In the Language of Miracles

• A New York Times Editors’ Choice •

“Assured and beautifully crafted . . . Hassib is a natural, graceful writer with a keen eye for cultural difference. . . . [She] handles the anatomy of grief with great delicacy. . . . In the Language of Miracles should find a large and eager readership. For the beauty of the writing alone, Hassib deserves it.” —Monica Ali, The New York Times Book Review

“[A] sensitive, finely wrought debut . . . sharply observant of immigrants’ intricate relationships to their adopted homelands, this exciting novel announces the arrival of a psychologically and socially astute new writer.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

For readers of House of Sand and Fog, a mesmerizing debut novel of an Egyptian American family and the wrenching tragedy that tears their lives apart, from the author of A Pure Heart

Samir and Nagla Al-Menshawy appear to have attained the American dream. After immigrating to the United States from Egypt, Samir successfully works his way through a residency and launches his own medical practice as Nagla tends to their firstborn, Hosaam, in the cramped quarters of a small apartment. Soon the growing family moves into a big house in the manicured New Jersey suburb of Summerset, where their three children eventually attend school with Natalie Bradstreet, the daughter of their neighbors and best friends. More than a decade later, the family’s seemingly stable life is suddenly upended when a devastating turn of events leaves Hosaam and Natalie dead and turns the Al-Menshawys into outcasts in their own town.

Narrated a year after Hosaam and Natalie’s deaths, Rajia Hassib’s heartfelt novel follows the Al-Menshawys during the five days leading up to the memorial service that the Bradstreets have organized to mark the one-year anniversary of their daughter’s death. While Nagla strives to understand her role in the tragedy and Samir desperately seeks reconciliation with the community, Khaled, their surviving son, finds himself living in the shadow of his troubled brother. Struggling under the guilt and pressure of being the good son, Khaled turns to the city in hopes of finding happiness away from the painful memories home conjures. Yet he is repeatedly pulled back home to his grandmother, Ehsan, who arrives from Egypt armed with incense, prayers, and an unyielding determination to stop the unraveling of her daughter’s family. In Ehsan, Khaled finds either a true hope of salvation or the embodiment of everything he must flee if he is ever to find himself.

Writing with unflinchingly honest prose, Rajia Hassib tells the story of one family pushed to the brink by tragedy and mental illness, trying to salvage the life they worked so hard to achieve. The graceful, elegiac voice of In the Language of Miracles paints tender portraits of a family’s struggle to move on in the wake of heartbreak, to stay true to its traditions, and above all else, to find acceptance and reconciliation. | “Assured and beautifully crafted. . . . Hassib is a natural, graceful writer with a keen eye for cultural difference. . . . [She] handles the anatomy of grief with great delicacy. . . . In the Language of Miracles should find a large and eager readership. For the beauty of the writing alone, Hassib deserves it.”
—Monica Ali, The New York Times Book Review

“This powerful and moving story wrestles with family, tradition, mental illness, grief, love, shame and the realities of being a Muslim in America post 9/11. . . . Hassib’s characters live and breathe with an honesty and vulnerability that makes them unforgettable.”
—The Herald-Dispatch

“A riveting and important book. It drives home the fact that no matter what religion we practice or country we are from, we are more alike than we think. [In the Language of Miracles] narrows the gap between us and may make us a bit more tolerant, understanding, and accepting.”
—The Missourian

“Impressive. . . . From [Hassib’s] first page to her denouement we can be gripped and moved by a study of the fault-lines within an immigrant family.”
—The National

“Hassib writes with an authority uncommon in debut writers; in this important book, she weaves the beauty of Arabic culture with the harsh realities of modern American life with exceptional insight and poetic ease.”
—Bustle.com

“[A] sensitive, finely wrought debut . . . sharply observant of immigrants’ intricate relationships to their adopted homelands, this exciting novel announces the arrival of a psychologically and socially astute new writer.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[A] stellar debut. . . . Thoughtfully examining the role of religion and prayer, parents and grandparents, this rich novel offers complex characters, beautiful writing, and astute observations about the similarities and differences between the Egyptian and American outlooks on life. It would be difficult to find a better book for any discussion group; highly recommended.”
—Library Journal (starred review)

“Topical both in its take on race relations and in its depiction of a trouble young man with ready access to firearms. . . . Hassib is a capable writer, especially when dealing with the interpersonal. Her natural use of language resembles that of Khaled Hosseini.”
—BookPage

