The Night Counter (26 page)

“I hid you from all the rough parts,” Brenda replied.

“Nah-uh,” Decimal said. “In fact, I’m not going to tell my kid even 40 percent of the stuff you’ve told me you’ve gone through.”

Decimal sat down next to Hala. “Gran, everyone says my mom is a loser for having a kid when she did and stuff. Can you imagine how much more of a loser she’d be without me to keep it together for her? What if I would be lost without this person inside me, you know?”

“What about college, baby?” Brenda asked. She ran her fingers through Decimal’s hair and adjusted her hairpin.

“Gran was telling me just today how the U is a perfectly fine place to go to school,” Decimal said. “It’s not Ivy League, but it’s not the crap school you said it was when you decided not to go to college. Maybe we could try a baby-sitting system.”

“That didn’t work with you,” Brenda said. “That’s why I decided it was a crap college and quit.”

“I’m better at figuring out things than you,” Decimal reminded her.

Brenda jiggled her leg. Hala held it down. Then Decimal put a hand on Hala’s leg to stop her jiggling.

“I’m only one-third happy about this and the rest just scared poor,” Brenda said, readjusting her shirt and bra. “You have no idea what this is doing to me.”

“I do,” Hala said.

Decimal sneezed, and the other two each handed her a Kleenex.

LATER THAT NIGHT
, Decimal took the prenatal vitamins Hala had given her, along with a long list of other things for her allergies and sight and hearing issues. Decimal read through the list one more time and then put on her baggiest flannel pajamas and curled up in bed to finish writing her letter.

IT WAS THE
dawn of the next morning when Scheherazade forced her hand out of Fatima’s fortress grip so that she could fold the Hello Kitty letter closed. The more Scheherazade had read, the tighter Fatima’s grip had gotten.

“This girl is thanking me for her decisions?
Allah Yustar
,” Fatima screamed. “I talked to Hala three days ago, and all she said was that there was a nice summer breeze. No mention of this child ever in the last seventeen years of weather reports, and this child is now having a child. Even when Hala comes to visit, she never comes with her daughter, sometimes her sons—two doctors,
nushkar rabna
, praise the Lord. I just assumed her Brenda had become a spinster and it caused her too much pain to talk about it, like it does me with Lena.”

Unable to find a response that would not offend her further, Scheherazade tried massaging Fatima’s shaking hands.

“Speak,” Fatima commanded. “I’m sure you want to reprimand me for having another daughter that didn’t marry a Muslim. Well, you can’t because he converted. It was easy, a meaningless gesture to make us happy.”

“It wasn’t meaningless if it was to make you happy,” Scheherazade pointed out.

“He was still from China,” Fatima answered.

“So? Some of the best tales I tell take place in China. Like the ebony horse who made a prince of a man.
Kan ma kan, fi qadim al-zaman
, there was, there was not in the oldness of time—”

“It’s not about the Chinese,
ya hamra
,” Fatima interrupted. “They
are very smart. If we didn’t invent the Arabic numerals first, the Chinese or the Indians would have, but this Chinese boy was not from our village, not even close. Ibrahim knew how hard it was to marry an outsider. We were sure he would leave Hala for a Chinese girl. I did not want her to be sad later. And look at the results—a child like this. I thought Amir would be the death of me.”

“Perhaps if you had been more welcoming of Dr. Wang,” Scheherazade wondered.

“We were,” Fatima said. “All the loans we took out for Hala’s medical school—we refused when Dr. Wang offered it to pay us back when they became wealthy, as if we didn’t have pride. But his parents … they wanted him to marry a Chinese girl, and so they spoke to Hala in Chinese even though they knew English. That would make her cry.”

“Perhaps you spoke to Dr. Wang in Arabic,” Scheherazade said.

“No, I did not,” Fatima replied. “In fact, I didn’t say a word to him at all in any language. And yet they eloped without telling me.”

“
Oh, child, do not marry a stranger you meet. Our chaff is better than foreign wheat
,” Scheherazade quoted from one of her own stories.

