Love from A to Z(40)

“It’s a crib. For your sister.”

Watching him push the bars into the holes he’d made on a long rectangle of wood was the moment I realized that Hanna was going to be a real person, not just something inside Mom’s body, an unseen being that I was told would be my sister.

“I’m hungry.” I attached the final piece to complete the roof of the castle.

“Go up and eat lunch then. Grandma went out, but she left some food on the table for you.” Grandpa picked up a mallet and began banging the bars in. “If you need help, ask me, okay? Your mom’s sleeping.”

I went upstairs and didn’t even look on the kitchen table, at what Grandma had left for me, and just went straight up to Mom and Dad’s room.

I wanted French fries. Mom’s French fries.

Which were the opposite of all the other French fries I’d ever eaten in my life. They weren’t crispy, they weren’t straight, they weren’t thin.

They were soggy and lumpy and chunky and steamy.

They were so good, like a hug for your mouth.

“Mom?” I knocked lightly at first, then harder when I heard no reply. “Mom?”

“Come in, sweetie.” She was sitting up in bed, under the bedspread, a book resting on her round stomach. She patted the bed beside her.

I leaned forward at the foot of the mattress, put my elbows up on it, and propped my face on the fists I’d made to cradle it. Someone, my sister, was going to come out of that stomach and sleep in the crib Grandpa was making downstairs.

“Can you make me French fries?”

“Grandma left lunch for you on the table.”

“But it’s not French fries.”

“Maybe it is. Did you check?”

“But it wouldn’t be your French fries.”

She closed her book. “Do you want to know the secret to my French fries?”

I nodded. “Can you tell me when you make them?”

She smiled, took the bedspread off her stomach, climbed out of bed.

And almost fell to the floor, something red trickling under her.

Her face, distorted and scary, looked at me.

The moan that came from within her told me it was pain that twisted her into a mother I didn’t recognize.

I sprang back, stricken, and then ran down two flights of stairs to get Grandpa.

Hanna was born that evening.

Prematurely, after a lot of pain. Pain I saw through the bars on the stairs I’d sat on while Mom and Grandpa waited for an ambulance.

I didn’t ask for French fries again for a long time.

Then Mom’s MS took a turn for the worse.

? ? ?

Memory two:

We were at our house in Ottawa. We’d come back for the summer when I was nine, would be going back to Doha at the end of it.

At our house in Ottawa, the kitchen was tiny, just two counters running parallel to each other, one bookended by a stove and a fridge, the other housing a sink. A small round table stood at the entrance.

On the day of my memory, I was in this kitchen, opening the freezer to get a Popsicle. When I closed it, Mom was standing there, leaning on her walker, smiling.

“Guess what I feel like eating,” she said, opening her eyes wide, her way to let me know it was something special.

“A Popsicle?”

“No. French fries. My French fries.” She turned the walker round and sat on it. “So, Adam, can you make them for me? If I teach you?”

I stood there for a second, pretending to work hard at unwrapping the banana Popsicle, picking at the wrapper like a scab. The seam on the plastic tore at once, and the frozen bar almost slipped out of my hands—as the image of Mom’s twisted, pained face the day Hanna was born invaded my thoughts.

“Hello? Earth to Adam?” Mom tilted her head. “The best French fries in the world?”

“Okay, just putting this away. I don’t need it anymore.” I opened the freezer door and hid my face behind it. I twisted and wrapped the clear plastic as tight as I could around the Popsicle. Then I left the door open, a barrier between Mom and me, as I moved to the drawer beside the fridge to get a rubber band to fasten the wrapper tighter, keep it secure.

She wasn’t allowed to see the tear rolling down my face.

Grandpa and Grandma had told me to make sure Mom knew I was going to be okay. Even though Mom wasn’t going to be okay.

By the time I put that Popsicle, secured with three rubber bands, back in freezer and closed the door, Mom saw me and my face ready to learn to make the best French fries in the world.

“Before I teach you, you have to promise you’ll never make them by yourself. Dad or Grandma or Grandpa or Marta has to be around.”

I didn’t ask her why she hadn’t said, Or I have to be around. “What about Hanna?”

She tried to throw a dish towel at me, laughing. “Babies don’t count.”

“What about when I grow up and Hanna grows up and we’re really old. Like ten and eighteen? I still can’t make them by myself?” I grinned and picked up the towel and, with a hook shot, landed it back on the table where Mom had picked it up from. “What about when we’re twenty and twenty-eight? Or sixty-one and sixty-nine? An old lady, an old man? I still can’t make them?”

Mom looked away for a moment but not before I saw the edge of her mouth quiver and then turn down.