her arms. The sharp scent of death in the tent. The way she kept them wrapped in blankets so Khaled wouldn’t notice, kept flipping and turning their limp bodies, hoping the color would return to their faces. Then the scrambling prayers. The small hole Khaled dug in the back of the tent, tears in his eyes. And somewhere, in the tight confines of their tent, that thing which had never left her since, the jinn. Watching her. She closed her eyes, muttered a quick prayer under her breath.
Forgive me, daughters. Forgive me.
Part III
Deya
Winter 2008
Deya ran out of the bookstore, the newspaper clipping crushed in her fist. At the subway station, she paced up and down the platform as she waited for the R train. Once on board she paced in circles by the metal door. She shoved past people down the center aisle, her fear and deference forgotten. At the back of the train, she opened the exit door—ignoring the EMERGENCY ONLY sign—and crossed into the next train car, even as the tracks rattled under her feet in the dark tunnel. In the next car she did the same—pacing, shoving, escaping from one car to the next as though the next car might hold a different story, any other story, so long as it was one in which her mother had not been murdered by her father.
When she finally paused, all she could do was stare again at the newspaper clipping in her hands:
MOTHER OF FOUR MURDERED IN BROOKLYN BASEMENT
* * *
Brooklyn, NY. October 17, 1997—Isra Ra’ad, twenty-five-year-old mother of four, was found beaten to death in Bay Ridge late Wednesday night. The victim appeared to have been beaten by her husband, thirty-eight-year-old Adam Ra’ad, who fled the scene of the crime. Police found his body in the East River Thursday morning after witnesses saw him jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.
How many times did Deya read the words and burst into tears? How many times did she scream in the middle of the train, stopping only when she realized that people around her were staring? What did they see when they looked at her? Did they see what she saw, staring at her darkened reflection in the glass window, the face of a fool? For now Deya saw how foolish she’d been. How could she have lived with her grandparents all these years and not known that her mother had been murdered by her own father? Beaten to death in their home, in the very rooms where she and her sisters spent their days? Why hadn’t she acted on her suspicions after reading Isra’s letter? Why hadn’t she questioned Fareeda until she’d admitted the truth? How had she believed her so easily? After all the lies she knew Fareeda to be capable of. Did she not have a mind of her own? Could she not think for herself? How had she lived her entire life letting Fareeda make her choices for her? Because she was a fool.
Deya clenched the newspaper clipping tight. Then she was screaming again, banging her fists against the train window. Her father had killed her mother. He had killed her, taken her life, stolen her away from them. Then the coward had taken his own life! How could he? Deya closed her eyes, tried to picture Baba’s face. The most clearly she could remember him was the day of her seventh birthday. He had come home with a Carvel ice cream cake, smiling as he sang her a birthday melody in Arabic. The way he had looked at her, the way he had smiled—the memory had always comforted Deya on a bad day.
Now she wanted to rip the memory out of her head. How could that same man have killed her mother? And how could her grandparents have covered for him? How could they have hidden the truth from his daughters all these years? And, as if that wasn’t enough, how could they have urged her to get married young and quickly, as her parents had done? How could they risk something like this happening again? Happening to her? She shuddered at the thought.
“No,” Deya said aloud when the train stopped at Bay Ridge Avenue. As soon as the metal doors slid open, she ran. “No!” she screamed. It would not happen again. Not to her. Not to her sisters. Isra’s story would not become theirs. She ran until she reached the bus stop, telling herself again and again: I will not repeat my mother’s life.