Fatima nodded. “I told Hala how neither Ibrahim nor Marwan would have dared to treat me badly because then my uncles would have taken care of them—come all the way over from Lebanon to do it—and everyone in the village would have known,” she said. “Their whole family would have been shamed. But when a girl marries an outsider, she doesn’t have that protection.”

“He was not a stranger to her.”

“Ha, his parents used to call Hala the white girl like that was bad,” Fatima recalled. “But Millie said being white was the best thing you could be. She said her husband wouldn’t have minded our kids dating each other if he thought of us as white instead of darkies. I had to remind Millie my daughters didn’t date anyone—of any color. They just married.”

“And Hala ended up with two boys and one girl and six grandchildren,” Scheherazade said. “
Smallah, smallah
, she has more descendants than any of your other children. I would call it a successful marriage.”

“Even though she is a gymnologist, I do not think she planned on three children,” Fatima said. “She always said that I had five times too many kids, so I think she only wanted two, which is the number of times she separated from Dr. Wang.”

“You divorced your husband,” Scheherazade countered.

“Only once, and I waited a long time before I did,” Fatima said. “I gave it a chance. For sixty-five years, I gave it a chance. She should have tried longer. Perhaps if they had not separated the first time, their daughter wouldn’t have become such a bad girl. All but one of my girls were long ago married when I divorced. I could not wait on Lena any longer.”

“You and Dr. Wang agree on condemning Hala’s girl,” Scheherazade said. “With so much in common with him, it’s a shame you were one of the causes of his first separation.”

“Do not accuse me of their unhappiness,” Fatima seethed. “It takes time to admit that happiness between two people has left forever.”

“Where did your happiness go?”

“It wasn’t the disappearance of happiness so much as the appearance of sadness.” Fatima sighed. “We were too peaceful. Too peaceful. We hardly talked for thirty years.”

“Ah, you could no longer trust him with your words,” Scheherazade said.

“I still trust him.”

“What is love if not trust?” Scheherazade said. “My husband did not behead me because he trusted me to be faithful, unlike his first wife had been with her servant.”

“I am not a heroine like you,” Fatima said, defending herself. “But my Hala was born in a time of heroes and rationing. There was even a shortage of births. It was the end of the world war. I was one of the few that had a husband too old to go in the military, so I kept on having babies. Hala was the third girl in a row, so I felt Ibrahim’s fear even though she was a happy child. … She always gave me things, things she made at school, look, even her diploma.”

Fatima pointed out a framed photocopy of Hala’s diploma from the
University of Michigan medical school. Then she flicked Decimal’s letter away from her bed.

“Those who give like to get,” Scheherazade said. “Give her the house.”

“What would people say in the village square about her family?” Fatima shuddered. “
Inshallah
, I have Amir and Tiffany, which makes it much easier for me to die from the shame that will surely get me now.”

“But Amir can’t—” Scheherazade censored herself as Fatima was too shaken by the letter to take any more bluntness. “Accidents have been happening since before the
jahiiyaa
, the time of ignorance. We do not abandon people for accidents, and I think Hala understands that.”

“I did not protect my children well from accidents,” Fatima said as heavy tears formed in her eyes.

“Surely you cannot be this tormented merely by babies born out of wedlock, as shameful as that is?” Scheherazade clucked as she gently wiped away Fatima’s first tear with the edge of her veil.

Fatima pushed the veil away. “
Khallas
. Enough,” she pleaded. Scheherazade thought to inquire a little further. But Fatima lifted her hand to make her stop talking, and Scheherazade understood that Fatima’s thoughts were no longer about Hala.

Then she fell silent for the longest period since Scheherazade had met her. Scheherazade attempted a slightly different approach. “So if you had a daughter that married from the village, she would have been your happiest child?”

“But I do have a daughter who married from the village,” Fatima said, slowly looking at Scheherazade again. “Miriam. Ibrahim’s first child.”

“Ah, the firstborn.” Scheherazade smiled, trying to get back to the prideful Fatima. “Always so dear.”

“Her face was the plainest of all my daughters,” Fatima said. “But it was never easy to see her face because she was always looking at the ground, especially when the children at school began making fun of her. She had a twisted foot when she was born.”

“Still, a boy from your village wanted her.” Scheherazade beamed.

