The Newlyweds (15 page)

“Well, except for that,” Kim said. “That wouldn’t have worked, in our case.”

“But your mother didn’t know about—the baby?”

“God, no. She would say it served me right, doing something like that. She’s very pro-life. And I mean, they encouraged me, but I’m the one who decided. I knew I’d made a mistake from the moment the sedative wore off—the worst mistake I’ve ever made. It was awful because I’d always known my mother was wrong and that abortion
was a lifesaver for women. I hadn’t had any problem going into it. And then after it happened, all I could think of was that I wished she’d somehow stopped me. How it was final, and it was my fault.”

“Oh,” Amina said. “I don’t—”

“I know it’s a lot to ask—but if you could please not mention anything about this to George?”

Amina hesitated only a second. “I won’t say anything.” She was still struggling with the idea that Kim was confessing something of this magnitude—something she hadn’t even told George. She’d lived in Rochester nearly a year, but this was the first time anyone had told her a secret.

“I thought Ashok and I could start over in New York. Leave it all behind. But I didn’t realize how hard it is to make it work, after something like that.”

“How long were you in New York?”

“Only about four months. That was five years ago—the baby would be six now.” Kim smiled sadly. “I had an ultrasound the week before we decided to do it. I still have those pictures.”

The phone rang, and Amina started. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m sorry. My parents call sometimes during the day.”

But it wasn’t her parents; it was George.

“Hi, honey,” he said. “How’s it going?”

“Fine.”

“Good—listen, will you do me a big favor? If I tell you exactly how to do it, can you go across the street and check if the Snyders’ porch lights are still on? If they are you’re going to have to get the key—it’s underneath that planter that looks like an animal, a badger or a beaver or something—and unlock the front door. There’s been an emergency with Dan, and Annie’s been at the hospital all day with both kids. She says she thinks she left the alarm off and the lights on.”

“Kim is here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, she’s visiting. She came to bring flowers for the Snyders.”

George sounded irritated. “She didn’t need to do that.”

“We were just having tea.”

“Well, if she’s just sitting there, she can go and do it. It’ll be easier—let me talk to her.”

Amina handed the phone to Kim, who assumed a patient expression, as if George were an older brother who habitually talked down to her. At one point she rolled her eyes at Amina and smiled.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, yeah—I know. I can do it on my way out.” She paused for a second while George asked a question.

“India,” she said. “Comparing notes.”

She hung up the phone, and then put her hand over her mouth. “Sorry, Amina—that was dumb. Did you guys want to talk again?”

“It’s okay,” Amina said. “I’ll see him tonight.” She had about a thousand questions for Kim about Ashok and her mother-in-law and the apartment building in Bombay, but Kim was already slipping into the leather clogs that she’d left at the door without having to be asked.

“I should go,” Kim said. “You were getting a lot done before I interrupted you. I can take the flowers myself, as long as I’m going over there.”

“Please come anytime,” Amina said, walking Kim to the back door this time. “Thank you for the bath salts. I’ll try them.”

Kim gave a little laugh and then turned away quickly, as if she were suddenly ashamed. Amina watched her hurry out through the garage and down the driveway and then, hardly looking, cross the street with the bouquet clutched in one hand.

She went back into the kitchen and began clearing away the tea and the uneaten lemon squares. But she could feel her heart beating fast. It was the kind of story she could remember the girls at Maple Leaf whispering to one another: a clandestine affair followed predictably by tragedy. Now here was an American tragedy, and as sorry as she felt for Kim, who had lost both a husband and a child, there was a part of her that was secretly thrilled. Of all the people Kim might have told, she had chosen Amina.

22
That evening George got home at five, later than usual. He told her at length about a colleague who might possibly be fired while she finished preparing dinner. She waited to bring up the subject of Kim until they were sitting at the table.

“Did you ever meet Ashok?”

George was looking at his new BlackBerry in his lap and didn’t look up. “Who?”

“Kim’s husband—Ashok. Did you meet him?”

