The Blue Between Sky and Water (12 page)
“Will you teach me, too?” Nur asked Khaled.
“You’ll learn to read Arabic in college, Nur,” Khaled said, and he pointed in the distance to a handsome young man tending to bees. “There’s your jiddo.” Nur’s heart swelled. It burst from her chest and flew. She chased after it, calling to the young beekeeper in the distance, “Jiddo, jiddo! Jiddo, jiddo! It’s me, Nur.”
She kept calling for him and felt a hand on hers. A woman with an accent called to her, “Oh, baby girl …” She looked around and saw Nzinga’s metallic blue gele first, then her kind face. There were beeps and lights and white walls. Tío Santiago was there, too.
They spoke, then he kissed Nur’s forehead. “You’re going to be all right, Nur.”
Doctors kept her two more days in the hospital to “make sure the infection has completely cleared.” It had been “pretty bad,” they said. She was a “lucky girl,” because the infection had gone from her tushie all the way into her “kidneys.” Her “vagina was bruised inside,” like someone had “done something to it.” Could she tell them “how that happened”?
She mustered an emphatic “No!” when they asked if her Tío Santiago had hurt her. “It was Sam!”
They didn’t make her tell everything. She was allowed to draw pictures to show what Sam had done to her. She thought she had to draw what she had done to Sam, too, so she did, and it made Nzinga cry.
Soon it was time to leave the hospital, with Nzinga once again in her life. This time, at the ripe age of nine, she refused to go until someone brought her secret book and Mahfouz, her bear. Nzinga got them. And on her first night in a new foster home, Nur snuggled with Mahfouz, staring at the cover of her book, contemplating the words
Jiddo and Me
, trying to remember the tenderness that had been. She thought of an old shoe and sensed inside her body there littered so many islands of crusted uncried tears. She looked at the still unopened book and put it aside. Nearly fifteen years would pass before Nur would open that book again, as she searched her memories for Tío Santiago, Jiddo, and a boy named Khaled with a streak of white hair.
More than two decades would pass before Teta Nazmiyeh finally heard the stories of Nur’s life. When Teta looked into those mismatched eyes, she felt as if time had folded on itself, and she gave glory to Allah. She said the most luminous light is found at the other end of darkness. And she said that Nzinga was one of us, that she would always have a home in Gaza.
Nzinga had been in the United States almost two years when she was assigned the case of a little girl named Nur whose sole guardian, her grandfather, was seriously ill. Her task was to secure temporary housing for the girl while she attempted reunification or placement with relatives.
The first time she met Mr. Mamdouh Baraka and his granddaughter at Charlotte Mercy Hospital, the old man said things to her like, “Thank you, my daughter,” and “Yes, my child.” It surprised her to hear an Arab man use African linguistic mores that make relatives of strangers. They spoke for a while, and when the little girl had gone out of the room, he gripped her hand, begging with all the force he could gather, “Please help my granddaughter get to our family in Gaza if I don’t make it out of here.” He showed her the paperwork and flight arrangements, and gave her the name of an old friend in California who could communicate with his sister in Gaza, since Nazmiyeh couldn’t speak English.
Nzinga looked at him, unsure of herself, and in the shadows trampling his face was the weight of exile’s untouchable loneliness. Specks of age pushed into skin, Muslim Palestinian skin, consigned to peripheries and inferiorities. Displacement had warped his soul and the possibility of leaving his granddaughter alone there deposited in his eyes a wild fear.
Nzinga saw it all and stayed at the hospital longer than she had planned. “I will do everything I can for Nur,” she said to the grandfather, “I promise you.”
When the sad day came and went, and Nzinga finally met Nur’s mother, she understood why Mamdouh had insisted that Nur be sent to her family in Gaza. The mother had little interest in her daughter, claiming to be financially unable to care for Nur, until Nzinga was obliged to inform her that Nur’s grandfather had a significant life insurance policy put into a trust fund for Nur’s sustenance and education.
Nzinga tried, but she could not make a compelling case for Nur to be sent to live with relatives in another country when her biological mother would take her. Besides, the state would not allow Nur’s travel outside of the United States as long as she was a ward of the court. There was nothing Nzinga could do but hand Nur over to her mother. And it pained Nzinga, even if it did not surprise her, that four years later, she was tasked, once again, with finding a home for Nur. After six temporary foster homes and six different schools over the course of two years, a permanent space opened up for Nur at a Southern Baptist children’s home in Thomasville, North Carolina, called Mills Home.
