Merge in One Thousand Feet

After dinner, Leila and Ali trudged through the cold to a dive bar she’d liked in law school, on the outskirts of Ohio State’s campus. Two shots and she loosened up, asking Ali if all Egyptian people avoid talking about their feelings, or just her father. Ali laughed big and booming. The Fitbit guys with their Bud Lights and the old-timers in Carhartt jackets turned to stare.

Good, Leila thought, behold us. Leila was still reeling from the recent election, still crying herself to sleep watching old clips of the Obamas dance to “At Last.” She kissed Ali under the melted popsicle glow of the Christmas lights.

Her mother, a button-nosed blonde from Columbus, had warned her against Arab men. “They just want to suckle at their mother’s teats,” Lynn had said, explaining her ultimate incompatibility with Leila’s father, Nabil. But Ali was an enthusiastic lover. He tended to her nipples, sure, but he had also pulled up a photograph of his fiancée in Cairo when Leila asked to see her. The sweet girl’s face, encircled in a floral-print hijab, stared back at her as she came harder and longer than she thought possible with another person.

During that dreamscape week in late December, Ali spent four nights at Leila’s apartment. Between sex and episodes of NCIS, she mined him for information about Egypt. Ali spoke with a mournfulness, for a country that, he felt, was beyond hope. “Have you seen the traffic around Giza?” he said. “Democracy will never work there.”

Like a schoolgirl, Leila rushed to show what she knew. She had traveled to Egypt just once, when she was thirteen, with her father’s new family—Nabil’s second wife, Magda; Magda’s son from her own first marriage, the striking and lean Moustafa; and Leila’s baby half sister, Shireen, a fat potato topped with curls.

She told Ali about sitting in immovable traffic for hours in her aunt’s Peugeot along Alexandria’s corniche. All around them people in dusty pants swarmed, tapping the car hood with their hands as they passed, or pausing to try to sell them plastic junk.

Leila was sandwiched between Magda and Moustafa in the back seat, trying to ignore her stepbrother’s thigh smashed against hers, when her aunt decided enough. She swerved a U-turn onto the sidewalk, parting the cussing crowd. Magda gulped ya mommy, and Leila and Moustafa screamed, but her father, Nabil, in the front seat, stayed calm. He stuck his head out of the passenger window, instructing the pedestrians like a traffic guard. What Leila remembered most was her father’s voice—intimate and stern. She’d never seen him act with such ease.

▴ ▴ ▴

“Remember when Aunt Fairuz parted traffic?” Leila asked her father the Friday after Ali returned to Cairo, to marry his bride and to share what he’d learned about nuclear fusion with the Emirate company that had paid for his education. Leila heard the hard click of the turn signal of Nabil’s 1991 Mercedes S-Class, the car he had bought after passing his citizenship exam and that he cherished more than life itself.

Leila and Nabil spoke on the phone every Friday afternoon, when Leila’s law firm allowed employees to work from home, and their conversations typically timed out at ninety seconds. Hi habibti. How are you? Good. How are you? Alhamdullilah. You have money? Yes Baba. How’s Chicago? Koolo Tammam. All is good. He’d run out the clock offering praise to God for her health, his own health, her mother Lynn’s health, Magda’s health, her half sister Shireen’s health and the health of Moustafa, whom Nabil had come to consider his own son. Then they began the goodbye process, another thirty seconds. It wasn’t much. But it was enough for Leila to convince herself that Nabil loved her, in his own way.

Nabil, now in his seventies, did not remember his sister Fairuz and the swerve. “Crazy woman,” Nabil said. “Always making a ruckus.” Leila’s father clung to words like ruckus and good golly, the 1950s phrasing of the American movies of his youth. He laughed despite her irritation at his forgetting. The Garmin in Nabil’s car instructed a merge onto Lake Shore Drive. “Alrighty,” Nabil said, responding to the Garmin. “If you say so.” Leila’s mother, Lynn, liked to say she’d only feared for her life twice: giving birth to Leila and every time she was in the car with Nabil.

Leila spread out on her couch three hundred miles away in Columbus, the phone a slice of bologna between her ear and shoulder. “I remember,” her father said, lost in his own revelry. “She bumped Samir Sabri’s Mercedes in front of the Sporting Club. Crazy woman.”

