The Terrorist’s Son by Zak Ebrahim

1
November 5, 1990
Cliffside Park, New Jersey
    My mother shakes me awake in my bed: “There’s been an accident,” she says.
    I am seven years old, a chubby kid in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pajamas. I’m accustomed to being roused before dawn, but only by my father, and only to pray on my little rug with the minarets. Never by my mother.
    It’s eleven at night. My father is not home. Lately, he has been staying at the mosque in Jersey City deeper and deeper into the night. But he is still Baba to me—funny, loving, warm. Just this morning he tried to teach me, yet again, how to tie my shoes. Has he been in an accident? What kind of accident? Is he hurt? Is he dead ? I can’t get the questions out because I’m too scared of the answers.
    My mother flings open a white sheet—it mushrooms briefly, like a cloud—then leans down to spread it on the floor. “Look in my eyes, Z,” she says, her face so knotted with worry that I hardly recognize her. “You need to get dressed as quick as you can. And then you need to put your things onto this sheet, and wrap it up tight. Okay? Your sister will help you.” She moves toward the door. “ Yulla , Z, yulla . Let’s go.”
    â€œWait,” I say. It’s the first word I’ve managed to uttersince I tumbled out from under my He-Man blanket. “What should I put in the sheet? What . . . things ?”
    I’m a good kid. Shy. Obedient. I want to do as my mother says.
    She stops to look at me. “Whatever will fit,” she says. “I don’t know if we’re coming back.”
    She turns, and she’s gone.
    Once we’ve packed, my sister, my brother, and I pad down to the living room. My mother has called my father’s cousin in Brooklyn—we call him Uncle Ibrahim, or just Ammu—and she’s talking to him heatedly now. Her face is flushed. She’s clutching the phone with her left hand and, with her right, nervously adjusting her hijab where it’s come loose around her ear. The TV plays in the background. Breaking news. We interrupt this program . My mother catches us watching, and hurries to turn it off.
    She talks to Ammu Ibrahim awhile longer, her back to us. When she hangs up, the phone begins ringing. It’s a jarring sound in the middle of the night: too loud and like it knows something.
    My mother answers. It is one of Baba’s friends from the mosque, a taxi driver named Mahmoud. Everyone calls him Red because of his hair. Red sounds desperate to reach my father. “He’s not here,” my mother says. She listens for a moment. “Okay,” she says, and hangs up.
    The phone rings again. That terrible noise.
    This time, I can’t figure out who’s calling. My mother says, “Really?” She says, “Asking about us? The police?”
    A little later, I wake up on a blanket on the living room floor. Somehow, in the midst of the chaos, I’ve nodded off. Everything we could possibly carry—and more—is piled by the door, threatening to topple at any second. My mother paces around, checking and rechecking her purse. She has all of our birth certificates: proof, if anyone demands it, that she is our mother. My father, El-Sayyid Nosair, was born in Egypt. But my mother was born in Pittsburgh. Before she recited the Shahada in a local mosque and became a Muslim—before she took the name Khadija Nosair—she went by Karen Mills.
    â€œYour Uncle Ibrahim is coming for us,” she tells me when she sees me sitting up and rubbing my eyes. The worry in her voice is tinged with impatience now. “If he ever gets here.”
    I do not ask where we are going, and no one tells me. We just wait. We wait far longer than it should take Ammu to drive from Brooklyn to New Jersey. And the longer we wait, the faster my mother paces and the more I feel like something in my chest is going to burst. My sister puts an arm