Chapter 1. Excised Limbs #3
Haifa takes a bottle from her purse on the bench and runs back, and Marina pours it with a shaking hand over her red foot. The blood washes out, but more still leaks from her wound, coiling inside of the wrinkles of her skin.
“What happened? Oh, sweetie, are you okay? What happened? Oh, I—”
“I cut myself on a beer bottle. Watch out.” Marina points to the glass and grits her teeth as she gently rubs away the grains of sand. “Check your purse. There was a snake on the table.”
But Haifa is already digging through her purse, a concentrated look on her face. “I know I had one … yes!” She pulls out a salt packet from a restaurant triumphantly, tearing it open with her teeth.
“Here.” She poises over Marina’s foot with the packet, but Marina jerks away.
“Are you kidding me?! You’re literally going to rub salt in my wound?”
“It’s an old trick, trust me. It will stop it from bleeding.” Haifa’s voice has taken on an uncharacteristic tone of assuredness. Marina reluctantly stretches her foot out.
Haifa rubs the salt against the cut, the crimson melting into her fingers, and Marina bites the inside of her cheek again. It stings, like lemon juice to a hangnail.
“Enough! Bas, Mama.” Marina jerks her foot away and Haifa raises her hands.
“There. See? The bleeding is already slowing.”
Marina twists her foot around, and she’s right. The bleeding has been stemmed almost entirely.
“Water, please. Let me wash this.”
“I know it hurts, honey, but it works. Rinse with the rest of the bottle and let me get you a towel.” Haifa stands and goes over to the car.
“How did you know how to do that?” Marina calls after her. She rubs her hands against each other, ridding herself of the sand and grit. It falls to the side like a dirt snowfall.
“Tata taught me.”
Haifa tosses the towel she’s found over to Marina, who wraps it around her foot as a makeshift bandage. “Well, how did she know?”
Haifa shrugs and offers her arm to her daughter. “She knew a lot of home remedies like that.”
“Why don’t you ever teach me any?”
“I just did.” She leads Marina down back toward the park bench, where the snake has disappeared.
Marina stretches out her foot and silently observes it. No, she wants to say. You haven’t taught me anything about us. Not in a long time.
“Sweetie, what do you want me to tell you?” Haifa gives a half laugh, half sigh in a puff of air through her lips.
“It’s not like I know much. You want me to tell you what I know?
We come from Haifa. Tata had a house there.
She named me after her city. She had two parents and one older sister.
There—that’s it. That’s the entire familial history I know. ”
“I wonder what the house looked like.”
“Stone.” Her voice softens. “She always told me it was white stone.”
Marina leans her head against her mother’s shoulder. She looks out into the distance, where the sun is turning a fiery scarlet over the water.
“Don’t forget to take the oranges,” she says. She points to the picnic table, where the red bag of fruit lies.
“Don’t worry, I won’t.” Haifa smiles and smooths Marina’s hair gently.
The pair silently watch the sun slowly fade together. Finally, Marina speaks again.
“Is it still there? The house?”
“Who knows? After Israel took everything, I don’t know. Maybe. It may not even be a home still.”
Why is the house in Haifa haunted?
For the remainder of her life, in the latter of the two periods that were dictated as before 1948 and after, Nuhad Sayadi was severed from the place she’d always called home.
Nakba in Arabic means “catastrophe.” She always thought a more appropriate term would have been qatia’a: “cut.” When her family was forced to leave, she was severed from the city and her home.
Nuhad and her family were never allowed back, a soldier having taken residence inside, military law imposed, and her family fresh refugees from their city.
Even as death finally, gently embraced her, Nuhad never learned the fate of her home in Haifa or the hauntings that had descended.
It was painful to return to those memories.
To Nuhad, it was her fault that her family had to leave in the way that they did.
They abandoned their home. Her fault. This series of events played like a film in her mind on certain nights. It was her fault.
When the soldiers came with their guns and their loudspeakers blaring the wails and screams of their victims, Nuhad had thrown herself into the sea.
She was just a girl. The water called to her, buffeted by the demands of her mother, and both begged her to swim toward the boats.
Toward refuge. No one could blame her for what happened. Except for Nuhad.
In hindsight, she told herself that she should have stayed. She should have let herself suffocate despite all of the air in the city having been sucked away. She should have stayed with her parents, even if it meant certain death. She should have—
And so, the weight of losing her home planted itself on Nuhad’s shoulders for the rest of her life.
