Chapter 1. Excised Limbs #4
“Shu fi?” Sara asks, leaning against the doorframe.
Haifa’s lip gloss is sticky against her teeth as she bites her lip. Relationships all have a give-and-take, and she hasn’t given enough to Sara to warrant her asking for support.
“Are you okay, Haifa?” Sara’s eyes search hers.
“I can’t take you away from work,” Haifa says, trailing off.
Sara brushes a hand in her face. “Wala yhimmik. I’ll take my break now. Come on—let’s go sit in the garden.”
She picks up the second box and Haifa follows her to the small square of green in the middle of the hospice. It’s a spot of color in this place of endings. Sara sits on the stone bench and pats for Haifa to join her.
Haifa sighs, sinking beside her friend. “Marina wants to go to Haifa.”
“Okay.” Sara snaps back a hair tie as she pulls her hair—black tufts of roots beneath breakable dyed blond—into a ponytail.
“Would you—” Haifa pauses and bites her lip. “I mean, would you let your kids go…? I don’t know. I don’t even know what I’m asking.”
“Habibti, she’s already going to Nazareth. What’s a journey to another city just forty minutes away?” She shrugs, then meets her gaze. “Why? Is there a reason you don’t want her going?”
“No, it’s just—” Haifa lowers her voice as a man in a wheelchair passes them. “I don’t know anything about the city. I’ve never even been.” She pauses. “And … there’s something wrong. I don’t know what, but there’s a reason why my mother never went back.”
“Taba’an, the occupation.”
“Yes, of course, but … even when we visited Palestine, she refused to go back to Haifa specifically. I don’t know why.” Haifa lets out a held breath in the form of an airy laugh. “And it doesn’t help that she always compared me to that stupid city.”
“What do you mean?” Sara cocks her head.
“Never mind. I don’t know.”
“Why not let her go? It could be a good chance for her to explore.”
“We don’t have family there, and Marina has never”—she draws out the word to emphasize it—“traveled on her own.” One hand wraps around her stomach while the other comes up to her temple.
“Haifa,” Sara admonishes. “You know as soon as she lands that she’s going to go anyway. You might as well let her go with your permission—and with your knowledge of where she’ll be.”
Haifa shakes her head, the beginnings of a smile on her lips. “Okay, that’s true.”
Sara places one hand of long red nails, chipped at the tips, on Haifa’s arm. “Let her go. Let her discover for herself.”
“Fine, okay,” Haifa says with an exasperated laugh. “But where do I even send her? How do I know she’ll be safe?”
“Habibtchi, our countries are never safe.” Sara winks and bites her lower lip in jest. “She’ll be fine.
She’s staying with family, sah? I’m sure they have friends there.
Or they know a bed-and-breakfast there. You don’t have to send her for the whole time, but maybe when she lands she can spend a few days there before going to see your family. ”
Haifa nods silently for fear of the sudden lump in her throat melting. Marina will be digging through the past—the past that Haifa has always been too terrified to seek.
Sara gives her hands one more squeeze, and together they each carry one box back to Haifa’s car. As Haifa pulls out of the parking lot, she sees Sara watching her from the entryway. The emotions build inside, threatening.
Why is the house in Haifa haunted?
Haifa followed after her mother, picking up shreds of histories and recollections on the rare occasions when Nuhad would speak about them.
Now, Haifa only has scraps torn from the edges, a painting whose canvas has been ripped out—pieces.
She knows that her mother was forced to flee, that her city has transformed into something else, and that a house existed once.
She knows scattered family members across the diaspora.
Hauntings, to Haifa, were the ghosts that lived on in her mother’s eyes.
They were in the way she would press her lips together, refusing to elaborate as her eyes became milky with unshed tears.
They were in the way that her mother refused to step into another ocean.
The haunting of Haifa was the distance between Nuhad and Haifa, a mother refusing to pass on the trauma she held, and a daughter wanting only to connect.
Haifa’s haunting is in her desire for the love that her mother withheld; her ghosts are the scant, distanced, harsh words Nuhad gave her, these specters that guided her life, instilling in Haifa the uncertainty of what she needed to do to secure her mother’s affection.
She didn’t know about the ghosts, not as a child.
But the hauntings were clear deep in the wells of Nuhad’s eyes, even before she died.
Haifa doesn’t know why the house in Haifa is haunted, but she does know the echoes of ghosts past.
Haifa’s tears wait patiently behind her eyes until she is on the long, empty road home. There, they fall like sudden monsoon rains. She never cries when she expects to. Haifa’s entire hand isn’t enough to wipe the wetness from her cheeks.
“Fuck,” she whispers to herself. She grabs her water bottle and drinks in huge gulps, trying to wash the feelings away.
The tears are still coming in gasps and hiccups, unwarranted by the expectation of her grown daughter’s absence on a trip she should be taking.
Haifa knows this. But still they fall. It is as if someone, or something, has come back to life.
At the last second, she swerves, taking the exit that doesn’t lead toward home. It veers into the more rural Illinois farmland, and at the first sign of an empty field, she pulls over. It is silent in the car except for her own breath.
She gulps the water again, this time a little too greedily. Water dribbles out of the side of her mouth and onto the front of her shirt.
Marina’s first trip to Palestine will now tie with the number of times Haifa has visited, and she will be visiting the city of her own inadequacy.
Her daughter needs it, she knows, and though her attempts at being a supportive mother have sometimes fallen flat, she knows that Sara is right.
It’s more than Haifa’s own mother did. Nuhad was stubborn, even after her mind slipped.
They argued up until her death, her mother’s eyes far away and her voice barely above a whisper.
In the last few days before she passed, Nuhad had only one demand:
Bring me saltwater.
Why? Why saltwater, Mama?
I need to cleanse myself.