Spilled Ink, page 17
Mona appears, hugs my mom, and then takes a seat next to me.
“Hey,” she says, leaning into me. “This is an amazing turnout. So many people from school are here.”
“Have you seen Chris or Liam?”
Mona cranes her neck. “That might be Liam . . . No, that’s actually Garrett. Or someone else. I think I need new contacts. Oh, but that’s Keith for sure.”
Keith?
I turn around and spot Keith standing at the far end of the room. He’s with a couple of other guys from school. I’m glad he’s here.
Dad returns to his seat with a signal that nothing has changed with Yusuf. My mother has her head on my dad’s shoulder. He’s whispering something to her.
“I don’t want to be here,” I quietly confess to Mona, and immediately hear how ungrateful I must sound to everyone who has shown up on this cold night to pray for my brother.
She looks straight into my eyes.
“I don’t want to be here either,” she says. “I absolutely hate that we’re here.”
I want to hug Mona for getting me.
“Asma said you might thank people for coming,” Mona says. “After Imam Jameel speaks.”
“There’s no way. I’m going to mess it up and I’ll look so stupid. I can’t.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Mona says. “Imam Jameel will say everything that needs to be said.”
Someone dims the lights just enough to appreciate the glow of the battery-operated tea lights that have been handed out. Imam Jameel steps behind the podium, leans into the microphone, and welcomes everyone. The room returns the greeting, a murmuration of peace.
“Tonight, we make certain that young Yusuf’s family, the Jamali family, knows that they are not alone. Their heartbreak is our heartbreak and we have been and will continue to pray for brother Yusuf’s recovery,” he says, looking directly at my parents. My mom reaches out to both me and my father. Her left hand squeezes his and her right, mine.
“I would guess many of you did not know Yusuf but were summoned here by the compassion in your hearts. It is times like these that I am most proud of this community . . .” Imam Jameel’s voice is soothing, so much so that I lose track of what he’s saying and feel lulled by the rhythm and tone of his voice. He leads the room in prayer and I cup my hands and lower my head as well.
Ameen. The word covers the room like a warm blanket.
“We are also joined by a member of our county council. Councilmember Peters, thank you for being here,” Imam Jameel says, raising an arm in the direction of the wings. There’s a man with salt-and-pepper hair. He’s wearing dark pants and a brown wool coat. A woman stands beside him in a belted black coat and a work bag slung over her shoulder. The councilmember raises a hand in acknowledgment. Imam Jameel motions for the man to join him at the front of the room and the councilmember obliges, sliding behind the podium with a faint air of reluctance.
“Why is he here?” I ask Mona.
“Thank you, Imam,” the councilmember says, his head slightly bowed. The woman on the sidelines has her phone in front of her. She taps the screen. Did she take a picture? “My heart goes out to the Jamali family. As a father, as a member of this community, as a councilmember, I can only imagine how painful this must be. We will continue to keep . . . uh, Yusuf in our prayers.”
He takes a step back and yields the podium to Imam Jameel again. He’s hardly taken one step away when a voice breaks through the thick quiet of the room and halts the councilmember’s departure.
“I’m sorry.” He smiles and shoots Imam Jameel a quick glance before looking back into the crowd for the source of the voice. “I did not catch that.”
“What can you tell us about the investigation?”
I turn around to see who’s asking this question. The tea lights have made all the faces look eerie, exaggerating the hollows and the wet eyes. I can’t tell, and from the way the councilmember scans the room, he can’t identify the person either.
“Investigation? Well, I am fully confident that our police department is looking into all possibilities. Public safety is a priority. Now, whether that means building structures need to be kept up to code or . . . or whether we’re dealing with a situation of malicious intent, that remains to be seen. Let us focus now on this young man’s recovery, his healing.”
