Poached Pear 16, Cherry Vanilla 7: Aftershocks
Title: Aftershocks
Main Story: In The Heart
Flavors, Toppings, Extras: Poached pear 16 (flotsam & jetsam), cherry vanilla 7 (the haunted house), My Treat (Growing up, Joanna always knew something was off.), malt (Summer Challenge 311: From Here, Jenny Owens Young), brownie, fresh peaches ( You may have a feeling that if you don't have something positive to say, you shouldn't say anything. This idea could keep you tongue-tied today... If you're frustrated, angry, or hurt, address the issue openly... You're only harming yourself by pretending that everything is OK when it isn't.), fresh strawberries (wrecked houses), cookie crumbs (of part of In the Creases), rainbow sprinkles.
Word Count: 5070
Rating: R, for cursing and sexual situations.
Summary: The Amala children survive.
Notes: This took a while. Character opinions are not the author's.
Deborah knew, right from the very start, what Baba had done.
None of her sisters were really old enough to understand, nor did her parents tell her or them anything. But Deborah was eleven, and she knew. She heard Mema screaming, heard the word "whore." She was smart; she could put things together. She knew.
She knew exactly what Baba had done, too. Mema hadn't exempted her from family education, probably because she-- and Deborah-- hadn't known that in fifth grade, it basically meant sex education. So she'd gone with all of the other girls to a classroom near the gym, and she'd learned.
Oh, she'd learned all sorts of things. She'd sat at her desk, wide-eyed, while the bored-sounding teacher told them all about things like periods and how babies grew inside you, and exactly how their bodies worked. It was deeply surreal, imagining these things going on inside her, the more so because Mema had announced over the winter that she was going to have another baby, so she had first-hand knowledge of what it looked like from the outside. Watching Mema's belly grow while the teacher told them in class what exactly was happening had been interesting, but at the same time a little scary.
They'd learned about sexual intercourse, too, and just remembering that made her ears flush. The very idea of the thing-- it seemed a gross violation, and painful, too. Deborah couldn't begin to imagine doing such a thing herself. And when she realized that you couldn't have babies without that, and therefore, since Mema was going to have a baby, Mema and Baba must have done that...
Well.
It was a good thing that blushes didn't actually heat your skin up too much, because Deborah was afraid that her hair might have caught on fire.
Poor Mema.
Fortunately, their bored-sounding teacher did nothing to encourage class participation apart from asking for questions at the very end, so she could duck her head forward and hide in her hair, and do her best to forget that. She'd managed fairly well, until Mema began to scream.
After that, she didn't really know what to do. Baba gave her his wallet and she obediently hustled Joanna down the stairs, away from the fight. Then she hesitated at the foot, Joanna tugging her in one direction, and the sick fear in her stomach pulling her another. She gave in at last, told Joanna to find Ruth and Nadia, and crept back up the stairs, just for a moment, to listen.
Mema was still screaming, so she didn't have to go very far to hear. "...How will you tell them that you're leaving them for some woman you met on the street?"
"I won't be leaving them," Baba said. He sounded so calm, like he and Mema were just talking over the dinner table, which made what he said next even more frightening. "I am divorcing you, Fatimah. That doesn't mean I love them any less."
Deborah clapped her hand over her mouth to keep from crying out. Baba was divorcing Mema? For somebody else? How could he? How could he leave?
Mema laughed, but it didn't sound happy. "And you think I will let my children-- my children-- spend one moment of their lives with that woman? You can do anything you want, Farid, and it will not make her any less a whore."
Deborah knew what that meant. It meant that Mema wasn't the only one. It meant that all those nights Baba hadn't come home for dinner, all those nights when he'd told them he had to stay away because he had work, or a party for work, or a meeting with Uncle Allen, he hadn't been doing any of those things. He'd been off somewhere else with some woman, doing that.
She'd pressed her hands against her ears and crept back down the stairs.
Mema and Baba didn't scream at each other again, at least not about that, and she began to relax, eventually. But the thought of Mema and that poor woman and Baba and that tangled in her head, clung to her mind and would not leave her be.
And later, so many years later, she'd married, because that was what girls did. And she'd lain in bed with her eyes shut tight and let her husband do that to her. It was everything she'd thought it had been, as a girl; painful and humiliating and violating, but she'd done it, because that was what girls did. All girls, married or not, because that was what boys wanted them to do, and what was a girl's life, without a boy?
It destroyed their lives sooner or later, but they did it anyway, and so did she.
And in turn, it destroyed her life too. It just took a little longer.
--
It surprised Joanna when she thought about it, but she'd once been a fairly talkative child. Not by comparison to her gregarious and outgoing siblings, of course, but Baba and Mema had encouraged their children to be curious, to ask questions. True, sometimes they did snap when asked about certain things-- Joanna had quickly learned not to ask religious questions they couldn't answer-- but those subjects were easily avoided, and she was a child, easily forgiven.
Everything had been easy once. Her hair hadn't been so long, so easy to tangle. She hadn't had endometriosis, or at least it hadn't manifested. Her family hadn't been so tense and prickly, such a minefield of emotions, with a bomb waiting everywhere she stepped. She could say what she liked, ask what question she liked, and be certain of getting nothing worse than "little girls shouldn't think about such big questions."
Did Mema and Baba realize what they were doing at the time? She didn't think so. When she was young she thought her parents were omnipotent, wise and perfect beings, but now she knew that was not so; adults were no more than grown-up children, frightened by their responsibilities into pretending infallibility. Her parents were once comfortable enough to at least accept questions from their children, but that changed.
Everything changed.
Not, perhaps, the little things. She still had a roof over her head, food and water, clothing provided to her. She still went to school, saw doctors and dentists, had all of her physical needs seen to. If emotionally she was abandoned, well, she knew her mother at least never meant to do that. It was just the hardening of her own spirit that made her lock away the things her children needed most.
Silence killed so much of her. Her courage, her happiness, her ability to have children, if she'd only been able to speak she thought maybe she might still have some of them. And she was trying hard, so hard, to break her silence, to speak to Hugh and maybe drain a little of the poison she knew she carried within her.
