A Woman Is No Man(71)

Fareeda felt nauseous, her tongue dry. She swallowed, then took another sip of her chai.

“I mean, it makes sense,” Hala went on. “The girl was raped as a child, then married off at once. Poor girl was barely thirteen. And we all know Ramsy. A drunk. Day and night with sharaab in his hands. He probably beats the poor girl every night. You can imagine the rest. She likely thought she was saving her daughter. It’s sad, really.”

Fareeda kept her eyes on her legs. Her fingers trembled against her teacup, and she placed it on the old barrel they used for a coffee table. The barrel was rusted and moldy but had been standing strong for over ten years, ever since Khaled and Fareeda first married in the camps. It had served many uses then. She remembered using it as a bucket to shower.

“Nonsense,” Awatif said, pulling Fareeda back into the conversation. “No mother in her right mind would kill her child. She must have been possessed. I guarantee it.” She turned to Fareeda, who sat silently beside her. “Tell them, Fareeda. You would know. Your twin daughters died right in your arms. Would a mother ever do such a thing unless she wasn’t in her right mind? It was a jinn. Tell them.”

A flush spread across Fareeda’s face. She made an excuse to grab something from the kitchen, knees buckling as she rose from the plastic chair. She tried to keep from falling as she walked across the dirt garden, past the marimaya plant and the mint bush, and into the kitchen. It was three feet by three across, equipped only with a sink, soba oven, and small cabinet. Fareeda could hear Nadia on the veranda whispering, “Why would you bring up such a thing? The woman lost her firstborns. Why would you remind her?”

“It was over ten years ago,” Awatif said. “I didn’t mean anything by it. Besides, look at her life now. She has three sons. Her naseeb turned out pretty good, if you ask me. No reason to fuss.”

In the kitchen, Fareeda trembled violently. She remembered her daughters’ death in bits and pieces only. Their bodies turning blue in her arms. The sharp scent of death in the tent. The way she kept them wrapped in blankets so Khaled wouldn’t notice, kept flipping and turning their limp bodies, hoping the color would return to their faces. Then the scrambling prayers. The small hole Khaled dug in the back of the tent, tears in his eyes. And somewhere, in the tight confines of their tent, that thing which had never left her since, the jinn. Watching her. She closed her eyes, muttered a quick prayer under her breath.

Forgive me, daughters. Forgive me.





Part III





Deya


Winter 2008

Deya ran out of the bookstore, the newspaper clipping crushed in her fist. At the subway station, she paced up and down the platform as she waited for the R train. Once on board she paced in circles by the metal door. She shoved past people down the center aisle, her fear and deference forgotten. At the back of the train, she opened the exit door—ignoring the EMERGENCY ONLY sign—and crossed into the next train car, even as the tracks rattled under her feet in the dark tunnel. In the next car she did the same—pacing, shoving, escaping from one car to the next as though the next car might hold a different story, any other story, so long as it was one in which her mother had not been murdered by her father.

When she finally paused, all she could do was stare again at the newspaper clipping in her hands:

MOTHER OF FOUR MURDERED IN BROOKLYN BASEMENT



* * *



Brooklyn, NY. October 17, 1997—Isra Ra’ad, twenty-five-year-old mother of four, was found beaten to death in Bay Ridge late Wednesday night. The victim appeared to have been beaten by her husband, thirty-eight-year-old Adam Ra’ad, who fled the scene of the crime. Police found his body in the East River Thursday morning after witnesses saw him jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.

How many times did Deya read the words and burst into tears? How many times did she scream in the middle of the train, stopping only when she realized that people around her were staring? What did they see when they looked at her? Did they see what she saw, staring at her darkened reflection in the glass window, the face of a fool? For now Deya saw how foolish she’d been. How could she have lived with her grandparents all these years and not known that her mother had been murdered by her own father? Beaten to death in their home, in the very rooms where she and her sisters spent their days? Why hadn’t she acted on her suspicions after reading Isra’s letter? Why hadn’t she questioned Fareeda until she’d admitted the truth? How had she believed her so easily? After all the lies she knew Fareeda to be capable of. Did she not have a mind of her own? Could she not think for herself? How had she lived her entire life letting Fareeda make her choices for her? Because she was a fool.

Deya clenched the newspaper clipping tight. Then she was screaming again, banging her fists against the train window. Her father had killed her mother. He had killed her, taken her life, stolen her away from them. Then the coward had taken his own life! How could he? Deya closed her eyes, tried to picture Baba’s face. The most clearly she could remember him was the day of her seventh birthday. He had come home with a Carvel ice cream cake, smiling as he sang her a birthday melody in Arabic. The way he had looked at her, the way he had smiled—the memory had always comforted Deya on a bad day.

Now she wanted to rip the memory out of her head. How could that same man have killed her mother? And how could her grandparents have covered for him? How could they have hidden the truth from his daughters all these years? And, as if that wasn’t enough, how could they have urged her to get married young and quickly, as her parents had done? How could they risk something like this happening again? Happening to her? She shuddered at the thought.