Across the ocean, on the other side of the line, I can almost hear the tinny notes of “La vie en rose.” Mama’s ringtone, Mama’s relic of a phone. I know neither has changed since I left Damascus. I know the phone is on the marble table by the jade velvet sofa the sun has lightened. I know Baba is calling out, Ya Sayde! Telephone! I know she cannot hear him; she is chopping something in the kitchen.

“Allo?”

“Baba.”

“Samati?”

Samati. The only other man in the world who calls me that. In an instant, lemon and verbena.

“Weinik, ya binti?”

I am five years old again and safe. I’m here, Baba. I’m here.

“You haven’t called in days! Sayde, ya Sayde! Taa’i! It’s Sama!”

“Sama? Yalla, yalla! Jayi!”

She places the knife on the board, wipes her hands hurriedly with the checkered kitchen towel that always falls off the hook. Even in her haste she will pick it up.

“Yalla, Sayde!”

The scuffle of slippers: French gray lined with fine lace.

Baba says, “Something smells wonderful.”

“Warek ‘einab.”

His favorite. I hear a slap.

“Wafi! Stop eating those karabeej! The doctor said less sugar…”

“I didn’t—”

“You have crumbs in your beard.”

Now Mama has her hand on her hip and over Baba’s beard, the two little telltale patches of cheekbone are pink.

“I only had one, wallah!”

And my heart suddenly aches for the sweet, powdery semolina, sticky pistachio paste, the hints of warid and orange blossom. My throat constricts.

“Keifik, habibti?”

“Fine, Mama, how are you?”

An almost-quiver as I force the lie out. She hears it, continents away.

“Sama? What’s wrong, habibti?”

“Is everything all right?” Baba asks.

“Yes, everything is…”

I am crying. Scraped-knee-on-asphalt, bullied-in-the-playground crying. Mama, Baba, please-mend-my-broken-five-year-old-world crying. To my shame and horror, I cannot stop. The years of distance I built between us—in the name of freedom, my independence—collapse.

“Wafi, she’s crying!”

“Samati, tell us what’s wrong.” His voice as far away and helpless as he.

“Ask her if she’s sick! Did she eat?”

One loves as one knows how. Her questions cut across time.

“Your mother asks—”

“I ate,” I lie, as all children do to the mothers they abandon. Yes, I’m fine. No, I am not sick. A cold, allergies. Yes, of course I ate. The transcripts of transatlantic phone calls are rife with lies, both ways; those we tell loved ones, those they tell us, all of which we believe, because we choose to, because they help us endure the distance.

“And I’m not sick. I’m…”

For a second I fantasize about one more lie:

The baby was born, premature but healthy. Don’t worry, all is fine.

I imagine: What did she say, Wafi? The baby, Sayde! He’s here! Silence for a moment, then a spring shower of Mabrouk! Mabrouk, habibti! Pastel, gossamer streams of blessings and congratulations.

“Well, then, what is it?”

My chin gives way and before I can stop it, the truth spills out, unfiltered. It gushes through the phone line, through the air, seven time zones, through the speaker, into my parents’ salon. It breaks every rule every child knows not to when calling home. I finish and wait. Shell-shocked silence. Dust falling on still water.

Baba curses quietly: “Yil’aan abouh,” so low it could have been a prayer. “Yil’aan abouh…”

“Wafi…”

“So he meant it. Every word he said in his campaign. The wall, the immigrants… Yil’aan abouh. Yil’aan abouhon, all of them.”

The curses grow louder and deeper with his comprehension.

“Yil’aan abouhon! Them and their country! How dare they do this to people? To my daughter?”

The primal, bestial fury of a parent.

“We saw the news,” Mama says, “but we didn’t even—”

“Deporting people? A travel ban? They’re a nation of immigrants, the hypocrites!”

“Baba.”

But Baba cannot hear. He can only see his daughter, crying in a playground on the other side of a fence, a border, an ocean.

“Yil’aan abouhon!” As though said enough, loud enough, the words might match his anger, denounce, undo this injustice. They do not. They merely tire my father’s smoker’s lungs. He coughs, heaves, many minutes. His breathing finally slows. I wait for Baba to fix everything, as Baba always does.

He clears his throat.

“Where are you now? The baby…”

“I’m in the apartment. The baby’s at the hospital.”

“Habibti,” murmurs Mama, and there is nothing else to be said, nothing that could bridge this giant gulf. Nothing to fix.

“Are you in the living room?”

“Yes.”

“On the sofa?”

I join them there, on the softened velvet that once was jade. I close my eyes and my fingertips remember tracing stars and waves, running across the fabric, upstream, ruffling the threads. Touch. There should be a way, someday, for fingertips to touch through phones, through screens and windowpanes, and the plexiglass of incubator walls.

“Are you both all right? Are you being careful?”

“We’re fine, habibti. We’re fine. Don’t worry about us.”

The lies we tell those we love, because we love.

As long as I keep my eyes closed, we sit on the sofa, in the silence of their breathing. Beyond my eyelids, the real, vacuous living room will not have changed. Every item, now devoid of meaning, will still be in its place. That there will be no sign, nothing to bear witness to the fact that the world has gone mad, is absurd and grotesque. Only spoiled food, hardened bread.

“Are there still bread shortages?”

“Shh, habibti. Let’s not talk about that now.”

They too must have their eyes closed, their hands overlapped on the sofa.

“Tell us about the boy. Does he look like Hadi?”

Outside my parents’ window, people are dying, for words they said or didn’t or forgot or now deeply regret. Queuing outside embassies for visas. Queuing for everything: lentils, flour, rice. Yanking cash out of ATMs, pawning their grandmothers’ watches, selling gold, going to bed fully dressed… but in my parents’ mad world, and in mine, there is a room with powder-blue walls and green velvet that smells faintly of tobacco, lemon and verbena, and a wafting aroma of warek ‘einab.

“Do you need money?” Baba asks. From a country at war. One loves as one knows how.

“Wafi, ask her if she had dinner.”