Rashid nearly jumps at the knock on her door.
Kathryn motions for him to relax, to stand down, as if he were a frightened animal in her home. “It’s Michael,” her tone sharpens, “my son.”
The words sting, reinforcing the violence she has done to his memory. As she opens the door, Rashid stands again, slowly. Michael greets her. Though still handsome, he looks different than he did a few days ago at breakfast, his eyes darkly circled, his face now shadowed with stubble.
“Rashid,” Michael acknowledges him.
“Michael,” his father replies in kind, “thank you for agreeing to see me.”
Kathryn stands between them, barely comprehending how they could be connected. “I’ll get us water.”
“Please,” Rashid says meekly.
The two men sit in Kathryn’s living room, facing each other, not talking, listening to the sound of glasses on the counter, water rushing from the faucet. When Kathryn returns she serves her son first, placing a protective hand on his shoulder. She sets the other glass in front of Rashid on the table.
He feels untouchable.
“Andrew?” he asks quietly.
“Andrew’s not coming,” Kathryn says. “He told me he wants nothing more to do with you.” A desperate chuckle escapes from the tightness in her chest. “What the hell do you expect us to say?”
He presses his lips tightly together. “Nothing. I don’t expect you to say anything.” He sips from the glass and sets it back down.
Michael holds his mother’s hand.
Rashid inhales. “I have come tonight to tell you I won’t bother you again. I was foolish to dream I could possibly return to you, that you would allow me back into your lives.” He looks at Michael, holds out his hands. “He is such a man, such a very good man, Kathryn. I will be grateful to you all my life that you’ve raised this son…our son…into this man.”
“By myself,” she jabs again at his wound.
“Yes, I imagined I was helping with the money I sent.”
Kathryn flinches at the memory of those envelopes, sits down on the arm of Michael’s chair.
Rashid runs a hand over his clean-shaven face. He has taken off his turban, removed his beard. He no longer needs to hide behind some other identity. He feels exposed, wonders how to start with what he knows he has to say. “I learned to live only in my imagination.” He looks from Kathryn to Michael and back again. “For twenty years I imagined reuniting with you, with all three of you, and continuing our lives. I prayed for your safety. I believed God would protect you, would compensate you somehow for your suffering.” He presses his hands into his thighs, rests them uneasily on his knees. “But this was not your reality.” He resists the impulse to accuse her of murdering his memory, never speaking of him to their sons. “I understand now that I held on to this impossible fantasy for my survival. Not for yours.”
She lets go of a deep sigh, closing her eyes against the sight of him, whatever attractive appearance he had once possessed, ground away by the intervening years.
“So after I leave here tonight, tomorrow morning, I’ll go to the authorities. I will allow them to decide my fate.” He looks out the window into the darkness, unable to bear the distance separating him from these people he loves just a few feet from him. “This world has nothing left for me.”
“Don’t expect me to feel sorry for your suffering.” She shakes her head. “You’ve brought this on yourself, and now after all these years, you come back like some ghost to haunt our waking lives. Please go.”
“What?” Michael blurts out.
Rashid and Kathryn turn, surprised to see Michael leaning forward.
“How can you think that would be acceptable to me?” he demands indignantly. “How can you think that after abandoning us, after all that you’ve put my mother through, after all the experiences you denied me and my brother, that you can just appear, like you came out of thin air and then abandon us once again?”
Rashid looks helplessly, “What do you want from me?”
Michael utters an incredulous sound, almost a laugh. “What do I want from you? At least some time to let me decide.” He stands up, looks down on his father. “I don’t know who you are. You might be a monster. You might be some kind of misguided militant, or a victim of some backward tradition. But for some reason my mother married you, at some point you were here with us.” He grimaces, resisting the tears shining in his eyes. “I remember who you were. I was a little boy who had a father. And then I was a little boy who didn’t. And as if that weren’t hard enough to comprehend, for twenty years I was not allowed to admit any of those memories, to anyone.” He paces away from his chair. “You may have been underground in fucking Pakistan, but my childhood, my memories have been underground too, afraid of the wrath of her suffering.”
