There it is, that flutter of hope back in my heart. “You really think?”
“Of course—why not? Look at the deal he’s getting! He gets to stay with you, have his business here, start a new one in Canada—there’s no downside for him, Tami.”
“He does like to ski,” I say, recalling how he mentioned earlier today about wanting to go skiing in Utah this winter.
“See? He could ski all winter!” she says. “And it’s really not too far to visit. It’s no different than if you lived in New York or Boston. It’s just a long plane ride, with one or maybe two transfers. We can visit all the time, and Ike can come back and forth ... maybe he has to stay here a few months longer than you because of the shop, but that’s okay, right? That’s not the end of the world. Going to jail, or being sent back to Iran—
that’s
the end of the world. And then, in ten years, you can come back!”
I like this idea. I like it very much, and I think Ike might like it, too. It’s more complicated than what we have now, and I know he likes things to be simple, but we can’t keep what we have now, anyway. That’s not an option, so ... why not, Ike? Why not give it a try?
I’m back at home having tea in the backyard with Rose when Ike returns, looking weary and broken. I start to get up and go to him, to kiss him hello, as usual, but something about his approach stops me. He watches me warily, as if I’m someone he hardly knows. As if I’m not his wife.
Rose, on the other hand, does go to him. She pats his cheek and announces she’s going inside and would he like any coffee. He says no, thank you, he doesn’t feel like any coffee. He takes her chair and sits back in it with his legs spread and his fingers intertwined.
“You don’t feel like coffee?” I say, smiling. “You always feel like coffee.”
“Listen, Tami,” he says. “We need to talk.”
“We do,” I agree.
“Can I ask what you’re smiling for?” he says. “Did we not just attend the same immigration interview?”
“I’m smiling because ... Ike, how would you feel about moving to Canada with me?”
I lean forward to convey my excitement, but he does the opposite, startling backward.
“Canada?” he says. “Are you serious?”
I can’t tell from how he said it if he meant it in a good or a bad way. I decide he meant it in a good way.
Are you serious!?!?!
“Sure! We could open a coffee shop there. A whole chain, maybe. It’s colder—people probably drink more coffee in Canada, wouldn’t you think? I talked with Maryam, and they’re willing to lend us the money—we were thinking Toronto, but, really, anywhere’s fine. We could go wherever you want, and then in ten years, we move back here. What do you think?”
Ike is expressionless. “What about the shop here?”
“We’ll hire a manager for it.”
“With what money?” he says. “We weren’t going to be drawing a salary for at least six months, probably longer, remember? We might have money in the bank, but that’s all to carry the cost of the coffee shop until it can carry itself. We need that for cash flow. We can’t afford to hire a manager. You know perfectly well that we’re in the sweat-equity phase of the business.”
“Ardishir will help out with the money,” I say.
“Wouldn’t it be easier for you to go to court and appeal the decision?”
I was afraid he’d say this. “We won’t win, Ike.”
“You don’t know that.” Now he’s the one who sits forward, and I’m the one who shrinks back. “We try again, and we keep on trying. That’s what we do.”
“You want to be arrested, Ike? You want to put your future at risk like that?”
“No one’s going to arrest me,” he says. “Hernandez was just trying to scare us.”
“Well, it worked.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t take much to scare you,” he says. “That’s pretty much your standard operating procedure, remember? ”
Excuse me?
“I knew you were going to do this,” he says. “I sat up there on the porch at the cabin, and I just knew it. I knew you wouldn’t fight. I couldn’t come up with any possible circumstance under which you’d agree to go to court. You’re going to slink out of town like a beaten-down animal, and you’re going to go through the same thing again somewhere else. Because wherever you go, there you are, Tami. Until you learn to fight, you’re never going to get what you want.”
I will not cry.
I will not cry.
“If I thought I had any chance of winning, Ike, I’d fight with everything I had.”
“You
do
have a chance of winning,” he says. “That’s what an appeal is—it’s a fresh look at the situation. Hernandez didn’t even ...” He shakes his head in disgust. “Some judge out there is going to look at the fact that we’re crazy in love with each other, and we have a business together. We have contracts together. Leases. We have family in town. You’re not going to be a drain on society. You’re not some sort of risk to the country, Tami. There’s got to be some sane judge who’s going to recognize that!”