She was trying, but a lifetime of experience told her not to, and it was so, so hard to overcome.
One night. It only took one night for everything to fall apart completely, but then of course it had been months in the building. She and her siblings and her mother had been going about their lives with their eyes closed, ignoring the wave that trembled above them, waiting to sweep everything away. Perhaps they'd deserved their fate, a little, for that willful blindness.
She could still remember everything about that night, from her mother's wailing screams to her father's stony silence. Ruth and Nadia sitting upright in bed, their eyes wide and frightened, their faces showing her own total incomprehension. Only Deborah had seemed to understand what was happening, and the terrible sadness in her face had refused all questions.
But really her silence came from before that.
She'd asked Baba what was wrong, why Mema was sobbing like Ruth had when she'd broken her arm. She'd asked him to make it better. Baba could always make things better, somehow; it was one of the magic things about him. She'd asked him.
She'd asked him.
And then Mema came barreling out of her room screaming, raging, and all Joanna could do was flinch back and clap her hands over her ears, trying not to hear it, trying not to cry. She'd asked Baba to help Mema so this was her fault. She shouldn't have asked.
Deborah came and got her, guiding her gently down the stairs while tears blinded her. But not even Deborah and ice cream could make her feel better. She shouldn't have asked.
It was her fault.
Intellectually, she knew it wasn't. At least now. She knew that whatever Baba had done had happened long before that moment, that Mema's rage had nothing to do with her. Intellectually she knew a lot of things.
Silence still felt safer.
--
Ruth could remember when she had a home.
It hadn't been that long ago. A few weeks, a few months... less than a year, certainly, before this frozen silence had descended upon the house. Back when they'd been happy. Back then, back when home still meant something, dinner was her central point; the best part of the day.
It always started at school. It wasn't that Ruth disliked school, exactly, but she didn't like being away from home so long. There was no Deborah or Joanna at school, to explain complicated things that she didn't understand, no Nadia to play with, no Jasper to tease and tickle. No Mema to soothe her hurts. No Baba to pat her head and tell her she was beautiful. Ruth spent most of her time at school daydreaming, and wishing she was littler, so she didn't have to go.
Mema had put her in the morning kindergarten class, so that she could go to school with Deborah and Joanna. She liked that, liked sitting on the bus between her sisters, dozing on Deborah's lap or learning to count with Joanna. She didn't so much like coming home by herself, the hard plasticky seat sticky under her hands, the long hot walk from the bus stop to home, but she was going home, to the comfortable kitchen, Mema's cool hands and the snack she always got for being such a brave girl.
After that there was a nap. Ruth was a big girl of nearly five-- she was much too old to take a nap, but Mema made her do it anyway. Ruth usually lay in her bed and kept her eyes stubbornly open, while Nadia wheezed out soft breaths in her bed across the room. But dinnertime was coming. She consoled herself with that. And soon enough Deborah would open the door and tell them get up, get up, it's time.
They had a whole ritual around dinner. First Mema would set Jasper in his high chair and buckle him in securely. Then she would turn to the girls, clap her hands, and assign tasks. Nadia was still too little to get anything really important, so Mema usually let her sift flour or pull apart vegetables or something silly like that. Only Deborah was allowed to use knives, and usually Joanna got to measure ingredients, or melt butter. But Ruth was old enough for some important things, stirring smooth and even, laying vegetables out in pans, pouring sauces. Little, but important. She remembered sitting in her wooden chair at the table, stirring smugly, feeling so much more important that her littlest sister, because she could do something necessary.
She'd loved those long afternoons in their warm, comfortable kitchen, the sun slanting across the tiled floor and the scarred wooden table, dust motes dancing in its beams. Mema and Deborah told stories and jokes, Joanna asked endless questions, Ruth sang songs and nursery rhymes, Nadia and Jasper would laugh and clap their hands, pleased just by the sounds. They all talked about their days, about the things the three oldest were learning in school, and the plans Mema had made for the weekend. Sometimes, very rarely, Baba would come home in time to help cook, and they'd all laugh at him while he fumbled his way through tasks that even Nadia could do easily, until he gave up and swooped on the girl who'd laughed the loudest, tickling her to gasps while the others laughed even harder.
Then Mema shooed them out to go wash up. Deborah helped the babies, but Ruth was big enough to wash her own hands and face. She scurried downstairs again as fast as she could, because it was her job to set the table, centering each plate carefully in front of a chair, and setting the silverware at precise intervals. As soon as she finished, Mema called everyone to the table and they came, laughing and happy, while she settled Jasper in his dinner chair. They all hopped onto their chairs and said grace, and then...
Oh, and then.
There was no talking at the dinner table. It wasn't a rule; it was just that everyone was too busy eating to say anything. Sometimes, when Baba was home for dinner, he'd talk and talk and then comment on how quiet they were all being, while they marveled at his ability to ignore Mema's dinner.
Somehow, it was always perfect. Even if Joanna had accidentally measured something wrong, or Ruth put something in a bowl where it shouldn't go, somehow the dinner still came out delicious. The meat was done to perfection, the vegetables just at the right stage between too crisp and too soggy, the side dishes blended perfectly.
There were never any leftovers at Mema's meals. And Mema had promised to teach her to cook, someday. Ruth couldn't wait to cast her own spells with food.
Then they'd pick everything up and carry it into the kitchen, dark now, but just as comfortable and warm. They each had their jobs: Nadia would pick up all the napkins and throw them away, Ruth carried in the silverware, Joanna the plates, Deborah the glasses. They'd wash the dishes and put them away, all together, laughing and talking like they had before. And then they'd all go their separate ways until it was time for bed. Ruth usually stayed in the kitchen, fumbling her way through her very first books, while her sisters did their homework and Mema watched over them all.
