Baba had promised that we wouldn’t have to run anymore. He came to our home, back in the camp one day, and his face was sad. Even when he told us he had managed finally—after four years—to get us visas to the United States, we couldn’t believe that we were leaving the camp. We were lucky, and we knew it. We could only get out because Baba’s cousin, who had gone to America in 1948, made some papers for him. It had never been our home—Haifa would always be our real home—but still … I thought of Dina down the alley, whose father had died when they bombed the olive groves one day, and her stepbrother who hobbled to a bus every day on his crutches—his right leg lost to a landmine—to work at a candy factory in the city. Dina used to come to my room and cry sometimes. Her stepbrother was frustrated with his condition, knowing he couldn’t get married, because girls needed husbands who could provide for them, and who could he provide for by wrapping little silver papers on chocolate for ten hours a day? Well, he was frustrated. And I guess he tried once or twice to … you know what I am saying?—yes, I can see you know. So he tried with Dina. And she was scared to death. How could I leave her in that house, with nobody to help her hide? At least she could tell her mother she was sleeping at my house, but now that I was going to America, where soldiers didn’t break into your house and landmines didn’t steal your brother’s legs … Where would she go? Even now, I wonder what happened to her.

I shouldn’t talk about Dina anymore. I don’t want to.

No, I will not. It’s not my right to tell her story. I can only tell you mine.

You? You can tell mine because I am giving it to you to keep safe, or to tell all the people, or to tell your sociology professor. Do as you like. It is yours now.

Where was I?

Yes. The closet. How was I to know it was a janitor’s closet? To me, it was like the bunkers in the camp. There was water, and even some crackers and juice boxes on a shelf above the toilet scouring powder. Heaven!

We had landed two weeks before this in the United States, but I already felt like a survivor. I was worried about your aunt and uncles, who were all in the middle school. I was in the high school building, and I wondered if they had found a place to hide as well. I went to the little sink and threw up, then huddled down on the floor again, my stomach twisting with fear.