Chapter 11. We
We
It’s a dream. Marina knows it’s a dream. There’s a voice, whispering,
Come to me, Marina.
Arms made of stone open wide and within their embrace is a warm, homey living room with well-worn sofas and photographs hanging on the walls.
Come, and I will ease everything, it whispers. Its voice wraps around her like a sharp icicle caressing her skin, leaving a thin trickle of frigid water in its wake. Marina shivers despite knowing it’s not real.
Come, and I won’t let you go. Not again.
Grainy particles invade Marina’s mouth and stick against her tongue as she spits. She raises her head in confusion and is nearly blinded by the bright white light of the sun over the shore. Seagulls squawk nearby, searching for food.
Her hands touch hard earth as she pushes herself up.
Peeling away from the ground, Marina can feel that the concrete has made shallow grooves on the side of her cheek.
The waves lap gently onto the shore despite the storm making landfall tomorrow.
Sand flies into her eyes with each soft breeze from the sea, and she rubs at them with equally grainy fingers. Marina stands, wobbling on both legs.
The sight of the black tar of the parking lot reminds her—
Tariq.
His grave is here. Grief and anger washed over the young boy who would stay young forever, and they stood together over this spot—here—and Marina watched as he vanished into his grave.
Hair flies into her mouth as she whips her head to the side, looking for him, but she knows he’s gone. He reburied himself.
It’s mine.
The gaping, gasping absence of oxygen in her lungs grips her throat and blackens the edges of her vision. She wants to scream, but there’s no fuel to light the fire she feels. Tears squeeze through the corners of her eyes and drip down onto her clothes—
Her hospital gown.
She’s still wearing the thin white gown that she had woken up in the day before. She sways, all of the memories of the past day overwhelming her: the hospital, her lungs, Tariq. And her mother—her mother is coming today.
Marina nearly collapses under the weight of memory, but she manages to stumble forward, her hands grasping on to the trunk of a warming car. She pants and looks ahead. The streets are empty; in fact, she holds on to the only car in this parking lot. It’s too early.
A figure moves at the edge of her vision and Marina turns her head automatically, but there is only a Styrofoam cup trailing down the road in the wind.
The figure moves again, off to the right, and she whirls to pin it in place, but again, it disappears.
She can only see the ghosts that haunt this city at the edge of her vision.
Knowing that they are there is almost a comfort laced in grief.
The city is haunted but it is hers, the land holding both her great-uncle’s body and her grandmother’s home.
The specters of memory live at the edges of Haifa, but still, they are here. They are here.
Sighing, trying to force air into her lungs, Marina focuses on her feet and each step they take forward to take her back to Rania. Or a taxi. She can’t go back to the Israeli hospital.
“What…?” Her whispered voice trails off. Saltwater moistens her feet; as she looks down, she stands in a puddle that didn’t exist a moment before.
Her vision swims as she looks into the distance. The water continues down a thin pathway against the concrete, just as it did in the house when she found Nuhad’s journal. Her eyes follow it to the sand, where it soaks into the grains. It wants her to follow.
The house. The house is here.
The water drip, drip, drips down the parking lot stairs.
Her hands grasp whatever they can find for stability: poles, trees, trash cans.
With each breath, her lungs burn with air that should feel oxygenated but instead feels like a continuous, smothering suffocation. Her eyes are trained to the ground.
The trail transforms from parking lot to sand as it guides her to the beach. The water has become a rushing sort of trough, carving the sand away and pushing churning seawater through. To the sea.
Marina follows the watery path.
She holds on to nothing as she stands against the edge of the ocean. The horizon is still dusty blue, and the bright, impossibly glittery water doesn’t absorb the morning sun—it reflects it, gives a mirror to it. It holds the sun up to itself and says: Here. The light is within you.
Come to me.
Her body knows what she’s about to do before she does.
Her legs continue across the hot sand. Her breath is loud in her ears from earth to sea, but there is an infusion of fresh oxygen into her lungs.
She breathes properly for the first time in two days.
