He slipped the coat around her shoulders and helped her zip it up. Nearly midway through her pregnancy, she was just starting to round. He had bought her that coat, a serious, no-joking-about-Boston-cold coat, with his own first, proud paycheck. Hadi Deeb, employed.
It was white and had been delivered in a large white box tied with a velvet bow, the color of deep midnight. She had kept the ribbon, because she did such things, his wife.
“My wife,” he had said, over and over at that dinner with the expats, amazed each time he heard it. Amazed whenever he could hear it: it had been one loud, raucous dinner.
It had felt almost like home. He had spoken in Arabic, loud, and been understood, and had laughed and eaten and drunk. But toward the end, the arak had run out. The food and talk of Syria had begun to weigh heavy in his stomach.
And now, most of the chairs were empty, and outside, it was dark.
The door opened and shut. Cold air blew in, and he caught a sudden whiff of that blue Sunday smell that hung about the patrons of the Lebanese sandwich shop. It seeped, swift and damp, into his open coat. He felt keenly adrift, lost.
Never had he been so far, felt so far away from all he knew to be familiar. Even in this restaurant, where, minutes ago, he had been surrounded by his compatriots. Salim was right; he didn’t belong in Damascus anymore. But Hadi knew he didn’t belong in Boston either. He was in-between, somewhere, nowhere, suspended over the Atlantic, speaking in English and singing Fairuz in Arabic. Free to go where and be who he wanted, as unbound as he had ever been, and as uprooted. His fingers were clumsy, but he finally pulled up the zipper.
“Thank you, hayati.”
She touched his arm and he felt a sudden rush of safety, hot and concrete. He put his hand over hers, to keep it there.
“I look like a giant marshmallow,” she grumbled.
She did not. She looked small, vulnerable, flushed. Pregnant with his child. Once more, he wondered why and how he, Hadi Deeb, had come to be holding her arm, in Boston, in a Middle Eastern restaurant. Sama Zayat wavered but he held on, to her and the confluence of their lives, just then, like a lifeline.
In the street, they were both briefly stilled by the quiet openness; it had been loud in there. A mildness unimaginable for a Boston November. They walked at her pace.
“Did you have a good time?” he asked.
“I did. Thank you so much for the surprise. I hadn’t had a man’ousheh in years! I didn’t even know I missed it.”
“Really?”
She stopped them both to stand on tiptoe and kiss him on the lips. Then they walked, and he was silent.
“What about you? Did you have a good time?… Hadi?”
“It was fine.”
The words came out gruffer than he had intended. He had been drifting away again. They reached an intersection and he realized they should have turned sooner. He didn’t recognize the white facades, the dark violet windows. They were lost, they realized, and Sama groaned: “I really need to use the bathroom.”
“Again?”
Pregnancy bladder. Panic. Cab. Mad race through the streaking red, yellow, green traffic lights, past white lampposts and the orange windows of living rooms, the moonlit river, Cambridge…
Finally! Hadi Deeb, Sama Zayat, next to the blue front door. She fumbled for the keys she had already given him. Quick! They’d check the mailbox tomorrow. He waited while she gathered breath and courage: four flights of steps.
“Soon I’ll be too pregnant for this! You may have to carry me.”
She puffed and tried to smile and tripped.
“I might have to start carrying you now!”
They reached the top floor and she flew into the bathroom. A few minutes later, coming out, she said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do when the kicking really begins.”
Hadi smiled. “Bladder football,” he said, then thought of something. “Americans call it soccer.”
“So?”
He was silent. It returned, that unmoored feeling from the restaurant: their child would be American.
“Hadi, are you all right?”
“Our child won’t speak a word of Arabic,” he blurted.
For a moment, she just looked at him, then took his hand. They went to the couch. On the coffee table lay the Lonely Planet guide to Syria. In it, the food and songs and vistas of orchards and Sundays and he and the boys kicking Zahi’s football in the municipal lot. None of it would mean anything.
“Maybe,” Sama said, “maybe not. Maybe our child will speak five different languages, be a poet…”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
She thought about this for a while.
“I chose to leave Syria—”
“You were forced to. We all were.”
She shook her head.
“I made a choice, and I chose to come here. I could have gone anywhere. I chose this country… Hadi, what is the difference between an M-21 and a 120-millimeter…?”
Mortar. The first was a rocket. One learned to hear the difference after enough hours spent hiding in the basement. Hadi looked at Sama and at where he was, on an Amazon-green sofa.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. He was no longer lost. His wife and child didn’t need to know the difference between a mortar and a rocket.
He sat with his wife on the sofa, breathing the scent of red apples and vanilla in her hair, listening to the last notes of the lingering Fairuz song in his head. The lahn… the melody returning to its original cadence. He said, “You know, I think you’re right: Maybe we should get a piano.”