Instead of sitting in this room, praying, I should be putting a third blanket over Yusuf because hospitals are surprisingly cold places. They should be warm with the smell of home-cooked food wafting through the vents and people’s favorite songs playing in their rooms, just loud enough to drown out the beeping of the machines. The sheets should be made of flannel and they should ask that families bring in their blankets from home if they want people to get better. I want justice for my brother and I want to know how many candles we need to shine a light on what happened to Yusuf that night.
My throat tightens again. I take my scarf off because it feels a bit like being strangled, and I must have done it less than gracefully because Mona looks concerned about me.
I sink my gaze to the cold floor, to the scuffed toes of my boots, embarrassed that I can’t even keep myself composed during a candlelight vigil with a room full of people gathered to pray for Yusuf. Why are these people asking the councilmember about an investigation? Shouldn’t I be the one pressing for answers?
“Do you really think this was just a building issue?”
Breathe, I command myself.
“As I said, I am fully confident that our law enforcement . . .” The councilmember repeats his canned deflection.
My eyes brim with tears. I am suddenly overcome with exhaustion. My sleep has been tortured for the past week and I might not be able to sit still much longer.
“We are concerned for our public safety, too,” a woman declares. She’s standing, so there’s no issue identifying her. “Hate crimes are on the rise across America. What are you doing about that?”
Mom dabs her tears with a tissue. Dad’s face is so tense, I can see his jaw muscles quiver. That’s exactly how I’m feeling.
“I appreciate your concern . . . ,” the councilmember starts.
I don’t hear the rest of his response over the noise in my head. It’s mercifully over soon after that. Imam Jameel concludes with a prayer and people stand up. People, including Asma’s and Mona’s parents, approach my parents to offer hugs, handshakes. Even some of our classmates stand a few feet away, timidly waiting a turn to say something. Keith is not one of them, so he probably slipped out with Garrett and the others. Asma and Mona are at my side, but when I see them get pulled into conversations, I use the moment to slip away.
I didn’t make a conscious decision to leave, but in a flash I’m in the bathroom standing over a sink, my eyes blurred with tears, when I feel a hand on my shoulder.
“Yalda, you have to breathe,” Nahal says. I cover my eyes with my hand, fingers tented and trembling. Nahal waits. It feels strange to hear her say my name but shouldn’t. We walk through the same doors. We know the same words. We eat the same foods. I’ve avoided her because I was uncomfortable with myself, not with her.
I am a mess, but a little less of a mess because Nahal’s hand is still on my shoulder. Like the thin string of a windblown kite, it’s enough to keep me from being lost to the winds. My breathing slows. I just need one more moment to face Nahal, to thank her for being here.
“There you are!” Mona says as the bathroom door swings open. “Oh, hi, Nahal! Yalda, are you okay? Oh my God, that was so intense.”
Mona wraps her arms around me and squeezes tight. In the second it takes for me to blot the tears from my eyes and look up, Nahal vanishes.
23
“On the count of three. One, two . . .”
The doctor pulls the tube from Yusuf’s mouth in one smooth swoop, and all of us in the room hold our collective breath as we wait to see if after more than a week of having a machine inhale and exhale on his behalf, Yusuf will take a breath on his own.
According to the nurse who took care of him last night, there were times the machine wasn’t breathing for him. And she saw his eyelids flutter. And just an hour ago, this doctor showed us the scan of Yusuf’s head that was done before the sun came up. Compared to the scans from the past few days, there hasn’t been any new bleeding and the swelling has gone down a lot.
This is actually a very strong recovery given his injury. His condition is more stable now, the doctor had said in a flat voice.
Stable is not how I would describe anyone or anything right now. It feels like every time someone looks at a phone or I leave the hospital, there’s a situation to deal with.
I think I see Yusuf’s chest move. I look at the doctor’s face while a nurse steps in and slides a long plastic catheter into Yusuf’s mouth to suction out saliva. The skin around his mouth is raw from where the tape had held the breathing tube in place. His lips are chapped, nearly fissured. His eyes are roaming behind his lids, in search of something.
