Now they’re near the bustle of the main street. Time is running out, and Tahera has only to reach that brightly lit corner for her world to be altered, perhaps irrevocably. Say something, Ammi, she wants to cry out. She prays for something to change the course she’s on—perhaps she won’t find a taxi, perhaps she’s too late for the last flight to Dallas, perhaps she’s left her purse behind and cannot buy a ticket or board the airplane—even as she realizes that it’s in her power to turn back. Yet how powerless she feels.

At the street corner, she rummages through her handbag: she does have her credit cards and license. Is there anything she’s left behind? The only thing that comes to mind is the book of poetry Seema had given her. She’d seen it lying forlorn beside the Quran but had not packed it. Forlorn! The very word is like a bell to toll her back to herself.

And here is an empty yellow taxi drawing up at the traffic light. Is it a vision or a waking dream? Automatically she raises her hand to flag it down.

“To the airport.” Her voice is surprisingly firm, yet appears to be spoken by someone else, not her. Is she awake or asleep?

She cannot bear to look at her mother. The driver—Middle Eastern, maybe even a Muslim, she thinks inconsequentially—springs open the trunk and swings her suitcase into its depths. Deprived of its weight she feels untethered, as if she could float up into the fog-hazed skies to join the fading moon, leaving the streets, the lights, the city’s inhabitants—her mother and sister—behind.

The driver thumbs open the passenger door for her and climbs back into the car. She turns, finally, toward her mother in a hungry embrace, almost throwing herself at Nafeesa, as if to not give her a chance to resist. She buries her face in her mother’s hair. She would like to press Ammi into her body, to inhale Ammi into her lungs, to kiss Ammi’s cheeks and eyes and forehead and hands, to memorize the feel of every inch of her skin.

What she still cannot bring herself to do is meet her mother’s eyes.

“I must go,” she mumbles into Nafeesa’s hair, fighting a sudden and terrible urge to justify her decision. She cannot maintain the embrace any longer without breaking down. She releases Nafeesa, then scampers into the taxi, pulling the door behind her with extra force, afraid her mother might follow her inside. The crash resounds in the cab, and the driver asks, “Were you trying to break the door?”

She doesn’t reply. She has her face pressed to the window, her eyes fixed on the figure at the street corner: small, crumpled, and diminishing, while the moon continues to stalk her.

34

Say: You who tread a different path! I do not revere what you revere. Nor do you revere what I revere. I shall never revere what you have revered. Nor will you want to revere what I revere—