Tuesday, Tsunami Tuesday

Fall then / Fall now

My mortality became very clear and present, made louder by my youngest’s late night visits to our room. I’ve had an unhealthy preoccupation with my phone and its madness lately, so she searches for my attention in the witching hours. A clumsy twist of our bedroom door knob stirs me awake. With bleary eyes, I track her sinewy shadow as she cuts a determined path to my bedside. Then I lift the covers to greet her, right on cue.

These midnight exchanges became our sacred routine, all permissions granted in silence. Snuggled in, she paws and nuzzles at my frame – as if I’ll disappear under the weight of her – the way I used to with my own mother when I was six. I graze my lips across the top of her forehead, where her babyhood remains captive in the peach fuzz along her hairline. I love to savor the sweetness of my children this way, a ritual I adopted since the day they were born.

God help me, this fortune is too difficult to bear. For the last few weeks, I’ve depended on absorbing every essence of their being – like an asthmatic depends on an inhaler – to get me through some days without panic.

Taking deep breaths at her crown, a tsunami nightmare takes hold. I’ve had these recurring dreams as far back as I can remember, a Looney Tunes version of dying 1,000 deaths. A new mutation visits me now and invades my waking life: menacing walls of water transform into towers of severed limbs and rubble. If I survive, I am lost in a landscape I’ve never been. On this night, I find my daughters in an open courtyard, lifeless and pale, next to a group of wailing women digging in the dirt with their bare hands.

The excruciating sound of mothers and mourners startles me in my wake. Their screams carry whispers of love and longing in Arabic that resonate in my bones: Oh my love, the soul of my heart! My life, my moon! Words of endearments that adults shower on children as a matter of course are now anchored in horror, in misery.

It’s Tuesday, 4:30am. 2:30pm there. I resist the urge to scroll and pull myself up out of bed to attempt some semblance of discipline, to counteract a tidal wave of impotence I navigate with dutiful malaise. I’ve started early morning meditations to steel myself from the nausea as I cling to find balance above board. After all, I’m expected to move through these days unencumbered, grateful and productive, like everyone else. But for those of us paying any attention, for those of us that feel the shockwaves of fright and fury burning through our lineage, there is only despair.

⧞

Calls to our house from overseas usually came late at night or early in the morning. They were mostly warm reconnections with family and old friends of my parents – until they weren’t.

Soon after the phone rang one morning, I heard my mom yell-sobbing from the kitchen, then the sound of the phone receiver being thrust back into its mounted cradle with force. Then came rhythm of my dad’s heavy footsteps running to her aid, like a man running off to war.

“Damn Tuesday! Damn it, damn it!” she screamed and cried, repeatedly smacking the phone on the wall. The little bell buried in the mechanics of her weapon yelped with every thud. “Bad news always comes on Tuesday!”

Her violent eruption of grief paralyzed me as I listened from across the house. Dramatic sadness mixed with anger was unlike anything I had seen or heard in real life. Something terrible must have happened to someone she loved. As my dad consoled her, I stayed locked in my room, ticking through our relatives in my head, wondering if our phone was broken. When I finally emerged to find her, she was –––

“Hey, Mom, remember when Monif died? He was in Paris, right? They found him on the train tracks?”

“No, Geneva,” she said quietly in her sideways speech. “He was in Geneva, he was going…they killed him.”

“I remember it was Paris,” my brother said.

A smiling couple walked by where we sat and nodded hello. They were holding hands on their way to the edge of the marsh. We had taken my mom out for a walk in her wheelchair at the nearby park, a rarity for her to want to do in this phase. My brother popped wheelies as he maneuvered past rough patches in the trail. We found a good bench with a nice pocket of sun for her to stretch her legs and feet, solar energy to heal.

“It was Paris,” he said again.

I trusted my brother’s memory the most. He was a not-so-secret Francophile, there was no way he’d forget anything related to France in our orbit. My mom flipped her lip and shrugged her right shoulder, the one that still worked, surrendering her point with little care.

Another rarity. The old Laila would have never surrendered.

“It was a few days after the accident,” she continued. “I was alone with you. Your dad was visiting the family in Egypt.”

“Wait, dad wasn’t there?” I said. “In my memory – I thought. I thought I remember him being with you in the kitchen. He was gone?”

“Yes. He was gone. I was alone.”

I sat in silence for a moment, contemplating why I had inserted my father in a memory of her that did not correlate. A hero in absentia.

A flock of geese gilded low over our heads, and I trained my eyes to watch them. The whole scene could have been majestic, but their irritating honks derailed my thoughts.