Spilled Ink, page 11
SOS. If I spontaneously combust during the chem test will I automatically pass? And if so how can I create the right conditions for spontaneous combustion? Pretty sure I know nothing.
Mona’s lowest grade in her entire life has probably been an A-. Still, she sounds the alarm before every exam, which would be irritating if she weren’t amusing and if we didn’t know that intensity is her brand. Studying with her is a little like boot camp. Asma and I feel obligated to balance her out, so we make sure we have plenty of snack breaks and music interruptions. We are the jelly to her peanut butter. I type out a reply.
Study sesh this weekend?
When and where? Don’t say library, Mona replies. I have been there so much, they offered to name a chair after me. Like I’m a founding father or something.
How about Room? I suggest.
Mona responds with a relieved emoji and a brown thumbs-up sign. I can’t settle on exactly which shade best represents me so for now I’m still the color of an egg yolk.
Saturday @ 4? Mona adds.
Asma joins the conversation then.
I think home would be better, she types, much to my surprise. Since when is home better than being out in a coffee shop? Asma was the first of us to visit Room.
I could go for a lemon ball though, Mona says.
Home is less distracting, Asma adds.
“Yalda, call your brother, please. He should have been home by now,” my mother says.
“I just texted him,” I reply.
“Call him, Yalda,” she says, exasperation in her voice. To my mother, texts are the absolute lowest form of communication, and often she denies they even count at all.
I dial my brother and listen to the ringing, ready to hear him tell me he got my message and is on his way—but he doesn’t answer. It is late and this is unlike him. I tell myself not to picture a car crash. He’s fine—just not in any rush to get home and face any questions about WhereHouse or school.
“He’s probably driving,” I say. Mom nods but she looks unsure. We head to the living room and I curl up on the sofa, my legs tucked under me. My mother sits beside me with the Divan-e-Hafiz on her lap. She flips open to a page and starts reading. My father joins us, dressed in a sweatshirt and sweatpants that make him look like a soccer coach for a junior league.
“Still not here?” he says. He goes to the closet and takes his phone out of his jacket pocket. He taps on the screen and I can hear his call go to voice mail, too. “Is he with his friends again? God knows what these boys are doing at this time of night. This is too much. Yalda, really, you don’t know where he is?”
“No,” I reply, and the look on my dad’s face makes me feel like I’ve failed in some sisterly duty. “He’s not answering my texts or calls either.”
My father pours himself a cup of tea and walks over to the window. He has a hand on his hip. I can almost hear the lecture swirling in his head. My mother traces the lines of a poem, reading the verse under her breath. I don’t know if it’s the poetry or Yusuf or the candlelight making her eyes glisten.
“Do you want to read me something while we’re waiting?” I ask my mom. We need to work out some of this tension.
She glances at her watch and shakes her head.
“Your brother is not here,” she says.
“But I am,” I say. Sometimes it feels like our home revolves around Yusuf. Maybe every family’s universe is arranged this way and that’s why boys are called sons.
“Let me call him one more time,” she says, reaching for her phone.
I head back to my room, feeling antsy. Everyone’s tense and annoyed in the house and I can’t fix any of it. Instead of showing up tonight, Yusuf has ghosted us.
I lie down on my bed and stare at the last message I sent Yusuf, still unanswered.
15
It takes me a minute to figure out I’ve fallen asleep on top of my blanket. It’s as dark as a dungeon outside but the light is on in the hallway and I can hear voices. Groggy, I step into the living room to see what’s happening.
My father is pacing the living room; one hand holds his phone to his ear while his other hand rubs the back of his neck. My mother is standing near the fireplace, arms folded and her forehead grooved with worry. The taller candles are still aflame, but a fraction of their original height. The bowls of fruit and nuts are untouched.
“I want to report a missing child,” my father says. “They transfer me two times. Yes, I am the father.”
Yusuf’s still not home. Dad’s calling the police. My stomach drops. My mother looks at me and blinks.
“What’s going on?” I ask her. I look between her and my father.
“Yusuf didn’t come home,” Mom says, her voice breaking.
My mind races. I dash back to my room and check my phone. Yusuf still hasn’t replied, which makes my stomach drop. I dial his number and walk back to the living room. It goes straight to voice mail. He was at work. Why isn’t he responding?
“Yes, I can hold,” my father says, his hand falling against his thigh in frustration. He puts the phone on speaker and looks straight at me.
“Dad, let’s go to the studio,” I say, touching his arm. Why are we sitting here? We should go out and look for him.
“Wait, wait,” he says to me, shaking his head.
“Mom,” I say, turning my attention to her. “Let’s just go there. We can check for his car.”
She lets out a jagged breath. Her usual optimism is nowhere to be found.
“Your father went already. His car is in the parking lot. Yalda, can you call him again? Maybe he’ll answer you.”
My skin prickles. If Yusuf’s car is in the parking lot, where is Yusuf?
“My name or my son’s name?” Dad says. He starts to spell his own name but shakes his head and tells the person on the line that he’s going to start again. He repeats himself, his accent a little heavier than usual in the midnight hour.
