Farah stood with two men who were also waiting. It was hot, burning dry Jericho hot, but she was still numb as she wiped the sweat from her forehead with the edge of her white scarf.

“Are you going to Jenin?” called a young woman in a dress that reached to her knees. Several feet behind her were a young boy and girl and five large suitcases.

“Yes, and we will leave as soon as I load your bags and your children,” said the dark-skinned driver as he walked over to get the suitcases and leaned down to squeeze the little boy’s cheek.

After the driver had tied two of the suitcases to the roof and stuffed everything else in the trunk, Farah folded herself into the car, sitting by the door in the back with the woman and her children.

“What a relief to get away from that checkpoint,” the young woman muttered to no one in particular.

“God give us strength to deal with these hardships,” said Farah, not realizing that the woman and her children had crossed the bridge with the foreigners.

The woman didn’t say anything.

Fully loaded, the car grumbled past the other services and onto the road. Dust flew up everywhere and the windshield was already caked thick with dead bugs and encrusted dust from previous trips.

Farah turned toward the window and closed her eyes, gripping the image of her so-young-nineteen-year-old daughter across the river with that man she didn’t know, standing there like an angel with that tiny dead baby in her arms. No way to explain a death like this; it is God’s will. Farah felt all the sadness she had resisted in her daughter’s presence wash over her in the form of exhaustion, desperate exhaustion. In other times things were different, she thought. In those times you had other things to think about.

Farah. Joy. Surely her father had cursed her by giving her that name. One whose name means joy could only know misery. And what misery I have known, Farah thought to herself as the car rattled on the road home.

She remembered being sixteen years old, so much like that lovely daughter of hers, and sent off to live with her new old husband who gave her two children and fists that pounded her with welts to cover her body, welts she ignored or covered until it broke her father’s heart and he convinced her husband to release her with divorce to freedom, but there is no freedom for a divorced woman with two children.

“You will marry again,” her father would say, though her mother kept silent on the subject except to say, “God willing.”