Chapter 1. Excised Limbs #2
Marina is like a tree whose diseased limbs have been excised; she is rooted solidly in earth, but it is not her earth.
She stands alone, a single tree displaced from her family.
There are no limbs to reach above to for answers.
There is no one to ask. Her mother refuses, her uncles know little, and her cousins are either too distanced to casually ring up and ask, or they also have been cut off from the family history.
Tata Nuhad held the answers. She was the only one who knew who their family was, but she had performed the amputation herself.
Nuhad had cut off that part of herself, the pain.
Marina knows this—it’s not entirely Haifa’s fault.
Nuhad cut it all. But it wasn’t just her history to excise. It was a shared history.
She shakes out her black hair from the clip that holds it back and turns down the music. It’s her unspoken sign that the anger has turned into something else—sadness, muted frustration, or in this case, guilt for her words—and soon she can feel the ground shifting as Haifa walks toward her room.
“Habibti?” Her mother knocks. Waits.
“Yeah?” Marina is expecting this—the attempt to make everything okay without an apology.
Haifa opens the door gingerly. “Do you want to go to the lake? It should be a nice sunset … It’ll be cooler there, too.”
Why is the house in Haifa haunted?
Marina gropes blindly in the dark, seeking the light of history to reveal the truth of the present.
Held between two cultures and three countries, she needs something to tether her to solid ground.
The limits of ancestral history she’s been told end at the simple fact of being Palestinian.
She knows the city they come from—her mother’s name.
Marina needs the memories, but she doesn’t know that they are freely sitting in the house in Haifa in the ghosts’ mouths, waiting to release and be released. She wants to paint the past and piece the canvas back together, filling in the spots about their family, their city, their occupations.
Marina doesn’t know why the house in Haifa is haunted—she doesn’t even know that there is a haunting in Haifa at all.
The car ride is short; the lake is only twenty minutes from their home, and as she exits the car, Marina’s legs feel heavy in the humidity.
The bag of oranges bites red ridges into her fingers, slapping against her thighs with each step she takes toward the water.
The lake demands fruit, Haifa says. And so, fruit they bring—as an offering to the water, or maybe a single bite of sweetness can cut the dry, earthy taste that settles in one’s mouth as they dive in, again and again and again.
Maybe the lake demands fruit because it’s lonely, and eventually, just once, a seed could grow in its sand.
Marina feels an itch on her arm and instinctively slaps at it.
The mosquitoes tend to congregate around the settled, calm waters of Lake Michigan.
“Here! This looks nice.” Haifa stops at a picnic bench that sits on a grassy patch.
Sand mixes in with the green, but if Marina blurs her eyes, they come together as conjoined in her double vision.
It’s like pretending that she and Haifa are okay.
Tall trees surround them in a towering canopy of rustling leaves and dark shade.
Marina hops onto the table and places her feet on the bench, wiping away the sand from where she sits.
The sun is making its dip toward the horizon, painting its own orange over the water, and maybe this is why the lake demands fruit—the sun is always out of reach.
Sweaty fabric clings to Marina’s body as her temperature rises to match the humidity, and her thoughts stray toward irritation.
“Want to go dip our toes?” Haifa sits beside her on the bench and reaches down to unbuckle her sandals. Her eyes are turned away, but Marina senses the false hope that lights them from within each time she asks this question. Each time they come to the lake.
She shakes her head, feeling her mother’s disappointment. And why shouldn’t Haifa feel as disappointed as Marina does after their argument?
“Maybe next time.”
Haifa has asked the same hope-laced question for as long as Marina has had the same answer for her.
The water is a suffocating, endless stream of panic.
Like all young children, Marina would often try to hold her breath for as long as possible at the community pool.
But it never held—as soon as she dipped below the water, her lungs clawed with need as if they were prisoners.
Once, she nearly drowned. Until the very last moment, when the lifeguard saw her head below water, arms listlessly drifting up to float, she didn’t know if it was the last thing she would ever experience.
