Chapter 6: Doe-Eyes

Wednesday came up gray and cold off the high ridges, and the house woke into it the way it had all that week — a little awkward, a little warm, five people still learning the shape of what they’d become.

Mariam was up before any of them. She had the stove going and the dough working under her hands before the light was good, and she moved through the cold kitchen the way she moved through everything, settling the house around her by the simple fact of being in it.

Nadia came up the stairs with Omar, and she didn’t have to say a word — it was all over her, the loose easy way she moved, the look on her face like a cat that had gotten into something. She slid onto the bench and reached for the bread, perfectly content, not the least bit shy about any of it.

By now it had become the way the day started. Omar went round the kitchen and kissed each of them good morning. Just like the day before, Mariam first, a warm kiss to her soft lips as she worked the dough; then Nadia, who tipped her face up and got a proper one and looked entirely too pleased with herself about it; then he came to Dina, blushing smiled at him with a look of expectation and kissed her tenderly, licking her botyom lip. She muttered “Such a bad man!”. She didn’t mean it, and they both knew she didn’t. Her lip again curled a couple of millimeters.

When he came to Yasmin he slowed. He always slowed for her. He cupped her cheek and kissed her forehead, gentle, brief, nothing she had to brace for, and said quietly, “Good morning, Doe-eyes,” the gave her a soft peck on the lips before he moved on and let her breathe.

It was the most ordinary thing in the world, and that was the miracle of it — that a house full of women who’d each been thrown away had somehow arrived at a morning this plain and this kind.

Dina watched Nadia a moment, then looked at Omar.

“Boy, husband — what did you do to her? She’s acting like she’s already pregnant and ready to bust.”

“My tall, willowy beauty,” Omar said, taking his tea from Mariam, “I’m outnumbered four to one. I have to keep you girls happy. It’s simply a matter of survival.”

Even Yasmin giggled at that — and then caught herself, because tonight was hers, and the giggle died into something tighter.

Mariam set bread in front of her without a word and let her hand rest a moment on the girl’s shoulder.

Mariam saw it all from the stove, the way she saw everything.

She saw Yasmin’s hands shaking faintly around her cup. She saw Dina’s prickle and knew the shape of the fear under it — Thursday was bearing down on her, and Dina with something bearing down on her got dry and sharp to cover it. She saw Nadia settled and glowing and Omar gentle, the whole fragile new machine of the family running, and she did what a matriarch does: she kept the ordinary going so the frightened ones had something solid to stand on. She set the day’s work. She sent Dina to the field and Nadia to the goat and the garden. She kept her own hands busy and her voice even, and let the rhythm of an ordinary morning hold the house together while two of her girls quietly came apart inside.

When the others had scattered she found a reason to keep Yasmin near her a while, in the warm kitchen, peeling and grinding, not talking about the thing. Just close. Just steady. It was its own kind of mothering, and Yasmin leaned into it without knowing she was doing it.

It was Nadia who said the true thing, later, when she found her cousin at the wash.

Yasmin was scrubbing the same shirt long past clean, her knuckles raw with it, her eyes somewhere else entirely. Nadia knelt down in the dirt beside her and put her good hand over Yasmin’s, stilling them in the gray water.

“Stop,” she said gently. “You’ll scrub a hole through it.”

Yasmin let go of the cloth. For a moment she didn’t speak. Then it came out small and broken. “Tonight’s mine. And I’m so scared I could be sick.”

“I know.” Nadia didn’t let go of her hand.

“You don’t, though.” Yasmin’s chin crumpled. “When my husband came to me at night, I used to leave. Not the room — myself. I’d go somewhere far back inside my own head and wait there until he was finished, and then I’d come back and clean myself up, and that was marriage. I got so good at leaving I could do it with my eyes open.” She was crying now, without sound, the way she’d taught herself in a house where noise was dangerous. “And Omar’s so gentle it makes me want to weep, and when he’s gentle I don’t want to leave — I want to stay. I want him. So much I can’t breathe with it. And that’s the part I can’t say to anyone. The wanting. I haven’t let myself want anything in years, because wanting is the thing they break you through. And tonight I have to go down there and want him, and I’m so afraid I’ll slip away inside and not be able to come back, and he’ll see it, and he’ll know how broken his wife is.”

Nadia pulled her in, the two cousins kneeling in the dirt over a basin of cold water, and held her with the one arm she had.

