Strength came holding the hand of rage. “My mother’s wish was that I study in America. If I stay here, I will kill myself. I will go to my mother and then you will have the blood of two people on your hands.”

He stared at me. No yelling. No cursing. No invitations to kill myself this very minute at his feet—something I surely would never have been able to do even with my grief at its strongest. Just staring. He turned and walked away. We did not speak again. Jalal took us to the airport and my father did not come to say good-bye. In one week, I lost both my parents.

Fay held my hand for most of the flight back. “We are your family and we love you,” she kept saying. “He will come around, you’ll see. Give him time.”

Stitch with red for blood.

Stitch with white for purity.

Pull it all out and sit in black for death.

6 MAWAL Crossing

6MAWALCrossing

As my mother puts it, Huda was the first lovely Nawarese girl dragged by marriage across the river Jordan, but not the last.

“As life gets harder, more fathers are willing to release their daughters to a different world.”

And then their mothers come and weep and lick their wounds in my mother’s house—like Farah, a neighbor who is married to my mother’s uncle Bajis. She is a serious woman and is not friendly with many people, but together, she and my mother are like sisters.

Her voice is thick as she spills her sadness. ...

Spring is the beginning of life. Spring is the end of life.

“Go back. Go back,” the daughter told her mother’s stone face. “Your other children are waiting for you and I will come visit you soon, God willing.”

Mother and daughter said good-bye before they reached the bridge that crosses the river Jordan. The mother’s heart broke, but her face stayed smooth, her sadness showing only in the darkness of her blood, in the eggplant color her face became as she folded the sadness into herself, ate it like an almond nowhere near ripe.

It used to be that those were the joys: almonds in spring, figs in summer, olives in fall, memories in winter, mulberries in spring. But now everything was bleak winter memories, even the fruits hanging heavy on the trees, all bursting with what was and what will never be again.

We are from God and to Him we return.

Born crying-screaming, dying crying-whispering: a baby with no words to express his pain, only shrieks; an old woman with all the words in the world clattering inside her and she keeps her mouth clamped shut for fear the loudness will escape.