“No,” George said. “He answered the phone once, when I called her after 9/11. She started a job in Manhattan three days before it happened—did she tell you that? I think that was part of what made Ashok want to leave, after a while. She told me every time he took a backpack on the subway, people would stare at him.”

“That doesn’t happen to me,” Amina said.

“We don’t live in Manhattan,” George said. “Plus, you don’t exactly look like a terrorist.”

“Well, did Ashok look like one? Kim says he was from a wealthy family.”

“Who knows? People were panicking. Look—I’m glad you and Kim are becoming friends. That’s what she hoped would happen.”

“You didn’t hope?”

“I want you to be friends with whomever you want. I don’t want to pick them for you. Kim doesn’t always make the best choices, but she’s generous—you have to give her that.”

“Give her what?”

“She’s generous,” George said. “That’s all I mean. She rushed right over after I e-mailed.”

“Why did you e-mail her?”

“Because that’s what you do.”

“But you didn’t e-mail me.”

George had the same exasperated look he got when there was water on the basement floor or one of the kitchen drawer pulls came off in his hand. “You hardly know them. Did Kim tell you how serious it is? He may have to have a pig heart.”

“A pig heart!”

“Well, maybe not the whole heart. I think it’s just the valve.”

“What is the valve?”

“Like on a faucet,” George explained. “The part that allows the blood to circulate.”

“They’re going to put the valve of a pig into Dan Snyder?”

“It’s amazing what they can do now. Strong is a great hospital—he’s lucky he lives in Rochester.”

Amina thought of what her cousin Nasir would say about that. There was a section in
The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam
entitled “Medical Necessity,” but she doubted anyone who’d contributed to that book had thought of the possibility of an actual piece of pig being put inside a human body.

“He’s lucky he’s not a Muslim,” Amina said, but George had taken his plate into the kitchen.

“Make sure to wear your boots tomorrow,” he said when he returned. “It’s supposed to be the storm of the season.”

She was disappointed when she arrived at MediaWorks the next morning to find only Carl in the stockroom. Lisa had been sick all the previous week, and Amina had taken over some of her shifts; she had made more money than she had any other week of her life ($343.20), but she’d missed Lisa, whose aggressive banter with Carl at least broke up the long stretches of the day without customers.

Ordinarily when Carl was in the stockroom, he was either looking for something in particular (which Lisa had invariably misplaced) or straightening the shelves; Amina was surprised to find him sitting on an unopened UPS shipment box, drinking his coffee.

“Lisa is sick again?”

Carl looked at Amina as if he didn’t recognize her, and then nodded.

“Will you be needing me to work her shifts?” She would have to call George in that case, since the bus didn’t run on their route after five; he would have to pick her up when he was finished for the day.

“No. You can go home at the regular time.”

“But who will—?”

“I can close up. It’ll be slow tonight, because of the snow.”

It occurred to Amina that this scenario—herself and Carl, an unmarried man less than ten years older than she was, alone together in the stockroom—would be unthinkable to her parents, her aunts, and even her cousin Ghaniyah. She’d had the same realization in other situations: when she had skipped her
dhuhr
because there was nowhere private to pray at MediaWorks, and she felt too strange putting down a mat in the stockroom. Or when she’d drunk half a tall glass of Aunt Cathy’s sangria, before she had understood that it was made from wine. Because those things were unthinkable, there was a
way in which they hadn’t happened: they had happened only to her American self, a person about whom her Bangladeshi self was blissfully unaware. She asked forgiveness for these errors in her prayers, but if she failed to mention them to her parents, she didn’t feel she was committing further sins. “Is Lisa very ill?”

“No.” Carl focused on Amina, as if he’d only just now noticed she was there. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, but Lisa isn’t coming back.”

Amina stared at Carl. “Lisa is fired?”

“Laid off.”

“But Lisa is good,” Amina said. “She says funny things sometimes, but she’s the one who taught me to do my job. I couldn’t have learned it without her.” She wondered if this sounded insubordinate, but Carl didn’t seem to notice.