The doctor has already warned us that if he doesn’t breathe on his own, they’ll have to replace the breathing tube and hook him back up to the machine. The room is quiet now without the whir-click-blow of the ventilator.
“Yusuf,” my mother calls. “You can do it. Breathe, janem.”
She slips into Dari, sounding like she’s trying to encourage a much younger Yusuf to ride down the sidewalk without training wheels for the first time. My father and I are silent. It should be Mom’s voice he hears—if he’s able to hear any voice at all.
“He’s doing well,” the doctor says approvingly. The nurse adjusts a coil of plastic tubing, placing prongs into Yusuf’s nostrils to feed him oxygen. “This is a big step, but he’s not out of the woods just yet.”
We spend the next hour watching Yusuf breathe. My chest goes up and down with his, as if my breathing is now dependent on his. Am I stealing his air? It’s an irrational thought but I can’t help feeling like there’s just not enough in this room to go around.
“I’m going to take a walk,” I say to my parents as I stand. My dad gives my arm a squeeze. Mom smiles weakly and resumes her vigil over Yusuf’s chest, his hand clasped tightly between hers and pressed against her cheek.
I’m almost tempted to find an empty room, crank up the dial on the wall, and suck the oxygen into my own lungs. I skip the elevator and take the stairs, my sneakers squeaking on the linoleum tiles and announcing my escape to all the floors above and below me in the stairwell.
I slip into the lobby and don’t notice that someone’s come up behind me.
“You all right?” a voice asks. I spin around, caught off guard, and the woman behind me takes a half step back when she realizes how startled I am. I recognize her as the woman from the information desk. Her tight curls bloom from a high ponytail. She’s wearing a blazer with dark jeans and weathered ballet flats that made it possible for her to get so close to me without making a sound.
“I’m so very sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you,” she says. “My name’s Olivia.”
“No, it’s fine. I was just—”
“Who do you have here, baby girl?”
“What do you mean?” I ask, confused.
“Who have you been visiting?” she adds. Her voice is so soothing that I forget she’s a stranger.
“Oh, my . . . my brother,” I say. “He’s in the ICU. He was hurt in a bad fall.”
“I thought you might be related to him. I heard about that,” Olivia says. “I’ve got your family in my prayers. I want you to know that.”
I lift my head to thank her but can’t do more than nod.
“And I can tell your brother’s got a lot of people sending him light right now. I turned a few people away myself yesterday. Had some kids come in here hoping to get upstairs and see him. One kid came in with sunglasses on, trying to hide his tears behind a pair of aviators.”
“People have always come around for Yusuf,” I say, and smile despite myself, thinking of the way Yusuf’s eyebrows lift, the way his face lights up when he sees someone.
But that’s what’s made all this smoke about WhereHouse even more unexpected. On top of that, something about the masjid’s vigil makes me want to throw up, and it doesn’t take a psychotherapist to figure out why. The last time I saw a whole masjid of people praying for one person was at my cousin Rahim’s funeral.
“But then . . . then there are people who are saying awful things about him. Straight-up lies,” I tell her.
Olivia shakes her head.
“Rumors. Prettiest kind of poison. People love to talk, especially when they have nothing worthwhile to say.”
I laugh despite the lump in my throat. I can’t let one person’s rant get me down. And now that Yusuf is breathing on his own, it’s easier to hope for a recovery. I keep telling myself that Yusuf will soon be awake and full of questions. I want him to know that I did more than pray for him.
While the masjid organized a prayer for Yusuf, some people were calling for the police to investigate this as a hate crime. I’ve heard about people being attacked for being Muslim after 9/11. And as proof hatred is truly ignorant, there are the Sikh people who suffered bigoted attacks by racists who took their turbans as a sign they were Muslim. Then there are the people who died because of someone’s rage. It’s not always easy to prove that rage was hate. I think of the young man in a gray suit and a soft pink tie, a smile that tells you he was the life of the party. The mom of six shot on the sidewalk of her quiet neighborhood. The three young adults who had been playing a board game, were summoned outside and shot by an irate neighbor. Though I’ve heard about hateful attacks, I still never imagined my family could be the victim of a hate crime and don’t know how I feel about that possibility.
