I looked at Ali, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. He stared at the wall instead—stared at a blank, bright wall with a barely contained anger I’d never even known him to possess. I couldn’t process this right now. Not right now.
My mother was in the hospital.
I turned back around. “Shayda— Please—”
“Why are you even with him? He doesn’t associate with people like us anymore. His reputation can’t handle it.”
I felt Ali move before I saw the motion. He stalked toward my sister, looking suddenly murderous, eyes flashing. I could tell he was about to say something and I nearly shouted just to beat him to it.
“Stop,” I said. “Shayda, you’re yelling at the wrong person. Please. Please just tell me what happened. I couldn’t understand what you said on the phone. Is she hurt? How did she get here? Did you have to call an ambulance?”
Fear flitted in and out of Shayda’s face, giving her away. Her eyes shone, then dulled, the only evidence of the war within her, and in that moment she transformed. She was suddenly more than my stupid sister—she was the sister I loved, the sister for whom I would cut off an appendage, take a bullet. I pulled her into my arms even as she stiffened, held on tight when she softened. I heard the hitch in her breath.
“Whatever it is, it’s going to be okay,” I whispered, and she flinched. Jerked back. Became a stranger.
“Why do you smell like cigarettes?”
Panic rioted through me.
Lie, I screamed at myself. Lie, you idiot.
“That’s my fault,” Ali said, and I spun around, stunned. His anger was gone, but in its absence he looked wrung-out. Run-down. “My bad.”
“You smoke now?” Shayda again. “That’s disgusting. And haram.”
“Really?” he asked, eyebrows up. “I thought it was a gray area.”
Shayda’s eyes darkened. “Whatever. You can go now.”
Ali didn’t move. He looked away from Shayda, his eyes glancing off the wall, the ceiling, the floor. But he didn’t move.
He looked at me.
“Are you sure you want me to go? Do you guys even have a ride home?”
“Shayda has her car,” I explained.
“What about your dad? Do you want me to call him?”
I was still processing that, still trying to find a tidy way to explain that my father was likely sleeping in a room not unlike the one my mother currently occupied when he said—
“What about Mehdi? Did h—”
Ali froze, as suddenly as if he’d been struck by lightning. Slowly, he dragged both hands down his face.
“Fuck,” he breathed. Squeezed his eyes shut. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Shayda walked away.
She left, left without a word, the lines of her lean form rippling in the distance. Me, I’d fossilized in place. I stood staring at a single flickering bulb in the brightly lit corridor long after she disappeared from sight. My sister was wrong about many things, but she was at least partly right about one: Ali didn’t associate with us anymore.
It was surreal how it happened, surreal how different my life had become in his absence. Ali and I, Shayda and Zahra—we used to see each other every day. My first year of high school we’d all carpool, our moms taking turns driving us to and from campus. Once Ali and Shayda got their own cars they tore free, only too happy to break up the band, pursue their independence. Still, my life kept colliding into his. His life kept colliding into mine. Ali and I had been fixtures in each other’s lives for five years until one day, a week before my brother died, everything between us broke. We stopped talking at the beginning of my junior year, his senior year.
Overnight, we’d become strangers.
“Shadi.”
I looked up.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m—”
I shook my head too fast. “Oh, Ali. It’s okay.” I smiled and realized I was crying, my eyes bleeding slow tears that made no sound. My emotions had finally boiled over. I didn’t know why they chose that moment, didn’t know why they were directed at him; but I knew, even then, even as I could do nothing about it, that the picture I made must’ve been terrifying.
Ali looked struck; he stepped forward.
I walked away.
Eight
The teakettle was screaming.
I stared at it, the steam curling, silver body shuddering on the stovetop, demanding attention. We had an old electric stove, its white paint chipping in places, burned-on grease splattered across the steel drip-bowls within which sat lopsided heating elements. The lopsided heating elements made it so that nothing heated evenly, which made it impossible to cook anything properly on this stove, which was one of the quiet shames of my family. The only thing this stove ever did well was bring water to an acceptable boil.
I turned down the heat. Poured the hot water from the kettle into the waiting belly of a porcelain teapot, brewing the leaves within. I wrapped the whole thing in a hand towel, set it aside, let it steep. We didn’t have a proper samovar, so this would have to suffice.
I heard murmurs of conversation coming from the living room, where my mother and my sister were waiting. I did, did not want to join them, did, did not want to know what they were discussing. I lingered in the kitchen too long, arranging cookies on a plate, selecting glasses for our tea.
My mother had thought she was having a heart attack.
Shayda was at the house when it happened, called 911. She’d called me, too, apparently, several times, but my dying phone had connected only once. The ambulance came, drove straight to our home for the third time in as many weeks, strapped my mother to a stretcher, and wheeled her away.
