“He doesn’t want to rattle cages,” he tells her over the phone, while she and her father and Fouad are waiting for their flights at the Miami airport. Fouad will go back to Jidda. His education in America is over. He won’t talk to anyone about what happened in the detention center. He swears wallahi he’s never hung out with terrorists or zealots. He wants to go home.

“Whose cages?” she says.

“The people who shut him up last time, who put him in prison. Those are the same people who got his son out.”

She’s not naïve. She should have seen it.

DREAMS

2018

LAST WISH

Hannah prophesies her grandfather’s death.

She’s always had memories of dreams here and there, like anyone else, but since her forty-eighth birthday two months ago, her dreams have been more vivid. She wakes up with memories of symbolic sheaves of wheat and fat sheep and never-ending stairways and the family in Jidda burying her mother.

Unlike the Prophet Yusuf, she has no one to explain the symbols to her.

For several weeks before the news of her grandfather’s illness arrives, she dreams of emaciated animals—dogs, cats, goats, chickens, a lion, a hyena, a zebra. She dreams of wilting fruit trees and straw-brown lawns. At first, she attributes these visions of near-death to the onset of her eleventh New England autumn, the primary intensity of the trees bursting against the deep blue sky, that last gasp before winter. She’s no wimp about winter; she grew up with the northern Ohio lake effect, frozen eyelashes, snow boots, snow pants, and snow mittens clipped to her down coat. The time she spent in temperate and tropical places strengthened her fundamental resilience.

Still, fall depresses her. It conjures death. Hamza makes fun of her for saying that, but she knows she’s not wrong.

She wakes up on a fall Tuesday morning and digs her sketchbook, which she hasn’t touched in years, out of her nightstand drawer. It’s the same fat book she took on her first trip to Jidda, set aside when she ditched art school for pre-law. Last night she dreamed she was drawing in it—was it a dream of the past, or the future? She isn’t sure. The sketchbook has been hiding under random photos of Fareed as a baby, as a toddler, in first grade; under a half-knitted scarf and smooth wooden knitting needles; boxes of not-her-taste jewelry from aunts and cousins; forsaken cell phones; and an iPod Shuffle.

She sketches, in pencil, trees outside the window and snippets of her dreams, trying to capture in-betweenness: the space between seasons, between waking and sleeping, between life and death.