CHAPTER ELEVEN PRESENT DAY
It’s three in the morning, and the shadow under the metal door hasn’t moved.
I’ve been watching it for the last twenty minutes. Every time I think about sitting up or turning on the light, lead fills my stomach, pinning me in place.
Because I know it’s watching me, too.
I can’t explain how I know this shadow is an imposter any more than I could explain why fingernails grow outwards instead of sideways. Call it delusion, call it a rare moment of intuition, but I will swear on my life that I am not alone in my room.
The shadow under the metal door always shifts, moving with the moon throughout the night.
I want to call for Baba. I want to hear his footsteps as he lumbers down the hall.
I want him to open the door and switch on the light with the hand he isn’t using to rub his eyes.
Just as he had when I was a child, I want him to sit on the edge of my bed and laugh at how silly I am to be scared of the dark.
“Ya binty, what’s in your head can’t hurt you,” he’d cajole, tapping my forehead.
Back then, he would take me downstairs for a cup of mint tea, and we would watch Sanawat il Daya’a until one of us fell asleep.
But if I call Baba into my room, something much worse than a shadow will follow him inside.
My phone is under my pillow. I know who I need to call, if I could only convince my limbs to thaw. Some primordial instinct has locked them tight, trying to keep me frozen and invisible until the danger is gone.
Tears collect in my unblinking eyes. I have to call Jesse. I have to move. Otherwise, I won’t just be playing dead. The fear alone will stop my heart.
I draw my phone out from under my pillow. The screen flickers on, harshly bright.
I can’t unlock it without looking away from the shadow.
Saliva thickens on my tongue, syrupy with my rising nausea. Count to three, I order. Count to three and look away.
One. I maneuver my phone in front of my face,
Two. My thumb hovers over the bottom of the screen, ready to swipe.
Three.
I look down.
My thumb shakes as I pull up my call log and press on Jesse’s number. He’d typed it in before I left his house.
It rings. I hold my breath, fixed on his name. (He saved it as “J. Talbot,” probably to avoid giving me the idea that we’re more than glorified business associates.)
Voicemail. The machine’s robotic message passes too quickly, and I’m plunged back into the tomblike silence of my room.
“Jesse,” I whisper. “There’s something in my room. Please … please come.”
I press the screen to end the call, and a weight settles on my legs.
When I was a kid, I heard this story about a guy who died from a prank gone wrong.
His friends dressed up as kidnappers and abducted him from his dorm in the middle of the night, throwing him into a van headed for one of their houses.
They dragged him into the yard and forced him to kneel in front of a tree stump.
Trying to keep the laughter from their voices, they told him he would be executed.
The poor guy was out of his mind with fear, sobbing and shaking and begging them not to do it.
They played him an audio of a sword being sharpened. In the back, another “friend” dunked a towel in a bucket of ice water. Then they forced him to count down from ten. At zero, they dropped the towel onto his neck.
The guy died immediately.
Ridiculous, isn’t it? A person can’t actually die just by believing they died any more than someone could live by believing they were still alive.
But when my legs are pinned beneath the weight on top of the covers and the seconds tick by like centuries, I can believe it. I can believe a mind can be convinced of something so thoroughly that it bends science and medicine and reality itself into compliance.
The shadow beneath the metal door has moved to my dresser. Back to normal.
And sitting cross-legged on the covers is my mother.
Her hair falls in a rippling black curtain down her spine. Bright green eyes rake over me with concern. “Why are you crying, habibti? Did someone at school upset you?”
Across her sweater, SAWYER ELEMENTARY MOM is embroidered in bold letters. Her jeans are distressed at the knees and belted low at her waist.
Mama scoots closer, and I’m too frozen to do anything but stare.
“Yasmina, what’s wrong?” Tears collect in her eyes the longer I stay silent. “Did someone hurt you?”
This isn’t real. This thing sitting on my covers is not my mother.
