For three days I wait, tensed like a coiled spring in that hotel room. There will be no more introductions, no more men who will deliver me like some kind of dangerous package to another place. I am waiting only for myself. I need only find the directions to her home. The absurdly simple task inflates in my mind. I watch the television screen in the hotel room, trying, unsuccessfully, to lose myself in other peoples’ dramas. I order a pizza, and think about turning back. But I have no one waiting for me, no transport to the border. I have not planned for a return to Pakistan.
Be a man, I tell myself. Finish this thing.
But the days pass.
The front desk calls, I must pay the bill, they do not allow guests to stay for more than a week without paying. I turn over several months’ worth of wages for my week-long stay.
I brace myself to step into the hostile friendliness, the toxic cleanliness of America. I spend two hours walking to the address I have for the hawala. In a non-descript low-rise commercial strip, the shop offers both pre-paid phone plans and travel services beneath dusty posters of Dubai and Mecca.
I request the funds that have been piling up since I cancelled the postal mailings to Kathryn. “I had expected you several days ago,” the hawala man says in Arabic-accented English. “I thought maybe something had happened to you.”
“A whole lifetime has happened to me,” I respond somberly, taking the cash in an envelope and walking back out. I stand on the corner watching the traffic, hoping for a taxi to come by. After a half hour passes, the man from the shop comes out. “Do you need something?”
“A taxi.”
“Well why didn’t you say so? You’ll wait all day here. In America everyone has their own car.” He waves me back inside while he requests a car for me.
I gaze at the Mecca poster. I never made the Hajj, never suffered through the swirl of crowds and heat to throw stones at the devil and circle the Kabba as my father and grandfather did. But this pilgrimage to my past, I remind myself, is every bit as difficult, will also align my life with God.
The car arrives, and the task I had procrastinated this last week, he accomplishes with a few words into his navigator screen. A red line on a map shows in stark clarity the final leg of my journey to Kathryn.
The red line grows shorter and shorter until he pulls into the driveway of an apartment complex. My heart sinks. The units look small, the building shabbier than what I remember of our condo together in Los Angeles.
The driver turns around. “What are you waiting for?” He points to the meter still running on his screen. “The fare will increase until you pay.”
Still I sit, slowly pull out bills to pay the fare. He turns off the meter and still I sit.
“That’s it, man. I’ve got another passenger waiting.”
Then I am standing in the driveway. A bead of perspiration slides down my back. My heart pounds. Kathryn could be close enough to be in my arms within moments. I look down at my hands, the darkness of years of mechanics’ work lingers in the swirled lines of my fingertips. How could these hands possibly be worthy? A car pulls past me into a parking spot. The driver, a young Latino man gets out and looks at me briefly, his eyes passing over my turban with a momentary interest, but he says nothing as he ascends the stairs and disappears down a corridor. I step toward the bank of mailboxes, consider simply leaving the bills I have picked up at the hawala and leaving before I cause more damage in Kathryn’s life.
I can barely focus my eyes to read the names on the individual boxes. I nearly jump at the sound of a woman’s voice. “Can I help you?”
I recognize the voice, unchanged after all these years. I turn, take in her face in a moment before averting my eyes. She has aged. Of course I knew she would, but I hadn’t considered the ways the years would line her face.
“I’m just looking for a mailbox.”
“I can see that,” she says. “Whose mailbox are you looking for?”
“Kathryn,” I pause, I want to call her by her name, I want to say Kathryn Siddique, but I catch myself. “Capen.”
“That’s me,” a note of curiosity in her voice.
Wordlessly, I offer the envelope bearing the words, To the Family of Rashid Siddique.”
She sighs, does not reach to accept the envelope. “Are you the one who delivers these?”
I shake my head. “This is the first time I’ve come in person.” I look up again, allowing myself to engage her eyes. Her pupils grow wide. Her smile of pleasant hospitality gives way to a series of expressions in quick succession, reflecting emotions I can only imagine.
“Are you Rashid Siddique?” she asks, she nearly laughs at the absurdity of her own question.
I inhale, bracing myself for the world of possibilities beyond this question. “I was.”