Survivor

I walked slowly, carefully, along the sidewalk, avoiding the icy patches. Aliyah held my arm with her hands, strong and secure. We were headed to 5th and South Streets, to the used bookstore at that intersection, where Aliyah wanted to buy the new novel by her favorite Indian-American author.

“It just came out a few weeks ago,” she chattered as we crept at an excruciating pace, “so for sure someone’s read it by now and sold it to the bookstore. I can’t wait to read it myself, because I loved her first book—the short stories. I loaned it to you, right? Did you ever read it?”

“Nope,” I said. “I didn’t get a chance to read too much, even though I guess I had tons of time on my hands.”

“That’s OK … you were recovering, and that was the most important thing.”

I noticed that she didn’t say, “You’re still recovering,” which is what was factually true. She implied that I had recovered, that my recovery was in the past, some obstacle that had been surmounted. Somehow, even though I knew it wasn’t true, I felt a little better.

Funny. I’d grown up with Aliyah, Hanan, and Reema, and I’d always thought Aliyah, petite and slim, was the weakest of us all. Physically, for sure, but emotionally too. She was a writer, and she usually joked that that was why she was so sensitive. I always imagined that any sort of tragedy—heartbreak, death, illness—would destroy her, send her into a decades-long funk in which she would pine away in her room, writing into a journal or composing angry and depressed poetry. Maybe I didn’t understand her as well as I thought. Maybe I didn’t understand any of my friends. And maybe they didn’t understand me either.

“Remember when we were kids,” I suddenly said, realizing as soon as I spoke that I’d interrupted Aliyah’s chattering and had changed the subject completely.

She didn’t seem to mind, just looked over at me. “What’s that?”

“Remember when we were kids,” I started again, “and we said that when we grew up, we would all buy a big house and move in together?”

“Yep … and the house was going to have seven different rooms, each one a different color of the rainbow.”

“Mine was going to be the red one.”

“And mine the purple. I think Reema took the yellow room and Hanan took the blue one.”

“I think we had to convince her to take the blue one. She originally wanted brown or black or something like that,” I reminded Aliyah. I couldn’t believe I remembered all these details, but the image was clearly in my mind. We were about ten years old, sitting in Reema’s parents’ house on Tasker Street, in the basement where the TV and the dollhouse were. We’d even drawn sketches of what the house would look like, and since each of us wanted a turret, the house had four, one in each corner.

“Yeah, I guess Hanan had a dismal outlook back then,” Aliyah said, laughing. “In some ways, she still does, but I guess I would be the same if I’d gone through what she did.”