The inside of the house was not exactly as I’d remembered it. She’d painted the living room dove gray; pulled out the blue shag and refinished the wood floors; replaced some of the old, secondhand furniture with trim Scandinavian pieces; and sold the barber’s chair or donated it to Goodwill. In its place in the basement was a treadmill facing a brand-new television. But the bay window was full of greenery. And the house was full of ghosts. Like, I could sense the presence of the barber’s chair whenever I went down to the basement to wash my clothes or jog on the treadmill. I could feel myself passing through the specters of us—us on the day we arrived, us on the day of the haircuts, us on the day we left. Frozen as if in amber.

The memories are painful. Writing this is painful. But the memories and the pain are mine. The story is mine.

I spent my senior year at W’s house. I slept in the room I’d slept in before. The walls were repainted dark purple, and W asked if I wanted to hang up posters, “like teenagers do.”

I had a couple Matisse posters from the Cleveland Museum of Art. I’d brought them with me in a poster tube. I put them up with sticky putty and thumbtacked some of my own drawings to the wall. I didn’t care if those got holes.

I had a suitcase of clothes—not that old blue one; this was my own, tweedy brown—and I never unpacked it. One day, I came home from school and W had put everything in drawers. She stashed the suitcase in the basement, next to the treadmill.

“I don’t want you to think you can up and leave,” she said.

“But the suitcase is downstairs. I don’t have much stuff. I can pack anytime, if I want to leave.”

“Tell me you’re not going to leave till you graduate high school.”

“I’m not going to leave,” I said. “I’m not my mother.”

“I’m still mad at your mother, but you’re not allowed to talk about her like that.”

I told her that was a deal breaker. If she wanted me to stay, she had to understand that if anyone should be mad at you, it was me. That she couldn’t take that from me.

We were standing in the basement.

“OK, honey,” she said.

With those words, she was the first person—not including Baba—to acknowledge everything you took from me.

The year went by fast. W made me go to the movies with her on Friday nights. She cried when I left for college and made me promise to call her weekly.

When I started thinking about going to Saudi junior year, she didn’t like the idea. You had gone through so much trouble to keep me from there.