For a week I have been imagining a new life with Fadia and Selim, envisioning the two of them established permanently in my apartment and half believing that the more clearly I see it the more likely it may become true. This is, I know, a particularly desperate variety of magical thinking. At first I picture us doing as Fadia suggested in her email, with no recommencement of our intimacy, but the longer she stays here I feel certain — I wish beyond logic or respect for whatever her own wishes might be — that she will look at me with greater affection, perhaps even love, and by such slow measures we will slip into being the family I confess to wanting since the moment she told me she was pregnant. So joined together in this way, as husband, wife, and child, all of the other issues, the problem of my uncertainty in the face of American law, must surely evaporate, for it would become clear to the authorities that Fadia poses no risk to anyone. Tracking her as I have been tracked, the intelligence agencies would see in her face and behavior that being related to Saif cannot possibly suggest anything about her own beliefs or loyalties.
As I stepped from the elevator I was aware of my own heartbeat, a vein pulsing in my foot, my hands gone cold. Fadia looked as she always has, a swirl of black coat, ivory scarf pulled up to cover her head, and there in her arms was our son, asleep, swaddled in white.
‘Your country, Jeremy,’ she sighed, rolling her eyes with a look of fatigue and exasperation. Without asking, she handed me Selim, who did not stir as she shifted him into my arms. He was plump without being fat, a healthy baby, his straight hair blond and yet dark at the roots, and on him I smelled that scent I had caught decades ago, during a warm spring day in Washington, DC, the aroma of an otherness that was at once strange and familiar, emanating from the boy who is now a man my age, a boy who, in my colander memory, might or might not have been called Amir, an Egyptian I assume later returned to his country, a boy from a good family like Fadia herself, a boy destined for public life as she herself might have been had she stayed. Who will Selim grow up to be? How, I thought in that moment, catching his scent, will I ever manage to let go of him? I will not do it willingly. I watched as Fadia managed the stroller and her suitcase, so practiced in her movements that I wondered if there had been other trips, to Paris or Cairo or who knew where else, trips that might have made the Department of Homeland Security look at her passport and wonder. What passports do they use? Egyptian? French? I still know nothing of such basic practicalities about her life.
‘My phone doesn’t seem to be working. Otherwise I would have called. I was interrogated for three hours at JFK. They took us into a little white room with no windows, and asked hundreds of questions, about my father and brother, about my uncle, what I was studying in Oxford, why I was coming here, how long I would be staying. At one point I didn’t think they were going to let me into the country, or, worse, I imagined we were going to disappear, or that Selim might be taken. For a moment I even considered you might have tipped off the authorities in advance, just to take him from me.’
‘I would never do that.’ But how simple a solution it would have been, I thought, to sacrifice Fadia for the sake of Selim.
‘No, I know that. I was exhausted and frightened. I told them I was coming to see you, that you were Selim’s father, but we weren’t married. I think they thought I was trying to stay here, and I said no, I showed the letter from College to prove I’m a full-time student, which seemed to satisfy them on that point at least. And a French passport is not without value, I guess. I demanded they let me phone the embassy and when they hesitated I started to panic and told them everything I know about Saif, which isn’t so much, although apparently he is on a list, maybe several different lists. I gathered this from the questions they were asking. So I decided total honesty would be more prudent than any hint of deception or resistance.’
‘I’m sorry it happened.’
‘Why? It isn’t your fault.’
‘That doesn’t stop me being sorry.’
She yawned and in the light of the elevator I saw how much the last six months have marked her. It was not just the flight, not even the work of motherhood, but perhaps the worry about how life is going to evolve in the coming years. There is a new quality carved into her face. The stone I once admired has become softer, more plastic, and the consciousness of death’s proximity, which in the past I thought I saw in her expression, has been textured by a more nuanced awareness of the precariousness of life, the life she and I produced, the life she must protect. Or so I imagined. At the door I handed Selim back to his mother, and as he left my arms I found my heart was everywhere, torn and scattered between them.
‘I bought a crib and put it in your room, although if you’d rather have separate rooms it’s easily managed. I want you to be comfortable.’
‘The same room is fine. He sleeps well. I won’t be disturbed.’
I asked if she wanted something to eat, but no, she had eaten on the plane, she wasn’t hungry, just a shower, she said, arranging our son on the mattress and already, swiftly, unpacking their things into the closet and chest of drawers. ‘Pick him up if he cries.’
Not presuming to touch her or do anything that might make her feel ill at ease, I nodded, moving aside to let her pass. Tomorrow I should at least offer to put them in a hotel. ‘No!’ I imagine her saying. ‘We want to be with you!’
As the water ran in the bathroom, I watched my boy’s chest rise and fall, his nostrils distend, contract, the eyelids flutter, a sigh push itself out of his mouth. How like me as a baby he looks, the same blond straight hair. Only the dark roots are different, and the subtle olive complexion. Will my son be an American? Is that a choice his mother would allow him to make? Or will he always be foreign in the country of his father?
Now I sit here, fireworks exploding all over the city, as my son and his mother sleep down the hall, the fulfillment of my most profound desire since leaving Oxford, and the source of a pain I did not anticipate, the gnawing of an even greater desire: never again to be parted from either of them.
~ ~ ~
When I wake on the first day of a new year, the morning of my son’s first birthday, Fadia is moving about in the kitchen, taking care to be quiet, opening cabinets, searching for something she cannot find, and then, in the distance, I hear the sharp cry of my son, the first time I have heard his voice since July, drawing me from bed and into the kitchen. Fadia sees me and smiles an apology, but this, I know, is what it means to live with a baby.
‘Shall I go?’ I offer.
‘No, it’s fine. I’m sorry I woke you. I was looking for the coffee.’
‘In the freezer.’
‘You shouldn’t freeze coffee. It ruins the flavor.’
‘Does it? I didn’t know. I won’t from now on.’
Fadia leaves the room as I make the coffee. A few minutes later she returns with Selim, who is awake and smiling.
‘He needed a change.’ Our son looks at me for an instant and then buries his head in Fadia’s hair. ‘Don’t be shy,’ she coos. ‘Who’s that? Remember? Is that papa? Can you say papa? He already says mama but I think he’s confused. I usually speak to him in French.’
I reach out to touch Selim’s hand but he pulls it away, tightening his fingers into a loose fist. If someone is watching us now, how banal they must think us, making coffee, changing diapers, getting to know each other once more. Surely the banality of our lives puts us above suspicion, or is banality no protection against algorithms and keyword searches and guilt by association?
We sit in the dining area, overlooking the street, which is still dark, not yet dawn.