In America, holed up in the hotel, there were days when the night terrors crawled into my throat and my eyes and came streaming out of my hair. For I knew Abu was disappeared forever. I could see the bad men that had come for him. They could come for us too, yes they could, Ammi said. They were stretching and moving as shadows on a wall. They carried tire irons, like the dacoits Abu told me about, the time he trespassed on some land for a story and got chased away. Or sometimes they had long curving knives, in their teeth, like in a cartoon.

We shifted to an apartment in Brooklyn, friends of friends, who had an extra bedroom that looked out over a gray shaft. One day Ammi put on her dangling silver earrings, drew her eyes with kohl, and registered me for school—I began fourth grade, amazed I didn’t need a uniform. She even got a little job helping out in a travel agency, picked up work as she could. But my terrors persisted. How could a person disappear? What happened to his jeans and his shirt, the button-down one he liked? I had nightmares of Abu lying on a road. He turned the color of dirt, reddish brown. Leaves twisted in his mouth. At night I’d hear Ammi weeping and then she’d clutch me tight in the bed. In the morning she would spring me loose to school. “You ask the teacher three important questions, Rania,” she would say. “That’s who we are. Who your father was. We ask questions. And we do not give up.”

Ammi began to groan with sickness. She would bolt from our bed, cupping her stomach, and I’d hear her retching inside the bathroom down the hall. The wife brought her broth and torn-up bits of paratha. One day she gently laid down a slender box. Ammi took it and disappeared down the hall. When she came back, she told me, “I’m having a baby.” It was Kamal, our tiny tadpole, swimming in Ammi’s belly. A miracle. A sign that running was the right thing to do. A part of Abu would be born, here.

Over supper every night Ammi asked me my three questions for the teacher, and I would tell her. I wanted to know why oceans had salt and lakes did not. Why did the mothers here show up at school dressed in drab colors, but the kids could wear what they wanted—a girl in my class had on neon-pink tights! What’s the difference between a barrister and a lawyer? Why do they spell favor without the u? Ammi would laugh, and in school I got little stickies of gold stars and smiley faces on my notebooks. Rania is so lively! the teachers would write. So inquisitive!