“You are not broken,” she said into Yasmin’s hair, low and fierce. “You got beaten by a man who should be in the ground for it, and you’re still here, and you still want to be loved after all of it. That isn’t broken. That’s the bravest thing I know. Some women would have gone cold forever and you didn’t. You kept it alive in there even when it cost you blood.” She drew back and made Yasmin look at her. “And Omar already knows. He’s not blind. He sees what was done to you, and he chose you anyway — all of it, the flinching and the fear. He didn’t marry some untouched girl who never got hurt. He married the woman who lived through it.”

Yasmin pressed her face into her cousin’s shoulder.

“And if you start to slip,” Nadia said softly, “you tell him. Before, or in the middle, doesn’t matter. You say, ‘Omar, I’m slipping, wait for me.’ And he’ll wait. He’ll hold still and hold you and wait as long as it takes. I know it the way I know my own name. That man waits.” She kissed the top of Yasmin’s head. “You won’t be alone in there anymore. That’s the whole difference. You used to leave because you were alone. You’re not alone now.”

For a long while Yasmin just wept against her, the cold wash water going still beside them, the gray morning lightening over the ridge.

“Say it back,” Nadia murmured, “so you have it tonight.”

Yasmin drew a shuddering breath. “Omar. I’m slipping. Wait for me.”

“He will,” Nadia said. “I promise you he will.”

The day went the way Yasmin’s whole body had been dreading and longing for, both at once.

She kept finding the same room he was in. Not close — she hadn’t the nerve for close — but at the edge of it, the way you warm your hands at a fire you’re still half afraid of. And he let her. That was the thing she was still learning to believe about him: he never reached for her first, never closed the distance she kept, never once made her pay for the space she needed. He’d glance up, find her there, give her that easy unhurried smile, and go back to his work, and leave the choosing to her.

Once she brought him tea he hadn’t asked for, just to have a reason. He took it and brushed his thumb over her knuckles where her fingers wrapped the cup — light, brief, gone before she could flinch — and said, “Thank you, Doe-eyes,” and nothing more. She carried the warmth of it around the rest of the afternoon.

Mariam watched the light go long and, before the evening meal, drew Yasmin aside and held her by both shoulders.

“There’s no test tonight,” she said quietly. “No way to fail it. He won’t grade you and he won’t hurt you, and if all you want is to be held till morning, that’s allowed, and he’ll thank God for it.” She smoothed a strand of hair off the girl’s face. “You’re not the woman that man made. You’re the one who’s going to walk down those stairs anyway. Hold onto that.”

Yasmin nodded, not trusting her voice.

At dinner, when the plates were cleared but before anyone rose, the household sat a moment in the warm lamplight, and the talk was easy and ordinary — Dina needling Omar about something, Nadia quiet and content, Mariam presiding over it all. It was the most ordinary thing in the world, five people at a table, and Yasmin sat among them and let it steady her, this family she had somehow been folded into, and thought that whatever waited at the bottom of the stairs, she would not be facing it from outside a family ever again.

When the lamps were lit and the house drew in toward sleep, Omar didn’t go down ahead of her. He waited at the top of the stairs with the lamp, so she wouldn’t have to walk into the dark alone, and Dina squeezed her wrist as she passed and Nadia gave her one small steadying look, and then it was just the two of them at the top of the stairs.

She came to him with her hands knotted in front of her and her whole body held like something braced against a wind that hadn’t come yet.

He didn’t reach for her. He’d learned that much. “You’re frightened,” he said. Not a question.

“Yes.”

“Of me?”

A pause. Then the truth: “No. I keep telling myself no. But my body doesn’t believe me yet.”

He nodded slowly, as if that were a reasonable thing and not a broken one. They went down together, and he set the lamp on the shelf, and turned to her, and took both her hands in his.

“Before anything,” he said, “I want to hear it from you, the way I heard it from the others. At the table you all voted to take me. Tell me yours.”

“I voted yes,” Yasmin said, barely above a whisper. “I want you for my husband. I was the most afraid of all of them and I still wanted you. I think I wanted you because I was afraid and you never once used it against me.”

“Then hear mine,” he said. “Yasmin. I take you as my wife — the whole of you, what you survived and what it left behind, the fear and the flinching and the wanting underneath it. I will never be the hand you learned to brace against. I vow to be gentle with you all my days, to wait for you every time you need waiting for, and to thank God every morning that the bravest woman I ever met still had it in her to want to be loved. As God is my witness.”