Nur had everything we wanted. We thought all Americans did. But for all the security and freedom and opportunity she had; for all the learning and good grades; for all the ways she excelled, Nur was the most devastated person we knew. There was no place in the world for her to be. She could be tolerated, maybe even accepted, as long as she was good. But when she wasn’t, she was sent away, abandoned. So she was always trying to be good, submissive, and she panicked when someone got upset with her. Life burrowed holes and tunnels in her. It filled her with an immense silence that grew teeth and claws that cut her from the inside.
Mills home was a campus of twenty “cottages” set up by the Southern Baptish Church. Each cottage had a set of “house parents” who cooked for ten to fifteen children.
Nur was twelve years old when Nzinga drove her there on a warm summer day. She noticed that Nzinga had put on weight since the last time she had seen her and she wanted to call her a fatty. She thought about all the mean things she could say to Nzinga. Something about her stupid braids, maybe. But words always got stuck in her throat. She could write them down later. On paper she could tell herself how much she hated Nzinga for moving her from one shitty foster home to another.
“Nur, I know there is terrible hurt inside of you,” Nzinga broke the cold silence. “And it didn’t help that it has taken so long to find a permanent placement for you.”
Placement. Nur was fluent in the jargon of Child Welfare. She was a case of “neglect and sexual abuse without possibility of reunification.” It had taken a lot of effort on Nzinga’s part to get that classification for Nur so she didn’t have to go back to live with her mother. But Nur wondered sometimes if that wouldn’t be better than bouncing from one school to another. Always being the new kid who either got bullied or who made friendships that were torn like paper in short order.
Before Nur went to her first foster home, Nzinga had given her a prayer mat with salat clothes. “Your grandfather wanted you to continue to pray as you did together and I gave your mama the mat and clothes he had entrusted to me,” Nzinga had said. “But I figure you never got it since I haven’t seen you pray like you used to in the hospital with your grandfather.”
Nur thanked her for the gift. But her new foster mother made it clear that hers was a Christian home and demanded Nur hand over the rolled up mat. Nur never got it back.
“I’ll get a requisition from the county to get you a new prayer mat and salat clothes,” Nzinga said the day she picked Nur up to take her to the second foster home. “I should have known better than to put you with that family. I’m sorry, Nur.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want a stupid prayer mat anyway,” Nur said.
The second foster home was a three-story row home in Charlotte, where six other foster children lived under the care of a kind elderly woman from Jamaica. She and Nzinga embraced when they arrived. Nur did not react or respond. She stared at whatever inanimate object she could find, a place for her eyes to sit and rest. Her foster mother was kind and Nur adapted to her new home, which started to feel like family. She made friends at her new school and soon began to thrive.
But eight months later, Nzinga arrived to move her once more. All the kids were being moved. Their foster mother’s trip to the hospital the day before had left her disabled from a stroke. None of the kids were allowed to visit her and Nur never saw her again. Just like that, family was formed and dismantled, forever.
The third through sixth foster homes were a blur, blending together into a single incident where some older kids pissed in a cup and poured it on her while she slept, then accused her of wetting the bed. Nur didn’t know how to retaliate. Everything inside of her, words, rage, humiliation, even joy would try to find a way out, but it all got stuck. In her throat, her belly, behind her eyes. Nothing made its way out. Clots of unuttered words and uncried tears formed and took root, spawning a silence that spread to all her parts, such that everything about her seemed quiet. She breathed and ate quietly. Her eyes were remote, without language. That’s how she was the first day she arrived at Mills Home. Mrs. Whitter, her new housemother, a desiccated white woman with exceptionally thin lips, was delighted, “Praise Jesus!” that the “first Muslim child on campus” had been delivered to them. “We love and accept everybody here,” she said.
Nur didn’t react. She plopped her sights on something insignificant and waited for the greetings, the introductions, the rule readings, the importance of God and Jesus in each cottage, the formalities of yet another “family,” to be over. And when Nzinga left, Nur didn’t say good-bye.