Their home was so comfortable, their routine so well-worn, that she barely noticed when Baba stopped coming home for dinner. Nothing really changed, after all; they laughed and talked just as much, and she had no inkling that anything could be wrong. He was just working late, like he did sometimes. Baba had to support them all, after all. Sometimes that meant he wasn't home as much as they wanted.
And then.
And then there was the night of screaming. Mema said awful, awful things to Baba, and more, things in Arabic that Ruth was somehow sure were worse. Then Deborah looked sad all the time, hurried them all out of the house as often as she could.
Ruth didn't understand. Everything had been fine and then suddenly Mema was angry, so angry it scared her breathless. What had been cool was burning hot, what had been safe was suddenly dangerous, the whole world aflame and not a drop of water to be found. Home was gone, and she didn't know when it was coming back.
For a whole week, school was her only refuge, the only place away from the tension and the fear; the only dinner she and her sisters had was what they could put together themselves, clumsily, with Deborah's help. They ate in the kitchen, that no longer felt so cool or comforting, and talked in whispers, lest they start the screaming again.
Eventually Mema began to cook again, though she never again let anyone help her. Eventually they began to eat dinners in the dining room again, all together, though the atmosphere was no longer so easy. But somehow the food, though still cooked perfectly, no longer tasted as good. The kitchen, still cool and bright, was no longer quite so comfortable. When they finally moved, it was a relief not to be in that house, so crowded with memories of what it felt like to be home.
Mema never did teach Ruth how she cooked.
And Ruth never again had anything like home.
--
It wasn't until Nadia became a mistress herself that she started to wonder about her father's.
She knew he had to have had one. From what her sisters had said, from what she herself remembered, there was no other conclusion to reach. Not that it surprised her very much. He was married to her frigid bitch of a mother, after all; it would have been damn near inhuman of him to stay faithful for all these years, and she knew her parents were very, very human.
She wondered about the woman, lying in bed next to her sleeping lover. What had she looked like? Pretty, Nadia supposed. Mistresses were supposed to be pretty. She was, certainly, with her black hair and her high cheekbones and her eyes that looked so good with smoky makeup.
All of her sisters were pretty, really, in their different ways. Ruth had her big eyes and good bone structure and sweet, pouty mouth, equal to Nadia's own, although she'd never admit that out loud. Joanna had her gorgeous skin and bright, lovely smile. Deborah wasn't as pretty as the others, in Nadia's opinion; her only real beauty was her hair, long and soft and curling at the ends.
A pity she insisted on wearing hijab. Nadia had given up on that a long time ago, along with every other vestige of the religion she'd been born into, and any other religion, for that matter. Why bother? Allah didn't listen, didn't answer your prayers any more than God or Jesus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster did. If there was a divine force, she'd decided, he or she or it was supremely indifferent to the fate of those who crawled on earth.
So what did it matter, if Nadia fucked a married man? He liked her, and she liked him. They had a good time together. They weren't hurting anyone-- okay, maybe his wife, but fuck her, she was a frigid bitch just like Nadia's mother.
Nadia rolled over, and stroked Chris's back. He grunted in his sleep.
Not that it mattered to her. She didn't love him. Sometimes she barely even liked him. They were using each other, the pair of them, and frankly she was okay with that. After the disaster that had been her last couple of boyfriends and the sheer apocalypse that had been Maryam's father, Nadia was ready for a few commitment-less relationships.
She wondered if her father's mistress had been so stupid as to think that he would leave his wife for her. Nadia knew her father, as she knew all married men. They thrived on inertia. Likely her father had strung the anonymous woman along, promising love and marriage and a pair of matching rocking chairs on the steps of the nursing home. But she'd never gotten them, never would get them, because Nadia's father was a cheating bastard like every other cheating bastard, content with his comfortable home, his pretty, smiling, portable womb of a wife, and his oh-so-fuckable mistress on the side.
Chris Rowland was like that, a little. She pretended sometimes that he wasn't, but she knew he was.
Maybe her father's mistress had been like Nadia, a little. Maybe she'd known perfectly well what she was getting into. It wasn't as if Nadia had gone into this blind, after all, wasn't as if she hadn't known what would happen when she'd walked into a club in her best slutwear and looked for the handsomest man in the place. Chris hadn't even bothered taking off his wedding ring, for fuck's sake. She remembered its cold metal sliding across her nipple when he'd fucked her against the wall, that first night.
Why would she even care if he was married? If his marriage hadn't been on the rocks, he'd never have taken her up on her proposition. If his wife wasn't such a witch he wouldn't have been in the club in the first place. No, Nadia couldn't find it in her to feel guilty.
Whatever. It wasn't as if love was a real thing anyway. Parental love, yes-- she loved Maryam deeply-- although that was pretty rare, because neither of her parents loved her or any of her siblings very much. She thought that they might have, once upon a time, but they'd forgotten all love in their hatred for each other, and their children had become casualties on the battleground of their marriage.
Fuck. Was she crying? Fuck.
Nadia rolled over and swiped at her face. She wasn't crying, she told herself fiercely. She wasn't crying, because she wasn't sad. She had a great life. A good job, plenty of money, a great lifestyle. A hot man who'd fuck her whenever she wanted, no commitments, nothing tying her down besides her kid. And Maryam was a good kid, who had an open invitation to stay with Joanna besides, so it wasn't as if she was that much of a burden. Everything was as near perfect as it could be for a single mother with judgmental parents who'd never really loved her anyway and sisters who looked down on her and brothers who thought she was a whore.
Fuck.
Beside her, Chris stirred and let out a sleepy grunt, then sat straight up. "Fuck, is that the time?"
"What?" She rubbed her face again, then glanced at the clock; half an hour before he'd told her she had to go. "You have time."
"No, I don't," he said, reached over, and slapped her ass. "Roll over, babe. I want to fuck you one more time before I have to make nice with the bitch and her family again." He leered at her. "Give me a good memory, Nads. Something to get me through."
She hated that nickname.
Nadia made sexy noises, rolled over, and wondered, while Chris took hold of her hips, if her father's mistress had ever had a nickname she hated.
