Lamees and Hannah’s father are the first people Hannah has ever met who sound like her mother. That thin membrane of accent that makes her mother a mystery is normal here, is how English comes out their mouths. This place—this bride of the Red Sea, as her father calls the city—is the origin of her mother’s phonemes. The blue sky like a vat of dye, the air like steam in a bathroom, the promise of sea to the west and carpets of sand to the east, somewhere over there past the city limits. These things gave birth to her mother’s p’s that are not quite p’s, her v’s that bear passing resemblance to f’s, her insistence on opening lights rather than turning them on.

And so there is a strange familiarity she feels with these two, while at the same time she finds it disconcerting to speak to Lamees in public, to speak to someone whose eyes and mouth she can’t see. Disconcerting to speak with her father, who was dead, who claims one day Hannah disappeared with her mother in a poof. Like I was some sort of five-year-old genie, she wrote to Malik in the letter she’s been working on since she boarded the plane in Cleveland. She’s already written five pages, front and back. Is that what happened? Whatever the truth, she blames her mother for lying about her father’s death, which suggests she lied about so much more. Sometimes Hannah blames both her parents, but mostly her mother.

“They didn’t have what I wanted,” she tells Lamees. It’s a white lie. Hannah is not an incurable liar like her mother.

The neon ads of the city are reflected in miniature in her car window: tires, soda, furniture, fresh juice. Her father stops at a shawarma shop, the spit directly outside manned by a guy with a carving knife and a chef’s hat and patches of sweat on his back and under his arms.

Alone with Lamees, Hannah starts to hum. She’s ruined things for herself; she can’t listen to the tape because she’s lied. Why did she lie?

“I stopped listening to music,” Lamees says. “I used to love it, but the Prophet told his followers only the human voice and drums are halal.”

What kind of person doesn’t like music? About her stepmother, Hannah wrote: It would be weirder if my father and I had any history together. As it is, she’s some stranger. She can’t figure out what to make of me. Maybe that’s not fair. Maybe that’s my problem. I want to get to know her. Really.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS