to listen to it now. “It was a Saturday,” he would say. That was how he always started the story. “It was a Saturday. The Saturday before finals week.” I think he liked that story because it had the easily discernible arc of the American Dream: Immigrant Crosses Ocean, Starts a Business, Becomes a Success.
He told the story from time to time, just to remind himself that everything turned out fine for him. But all that changed one September morning. At least for me, it did. I remember that the smell of smoke reached me first. I was fiddling with the car radio, trying to find a station that wasn’t playing commercials. Next to me, my father drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, waiting for the light to change. “Just put NPR on,” he said. But I was sick of the news. That was why I’d insisted on going to work with him that Saturday morning—I couldn’t bear the news any longer. I settled on a station that played classical music, leaned back in my seat, and let the colors wash over me. Then I smelled smoke. When my father made a left onto the 62, I saw a gray plume rising in the distance. I thought it was a burning car or a propane tank, but as we got closer, I realized the smoke was coming from the shop.
We turned onto Kickapoo Trail to find Aladdin Donuts burning like a stack of hay. In a single motion, my father jumped out of the station wagon and pulled out his cell phone, just as Mr. Melendez at the 7-Eleven across the street came running toward us. “I called 911,” he said. He told us he’d been changing the paper in his cash register when he heard the sound of screeching tires. He’d thought nothing of it until the smell of smoke came drifting in through the doorway, a mix of gasoline, ash, melting plastic, and caramelizing syrup. Years later, a whiff of smoke, even if only from a beachside barbecue, can still conjure up my memories of the arson. Standing beside my father that day, I watched the flames lap at the store sign until the glass frame cracked. In the distance, a cacophony of sirens rose, ending in a deafening roar as the firefighters drew up to the lot. Under the spray of their hoses, the smoke turned a cloudy white that made my eyes water and my nostrils burn.
It was a junior officer from the San Bernardino County Fire Department who found the cause of the fire: a brick wrapped in a rag that had been doused in accelerant. “Homemade,” the officer said.
“I know,” my father replied. He had seen this kind of thing before, he said, in the Casablanca protests of 1981. He shook his head in disbelief. I think he was just realizing that he had moved six thousand miles for safety, only to find that he was not safe at all.
When we returned home, we found my mother where we had left her at six in the morning, sitting on the sofa with one foot tucked under her, watching CNN, where footage of the twin towers burning in New York still played in an endless loop. “What happened?” she asked, standing up.
My father told her.
I walked past them to my bedroom, where I peeled off the T-shirt and jeans that now reeked of smoke. But even after I showered, I couldn’t get rid of the smell of soot. My hair was redolent with it. From the living room came the soundtrack of my life—my parents arguing with each other. “We should go back,” my mother was saying.
“Go where?”
“Home. Casa.”
“We can’t go back, Maryam.”
“Of course, we can.” Morocco had changed, my mother insisted, things were different now. But my father didn’t think this was true. Besides, the Mojave had grown on him; he couldn’t imagine living in a big city like Casablanca anymore.
“We’ll move to Marrakesh, you’ve always liked it there.”
“But what about Nora? She’s still in school. No, no. We can’t move.”
Even after I walked back into the living room, they continued talking about me as if I weren’t there. They argued for days.