--
Jasper was the last child of his mother's happiness, and oh, how well he knew it.
He'd sort of liked it as a kid, before he'd understood the full implications of what it meant. Back then, being Mema's favorite had meant later bedtimes, candy when he didn't deserve it, temper tantrums indulged and petted away. All he had to do in return was occasionally declare that Mema was the very bestest, or that Mema was the prettiest lady in the whole wide world. It had seemed a pretty good deal, back then.
He'd been the most spoiled fucking kid imaginable. Alan was too young to remember his really terrible years, but he was damned lucky his sisters were still talking to him at all, much less that they still regarded him with any kind of affection. His father definitely didn’t, but fuck his father, anyway.
Fuck both his parents, honestly. They'd both fucked him over in their own special ways. It had just taken him longer to realize that his mother's cruelty came disguised as love.
He couldn't remember quite how he'd figured it out. School had probably helped; intelligent teachers, annoyed classmates, and a little tough love from his guidance counselor in high school had straightened him out some. His sisters must have done their own quiet part, maybe his father, too. In the end, though, it had probably been his own mother who showed him how poisonous her love was.
They'd started to fight, as he got older. Little things at first, arguments over what he should have for lunch, or what grade he ought to have gotten on some test or other. It had seemed normal enough. But then Jasper began to notice a certain coldness in his mother's eyes after every argument, a coldness that stayed until his next lavish demonstration of love for her. Even then, it didn't go away, it just went into hibernation until he defied her again.
Then he'd noticed the way his sisters flinched whenever he'd start up strident demands. Then he'd noticed the disgust and pain on his father's face whenever he looked at Jasper. Then he'd realized what, exactly, his mother was turning him into, in her desperate need to love someone who wouldn't betray her.
He'd been so angry, so embarrassed. Wasn't it a parent's job to raise their kids into decent human beings? And here he was, the most awful little shit imaginable, and his mother smiled and nodded as long as he was extravagantly loving to her.
The obvious answer was to be even more of an awful little shit. Or so it had seemed at the time. In retrospect, that had been really fucking stupid of him, but hey, he'd been thirteen.
His mother had accused him, in a later fight, of deliberately trying to alienate her. Jasper remembered feeling surprised, not that she'd feel that, but that she'd be so aware of it. He'd said something shitty to her, no doubt-- "better to be the black sheep than your fucking pet," or something like that-- but mostly he just remembered that surprise, and the hurt on her face when she'd realized he meant it.
Not that it had helped. Obviously. He'd tried so hard to disgust his parents and then been so surprised when it worked. Teenagers were such idiots and he hadn't been any better than most. At least his sisters had been mostly at college, generally as far away from home as they could get, so they hadn't hated him too much. And Alan... well, he didn't know why Alan didn't hate him, but he wouldn't question it.
He liked to think he was better now, more of a grownup and less of an idiot kid lashing out at anyone he thought he could hurt, but... well, there was a reason Jasper didn't talk much to his family anymore.
He only hoped they didn't think too badly of him.
--
The week after his father died, Alan went looking for Arelie Koch.
He would have gone before, but he hadn't known her name, hadn't even known she existed before. Then his father called her name in his final hours, begged for her forgiveness in the minutes before he died. Alan had a very enlightening conversation with his siblings at the funeral, and subsequently a very understanding one with his wife. Then Chrissy took their kids home, and he began his search.
He hadn't even been born when Arelie entered his father's life, had slept in his mother's womb while his family tore itself apart. He'd been born in the aftermath, under a hot August sun while his sisters shivered with fear and his brother begged for understanding. He'd never known the cohesion they'd lost, never grieved for a family he didn't know he'd lost.
In the end, he wasn't sure he minded. His sisters, his brother, they'd been pushed and pulled and twisted so much by the loss of that family. He'd grown into himself unhindered by that pain, so much so that he hadn't even known large families could be happy until Chrissy took him home for the first time. It just felt like the way it was.
Arelie Koch. He knew nothing about her, and Jasper had flatly refused to talk to him about it, had in fact left as soon as the funeral was over. His sisters, though, they were all old enough to remember in painful detail what had happened. They'd all known something. And most importantly, they'd all answered his questions.
Deborah, newly divorced, hadn't met his eyes, just looked away and mumbled, "She just did what he wanted her to. Poor woman."
Joanna smiled soft and sad, and said, "She fell in love. I can't really blame her for that." Then she'd looked at her husband, playing with Annelise and Freddie, her smile widening and brightening. "Can you blame anyone for that?"
Ruth hugged herself, looked at the formica table top and spat, "Homewrecking bitch," before getting up and stalking away.
Nadia just shrugged. "They probably just wanted a good fuck," she'd said. "Who wouldn't?"
All in all, it had told him a lot about his sisters, but not much about Arelie. And Alan was curious. Who had she been, really? What had she been thinking when she began that affair with his father?
More importantly, what had she been thinking when she ended it?
Arelie Koch. She'd just vanished, as far as he could tell. He found her old house pretty easily, but she'd sold it not long after the whole mess had begun and gone into the wind. Not that he could really blame her. She'd either gotten her heart broken or suffered a massive humiliation, and either way why would she want to stick around?
There was a trail, though. It was subtle, and difficult to follow, but it was there, and Alan was nothing if not persistent. He'd find her, eventually. He would find her, and...
And then what? What would he say to her when he found her? "I'm the son of your former lover, and I just wanted to see what you looked like?" No. That was a surefire way of getting a door slammed in his face. No, it would have to be something deeper. Something more important.
He spent a lot of time planning it while he went from place to place, looking for any sign of her. He'd tell her his father was dead, to start with. Maybe he'd tell her Mema was dead, too, so she'd know she had nothing to fear from it anymore. He'd tell her she'd done the right thing, at the end, and he appreciated it. He'd tell her...
He'd tell her it wasn't her fault, what his parents had done to each other and to their children. He'd tell her he didn't blame her for most of it, and that he'd forgiven her what blame she did deserve.
He'd tell her he hoped she was happy.
Someone, at least, should be happy.
Main Story: In The Heart
Flavors, Toppings, Extras: Poached pear 16 (flotsam & jetsam), cherry vanilla 7 (the haunted house), My Treat (Growing up, Joanna always knew something was off.), malt (Summer Challenge 311: From Here, Jenny Owens Young), brownie, fresh peaches ( You may have a feeling that if you don't have something positive to say, you shouldn't say anything. This idea could keep you tongue-tied today... If you're frustrated, angry, or hurt, address the issue openly... You're only harming yourself by pretending that everything is OK when it isn't.), fresh strawberries (wrecked houses), cookie crumbs (of part of In the Creases), rainbow sprinkles.
Word Count: 5070
Rating: R, for cursing and sexual situations.
Summary: The Amala children survive.
Notes: This took a while. Character opinions are not the author's.
Deborah knew, right from the very start, what Baba had done.
None of her sisters were really old enough to understand, nor did her parents tell her or them anything. But Deborah was eleven, and she knew. She heard Mema screaming, heard the word "whore." She was smart; she could put things together. She knew.
She knew exactly what Baba had done, too. Mema hadn't exempted her from family education, probably because she-- and Deborah-- hadn't known that in fifth grade, it basically meant sex education. So she'd gone with all of the other girls to a classroom near the gym, and she'd learned.
Oh, she'd learned all sorts of things. She'd sat at her desk, wide-eyed, while the bored-sounding teacher told them all about things like periods and how babies grew inside you, and exactly how their bodies worked. It was deeply surreal, imagining these things going on inside her, the more so because Mema had announced over the winter that she was going to have another baby, so she had first-hand knowledge of what it looked like from the outside. Watching Mema's belly grow while the teacher told them in class what exactly was happening had been interesting, but at the same time a little scary.
They'd learned about sexual intercourse, too, and just remembering that made her ears flush. The very idea of the thing-- it seemed a gross violation, and painful, too. Deborah couldn't begin to imagine doing such a thing herself. And when she realized that you couldn't have babies without that, and therefore, since Mema was going to have a baby, Mema and Baba must have done that...
Well.
It was a good thing that blushes didn't actually heat your skin up too much, because Deborah was afraid that her hair might have caught on fire.
Poor Mema.
Fortunately, their bored-sounding teacher did nothing to encourage class participation apart from asking for questions at the very end, so she could duck her head forward and hide in her hair, and do her best to forget that. She'd managed fairly well, until Mema began to scream.
After that, she didn't really know what to do. Baba gave her his wallet and she obediently hustled Joanna down the stairs, away from the fight. Then she hesitated at the foot, Joanna tugging her in one direction, and the sick fear in her stomach pulling her another. She gave in at last, told Joanna to find Ruth and Nadia, and crept back up the stairs, just for a moment, to listen.
Mema was still screaming, so she didn't have to go very far to hear. "...How will you tell them that you're leaving them for some woman you met on the street?"
"I won't be leaving them," Baba said. He sounded so calm, like he and Mema were just talking over the dinner table, which made what he said next even more frightening. "I am divorcing you, Fatimah. That doesn't mean I love them any less."
Deborah clapped her hand over her mouth to keep from crying out. Baba was divorcing Mema? For somebody else? How could he? How could he leave?
Mema laughed, but it didn't sound happy. "And you think I will let my children-- my children-- spend one moment of their lives with that woman? You can do anything you want, Farid, and it will not make her any less a whore."
Deborah knew what that meant. It meant that Mema wasn't the only one. It meant that all those nights Baba hadn't come home for dinner, all those nights when he'd told them he had to stay away because he had work, or a party for work, or a meeting with Uncle Allen, he hadn't been doing any of those things. He'd been off somewhere else with some woman, doing that.
She'd pressed her hands against her ears and crept back down the stairs.
Mema and Baba didn't scream at each other again, at least not about that, and she began to relax, eventually. But the thought of Mema and that poor woman and Baba and that tangled in her head, clung to her mind and would not leave her be.
And later, so many years later, she'd married, because that was what girls did. And she'd lain in bed with her eyes shut tight and let her husband do that to her. It was everything she'd thought it had been, as a girl; painful and humiliating and violating, but she'd done it, because that was what girls did. All girls, married or not, because that was what boys wanted them to do, and what was a girl's life, without a boy?
It destroyed their lives sooner or later, but they did it anyway, and so did she.
And in turn, it destroyed her life too. It just took a little longer.
--
It surprised Joanna when she thought about it, but she'd once been a fairly talkative child. Not by comparison to her gregarious and outgoing siblings, of course, but Baba and Mema had encouraged their children to be curious, to ask questions. True, sometimes they did snap when asked about certain things-- Joanna had quickly learned not to ask religious questions they couldn't answer-- but those subjects were easily avoided, and she was a child, easily forgiven.
Everything had been easy once. Her hair hadn't been so long, so easy to tangle. She hadn't had endometriosis, or at least it hadn't manifested. Her family hadn't been so tense and prickly, such a minefield of emotions, with a bomb waiting everywhere she stepped. She could say what she liked, ask what question she liked, and be certain of getting nothing worse than "little girls shouldn't think about such big questions."
Did Mema and Baba realize what they were doing at the time? She didn't think so. When she was young she thought her parents were omnipotent, wise and perfect beings, but now she knew that was not so; adults were no more than grown-up children, frightened by their responsibilities into pretending infallibility. Her parents were once comfortable enough to at least accept questions from their children, but that changed.
Everything changed.
Not, perhaps, the little things. She still had a roof over her head, food and water, clothing provided to her. She still went to school, saw doctors and dentists, had all of her physical needs seen to. If emotionally she was abandoned, well, she knew her mother at least never meant to do that. It was just the hardening of her own spirit that made her lock away the things her children needed most.
Silence killed so much of her. Her courage, her happiness, her ability to have children, if she'd only been able to speak she thought maybe she might still have some of them. And she was trying hard, so hard, to break her silence, to speak to Hugh and maybe drain a little of the poison she knew she carried within her.
