Chapter 13. Return #5
“Mama?” Marina opens the door gently, quietly, and her stomach clenches at the possibility that she was wrong and an Israeli family waits on the other side, ready to call the police. But it’s empty.
A warmth settles over her shoulders and she relaxes involuntarily.
The embrace extends to the physical space itself.
The storm quiets, dimming the rainfall to a soft pitter-patter outside of the window.
The air itself calms, as if the house has been holding its breath and just released a great sigh.
A ghostly scent of hariseh wafts from the oven.
Marina follows it and looks up at the small bit of yellow wallpaper in the corner of the room.
Her fingers graze the paper gently. It’s the same color as the kitchen wall at home. Home—both places.
As Marina walks, the bones clink softly in her shirt pouch with every step. With every movement, a reminder that she holds Tariq.
“Mama?” she ventures. Her mother’s presence lingers in the air, but the living room and the light pink hallway and everywhere in between are empty. “Mama?”
Circling back to the kitchen, her eyes search for a container and land on an empty shoebox sitting over the refrigerator. She pulls it down and places Tariq’s bones as gently as she can inside. Salt still clings to him like a dusting from the heavens. Tears blur her vision.
“I’ll bury you properly tomorrow. Somewhere beside your parents. In Nazareth, maybe. Or by the sea,” she whispers, caressing the side of the box—
No no no no no—no. No! No! Please … please.
—and without warning, a scream shatters this awed silence.
It smashes through the comfort, leaving shards of pain in its wake. Marina’s heart pounds as she ducks, her head spinning as she searches the room. No one is here, but the sudden deathly silence makes it feel as if something surrounds her. Something—
“Hello? Mama?” Marina yells, but her voice warps in the space around her and bounces back against her, as if she’s screaming underwater.
Haifa is here—she knows she’s here, the scent of her perfume lingers in the air. The only other proof of her existence is the phantom scream, like Khaled said he had heard before. The warnings about the house suddenly ring against her memory, raising alarm bells that dawn a harrowing realization:
The house has swallowed Haifa.
She walks to the door quickly, her hands stiff by her sides. Her breath is irregular; the rocks feel like they’re back, tumbling down her alveoli as she gasps through her nostrils. She reaches for the handle—
It’s locked. Marina cannot open the door.
Sweat now beads on her forehead despite the water that still lingers there.
Her fingers fumble against the lock but it has been melded shut against its bolt.
From behind, Marina hears the soft swish of shutters slowly closing over windows.
They snap into place with a final click.
A shiver rolls down her spine, from neck to base.
She runs to the back door hidden at the other end of the house, and though her shoes tap against the linoleum floor, the house keeps its silence held in suspension, waiting for the drop, too.
Marina’s breath stalls as fear grips her with an unbreakable iron vise.
She reaches for the doorknob, but it also remains unyielding beneath her hand.
Thrusting her shoulder against the door, Marina pushes her body weight against the wood. But nothing moves. Everything remains still for a single, precious moment longer until a door slams open to Marina’s right. She whirls around.
Haifa tumbles out of the closet, panting hard, her glasses askew. She’s here. It was her scream. Haifa looks to Marina, and for a split second she doesn’t recognize her, but then—
“We have to leave. Now.”
Marina turns back to the kitchen, where the shoebox still sits on the counter.
“Tariq,” she says, and it is with this single sentence, this single expulsion of breath—
HE. STAYS. HERE.
—that the tightly wound pleading of the house finally shatters.
A rush of wind tears through the house, bringing with it the rage of the storm from outside.
Rain pours from the ceiling and wraps them both in small cyclones; Marina’s hair whips back and forth, painting her mother in black, billowing streaks.
All of the air from the room is sucked out—can’t, breathe—but then gets spat back with items that hurl through the raging winds: the old painting, real estate paperwork, the marbled pink vase that tips and rolls, slamming into the wall.
Lightning flashes above, as if the ceiling were the sky. As if the house were the city.
My family.
A long, gray shadow seeps from the cracks in the stone; it hovers on the ground for a moment before rising in full.
Water flies off of its ethereal form and lands in sharp, stabbing droplets against Marina’s lips: it is salty, rotten.
It beads against her skin and falls to the ground, where it forms the same thick, warm puddles of blood that collect unseen in Haifa’s gutters.
