I feel a mixture of relief and fatigue to be back. So many relatives and neighbors coming to pay their respects, to visit my grandmother’s memory. I know they see me with curious eyes. I left before marrying age. I have finished high school and I should be coming back for marriage, not for death. I should have longer hair. I should wear makeup. I should not wear blue jeans and “extremely unfeminine dresses,” as Aunt Suha says. I should stop using English words. Nila, one of my classmates at the American school, just married and is already pregnant.

I am unconnected.

There is comfort to be in my own house, to wake up in my own language, but all those faces I’ve carried with me for so long wear suspicion in their eyes as they greet me. I have walked so far away from them.

I wake up less groggy at the beginning of my second week home. Until now, time has been a blur of memories and nightmares. The pungent smell of coffee fills the air and I find Latifa in the kitchen. I open the refrigerator and there are seven whiskey bottles filled with water.

“Are you hungry?” she asks me and I am starving, but the house is beginning to close in on me so I say no.

“We’ll have coffee on the porch,” she says as I watch her pull the pot from the heat, one, two, and three times before it boils over. “I always know just when to pull it away,” she says and sets the pot and two demitasses on the tray.

The sun is bounding in the living room, and even though the doors and windows are open the house smells of being closed up for a long time. We go to the front porch, which has no furniture except for two chairs and a small table. Everything is white. The house is white, the yard is white tile, and the six-foot wall that borders the house is white. White, white, white to blind the morning sun, as though they were in competition.

My sister is the color of the soil under the peach trees after they have been watered, which is one reason why she doesn’t like me: I am lighter than she is.

She goes back in the house and returns a few minutes later with a tray of melon, bread, and cheese. “Breakfast,” she announces as though I might have thought it was shoes or saddles if she had not said otherwise.

We eat without speaking. Latifa is watching me, chewing her food loudly. It occurs to me that Latifa and I share nothing, except our mother.

“You seem different,” she says finally. “You don’t look like you think you’re better than us anymore.”

“I never thought I was better. Why would you think that?”