“A family reckons with tragedy amid a storm of suspicion in Egyptian author Hassib’s debut novel. . . . [In the Language of Miracles] offers fascinating insight into the lives of American Muslims, and the prejudice with which they contended in the years after 9/11.”
—Publishers Weekly

“[An] admirable debut . . . Hassib does fine work portraying a family divided by culturally and generationally divergent reactions to a harrowing situation, and the novel builds to a gratifying crescendo as the memorial nears and tensions rise.”
—Booklist

“Spoken words are all powerful in Rajia Hassib’s masterful book about thought vs. action.  Whether the characters are explaining, questioning, or stating their deepest beliefs, though, conversation never creates anything; it’s the human response to the life that subsumes us, whether we’re active or passive.  In the face of tragedy, and even great happiness, abstractions fall away; the personal and particular endure.  It’s a very moving book.”
—Ann Beattie
 
“Smart, nuanced and culturally dazzling, In the Language of Miracles is a heartrending story of Egyptians and Americans, of two families whose lives are intertwined and then unraveled by fate. Hassib’s writing has an intoxicating quality that made this a page-turner, but by the end, her beautiful story surpasses its characters in its unflinching investigation of tragedy, mental illness, and healing across two cultures in conflict.”
—Zoë Ferraris, author of Finding Nouf and City of Veils

“Rajia Hassib's In the Language of Miracles is a tautly told story of one family’s grief and the quiet but daunting burden of survivorship. She has deftly captured their individual struggles as they swim through the deep waters of loss and blame. We turn page after page and hope, as all bereaved do, that there’s a chance for healing.”
—Nadia Hashimi, author of When the Moon is Low and The Pearl That Broke Its Shell

“Rajia Hassib’s timely novel is a gripping, hold-your-breath exposé about being Muslim in post-9/11 America where the heinous act of one can demonize all. But it’s also a universal, multi-generational, immigrant tale. The old-world, Egyptian grandmother’s bungled English, her prayers and incense, rub against her American-born, tech-savvy grandchildren’s bungled Arabic and Western music. It’s an intelligent, beautifully rendered reminder that no matter our ethnicity or creed, we all long for acceptance and a place to call home.”
—Marie Manilla, author of The Patron Saint of Ugly

“Rajia Hassib has a finger on the pulse of two languages and two cultures. She deftly spins an honest tale of a family reeling in the wake of tragedy, all the while exploring the subtle complexities embedded in communication, culture, and human relationships.”
—Laila Halaby, author of Once in a Promised Land | Rajia Hassib was born and raised in Egypt and moved to the United States when she was twenty-three. She holds an MA in creative writing from Marshall University and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker online, Upstreet, Steam Ticket, and Border Crossing magazines. She lives in West Virginia. |

PROLOGUE

When Khaled fell sick at age nine, his grandmother descended on his parents’ house and promised him healing. Armed with incense, a thermos filled with holy water from the Zamzam Well in Mecca, and a frayed pocket-sized book of prayers, Ehsan arrived at Khaled’s bedside ready to fight any and all misfortunes that might have befallen her favorite grandchild. His illness, she insisted, had to be the result of an evil eye, its malice aggravated by her daughter’s negligence of the simplest methods of protection from such wickedness. “Not a single blue ornament on display in the entire house! And when was the last time you played a recording of the Qur’an in the kids’ rooms? How do you expect to protect them?” she chastised her daughter again and again. Khaled, with his jet-black hair, green eyes, and that coy smile that always caused Ehsan to burst into a recitation of the sura of Al-Falaq to pray for his protection, was particularly vulnerable to the evil eye. His mother’s insistence on throwing him an elaborate birthday party a few weeks earlier must have been the last straw. “Why parade the boy around? Why invite people’s envy?” Ehsan would repeatedly mumble as she tended to the sick child. They might as well have injected him with bacteria and saved the money spent on the inflatables.

