All We Have Left (28 page)

None of them say anything, they’re all so tired. One older firefighter has a hand clasped to his chest and he’s gasping raggedly for air, leaning heavily on the rail.

One of the last in the group notices Travis and me catch Julia as she abruptly sags in our arms.

“What’s wrong?” he asks. He’s not young, and even though he looks nothing like my father, he reminds me of Ayah with his steady voice and calm gaze. “What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s got some sort of heart condition,” I say.

He leans down over Julia, and for the first time I notice her face is stark white and her lips are blue. Her eyes flutter as she presses a hand to her chest.

He calls up to the other firemen who have already trudged out of sight. “Lieu, I got a woman here having a heart attack or something. Whatcha want me to do?”

There’s a flurry of activity above as someone snaps an order, and another firefighter comes back down and helps lift Julia out of our arms.

“Let’s go,” the older firefighter says, and though his voice is unflappable, I can sense his urgency.

Impulsively I hug him, and his helmet bumps against my head, and his ax pokes into my leg, but he hugs me back, one-armed and without speaking.

“Wait, wait,” Julia whispers, her eyes closed. She opens her eyes and looks straight at us. “Thank you,” she says, and her voice is clear.

We nod, and her eyes drift closed. “Thank you,” she murmurs again.

And then they are gone. The two firemen charge down the stairs, Julia dangling between them, her head resting on one of their shoulders. I frame the picture in my head, because I don’t want to forget.

I notice that Travis is still carrying Julia’s purse, and he sees me noticing.

“I didn’t think the firemen would want to carry it,” he says defensively. “I’m going to make sure it gets back to her.”

“I believe you,” I say softly, and I do. Maybe he
was
thinking about stealing the maintenance guy’s wallet earlier in the sky lobby, but I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that’s not what he’s thinking about now.

“I’m not like you think I am,” he says. “I mean, sure, I’ve gotten into some trouble lately, but it’s not like I’m some sort of career criminal or anything. It’s just … nothing seemed to matter. My dad thinks I’m a pretty horrible excuse for a human being, and it’s hard not to agree with him.”

“You were in college. You said you wanted to be a music teacher.” I stare at him curiously. “How do you go from that to, you know.
That.
” I gesture at the purse he’s carrying, meaning him trying to steal from the guy in the sky lobby, which is a little oblique, but he seems to get it.

He shakes his head. “You’d be surprised how easy it is for everything good about yourself to slip away. I know it was stupid, I always knew it really wasn’t me, but I just couldn’t seem to care enough to stop.”

“Your dad really thinks that about you? That you’re horrible?” I can’t even imagine. No matter what I did, what I said, I know that Ayah will always love me. Even now, when I’m still a little angry at him for not letting me go to the NYU program, I know that he truly believes that he has my best interests at heart.

“When I was a kid,” Travis says slowly, “and it would storm, I used to sneak into bed with my parents. My dad would put his arms around me, and I’d feel so safe, like a kid taco. He’d kiss my forehead, and it felt all scratchy and rough, but still good, you know? I knew he loved me, then. He’s just not a real huggy-feely type of guy. He doesn’t give out praise very often, but when he does, you know he means it. But he is so sure he’s right. He hears what he wants to hear, and thinks what he wants to think. He used to tell me, ‘I get up every morning and get on the side of that mountain and prove I’m a man. What are you going to do to prove what kind of man you are, Travis?’ Like I had an answer; I was ten years
old. But that’s how he sees the world. And now, I know I’ve disappointed him. And I don’t know if he’ll be able to look at me the same way. Mom tells me to just wait, that he’ll come around, but I’m not sure he will.”

I open my mouth, but what on earth is there to say to
that
?

All of a sudden, there’s a call from above us, an urgent command to “move right, move right!”

Travis and I squeeze up against the wall and see the woman coming down the stairs, her eyes wide open and unseeing. “Don’t touch her!” the man behind her yells, and we squeeze back tighter against the wall.

Oh God, oh God, please help me, please help her!
I scream silently in my mind as she drifts toward us silently, like a ghost.

She has what looks like gobs of dirty bubble gum on her face, but I know with a kind of dumb horror that it is her
skin
, blackened by fire, peeling away from her flesh.

She walks by, her eyes unseeing, not even touching the railing. Several people hover around her, afraid to touch her, but still making sure she doesn’t fall.

As she passes me, I see that she has no skin on her back, none at all; it’s just raw, charred flesh. Her skin has rolled up to the back of her neck, like an obscene pink turtleneck.

After she’s gone, I put my hands on my knees because I feel like I’m going to throw up. Travis’s face is pale, his eyes wider.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” someone calls from above us, and I realize that Travis and I are holding up the line.

We start down again.

Adam walks me home from the Peace Center through the heavy night air, swollen mosquitoes buzzing past our ears. His hands are stuffed into his pockets, and he’s not walking particularly close to me, but I feel almost magnetized, like my entire body is being pulled toward him.

“What are you thinking about?” he asks, and the question opens something in me, like my heart has been unfolded and shaken out in the clean, summer air.

“Have you ever kissed a girl?” I ask before I lose my courage.

He doesn’t say anything for a minute, and I feel so stupid.

