All Nansy had wanted from Azzam was a hug, some consolation. After leaving the hospital, he went with Nansy to her parents’ home in a-Tur, where Sadine was waiting. There, too, he was cold. Later, Nansy couldn’t sleep. It had been the longest day of her life and still it wouldn’t end. What she was sure was Salaah’s Spider-Man backpack appeared and reappeared in images in the news and social media, in photos and videos of the accident. Wide awake, staring at the ceiling, she imagined the crash: where Salaah had sat on the bus, which friend had been next to him, whether he had eaten his candy, what he had done in the moment when the bus flipped over, whether he had called for her.
In the morning she wanted to go back to the hospital. “Go where?” Azzam said. “There’s no face, no nose. There’s nothing there.” Did this man feel anything? How could he have left Salaah’s room with such indifference when her brothers had fainted, screamed, broken a hand? At Hadassah, Azzam’s mother still wouldn’t speak to Nansy. She glared at her as if she were the enemy. Azzam’s father said Nansy should look at Salaah. “She sent him on the trip—she should see the result.”
So again Nansy asked to go to Salaah. Again her brothers begged her mother to prevent it. Osama held his mother’s face and locked eyes with her. “Don’t let your daughter do it. She’ll go crazy—you’ll lose her. If I go to the bathroom, promise me you won’t let her go.” Again Nansy asked the staff for updates, and the same doctor pointed the same finger toward the sky. She was told that Salaah was heavily sedated and could feel no pain. So she returned to Sadine in a-Tur.
Nansy went back and forth to Hadassah over the next two days. There was no news and still she didn’t enter Salaah’s room. Her in-laws demanded to know why she hadn’t seen him; her family insisted that she absolutely must not. In a-Tur, her parents’ neighbors told her Salaah would be okay. They brought food; she barely ate. She was weak, pale, worn down.
In the evening of the third day, Salaah appeared to her in a dream. He was wearing his favorite red coat, which he hadn’t taken on the trip, and he was playing with the five dead children. Nansy’s mother and aunt also dreamed of Salaah that night. Salaah had spoken to his grandmother. “Tata, I’m going to join my friends,” he said, and then walked toward Ula and the five children. Nansy’s aunt had dreamed that the prophet Ibrahim had recited the Quran to the dead children and then told them their friend would be joining them.
Nansy felt wholly depleted. She had not been back to the hospital that day. Her family urged her to rest. Her mother told her to pray for the best thing for Salaah, even if it meant death. Before sunset, she felt a pang in her chest, as if someone had squeezed a fist around her heart. Her first thought was that Salaah’s soul was leaving his body. She got dressed and told the family she had to see Salaah, now. This time, she said, she would go in the room, look at him with her own eyes. Impatient to leave, she waited in the stairwell and then went down to sit in the car. As her mother was on the way out, she took a call from Azzam’s sister, who told her that Salaah had died.
Nansy’s mother got in the car, saying nothing to Nansy. They were waiting for her father to finish the sunset prayer at the mosque next door. Exiting the mosque, he answered a call and froze. Nansy saw that something was wrong, but he, too, hid the truth. He said they couldn’t go to the hospital because Salaah had caught a bacterial infection. Without the outer protection of skin, burn victims were especially prone to them. They all went back upstairs.
Neighbors followed them into the apartment, and Nansy could tell that there had been a change. Finally, someone said what she already knew. Nansy registered no shock, only remorse. She shouldn’t have listened to her family—she should have seen Salaah in the ICU and done right by her son. Compounding Nansy’s guilt for signing the permission slip to go on the trip, there was now the deepest regret that she hadn’t said goodbye to Salaah.
In the salon, the neighbors said there was a glow around Nansy’s face. They swore they had never seen anything like it. The light in the room did seem to have a different quality, just after sunset. But Nansy’s mother saw no glow in her daughter’s eyes, only anguish.
AZZAM BURIED SALAAH in the same cemetery as Abdullah al-Hindi, in Baab al-Asbaat, next to the Old City walls. For the three days after the funeral, Nansy went to Azzam’s family home in Wadi Joz to receive condolences while her in-laws continued to shun her. The few words they directed her way seemed designed to cause torment. “You’re his mother. Why didn’t you go say goodbye to him?” She heard her father-in-law complaining that she was wearing the same jacket she had on when the accident happened, and it wasn’t black.
Nansy couldn’t bring herself to return to the apartment in Ras Shehadeh, to Salaah’s drawings and toys and clothes. Every inch of the place held a memory of her boy. So she stayed with her parents in a-Tur. People from her neighborhood, from the school, from Anata, asked when she would come to the other side of the wall so they could pay their respects. They hadn’t been able to call on her because of their green IDs. Nansy dreaded going back to that walled ghetto.
