In Aspiration, Lara trims her own hair every six weeks. She takes the heavy scissors from her sewing basket and sits on the toilet with the door closed after Emma is in bed. She doesn’t have to look in the mirror. She cuts a straight line across the back of her own neck with her eyes closed. Having kicked around the West Coast for a couple of years, Lara has learned some things. Don’t get familiar with a hairdresser. Word always gets back to someone about where she and Emma are. In other towns, before Aspiration, it happened time and again: A Buick or Chevy—some car that could be her neighbors’ but definitely wasn’t—out on the street several days in a row. Or some Saudi she didn’t know watching her in the grocery store. She always knew they were Saudi before she heard them speak, by the particular blackness of their hair, the way the women wrapped their headscarves or didn’t wear them at all, the smell of the men’s cologne, some specific note in a child’s whine that reminded her of her childhood. When they recognized her or almost recognized her, she and Emma had to move again. One year, they moved four times, and in between she had the mole on her cheek removed in a dermatologist’s office. She has learned to avoid towns with universities or flight centers, the types of places Saudis go to study or train for the national airlines. She watches out for an American man in a baseball cap and sunglasses, reading a newspaper. That’s what a private investigator looks like. When she catches a man like that watching her, she knows how to pick up and leave. She’s not tired of leaving. Behind her eyelids, when she’s snipping her hair, she sees the possibility of weariness edging toward her. The possibility she’ll one day want to find a place she never wants to leave. Will want to chisel her home into a rock face. But the fear of being found stays with her, the wanting to put on her own cap and sunglasses, hide behind the paper’s A section, and spy on Emma at school so no one can snatch her.

Emma has refused to have her hair cut for years. It wraps itself around her as though protecting her, covers her face and her shoulders, her little-girl chest, her back, nearly reaches her butt. Her fingers are long and elegant, her hands nearly the size of Lara’s already, but her little-girl feet haven’t caught up.