“All my married daughters were pretty enough to marry on their own at least once,” Fatima asserted. “Except Miriam. But
al-hamdillah
, we were able to marry her off. To Joseph Yusef. In New castle in Pennsylvania. Joseph Yusef’s great-great-grandfather was once one of the biggest landowners in our valley, but he had so many children and they had so many children that eventually no one had a piece of land big enough to make a living from. Joseph Yusef’s grandfather left Deir Zeitoon because the American missionaries told many young men in our village that America was the saved place.”

“His father became a Christian?” Scheherazade said.

“Don’t be silly,” Fatima said. “He was saved financially. The missionaries visited Deir Zeitoon once and brought us many Bibles in English and lots of medicine. Mama said not to worry about the Bibles. They only wanted to make the Mount Lebanon Christians their kind of Christians. They gave me a Bible they had translated into Arabic, and Mama told me to thank them and not mention that I couldn’t read it in any language.”

“Would your grandmother, the great matchmaker, have chosen Joseph Yusef for Miriam if everyone were still back in Deir Zeitoon?” Scheherazade asked.

“What other choices were there, really?” Fatima said. “Ibrahim met Joseph Yusef at a village convention in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, which has no Lebanese people, but the Deir Zeitoonis thought it was a funny name, so they put on their tarbooshes and got together there every year. One day, Ibrahim asked Joseph Yusef, who had driven his grandfather there, if he would like to marry Miriam.”

“She and Joseph Yusef agreed so amicably to your arrangement?” Scheherazade wondered.

“I’m sure they would have been happy if Joseph Yusef had lived long enough for the marriage to last more than six months,” Fatima said. “But at least she had a child.”

“
Ya’salam.
” Scheherazade winked. “She had another miracle baby like Amir.”

“No,” Fatima corrected. “She got pregnant right before Joseph went to Vietnam. He was one of the last American soldiers to die there … finally, something she was able to feel proud about. Which was far more than Ibrahim was expecting her to get from marriage. …
Ya Allah
, how can I talk to Ibrahim again? I must call him back to prepare the will for the house in Arabic, but I might blurt out something about this terrible letter girl. I will die of this shame, won’t I?”

Fatima bowed her head, her purple stubs staring Scheherazade in the face. It was dawn, and Fatima had not slept all night. Even an old lady counting down time should be spared at least a few hours of conscious mind, especially if it was holding her back from calling the man who loved her. Scheherazade reached into the Ottoman coin belt tied around her waist and pulled out a little satchel filled with chamomile leaves and special herbs. With Fatima’s troubled eyes shifted to the letter on the ground, Scheherazade slipped the contents of the satchel in her water glass. She handed Fatima the glass and wiped off one of the pills Fatima had tossed on the floor. She lifted Fatima’s head with her hand.

“Take just one of these pills,” Scheherazade said. “
Min shan khatri
, for my sake.”

“Promise you’ll tell me then,” Fatima replied.

Scheherazade put her hand to her heart. “I will tell you everything I can tell you. I vow on your mother’s mother’s grave.”

Fatima’s hand went to her heart at this most solemn of promises. She swallowed the pill, with Scheherazade guiding the water down her throat until she shoved her away.

“That’s enough. I’m not your camel,” Fatima said. Her focus was already beginning to fade, and Scheherazade gently brushed her hands across her eyes as she drifted into dreams, surely of the house in Deir Zeitoon.

Scheherazade put the covers over Fatima and lay the dress she had brought from Lebanon on top so that the old lady would have something beautiful to wake up to.

In the meantime, Scheherazade decided, she would pass this new day
with Miriam, a daughter whom Fatima had not asked her to go see, as if she were beyond concern, perhaps because she was well taken care of as a martyr’s widow.

Scheherazade flew across the mountains and across the widest expanse of wheat fields since the glory days of the Fertile Crescent until she came upon a quiet town of tiny hills dotted with sizable homes, most marred by chipped paint, overgrown lawns, and silence. Not far from there a town for bigger houses identical to one another was being built. That was where Scheherazade found Miriam and the war hero’s son. Fatima’s bump on his nose was partially hidden from the sun by a hard hat.