Khaled, aware of his favored status, had not thought it strange that Ehsan would travel from Egypt two months before she had originally intended, risking a flight into JFK on the heels of the blizzard that ushered in 1996, probably spending the ten-hour journey imagining her plane tumbling down in the middle of the unfamiliar snow she still feared beyond reason. On the day of her arrival she walked into Khaled’s room, flanked by his parents and followed by his siblings, Hosaam and Fatima, and sat on the edge of his bed, the thermos held tightly in both hands. In a whisper that implied her words were meant only for his ears, Ehsan told Khaled the story of the holy water she had requested specifically for him, water her sister had carried all the way from Saudi Arabia to Egypt and that she in turn had carried from Egypt to the United States.

“This is blessed water,” she said as she unscrewed the thermos lid and poured just enough to moisten a washcloth. “It is water that has run since the time of the prophet Ibrahim, peace be upon his soul. It is so pure it can heal the sick. If you were in the middle of the desert, one sip only would quench your thirst for days. This water,” she continued as she put the thermos on his nightstand and held the white washcloth up for him to see, “runs out of the deep belly of the Arabian Desert, yet in this scorching heat it still comes out ice cold. This water will make you all better.”

Khaled listened to her, struggling to make out the words, which she pronounced in an Arabic he found different from the one his parents used and yet familiar, since he had spent months out of each year in the company of his grandmother either at his home in Summerset, New Jersey, or at hers in Alexandria. Keeping his eyes on her lips helped him understand her better and also filled him with comfort; years later, he would still remember how unfamiliar his own room had felt, crowded as it was with his entire family. Hosaam’s bed, the upper of the bunk beds, loomed heavily over Khaled’s head the whole time, and throughout his feverish nights he would wake up imagining the bed was slowly lowering and eventually flattening him, and he wondered what his mother would do when she walked into his bedroom in the morning and found her son sandwiched between the two mattresses. Hosaam had not slept in his bed for days, having been banished to the living room both to protect him from potential infection and to give his brother some rest. Sitting on the edge of Khaled’s bed, slowly dipping the washcloth in the small bowl now filled with Zamzam water, Ehsan’s large body managed to make his bed seem more solid and less overcast in the shadow of his brother’s. Looking at her, he could also ignore his other fears: that Fatima, standing in the corner, would accidently topple over the Lego that he had stacked on his desk, or that Hosaam would look under his bed and find the ladybug he had discovered crawling on their windowsill that morning, so rare in January, and that he had placed in the little jar with holes in its lid to keep safe until he could figure out what to do with it.

Ehsan put her hands under his armpits and lifted him into a seated position as she instructed her daughter to grab one of Hosaam’s pillows and place it behind Khaled’s back. Gently, Ehsan pushed his shoulders until his back settled in a Khaled-shaped groove in the pillows. He did not feel like sitting up, but he did not object. Ehsan, clad in permanent black since her husband passed away thirty years earlier, was not a figure he was willing to defy. Besides, as she leaned over him, adjusting the pillows, Khaled enjoyed breathing in the smell of incense, rosebud soap, and spices that always clung to her dress and her white veil, and the verses from the Qur’an that she hummed under her breath reminded him of her home and filled him with an unrealistic expectation of freshly baked cake and cold, frothy lemonade.

“How does the water work?” Fatima asked. She had inched closer to his bed, keeping to his left-hand side where their mother, Nagla, sat. The youngest of the three siblings and barely seven, Fatima’s Arabic was the most riddled with an American accent that Khaled knew she was trying hard to mask. He looked at her and smiled. The sun, shining through the window behind the illuminated strands of her black hair, framed her face in a messy halo. He was grateful she had asked the question he had in mind but would not ask in the presence of Hosaam, who was leaning against the door frame, watching him.

“It works any way you want it to,” Ehsan answered as she started folding Khaled’s sleeves up. “If the sickness is in your stomach, you drink it and it takes the sickness away. If it’s on your skin, you wipe yourself with it and it heals you.”

“But . . . Khaled’s lungs are sick. How will you get it there?” Fatima’s eyes widened and teared up, her lower lip trembling as she looked at Khaled.

“Oh, we don’t have to get it there,” Ehsan said, laughing. Khaled laughed, too, relieved. “We’ll just wipe his chest and face with it, and maybe give him some of it to drink.”

Slowly, Ehsan started unbuttoning the front of Khaled’s pajamas. Her hands, rough with years of cooking and cleaning for five children and twelve grandchildren, rubbed against his feverish skin and he winced. When she was done, Ehsan pulled the pajama top open. Khaled immediately started shivering, looked around him at his mother, his sister, and his father and brother, both standing by the doorway, and instinctively pulled the shirtfront closed. Ehsan, who had just had time to reach out and grab the washcloth from the bowl, looked at him and laughed.

