to go. Skandar was out of town, and she didn’t want to be alone if something was really wrong, more wrong than it seemed. So I said I’d stay until the doctor pronounced; and by then it was almost the end, because the stitches themselves, four of them, so near to the edge of his eye, were a matter of minutes, a neat pull of needle and thread, rather like my mother repairing my downed skirt hem between breakfast and school, except that the sandy-haired doctor didn’t bite the thread with her teeth when she was done, she snipped niftily with gleaming little scissors and ruffled Reza’s hair—he was so bleary he was almost asleep—and said, “Don’t worry. Nothing’s changed. You’re still going to break hearts with those eyes,” and she knew and we knew that this was true; and then she said he could go home at last.
I drove them down the alley off the riverbank to their town house. Reza had fallen asleep in the car.
“Do you want some help? I can carry him in.”
Sirena’s eyes were sunken hollows in the gloom. “Nora,” she said, “you are so very kind.”
“It’s not kindness,” I said. I picked him up in my arms as she worried the front door key, and I followed her into the darkened house bearing my warm burden (his breath tickled my neck), and I climbed the stairs behind her and laid him on his bed. Shoes off, coat off, trousers unbuttoned and off, covers up, and in all this he barely stirred, so deep was his exhaustion. I stood looking at him while she went to put on the kettle, the lights. He lay on his back with his arms on top of the blanket, his head upon the pillow, his cheeks flushed pink, and when he breathed out his lips pursed, slightly, in a little “o.” My God, he was beautiful, all perfect promise. And before I left him, I stroked his hair and bent to kiss his brow. He smelled of the hospital. He shivered a bit in his sleep.
Skandar wasn’t there, but in some way he was, and I felt a vague, lingering guilt at my dream, as though I’d done something wrong, had tried to steal Sirena’s child and husband both, as though she might look at me and know it.
So I found myself near midnight at Sirena’s dining table, drinking mint tea and eating toast with butter and plum jam. The place was oddly soulless—renovated in the eighties, rented furnished, with ugly, solid, institutional chairs and a tinted, speckled glass globe hanging from the ceiling. The walls were stuccoed, the floors beige wall-to-wall. The kitchen cabinets—visible behind the vintage pass-through from the dining area—reminded me of an old man’s Cadillac: antique but carefully preserved, at once touching and hideous. It shouldn’t have surprised me that the Shahids lived in such a place—they were passing through, after all—but it did. They were so special, and this place so nondescript.
Sirena and I hardly spoke, for a long stretch. I could hear her, and myself, chewing toast. She looked exhausted.
“He’s going to be fine, you know,” I offered at length. “The surgeon wasn’t kidding. Nothing’s changed.”
Sirena’s eyes were wet. “Nothing’s changed. You say this, but we know it isn’t true. Not about his face—his face will heal. But what have we done, to bring him here to this? What has Skandar done? Nobody wanted to come but him—but who can be the wife who says ‘No, we cannot go’?”
It hadn’t occurred to me that she disliked it here, disliked the very idea of here. “I thought Reza was liking it—school and everything?”
“What’s the point of not liking it? I tell him at bedtime stories about his friends at home. He knows we’ll go back, so it was okay. But now this?”
“The boy who did it will be properly punished this time. He might even be expelled.”
“And for Reza, does this make a difference? Not at all. Now Reza knows he lives in a world where people can throw rocks at you just because of who you are, just because they don’t like your name or your skin.”
“You do know it isn’t normal, right? That’s one unhinged kid, who’s got real problems. It has nothing to do with Reza personally; I think he can understand that.”
“When you’re an Arab or you have a Middle Eastern name, it’s never personal, but it’s always there. I was anxious about America, but then I thought, in Cambridge,