For the next six years, Nzinga would make the two-hour drive every six months to visit Nur. Only when Nur was fourteen years old did she realize that no other case worker did such a thing for any other kid on campus.
“Why do you always come? It’s not even your job,” Nur asked, taking a bite of her burger at a local diner where the two usually went on these visits.
Nzinga looked up from her plate, a penetrating smile in her eyes. “You’re right that I don’t have to come. Why do you think I come?”
“How the hell would I know!” Nur rolled her eyes.
“I already told you not to use curse words around me, little girl!” Nzinga snapped, but even such agitation or anger did not dimish the thing in her eyes that always seemed to smile at Nur.
“I’m sorry, Zingie.”
“I liked your grandfather and maybe I like you, too. When you’re nice and when you don’t use bad words, I like you more,” Nzinga said. “How are your grades?”
“Fine.”
“Yeah, I know,” Nzinga winked at her. “Mrs. Whitter said you were the best student they’ve had in their cottage.”
“Whatever,” Nur said, and Nzinga laughed.
Still laughing, Nzinga tucked her lips under her teeth, imitating Mrs. Whitter. “Praise Jesus!” And they both laughed.
“Laughter looks good on you,” Nzinga said. “That’s how you were when I first met you. The way you and your grandfather were together was probably one of the best love stories I’ve ever seen. Maybe that’s why you’re one of the few cases I can’t let go of.”
Nur looked down, moving food around on her plate. “I can hardly remember what he looks like,” she said. “He doesn’t even seem real. Like it was all a dream.”
“I know what it’s like to come from so much love and one day find yourself alone in strange places, without love to hold you together. I had five brothers and every one of them is gone.”
Nur smiled and said, “We’re cursed.” Nzinga smiled, too.
“That’s kinda how I feel, Nzinga. Like there’s nothing holding me together. Like I’m just made up of a bunch of pieces from different places and it’s all taped together and is gonna rip apart if I move too hard or talk too loud or something,” Nur said.
Nzinga reached across the table, gently lifting Nur’s chin and cradling her cheek in her palm. “You are not going to fall apart. You are more whole and sturdy than most people. Want me to tell you how I know?”
“How?”
“Because I have never met a fourteen-year-old who recognizes the details of their own feelings the way you do. And I have never met a fourteen-year-old who can put language to those feelings the way you just did. In fact, I don’t meet too many adults who can do that, either,” Nzinga said, narrowing her eyes and concentrating her brow. “Some day, you’re gonna make your own family, Nur. I hope you will find your way to the world in your grandfather’s heart. He wanted you to know Arabic and know your people in Palestine.”
Palestine seemed another planet to Nur. She barely remembered the Arabic she had known as a child. “Whatever,” she said.
That night, after Nzinga left, Nur asked Mrs. Whitter to retrieve her book from the cottage safe, but Mrs. Whitter knew nothing of it. She would later learn that Nzinga had rescued it from one of the last foster homes where other kids had gotten their hands on it, scribbling obscenities in it, crossing out Nur’s drawings. But for now, Nur thought she had lost it in the moving from one foster home to another, and she despaired. Mrs. Whitter said, “Whatever is wrong, just ask Jesus for help. He loves everybody. But he will love you more if you accept him as your savior.” Nur let those words fall on the floor behind her and she didn’t turn around to pick them up. She went into her room, turned off the light, and circled her body around memories wrapped in a blue ribbon, entitled
Jiddo and Me
. She thought of the letters to her mother that had gone unanswered, and it occurred to her that Nzinga was the nearest she had ever had to a mother.
She dreamed again that night—as she would repeatedly for years—of a river, a boy named Khaled with a white streak of hair, and a girl named Mariam with a wooden box of papers and pencils, who would greet her in Arabic: “
Salaam ya nur oyoon Mamdouh
.” Greetings, light of Mamdouh’s eyes. Nur would ask, in Arabic, what they were doing. “Learning language,” they would say. “Will you teach me?” Nur would ask. But the boy, Khaled, would shake his head sorrowfully, saying, “You must learn to blink first,” then he and Mariam would return to a conversation in Arabic that she could not understand. In the dream Nur would try to blink, but her eyes would dry out, and she would wake in panic.