CNN has replaced Saudi television. Hannah, Lamees, and Mary watch most of the day. At Dhuhr and ‘Asur prayer times, the broadcast shifts to readings of the Qur’an, and Lamees leaves the room to say her prayers while Hannah and Mary watch the boys.

On TV, they show US soldiers writing “love letters” on bombs. At home, Malik is writing Hannah a breakup letter as though she hadn’t already broken up with him, but of course she doesn’t know that yet.

The boys go stir-crazy until Lamees turns the TV off and tells Mary to take them to the roof to run around.

When Hannah’s father comes home, near Maghrib time, he’s already taken his shimagh and iqal off and hung them in the crook of his elbow. He heads straight to the bathroom to wash up.

Hannah doesn’t know how to wash for prayer, and she doesn’t know how to pray. She puts on one of Lamees’s long prayer scarves, a sharshaf, as big as a bedsheet. Lamees lays out prayer rugs, one vertical in front and a second horizontally, behind the first. Hannah stands beside her stepmother as her father leads them in prayer.

“Allahu akbar,” he starts, and she raises her hands and lowers them to her chest, like Lamees.

Hannah doesn’t understand the words her father recites out loud, and she struggles to mimic Lamees’s and her father’s movements. But she can pray with them. She needs to pray.

GONE

With Operation Desert Storm launched and the country officially-officially at war, they settle into a new routine. Fouad’s school closes, and so the three boys are home. It’s like being home because of a blizzard—except it’s because of a war, and no one knows exactly when it will end, though Summer has heard that it won’t last long. Flights start up again, but flights are limited; it’s not clear when Hannah will be able to leave. She feels guilty at the idea of leaving her dad and his family behind to deal with the war without her, but she also wishes for certainty, for the Arabica coffee shop on Coventry Road, for a life drawing session, a French avant-garde movie at the Cleveland Cinematheque, a blizzard.