She was also worried about Sadine. Since the day of the crash, Sadine had started pulling her hair out and scratching her face. For more than a month, she didn’t speak. Then Azzam announced that he wanted to take Nansy and Sadine on a trip to Ramallah. It was one of the first humane gestures he had made to his wife. Nansy felt a glimmer of hope. He had been so distant, so cruel. And vicious as well. Days after the funeral, he had forced himself on her.
Nansy was willing to forgive a lot after the accident. She felt pity for Azzam. He, too, was broken and grieving, even if he didn’t show it. So the three of them drove toward Ramallah on the Jaba road. Stopping the car on the shoulder, Azzam said this was where the accident had happened. Nansy broke down, sobbing from the pain of his spite. Sadine was in the backseat, watching her mother cry. Nansy wanted to crawl into a hole and die. If Azzam had given her pills or a knife and told her to kill herself, she would have done it there and then. He hadn’t meant to hurt her, he said later—he thought she would want to see the site.
At the end of the traditional forty days of mourning, Nansy learned she was pregnant. Friends and family drew divine meaning from the auspicious date. God had taken her child and was now giving her another one, a better one. How could people be so stupid, she thought. As if there were such a thing as a better one.
The pregnancy put more strain on the marriage. Nansy thought Azzam’s family took pleasure in abusing her. “You killed him,” her mother-in-law said on several occasions. By the sixth month of her pregnancy, Nansy was frail and exhausted, and spent much of her time in bed replaying memories of her son. When she learned she was carrying a boy, she wanted to name him Salaah. But she had dreams that seemed to warn her against it. In the first, a sheikh handed her a baby whom he called Mohammad. In the second, Salaah brought Nansy a blue onesie, which he said was for his brother Mohammad. So Nansy named the boy Mohammad. He was born on Sadine’s fourth birthday, a little more than nine months after Salaah had died.
Then Nansy got pregnant again. She hadn’t been trying. In fact, she had been using contraception. Now Azzam wanted a divorce, but first he demanded that she sign away her right to the compensation they collected for Salaah’s death. The blue ID holders had received money from Karnit, an Israeli government fund for victims of road accidents; the law specified that anyone hit by an Israeli-owned vehicle had to be paid compensation, no matter where the accident took place, but only if the victims were Israeli or tourists. Green ID holders such as Abed and Haifa would not get a penny from Israel.
Azzam and Nansy had secured slightly more than $200,000. Azzam wanted her to give up not just her share of the money but also everything else: their joint possessions; child support; and the mahr, Nansy’s dowry in gold.
When Nansy said no, Azzam hit her. He paid a lawyer to draw up a separation agreement and put it in front of her every few days. Each time she refused to sign, he beat her. Sometimes the beatings put her in the hospital. After one incident, she expected a miscarriage. Azzam didn’t let up. “Aren’t you tired?” he said. “Just sign the papers and you can go.” Then he threatened to send her to a mental institution and told her she was losing her mind. He would leave the children’s toys in strange places in the apartment and blame it on Nansy. Suspecting him of drugging her, she stopped drinking the coffee he made. He also told her that his sister had pictures of Salaah at the hospital—which was true—and he’d force her to look at them if she wouldn’t sign.
Nansy made excuses for him, thinking he had gone mad with grief. Nonetheless, she downloaded a recording app to his phone. What she heard was his sister and father encouraging him to beat her, to do whatever it took to get rid of her. In one recording, his father suggested hiring someone to kill her. Nansy began to fear for her life.
She gave birth to another daughter in March 2014. That summer, when the baby was four months old, Nansy asked her father for money to buy the children presents for Eid al-Fitr. When she came home with bags of new clothes, Azzam was angry and beat her severely. This time Nansy called her brother Osama to come pick her up. Wearing nothing but her nightgown, Nansy took the three children and left Azzam for good.
She moved in with her parents in a-Tur, on the other side of the wall, but their situation remained precarious. Israel had slated the five-story apartment block for demolition. Palestinians were routinely denied permission to build in annexed East Jerusalem—only 13 percent of Palestinian neighborhoods were zoned for construction, and most of that was already developed. So they were forced to either build illegally or move out. Nansy’s parents, like many others, paid hundreds of dollars in fines to the municipality each month, hoping to stave off demolition.
After the divorce, Nansy still wanted Azzam to be a father to his children. He rarely asked to see them, though. Nansy and her parents raised them on their own. The accident had ruined Nansy’s life and destroyed her family, but she didn’t think she was unusual. It had crushed every family, each in its own way.