wedding clothes to take with us. Tats’s clothes as well. Linda insisted we get ready there.”
“Who’s us?”
“Us?”
“Us for breakfast?”
“Dania and Lamya, Uncle Bilal and Layth.”
“Layth left,” I say, wondering if I should bring up the fight between Uncle Bilal and Layth. In case she erroneously thinks they’re such a happy family.
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”
From a split in the window drapes that allows parking lot lights to cast into our room, I see Tats’s form on the bed. Gentle snores accompany the lift and fall of her chest. Maybe watching the rhythm of her sleep will also help me fall asleep.
Mom stops stroking me and lets out a big sigh. “Uncle Bilal was so happy Layth was staying for the wedding, he even went and bought him a jacket today. He was trying his best to help Layth.”
“Do you like Uncle Bilal?” I whisper into the pillow.
“What was that?”
“Uncle Bilal?” I ask a bit louder.
“What about him?”
“Do you like him?”
She doesn’t answer.
I look at the digital alarm clock and record the time in my head: Saturday, July 17, 3:18 a.m.
The night before my brother’s wedding. Well, officially the day of his wedding.
And my mom’s gone quiet when I asked her if she likes someone.
“I was honest with you,” I remind her, still talking mostly into the pillow. “I told you who I liked.”
“But my answer affects your life in a bigger way, Janna.” Her voice is so quiet, even though she’s not speaking into the pillow but to the back of my head.
“I think I know the answer, then.” I can’t stop my body from deflating—which is strange, because I’m lying in bed.
It deflates, even though it’s actually filling up with all the unknowns ahead.
It feels like the security and safety I began to let myself feel after Mom and Dad’s divorce, the sense of home being Mom and me, is beginning to escape through a tiny puncture.
Mom puts a hand on my back once more and starts to massage it again, but I do the one thing I don’t want to do, that my mind and heart don’t want me to do, but that my body on its own, completely by free will, by instinct, does: I shake her touch off.
Hard.
She removes her hand, and there’s a frozen stillness behind me that I can feel.
I watch Tats’s breathing and mimic it and pretend to have fallen asleep, but my eyes are wide open, my brain imagining Dania and Lamya and Uncle Bilal in our lives always and forever, intruding on the way things are with Mom and me and Muhammad, and even Sarah now.
That’s my family.
It’s 3:32 a.m. when I hear a noise.
It’s a pulled breath. And then a swallow. And then Mom gets off the bed and goes to the bathroom quietly.
When the door closes, I turn around for a moment to rest on my other side.
The lights from the window show her pillow squashed, a strange blotchy shadow on it.
I sit up and touch the dark spot.
It’s wet.
I flip back around quickly and close my eyes and close myself so I don’t think about what it feels like to cry so much so quietly.
* * *
After Mom’s fallen asleep—and I’m certain by the way her breath becomes even—I flip to her and stare at her face.
I love her.
And I want her all to myself. Is that too much to ask?
I put my hand out and lay it softly on her shoulder.
She doesn’t know how much I love her, I guess.
She opens her eyes right then somehow—like we’re cosmically connected or something—and I draw my hand away. But before I turn around, I say, “I love you.” Really quietly.
I think she heard, because she places a hand on my back, and I can feel that it’s filled with love.
* * *
I wake up for Fajr before Tats’s alarm goes off, pray, and then text her. DON’T WAKE ME UP TO SWIM.
Mom’s reading Qur’an from her phone in the armchair, the light shining on her head, which is covered in her long prayer dress that’s one big circular cloth starting from her head—with a hole for her face—and reaching the floor.
I get into bed and pull the covers up over my hair but allow the folds to fall and make a small, open space through which I can watch Mom.
When she wears her prayer dress, she looks like those stacked wooden Russian dolls that you take apart, each doll becoming smaller. Every single morning, her doll self reads