I left the law firm after a custody case involving an undocumented mother and a father who was a known white supremacist. Besides Taytay, I hadn’t spoken to my family in four years. I knew that when my brothers graduated from college, my dad would set them up in business, give them money for a house, just as he would have for me, just as his father did for him. That I didn’t need a family. I didn’t need anybody. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when my mother called. I knew Rasha looked up to me, and I was proud to have set an example for her when I left for college in the US. I didn’t know anything anymore about the family I was about to see in Charlottesville, despite the fact that they had been the beginning and end of my world for twenty-two years.
I remembered my mother’s steady tone of voice on the phone, the way she spoke as if this were all so normal. Just a normal daughter going on a normal trip to spend time with her normal family. My mother was the villain, I reminded myself, and villains don’t get to fall apart. How familiar it felt to be back in a group of loud, raucous Arabs, how bizarre to not know the half of what they were talking about, the new babies or in-laws, the recent vacations and last year’s weddings. Her graduation, her time for the spotlight; I certainly didn’t want the attention. Like the rest of the family, she was polite but didn’t ask questions. I certainly didn’t feel like talking about my tiny one-bedroom apartment, my already struggling café, not knowing what to do with my life. “Habibti, we don’t need to talk about anything.” “I’m calling Taytay.”
The long minutes it took to get my grandmother on the phone were strained with a tense silence. When Taytay answered the phone, I didn’t even say hello. “She wants me to sleep in the same bed,” I said to my grandmother, but really, I suppose, to my mom. “I just don’t know why your father did this,” she said, confirming something I knew without knowing. He controlled my mom, my siblings, my cousins, the only one he couldn’t control was my taytay. For the many years since my asylum decision, I’d felt like I was the one holding the key to the prison I lived in, but it was my father all along. I felt myself open to my grandmother’s next words: “Forgive her—and be gentle.” I’m not sure if they were for my mother, for me, or for us both. I didn’t sleep in the bed, curling up instead on the room’s tiny love seat, but after that afternoon, there were no more arguments between us.
Throughout the weekend, my mother asked continually, Mihtajeh shee?—if there was anything I needed. For my mother to have shown up in the United States, without my father or, presumably, his blessing, was an enormous gesture. A month later, as I hugged a seventeen-year-old Inam in the airport terminal, the amount of time that had gone by nearly took my breath away. As we passed the familiar landmarks of my daily life, which now seemed so dreamlike, I thought to myself that maybe I could feel like my mother’s daughter again, but would I ever feel like my father’s? “Mama, where is it?” I asked my mother when everything was unloaded. A few days before their flight, my mother had asked if I would like them to bring anything from Jordan. .” I said breathlessly, before realizing it probably wasn’t the best thing to say in an airport a year after 9/11.
Together, we located the lost bag and, for the first time in five years, I had kibbeh labanieh for dinner. Being with Inam again was the best part of the weeks with my family. She looped her arms around my mother’s shoulders and sat on my father’s lap in their rental apartment. “I didn’t,” I said. “Why did you lie to Inam?” My father looked surprised. “We didn’t.” “You did. Why didn’t you tell her what you did? Not let Mama talk to me?” I was yelling and crying at once, losing my grip on the hardened exterior I had spent so much time perfecting. We are going to discuss it in front of Mama and Inam so you don’t lie to them anymore.” I felt brazen, angry, and distraught. What kind of father does this to his daughter?” “You left us. What kind of daughter does this to her family?” my father boomed. That’s when I realized that yelling at my father didn’t actually feel good. Looking around the room—at my mother’s tearstained face, my father’s furrowed brow, my sister’s pained expression—I realized that nothing was going to fix us. But I didn’t want things to be how they were before—secrets and lies, silence and separations, good guys and bad guys—I wanted things to be better.