A Woman Is No Man(77)
“Why did you lie to us all these years?” Deya said. “Why didn’t you tell us the truth about our parents?”
Fareeda began to sweat. There was no escape. As with everything else she had done in her life, she didn’t have much choice.
She drew a slow, long breath, feeling a weight about to come undone. Then she told Deya everything—that Adam had been drunk, that he hadn’t realized how hard he was hitting Isra, that he hadn’t meant to kill her. This last part she said again and again. He didn’t mean to kill her.
“I was only trying to protect you,” Fareeda said. “I had to tell you something that wouldn’t traumatize you for the rest of your life.”
“But why did you make up the car accident? Why didn’t you tell us—at least later?”
“Should I have gone around advertising it? Tell me, what good would it have done? The news had already disgraced our family name, but I tried to shelter you! I didn’t stand by and do nothing. I tried to stop it from ruining your lives! Don’t you understand?”
“No, I don’t!” Deya shouted. “How can you expect me to understand something like this? None of it makes any sense. Why would he kill her—murder the mother of his children, his wife?”
“He just—he just . . . he lost control.”
“Oh, so you thought it was okay that he beat her? Why didn’t you do something?”
“What was I supposed to do? It’s not like I could’ve stopped him!”
“You could’ve stopped him if you wanted to!” Fareeda opened her mouth, but Deya cut her off. “Why did he kill her? Tell me what happened!”
“Nothing happened,” Fareeda lied. “He was drunk, completely out of his mind. That night, I heard him screaming from upstairs. I found him on the floor, shaking beside your mother’s body. I was terrified. I begged him to leave before the police came. I told him to pack his bags and run, that I would take care of you all. But he just looked at me. I don’t even know that he could hear me. And the next thing I knew, the police were at my door, saying they’d found my son’s body in the river.”
“You tried to cover for him?” Deya said in disbelief. “How could you cover for him? What’s wrong with you?”
Fareeda chided herself—she had said too much. Deya was staring at her in horror. She could see pain in her granddaughter’s eyes.
“How could you cover for him after he killed our mother?” Deya said. “How could you take his side?”
“I did what any mother would’ve done.”
Deya shook her head in disgust.
“Your father was possessed,” Fareeda said. “He had to be. No man in his right mind would kill the mother of his children and then kill himself.”
Adam was out of his mind. She had no doubt about this. After the police had come and told her what Adam had done, Fareeda had sat on the porch, dumbfounded, staring out into the sky, feeling as though it had collapsed on her. She thought back on all her years with Adam, from his birth one hot summer day as she squatted in the back of their shelter to years later, when they’d made it to America and Adam had helped them run the deli, working day and night without end. Not once would she have suspected this from her son. Not Adam, who had never missed a prayer growing up, who had wanted to be an imam. Adam, who did everything for them, who always bent over backward to please, who never denied them. Adam, a murderer? Perhaps Fareeda should have known from the way he came home every night, reeking with sharaab. But she had just shrugged her fears aside, told herself everything was okay. After all, how many times had Khaled gotten drunk in their youth? How many times had he beaten her senseless? It was only normal. And she was stronger for it. But murder and suicide—that wasn’t normal. She was sure Adam had been possessed.
“So Mama and Baba were both possessed? Really? That’s your explanation for everything?”
Fareeda bit the inside of her lip. “Believe it or not, it’s the truth.”
“No, it’s not! Sarah said there was nothing wrong with Mama.”
Fareeda sighed. If only that were true, if only she had invented all of Isra’s trouble. But she and Deya both knew there had been something wrong with her. Quietly, she said, “You don’t remember how she was?”
Deya flushed. “It doesn’t mean she was possessed.”
“But she was.” Fareeda met Deya’s eyes. “And Adam was possessed, too. He wasn’t in his right mind. Only a majnoon, a crazy person, would kill his wife like that.”
“That still doesn’t mean he was possessed! He could’ve been—” Deya searched for the right translation in Arabic. “He could’ve had a mental illness. He could have been depressed, or suicidal, or just a bad person!”
Fareeda shook her head. It was typical of her granddaughter to revert to Western concepts to understand everything. Why couldn’t she accept that Western medicine had no understanding of these things, much less a cure?
The teakettle whistled, puncturing the silence between them. Fareeda turned off the stove. In moments like this, when the smell of maramiya filled the kitchen, she had to admit how much she missed Isra, who used to brew chai just the way she liked it, who, even when she was upset, never disrespected her. Isra would never have yelled at her the way Nadine had screamed the morning before she and Omar packed their bags and moved, just like that, leaving Fareeda alone. And what had she done to deserve it? Fareeda wondered, pouring herself some tea. She remembered Omar saying how controlling she was, how he couldn’t even be nice to Nadine in her presence, how he had to pretend to be tough, manly. How much he hated the word manly, he had said, almost spitting as he did. Well, that’s because he wasn’t a man, Fareeda told herself now, adding two spoonfuls of sugar to her tea. Neither was Ali, who had taken off to live in the city with some girl, leaving her to raise her granddaughters on her own. Leaving her to clean up the family mess once again.