32. Raees
32
Raees
I stand outside Abbu’s apartment door.
Eighteen years. That’s how long it’s been since I last saw him.
According to Ramishah, he spent a year and a half in a psychiatric hospital. Then back to the streets. Homeless shelters. Bad company. A relapse. Borrowing money from Uncle Kareem for another stint in rehab.
But this time, sobriety stuck, apparently. He’s been working towards his real estate license again, climbing out of the wreckage of his life, piece by piece. My mother, soft hearted to a fault, stepped in last month when he had nowhere else to go. She refused his apology for the years of hell he put her through, but somehow, she still found him this new apartment.
A brand-new start for a man who left nothing but ash in his wake.
I lick my dry lips and raise my fist, rapping three times against the door. Each knock feels like a nail hammered in my chest.
Head high. Don’t cower in front of the coward. Don’t let him see the fear. Say your piece. Walk away. Don’t come back. Ever.
The locks click like a gun trigger to my temple.
Sweat pools at the base of my neck, and prickles across my forehead.
My heart’s a runaway train, hammering, hammering, hammering.
I still have time. I could leave. I could turn around, walk away, and let him rot in this apartment without ever knowing I came. I’ve lived eighteen years pretending I didn’t have a father—what’s another lifetime?
The door creaks open.
I stop breathing as my eyes lock onto Abbu’s hollow, hazel ones.
They look smaller now, like the years carved them out and left nothing but pits in his skull. They used to burn like fire, burn through me, but now they just look . . . extinguished.
Defeated.
A part of me hates that I noticed that. A part of me hates that I care.
He stands tall in the doorway, taller than I remembered, wearing a loose t-shirt and pajama pants that cling to his narrow hips. His silver hair is combed back, still damp, as though he’d known I was coming and wanted to look presentable. But it’s his body that throws me off the most. He’s not the pudgy, round man I used to know. He’s broader now, his shoulders square, his arms bulked, yet his presence doesn’t feel bigger.
If anything, he feels smaller.
The tattoo sleeve catches my attention. A riot of ink crawling up his right arm, patterns and shapes weaving across skin. Did he go to rehab or prison?
“Raees,” he says, the rasp still intact, but softer at the edges now.
I blink rapidly, trying to shun away the sting of tears threatening to spill. Don’t cry. Don’t cry in front of him. He doesn’t deserve your tears. You’re not that boy anymore. He can’t hurt you. He can’t.
But that boy is still there, trembling inside me, convinced that the man in front of me can reach out and pluck my eyes right from their sockets if I showed any weakness.
“You look . . . well,” I strain out, flat and wooden.
Faint lines crease at the corners of his lips. “Come in, please.” His tattooed arm gestures toward the room.
Please? My father just said ‘please’ to me? I can count on one hand the number of times he’s ever spoken to me like I was human, and none of them involved the word ‘please.’
My feet feel chained as I move past him. The apartment smells faintly of cleaning solution, a sterile attempt at starting over.
I toe off my shoes automatically. It feels strange to be doing it in his space.
“How have you been?” he asks.
I glance up, eyes sweeping across the room. The living space is cavernous but barren. There’s a single couch, sagging slightly in the middle, and a battered coffee table sitting awkwardly in front of it.
“Fine,” I say shortly, hands in my pants pockets. “You?”
“Very well.” He drifts into the attached kitchen and opens a cupboard. “Do you want anything to drink? Water? Juice?” He pauses, glancing at the mostly empty shelves. “I still gotta go grocery shopping.”
“No, thanks.” My words come out clipped. “What’s with the ink?”
He glances at his sleeve. “Oh, this?” His fingers graze the designs. “I’ve got a buddy who owns a shop in the city. Every time I felt the urge to break my sobriety, I’d get a tattoo instead.” He looks up at me, and I do my best to maintain eye-contact. “There’s forty-six of them. Got the last one three years ago.”
Forty-six. My brain latches onto the number, repeating it like a mantra. Forty-six urges. Forty-six times he chose needles and ink over violence and poison. I don’t know if I’m supposed to be impressed or horrified.
“Let’s sit and talk,” Abbu says. He points to the couch and lowers himself onto it like it’s his throne, sinking back into the cushions.
My feet feel heavy as I cross the room, but I don’t follow him to the couch. I can’t. Instead, I take the armchair at an angle, putting a little buffer between us. I can feel his eyes on me as I sit, my back rigid, my arms folded tightly across my chest.
“Rosy tells me you’re working in the education system.” He tries to sound like we’ve done this a hundred times before. “Are you a teacher?”
I exhale slowly, forcing my face into neutrality. My mother is a saint, but I thank God she knows how to keep certain details to herself. She’s told him the bare minimum. The city where I work. My job title, vaguely. Nothing specific. Nothing he could use.
