I love my mother. Very much, actually. But she doesn’t comfort me the way Auntie Siham comforts Nadia when she fails a test or falls off her bike. Baba doesn’t either, but that’s not his fault. He’s not really around. I guess I don’t really rely on Mama too much, although she depends on us pretty heavily. If we’re unhappy, so is she. If we don’t smile at her every second, if she catches us in the middle of a thought or a concern, she thinks we’re mad and she gets upset, slamming cabinet doors and banging glasses down on the table. Once I came home with a “B” on a math test, thrilled really, since I’d struggled with fractions all quarter long. I remember Baba hugged me and gave me $5, and then I suppose I ran right up to my room to hoard it in my money box, forgetting to get a hug from Mama too. The rest of the evening, she muttered angrily about “appreciation” and “respect.” And she wouldn’t believe I hadn’t meant it. When I don’t finish my plate at dinner, she lectures me about the refugee camp again, about her life before Baba, about how she and her sisters had to walk to the next village, and knock on the doors of the convent and ask for food. “We would have walked to Bethlehem if we had to!” she says, as if I have any clue where Bethlehem even is and how far it is from where she used to live. Nadia speaks Arabic well and she knows more about “back home” than I do, but I’m a lost cause. My mother has never shown me a map, and I’ve heard these stories a million times, but she tells them like they are new, as if the memory just popped into her mind and she is living it again.

Sometimes I feel like Baba wants to explain things to me, to tell me something about Mama he thinks I should know. The words form, he leans in, then hesitates and pulls away.

We returned from trick-or-treating at 8 P.M. on the dot, and Mama was smoking a cigarette on our stoop, tapping her foot on the marble steps. She didn’t see us approach at first, her eyes fixed on the cement slab of the sidewalk, smoke pouring from her lips like a chimney, the red ash of her cigarette tip a beacon in the dim light. A little boy dressed like the Incredible Hulk approached her and said “trick or treat,” but hurried back to his mother when Mama stared right through him.

Auntie Siham went up and put her arm around Mama’s shoulders. Nadia and I stayed behind on the sidewalk.

“Layla?”