Kathryn looks at Michael, cut by his words.
“Sorry Mom, I don’t blame you, but you weren’t the only one he left.” He steps closer to Rashid, towering over him. “So at the very least, you owe me some time to decide for myself about whether or not I want you in my life.”
Silence hangs in the room.
She speaks first. “Michael, he can’t stay.” She turns to Rashid, “You can’t stay. Forget the emotions for a minute, he’s a fugitive,” she raises her shoulders at the obvious fact. “Every minute he’s with us, we risk our own innocence. Michael, you should understand the legal implications better than I do.”
Michael sits again, now on the arm of the sofa, just a cushion away from Rashid. “Are you still an American citizen?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have an American passport. I’m traveling on a green card.”
“A legitimate one?”
“No,” Rashid averts his eyes with the admission.
Michael pauses, thinking. “Well, you were once a U.S. citizen so you have rights to due process under the law and to legal representation.”
“For what? I will admit my guilt, why would I need representation for that?”
Michael holds his hand to his forehead, closes his eyes in frustration, then speaks with forced patience, “Because your sentencing could still be negotiated.” When Rashid doesn’t respond, Michael says very deliberately, “You could avoid the death penalty or solitary confinement.”
Rashid smiles ruefully. “I’ve already endured both. I’m not afraid of those things.”
“But I am.”
Rashid blinks with surprise. “So what should I do?”
“You will not go alone,” Michael commands. “Tomorrow, I’ll go with you. I’ll provide you legal representation.”
“No Michael,” Kathryn gasps.
“Mom, I’m a grown man. This isn’t your decision.”
She flinches at his defiance, the independence she has always instilled in him.
“You will wait tomorrow, until I come for you. All right?”
“You’re sure you want to do this?” Rashid looks up into the eyes of his son, sees the reflection of the little boy, wonders at the mystery of how he has become this man.
“I’m sure.” Michael does not soften. “You have to commit to me that you won’t talk to anyone from the government without me present.”
“You have my word.”
Michael holds out his hand to confirm the agreement. Rashid hesitates then grasps Michael’s hand, pulling tightly, and then he feels the arms of his son around him. Something inside him cleaves, allowing all the years of waiting, all the guilt and fantasy and self denial to swirl into the whirlpool of the past and his horizon fills from pole to pole with the strength of his son’s exquisitely paternal embrace.
The sight of these two men causes Kathryn to catch her breath. She feels the years without affection, without her complement. Would she recognize those arms again?
“Michael, you should go home and get some sleep,” she speaks as they separate from each other.
He nods to Kathryn, again the obedient son. At the door, he glances at Rashid and then at his mother. “Are you sure you want me to leave you,” he hesitates, “alone?”
“I’m OK,” she reassures him.
Rashid stands near the door, unsure what to say next, expecting her to ask him to leave.
Kathryn turns back to him. She looks at his hands, avoiding his face. “If you’re going to give it all up tomorrow, this could be your last night of freedom.”
“Or my last night of exile.”
“All of a sudden, I…how do I say this? I have so much to say to you. So much anger, I thought I just wanted you to disappear again so I wouldn’t have to deal with you. But now that I know I’ll lose you again…”
He allows the silence to linger before speaking. “What can I say to you? What can I give you? Anything I have the power to do.”
She covers her face with her hands, drawing inward, vulnerable. Slowly, he reaches out one hand to touch her arm, then the other until their arms form a circuit, an energy flowing back and forth between them. In the space between them, the void, the absence and longing lingers. But she allows him to reach across, to make his way to her. In the hesitation she crumbles, her cheek rests against his chest, the heart inside beating furiously. And his arms are around her. He braces for the end of this moment, savoring her life next to his. Then, directed by a will she cannot control, she presses her palm into the small of his back, holds him to her, wishing she could stay like this, wishing the time before and the time yet to come would fall away, leaving only this feeling of connection.
Rashid speaks the words that threaten to burst through his chest. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For so many things, I don’t have enough words to say them.”