the symptoms, the possible warning signs.
The doctor ran all kinds of tests on her, but they came back negative. She had not had a heart attack, he’d said.
She’d had a panic attack.
She was going to be fine. They’d given her something, some drug she would no doubt have refused had she known exactly what was in it, but it helped calm her down. Helped steady the horrible stutter in her heart.
For some reason, the doctor had thought I was the eldest.
He didn’t even ask, he’d just assumed, and he’d motioned for me to follow him out into the hall, closed my mother’s door behind him. Shayda had gone to pull the car around. My mother was changing back into her clothes. The doctor grimaced as he turned to me, grimaced and said—
“You’re the older sister, right? Listen, there’s something I need to discuss with you about your mom.”
Perhaps I should’ve told him the truth. There was no doubt a reason he wanted to speak with the oldest child, no doubt a legal or moral or psychological reason why I was uniquely unqualified, as the youngest, to hear what he was about to say. But my terrified curiosity would not allow me to walk away from an opportunity to know more about my mother. I wanted to know what was happening to her. I needed to know.
At first, the doctor said nothing.
Finally, he sighed. “I noticed your father is here in the hospital, too.”
“Yes.”
He tried to smile. “You okay?”
Heat pushed up my throat, the backs of my eyes, seared the roof of my mouth. I swallowed. Swallowed. “Yes,” I said.
He looked down at his clipboard, looked back up. Sighed again. “Does your mother have a history of depression?”
I blinked at the doctor, at the dark scruff growing down his neck, at the surgical mask stuffed into his coat pocket. He wore a scuffed gold band on his ring finger, and in that hand he clenched a stethoscope. There was a smudge of something on his shirt, chocolate or blood, I couldn’t tell. I didn’t know what his eyes looked like. I couldn’t meet them.
I did not understand.
“When your brother died,” he said, and I looked up then, took the hit to the chest, felt it shudder through my bones. “When your brother died did she”—he frowned—“has she been—has it been hard for her? Harder than what might seem normal?”
The question was so stupid it struck me hard across the face.
The doctor backpedaled, apologized, tried again. “There’s no right way to say this. I’ve never had to have this conversation with the child. Usually I have these conversations with the parent.” He took a breath. “But I feel that, considering the circumstances—with your father in a delicate state at the hospital, and with your younger sister to care for—I think you should know what’s happening here. I think you should know that I’m highly recommending your mother seek professional help.”