“What’s wrong, boy? Are you shy?”

“I’m cold,” Khaled said, blushing. Fatima retreated into her corner and sat on the floor, pulling both legs up to her chest.

“Don’t be silly, Khaled; it’s just us,” Nagla said, pulling his shirt back open. Khaled’s lower lip quivered and he looked at his older brother, who was grinning down on him.

“Do you know the story of the Zamzam Well, Khaled?” Ehsan asked as she slowly touched the wet washcloth to his chest. Khaled, the fabric cold and prickly against his skin, felt his eyes well up and shook his head so that he would not have to speak.

“Well, it goes like this: The prophet Ibrahim, peace be upon his soul, took his wife, Hagar, and their young son, Ismail, out to the desert as he went in search of God. This is the Arabian Peninsula, you know, and the desert there is hotter and drier than the inside of a brick oven on an August day. So he set up camp for them between two large hills called Al-Safa and Al-Marwah, and then went up one of the nearby mountains, where the angels had told him he should go,” she said as she gently stroked his entire chest with the cloth. She paused for a moment, murmuring prayers and verses from the Qur’an as she moved the washcloth in circles. When she was done, she pulled out a dry towel and started patting his chest.

“Hagar and her child waited for so long, they ran out of water, and Ismail started crying of thirst. His mother, desperate and aggrieved, ran up one hill, hoping to see someone who could help her, but there was no one there. So she ran back down and up the second hill, again looking for help, but saw no one. Seven times she ran from one hill to the next, the cries of her son piercing the empty desert, and still she found no help. Finally, she fell to her knees by her son’s side and asked Allah for the help no humans had given her. And what do you think happened next?” She leaned close to Khaled as she buttoned his shirt.

“What?” Khaled asked, his eyes fixated on her face.

“Young Ismail struck the ground with his heel and water spouted out of it! Water so pure they each drank their fill and all sickness disappeared from them. Water so abundant it still runs to this very day out of the hot desert, just as it did thousands of years ago at the time of Ibrahim. This,” she said as she picked up the thermos and held it high like a trophy, “this is water out of that same well that will not dry out until Judgment Day. This is water that God ordered to flow as He answered the prayer of one who needed Him, one who knew He was the only one to turn to in the hour of need. This is blessed water, and it is healing water, and it will make you all better.”

Khaled looked at the thermos, his eyes wide. He could barely feel her stroke both his arms with the cloth as he looked at Fatima and saw her staring at the thermos, too. His parents exchanged looks, his father rolling his eyes, his mother looking away from Ehsan so that she would not see her smirk. Then he saw Hosaam, three years his senior, still leaning against the door frame close to his father, grinning.

“Oh yeah?” Hosaam said. “So this is holy water?”

“Yes, it is,” Ehsan said without turning to look at him.

“So this water is going to make him better, huh? How’s that? Is it antibacterial water or something?” Hosaam laughed at his own joke. Khaled saw his father give Hosaam a stern look that Hosaam either did not see or chose to ignore.

“Don’t make fun of that which you don’t understand,” Ehsan said. Slowly, she turned and looked at Hosaam, holding his gaze until his grin collapsed into an uncomfortable smirk. “And mind your manners when you talk to me, boy. I’m not your mother.”

“He didn’t mean it, Mama,” Nagla said, smiling at her mother and mouthing something at Hosaam behind her back, to which he waved a dismissive hand that his father quickly slapped down.

“This is no laughing matter, Nagla. You should know better.”

“I know, Mama, I know. I’m sorry. The kids are just not used to this stuff.”

“This stuff is not something you get used to. This stuff is something they need to learn to respect. You know what happens when you disregard stuff like that, Nagla.”

Khaled’s father snickered, and Khaled looked quickly at Ehsan, thankful she was still too busy pulling his sleeves down to notice his parents grimacing behind her back.

Ehsan stood and picked up the bowl and the thermos. “Still, they’re your kids, and you can raise them any way you like. Here,” she said as she turned around and shoved the bowl into Hosaam’s arms, “make yourself useful and take this to the kitchen. And you,” she spoke to Nagla, carefully handing her the thermos, “take this to my room. Let me have some time alone with the boy.”