Crimson liquid drips down her legs in viscous, heavy droplets, mooring her in a sickening understanding. Marina knows this shadow.
It’s the same one that has followed close behind her heels in the city, the same one that curled its slate fingers around Rania’s memories. It reached for her from below the sea, weighting the house of her grandmother, and the city, and its people, in a reality they never should have known.
It is Death.
It stretches over the city for it lives here—it has seeped into the pores of each stone and formed the whispers of every recollection of murder.
It has been fired from every Israeli military rifle.
It has pooled around the body of every Bilal Khalidi as they bled out.
And with every bullet, every real estate signing and tar pouring, Death’s home was cemented.
“No. No, no,” Marina cries with the realization.
Despite the desperation in her mother’s eyes, there is a horrified comprehension in her face—Haifa senses what this shadow is.
It expands, growing in size and depth, and covers the stormy ceiling.
Flickers of light tear through the darkness and thunder roils in heart-shattering booms.
Marina pushes against the storm but the wind resists, holding her in a wild, breathless column; it grows stronger and stronger, and the overpowering force whisks the vase to the opposite side of the room.
The sheer power of the gusts slams it against the living room pillar.
Diamond-glinted shards of ceramic fly in every direction and both Marina and Haifa hold their arms up by their faces instinctively.
Small, superficial cuts appear on Haifa’s skin, visible only by the faint red lines that bead to the surface.
She gasps and jerks her head toward her arms. The storm calms slightly and the vase pieces crash to the floor, though the wind still howls.
As Haifa holds her arms out to examine them, fine grains of salt fall from the ceiling and land in the cuts.
She flinches and immediately pulls them back in, gripping them close to her body.
“What the fuck,” Haifa yells, but the salt keeps falling, digging itself into her skin, as if it could stem the bleeding as Haifa once did on the lake for Marina a lifetime ago.
I’m sorry … I’m … sorry.
“Mom—”
But you can’t leave.
“We have to go. We have to go.”
Not ever.
The fear overtaking her completely now, Haifa starts to walk toward Marina, but in the instant that one foot steps in front of the other, the stone tiles ripple inward, as if made of liquid, and wrap around Haifa’s feet and legs. No—they don’t wrap. They disappear.
Haifa sinks into the floor.
In a matter of moments, her lower half is encased in the tiles; she is a woman attempting to escape from a tombstone.
“Oh, my god,” Marina cries, and it’s as if the expression on her face causes her mother to look down, unaware of what’s just happened. Haifa’s eyebrows lift and her mouth draws down at the corners in the picture of pure terror. No sound comes out of her mouth for a moment, then it finally escapes.
Haifa screams.
In the splitting echoes of her fear, the house takes over. Beneath its pulsating fury is a thinly veiled desperation. The house wants them to stay as badly as Marina once wanted to understand her entire history, but she can’t. Not like this.
“Marina!” Haifa’s piercing voice cracks through the ice that Marina finds her limbs frozen by. She meets her mother’s gaze. “Go!” Her hands wave wildly at the windows. “Go!”
Her mother’s painful, wretched yells electrify Marina’s legs to pick themselves up and run.
As she leaps over the stone, droplets of blood flicking from her skin, the shadow hovers above her and the storm’s winds push against her.
The window in the living room, the one that looks out to sea, is still clear.
She skids to a stop in front and reaches for the lock, hands trembling as they fumble with the plastic. It flips, and her nails scrape against the bottom of the wood as she tries to heft it open; she manages an inch, but it comes crashing down against her hands as the house slams it shut.
Now Marina screams.
She pulls her hands out from beneath the window and turns wildly, fingers swelling with painful pressure and hair flying.
All around her, the house groans—horrifying, awful lamentations that come from the depths of its soul, from the city beneath the sea.
Before Marina can run to the window in the kitchen, or search for windows in the bedrooms, she feels herself being pulled backward.
Unseen hands grab her shoulders and yank her to the wall beside the painting.
She catches a glimpse out of the corner of her eye—they are white, pale limbs that come from the fabric of the walls themselves.
Marina attempts to pry their grip from her shoulders—she grits her teeth from the pain in her fingertips—but even more hands grasp her legs, her hips, her neck.