the trees. But eventually I left. For three months I dug foundations and mixed concrete in one place. For a full year I planted seedlings and watered the plants that grew from them. I learned to weave chairs from bamboo, to build protective barriers around turtle nests and runways so the hatchlings could find their way to the ocean without getting lost. In all this time, I have not gone home. On the phone my mother’s voice has grown colder, my father no longer asks when I will come back. Only my aunt Zaynab laughs at the sound of my voice.
When her third and final husband died, Zaynab refused to mourn. My grandmother, older and widowed by then, did not interfere. Even when Zaynab was seen laughing in public, wearing yellow and violet, her hair newly bleached and permed, my grandmother shook her open palms at those who spoke. ‘Enough,’ she said. ‘Words have a taste, just like food.’
A month before I had left I’d swallowed fist-fuls of pills and at the hospital they pumped my stomach twice to get them out. I had taken them while in bed, had pulled the covers above my head and closed my eyes. Falling asleep I had seen a lionfish swimming among the corals, a koala perched on a eucalyptus tree. The air was clear, and I could breathe. I woke up in a hospital room filled with the smell of disinfectant and the sound of my parents’ screams. They yelled at doctors, at nurses, at me. ‘Please get better,’ they said. ‘Please make her better.’ As everyone else moved about the room in fevered frenzy, only my grandmother stood still, rubbing my feet with one hand and working her beads with the other. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Hundreds of female names in our language, but ours means triumph and nothing else.’
When she died two years ago I sat near a drying river thousands of miles from home and tried to imagine what she was like as a girl. I had seen only a single photo from before she was married; already by then her eyes were those of a woman, an island in rolling ocean. She had been married at fifteen, had borne seven children before she was twenty-four. With her hands she had sorted a lifetime of rice and lentils, had gutted fish and deboned chicken. She knew how to upholster furniture and help grapevine spread and climb, how to cover bruises and scars so no one could see them, how to measure the value of her life and still rise.
**
They sleep, and in shadowed lands unsheathe their swords and thrust them at who comes. False warriors swathed in robes try to crush them with their stones, stab them with their daggers. But the morning star appears, flushes the sky a milky pearl and lights their way. The blood they draw is soiled but feeds the land. Clusters of acacia trees sprout and grow at their feet, their flowers shade them as the day grows hot. Three cranes, with black-tipped wings and bright red crowns, circle above them, exalted monarchs of their skies.
When they wake it is in gardens, labyrinthine and immense. Thick walls of boxwood keep them from seeing in any direction and they are not tall enough to peer over the edges. Instead they call to one another through the plants, follow each other’s footsteps as they fade. Though the road is sinuous, eventually they find its end, a sheer cliff’s edge that beckons them to fall. They retreat, some quicker than others, some lingering near the tip, considering the weightlessness of their bodies if they fall, the weight of them if they stay.
It is only when the first one tilts over, seemingly stumbles into air, that more approach. One by one now they jump, some with eyes closed and legs pulled up toward thumping chests; others with arms spread and flapping, voices echoing as they go. Some dive, headfirst, arms at their sides, bodies like arrows. At different speeds they descend, some directly down like raindrops, others more slowly, in smooth, undulating motion as if across invisible hills.
What do they see? A gazelle nursing a lion, a camel running through a valley, its face unbridled, its back unfettered, the air damp, clear.
DISAPPEARANCE
The summer Etan Patz disappeared, New York was burning something fierce. ‘It’s hotter than a hooker in hell,’ my father would say after a day’s work, his collar slack and soiled, his scalp like wet sandpaper.
For three months our mothers kept us indoors, wouldn’t let us out no-way-no-how, convinced that the man who’d snatched Etan was prowling the neighborhood for more. I imagined a lunatic in a sorcerer’s cap stirring a pot of boys with a broom handle, bending over and pinching their thighs to feel for tenderness. Wondered what we’d smell like in that pot. Probably something awful, all that Kool-Aid and Play-Doh, gym socks and rusted pennies, pooled together like that.
‘Let me out, woman,’ I’d demand each morning and duck in time to miss my mother’s palm swinging toward the back of my head. I hated her in those moments, my larger-than-life warden, wide and rubbery like an inflatable raft sheathed in floral cloth. Why I had to be kept from the swimming pool, baseball games and sugar cones balancing scoops of rainbow sherbet, I didn’t understand. She never budged, not once. Stayed like that too, the rest of her life, unyielding as a nail in cement, until we buried her. Even then, at the very end, she’d still go on about ‘Poor Etan.’
Only thing that kept me from grabbing a bedsheet and parachuting out the window that summer was Tommy Palansky. He’d moved into the apartment beneath ours and his mother wasn’t letting him out either. We’d spend every morning running up and down the stairs of our four-story building, the light filtering in through window panes thick with dust and falling across us in streaks of gray. We’d gather Legos, rubber balls, wadded newspaper, candles melted down to their stubs, old slippers – anything we could filch undetected. Then we’d position ourselves on the steps on either side of the stairwell and build military posts out of broken-down cardboard boxes and plastic tubs and declare War with our ragtag arsenal. My brother Ralph would stand in the doorway and watch, drooling all over himself and saying nothing.
‘Ben, let Ralph play with you,’ my mother would holler from the living room where she sat peeling potatoes or snipping green beans into a colander, the record player behind her always screeching nothing but Fairuz.
‘All he does is drool, Ma,’ I’d yell back. I’d hold real still then, listening for the creak of wooden baseboards beneath her swollen feet. Sometimes she’d leave me be a little longer but eventually she’d come, her weight pressing down on linoleum and thudding across the cement of the stairwell. She’d pinch my ear between fingers, plump and damp, and pull me so close I could make out the short black prickles sprouting from her chin.
‘His whole life people gonna look to us to see how they oughta treat him,’ she’d say. But the kid really did drool everywhere, spit that mixed and mingled with all the other fluids he leaked. Sweat and snot and saliva on his face and neck, t-shirts, every Tonka truck and green army man we owned. The heat made it worse. He’d wake up dry enough and by lunchtime he was like a sponge left in a bucket of dirty water.
Rubbing my ear, I’d take his hand and lead him to my post, prop him up on the front line and hand him artillery to launch at Tommy. He was good at taking orders from me when he was in the mood for it, I had to give him that. Would strike Tommy on the shoulder with empty shampoo bottles and right on the head with wooden blocks.
‘That’s not fair, there’s two of you now,’ Tommy would groan.
‘Pipe down. He’s like half a damn person,’ I’d say. Then Tommy would get bored and start crawling on all fours, hooting and roaring and pounding his chest like a mad gorilla or some other wild beast. He’d circle Ralph like that, coming close enough to sniff him and then retracting in disgust. Guess I couldn’t blame him. The kid smelled like pickled eggs most days. Ralph never would react. He’d just stare right ahead and you couldn’t be certain if he was actually seeing Tommy or even looking at him. I can’t say I felt bad for my brother then the way my mother did. Didn’t see any sense in feeling bad for someone who didn’t seem to mind.
‘What