It’s wearing her clothes, and it even smells like her.
The overpowering spice of her ninety-nine-cent bottle of Jordache tickles my nose.
Longing surges through me, wrapping around my chest and wringing every last drop of air from my lungs.
“You can tell me, you know. I’m your mother.”
I shake my head. It’s the only action I can bring myself to take.
She studies me, searching for the lie. I know what she’ll say next. We’ve had some version of this conversation a million times. Judging by the sweater, this one is from my last day in the fourth grade, when I’d come home with a bloody nose and a teacher’s note.
“Yasmina, you are not weak.” Her voice hardens, something cold and distant flashing over her features. “I did not bring you here to be weak. If someone hurts you, you hurt them back.”
A distant thud draws my attention from Mama for a second. I glance at the roof, brows furrowing.
When I glance back down, her face leans inches from mine.
“What kind of home is this if you can’t even fight back?” she demands. Her breath wafts across my cheeks. “If I can’t protect you here, then what was the point of any of it?”
My fourth-grade self hadn’t had a clue what she was talking about, and my teenage self isn’t faring much better.
I force myself to hold her gaze. My lips tremble as I part them, my teeth struggling to unclench.
“You. Aren’t. Real.”
A fissure cracks Mama’s skull open like a chisel taken to a statue.
“My mother is dead,” I hiss.
Another crack, this time down her throat and across her chest. The tears spilling down her cheeks fall faster, a fountain without end. She wipes them away. When she lowers her hands, empty eye sockets stare back at me.
The metal door rattles. The sliding pieces of my mother’s face rearrange into a gruesome grin.
“How did I die, Mina?” She bounces on her knees, pieces of her breaking off like glass and falling onto my bedspread. Blood pours through the cracks, winding through her in rivulets of red. Her voice deepens with each repetition, becoming an inhuman snarl. “How did I die? How did I die?”
“I don’t—I don’t know!” I scramble off the bed, clipping my elbow against the dresser. On the bed, her silhouette ripples and tugs.
“Liar!” she howls. The sound scrapes through me, knives hacking into my skull.
The shriek of hinges finally snaps me from the last of my shock, and I scream. I scream until it feels like my insides liquefy, rising like molten lava seconds from an eruption.
A cold hand closes over my mouth.
“Mansour!” Jesse growls. Rain dampens his hair, clinging to his cheekbones. Dark eyes roam over my petrified features. “Hey, hey, look at me! You’ve gotta calm down. Your dad—oh, crap.”
Heavy footsteps thunder down the hall, headed straight for my room. “Mina!” Baba calls. “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”
I push Jesse off and roll to my knees, crawling to the door just in time for Baba to twist the handle. The lock I installed strains, the metal bar bending as Baba pushes against it. “Yasmina!” he bellows. I can’t remember the last time I heard him shout. “When did you get a lock? Open this door!”
I drag myself to my feet and rest my forehead against the door. “Nothing’s wrong, Baba. I just had a bad dream. I’m so sorry to have woken you.”
The lock strains again as Baba pushes open a tiny gap between the door and the frame. “You don’t sound right. Let me in.”
From the corner, I spot Jesse pushing the metal door shut. Is that how he came inside? Is he determined to slip off my roof and break his neck?
The door thuds, the gap widening as the lock struggles not to snap. “Mina,” Baba snarls, and it hits me with the force of a truck.
For the second time tonight, my heart stops.
The fetid odor of rot and sewage slips through the gap in the door, curling into my nose.
“Mina, Mina, Yasmina,” Baba sings, and bile surges into my throat. It has him.
And it can talk.
“Jesse, come help me close this door!”
“Are the shadows keeping you company? We know how lonely you get, little Mina. So very lonely.”
Jesse’s shoulder joins mine, shoving against the door.
“Unless … uh-oh. Don’t tell me you’re scared of your own shadow,” the thing that isn’t Baba says, laughing. Ice sluices through my veins. “Your mother was never scared of her shadows. Then again, she rarely cared about anything long enough for its shadow to chase her.”