“That’s not what this is about,” I say. “It’s about taking advantage of someone’s generosity. That’s what I did. The government didn’t have to give me a visa in the first place, but they did. They said, hey, yes, sure. You can come see your sister for three months, absolutely! Just, when your visa expires, understand that you have to go home. I didn’t keep my end of the bargain, and they have every right to make me leave.”
“Whose side are you on?” Ike’s voice is raised, angry. “I don’t think there’s a lawyer out there who could argue against you better than you just argued against yourself.”
“It’s the truth, Ike.”
“I thought you married me because you loved me.”
“I
did
marry you because I love you.”
“I’m your
husband
,” he says. “And I’m a citizen. They
don’t
have the right to keep my wife from me. Who’s the government to tell me who I can love? They need to get the hell out of my bedroom.”
“You want to go to court so you can tell them that.”
“Damn straight I do.”
“But guess what?” I say. “You can go to court, and you can say those things, and you can fight on principle, but you’re still going to lose.
We’re still going to lose.
And when we do, we lose control of what happens. They might arrest you. They’ll definitely arrest me.”
“You don’t know that,” he says. “You’re just talking out of fear again instead of facts. They might give you months before you’d have to leave!”
“And maybe not,” I say bitterly. “You live in a world, Ike, where you think your best-case scenario is what’s always going to happen. That you’ll get the result you want, or that you deserve. But let me tell you the worst-case scenario, okay? It’s pretty ugly. Worst-case scenario is that you get arrested and get out of jail in, I don’t know, maybe three months, maybe a year, maybe you even get out on bail the same day. Me? I don’t have it so good. They handcuff me, arrest me, put me on some military plane and take me to God knows where, some immigration detention facility where no one can find me, or they dump me in Iran, or ... who knows?
We just don’t know.
You say we create our own destiny, but not by going to court we don’t, and that’s why moving to Canada—now, voluntarily—is the right thing to do. Don’t you see that?”
He slams his fist on the table. “
I don’t want to move to Canada! I don’t want your family’s money!
I want to make my
own
way in the world. I don’t want to get by on the generosity of other people.”
“Is it so wrong to let other people help you?”
“It is when you can take care of yourself,” he says. “And that’s all I’m asking you to do. This is not a new issue, Tami. It’s the same old one—your unwillingness to do what’s hard for you to do, which is to stand up and fight for yourself. To fight for
us.
” He sits forward and softens his tone. “I want you in court. I know it’s going to be hard for you. I know you’ll shake like a leaf and your knees will knock and your voice will quiver. But that’s your truth, Tami, and there’s beauty in it. Freedom’s not for the faint of heart—remember I told you that once?”
But I
am
faint of heart. “I’ll lose, Ike.” Tears stream down my face.
Not his, though. His eyes are dry and piercing, so blue I can hardly stand it. “You lose by not fighting, Tami.”
I lose
him
by not fighting. This is what he’s saying.
“Can we just go to Canada, Ike? Please? It’s the last thing I’ll ever ask you to do for me, I promise.”
“Tami, I can’t.” His voice breaks. “I can’t ignore the basic, fundamental problem between us anymore. We’re at a point in our relationship—a crossroads, if you will. And if you’re not willing to do this for me, then I’ll lose respect for you, and if that happens, we can’t make a life together no matter where we are.” His eyes are both loving and earnest, and very, very determined. “I need to see you strong, for once. I need to see you fight, for once—to fight for us. Because if this life we have together—here in Tucson—isn’t worth fighting for, Tami, then what is?”
Chapter 29
F
our days later, the letter arrives, bearing the news we knew it would.
Your application for residency has been denied.
A court date is set for next week; it’s not a date I intend to keep.
