CHAPTER TWENTY–SIX PRESENT DAY
I rouse to gentle hands smoothing my hair.
“Mina, binty habibty.” Baba cups my face, pushing away the tangles of my curls. “Can you hear me?”
He sounds so worried. I should open my eyes and let him know there’s nothing left to worry about.
A gruff voice cuts in. “She needs to see a doctor. I’m quite confident she had a preexisting head injury.”
“What?!” Baba’s exclamation finally jolts me the last few inches into wakefulness, and I pry open my eyes to the unlikely sight of my father and Elias Talbot looming over me.
I struggle to sit up, kicking my blankets into a heap at the foot of my bed.
“It’s okay, Mina. You’re safe.” Baba helps me prop myself against the headboard. “How do you feel?”
I stare at Elias Talbot’s face for longer than anyone would consider polite.
He doesn’t look much like his son—where Jesse’s hair falls in midnight waves of black, Mr. Talbot’s is a light brown.
He’s shorter than I thought he would be, standing an inch below Baba.
In his jeans and button-down, he looks more like an accountant than a mortician.
Except … he has Jesse’s eyes. The same dark, piercing stare cutting through me like an unsheathed knife.
“Baba, are you okay?” I search his head for wounds. “Where did she hit you?”
Baba’s brows furrow. “Where did who hit me?” He glances at Mr. Talbot worriedly.
“It’s normal to lose time after a head injury.” Mr. Talbot presses a thumb to my eyelid. “Look up, please. Good. Now try to look at your toes.”
He gives a few more instructions before I’m seemingly cleared. “My son found you and your father collapsed in the living room, Miss Mansour. We were hoping you could tell us what happened.”
Jesse found me?
“Where is—” My voice peters out before I can finish, too hoarse and weak. I clear my throat. “Where is he?”
“Right here, Sour Patch.”
Leaning against the doorframe, Jesse smiles wanly at me.
Elias Talbot’s lips thin. “Shouldn’t you be home?”
“I wanted to check on her.”
“You’ve checked. The mortuary sinks won’t sanitize themselves.”
“Is he in trouble?” I ask Mr. Talbot. “He shouldn’t be. He only came to check on me because he thought I was in danger.”
“In the middle of a storm,” Mr. Talbot points out.
Baba nods. “A Ward Wailer.”
Oh, great. They’ve teamed up.
“Can I talk to Jesse alone?”
Baba’s face darkens. A long, tense minute passes.
Jesse eyes my dad nervously, but he doesn’t know Baba.
This entire situation reeks of my father’s least favorite perfume: conflict.
It’s too much trouble to argue with me, and most likely now that he knows I’m alive, he’ll get his laptop case and drive back to campus for the rest of the day.
Baba bursts into laughter, grabbing my dresser to steady himself.
Professor Mansour snorts—an actual snort—and doubles over while he struggles to catch his breath.
Straightening, Baba wipes the corners of his eyes, still chuckling softly. “Ala gusity, Yasmina Mansour.”
My jaw drops the rest of the way open. I can count on one hand the number of times Baba has spoken Arabic in front of strangers.
He’s angry. No, not just angry. For the first time I can remember, my father is furious.
“Over his dead body,” Mr. Talbot translates for Jesse. When Baba and I glance at him in surprise, he shrugs. “I’m a mortician. Part of the gig includes knowing the different words for corpse.”
“Glad to see you’re well, Miss Mansour. We’ll come visit when you feel better,” Mr. Talbot says. He takes his son by the elbow, steering him out of the room. Jesse doesn’t resist, letting himself be led away without a single glance back.
It’s for the best. No need to irritate our fathers further, right? It would be stupid to feel hurt over him following the rules for once.
Later, we can figure out how I’m still alive. I was the last Haikal who could feed the curse, and I’d said no.
Why hadn’t the curse come to collect yet?
In my fugue state, the consequence of their departure doesn’t settle over me until Baba leans over to fuss with the pillows behind me.
For the first time since I visited the Haikal villa, Baba and I are alone.
Anxiety tightens cords in my stomach. My nostrils flare, anticipating the odors of sewage and rot.
One tense moment slips into the next. Baba is speaking, but I’m fixed on his brown eyes.
His wonderfully normal brown eyes.
I grin, a wild laugh bubbling in my chest. Maybe it’s over. Really, truly over.
I survived. The curse didn’t win.
“Oh, by the way, I booked our tickets,” Baba continues, sniffing the cap of my water bottle suspiciously before passing it to me. “We leave for Masr a week after you graduate.”
I accept the bottle without thought, waiting for the punchline. Baba continues to fiddle with the items on my dresser, organizing them without a single iota of precision.
“Really?” I don’t dare breathe. This kind of hope is life-threatening. Too much weight attached to such a fragile hook, waiting to crush me at Baba’s command. “You’ll take me to meet your family?”
I scoot over as Baba perches on the bed. When his arm goes around my shoulders, I curl into him without a second thought. Despite the tears I’ve already shed, more of them gather against my eyelashes, dripping onto my cheek.
“You’ll meet everyone, and they’ll get to meet you,” Baba murmurs into my hair.