Her family was displaced to Nazareth first, where her older sister lived, and then scattered to Jerusalem in bits and pieces. As an adult, Nuhad emigrated to the United States, needing somewhere, anywhere, to serve as a peaceful refuge after a lifetime of moving around Palestine, unable to breathe.
It was her fault. Others tried to help, saying a young girl couldn’t have known what she had done—she only meant to swim toward the boats and seek refuge for them—but their sympathies paled to reality. Nuhad lost her home. She lost everything that makes a life.
Though she thought of it often, Nuhad never spoke of her past. It was painful enough in her mind, the grief filling dusty corners of memories.
To salvage the home she had lost, she attempted to create a living manifestation of the place that she’d once called home within her daughter. She named her Haifa.
But the house in Nazareth, and later the house in Chicago, wasn’t a home. As much as she tried to replicate the warmth of a place in her memory, nothing could compare. Everything in life fell against her expectations. Because it was her fault. She went into the sea.
Despite the physical distance, Nuhad and her childhood house in Haifa were inexplicably connected.
She knew, in her heart, that it would remain empty for her.
A small part of her hoped, wished, knew—it was chewing on residents and spitting them out, blackening them with the rage that blistered within the stones and floorboards after their displacement.
And in turn, the house felt the same inextricable connection to Nuhad, its youngest daughter, and her wishes.
The house in Haifa swallowed more people, greedy for its family, hoping that someday, in the wake of the pile of bodies it left behind, it would finally be enough for Nuhad and her family to return. But they never did.
Nuhad knew why the house in Haifa was haunted, for she left a piece of herself in its walls.
It’s a new day.
This has been Haifa’s mantra in the moment that her eyes open and the sleep clears from her head; it is a soothing prayer she holds in the hope of a new day as her eyes stare at the white ridges of her popcorn ceiling.
It’s a new day—even after a fight with Marina.
Even after she is reminded, once again, of her own inability to measure up.
And how can a mother admit her own failure to her child?
Haifa is supposed to be the beacon, the stalwart light in which her only daughter can always seek comfort and stability.
She’s supposed to be better to her than Nuhad was to Haifa.
It’s a new day.
Haifa climbs out of bed and quickly pulls on a T-shirt and jeans; she rakes her fingers through her hair without looking in the mirror and grabs a muffin from the tray sitting out on the kitchen counter.
Marina is still sleeping, which is good.
Haifa needs to pick up the last of Nuhad’s things from hospice.
The car ride is quick—Nuhad’s final home was only a short drive away, for Haifa’s own anxieties. As she walks in, the familiar scent of the building floods her nostrils. It’s been two months.
“Haifa?” the woman behind the reception exclaims when Haifa signs in. Her face is new. “Like the city?”
“Yeah.” Haifa gives her a polite smile.
“I’ve always wanted to visit Israel! Have you ever been?”
Haifa stares at her.
“No.”
“Oh, I’d love to go,” she says, but her voice trails off at the end as Haifa turns from the desk. It’s supposed to be a new day.
She walks into the dining hall and spots Sara. She’s in her white scrubs, the ones with faded blue flowers linked together in long chains.
“Sara,” Haifa says, and she is folded into a hug.
“Haifa.” Sara pulls back and looks at her sympathetically. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m fine.” Haifa shrugs and gives her a half-hearted smile. “I’m just here to pick up my mom’s stuff.”
“Of course.” Sara’s face is the picture of compassion, composed of thin, pink lips pulled slightly downward at their edges in a concerned pout; fragile spiderwebbed lines beneath her kind, dark eyes; attentive eyebrows stitched together in the middle.
Sara was the only reason Haifa felt comfortable leaving her mother here—she treated her like her own.
Sara leads her to a plain white door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY and unlocks it with one of the keys attached to her neon-green wrist strap. It opens into a storage closet and she points to two boxes labeled NUHAD.
“Thank you for keeping them here for so long. I know I’m really, really late to pick everything up.”
“Mish mashkal,” Sara reassures her in her southern Lebanese dialect. “Nuhad was family.”
Even though they’d only just met a year ago, and became friends within the last few months, Haifa feels understood by Sara. She’s like the older sister she’s never had.
Haifa picks up one of the boxes, then hesitates. The contents of her mother’s belongings are heavy in her arms.