“Come on, Fatima,” Samir said, holding out his hand. His daughter jumped up, ran to him, and took it. As the family walked out, Ehsan reclaimed her seat on the edge of Khaled’s bed. Smiling, she reached out and pushed a stray strand of moist hair away from his eyes.

“You want to lie down again?” she asked. Khaled nodded.

Gently, Ehsan pulled the covers back and let him slide down before she pulled them back up, tucking them around him as he laid his head on his pillow. Then she sat back next to him, and softly and monotonously started reciting verses from the Qur’an, her right hand now stroking his arms through the covers, now his legs, and occasionally straightening his hair. Khaled closed his eyes. He did not care what Hosaam thought. He did not care what his parents thought. He believed everything Ehsan said. He believed because he could feel her coarse hand against his forehead but his skin did not ache anymore, and because he could already feel the tightening in his chest lessen and his breathing grow steady and deep, like he was finally able to pull enough air into his lungs to fill them all up.

“Setto?”

“What, habibi?”

“What did you mean when you said it was not good when people didn’t respect stuff like that? You know, about the holy water?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. I was just wondering.”

“Well, do you believe it?” she asked as she stroked his head one more time.

“Yes, of course I do.”

“Then you have nothing to worry about, do you?”

Khaled did not answer. He thought he should ask her more questions, just to make sure nothing bad was going to happen, but his eyelids grew heavy, and her hand, suddenly lighter, seemed to push the questions out of his mind with every new stroke until he finally fell asleep.

WEDNESDAY

1

ENGLISH: The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away.

Bible

ARABIC: God gave; God took; God will provide compensation.

Saying

For almost a year, the Bradstreets and the Al-Menshawys practiced elaborate avoidance tactics, living next door to each other yet hardly crossing paths. Khaled noticed his parents’ change of habits right away: Samir, after years of leaving for work at 8:00 a.m., started heading out a full half-hour earlier just so he would not run into Jim Bradstreet. Coming home, Samir no longer parked his car in the driveway and walked through the front door but squeezed his Avalon into the cluttered garage then slid through the barely open door and walked into the kitchen. Nagla abandoned her wicker armchair on the deck, moving her ashtray to a bench where she sat with her back to the living room wall, looking away from the Bradstreets’ backyard and hidden from their view. Even Cynthia Bradstreet forsook her gardening and the backyard she had practically lived in for years. From his bedroom window, Khaled watched as her irises wilted and drooped and her herb garden succumbed to negligence, the tan spikes of dry dill and cilantro eventually covered by snow, which, once it melted, revealed a rectangular bed of lifeless mud where the blooming garden once stood.

Then, just short of a year after the deaths, Khaled answered the door one evening and saw Cynthia Bradstreet standing on his parents’ doorstep. One hand still holding the doorknob, Khaled stared at her, forgetting to step aside to let her in.

“Hey, Khaled,” Cynthia said, moving closer to grab his hand. Khaled had grown four inches since he turned sixteen a year earlier, and she had to look up to meet his eyes. Despite the warm weather, her hand was freezing cold.

“Hey, Aunt Cynthia,” Khaled said. Behind him, he heard his father’s heavy step, followed by his mother’s hurried one, and then Ehsan’s shuffling feet and her voice, mumbling prayers.

 • • • 

Nagla served tea in gold-rimmed miniature glasses that wobbled on the silver tray in her unsteady hands. Khaled, terrified that his mother would drop the tray in Cynthia’s lap, stared at Fatima until their eyes met and then nodded toward their mother.

“Here, Mama. Let me,” Fatima said, taking the tray and passing the tea around before walking into the kitchen to serve Ehsan, who had settled in at the breakfast table the moment everyone else was seated and had started softly reciting the Qur’an, her oversized copy of the book resting under her palms, the print large enough for her to see without glasses. In the background her voice rang in a constant hum that Khaled missed only whenever it was interrupted, just as he noticed the combined noises of air conditioner, refrigerator, and running dishwasher only when the power went out in the winter and the house was suddenly drenched in silence.

Khaled, sitting at the bottom of the stairway, watched as his father sipped his tea, legs crossed in his armchair. Neither Nagla nor Cynthia tasted hers, though both women held on to the gold-rimmed tumblers, wrapping their fingers around them.

“I wanted to be the one to tell you,” Cynthia said, raising her eyes to look at Nagla. “We’re planning something for next weekend—for the anniversary.”

