Muneer and Saeedah will sleepwalk through the year. One day, near the end of his internship, something in them will snap decisively, and the state of their marriage will revert to exactly what it was before Hanadi was born. Saeedah will say she would rather stay in America—a place she has never been drawn to, has not always seemed to like—than stay married to him.

He will feel the knife of her disdain turning in his stomach, though he feels the same. He will grant her wish of divorce and move back to Jidda without them, intending to find a way to bring his daughter home.

But he won’t. Saeedah will shatter Muneer’s life as though she were smashing through a sheet of ice. She will hide his daughter from him so well it will be as though the child were back in the womb, unreachable.

Leaving the beach with his wife asleep in the back of the VW, speeding to the hospital with the heater turned up so it whooshes and rattles, Muneer is blind to the future. He prays, “Oh, Protector, protect them. Oh, Protector, protect them.”

God alone knows what lies ahead.

“YOU ARE DIVORCED”

1974–1975

WITNESSES

If anyone aims the sentence “You are divorced” at Saeedah three times, she is not there to hear it. Spoken or unspoken, the words must travel to her across continents, from Jidda to Cleveland Heights, as though transported by jinns or the world’s most muscular carrier pigeons. The men of her family go about the official business of nullifying her marriage without her, same as they signed her marriage contract six years ago at the neighborhood mosque while she sat on her mother’s bed with three sisters curling her hair and kohling her eyes for the wedding celebration.

“Your brothers Hazem and Mohannad were with me in the judge’s chamber,” her father says on the phone, describing the divorce proceedings. Three of Muneer’s brothers were there, too, though the names go in one ear and out the other. Baba is trying to reassure her that the divorce has truly happened: male witnesses prove its reality.

Thank God? Thank you? Neither sounds correct.

“OK,” she says.

Saeedah’s mother takes over the phone with a rush of habibtis and God protect yous, and Saeedah wonders how vigorously she has pushed Baba aside with her hennaed palms, what kind of side glance he is giving her from under his shimagh, which he hardly ever takes off, even at home. Always professional, always ready for a journalistic scoop.

“When are you bringing my darling home?” Mama says, speaking of Hanadi.