out of her skin, the muscles in her jaw clenching
But other times it was worse: nights when Deya would lie in bed and hear Adam yelling on the other side of the wall, her mother weeping, then even more terrible sounds. A bang against the wall. A loud yelp. Adam screaming again. Deya would cover her ears, shut her eyes, curl up in a ball, and tell herself a story in her head until the noises faded in the background, until she could no longer hear her mother pleading, “Adam, please . . . Adam, stop . . .”
“What are you thinking about?” Nora asked, studying her sister’s face. “What are you remembering?”
“Nothing,” Deya said, though she could feel her face betray her. Sometimes Deya wondered if it was her mother’s sadness that made her sad, if perhaps when Isra died, all her sorrows had escaped and settled in Deya instead.
“Come on,” Nora said, sitting up. “I can see it on your face. Tell me.”
“It’s nothing. Besides, it’s getting late.”
“Pretty please. Soon you’ll be married, and then . . .” Her voice dwindled to a whisper. “Your memories are all I have left of them.”
“Fine.” Deya sighed. “I’ll tell you what I remember.” She straightened and cleared her throat. But she didn’t tell Nora the truth. She told her a story.
Spring 1990
Isra arrived in New York the day after her wedding ceremony, via a twelve-hour flight from Tel Aviv. Her first glimpse of the city was from the plane as they approached John F. Kennedy Airport. Her eyes widened and she pressed her nose against the window. She thought she had fallen in love. It was the city itself that captivated her first, immaculate buildings stories high—hundreds of them. From above, Manhattan looked so thin, like the buildings could just crack it in half, as though they were too heavy for that small sliver of land. As the plane neared the earth, Isra felt herself swell up. The Manhattan skyline turned from toylike to mountainous, its towers and citadels shooting upward like fireworks bursting into the sky, overwhelming in height and power, making Isra feel small, yet at the same time bewildered by their beauty, as if they were something out of a fairy tale. Even if she had read a thousand books, nothing could compare to the feeling she had now as she inhaled the view.
She could still see the skyline when the plane landed, though now it was a faint outline with a bluish hue on the far horizon. If Isra squinted, it almost seemed like she was looking at the mountains of Palestine, the buildings like dusty hills in the distance. She wondered what else she would see in the days to come.
“This is Queens,” Adam told her as they waited in line for a cab outside the airport. Once inside the minivan, Isra sat near a window in the back row, hoping Adam would sit beside her, but Sarah and Fareeda joined her instead. “It’s about a forty-five-minute ride to Brooklyn where we live,” Adam continued as he sat beside his brothers in the middle row. “If we’re not stuck in traffic, that is.”
Isra studied Queens through the taxicab window, eyes wide and watering in the March sunlight. She searched for the immaculate skyline she had seen from the plane, but it was nowhere in sight. All she could see were endless gray roads, curving and looping back in on themselves, with cars—hundreds of cars—zooming along them without stopping. Adam said they were two miles from the exit to Brooklyn, and Isra watched as the cabdriver merged to the left lane, following a sign that read BELT PARKWAY RAMP.
They sailed along a narrow highway so close to the water Isra thought the cab might slip and fall in. She didn’t know how to swim. “How are we driving so close to the water?” she managed to ask, eyeing a large ship in the distance, a cluster of birds soaring above it.
“Oh, this is nothing,” Adam said. “Wait until you see the bridge.”
And then it appeared, right in front of her, long and silver and elegant, like a bird spreading its wings over water. “That’s the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge,” Adam said, watching Isra’s eyes widen. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“It is,” she said, panicking. “Are we driving on it?”
“No,” Adam said. “That bridge connects Brooklyn to Staten Island.”
“Has it ever fallen?” she whispered, eyes glued to the bridge as they neared it.
She could hear his smile in his reply. “Not that I know of.”
“But it’s so skinny! It looks like it could snap at any minute.”
Adam laughed. “Relax,” he said. “We’re in the greatest city on earth. Everything here is built by the best architects and engineers. Enjoy the view.”
Isra tried to relax. She could hear Khaled chuckle in the passenger seat. “Reminds me of the first time Fareeda saw the bridge.” He turned back to look at his wife. “I swear she almost cried in fear.”
“Sure I did,” Fareeda said, though Isra noticed that she still seemed nervous as they drove under the bridge. When they came out the other side, Isra exhaled hard, relieved it hadn’t collapsed on them.
It was only after they exited the parkway that Isra had her first glimpse of Brooklyn. It wasn’t what she had expected. Magnificent was a word you could put to Manhattan, but Brooklyn seemed plain in comparison, as though it didn’t belong alongside. All she saw were dull brick buildings covered in murals and graffiti, many of them dilapidated, and people pushing their way through the crowded streets with solemn looks on their faces. It puzzled her. Growing up, she had often wondered about the world outside Palestine, if it were as beautiful as the places she read about in books. She had been certain it would be, studying the Manhattan skyline, had been excited to call that world home. But now, eyeing Brooklyn through the window, seeing the graffiti scrawled on the walls and across the buildings, she wondered if her books had gotten it wrong, whether Mama had been right all along when she’d said the world would be disappointing regardless of where she stood.
“We live in Bay Ridge,” Adam said as the cabdriver stopped beside a row of old brick houses. Isra, Fareeda, and Sarah stood on the sidewalk while the men unloaded the suitcases. Adam held Isra’s suitcase in one hand and gestured around the block with the other. “Many of the Arabs in New York live in this neighborhood,” he said. “You’ll feel right at home.”
Isra surveyed the block. Adam’s family lived on a long, tree-lined street with row houses stacked against one another like books on a shelf. Most of the homes were made of red brick and curved in the front. They had two stories and a basement, with a short, narrow staircase leading to the front door on the first floor. Iron gates separated the houses from the sidewalk. It was a well-kept neighborhood—there were no open gutters or garbage littering the street, and the roads were paved, not dirt. But there was hardly any greenery—only a row of London planes lining the walk. No fruit to pick, no balcony, no front yard. She hoped there was at least a backyard.
“This is it,” Adam said when they reached the front gate of a house numbered 545.
Adam opened the front door and led her inside. “The houses here are quite cramped,” he said as they walked down the hall. Isra silently agreed. She could see the entire first floor from the hall.