Nagla nodded. “Yes. We saw the flyers.”

“I thought you might have.” Cynthia looked down. “Jim and Pat went a bit overboard with them, I’m afraid. They’re everywhere.”

Khaled had seen the flyer that very morning. Standing on the platform of the Summerset train station, waiting for the Amtrak to take him to New York, Khaled had turned around and found himself facing Natalie, her image centered in the flyer thumbtacked to the green felt, safely tucked behind the glass of the display case. She was wearing her hair in the asymmetrical bob that she had debuted only a few weeks before her death and a blue sweater that Khaled remembered seeing her wear to school. Looking at the flyer behind the protective glass, all Khaled could think of was the blue morpho butterfly, and how he had once told Natalie he would one day travel to South America and photograph his own, not catch it to put it on display, but watch it, follow it around, guess at the span of its wings, maybe even attempt to measure it, but then let it fly away unharmed.

Khaled waited for Cynthia to resume talking, his heart sinking. He imagined her asking his parents to leave town for the weekend of the memorial with no need to explain why the Al-Menshawys would not be welcome. He hoped that she would not be so blunt, that she would spare his mother the humiliation.

“We’ll be planting a tree,” Cynthia said. “At the park. A rosewood. They live very long, you know.” Khaled reached out for his teacup, which he had placed on the wooden steps, sipped some of the minted black tea, burned his tongue, and put the cup back down.

“That’s an excellent idea,” Samir said, nodding. Fatima moved closer to her mother and perched on the arm of Nagla’s chair, one arm wrapped around her shoulder. Khaled, watching her, smiled.

“I wanted to come to tell you in person.” Cynthia addressed Nagla, but Nagla still kept her eyes down, intently examining the surface of her tea. Only one year ago, they would have both been sitting at the kitchen table, alone, the hot tea growing cold as they whispered and laughed.

“I knew for a long time now that I’d be holding some kind of service,” Cynthia went on. Khaled strained to make her words out. Her voice, so soft, made it seem as if she were whispering the words for Nagla’s ears only. “I need this, Nagla. Some closure. I’ve also realized, a couple of days ago, that I would never get closure unless I spoke to you, too.” Nagla looked up, for the first time meeting Cynthia’s eyes. “I want you to know that I don’t blame you. I . . . not anymore.”

Nagla nodded, quick, repeated nods, letting her head fall down again and her gaze rest on the tumbler in her lap.

Cynthia sighed. “Also—that whole memorial thing; I never intended it to be that public. When I first thought of it, I was hoping for something private, just for the family. But then Pat thought we should let people come, too, if they wanted to.” Samir’s eyes narrowed at the mention of Cynthia’s sister. Cynthia went on, “Jim agreed, and now . . . Well, you’ve seen the flyers.”

“I saw a couple of flyers today,” Samir said, crossing his arms at his chest. “I’m sure everyone saw them. You’ll have a good turnout.”

Cynthia nodded, placing her tumbler on the side table. She had not once looked Samir in the eyes. She turned to face Nagla again, reached one hand out and touched Nagla’s. “I know this might make you uncomfortable, but that was not my intention. I’m not apologizing for the memorial,” she added quickly, “but I do want you to know that this is not meant for you. I also want you to know—I need you to know that I don’t blame you for what happened,” she repeated. Nagla nodded again.

“Okay, then,” Cynthia said, getting up. Nagla and Samir followed her as she headed toward the door. Halfway there, Nagla’s eyes froze on the door-side console with its assortment of framed photos. She hastened, overtaking Cynthia and Samir, and stood by the console, her back resting against its marble edge. Khaled’s eyes met hers, and he understood. Of course. She was blocking Hosaam’s picture, the one of him when he was twelve or thirteen, grinning in his blue-striped shirt, his expression infused with the discomfort typical of school pictures. Khaled held his mother’s gaze, remained seated until Cynthia passed both of them on her way out. Only then did Nagla relinquish her spot, following her husband and standing by the door as Cynthia walked down the front path. Khaled followed, too, standing behind his parents and towering over both of them, watching as Cynthia turned to her own house, disappearing behind its front door.

Khaled let his parents walk back in and then slipped out. He looked around him at the quiet street where he grew up, familiar even in the darkness. Taking a deep breath in, he savored