She was trying, but a lifetime of experience told her not to, and it was so, so hard to overcome.
One night. It only took one night for everything to fall apart completely, but then of course it had been months in the building. She and her siblings and her mother had been going about their lives with their eyes closed, ignoring the wave that trembled above them, waiting to sweep everything away. Perhaps they'd deserved their fate, a little, for that willful blindness.
She could still remember everything about that night, from her mother's wailing screams to her father's stony silence. Ruth and Nadia sitting upright in bed, their eyes wide and frightened, their faces showing her own total incomprehension. Only Deborah had seemed to understand what was happening, and the terrible sadness in her face had refused all questions.
But really her silence came from before that.
She'd asked Baba what was wrong, why Mema was sobbing like Ruth had when she'd broken her arm. She'd asked him to make it better. Baba could always make things better, somehow; it was one of the magic things about him. She'd asked him.
She'd asked him.
And then Mema came barreling out of her room screaming, raging, and all Joanna could do was flinch back and clap her hands over her ears, trying not to hear it, trying not to cry. She'd asked Baba to help Mema so this was her fault. She shouldn't have asked.
Deborah came and got her, guiding her gently down the stairs while tears blinded her. But not even Deborah and ice cream could make her feel better. She shouldn't have asked.
It was her fault.
Intellectually, she knew it wasn't. At least now. She knew that whatever Baba had done had happened long before that moment, that Mema's rage had nothing to do with her. Intellectually she knew a lot of things.
Silence still felt safer.
--
Ruth could remember when she had a home.
It hadn't been that long ago. A few weeks, a few months... less than a year, certainly, before this frozen silence had descended upon the house. Back when they'd been happy. Back then, back when home still meant something, dinner was her central point; the best part of the day.
It always started at school. It wasn't that Ruth disliked school, exactly, but she didn't like being away from home so long. There was no Deborah or Joanna at school, to explain complicated things that she didn't understand, no Nadia to play with, no Jasper to tease and tickle. No Mema to soothe her hurts. No Baba to pat her head and tell her she was beautiful. Ruth spent most of her time at school daydreaming, and wishing she was littler, so she didn't have to go.
Mema had put her in the morning kindergarten class, so that she could go to school with Deborah and Joanna. She liked that, liked sitting on the bus between her sisters, dozing on Deborah's lap or learning to count with Joanna. She didn't so much like coming home by herself, the hard plasticky seat sticky under her hands, the long hot walk from the bus stop to home, but she was going home, to the comfortable kitchen, Mema's cool hands and the snack she always got for being such a brave girl.
After that there was a nap. Ruth was a big girl of nearly five-- she was much too old to take a nap, but Mema made her do it anyway. Ruth usually lay in her bed and kept her eyes stubbornly open, while Nadia wheezed out soft breaths in her bed across the room. But dinnertime was coming. She consoled herself with that. And soon enough Deborah would open the door and tell them get up, get up, it's time.
They had a whole ritual around dinner. First Mema would set Jasper in his high chair and buckle him in securely. Then she would turn to the girls, clap her hands, and assign tasks. Nadia was still too little to get anything really important, so Mema usually let her sift flour or pull apart vegetables or something silly like that. Only Deborah was allowed to use knives, and usually Joanna got to measure ingredients, or melt butter. But Ruth was old enough for some important things, stirring smooth and even, laying vegetables out in pans, pouring sauces. Little, but important. She remembered sitting in her wooden chair at the table, stirring smugly, feeling so much more important that her littlest sister, because she could do something necessary.
She'd loved those long afternoons in their warm, comfortable kitchen, the sun slanting across the tiled floor and the scarred wooden table, dust motes dancing in its beams. Mema and Deborah told stories and jokes, Joanna asked endless questions, Ruth sang songs and nursery rhymes, Nadia and Jasper would laugh and clap their hands, pleased just by the sounds. They all talked about their days, about the things the three oldest were learning in school, and the plans Mema had made for the weekend. Sometimes, very rarely, Baba would come home in time to help cook, and they'd all laugh at him while he fumbled his way through tasks that even Nadia could do easily, until he gave up and swooped on the girl who'd laughed the loudest, tickling her to gasps while the others laughed even harder.
Then Mema shooed them out to go wash up. Deborah helped the babies, but Ruth was big enough to wash her own hands and face. She scurried downstairs again as fast as she could, because it was her job to set the table, centering each plate carefully in front of a chair, and setting the silverware at precise intervals. As soon as she finished, Mema called everyone to the table and they came, laughing and happy, while she settled Jasper in his dinner chair. They all hopped onto their chairs and said grace, and then...
Oh, and then.
There was no talking at the dinner table. It wasn't a rule; it was just that everyone was too busy eating to say anything. Sometimes, when Baba was home for dinner, he'd talk and talk and then comment on how quiet they were all being, while they marveled at his ability to ignore Mema's dinner.
Somehow, it was always perfect. Even if Joanna had accidentally measured something wrong, or Ruth put something in a bowl where it shouldn't go, somehow the dinner still came out delicious. The meat was done to perfection, the vegetables just at the right stage between too crisp and too soggy, the side dishes blended perfectly.
There were never any leftovers at Mema's meals. And Mema had promised to teach her to cook, someday. Ruth couldn't wait to cast her own spells with food.
Then they'd pick everything up and carry it into the kitchen, dark now, but just as comfortable and warm. They each had their jobs: Nadia would pick up all the napkins and throw them away, Ruth carried in the silverware, Joanna the plates, Deborah the glasses. They'd wash the dishes and put them away, all together, laughing and talking like they had before. And then they'd all go their separate ways until it was time for bed. Ruth usually stayed in the kitchen, fumbling her way through her very first books, while her sisters did their homework and Mema watched over them all.
Their home was so comfortable, their routine so well-worn, that she barely noticed when Baba stopped coming home for dinner. Nothing really changed, after all; they laughed and talked just as much, and she had no inkling that anything could be wrong. He was just working late, like he did sometimes. Baba had to support them all, after all. Sometimes that meant he wasn't home as much as they wanted.
