Chapter 5: Tonight Is My Night

Tuesday morning Omar came up the stairs into the kitchen, and the whole room stopped.

Dina was pouring coffee and the cup slipped clean out of her hand and bounced off the table edge to the floor. Yasmin froze with two eggs in one hand and the frying pan in the other, halfway to the stove. And Nadia, by the window, went pink to the ears and started batting her lashes at him before she could think better of it.

He crossed to Dina first.

She came up from retrieving the cup, flustered, already reaching for something dry to say — and he took her face in both hands and kissed her, slow and unhurried, nothing like the brisk hard scrubbing she’d given him that first day below. When he drew back, she was blinking, the comeback nowhere to be found.

“You’re a pretty woman, Dina,” he said, his thumb moving once along her jaw. “You’d be prettier still with your hair in a ponytail instead of that braid.”

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Set the cup down with enormous care, as though it were the only thing in the room she could still be trusted to operate.

He stepped to Yasmin, who hadn’t moved, the eggs in one hand and the pan held up between them like a small shield. He leaned over it and kissed her anyway, gentle, brief.

“My little Doe-eyes,” he murmured.

Yasmin made a sound between a squeak and a sigh, and the eggs were in serious peril.

Then he saw Nadia at the table, her left arm tucked down out of sight beneath it the way she kept it when she wasn’t thinking about it.

He smiled, and his voice went soft and almost musical. “Nah-dee-ah. Can I have a hug and a kiss?”

She was out of the chair before he finished saying it. A second and a half, no more, and her arm was around his neck and she’d half-climbed him, holding on like she’d been waiting two years for permission.

When he finally set her back on her feet, he reached down and took hold of her left arm — the wrist that ended where a hand should be, the thing she hid — and lifted it and kissed it, easy, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

“You’re so pretty,” he said. “Do something for me? Wear your hair down — long and black and wavy, just like that.”

Her whole face went luminous. She didn’t tuck the arm away when he let it go.

Behind them Dina, still hunting for her own feet, muttered, “Well. So much for anyone getting breakfast made.”

The day did not pass evenly for any of them.

Dina caught herself, more than once, with two fingers pressed to her lips. She’d be in the middle of something — turning the soil, hauling water — and her hand would drift up on its own and she’d realize she was standing still in the field with her fingertips against her mouth, her stomach doing something unfamiliar and unwelcome and not entirely unwelcome at all. She had never been kissed before in her life. Twenty-one years and not once, too tall, too much, passed over while the small girls got picked. She had built a whole hard shell around not minding. And now a man had taken her face in his hands in her own kitchen and called her pretty and she did not know what to do with her hands or her stomach or any of the rest of it.

Late in the afternoon, alone, she took the braid out. Brushed her hair through with her fingers and then with the comb, slow, and gathered it back and tied it into a ponytail. She looked at nothing in particular while she did it. She told herself it meant nothing. She wore it that way the rest of the day.

Alone in her room that afternoon, folding the wash, Mariam stopped with a cloth half-folded in her hands.

It had only just occurred to her — the count of days, where she stood in her own cycle. She was in the middle of it. And he had filled her twice in the night before.

She stood very still and let herself do the arithmetic she had not let herself do in years, because for years there had been no reason to. A decade of an empty bed. Before that, a marriage that had given her nothing but the ring in the wall. She had decided long ago that her body was finished with that kind of hope — that she was too old, too used, that whatever season a woman had for bearing children had closed for her unnoticed while she was busy keeping everyone else alive.

A small, careful smile found her mouth.

This would be too much to hope for, she thought. Too foolish, an old woman like me, to even imagine it.

But she rested her hand flat against her belly anyway, just for a moment, the way she would have been ashamed to let anyone see.

But then, she thought. But then.

And she finished folding the wash, and said nothing to anyone, and carried the thought around inside her all the rest of that day like a coal she was cupping her hands around to keep alight.

Yasmin moved through her chores leaning toward the next day the way a plant leans at a window.

Tomorrow was hers. Wednesday. She knew it and she wanted it, and the wanting still surprised her every time it surfaced, like finding a door unlocked that had been bolted her whole life. My little Doe-eyes. A kiss given over a frying pan like it cost him nothing, like she was simply a woman a man would lean across a kitchen to be tender with. Her first husband had never touched her that way once. Touch from him had meant one thing, and it had a sound to it, and some part of her had spent years braced for that sound. Omar made no sound. He was only ever gentle, asking nothing, and every gentle thing he did loosened another knot in her until she caught herself wanting to be near him so badly it frightened her a little.

But the fear had changed its shape. It wasn’t him she was afraid of anymore — she’d stopped believing he would hurt her somewhere back in that basement, with a frying pan held up between them like a shield she hadn’t needed. What frightened her now was herself. Whether, when her night came, she could let go the way she wanted to. Whether her body would betray her with the old flinch at exactly the wrong moment and spoil it. Whether the man who had beaten her had ruined her for this too, left her too broken to be the wife she suddenly, fiercely wanted to be.

She wanted to give Omar a whole woman. She was afraid of how much of her was still in pieces.

She would lie awake a long time that night, counting the hours to her own, half terrified and half unable to wait.

And Nadia was useless, knew it and didn’t care.

She burned the first flatbread because she was watching him through the window mend the goat pen. She drew water and forgot what for. She sat at the loom and ran three rows wrong and picked them out, tongue between her teeth, with her one good hand. But underneath the fluttering and the burned bread there was something steadier in Nadia than in either of the others, and it had been there since the basement. The others were being won. Nadia had already decided. She had looked at this man — really looked, the way she looked at everything, missing nothing — and seen exactly who he was: a man who had taken hold of her ruined arm and kissed it like it was nothing to apologize for. She knew what she’d found. She wasn’t hoping he might be good. She was certain of it, the way she was certain of few things, and certainty in Nadia ran deep and quiet and would not be moved.

She wore her hair down all day, long and black and wavy, exactly as he’d asked.

At dinner, when the plates were cleared but before anyone rose, Omar set his hands flat on the table and said he had something to say to all of them.

The room went still. Mariam looked up from the bread.

“What we’ve made here — the four of you and me — in the eyes of God I believe it’s real,” he said. “But I want it real every other way too. Proper. In front of an imam, in a mosque, with witnesses. Not in a basement in the dark because we had to. In the open, because we chose it.”

“There’s no mosque that would marry four of us to you here,” Dina said — not arguing, just setting the truth on the table the way she did.

“No,” he agreed. “Not here.” He let it sit. “When the Americans come, I’m going back. Not to leave you. To fight for you. My word, my sworn statement, my commander behind it. I’ll petition to bring all four of you to America, as my wives, under my protection. And when you’re there, safe, we do this the right way. A mosque. Whatever the law wants and whatever God wants, both.”

Yasmin’s eyes had gone wide and wet. “You would do that. For us.”

“I’d do it because you’re mine,” he said. “All of you. And a man fights for what’s his.”

Mariam was quiet a long moment, her hand resting on the bread the way it did when she was holding something steady inside herself.

“Then tonight,” she said at last, “before you go down — you speak your vow to Nadia. One to one, the way you spoke it to me. And she speaks hers to you. It won’t be the mosque. But it will be ours, until we get there.”

Nadia sat very straight, her hair down the way he’d asked, and did not trust herself to say a word.