“You’re right. It was one stupid post. I think I’m going to call the police and see if they’ve figured anything out.”
“Good idea,” Olivia agrees. “Don’t let them forget about your brother, if you know what I mean.”
Something in the periphery pulls Olivia’s attention. Two women and a man are standing at the welcome desk. Three oversized helium balloons bounce between them—a pacifier twice the size of my head, a silver congrats, and a giant blue foot. She waves to them to signal she’ll be right over.
“Just look at those balloons. Just how exactly are those poor parents supposed to cram those into the car with a newborn when they go home? Some people got money to burn. Let me get back to my desk, but feel free to stop by anytime. And I hope the new year is kind to your family.”
The new year. It is so easy to lose track of hours and days in a hospital, but a new year begins tomorrow, changing nothing but the calendar. I watch Olivia as she returns to her desk to welcome the visitors with floating monstrosities, a tight smile on her face.
As I walk out the double doors, the chilly air sends a quick shiver through me. I sense a woman’s eyes on me and want to be out of view, so I return to the serenity garden. In this weather, no one’s interested in staring at a dry fountain.
I dig a pen and small notebook out of my bag and open to a fresh page. I write a single word at the top in block letters.
WHO?
I can’t think of anyone who would want to hurt Yusuf. I know people wrote some nasty stuff on his locker, but I can’t imagine any of them being so angry that they would try to kill him. Was it a random, deranged stranger? Possibly. Or maybe I just don’t want to think anyone could have hurt my brother, but considering I’m sitting in a frigid serenity garden outside a hospital, that’s some powerful denial. I bring the pen to the page.
Larson
But the officer told my mom he was at a movie. Who else? There was, of course, the graffiti.
Wyatt
Wyatt was apparently away for the weekend and some other kid ended up leaving the principal a sobbing voice mail, owning up to the graffiti. I think of the way Chris and Liam walked out of the principal’s office, the way they turned their back on Yusuf.
Chris
Liam
Writing their names feels like another betrayal. I want to erase what I’ve written, but I learned long ago that ink is a commitment. I draw slashes across their names that only partially conceal them, like faces behind a fence.
My eyes fall on Larson’s name again. Keith said Danny was trying to talk sense into him, but what if he wasn’t? Keith has shared a lot with me about Danny, but I still don’t know what he’s thinking when he sees me. That goes double for Keith’s mom. In fact, she may be even more uncomfortable around me.
Danny
I look up, my breath a tuft of confusion.
Below the names, I write another word.
WHY?
I take out my phone and see that Mona and Asma have both texted me to ask how things are going. Keith has sent a message too.
Hope Yusuf’s doing okay. And you too.
I’m glad Keith can’t see my notebook.
I tell the girls Yusuf’s off the breathing machine and Asma replies with a smiling emoji and hands in prayer. I give the same update to Keith and he responds with a string of thumbs up.
Yusuf’s friends must be wondering how he’s doing too. I’ve had a couple of people message me through Pic-Up but not anyone he hung out with regularly—like Liam or Chris.
I run my finger across the spiral of my notebook and sit back to think about this. When we were in fifth grade, Liam got called to the principal’s office for etching half his name into a cafeteria table. The lunch monitor made a big deal out of it and I remember Liam’s face flushing with embarrassment when he saw all the sandwiches hovering in midair, mouths gaping at the sight of him being led by the elbow out of the room. He must have wanted to get caught, though. Why else would he have been marking the table with his name?
But Liam’s a good guy. And so is Chris. They’re my brother’s closest friends and I must have lost my mind to even consider they would hurt him. I open the notebook again and scribble over both their names, violently enough that the tip of my pen tears the page.
My fingers are feeling the cold. I call Chris and stuff my left hand into my pocket to warm up. I bet he’s the one who showed up in the aviators.