And then.
And then there was the night of screaming. Mema said awful, awful things to Baba, and more, things in Arabic that Ruth was somehow sure were worse. Then Deborah looked sad all the time, hurried them all out of the house as often as she could.
Ruth didn't understand. Everything had been fine and then suddenly Mema was angry, so angry it scared her breathless. What had been cool was burning hot, what had been safe was suddenly dangerous, the whole world aflame and not a drop of water to be found. Home was gone, and she didn't know when it was coming back.
For a whole week, school was her only refuge, the only place away from the tension and the fear; the only dinner she and her sisters had was what they could put together themselves, clumsily, with Deborah's help. They ate in the kitchen, that no longer felt so cool or comforting, and talked in whispers, lest they start the screaming again.
Eventually Mema began to cook again, though she never again let anyone help her. Eventually they began to eat dinners in the dining room again, all together, though the atmosphere was no longer so easy. But somehow the food, though still cooked perfectly, no longer tasted as good. The kitchen, still cool and bright, was no longer quite so comfortable. When they finally moved, it was a relief not to be in that house, so crowded with memories of what it felt like to be home.
Mema never did teach Ruth how she cooked.
And Ruth never again had anything like home.
--
It wasn't until Nadia became a mistress herself that she started to wonder about her father's.
She knew he had to have had one. From what her sisters had said, from what she herself remembered, there was no other conclusion to reach. Not that it surprised her very much. He was married to her frigid bitch of a mother, after all; it would have been damn near inhuman of him to stay faithful for all these years, and she knew her parents were very, very human.
She wondered about the woman, lying in bed next to her sleeping lover. What had she looked like? Pretty, Nadia supposed. Mistresses were supposed to be pretty. She was, certainly, with her black hair and her high cheekbones and her eyes that looked so good with smoky makeup.
All of her sisters were pretty, really, in their different ways. Ruth had her big eyes and good bone structure and sweet, pouty mouth, equal to Nadia's own, although she'd never admit that out loud. Joanna had her gorgeous skin and bright, lovely smile. Deborah wasn't as pretty as the others, in Nadia's opinion; her only real beauty was her hair, long and soft and curling at the ends.
A pity she insisted on wearing hijab. Nadia had given up on that a long time ago, along with every other vestige of the religion she'd been born into, and any other religion, for that matter. Why bother? Allah didn't listen, didn't answer your prayers any more than God or Jesus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster did. If there was a divine force, she'd decided, he or she or it was supremely indifferent to the fate of those who crawled on earth.
So what did it matter, if Nadia fucked a married man? He liked her, and she liked him. They had a good time together. They weren't hurting anyone-- okay, maybe his wife, but fuck her, she was a frigid bitch just like Nadia's mother.
Nadia rolled over, and stroked Chris's back. He grunted in his sleep.
Not that it mattered to her. She didn't love him. Sometimes she barely even liked him. They were using each other, the pair of them, and frankly she was okay with that. After the disaster that had been her last couple of boyfriends and the sheer apocalypse that had been Maryam's father, Nadia was ready for a few commitment-less relationships.
She wondered if her father's mistress had been so stupid as to think that he would leave his wife for her. Nadia knew her father, as she knew all married men. They thrived on inertia. Likely her father had strung the anonymous woman along, promising love and marriage and a pair of matching rocking chairs on the steps of the nursing home. But she'd never gotten them, never would get them, because Nadia's father was a cheating bastard like every other cheating bastard, content with his comfortable home, his pretty, smiling, portable womb of a wife, and his oh-so-fuckable mistress on the side.
Chris Rowland was like that, a little. She pretended sometimes that he wasn't, but she knew he was.
Maybe her father's mistress had been like Nadia, a little. Maybe she'd known perfectly well what she was getting into. It wasn't as if Nadia had gone into this blind, after all, wasn't as if she hadn't known what would happen when she'd walked into a club in her best slutwear and looked for the handsomest man in the place. Chris hadn't even bothered taking off his wedding ring, for fuck's sake. She remembered its cold metal sliding across her nipple when he'd fucked her against the wall, that first night.
Why would she even care if he was married? If his marriage hadn't been on the rocks, he'd never have taken her up on her proposition. If his wife wasn't such a witch he wouldn't have been in the club in the first place. No, Nadia couldn't find it in her to feel guilty.
Whatever. It wasn't as if love was a real thing anyway. Parental love, yes-- she loved Maryam deeply-- although that was pretty rare, because neither of her parents loved her or any of her siblings very much. She thought that they might have, once upon a time, but they'd forgotten all love in their hatred for each other, and their children had become casualties on the battleground of their marriage.
Fuck. Was she crying? Fuck.
Nadia rolled over and swiped at her face. She wasn't crying, she told herself fiercely. She wasn't crying, because she wasn't sad. She had a great life. A good job, plenty of money, a great lifestyle. A hot man who'd fuck her whenever she wanted, no commitments, nothing tying her down besides her kid. And Maryam was a good kid, who had an open invitation to stay with Joanna besides, so it wasn't as if she was that much of a burden. Everything was as near perfect as it could be for a single mother with judgmental parents who'd never really loved her anyway and sisters who looked down on her and brothers who thought she was a whore.
Fuck.
Beside her, Chris stirred and let out a sleepy grunt, then sat straight up. "Fuck, is that the time?"
"What?" She rubbed her face again, then glanced at the clock; half an hour before he'd told her she had to go. "You have time."
"No, I don't," he said, reached over, and slapped her ass. "Roll over, babe. I want to fuck you one more time before I have to make nice with the bitch and her family again." He leered at her. "Give me a good memory, Nads. Something to get me through."
She hated that nickname.
Nadia made sexy noises, rolled over, and wondered, while Chris took hold of her hips, if her father's mistress had ever had a nickname she hated.
--
Jasper was the last child of his mother's happiness, and oh, how well he knew it.
