CHAPTER THREE PRESENT DAY #2
Some nineties show plays on the first channel I flip to. Loud and abrasive, good for pushing out my thoughts. I force myself to focus on the canned laugh track instead of the moist, heavy fabric sticking to my right arm.
The scissors glide through the seams at my shoulder. Bracing myself, I peel off the sleeve. The squelch of the blood-heavy fabric makes me queasy, and I rush to drop the sleeve in an empty grocery bag. Red spots spatter the plastic.
The sight of my blood smeared over the logo of my favorite grocery store disorients me.
It prods at the iron fist clamped around my chest, threatening to loosen it.
I don’t know what would happen if my chest loosened enough for me draw in a full breath of air.
I might use it to start screaming, and I doubt I’d ever stop.
I drag my hair over my right shoulder and off my overheating neck, trying to regulate my body’s temperature.
Our house has the insulation of tissue paper.
Usually that means I spend every winter sporting a runny nose and wearing holes in the big toe of my socks, but at this precise moment, I couldn’t be more grateful for the chill.
My body always reacts to stress by turning into a furnace—the weeks after Mama died, I could only sleep while curled beneath an open window—but I thought it would stop eventually.
It did not. In fact, it made some new friends called shortness of breath and lethargy.
The nineties show ends, and a documentary on the Saqqara Tomb replaces it. The camera pans over the pyramids and the crowded streets of Cairo. Mystical music plays in the background. I roll my eyes, groping around the couch for where I’d dropped the remote.
“One of the oldest civilizations in the world, Egypt contains secrets beyond our wildest imaginations,” narrates the British presenter.
“In Egypt, or ‘Masr,’ knowledge works in reverse. The more our archeologists learn, the less we understand about the history of this mighty, mystifying nation. Nobody, however, can dispute the importance of the Nile in every period of Egypt’s history.
Sacrifices were made to the Nile in hopes of bountiful crop yields and seasonal floods.
” The river comes into view, sloshing against the banks of a Nubian village, stretching past the Saqqara Tomb.
“Think of the secrets lost to this timeless river. If the Nile could speak, what would it tell us?”
I finally hunt down the remote. With my uninjured arm, I mute the television in time to avoid audio for the next clip, where a bunch of British archeologists dressed in white and beige suits hold ceremonial shovels inside a tomb while a couple of actual diggers wearing galabiyas maneuver around them.
To think just a month or two ago, I would have turned up the volume on this ridiculous documentary and spent the rest of the afternoon ignoring my homework to watch it.
I had been so focused on soaking up all the media on my home country that I could find; I didn’t even notice how strange or off-putting some of it was.
Though, not for lack of warning. Baba had a habit of assessing the names in the opening credits of any documentary about Masr. If it didn’t pass his inspection, he would refuse to watch it with me.
Truthfully, convincing Baba to sit down and watch anything with me was tough. To rip him away from his grading, I’d turn on a Masri show—if Ahmed El Sakka, Mohamed Henedi, or Hanan Turk is involved, Baba won’t even check his emails.
Still, he never lingers past an episode or two. The documentaries irritate him, but I think the shows hurt his heart.
I only swoon a little wiping my arm clean. Progress. Who knows? Constantly sopping up blood might cure me of my phobia once and for all.
I’m all about the silver linings these days.
After I finish wrapping gauze around my upper arm, I put away the rest of the supplies and head for the fridge. I pour myself a bowl of stale cereal and climb the stairs to my bedroom. A roll of thunder shakes the house as soon as the door closes behind me.
“Ugh.” I leave my bowl on the dresser and run back downstairs, grabbing the rain buckets from the garage. Ward is no stranger to storms, especially in February. Rattling, raging sheets of rain and wind lay siege to the county, flooding the lake and making the roads unusable.
Our roof may as well be Swiss cheese for all the leaks it springs. I stick buckets in strategic locations around the living room.
I switch on all the lights, fervently hoping Baba doesn’t walk into the house distracted. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard the muted cry of him tripping over a bucket.
The roof creaks, the wood furrowing like a stern brow under the onslaught.
I itch to grab my phone and text Rainie. I imagine the conversation would go as a million before it had.
Me:
WW Alert!! Grab your laptop, it’s my turn to pick the movie
Rainie:
Not a WW. This is practically sunbathing weather. stop trying to force me to watch Howl’s Moving Castle
Me:
you don’t understand. he has silver hair and a long black coat and he FLIES
Rainie:
He’s a cartoon
Me:
…
you’re killing me. like actual physical pain KILLING ME
Now, Rainie would probably recommend I meander out into the street with a lightning rod just for giggles. She certainly wouldn’t speculate over whether we had an actual Ward Wailer on our hands.
The Talbots’ rusted awning rattles in the wind, nearly louder than the rain pelting the windows. A car alarm goes off in the distance, and I resign myself to napping with headphones on.
I check my phone, but there’s no alert yet. Good. Ward Wailers have the power to bring the county—and its gridline—to its knees. I hate it when Baba is out of the house during one.
I push my curtain to the side. Sure enough, dark gray clouds hover low over our street. So much for a sunny Friday by the lake. Everyone at Canyon will be home today, too. Despondently watching their plans for the rest of the afternoon disappear in the blue afterglow of a lightning strike.
Instead of feeling smug, the thought of everyone else stuck inside only depresses me further.
Spooning cereal into my mouth, I grab my journal from my backpack. I’ve documented every attack, every bizarre incident since I left Masr. The first ten pages of the journal remain blank. Waiting for me to fill them with the details of what happened on the trip.
But I can’t. The fear refuses to let me condense it, to make it small enough to fit into words.
After I add a couple of hesitant lines about the encounter with Miss Diaz, I toss the journal, picking up the much rattier leather one I lifted from Baba’s study.
It contains only two entries: my mother’s maiden name on the first page, written in her trademark slanted script, and a photo of her and Baba in their early twenties.
Baba and Mama smile up at me from a two-by-two photo of them posing in front of the Stanley Bridge in Alexandria.
Baba has his arm around Mama, his square glasses slipping down the long line of his nose.
A nest of curly hair sits on top of his head, and he’s wearing a truly horrific pair of bellbottom jeans.
He’s also smiling wider than I’ve ever seen him smile in Ward.
Mama barely takes up space at his side. Much more reserved than Baba, her hands rest in front of her skirt, lips turned up at the corners. Coils of black hair cascade in spirals around her frame. I wind one of my own curls around my finger.
Nadine Haikal and Hatem Mansour met at the University of Cairo two years into Baba’s position as a faculty lecturer.
Nadine had taken a series of long buses from El Agamy, a rural area on the outskirts of Alexandria, to visit a friend on campus.
She ended up wandering around, lost, until Baba happened upon her.
I love hearing the story, drawing it around me like a warm and well-worn blanket, but Baba turns puce anytime I try to talk about Mama. I resent it, sometimes, how Baba hoards those memories of her. I was only nine when she went to her hometown for her first and last visit.
It’s almost as if he thinks by withholding stories about Mama or Masr, I’ll be a blank slate for America to fill in. A girl with an Etch A Sketch identity.
Outside, the rain howls, unleashing its wrath on Ward.
My hands tighten around the journal. I went to Masr to learn about who I am, where I come from. But also for answers, because here is my darkest, quietest secret: I don’t believe them about how my mother died.