I glance at him again—at his silver hair and his newfound calm, at the way he’s leaning back, one ankle resting on his knee like he isn’t sitting adjacent to a child he nearly killed—and a thought claws its way into my brain: Has he really changed, or is this just another role he’s playing?
I don’t answer his question directly. Instead, I say, “Something like that.”
My vagueness doesn’t bother him. He takes a deep breath, his shoulders lifting and falling. “That’s nice,” he says. “I thought you’d become an agent like your mother.” What he means to say is ‘like me,’ but he’s supposedly worked past his severe narcissism.
I break away from studying him. My eyes keep getting pulled to the tattoo sleeve, to the wrinkles on his face that weren’t there before, to the way he tilts his head like he’s assessing me.
But then his gaze drops to my hand. To the glint of silver on my ring finger. “You’re married?”
“I am.”
Abbu’s eyebrows lift. “Who’s the lucky woman?”
“I’m the lucky man.”
No way am I dropping Zinneerah’s name. No way. I can already picture the worst-case scenarios: him searching for her online, showing up outside our house like a specter from my past, waiting for her in the parking lot while she’s grocery shopping. My pulse pounds harder at the thought, and I push it down—stuff it into the same place where I’ve shoved every other intrusive thought about him.
“Arranged?” he asks.
“Yes.” On her end. I’ve been in love with my woman for six years. Six years of quiet pining, wondering if I’d ever deserve someone like her.
But he doesn’t push for more details about her. No probing questions. No inappropriate jokes. Just, “Do you like it?”
The question catches me off guard. “Being married?”
He nods, leaning forward, watching me in that disarming way he always has, skinning back the layers of my skin to see what’s underneath.
“I love it,” I state the truth. There’s no cracks in my conviction. I know he won’t understand. He’d laugh if one of his friends asked him that question, cracked some brainless joke about how marriage is just a contract for mutual misery. But that’s not me. Not with her. “My wife’s the strongest emotion I’ve ever felt. She’s compassionate, talented, and somehow has the ability to make my day with a single smile.”
He nods slowly at each trait I list. “You don’t have to explain to me how much you love her, Raees. Your eyes lit up the second I asked if you’re married.”
Such a simple observation, but it feels like he’s reached inside me and plucked something fragile from my chest. I don’t know how to respond.
His tattooed fingers lace together. “You always had so much love to give as a kid. I’m happy to know it’s still there. That it’s preserved in your heart, even after . . .” He trails off. “Even after everything I’ve done.”
“You can say the word ‘abuse,’ Abbu.”
The second the word leaves my mouth, I regret it.
My breath hitches as my muscles coil. My fists clench automatically, ready for his reaction, ready for him to swing his. The boy inside me is still, still bracing for impact.
But he doesn’t swing. He doesn’t yell. He doesn’t explode like he used to.
He just sits there. His broad shoulders slumped forward, his head dipping slightly, his lips pressed into a brittle line, and a disheartened frown pulled at the corners of his mouth.
And that look . . . that look is worse than any blow.
“I’m sorry for abusing you, Raees,” Abbu says softly. “I’m sorry for every cruel word, every strike against you and your mother. For eighteen years, I’ve been suffocating under the guilt of what I’ve done.”
The word “sorry” feels meagre for every slammed door, every raised hand, every night I pressed a pillow over my ears to drown out the shouting. Eighteen years. He says it like it’s a prison sentence, like we didn’t all serve time alongside him.
“There’s no justification for my behavior,” he continues. I wouldn’t be surprised if he rehearsed this. “I can’t erase the scars I’ve left, no matter how much I wish I could. If I’m dead to you after you leave here, then I won’t change your mind. I don’t have the privilege of being your father anymore.”
The privilege? A bitter laugh forms in my throat, but I choke it back. For so long, I thought I wanted this—some acknowledgment of the damage. And now that it’s here, all I can think is: Where was this man when we needed him? Where was this version of Abbu when Ammi-ji was crying in the other room, clutching her broken wrists?
“And husband,” I add quietly. “You don’t have the privilege of being a husband anymore.”
Abbu flinches.
He looks down, his hands folding and unfolding in his lap. “And husband.” His voice cracks on the word, and for a second, I see the man Ammi-ji used to describe with a soft smile, all starry-eyed with memories I’ve never been able to reconcile with reality. “Despite the love I once held for your mother, I let greed consume me. I let it poison everything good within me, until there was nothing left but regret.”
His gaze lowers to his bare ring finger.
“Seeing her again,” he murmurs, “it was like reliving our wedding day.”
I want to say something, but my tongue feels glued to the roof of my mouth.
“But you’re right,” he whispers. “I’ve forfeited any right to be a father, a husband. I won’t beg for your forgiveness, Raees. You’ve all grown well and healthy. I’m not going to become a pesticide in your lives again.”
