built on the past and yet foolish enough to imagine that what happens next is simply a matter of will and hope. And so there was this dream: of Mariam sitting alone on a couch in a house with dark wooden floors and whitewashed walls, a child asleep in a corner bedroom painted orange just as hers had been. The house was a near-perfect replica of the one she had grown up in, with arched doorways leading to the kitchen and bathrooms, along with windows every few feet opening out onto a grassy banana-tree-filled courtyard. The differences here lay in the furniture, sleek, low-slung, and thoroughly modern, just like the city the house in her dreams inhabited—let’s say a place somewhere along a coast, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle. What matters most, however, is the stillness, the sheer absence of sound that is otherwise impossible to find except in dreams. Here then is the place where no harm can happen: sanctuary that even the dead would be envious of.
By the time she woke up, the 1971 red Monte Carlo her husband was driving was halfway over the bridge spanning the Illinois River. She came to just in time to catch sight of a barge heading south along the river, its minor wake washing up along the abandoned shoreline littered with recently defunct brick warehouses that, she would say to me in a future time and city, seemed like the perfect metaphors for modern life—long, neglected, and relatively empty. It was not a beautiful view from the bridge, but it was an honest one, and for that she respected it. Even on a clear, sunny afternoon it carried with it a tinge of gray, as if sorrow were automatically built into this town and its recent decline. Ahead of them was a factory known for its tractors and earth-busting machinery. In two months it would be roughly two thousand souls and feet lighter—her husband’s being just one pair—while behind them, my mother knew, was a downtown whose finest days she had arrived far too late to see. She was not a spiteful person, except in her worst moments, but like anyone, she took a measure of comfort in knowing that recent disappointments in life were not hers alone.
She touched the side of her head just as the bridge came to an end. A small knot had already grown and in an hour would begin to throb as if the blood pressing against the grain of her scalp were seeking a way out.
I’m swelling in two places, she thought to herself.
She always did have a thing for pairs. While most people lived content with individual moments, my mother was constantly on the lookout for the twin event, the correlation that proved nothing happened by accident, and by extension, that none of us was ever really alone. I remember once coming home from school and finding her standing in front of the living room window with a plastic bag filled with ice wrapped around her hand. I was ten or eleven at the time. I knew enough by then to expect the worst—a temporary arrest, or her rendered into a ball of flesh huddled in a corner, but no one was home except her, and the visible signs of struggle—pillows on the floor, a TV blaring loudly, or a torn bra left dangling on the edge of a chair—were absent.
She actually looked serene that afternoon. Her body was pressed against the window, a distant but faint smile on her face, the kind we employ when remembering something deep and personal, something that no one else would ever understand.
“I burned my hand making tea,” she said when I came through the doors and asked her what she was doing and what had happened to her hand.
“And just by chance,” she asked me a few seconds later, “did you hear the news this afternoon? Two women, just a few blocks away from where we live, were burned to death in an apartment fire this morning.”
Up ahead a sign offering a room for $29.99 per night loomed, came, and then went. It was three thirty in the afternoon on a Wednesday and they were only twenty miles outside of the city,
By the time she woke up, the 1971 red Monte Carlo her husband was driving was halfway over the bridge spanning the Illinois River. She came to just in time to catch sight of a barge heading south along the river, its minor wake washing up along the abandoned shoreline littered with recently defunct brick warehouses that, she would say to me in a future time and city, seemed like the perfect metaphors for modern life—long, neglected, and relatively empty. It was not a beautiful view from the bridge, but it was an honest one, and for that she respected it. Even on a clear, sunny afternoon it carried with it a tinge of gray, as if sorrow were automatically built into this town and its recent decline. Ahead of them was a factory known for its tractors and earth-busting machinery. In two months it would be roughly two thousand souls and feet lighter—her husband’s being just one pair—while behind them, my mother knew, was a downtown whose finest days she had arrived far too late to see. She was not a spiteful person, except in her worst moments, but like anyone, she took a measure of comfort in knowing that recent disappointments in life were not hers alone.
She touched the side of her head just as the bridge came to an end. A small knot had already grown and in an hour would begin to throb as if the blood pressing against the grain of her scalp were seeking a way out.
I’m swelling in two places, she thought to herself.
She always did have a thing for pairs. While most people lived content with individual moments, my mother was constantly on the lookout for the twin event, the correlation that proved nothing happened by accident, and by extension, that none of us was ever really alone. I remember once coming home from school and finding her standing in front of the living room window with a plastic bag filled with ice wrapped around her hand. I was ten or eleven at the time. I knew enough by then to expect the worst—a temporary arrest, or her rendered into a ball of flesh huddled in a corner, but no one was home except her, and the visible signs of struggle—pillows on the floor, a TV blaring loudly, or a torn bra left dangling on the edge of a chair—were absent.
She actually looked serene that afternoon. Her body was pressed against the window, a distant but faint smile on her face, the kind we employ when remembering something deep and personal, something that no one else would ever understand.
“I burned my hand making tea,” she said when I came through the doors and asked her what she was doing and what had happened to her hand.
“And just by chance,” she asked me a few seconds later, “did you hear the news this afternoon? Two women, just a few blocks away from where we live, were burned to death in an apartment fire this morning.”
Up ahead a sign offering a room for $29.99 per night loomed, came, and then went. It was three thirty in the afternoon on a Wednesday and they were only twenty miles outside of the city,
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