Mina pulled down her chador to cover as much of her face as she could. Her brothers sat next to her, crumpled in the backseat of the taxi. In the darkness, the fleeting streetlamps occasionally lit up the people who were out at midnight. Mina glimpsed a couple, a woman in a dark chador and a young thin man, strolling as they ate ice-cream sandwiches. A few cats roamed the streets, wide-eyed. Mina closed her eyes and prayed.
They hadn’t made their beds. They hadn’t taken the kettle off the stove, or packed much. They hadn’t said good-bye to most of their relatives, trusting the grapevine to spread the news once they were safely out. At the last minute, Mina had thrown into her suitcase her color-pencil case and the markers from last year. Now huddled next to Darya and her brothers in the speeding taxi, she started to remember all the things she hadn’t brought. Underwear. Did they have enough underwear? She could see Baba press on an imaginary gas pedal as he sat next to the taxi driver in the passenger seat. The taxi driver, Ali, kept cracking his gum. The music he played was religious. A good front. If the guards leaned in and asked them questions, maybe Ali could help them.
“We are going to America,” Baba had said at breakfast, a few months after Mamani’s death. Each week more boys were sent to the front to fight. When he made the announcement, Mina saw in her father’s face that the decision had already been solidified between her parents, the details already worked out. When Darya had definitively said that her sons would not die killing their innocent Iraqi neighbors and Baba had said that his daughter would not be brought up silenced and stifled, together they had made their plan. At breakfast over sweetened tea and bread smeared with Mamani’s sour-cherry jam from summer, the children had simply been informed of the decision. And every action since then had been one of rushed secrecy, a heightened sense of urgency informing their charade of living as though they weren’t leaving.
At the airport, Ali threw their suitcases onto the pavement. It was half past midnight, and their flight left at five in the morning. They needed time to get through all the official checkpoints. Ali shook Baba’s hand and bowed his head at Darya. He took a good long look at Hooman and Kayvon. “Bereen. Bereen zood. Go. Go quickly,” he said. “In a few months, they’ll have you killing Iraqis.”
Hooman and Kayvon leaned over to pick up the suitcases. Mina looked at her brothers’ long arms and legs. She couldn’t imagine their bodies crouched in ditches near the border, ready to kill.
Inside the airport, Darya and Mina were separated from Baba and the boys. Darya and Mina made their way to the women’s section. Mina kept pulling her chador tighter, she didn’t want the authorities to find anything wrong with her hijab, she didn’t want to be the reason they were refused permission to get on the plane. They were told to empty their suitcases. Every item was carefully examined and massaged by the three chadored customs officials.
“Nothing valuable can leave this country,” one of the women said, looking Darya and Mina up and down with scorn.
Another woman body-searched them from head to toe, squeezing and patting them. Questions were asked about why they were going to America (for medical reasons—Baba had managed to create medical urgency with the help of his colleagues already in New York), how long they were staying (nine months), what, if any, jewelry, money, Persian rugs, pistachios, gold they were taking. A Barbie doll tumbled out of Mina’s suitcase.
The customs official lifted up the Barbie and looked at it at arm’s length. Her face contorted into a sneer. “Why do you need this?” she asked Mina.
“Remember how you had dolls when you were little?” Darya said quickly, desperately.
The female official smiled wearily at Darya. “No, Khanom, I do not. I never owned a single doll. It is you, the rich, who owned the dolls. It is you the spoiled rich class who owned everything in this country. Now look at you, scurrying away like frightened cockroaches.”
Darya stiffened. Mina readied herself for the throbbing forehead vein and a tirade from her mother. But instead, Darya only looked down at her feet as the customs official shoved their belongings back into the suitcase. A third woman was called over to look at their paperwork. The few minutes she spent leafing through their passports felt like an eternity. Then the woman jerked her head toward the terminal and handed Darya two boarding passes. Mina had expected more resistance, more struggle, expected the officials to even deny them permission to leave.
They walked quickly to reunite with Baba and Hooman and Kayvon. Mina realized she hadn’t repacked Barbie. The customs official had insisted on examining Barbie, twisting her arms, cracking her knees. As Mina turned to look back at the search station, where the chadored women were throwing around the belongings of another nervous-looking mother and daughter, she caught a glimpse of her Barbie’s dismantled arms and legs in a neat pile next to a picture of the Ayatollah.
ON THE PLANE, BEFORE THEY TOOK OFF, Mina looked out the window at the Tehran tarmac one last time. Baba had promised they would come back very soon, as soon as the “craziness” was over, and their country became normal again. Suddenly Mina’s heart tightened as panic washed over her. A dozen faces seemed to press against the tiny oval window of the plane. She could see Cousin Leila and Aunt Nikki and Reza and Maryam. She clearly saw Aunt Firoozeh’s nose pressed against the pane, and Uncle Jafar’s big mustache was squashed against the glass too. There was Soghra, dabbing her head with a hanky. And in her mind’s eye, Mina saw Agha Jan. She saw him sitting alone at his kitchen table, the newspaper limp in his hand, bent over an empty bowl. At that moment, Mina even saw Mrs. Amiri, looking at her with something like envy as she sat behind her teacher’s desk. Lastly, Mina saw Bita marching off to detention, turning around to look one last time at Mina. Lip-glossed, shining-black-eyed defiant Bita. The relief that Mina had expected once they were safely on the plane was not there. There was instead only a strange sensation: a suffocating feeling of guilt.
“We never said good-bye,” Mina said as they got ready to take off.
“We’ll be back,” Darya promised. “This is all just temporary.”
Mina closed her eyes and saw their house, its doors wide open, the windows unshuttered with the wind blowing through. The lemon trees that Darya had planted in the garden, the roses in the yard, the jars of tea leaves and baskets of fruit on the kitchen shelves.
She turned to look at her mother. Darya’s eyes were half-closed and her mouth was barely moving. But Mina recognized the words her mother whispered. She was stunned to see her mother praying. She had never heard her mother recite prayers, the Koran verses from which she had always distanced herself. When she prayed, Mina thought, Darya looked more like Mamani. Across the aisle, her father sat glassy-eyed. Hooman kept pulling nervously at his upper lip. For a minute, Kayvon’s head was covered in his hands. Then he looked up and saw Mina watching him. He managed a smile. “Freedom.” He mouthed the word as the plane lifted into the air. He held his trembling fingers in a “V” for Victory.
The plane went up higher and higher. Mina leaned her head back and listened to the buzz of voices and white noise. The pilot’s nasal muffled voice came through the speakers. She could smell a stranger’s cologne. She held on to Darya’s hand as they flew into the blackness.