Love from A to Z(19)

“I’m so sorry.”

“I’m usually not like this. I think it was just seeing Adam again last night after not seeing him for months.” She started the car again. “Anyway, just a heads-up. In case you see him quiet.”

“Hanna must have been really young?”

“One and a half years old. Of course she doesn’t recall Sylvia.” We were waiting to turn onto the road from the parking lot, so she looked at me for a moment. “Adam was nine, and he’d been very close to his mother.”

The rest of the way to the apartment we were quiet, me looking at the sky the whole time, unable to imagine his pain.

Daadi’s death in the fall had been traumatic beyond belief.

But then, Mom?

She and I fought sometimes, but she was also the number one reliable factor in my life, Dad being inaccessible at times due to his busyness as one of the few ophthalmologists in town.

I couldn’t imagine my rock being removed from me.

As I got out of the car, I blinked away my own tears.

? ? ?

After Maghrib and Isha prayers, combined, I lay in bed but couldn’t go to sleep.

Maybe it was jet lag. And how I’d slept in today.

I sat up.

Not jet lag.

It was Adam.

I think I felt something I hadn’t felt since I swore off feeling this way.

It was just a twinge and felt very buried, but it was there.

Like a pull inside whenever I thought of him.

After Yasin, this guy who hung out with Ayaan’s brothers, who I’d met at her house, I hadn’t felt it again. That was a year ago.

I’d liked Yasin, and he had liked me back, and then just like that, after three months, he had stopped liking me. Because he said he didn’t know why everything was an issue with me.

What he meant was he hadn’t liked me asking why he’d written a whole screed on how hijabi girls who wore makeup canceled their hijabs.

After Yasin, I’d decided nobody was going to get me interested in them unless they had something real to stand for. And brains.

That was my number one criterion.

That and a sense of quiet mystery?

I looked at the photo of Adam again.

He was sad.





MARVEL: RESOLUTIONS


Exhibit A: The Better Me manifesto I wrote in the middle of a Doha night.

Tomorrow I was going to be poised and peaceful.

Maybe quieter, too. Well, quieter in the sense that I was going to listen more than talk. Not jump to conclusions.

Just let things unfold. (More than I’d done yesterday; and yesterday, with Madison, I’d really pulled punches.)

I will have to pretend to love animals, however unpredictable they are. (Even though I am deathly afraid of dogs, because I was chased and bitten on my ankle by a Doberman when I was eight. And scratched by numerous cats belonging to friends. Not to mention the three instances of bird poo finding its way onto my head.)

Animals are unpredictable creatures for sure, not dependable like my Squish, but I will let them be so.

I am going to be a better version of myself, because this isn’t the time for my shenanigans anymore.

Somebody grieving is going to be in my vicinity tomorrow.

I need to rein me in.





ADAM


SUNDAY, MARCH 10


MARVEL: PHOTOS


HANNA KNOWS MOM THROUGH THE stories I tell her. A third of the way into whatever I’m sharing about Mom, she’ll say, “Stop,” and then go and get one of the many framed photos of Mom around the house. She’ll hold it and gaze at Mom’s picture while I finish the rest of the story.

Last night, when I gave Hanna the case I’d made for her rock collection, I filled her in on the time Mom and I made a house and garden in a jar. This was after we’d been living in Doha for a year, when I was seven, before Hanna was born, before Mom’s disease took hold of her.

At the time, I’d kept telling Mom I wanted to go back home, to our backyard in Ottawa. So in our Doha apartment kitchen she propped up a picture of our old house and built a model of it out of toothpicks. Then we worked together to make a yard for it that matched the one I missed so much. We placed the entire thing into a widemouthed jar to preserve it.

Hanna stared at Mom’s picture, the one where Mom is sitting on a swing, while I told her this story.

“Where is it? The jar with the backyard?” she said.

“That I don’t know. We moved into this house soon after we made it, and then things got busy when Mom had you. Then it got even busier when she got sick.” I finished fitting the wooden grid together inside the rock display case and flipped it up to show Hanna the interior. “You can put twenty-four rocks in here.”

“Thanks.” She took it from me and put it on the kitchen table we were at. “I wish I could see the jar.”

I leaned back in my chair. “What about a bird? Do you want to see a bird?”

“I see a lot of birds.”

“A bird Mom made?”

Her eyebrows rose high under her bangs. “Where? Is it in a jar?”

“It’s behind you.”

She turned around to another of Dad’s photographs on the wall. A sculpture of a goose, a Canada goose, midflight, hanging on invisible wire.

“Mom made that?”