A small wave washes over her toes and a delicious thrill runs up her spine, leaving cold goose bumps on her arms and legs even in the heat. Energy suddenly thrums in her limbs.
“The sea,” she murmurs. It’s involuntary, she doesn’t know where this reaction comes from, but she gives in to it and surrenders to the ocean.
Her mind has now caught up and though there is a voice that’s screaming at her, telling her she will drown, it’s overtaken by the wave of emotions she feels being in the water.
It’s warm and crystal clear, and she can see white sand and small flashes of minnows below the surface.
She’s up to her knees now. The same small voice is in the back of her head, telling her this is dangerous, but she pushes it away. She has spent her whole life fighting the pull. She’s tired.
Soft sand inches between her toes and over her feet until the water surrounds her at hip level. Her stomach shies away from the temperature, contracting with each wave lapping up around her. There’s something here, a memory—
Fill your belly with air. Yes, just like that—
Marina breathes deeply, perhaps for the first time since arriving in Haifa.
—and float.
She tips back, every single neuron in her brain aflame with fear and excitement, trusting in the sea of her grandmother. There. She floats up on her back, even waves her arms slowly through the cool water. Swimming comes naturally, as if she’s always done this.
The sun warms her face and she yearns for something unnameable.
The water is up to her chest now when she comes back down, and in the distance, she spots a point where the sea is calm. There are waves on both sides of this small channel, gently rolling away from its smooth surface.
Come to me, Marina.
Marina swims toward it, wondering and hoping for a sandbar.
An indescribable childlike joy bursts from within.
She could bring back some shells with her and maybe make a necklace out of them or put them in a clear glass cup on her desk back home.
Resin would bind it, and she could put a label on it as a forever reminder of her grandmother’s home: HAIFA, PALESTINE.
Marina only barely reaches this immovable channel before the water drags her away with unfathomable speed.
For a moment, Marina wonders where the sandbar is—she’s clinging to this notion that she’s just missed it—and it’s not until the beach moves away with frightening speed that she realizes that this is a riptide.
It’s carrying her out to sea. Marina thrashes against its pull, but the tide is far stronger.
In the reflection of the waves—through the froth and into the depths of the clear water—she can see, just barely, the outline of the house. It is a dark and ominous shape that swallows the sea and sand surrounding it. As Marina stares, the energy from the house absorbs her within.
Her legs stop kicking for one moment and the house draws her lower. Marina’s bottom half sinks, tilting her upward, and slowly, as she stares into the intoxicating gaze of her grandmother’s childhood home, the water inches up toward her neck and she descends. The sea laps against her throat.
Its stones open up to her, and the front door flies open—
Choking seawater floods her throat, and she thrashes, separated from the link to the house.
Her survival instinct is triggered, and Marina attempts to claw her way back to shore, but the pull drags her away, farther and farther out to open water.
Her heart pounds, panic setting in as she realizes that she won’t be able to last much longer.
Her arms are already tiring from trying to fight the current. And below—
A shadow spreads up from the open door and reaches long, gray fingers toward her.
It is the same as the one in the city that follows her as she walks, the same as the one in Rania’s breath when she speaks of the past. Water enters Marina’s mouth again, coating her cheeks in salt, and she sputters as she slowly sinks further, closer to the shadow.
Closer to the house. A desperation oozes from it.
Breathe. Float.
It’s a different voice than before—gentler—and so, counterintuitively to everything she feels at the moment, Marina pushes herself to float on her back and allows the tide to continue rushing her out to sea.
Beneath the water, her ears drown in the sound of the rush of the waves and her own heart beating loudly.
Much, much farther below, a quieter voice dripping in bitterness and hostility speaks.
Come to me.
She shuts her eyes tightly and remembers a chorus from a song, and she repeats it over and over again until she can no longer hear the voice.
After what feels like an interminable amount of time, the riptide pushes her out of its hold.
The sea calms, and Marina can feel the waves gently pull and push against her, bobbing her up and down.
She rights herself and squints to find the shore, purposefully avoiding looking below into the deep, dark maw of the sea.
It’s far. It’s so far.