CHAPTER FIFTEEN PRESENT DAY
The trees sway toward the empty highway, forming dark parentheses on either side of my car. Clouds swirl overhead, thinning the farther I get from the center of town. The university sits at the westernmost border of Ward, only a hundred yards or so from crossing into the next town over.
I eye the leaning trees. No way those trunks are structurally sound.
It looks like a single ambitious squirrel could break most of them in half.
I can’t imagine how Baba drives on this highway at night, nothing but his headlights to spear through the dark of the surrounding woods.
It’s only late afternoon, and I already want to turn on my high beams.
Tightening my hands around the wheel, I resist the urge to make an illegal U-turn in the middle of this highway.
I’ve only visited Baba on campus once before, when me and Mama surprised him with a cake on his one-year anniversary as an associate professor.
I remember being eight years old and struggling to choke down my giggles while we waited for him in his office.
How Baba had laughed when he saw us and swung me into his arms, proceeding to introduce me to his colleagues as “the secret boss.” Mama cut the cake and passed plates around to his co-workers.
The three of us went to eat in the courtyard while I daydreamed about enrolling at Baba’s university and seeing him all the time.
I park in a garage not far from the campus library and switch off the engine. A headache stirs to life between my temples.
After our meeting at the train tracks, Jesse had gone off with Mama’s journal to see if he could decipher the lists of numbers.
I’d told him I was going home to work on my speech a little more.
If I had mentioned my plan to visit Baba on the edge of town, he would have insisted on tagging along.
And if I had added that I plan to confront my father about his marriage to a serial killer, he would have slashed my tires and stolen my keys.
The last thing I need before this conversation is another distraction, and Jesse … Jesse is one hell of a distraction.
I close the car door behind me, flinching at the echo in the parking garage.
I made the right choice leaving Jesse behind.
He brings out a side of me I don’t recognize; someone who doesn’t think through her words ten times before she speaks or constantly shift her presence to accommodate someone else’s.
Someone who can be brash and irritable and snide, who probably would never have been voted homecoming queen.
The worst part is that I think she might be the version of me I like the best.
An ache blooms through me as I cross campus.
Kids my age lounge on blankets laid out on the grass.
The campus bookstore bursts with harried students, their coffees angled in the crooks of busy arms while they toss cookies and scantrons into their basket.
Someone passes me a flyer as I head toward a row of booths lined up on either side of the walkway.
Flyers and stickers are shoved into the hands of the students scurrying to the other side.
If this curse wins, I will never be a college student. I’ll never enroll here, never major in something practical so I can guiltlessly minor in Performance Arts.
I’ll never … be. Right now, I feel like the first draft of my graduation speech: strong foundation with lots of room for improvement.
The beauty comes later—in the first revision, the second, the third.
The person I’ve dreamt about being lives in one of those revisions, and the thought of never meeting her fills me with a nameless grief.
I dodge a guy on his scooter. He throws an apology over his shoulder, and I shake myself off. The curse won’t win. We’re making progress, Jesse and I. We have a plan.
According to our shared location tracker, Baba is in the library. I walk past the sliding doors and shiver at the blast of unnecessary air-conditioning.
A pretty older woman with silvering hair and a pair of square glasses perks up at the circulation desk.
“Do you know where I can find Professor Mansour?” I ask.
Her forehead furrows. “Oh, um, his office is—”
“No, not his office. I think he’s somewhere in the library, but it might take a while to check three floors.”
“Are you one of his students?”
“I’m his daughter.”
She brightens instantly. “Oh, hello! It’s so nice to meet you, Mina.” When I blink, she hurries to explain. “Sorry—Hatem speaks about you so much, it feels like I already know you.”
I offer her a smile and wonder if perhaps it isn’t the books drawing my father into the library for hours every day.
She sticks out her hand. “I’m Noura.”
I shake Noura’s hand and try to push aside a thought that’s both comforting and awful.
At least he won’t be alone if I die.
Noura leads me across the library floor, dodging stray book carts and chairs like an obstacle course she’s practiced to perfection.
