Part 27 (1/2)

”Nothing.” I was sorting parsley.

Madame said, ”Don't cry on it. It's unsanitary. Here, give those to me.” She took the stems from me and began to sort them herself.

If you loved them, then you would not ask questions about Baba's life before jail, his first family, or Nisrine's Indonesian family, because you did not care about past lives, this was your life now, this was important. You may fight, but only inside. You would always take their side, and you would not talk about them to tutors or police, or anyone outside the house. They were your life now, talking about them to others would only hurt yourself.

I wiped my eyes.

After a while, Madame sighed and patted my cheek. ”I think having Ha.s.san in the house depresses me. I used to have cheeks just like yours before I was married, Bea. I had full cheeks, just like yours.”

NISRINE DID NOT TRY to call like I did, she knew this was useless. She sat, looking pale and thoughtful.

”Why didn't he come?” she asked. ”I thought we understood each other. I thought, when he came to me across the sky, that he was something greater than myself.” Together, they had been making a new language.

She shook her head.

In the evening, we got a call from Moni confirming that Baba would spend the night in jail. When she got off the phone, Madame searched her purse for money. She searched her underwear drawer, and all Baba's shoes and his jeans and even his dirty s.h.i.+rt pockets and between the covers of his books. Then, she came to me.

”How much do you have?”

”How much do you want?”

”Well, we need to eat.”

I handed her my purse and she dumped all of it onto the table. Then we went through my pants pockets and my underwear drawer, and I gave her the money we found.

That night, Nisrine gathered up all the poems Adel had written, and the children and I watched her tear them, one by one, and release them over the balcony, where the wind took them.

”I miss him, Bea.”

I felt a pain in my heart for the poems. They danced before our window like snow.

”Look how light they are. I want to be light like that.” She had wanted to fly off like them.

”Words,” Nisrine said, ”only words.”

IT WAS THE NIGHT my mother was supposed to call.

Madame said, ”Don't tell her about what happened today, just say everything's fine.”

”Everything's fine?”

”You can't talk about it, Baba's in jail. If you talk, Baba might get in more trouble. You wouldn't want to put him in more trouble.”

”No.”

”Just say you're well, and we send kisses. Tell your mother I send kisses.”

My cell phone rang. It was my mother.

”How are things there, Bea? Are you still thinking of coming home? I hear on the TV there's been unrest.”

”Everything's fine.”

Madame blew kisses at the phone.

”Madame here kisses you.”

My mother was flattered. She made kissing sounds. ”Here's for you and Madame.” She made more kissing sounds. ”Is Dounia there? Does she send kisses?”

Dounia was twirling around like she'd been doing since the morning, being a snowflake.

”She's here. She sends kisses.”

”Well, kiss her for me, then, too.”

With Baba gone, there was a bed for each of us, and we each had our new place to sleep. I no longer slept with Lema; Lema slept in Madame's bed, because Madame was not sleeping, she was on Baba's sofa in the living room, watching TV. All night she sat with the TV tuned to the religious stations, a bottle of water between her clean feet. When I woke for the bathroom, she turned off the TV very quickly, and pretended to fall asleep.

WAITING.

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS when someone goes missing: your body shrinks, and the missing grows.

When my parents divorced, I got a stomachache that lasted and lasted, and wouldn't go away, and for a little while it felt like I became my stomach; the rest of me shriveled, and all I could think about was my little pain.

The next morning after Baba was taken, there was a thin line that ran between Madame and Nisrine and me, and as we did the housework, or played with the children, I could feel them where they were, thinking about Baba, and I could feel me where I was, thinking about Baba, and it was as if all of us, Madame and Nisrine and the children and me, were one big brain that thought, Baba. We had not forgotten our differences, but for the moment, they were put aside, and we moved about the house like birds together, migrating from room to room. When someone was hungry, we ate. When someone was tired, we rested.

We carried our waiting. Like Nisrine's gas, it clung to my sweater drawer and Arabic books, and our bras and pajama pants and underwear, which was all we wore around the house now because there was no need for s.h.i.+rts, when Abudi was still young and Baba was gone. His absence granted us this small freedom.

Free women, we waited, and as we waited, the missing grew. I searched again and again for people to call on my cell phone. I looked for Adel on the roof of the station.

By afternoon we became so bored waiting that even little things and sad things, like death, became scandalous. The widow who didn't cry when her husband died. Our neighbor's daughter, who beat her chest and threw her veil. We laughed, sighed, shook our heads.

Madame made long lists of the suitors who came to engage her before Baba, and she pinched Dounia's toes for each one: Simsim who lived in Maisaat. His shoe size was very large.

An old man who owned twelve buildings, but he was so ugly she couldn't look at him. He sat in front of her high school every day, reading the Quran.

Her cousin, but she didn't like him, so she told him, Put one of your houses in my name. Of course, he wouldn't. She knew he wouldn't, that was why she said it. How else do you refuse your cousin?