The picture of Mama as a teenager flashes through my mind. Her cold smirk and flat stare.
“You don’t know her!” I burst out, and I ram myself into the door over and over again.
Pain explodes in my arm, but I would let the whole limb snap off before I let this thing keep talking.
This creature in my father’s body, this nightmare that’s haunted me since I stepped foot in the Haikal villa—it doesn’t get to tell me who my mother was.
It doesn’t get to eliminate the woman who raised me for nine years, who would drape me over her shoulders and spin us around until we were both dizzy and giggling, who would greet each morning by smoothing the furrow in Baba’s brow and kissing his temple, who loved me.
What right does it have to tell me she’s not real?
I beat against the door until it’s replaced by a wall of flesh and muscle.
Jesse absorbs the blow across his chest before I can reel myself in.
I gasp an apology as his large hand closes around my wrist. “Mansour, hey.” His tone is firm, steady.
It cuts through my panic like a ray of sun in a storm. “The door is shut. It’s gone.”
We wait in tense silence, listening for sounds on the other side.
I hated not knowing what it had done to Baba.
The one time I stuck around to witness the thing leave a body it had possessed, the person had been staggering around, completely dazed.
They hadn’t remembered me, hadn’t remembered a second of their possession.
At the time, it infuriated me—there I was, bleeding and terrified, and the person who’d hurt me could scarcely remember why they’d walked into the room.
Now, their amnesia is a blessing. I hear Baba shuffling outside, probably disoriented, struggling to recall what brought him to my room in the middle of the night, and my only strength comes from knowing none of this will remain with him.
He’ll go to sleep with a faint headache, spared of any nightmares of a glowing door and orange eyes.
Eventually, the shuffling grows fainter as Baba returns to his bedroom.
Relief liquifies my muscles, and I sag into Jesse. His heart beats steadily under my cheek. Real and reliable, unlike everything else around me.
After a hesitant pause, Jesse’s hand settles between my shoulder blades. He rubs soothing circles into my back, his breath a warm caress against the top of my head.
“You sure there isn’t an easier soul out there for you to save?” I mumble. He smells divine, and I resist the urge to steal a deeper sniff of his collar.
A laugh rolls in his chest, rumbling against me. “I like a challenge.”
After a moment, I draw back, the shock easing away enough to remind me that I’m getting too cozy with a guy who’d wake up early just to avoid speaking two words to me. He’s being kind enough to comfort me—that doesn’t mean he suddenly wants to be friends.
“Your arm is bleeding,” Jesse says, zeroing on the clotted fabric stuck to my skin. “Come over to my place. I’ll fix you up.”
Since I don’t plan on going back to sleep for the rest of my life, I nod. “Let me grab a jacket.” I clear my throat, trying to rebalance myself. “By the way, we’re going through the front door, in case you were planning to scale my roof a third time.”
As I make my way to the closet, Jesse drops onto my bed. I pull out my fuzzy white jacket—the one Rainie says makes me look like a sentient cloud—from the hanger and draw it over my arms, yanking the zipper to my chin just in time to hear Jesse call, “Uh, Mansour? Is this yours?”
Jesse holds up my mother’s journal, pinched between two fingers, open to the first page.
I’d had this journal for nine years. I’d bought a magnifying glass to study the texture of the pages, flipped through it in search of a secret notation or a hidden message more times than I could count.
In all that time, I never found anything beyond bare, bone-white pages waiting between the photo of my parents and my mother’s name at the front.
I gape at the pages open in Jesse’s hand, inked in top to bottom with my mother’s cramped, slanted writing. My vision darkens in the corners, hysteria squeezing a fist around my throat.
Jesse turns the journal back toward himself. “Is that a no?”
And there’s really nothing either of us can do about it when my knees give out, and I slide to the ground.