In the Language of Miracles (17 page)

Perhaps Samir was right and she did possess supernatural eyesight as well as hearing.

Perhaps, if she looked closely enough, she could see through the depth of the woods and all the way to that clearing where, a year ago, her son and her friend's daughter stood, talking. Perhaps she could even freeze time, eternally watching this one moment, preventing it from progressing to the next, sparing herself the pain of
what if.

But she could not see that far. She shifted her focus, and now all she saw was her reflection in the glass and the reflection of her mother behind her.

She groaned. With the most force she could muster she lifted the ashtray up and flung it at those trees, at the window that she had often spent hours so futilely scrubbing, at her own reflection as well as at her mother's. The ashtray hit the windowpane with such force that the crystal went right through it, shattering it on impact, the shards falling onto the deck in a cascade that chimed and twinkled, a downpour of glass.

ENGLISH
: The truth shall prevail.

ARABIC
: Lies have no legs.

T
hey lied to him about the broken window, of course. Samir knew they were lying the moment Ehsan told him how
she
broke it while mopping. She even demonstrated the alleged accident to him, showing him how she was vigorously working on a spot where some spilled marmalade had stuck to the floor when the top of the mop's wooden handle struck the glass. Seriously? The one-inch diameter of the handle making an eight-inch-diameter hole? And was Ehsan really as strong as she wished him to believe? Sure, the windows were as old as the house, and he and Nagla had talked about replacing them for years, but still—no glass was so weak as to shatter on the impact of Ehsan's accidental stroke, enthusiastic though her mopping might have been. And if logic alone was not enough to prove her deception, one look at Nagla convinced him that her mother was lying. He knew that expression very well, the incredulous look his wife threw at her mother whenever she spun one of her stories. The deception would, perhaps, not have bothered him so much if Nagla had acknowledged it, as she often did. He waited for Ehsan to turn her back and tried to make eye contact with his wife, anticipating a roll of the eyes or a mouthed word that would place her firmly on his side, not her mother's—but Nagla avoided his eyes,
gazing instead out the window and, minutes later, stepping out for a smoke and leaving him to face Ehsan alone. His mother-in-law ranted endlessly about cheap windows that broke on touch, about paying him for it,
paying him,
as if he would take her money, even if she had broken it, as if she did not know what kind of an insult that was, to offer him
awad,
compensation for something she, his guest, had accidentally broken. Which, of course, she had not. Because she was lying.

What she and her daughter did not know, however, was that he knew perfectly well what had happened. He was certain of it, could picture it as if he were there. The whole incident played in his mind's eye as if it had been captured on film for posterity, like those videos about Hosaam that surfaced on YouTube after he died, or like those photos of Samir, his family, and his home that Angie had shown him only this morning.

Walking into his office, Angie had pushed him aside unapologetically and taken over his spot by the computer before he had a chance to object.

“I need to show you something,” she whispered. On her Facebook news feed he saw a picture of his family. They were walking up to their car in a parking lot—probably by the movie theater complex, which was the last time he remembered they had all gone out together. When was that—three months ago? Four? In the photo, he and Nagla walked in front, talking, while Fatima and Khaled trailed behind, Fatima glancing to her right, Khaled checking his phone. The photo was a close-up, a clear shot of their faces and torsos. A nice picture, actually, Samir thought—until Angie scrolled down and pointed at the screen.

Under the picture stood a question—a poll:
Do you think the family should be held accountable when a teenager commits a crime?
The two options—
Yes, they never taught him better
, and
No, it's not their fault
—
showed growing bars indicating the number of people voting for each. As of right then, both bars were almost equal in length.

“Wow,” Samir muttered.

“That's not the worst of it.” Angie clicked on an icon and a seemingly endless column of comments rolled down.

“What is this?” he said, his voice so hoarse he could hardly hear it.

“It's a poll someone posted on Summerset's Facebook page.”

“Summerset has a Facebook page?”

“Yes, of course it does.” Angie muttered. “That's not the point. Read those comments.”