He'd sort of liked it as a kid, before he'd understood the full implications of what it meant. Back then, being Mema's favorite had meant later bedtimes, candy when he didn't deserve it, temper tantrums indulged and petted away. All he had to do in return was occasionally declare that Mema was the very bestest, or that Mema was the prettiest lady in the whole wide world. It had seemed a pretty good deal, back then.
He'd been the most spoiled fucking kid imaginable. Alan was too young to remember his really terrible years, but he was damned lucky his sisters were still talking to him at all, much less that they still regarded him with any kind of affection. His father definitely didn’t, but fuck his father, anyway.
Fuck both his parents, honestly. They'd both fucked him over in their own special ways. It had just taken him longer to realize that his mother's cruelty came disguised as love.
He couldn't remember quite how he'd figured it out. School had probably helped; intelligent teachers, annoyed classmates, and a little tough love from his guidance counselor in high school had straightened him out some. His sisters must have done their own quiet part, maybe his father, too. In the end, though, it had probably been his own mother who showed him how poisonous her love was.
They'd started to fight, as he got older. Little things at first, arguments over what he should have for lunch, or what grade he ought to have gotten on some test or other. It had seemed normal enough. But then Jasper began to notice a certain coldness in his mother's eyes after every argument, a coldness that stayed until his next lavish demonstration of love for her. Even then, it didn't go away, it just went into hibernation until he defied her again.
Then he'd noticed the way his sisters flinched whenever he'd start up strident demands. Then he'd noticed the disgust and pain on his father's face whenever he looked at Jasper. Then he'd realized what, exactly, his mother was turning him into, in her desperate need to love someone who wouldn't betray her.
He'd been so angry, so embarrassed. Wasn't it a parent's job to raise their kids into decent human beings? And here he was, the most awful little shit imaginable, and his mother smiled and nodded as long as he was extravagantly loving to her.
The obvious answer was to be even more of an awful little shit. Or so it had seemed at the time. In retrospect, that had been really fucking stupid of him, but hey, he'd been thirteen.
His mother had accused him, in a later fight, of deliberately trying to alienate her. Jasper remembered feeling surprised, not that she'd feel that, but that she'd be so aware of it. He'd said something shitty to her, no doubt-- "better to be the black sheep than your fucking pet," or something like that-- but mostly he just remembered that surprise, and the hurt on her face when she'd realized he meant it.
Not that it had helped. Obviously. He'd tried so hard to disgust his parents and then been so surprised when it worked. Teenagers were such idiots and he hadn't been any better than most. At least his sisters had been mostly at college, generally as far away from home as they could get, so they hadn't hated him too much. And Alan... well, he didn't know why Alan didn't hate him, but he wouldn't question it.
He liked to think he was better now, more of a grownup and less of an idiot kid lashing out at anyone he thought he could hurt, but... well, there was a reason Jasper didn't talk much to his family anymore.
He only hoped they didn't think too badly of him.
--
The week after his father died, Alan went looking for Arelie Koch.
He would have gone before, but he hadn't known her name, hadn't even known she existed before. Then his father called her name in his final hours, begged for her forgiveness in the minutes before he died. Alan had a very enlightening conversation with his siblings at the funeral, and subsequently a very understanding one with his wife. Then Chrissy took their kids home, and he began his search.
He hadn't even been born when Arelie entered his father's life, had slept in his mother's womb while his family tore itself apart. He'd been born in the aftermath, under a hot August sun while his sisters shivered with fear and his brother begged for understanding. He'd never known the cohesion they'd lost, never grieved for a family he didn't know he'd lost.
In the end, he wasn't sure he minded. His sisters, his brother, they'd been pushed and pulled and twisted so much by the loss of that family. He'd grown into himself unhindered by that pain, so much so that he hadn't even known large families could be happy until Chrissy took him home for the first time. It just felt like the way it was.
Arelie Koch. He knew nothing about her, and Jasper had flatly refused to talk to him about it, had in fact left as soon as the funeral was over. His sisters, though, they were all old enough to remember in painful detail what had happened. They'd all known something. And most importantly, they'd all answered his questions.
Deborah, newly divorced, hadn't met his eyes, just looked away and mumbled, "She just did what he wanted her to. Poor woman."
Joanna smiled soft and sad, and said, "She fell in love. I can't really blame her for that." Then she'd looked at her husband, playing with Annelise and Freddie, her smile widening and brightening. "Can you blame anyone for that?"
Ruth hugged herself, looked at the formica table top and spat, "Homewrecking bitch," before getting up and stalking away.
Nadia just shrugged. "They probably just wanted a good fuck," she'd said. "Who wouldn't?"
All in all, it had told him a lot about his sisters, but not much about Arelie. And Alan was curious. Who had she been, really? What had she been thinking when she began that affair with his father?
More importantly, what had she been thinking when she ended it?
Arelie Koch. She'd just vanished, as far as he could tell. He found her old house pretty easily, but she'd sold it not long after the whole mess had begun and gone into the wind. Not that he could really blame her. She'd either gotten her heart broken or suffered a massive humiliation, and either way why would she want to stick around?
There was a trail, though. It was subtle, and difficult to follow, but it was there, and Alan was nothing if not persistent. He'd find her, eventually. He would find her, and...
And then what? What would he say to her when he found her? "I'm the son of your former lover, and I just wanted to see what you looked like?" No. That was a surefire way of getting a door slammed in his face. No, it would have to be something deeper. Something more important.
He spent a lot of time planning it while he went from place to place, looking for any sign of her. He'd tell her his father was dead, to start with. Maybe he'd tell her Mema was dead, too, so she'd know she had nothing to fear from it anymore. He'd tell her she'd done the right thing, at the end, and he appreciated it. He'd tell her...
He'd tell her it wasn't her fault, what his parents had done to each other and to their children. He'd tell her he didn't blame her for most of it, and that he'd forgiven her what blame she did deserve.
He'd tell her he hoped she was happy.
Someone, at least, should be happy.