Summer waits outside in the car. Inside, Lamees sits with Hannah’s grandmother and grandfather in a room with low cushions around its perimeter, like many other salons in the city. They have cups of tea in front of them and the room smells like rose water. In a crisis, there is tea.

Lamees has not removed her abayah or tarhah but she has uncovered her face, something Hannah never expected her to do with a man present.

Hannah’s grandmother Faizah says something in Arabic, something meant to be soothing.

Grandfather Fareed says, “I called people I know. They told me your father is in Riyadh. It’s the columns he’s been writing. They don’t want anyone raising problems in the middle of the liberation.”

“What the fuck,” Hannah says. She claps her hand over her mouth to keep the obscenities inside.

“I’ll jump on a flight,” he says. “I’ll call Bandar, too. You shouldn’t talk about it to anyone.”

“He’s in jail? In prison? That’s what you’re saying?”

“Your father’s a good man. They’ll let him go soon, inshallah. He did something risky.”

Hannah’s grandmother Faizah touches her arm, tries to lead her toward the salon.

Her grandfather tells her to stay for tea, for dinner. He has to go back to the paper. The idea of sipping tea when her father is God knows where makes her so angry she’s shaking, the way her leg shook once when she drove through a red light and missed an accident by a hair. She can’t stop the tremors. Through the fog of her anxiety, she is able to digest that her grandparents are consumed with worry, too. Her grandmother fiddles obsessively with beautiful blue prayer beads; her thumb keeps moving the bead along the string. Hannah’s grandfather twists his iqal back and forth. Their faces, too, are twisted with concern.

“Say a prayer,” her grandfather says. It is what people here say when they want someone to calm down.

She barely knows how to pray. “I want him to be safe,” she says. “I want him to come home. Is that a prayer?”

W

1987

Twelve years after we left W’s house, I went back. You didn’t expect that, did you?

Before my senior year started—you know this part—I left. Maybe you know why. Baba found me. It was like being visited by a ghost. My grief over his loss unburied itself and I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I couldn’t be under the same roof as you. Never again.

The part you don’t know is that I took a Greyhound bus to Toledo and W picked me up. I’m sure the reason she recognized me was because I was the only Arab chick waiting in the station, or maybe because I looked like you.