I can’t imagine Yusuf taking off with friends and not saying a word. Maybe he had a gig somewhere tonight with his band? No, he would have told me.
“Seventeen,” my father says. “No, not seven. Seventeen years old.”
“Okay, sir,” says the voice on the phone, drawing out the sir so it sounds like a small growl.
“He is a child,” my father argues. “Not that kind of teenager.”
Yusuf is fine, I tell myself. Or at least he will be until my parents get their hands on him. But I can’t reassure myself, especially not while I’m watching my parents. My dad bracing his neck, my mom with her arms wrapped around her chest—they look like they’re literally trying to hold themselves together.
I scroll through my contact list on my phone, looking for any of Yusuf’s friends. I don’t have anyone’s number, not even his bandmates’. I’ve never needed to call them. I tap on the icon for the Pic-Up app and bring up my brother’s profile. His last post was about thirty minutes after he was supposed to get off work. It was right around the time my dad got home.
It’s a picture of a flyer. A guy with a ukulele will be playing live music Saturday night.
Signing off tonight with this. Life ain’t life without music.
I tell myself this is a good sign. He took a picture and wrote a post. He’s fine.
“No, we have no fight. Nothing like that,” my father says. His frustration has him tongue-tangled.
“Sir, do you have someone there who can help translate for you?”
My dad squints, like he’s trying to see through fog.
“Translate? You don’t understand me?” His volume is rising as well.
“Sir, maybe someone else in the house could help?”
My father looks like he’s going to protest but then shakes his head and hands me the phone. Suddenly, I’m talking to the police. I picture someone with a badge and a gun on the other end, which frazzles me for no good reason. Does Yusuf want me talking to the police about him? He doesn’t need to be on their radar.
“Hello?” I say.
“Hello. What’s your name?”
“Yalda. I’m his daughter. I mean, you were talking to my dad about my brother.”
“Got it. Thanks for helping, sweetheart. How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“I thought your brother was seventeen?”
“We’re twins.”
“I see. Now, I just want to make sure I understood what your father was trying to say . . .”
She recaps what my father told her, down to the name of the music shop where Yusuf was working tonight. I decide not to congratulate her on getting it all despite the nonexistent language barrier because the sass won’t help me now.
“Does your brother have any medical issues?”
“No, nothing.”
“Any mental health issues? Depression?”
“No, nothing. He was a little upset today, but he’s not . . . depressed or anything.”
“I see. And does he take any medications?”
“No,” I reply. “He doesn’t take anything.”
“Okay, I see,” she says. Hang on. What does she see? I want to rewind our conversation in case I said the wrong thing.
“We’ll send an officer to check out the strip mall. Do you know what your brother was wearing tonight?”
“Jeans and . . . maybe a gray hoodie. Actually, I don’t remember,” I say.
“That’s fine. Here’s what I suggest you all do in the meantime. Call his friends and use social media to tell people you’re looking for him. You can keep trying your brother’s phone too, though it’s possible his battery is dead if it’s going to voice mail.”
She says we can expect someone to swing by the house at some point tonight. I picture Yusuf walking in and finding a police officer standing in our living room. My brother, the king of shenanigans, is going to laugh so hard, and I’m going to kick him in the shins for thinking this is funny.
“Sure, I can do that,” I say.
She tells me I’ve done a good job and I resist the urge to correct her. She doesn’t know I was just sleeping while my parents were trying to find my missing brother. I hang up and turn to my parents. They look at me like I’m about to announce where Yusuf is.
“I’m going to try his friends,” I say, and they nod.
I take out my phone to post about Yusuf. I write a couple lines asking people to hit me up if they’ve heard from him. Then I tag Chris and Liam in my post so they’ll see it. Since I don’t have their phone numbers, this is the best I can do. I look through my contact list. A couple of our classmates are online right now, including Keith. My cousin on the West Coast, where it’s only nine o’clock, comments that she’ll be praying for his safety and adds an emoji of steepled hands. Most of my family isn’t all that religious, but she’s different. She started wearing a hijab when she was fourteen despite her parents’ worries that she would attract the wrong kind of attention, which is oddly the same thing my parents say to me when I wear a dress that falls a couple inches above my knees. I don’t know if there’s a “right” kind of attention, but if there is, I’d bet it’s almost impossible to dress for it.
My screen goes black and I’m left staring at my reflection. What else can I do?
My mother starts clearing the table she’d set up for Yalda. She puts the bowl of pomegranate seeds straight into the fridge—no cover or plastic wrap. She does the same with the watermelon, moving with a resignation that makes me anxious.
I wish my parents would just sit down. I can’t think straight with them moving around, and maybe if I could just break through the noise in my head, I could be helpful. Yusuf posted his last update over three and a half hours ago. I think back to when my mother chided me for saying we’d get drunk on poetry tonight, when our living room looked like a scene from a cheesy romance novel. Why does it feel like that was a year ago?
I take my sketchbook out and stare at the pages. I keep checking my phone to see if any messages have come in but find nothing. My mom is calling Yusuf’s cell again. She leaves another message, her voice breaking as she tells him to call her back. She tells him Dad loves him and is worried about him, which is really her way of telling him Dad isn’t mad.