“They live in Ain Shams, near where I went to university. We’ll visit el balad, where I used to spend my summers.
Your gedo built an istiraha there when I was a kid for people to gather and spend time together outdoors, and I used to love roasting corn after dinner while your aunts embarrassed me at card game after card game. ”
Istiraha sounds like raha, which means rest, so istiraha probably means rest place. I’m about seventy percent sure, but I’m not about to distract Baba into giving me an etymology lesson.
“I also got us tickets to the new museum in Cairo.” Baba grimaces slightly, a world of opinions in that single action, and joy fills me at the realization that I’ll get to spend a summer seeing Masr through Baba’s eyes.
Learning how to love it the way he does and maybe helping him love it in ways he didn’t before.
We don’t mention Mama, and for once, I’m grateful for it.
“What if they don’t like me?”
“They’ll love you, Mina. It would be too hard not to.” Baba laughs suddenly, and says, “Yalahwi. I’m going to have to buy so many gifts.”
I pat Baba’s arm and smile up at him. “Leave that—and your credit card—to me.”
Three days go by without a word from Jesse.
Baba happened to see the bandages from my encounter with the corpse in Mr. Talbot’s mortuary, and it triggered a parental meltdown the likes of which I’d never seen from my father.
He called the school to arrange for someone to bring me my homework, flipped out again when he learned I’d accrued several truancies over the last two weeks, and decided I would be staying home until a) I healed and b) he could “trust a single word coming out of your mouth.”
For the first time in his professional life, Baba takes time off work to camp on the living room couch and ensure I don’t sneak out.
Part of me wants to rage at him. He practically authored the book on absent fatherhood, and now, when I need him to tune out of my life more than ever, he decides to dial back in?
The larger part of me, however, wakes up with a ridiculous smile on her face when she smells burning bread.
Despite knowing he has the attention span of a fruit fly, Baba refuses to microwave pita bread.
He insists on sticking it straight onto the stove, where it inevitably catches on fire when he gets distracted.
Dinners watching Ertugrul while Baba grumbles about historical inaccuracies, yet yelping when I close the screen after a four-episode binge.
Evenings doing our work quietly in the same room, the tap of our keyboards the only sound for hours.
It’s everything I wanted.
Two days after the confrontation with Khalto Safa, Baba hands me a steaming glass of red-tinted tea. When I wrap my hand around the middle instead of taking it by the handle, he hisses between his teeth. “Your fingers, ya mama!”
“Oh, sorry.” I quickly switch it to the other hand and let Baba examine my fingers.
“I feel fine, I promise.” Too fine, actually.
I flex my fingers in bewilderment. Grabbing onto a glass cup of boiling liquid should’ve hurt, even if just a little.
I haven’t felt much sensation in my hands and feet since yesterday, but I don’t want to worry Baba.
My tangle with Khalto Safa might have caused some nerve damage.
He grabs his laptop off the coffee table and drops onto the couch. “We don’t get to watch Ertugrul until we’ve gotten some work done. Go grab your backpack. I forwarded you your assignments. Spanish seems especially time sensitive, so I’d prioritize finishing that one first.”
I groan. “Baba, it doesn’t even matter. I’m graduating in two weeks.”
“Not if you fail Spanish.”
“I’m not going to fail!”
“Now say that to me in Spanish.”
I glare, and he rewards me with a triumphant smirk. “Get moving.”
I stomp upstairs, taking care to hit every step as loud as I can. As soon as I walk into my room, I beeline for the window and check Jesse’s driveway.
His truck is still there. Three days, and it hasn’t moved an inch.
Why hasn’t he called me back? I’ve even left the metal door in my room unlocked every night since Khalto Safa’s visit.
I’ve considered the grim possibility that Jesse simply doesn’t want to see me anymore. Without the curse forcing us together, am I back to being the Canyon High social butterfly he can’t stand?
The thought cuts deep. I can’t imagine going back to a world where Jesse isn’t one of the best parts of my day.
A world where I walk past him hammering at his porch and don’t say hello, because he frightens me and I’m not accustomed to being disliked.
Where I forget what it’s like to just be myself around someone.
A world where he looks at me and my heart doesn’t ache.
I turn away from the window with an aggravated exhale. At least Rainie, Aida, and Lucia have gone back to calling and texting me like the month of separation never happened. Prom is tomorrow night, and they’ve been begging me to come with them.
I’d thought about it. After all, I bought my ticket months ago. I have a dress. Prom was something I’d looked forward to for years. Baba has even given me a pass for the evening so long as I come home by eleven o’clock sharp.
But even though life continues to march forward, I’m still stuck.
In my sleep, the orange eyes follow me. I see shadows that aren’t there in the corner of my eye, urging me to acknowledge them.
She knew that if there wasn’t anyone willing to serve the curse, it would claim every Haikal life still roaming the earth. Including yours.
I don’t understand why the curse hasn’t taken me. Mama, Khalto Safa, and Teta were the last ones able to serve the curse until I opened the door. Until I passed the test.
When I said no, I broke the bargain. I dropped the Haikals’ end of the deal.
So why am I still here?