Samir started reading through them, grateful every time he read a compassionate one (
Will you all leave the poor family alone?
), nervous whenever he read the others—and there were so many. He had seen it all before, of course: the ethnic slurs, the insistence that
those people
were all inherently violent, the self-satisfied assurance that Islam was the real threat, the suggestion that, for their own sake, they should pack up and move somewhere else where they could
blend in
more easily. He reminded himself that he had grown a thick skin over the last year, that he had promised himself to pay no attention to such hate. Still, the sheer number of comments seemed to snuff the last breath out of his chest. All those people—talking about him and his family. He reached up and loosened his tie, took a deep breath. Told himself to calm down.

“Look, this is what's scaring me.” Angie scrolled farther down. In one of the comments, someone had posted a link. Angie clicked it and Samir saw a picture of his own house spring up in front of him, the yard littered with unrolled toilet paper, the garage door colorful with sprayed graffiti. For a moment, his heart sank with fear, but then he realized he had seen all this before.

“This was last year!” he exclaimed, pointing toward the screen. “I reported it to the police then. It was even on the news—that's probably how they got this picture. It's all gone now.”

“I know it's old, but why are people bringing it up again now? That's what's scaring me. Look.” She pointed at the minuscule profile picture of the person who posted the link. Samir squinted but could not make
out his face. “I know this guy. The son-of-a-bitch used to go to school with my brother.” Samir stared at his secretary, his eyebrows raised. She looked back at him. “Oh, shush—like you've never heard me curse before.” She waved an impatient hand at him. He managed a smile.

“This guy is trouble. And look at the comments he got—people are encouraging him! I'm scared, Sam.” She turned to look at him. “This is not good. You and your family—you need to be careful.” She paused. “I know you don't like to hear this, but maybe you should rethink your decision to stay in Summerset,” she whispered.

Samir blushed.

“You don't have to go too far. You wouldn't even have to leave New Jersey. Perhaps a larger town—”

“For God's sake, Angie,” Samir blurted out. “We've been through this already. I'm fifty-six. Do you really expect me to overhaul my entire life now?”

“It doesn't have to be that radical a change.”

“Not radical? A new house? A new town? A new practice?”

“Many doctors relocate their practices. Your patients will follow you.”

“Yeah, right. Because they are so loyal. You know how many have dropped me over the past year, Angie.”

“And I know how many have not. You're a good doctor. One of the best around here. People know that.”

“Then I shouldn't have to move, should I?”

Samir got up and walked away from the computer, turning his back to Angie, certain that, if she took a close look at his face, she would see the veins he now felt throbbing at his temples. He stepped up to the window, looked out, focused on his breathing. Behind him, he could hear Angie move.

“Do you need me to cancel the rest of today's appointments?” she asked. He glanced behind him and saw she was standing by the door.

“No.”

He waited. She did not move.

“You're not mad at me, are you? For suggesting you move away?”

Samir shook his head.

“You know I mean well. I'm only worried about your wife and kids. I know you thought people would forget, given time, but they haven't, have they? Someone might hurt your family, Sam. You should keep that in mind.”

Samir had to bite down on his tongue to keep from speaking. He waited till she left the room, and then he walked up to the door, closed it behind her. Placing both hands on the door, he pushed hard, trying to keep his hands from shaking, breathing heavily, waiting. He was not sure what stung him more: having his family paraded all over the Internet or hearing his secretary suggest he run away, exiled by shame. The insinuation that he was failing, as head of the family, to keep his wife and kids from harm was bad enough—but the suggestion, again, that he should move away in defeat was more than he could bear. He remembered one of his father's old neighbors, a loud, heavyset man who, after years of lavish success, had made headlines when it turned out he was involved in one of the Ponzi schemes that ravaged Egypt in the eighties like a swarm of hungry locusts. Unable to muddle through the scandal, the man had left the apartment building in the middle of the night, dragging his family behind him to God knows where, the
FOR SALE
sign surfacing later a constant reminder of his disgrace. Samir would never succumb to such humiliation, such a dishonorable exodus, moving away from the Promised Land rather than traveling in search of it. His entire life had been a constant labor aimed at providing a good home for his family, a stable practice for himself, a superior education for his children. This was why he had moved to America, why he had endured the uprooting of immigration. And now, when he was only a decade away from retirement, his secretary had felt the need to suggest he start all over somewhere else, just as Khaled had had the
audacity to propose before her. Samir pressed harder against the closed door, his head bent down. They could offer sugarcoated advice from now till Judgment Day—he was not going to let anyone coerce him out of the life he had spent decades building. He would rather see his practice crumble and his wife and kids become imprisoned in their own home than leave the town in disgrace.

