Davis drove me in the armored SUV. Rider stayed at the estate. The drive from Virginia to Baltimore took about an hour and I spent most of it looking out the window trying not to think about the last time I was in this city. I’d shot Ahmad here. Put two bullets in him in the apartment we shared and walked out and never came back. Baltimore wasn’t a place I had good memories of. It was a place I survived and left.
My father’s building was a three-story rowhouse in Park Heights that looked the same way it looked when I was a kid. Tired. The paint was peeling, the steps were cracked, and there were toys scattered on the front stoop that belonged to whichever batch of kids were living there now because Shamir Ali never stopped having children even when he couldn’t afford the ones he already had.
I told Davis to wait by the truck and I walked up the steps and knocked. My mother opened the door. She looked older.Thinner. Her hijab was faded and her eyes were tired and when she saw me standing there her whole face crumbled and she pulled me into a hug so tight I could feel her ribs through her clothes.
“Mehar. Oh my God, Mehar.” She was crying into my shoulder and holding the back of my head and I let her because she was my mother and no matter how complicated that was, her arms still felt like something I recognized. “It’s been so long. I thought I’d never see you again.”
“I’m here, Mama.”
She pulled back and looked at my face and touched my cheek with her hand and I saw something shift behind her eyes. The relief curdled into something harder and before I could register what was happening her palm cracked across my face so hard my head snapped to the side.
Three kids were standing in the hallway watching. My face was stinging and my mother was pointing at me with tears still on her cheeks.
“You and your sisters destroyed this family. You left and look what happened to your father. Look at us. We’re barely surviving and you’re out there living your life like we don’t exist. You’re a whore just like Zainab and Zahara. All of you. Whores.”
Davis was already moving toward the door but I held my hand up to stop him because this was between me and my mother and no man was intervening in it.
I slapped her back.
I put my whole body behind it and she hit the hallway wall and slid halfway to the floor and the kids scattered screaming and I stood over her with my hand still raised and my chest heaving and I felt nothing. I didn’t feel shit. Just that same empty feeling I always got being in this house. The one that reminded me why I left in the first place.
“Don’t you ever put your hands on me again,” I said. “I’m not twelve anymore.”
Khadijah came running from the back of the house. “What happened? What’s going on?” She looked at Fatima on the floor, then at me, and she understood immediately because Khadijah had always been the smartest woman in this house even though nobody ever gave her credit for it.
“Come outside,” Khadijah said to me. She grabbed my arm gently and pulled me through the kitchen and out the back door into the small concrete yard where the kids’ bikes were leaning against the fence.
“I’m sorry she did that,” Khadijah said. She looked embarrassed and sad and tired all at once. “It’s been hard around here, Mehar. Your father can’t work. The store is barely open. We’re behind on everything and Bryce has been the one keeping us afloat with whatever money he sends. When he stopped calling last week, your mother lost it.”
“That’s why I’m here. Bryce asked me to bring money for y’all.” I pulled the envelope from my jacket and handed it to her. “He’s okay. He’s safe. And Samaya is fine too.”
Khadijah took the envelope and held it against her chest and her eyes filled up. “Thank God. I’ve been so worried. He usually calls on Sundays, and when he didn’t this past week I didn’t know what to think.”
“He’s in a situation right now but he’s being taken care of. I promise you that.”
She wiped her eyes and looked at me for a long moment. Then she hugged me and it felt different from my mother’s hug. It felt real. Like she was actually happy for me, not just clinging to me because she needed something.
“I’m so happy you got out of here, Mehar. You and Zainab. I think about y’all all the time.”
“You can get out too, Khadijah. You don’t have to stay here.”
Her face changed. Something closed behind her eyes and she shook her head slow. “There’s so much you don’t know, baby. It’s not that simple for me. But I appreciate you saying it.”
I didn’t push. Whatever was keeping Khadijah in that house was deeper than money and I wasn’t going to solve it in a backyard visit. I hugged her again and told her I’d make sure that money kept coming and she thanked me and told me to get out of Baltimore because it wasn’t safe for me here.
“People talk,” she said. “And your father still has friends.”
We walked back through the house. Fatima was sitting in a chair in the living room with her arms crossed and a bruise forming on her cheek, staring at me with an expression that was half hatred and half heartbreak. As I passed her, I stopped and looked at her and she flinched. Pulled back in her chair like I was going to hit her again.
I didn’t say anything. I just let her flinch. Let her feel what it was like to be afraid of somebody you’re supposed to trust. She’d been watching my father do it to us for years and never said a word. Now she knew how it felt.
I walked out the front door and down the steps and was almost to the truck when I saw him.
Shamir Ali was walking up the sidewalk toward the building. Slow, hunched, twenty pounds lighter than the last time I’d seen him. His thawb hung off his frame and there was a thick, raised scar across the front of his throat where the tracheotomy had been. He was carrying a plastic bag from the corner store and when he saw me he stopped.
We looked at each other. He couldn’t speak. Whatever Prime had done to his windpipe had taken his voice permanently. But his eyes were the same. Dark, hard, full of that quiet menace that used to make me wet the bed as a child. He raised his free hand and pointed at me. One finger, extended, trembling slightly. A gesture that was supposed to mean something. A warning or acurse or whatever a broken old man thinks he can still deliver from a sidewalk.
“Fall back, boy,” Davis said from beside the truck. His hand was resting on his waistband casually but there was nothing casual about it.