Half of me is in shock, a not-unfamiliar feeling. My childhood took place during a time of war, Iran versus Iraq, and during that eight-year period, our entire country walked around shell-shocked—mourning profusely for all the dead soldiers, of course, but shell-shocked just the same. You can see only so much destruction, so many bombed-out houses, so many limbless men, so many orphaned children. You can see only so much, and then it ceases to register anymore. You block it out so you can go on. That’s me, now, again. Shell-shocked. I’ve fought my own small war for independence, and I’ve lost.
I’ve cried my tears. I’ve told myself to be grateful for the good times we had, that these extra months in America have been a gift—and I am grateful. All the same, I’ve surrendered to the inevitable. It always did seem too good to last.
But while part of me is in shock, the other part is very focused on what I need to do, which is find a way to get to Canada. Six months ago I couldn’t have done it. I couldn’t have moved to a new place alone and created a whole new life. Now I have no doubt that I can. And if Canada doesn’t work, I’ll go to Europe, or to Mexico, or I’ll become a nomad, a citizen of nowhere. The silly lines drawn on silly maps have nothing to do with me. I’ll respect no border.
I’m tough, aren’t I?
Not really, but it helps that Ike’s making it easy for me to go. He’s never home, and when I turn up at the coffee shop, he finds an errand to run, a reason to leave. It seems we’ve lost our common ground. There’s always something between us—literally. In bed, it’s Old Sport. In the driveway, it’s the door of the car. At the coffee shop, it’s the counter, or a table, or an armful of binders. Anything to block the natural, physical pull we used to have. The last time Ike thought I was leaving, he said,
Let’s not waste a single minute.
What happened to that, Ike?
I’m prepared to go, but there are a few good-byes I must say, and a few things I must do, the most important of which is to host Maryam’s baby shower.
We have it in her hospital room a week earlier than intended, and from her bed, my sister is the beautiful queen of the party. We have a catered lunch from the Tucson Tamale Company and a Welcome Baby chocolate cake from Cakes by Clara. Maryam gets so many adorable items for the baby, so many cute outfits. My gift is a handcrafted plaque for the baby’s room that says
Home Is Where Your Story Begins.
This makes Maryam cry. We play all the games she wanted us to play, such as Baby Shower Bingo and Baby Pictionary. Ardishir is the only male in attendance, and he plays along good-naturedly. Among the guests are Maryam’s two favorite nurses, Janine and Noreen, as well as friends from Maryam’s old job at Macy’s, along with her Persian women friends from the community. My contingent attends, too—Rose, Eva, Agata. My friends know what has happened to me, of course, but we keep it from the other members of the party. We must make time for celebration, even in the midst of tragedy.
The plan is this: I’m going to San Francisco to visit Nadia and to meet her new daughter. Also, I have that promise to fulfill for my father, that bottle of sand I must sprinkle on the ocean shore. These are the reasons I’ve given Ike. But here’s my secret: When I get on the plane to visit Nadia, I won’t be coming back.
San Francisco is a sixteen-hour drive from Vancouver, Canada, or a three-hour flight. From San Francisco, I’ll be going to Canada, I think by car so I can see more of America. Only Maryam and Rose and Nadia know this. Nadia has even agreed to go with me and stay until I’m settled. Two women and a baby, on the loose in Vancouver. Sounds fun, yes? The others, I’ll tell once I’m across the border. I don’t want any last-minute, white-knight gestures from Ike, although that seems unlikely in any case. I’m pretty sure he won’t come after me in San Francisco like he did in Las Vegas. When he’s willing to talk to me, he still insists I should go to court. Ardishir agrees with Ike, although as yet he hasn’t been able to find a lawyer who thinks I have a chance. None of us will change our mind, and none of us has anything new to say. All we’re doing is making each other miserable.
The morning I’m to leave, I ride my bicycle to Ike’s parents’ house. Ardishir and I prepared legal papers transferring my half of the coffee shop to them upon receipt of the amount of money I’ve invested so far. My intention is to put the envelope in their mailbox without having to talk to anyone, but as I’m slipping it in the box out front, I hear Camille call out, “Auntie Tami’s here! Hi, Auntie Tami! Mommy, Auntie Tami’s here!” She waves at me from behind the screen security door that keeps her safe inside.