“We’re waiting for you. So call me right away, okay?” she asks the hollow line.
Another hour passes—painfully. My parents tell me to go to sleep but say nothing when I don’t move. My phone’s battery is running low. I thought I had the charger in the kitchen but it’s not there. I come back to the living room to see if I left it by the couch again. I’m always losing this stupid thing.
It’s then that I remember the phone tracking app. All four of us are on a family plan and I think there’s a way to see where a phone is. I bring my laptop from my room.
“Dad, I want to log into the phone account,” I say.
He looks at me and then takes two quick steps to join me at the computer. I type in his phone number to access the account.
“What’s the password?” I ask. He looks at my mom.
“Kabul1999,” she says. Of course it is. That’s the year Dad’s family fled Afghanistan.
I’m in the account and clicking on all the tabs, trying to figure out how to track Yusuf’s phone. My parents look over my shoulder at the screen.
A map appears. There’s a flashing blue circle. The names of the streets start to load and I see the outline of the strip mall where both Crescendo and A Room with a Brew are located.
“See, his phone is there. Maybe in the car. Why would he leave his phone in the car?” my dad wonders aloud.
But the blue dot is surrounded by a big blue circle. The app doesn’t give us exact coordinates, just a general area.
“Maybe it’s not in the car,” I say. I would have felt a lot better if the flashing light had shown up at one of his friends’ houses.
My father’s already swinging his jacket on. He grabs his keys from the hook by the door. I throw on my boots and put on the first jacket my hand finds in the closet. He starts the car and is about to pull out of the garage when my mother bursts out of the house.
“I’m coming with you,” she shouts.
My dad doesn’t look happy about us all going but he doesn’t protest either. It’s a fifteen-minute ride to the strip mall but we’re there in ten. My dad pulls into the parking lot and parks next to the car Yusuf and I share. The car looks the same as always—a midnight-blue sedan with scratched-up bumpers and a guitar decal on the rear window.
Dad brought the extra set of keys this time and clicks open the doors. He opens the driver’s-side door and I open the passenger side. There’s no sign of Yusuf or his phone. There’s a paper bag from a burrito place in the back seat, but the car is otherwise empty. We look under the seats and then at each other, but only briefly.
My mother shuts the trunk softly and takes a step back. A shudder ripples down my spine. Something flutters in the thick of trees that surround the strip mall. Shadows move across a sky of spilled ink. Birds or bats? I cannot tell. I’ve never seen a night so dark.
I search the dark for clues, for answers. I blink hard, like I’m trying to wake myself from this nightmare. The air feels heavy moving in and out of my lungs.
I hate the silence.
“Where are you, Yusuf?” I say, my voice trembling.
We start walking in three different directions, a small search party. My mother breaks the quiet, calling out my brother’s name. A cool wind stirs the chimes outside the coffee shop, releasing tinny notes into the night. I stuff my hands into my pockets to keep my fingers from freezing.
I should know where he is. Why don’t I know where he is?
“Yusuf?” I call out. My voice is timid at first, but then I remember Yusuf turning away from me earlier today, the sullen look on his face. My mother climbs the cement steps to the second-floor shops; her hand hovers over the metal railing as if she’s afraid she might lose her footing. She peers into each darkened window on her way to the music shop on the corner. There are only three cars in the lot right now. I walk over to look inside each of them, although I can’t exactly say I’m hoping to find Yusuf in any of them.
My father walks to the corner of the building, just below the music shop. There are no stairs on that end of the shops. Why would Yusuf have wandered back there?
I see the light of my father’s cell phone swinging left and right. I feel something drop within me. I walk toward my father, my feet moving of their own accord.
“Yusuf!” my father yells, and my breath catches in my throat because there’s no lift at the end of my brother’s name. It is not a question. It is a declaration.
“Yusuf!” he calls again, and I run toward my father’s voice as the light of his phone drops to the ground on the longest, darkest night of the year.
16
I’m on the phone with the 911 operator, trying to keep straight in my head what the person on the phone is saying and what I’ve already said and relaying everything to my parents. All the while, I want to grab Yusuf by the shoulders and make him open his eyes.
Yusuf’s face is smeared with dirt and his hands are icy. One eyelid looks dark and swollen. Yusuf hasn’t even moaned. I’ve never seen him this silent.
Dad slides one arm under Yusuf’s neck and another under his knees and grunts, but Yusuf doesn’t budge—like he doesn’t want to be pulled away from the asphalt. Mom kisses his forehead and calls his name. When my father’s eyes meet hers, she points at Yusuf’s leg. Dad lets out a whimper that terrifies me.
“What is it?” I demand.
“His leg,” Mom says. “Tell them to hurry.”
I notice the unnatural angle. I look up again and see the height from which Yusuf fell.
“Please hurry. He’s badly hurt. We need help to carry him,” I tell the operator. Her voice is so calm that even as she tells me an ambulance is on the way, I wonder if she doesn’t comprehend that Yusuf’s not talking or moving or doing any of the things my brother should be doing right now.