I scoff. “‘Well and healthy’?”
Abbu looks like someone crumpled him and forgot to smooth him back out.
“I suppose I owe you a recap of the past eighteen years,” I mutter, adjusting myself on the chair. I’m about to bleed for the wrong human—open the wounds I patched up in therapy, and swallowed down with medication. “Remember that old stone bridge by Wilders Park? The one where the freight train passed underneath? You used to drag me there when I was barely knee-high. You said you found peace in the screeching metal. I didn’t understand what you meant until much later, of course.”
Abbu’s head snaps up, his eyes darting to mine.
He looks like he wants to interrupt, but I push myself to follow through.
“The night you nearly strangled me, I ran for that bridge. Did you know that? Did you even notice I was gone?” My hands dig into my thighs. “I didn’t stand on the bridge, though. No, I — ”
Just say it. Just say it. Just say it. Just say it. Just say it.
“I laid under it,” I state. “Right on the train tracks. I stayed there for . . . I don’t know how long. An hour? Two? Just lying there, staring at the stars through the gaps in the beams, waiting for the rumble. For the train. For anything. And then it came.” I bite down on my lip, drawing a bit of blood. “And let me tell you, when I close my eyes sometimes, I can still feel the rumble beneath me, the distant wail of the train, and that God awful screech clawing at my ears.”
Abbu stares at me, his face pale as ash. “Raees . . .”
“I finally grasped the sick comfort you found in that moment, lying there, waiting for the train to arrive. It was the realization that in the split second when flesh rips from bone, and bones splinter into nothingness, all noise fades away. No more incessant demands from your wife, no more whining children, no more suffocating pressure of climbing the corporate ladder.” I mirror his posture. “Young me believed we were bonding over watching the train, but in truth, all you needed was a nudge to stay alive.”
Abbu shakes his head slowly, eyes squeezing shut.
“Ammi-ji called five minutes before the train crushed me. If she hadn’t, I wouldn’t be sitting here, telling you a story I’ve told in therapy countless times,” I say as I remove my glasses and fold them in the collar of my sweater. “And taking my own life didn’t end there. At eighteen, I tried to cut open my wrists. At nineteen, I almost walked into oncoming traffic. At twenty, I took a hike to the trail we used to go, and pushed myself into jumping off the cliff, but I couldn’t do it. You weren’t there to pull me back, Abbu. There wasn’t anyone to slap me after. Except myself.”
Agony etches his face. He’s yet to open his eyes. “Does your mother know?”
“Who do you think paid for me to become ‘well and healthy’?”
He looks guilty of wording his sentence that way. “Raees, I’m sorry for everything I’ve put you through. I should’ve reached out as soon as I was out—”
“It wasn’t just you, Abbu,” I grit out, nails digging into the armrests. “You ruined my childhood, yes. For that, I’ll never forgive you. But if you’d reached out back then? If you’d shown up when I was at my lowest? I would’ve killed you instead of myself. Just to find peace. That’s how unstable I was. That’s what you did to me.”
My hands are sweating, but I can’t let go of the armrests. If I do, I might crumble.
Don’t look at him. Don’t look at him. Don’t look at him.
If I meet his eyes, I’ll lose whatever control I have left.
“I almost hit Ramishah,” I murmur. “She was just trying to help, and I almost . . .” My nails scrape against the leather, but I stop. Don’t spiral now . “That was the moment, Abbu. That was my wake-up call. Like the universe was handing me a cue card that said, ‘Get Help.’”
He sucks in a sharp breath, holding it in.
“I’d worked past the abuse, eventually, somewhat. I knew I was capable enough to put myself out there again, make better memories in university. And for a while, I did. At university, I met a girl in my program. I fell for her. I asked her out. We dated for two years before I finally worked up the courage to propose.” I let out a wry laugh, shaking my head. “And then, at her bachelorette party, she cheated on me with a stranger. The person I trusted most, the one who swore she’d always have my back, became the knife in it. And now, she works in the same faculty as me now. Every single day, I have to see her face.” I shouldn’t be smiling in this situation, but it’s fascinating to know how much I’m unaffected by the betrayal now. “But you know what’s worse, Abbu? You broke me long before she did. So, when she drilled through what little I’d managed to patch up, there was nothing left inside to kill.”
His mouth parts to speak, but then it shuts again, pressing into a thin, bloodless line.
We sit like that for minutes—him staring at the pile of fast-food coupons scattered across the coffee table, me staring at his face.
What’s he thinking? What’s he working up to? More apologies? More carefully rehearsed, guilt-ridden words meant to make me think he’s a brand-new person? Maybe some clumsy display of vulnerability, all so I’ll feel sorry for him. Is that what this is leading to? Am I supposed to pull out my phone and mark a date for lunch? “Father-Son Reconciliation,” penciled in between lectures?