She can’t help it; she’s never been able to simply swim back up, or grab another swallow of air before plunging back in. It pulls her down, smothering her into its depths, as soon as the water touches her skin.
It was for her own safety that Marina cut herself from the water.
Its pull is so immense, so enticing, that she knows it’s safer to be far from its grasp.
For her, the only thing she knows with complete certainty is that she will drown.
This is especially true in Lake Michigan, where the water can be murky and opaque, with riptides so powerful that they can sweep anything away.
Her greatest fear is not the water itself, but the memory of her thoughts just before she drowned—the crushing, breathtaking anxiety of her life, of her dreams, knowing everything she could have been and everything she wanted to be—finally grasping who she was, truly—and knowing that the possibility of that future could no longer exist. She can’t experience that again.
The last time Marina attempted to swim, she thought it was safe.
It was a friend’s pool. But even as she dipped into the shallow end, the filtered, clear water gripped at her with cold fingers, each tendril grasping at her skin and waiting for her to submerge before overtaking her.
She climbed her way back to the concrete instead, her toes gracing the cold drainage grate.
Jump! Do it.
Perhaps it was the dreamlike lull of that slow summer afternoon or the comfort of the plastic life jacket strap eating into her stomach, but Marina decided to jump.
And the water—the frigid, calm water of a chlorinated pool—burned her.
Its flames entered her mouth, diving down her throat and lodging in the air sacs of her lungs as she flapped her arms, choked, and sputtered, tasting the tears in her throat from the struggle.
Marina!
Her friend pulled her out, but it felt like the water clung to her, pulling her back, desperate to keep her in its sodden clutches. It was the life jacket. At the side, beneath her left arm, there was a tear.
I swear, I checked them this morning. They were fine.
The water desires Marina, and she knows it. Her breath becomes shallow when she starts to think about the pull, about how the water wants nothing more than to keep her in its depths.
Haifa sighs. “Okay. I’ll be right back.”
She walks toward the lake, taking wide strides to keep her pant hems folded where they are.
The sound of water gently lapping against the shore is like a metronome.
Haifa’s head hangs low; her silhouette, with hair lightly flowing in the breeze, makes a pretty picture against the sunset.
Marina bites the inside of her cheek. Her mother knows she’s scared, but she believes it’s from the near drownings.
The true fear lies deep in Marina. Haifa doesn’t understand the pull—or the sense of loss.
Marina leans back, fingers sliding against the wood of the bench, comfortable with keeping her distance from the water.
She closes her eyes against the sun, allowing herself to feel the waning warmth.
A roughness slides against her hand, and she shakes it off, thinking it’s merely old wood.
But it slides again, and Marina looks back.
A snake is slithering along the top of the table.
Its scales are black and diamond shaped, glinting in the sun, and though it’s short in length, there are wide bends in its body as it moves over the table.
She yelps, throwing herself from the picnic bench, taking two too-big steps away and nearly falling over her own legs.
A sharp pain slices against her foot, and she sucks in air through her teeth.
She lifts her foot and sees blood. Her heart pounds in her ears.
Eyes shifting focus, she sees the shards of a beer bottle that has been smashed against the sand.
A sudden wave of emotion engulfs her, and tears spring to her eyes unexpectedly.
It’s not just the pain from the glass, or her earlier argument with Haifa, or the fact that she is at the place that has nearly drowned her a dozen times.
It is everything, all of it, and it swallows her like the tides she fears.
Salt slides down the back of her throat.
“Mama? Mama!” Marina limps over to a flat rock, her eyes skirting the grass for nearby snakes, and sits down slowly.
Her foot is bleeding and now there are grains of sand and pieces of grass rubbing against the open wound.
She winces. Another mosquito buzzes by her ear and she swats at it, screaming, “Oh my GOD!”
Haifa turns to see Marina and runs back to the shore as quickly as the water will allow her. Her calves drip water and her shoes spray sand as they clap against each other in her hands. Small grains fly over Marina.
“I need water,” Marina says, her voice edged with irritation. “The wound is all dirty.” From you, she thinks bitterly, even though she knows it’s not really Haifa’s fault.