“Never mind,” I say quickly. “Forget I asked.”

“You’ve been talking to Sabeen, huh?”

“We talked for a while.” I look at the rich, red henna design
Sabeen painted on my palms, an elaborate floral drawing. I like Adam’s sister, even if I get the feeling that she’s worried about Adam and me. The fact that she thinks there’s something to worry
about
makes me feel warm and jittery inside.

“Well, Sabeen thinks she knows what’s best for me, and maybe she does, but what
I choose to do
,” he says and shivers race up and down my arms, “is none of her business.”

How can words have this effect on me, like I jumped into a lake so icy that it burns and makes me feel heady and alive? His eyes are on me, and something tells me that he can see what I’m feeling.

We walk in silence for a few minutes.

“What else do you have? I’m almost afraid to ask,” he says, and turns to smile at me.

It’s like he is handing me a key to himself, and the unexpected power of it makes me brave. “Do you ever regret being Muslim? I’ve been thinking about how we’re born into this world with no control of
what
we are, and it seems like we spend the rest of our lives trying to make people see
who
we are.”

He gives me a quick glance, but whatever he sees in my face seems to reassure him.

“My father says that coming to America made him a better Muslim,” he says, kicking some leaves off the road. “When he was in college, things had gotten pretty bad in Syria, and people were being arrested and killed by the thousands. One day Dad and his brother helped some people who
were being attacked in the street. That night he got a call telling him not to go to his finals at the university the next day, that there would be people waiting for him. He left that night and eventually made his way to America. His brother didn’t believe the warning, and was never seen again. When my dad first got here, he applied for political asylum, but he said he was determined to hate pizza and jeans because he thought somehow that would keep him from forgetting his home country.”

“Pizza and jeans?” I ask, and a small burble of laughter escapes me.

“I know.” Adam laughs. “Now pizza is his favorite food. But he didn’t want to lose himself here, so for a while he did everything he could to not forget where he came from. But after he graduated from college and got a job, he decided it was pretty cool to live in a country where you didn’t have to be worried about just disappearing one night, like his brother did. He married my mom, a good southern girl from Louisiana, and by the time my sister and I were born, he had hired a lawyer to try to move the immigration proceedings along, but then 9/11 happened …” He stops.

“What?” I put my hand on his arm, and he stares down at it and then up at me, and something kind of breaks in his eyes. I hold my breath, my gaze locked with his for a long moment, and then he grabs my hand and squeezes it.

We continue walking, hand in hand, something big and unsaid filling the space between us.

Adam clears his throat and continues, his voice husky. “I only remember some of it. I was only three, but Sabeen remembers more. We were living in New York City, and my sister remembers my mother carrying her out to the living room and seeing my father in handcuffs. Both Sabeen and I were crying, and there were all these strangers in the house, some of them with guns. They were all talking in loud voices, even to my mother, who had converted and changed her name by then. They took my dad to jail. He was there for two months, like he was a common criminal, not an engineer with a job and a family, who had never done anything wrong in his entire life. They said it was because he was here illegally, but it’s not like he was hiding or anything. He had a lawyer, he’d put in an appeal, he was just waiting to hear back. I remember being scared, and my mom telling me it would be okay, that, God willing, my father would come home soon. Then one day they let him out of jail. No apologies or explanations, just
you’re free to go.
”

“That’s terrible,” I say, and squeeze his fingers.

He looks down at our linked hands. “My dad said it made him a better Muslim, because he saw how important it was for him to show Americans that all Muslims weren’t like the ones who hijacked those planes. His citizenship application was eventually approved, we moved to Michigan, and my parents became involved in outreach for the Muslim American community. It’s not like they were the only ones that happened to. A ton of Muslims were arrested after 9/11,
some of them for less reason than my dad. It’s always been like that and always
is
going to be like that, one group singled out for one reason or another. It’s just our turn.”

He says this so matter-of-factly that my stomach turns.

“What?” He sees my face, and shrugs. “Yeah, I know, it sucks. But eventually there’ll be another group to hate on. Most people don’t give me a hard time because my dad is from another country, or that I’m Muslim. It’s hard though, because I want to believe the best in people, but time and time again, I get proved wrong.” He looks away, but he grips my hand, and tiny trembles course through my stomach and chest.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper.

We’re standing outside the shop. Fireflies are swirling around, and we watch them for a few minutes, shining their tiny lights in all that darkness.

“You better go in,” he says.

“Okay,” I say, but I don’t want to let go of his hand.

We stand for a few moments and then he releases my hand and I go up the stairs.

It’s only after I’m inside that I realize he never answered my question about whether or not he’d ever kissed anybody.

That night, Dad and I watch a show about someone doing a makeover on her kitchen. We don’t talk much, but it’s a good silence, not the awful, bottomless pit that it used to be. The
hopeful part of me thinks
maybe things can change. Maybe they
can
get better
.

Later, my cell phone rings and it flashes an unknown number. I almost don’t answer it, but I sigh and go stand by my window where I have better reception.

“Hello?”

“Is this Jesse?” a woman’s voice says. Her voice is breathy, as if she’s excited, or having trouble breathing.