No. Absolutely not.
I’ve seen this script before, and I’m not falling for it. I don’t care if he cries. I don’t care if he’s drowning in all the regret in the world. He can’t rewrite the past. He can’t erase the years of shouting, hitting, blaming, breaking. That’s not how this works.
“I’m selling my car,” I blurt out.
Abbu blinks at me, his face blank. “Something wrong with it?”
I focus on the loose thread poking out of the armrest, twisting it around my finger until it cuts off circulation. “My ex-fiancée drew hearts on the window of the passenger seat.” The thread snaps. “And my wife saw them.”
He tilts his head like he’s trying to translate what I just said into a language that makes sense. “You’re selling your car because of that?”
When he says it like that, it sounds stupid. But that’s not the point. He doesn’t get it. “It made my wife upset,” I explain, sitting up straighter.
Abbu squints, clearly unconvinced. “Why not just get it washed?”
“That’ll be your job.” My hand darts into my pocket, and before I can second-guess myself, I toss him my Audi A6’s keys. The metal jingles against his palm. “It’s yours now.”
He stares at them, like he’s holding something radioactive. “Raees, I can’t accept this gift.”
“It isn’t a gift. It’s charity.”
A sigh. “Still.” He holds the keys up, dangling them between his fingers. “I can’t accept it.”
This isn’t about him. It’s about getting rid of something that doesn’t fit in my life anymore.
“Throw it out. Sell it for money. Put it to use. I don’t care.”
“Raees—”
“Is there anything else you’d like to say to me before I go?” I cut him off, standing quickly to avoid whatever protest was forming on his lips. My hands tremble as I fix the cushion I was sitting on, pressing it back into place. I don’t even know why I do it. It’s not like he cares about the state of his furniture.
He grips the keys. “Can I see you again?”
“No.”
He looks down. “I expected that much.”
What did he expect? That I’d forgive him? That we’d suddenly become father and son again, like none of this ever happened?
“I’ll be taking my leave now,” I say, turning away before he can say anything else.
As I head toward the door, the pantry’s empty shelves catch my attention.
He’s never been the kind of man to think ahead, to plan, to provide. Grocery shopping for him was like throwing a dart at a spinning wheel—you never knew what he’d return with. He’d leave for eggs and come back with a frying pan, or wooden planks for some project he’d talk about but never touch. Or boots he didn’t need but somehow justified buying because they were “on sale.”
And then, on occasion, a bag of candy. “For your sister,” he’d say, tossing it onto the counter. Ramishah would grin and stash it in her room. Later, she’d open the bag and split the pieces with me, laying them out on the floor while we both tried to ignore the sound of his voice rising in the next room.
I shake the thought loose, and force my feet to keep moving.
“You know, all my life, I tried to conform you into becoming a man like me,” Abbu says, his eyes on my shoes as I tie the laces. “I thought the world would eat you alive if I didn’t toughen you up. That if I threw myself in front of the train, no one else would be able to protect your mother and sister.”
I glance up at him, but he’s in a staring competition with the floor, his hands hanging defeatedly at his sides.
“I was so busy trying to make you an adult,” he continues, “that I forgot you were just a child. My son. My only son. My little boy.”
He reaches out toward my shoulder, but I quickly stand, and step back before he can.
Slowly, his fingers curl around nothing before he lets it drop and presses it flat against his chest.
“I failed you, Raees,” he whispers hoarsely. “That’s a regret I live with every day, and I’ll carry it until my last.” His eyes are on me, glistening with tears. Actual tears. “I don’t want you to blame yourself for anything that’s happened. None of it was your fault. It’s never been.” He manages a small, trembling smile, his chin quivering. “I want you to live happily with your wife, your children, until you’re gray and old. I want you to come to my funeral even for a few minutes so I can meet the woman who breathed life back into you, and my grandchildren who will proudly call you their father.” I’m too numb to even realize his hand is on mine until I feel a gentle squeeze. “I’m glad you’ve become someone on your own terms.”
Tears gather along my waterline. I don’t want them to fall. I promised myself they wouldn’t. But they slip free anyway, cutting warm, itchy trails down my cheeks and neck.
I blink hard, but it doesn’t stop them.
Abbu wipes the corner of his eyes with a knuckle, sniffing loudly, and letting go of my hand to open the door.
I tell myself to stop thinking. Just go. One foot in front of the other. Don’t look back. Don’t.
But I can feel his eyes on me as I cross the threshold. My hand twitches, wanting to reach for his one last time. But I clench it into a fist instead. If I touch him, I’ll feel the cracks—his, mine, ours—and I’ll lose the nerve to leave.
The door creaks as it closes behind me.
I don’t look back as I walk away.