“Hatem comes in between his classes to work on his research. The professors in the rooms next to him always hold their office hours while he’s trying to focus, so he avoids the noise here. ”
Definitely not the books.
“Mm-hm.”
We climb the stairs to the second floor, past shelves full of weathered books with cracked canvas spines, their titles too niche and grandiose to invite much traffic.
The farther we go, the dustier the shelves become, until we find Baba at the single table wedged between the emergency exit and the last shelf, a bottle of water at his elbow and an explosion of papers around him.
His glasses sit backward on his hair, the rounded ends curving against his earlobes instead of around them.
At some point, he’d touched his face with inky fingertips, smearing a constellation of ink across his cheeks.
Tears spring to my eyes, proving the other reason I couldn’t bring Jesse along.
My father destroys me. He has always been terribly, desperately human. Mama was larger than life. Someone who could walk into a disaster and neutralize it without skipping a beat. I never worried about her, never wondered if she’d remembered to eat dinner or refill her prescriptions.
I don’t know when loving Baba started to feel like I was holding my breath, waiting for the universe to give me permission to exhale.
He glances up, a ready smile at his face, and visibly startles at the sight of me. “Mina!” He shoves his chair back. It slams into the shelf, and he struggles to stand in the tight crevice. He switches to Arabic, a clear sign he’s panicked. “What is it? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Baba,” I say, amused and a little sad. He would’ve been less surprised if someone showed up at his table with a hunting rifle. I’m an intrusion in this slice of life he’s carved without me.
The seed of a headache from earlier has grown, and I hide my grimace before Baba can see it and call 911.
His reactions to my pain have ranged from staying up all night to check my breathing after I coughed a few times at dinner to blasting through ten stoplights to get to the ER because I threw up chunky blood (also known as Twizzlers, six packs of which I’d snuck to my room and devoured at the ripe age of ten).
“Can you take a quick walk with me?” I ask Baba.
He glances at his mess of papers and then at Noura, who waves away his concern. “Just leave it, Hatem. I don’t mind, and no one else is coming back here.”
With Noura’s blessing, Baba follows me out of the silo of shelves. We go down the stairs without speaking, and only when we’ve stepped out of the library and into the quad does he break the silence.
“Let’s get you something to eat,” Baba says.
I open my mouth to protest and think better of it.
He’s tapping his loafer and glancing over my head, clearly excited to show me to a food spot nearby.
This campus is his home. He spends far more time inside these buildings than under the roof we’d once shared with Mama.
Here, he’s not Hatem Mansour, widow and single father.
He is Professor Mansour, a man with a crush on a nice librarian and research that keeps his days busy.
As angry as I am, I can’t bring myself to ruin it for him. I want him to think of me here. When he does, I want him to remember it warmly.
“Sure.”
Baba tugs on the sleeves of his blazer while we meander across campus and clears his throat. A bittersweet fondness tugs in my chest. Serious conversations have never been Baba’s strong suit.
Students shuffle around us, headphones on and gazes aimed at the ground. Laughter rings in the distance, sweetening the air.
“Why have you never taken me to Masr?”
The setting sun breaks through the clouds just in time to illuminate Baba’s features slackening in surprise. Years have passed since the last time I asked him this question.
“You were busy with school and your friends. Your dance team.” He looks away. “I didn’t want to disrupt your plans.”
In one burst of light, the lamps across campus flicker on.
And behind every person we pass, a shadow appears.
Regular shadows. Normal, physics-approved shadows.
I tear my gaze away and stop walking. “Or you didn’t want me to find out you married a monster.”
Baba also stops, turning to face me. He crosses his arms over his chest. “Excuse me?”
I had a plan. I was going to wait until we were seated somewhere private, ask him how his day was going, and then demand to know why he’d made vows to a serial killer.
“She was in the news, Baba. They’d investigated her family for decades.
” I shake my head, disgust warring with anger.
“You married Nadine Haikal knowing exactly who she really was.”
When I say Mama’s maiden name, Baba jerks as though I’ve shot him. Horror fills his brown eyes to the brim and overflows.
“Yasmina. What did you do?”