 • • • 

Back home, the broken window fulfilled the morning's prophecies. Considering how the upcoming memorial service was resurrecting the town's anger, it was only natural that the ripples such anger generated would find their way to Samir's property, as was frequently the case in the first couple of months following his son's crime. Ehsan's attempts to pass the vandalism off as an accident were almost amusing. Still, he listened to her explanations, let her play her story out.

“Are you sure
, ya haggah,
this was what happened?” he asked Ehsan once she stopped talking, loud enough for Nagla to hear through the hole in the window as she sat on the deck, smoking.

“Of course I am! What kind of question is that?”

“I was just wondering, because, you know, I heard something else. I
was told
something else,” he revised himself, walking up to the table and leaning across it toward Ehsan, who backed up against the wall, holding the mop in one hand like a medieval spear.

“What do you mean?” Her voice was shrill, and she threw a rapid glance toward Nagla, who, interestingly enough, seemed to snicker as she lit yet another cigarette. Samir pressed on.

“I mean that what I heard was different. A guy I know passed by here earlier today, and he said he saw someone in the yard, someone standing across from the deck, looking at the window.” Ehsan looked puzzled, and Samir held her gaze. He was determined to break through her lies, this time. It was one thing to allow her to rave on about her own life and
superstitious nonsense, and a totally different thing to let her lie about what happened in his house. Under his roof.

“He said he thought that person seemed about to throw something at the house. For a moment he thought he'd seen a large object—a rock, maybe?—fly in the air and in the direction of the house, but he thought nothing of it. He drove off, but then he decided to call and let me know. Just in case someone had tried to deface the house. It wouldn't be the first time, you know,” he said, his teeth clenched, remembering the spray-painted vulgarities on his driveway and garage door, the insults shouted from passing cars, remnants of the days and weeks after Hosaam died that still clung like leeches to his memory. Ehsan seemed puzzled, and he was satisfied to see her look outside at Nagla for what he assumed was help or a beckoning for her daughter to walk back in and shield her. He had cornered Ehsan, and now she had dug herself in so deeply she could not turn back. Nagla, extinguishing her cigarette, did not acknowledge her mother. He had driven both her and Ehsan to silence, which was a rare feat in and of its own. There was no need to humiliate them further.

 • • • 

From his bedroom window he could see Nagla, still sitting on the deck, the ashtray filled to the brim with cigarette stubs. Her refusal to acknowledge her mother's lies, even indirectly, stung him as a dismissal, another crack in their alliance as husband and wife.

She used to come to him first. “I am your family now,” he had whispered in her ear one night when they first moved to the United States, trying to ease the pain of homesickness that had driven her to bed, crying. For a long time his assertion had held true—he still remembered days when Ehsan would call
him
to try to coax out news that Nagla had denied her: where Cynthia had taken Nagla and the kids the weekend before; why she never tried to use her degree in pharmacy and work, at
least part-time, not even after the kids had grown. Talking to Ehsan on the phone, Samir would then choose how much information he wanted to provide to her: he wasn't sure where Cynthia and Nagla went (a lie); Nagla still felt the kids needed her at home, even though they were old enough for her to work, if she wanted to (true); Nagla didn't need to work anyway because he was providing for them well enough (a semitruth). Though he had not noticed it at the time, his control over how much information Ehsan had about her own daughter had cemented his position as Nagla's husband and closest ally. This, too, had changed. Now Nagla spent the entire day with her mother, confiding in her, collaborating with her when she chose to lie to him.

But blaming her withdrawal exclusively on her mother's presence was not fair. He had started losing her years ago. He could feel her inch away from him with every argument, every fight. He saw her hardened look whenever he insisted she spoiled Hosaam too much, and felt her anger when she retorted, as she never failed to do, that she did it only because he was too hard on his firstborn. She blamed him for Hosaam's death—he was certain of that.