I Have Lost My Way(9)

Silently, she climbed into the bed, and then my sister, who did not like to be hugged or kissed or even touched, wrapped her body around mine. “Don’t worry,” she murmured. “I’ll take care of you now.”

But I didn’t believe her. Sabrina, who delivered love pinches and scathing critiques. Who hated shiro and tibs and told me to be quiet when I sang. How would she take care of me?

As if she heard my doubts, my sister began to sing to me. Eshururururu, eshururururu, ye binyea enate tolo. I had never heard my sister sing, not even on holidays. I didn’t know she could sing. And yet she sang the lullaby in a clear, pure voice. She sang it as if she too had been born singing.

“Sing with me,” she said.

And I did. Eshururururu, eshururururu, sefecheme azeyea segagere azeyea seserame azeyea sehedeme azeyea yenima biniyea werede ke jerbayea. We lay together, singing, harmonizing without even trying. Our voices blended perfectly, easily, in a way that in real life we never did.

We sang and I stopped crying. I believed that as long as we sang together, I would be okay.





THE ORDER OF LOSS


PART II





HARUN



When I was nine, Ammi announced that her sister’s family from Pakistan was coming to visit. I was very excited. I’d never met Khala and Khalu or my three cousins. Usna was nineteen, too old to be of interest, but the twins, Amir and Ayisha, were my age. Ayisha was loud and rebellious and made fast friends with my younger sister, Halima, sneaking off to the 7-Eleven, buying Little Debbie snack cakes and Doritos.

That left me with Amir, who was small, quiet, and circumspect, the opposite of his sister. He did not want to go to the movies or play miniature golf or even venture into Manhattan to see the sights. So we stayed around the house, playing board games or lying on our backs in the yard, watching the planes take off from Newark Airport. “That’s Continental Airlines flight seventeen, bound for Los Angeles,” I told Amir. When he asked how I knew, I showed him the notebook I kept with all the flight departures and arrivals. I’d kept it hidden since Saif had warned me that if anyone saw it, they’d get the wrong idea. But Amir didn’t think the notebook was weird, and when I confessed my dream of one day being a pilot, he didn’t think that was crazy either. “You can fly to Pakistan and visit me,” Amir told me.

Amir went to prayer with his father every day, and that week I joined them even though I normally only went with Abu on Fridays and holidays.

“Your cousin is making you devout,” Abu said.

“Your cousin is turning you into a kiss-ass,” Saif said.

One day, I came back from mosque to find Ammi and Khala sitting at the dining room table, where Ammi often worked. Her ledgers were spread out, her cup of tea steaming. Khala was complaining about Ayisha, who had been sneaking junk food and hiding the evidence in the trash, where Ammi discovered it because Ammi discovered everything, be it missing receipts or misbehaving children.

“She’s already so fat,” Khala said, shaking her head.

“She should not lie,” Ammi said, inputting a receipt and transferring it from one pile to the other.

“I’m less worried about the lying than her getting fat,” Khala replied. “More fat.”

Ammi clucked her tongue.

“She’s already at a disadvantage,” Khala continued. “Amir must have sucked all the beauty away from her when they were in the womb. It would be easier to find Amir a husband than Ayisha.”

I didn’t totally understand what they were talking about, but the idea of Amir finding a husband gave me a strange tickling in my tummy.

After that, I could not stop sneaking looks at Amir. He was pretty. He had long eyelashes that were apparently enviable and hair that made a little exclamation point in the middle of his forehead, and his lips were red and shiny, the way Halima’s were when she sneaked on the berry lip gloss she kept hidden in her backpack. I watched how his lips formed a bow when he drank soda through a straw, and I imagined what it might be like to be that straw between Amir’s lips.

“What?” Amir asked, catching me staring at him drinking a Sprite.

And there it was, that tickling feeling.

During ’Asr the next day, I found myself drifting, murmuring the prayers while staring at my cousin’s ear. How had I never noticed ears before? The intricacies, the folds, the delicate pearl of the lobes, which on some people, like Abu, stuck to the neck, while on others, like Amir, were unattached. I touched my own ear as if for the first time, and the tickling feeling returned.

That night, we all watched a movie. We chose Aladdin, because the cousins had never seen it. Khalu disapproved of the way Islam was depicted. “Also,” Amir added, “with how immodestly Jasmine is dressed.”

We all huddled around the television in the basement and turned on the TV. The older kids seemed bored by it. Saif kept trying to do all the Robin Williams parts, but it had been a long time since he’d last seen the movie and he kept messing up.

“Shh!” I said, on behalf of the cousins.

“This movie sucks,” my brother Abdullah said.

“It’s giving me flashbacks,” Saif said. “I used to have such fantasies about Jasmine.”

“This is not appropriate talk for the children,” Usna said primly.

“They don’t even know what we’re talking about,” Saif said.