“You’re much better than Lisa. But unfortunately I have to give you notice, too. I’m sorry about this. We’ll stay open another two months—wishful thinking, in my opinion—and then I’ll need you for a few days of packing up after that.”

“But what about the new owner? The international—” She paused, afraid to mangle the word.

“No dice,” Carl said. “They dropped MediaWorks a couple of weeks ago. The owners were banking on that deal, and now they’re sunk.”

Amina didn’t understand, but she didn’t want to ask Carl to explain. She thanked God for providing her with such a sympathetic husband; she almost looked forward to telling George, since the loss of her job at least confirmed her prescience in opening the savings account. Of course George would say that he could send money to her parents until she found another job, and as much as Amina wouldn’t want to, of course she would agree. She couldn’t bear the idea of withdrawing her small savings ($2,147.53 to date) when that was the only tangible proof of her progress toward the apartment.

More than anything she dreaded telling her mother about MediaWorks, which was unfortunately not one of those things she could avoid mentioning without feeling she was lying. The loss of a job was an all-too-familiar event, and her mother would be sure to see in it signs of future trouble. At least with her father, there was always optimism,
even if it was groundless. If one thing went wrong, her mother had a maddening tendency to feel that everything else would follow it. That was a characteristic of her grandmother’s, too—one that her mother had always mocked and then suddenly folded into her own personality without even noticing.

George had been right about the weather. When Amina left MediaWorks, the snow was coming down fast; a powdery layer the thickness of three fingers coated the frozen gray mounds on the sidewalk around the bus stop. The only other person in the shelter was an old black woman, sitting right in the center of the bench with all her things around her so that there was no room for anyone else. She was wearing a clear plastic scarf over her hair, printed with flowers; her nanu and her aunts would love something like that, and Amina had almost gotten up her courage to ask where it came from when the woman startled her by speaking.

“Coming
down
.” She shook her head, as if the weather were a permanent condition, a new burden for the two of them to bear. “And not stopping anytime soon.”

“Do you think so?”

The woman raised her eyebrows at Amina. “Don’t take it from me. Take it from Glenn Johnson at 13WHAM.”

Amina nodded, although she’d never heard of Glenn Johnson. Apart from MediaWorks customers, this was her first real conversation with a black person. “Excuse me,” she said. “Where did you get your scarf?”

“This?” The old woman touched her head, laughing. “You want one?”

“For my grandmother,” Amina explained. She wondered if it was possible the bus wouldn’t come on a day like this and was glad she wasn’t the only one waiting. During the hours she’d been at work, snow had fallen on the trees, building to an unlikely height on even the thinnest branches. It was indisputably beautiful, and it made her think of her first drive in from the airport with George. He had been in a keyed-up mood—the same way she’d been at the airport in Dhaka seventeen hours earlier. But by that point in her journey she felt as if she’d been woken in the middle of the night and forced
to perform a role in a bad movie: the set was cold and harshly lit; she was seated next to a stranger; and she couldn’t believe any of it was really happening.

“You’ve never seen roads like this, I bet,” George had said. “See how everyone stays in their own lane.” But she hadn’t been watching the road. She’d been looking at the bare trees along the side of the highway, thinking she’d never seen anything uglier in her life. She had thought of what cunning it must’ve taken for America to have kept this unflattering season a secret from the rest of the world.

She was relieved now to see the headlights of the bus coming down West Henrietta, at exactly 4:35. The snow made it seem later than it was.

“Your grandma can get this cheap at Kmart—doesn’t she know that?”

“No,” Amina said, and when the woman looked surprised, she added, “She can’t go out on her own. She stays alone with a caretaker.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“Nothing. Only that she is old. And she gets sad sometimes.”

The woman made a sympathetic sound. “Don’t I know.”

Amina stepped aside while the woman greeted the driver by name and waited for him to lower the slow, automatic stair (so different from boarding any kind of bus in Desh). As she put her pass over the electronic sensor, she half turned back to Amina, as if to reassure her.

“But your grandmom is lucky,” she said. “She has you.”