“That must have been a different time,” Leila said. She asked Nabil what had happened.

He told her that the famous actor, Samir Sabri, had wanted to press charges against his sister. Fairuz had put up a fuss. I have four children. I have a good-for-nothing husband. Please Samir Sabri, spare me with God’s grace. The singer relented.

“He is a very good man,” Nabil said.

When he arrived at Friday prayers on the South Side of Chicago, Nabil apologetically told his daughter that he had to hang up. Leila checked the call length on her phone. Twelve minutes. A record.

▴ ▴ ▴

The next week, Leila came prepared. Most of her life, she had failed to find a vein from which conversation flowed with her father. How embarrassing, she kept thinking, that all this time she just had to come up with the right questions to ask. They needed to be direct, specific—just like the ones she asked when negotiating a contract for clients.

“How old was your mother when she married?”

“Sixteen,” Nabil said wistfully. “I’ll be darned.” He spoke of how he and his five siblings, each one year apart, howled in the American movie theater in Alexandria every Saturday. When he finally paused, Leila offered another question: “What was the name of your first girlfriend?”

“Rosa.”

“Who did she marry?”

“My cousin Lotfi.”

“Were you mad?”

“No,” Nabil said. “I love my cousin Lotfi.” Then Nabil began singing. Rosa, Oh Rosa, come find me by the garden.

Twenty-five minutes of call. The next week, after Nabil ran through his customary goodbyes and Leila hung up, Nabil called her right back.

“Hey kid,” he said. “Why don’t we go back sometime?” Leila was in her apartment, making a sign for the Women’s March in downtown Columbus. She hadn’t yet decided what to write. When Nabil suggested the trip, she dropped her Sharpie.

“I’d love that,” Leila said. She felt nervous, like maybe Nabil was calling her bluff. The last time Magda had called to invite her to Egypt, Leila had been sixteen and too invested in high school social dramas to leave for the summer. She’d said no, and they hadn’t asked again. When Leila hung up the phone, she wrote “Fifty-three percent of white women” and wondered if she should feel implicated or accusatory.

“Our interviews,” Nabil began to call them. Every Friday, a new list of questions prepared with the same rigor Leila would apply to one of her cases. Nabil spoke about jumping into the Mediterranean every afternoon, diving for sea urchin with his brother Reda, may God rest his soul. He told Leila about his twenties, falling asleep amid gunfire during the Six-Day War, throwing fishing line into the Suez Canal and taunting the Israelis across the water with insults and inquiries into their women. (“So beautiful.”) He said he had a small dog, named Katyusha, after a character in a Russian film, when he lived in the high-rise overlooking the Nile, right before he left for the states. There was a sweet, rambling tone to Nabil’s memories. Sometimes he’d go silent for a minute, traveling to a place far away.

“Wow kid,” he’d say. “You help me remember.”

▴ ▴ ▴

Months went by. In April, Leila planned a sixtieth wedding anniversary celebration for Pop and Dotty, her mother’s parents, at a barbecue restaurant in Germantown. Leila had begun taking notes during her weekly conversations with Nabil, compiling a rough chronology of his life. Every time she mentioned the Egypt trip, he promised he would ask Magda about their credit card points, about picking a date, when he got off the phone.

In June, Leila looked into taking an Arabic class at Ohio State. There was one for “heritage speakers,” second-generation children, but she read the description and knew she didn’t count. The other option was fusha, the Arabic of newspapers and politicians, of missives from the state. She mentioned this shyly to her father and he laughed. “You’ll sound like an undercover FBI,” he said.

She signed up for it anyway, without telling him. Summer came and went. During their calls, Leila would mention the cultural artifacts she learned in Arabic class to her father. Music by Om Kalthoum, movies by Yusuf Chahine. He responded with torrents of memory. After she completed her first level of fusha, in early September, she went out for shawarma with her classmates. She told them she was planning a trip to Misr with her father. When she talked to Nabil the next Friday, she brought it up with more force. Time to make it real. “Let’s book it this weekend,” she said.

Nabil urgently agreed. “The whole family must come. Moustafa, Shireen, everyone,” he said. Leila wasn’t opposed to this, but she wondered when this became imperative. The terms kept changing, and she feared her father was simply humoring her with a faraway trip to Egypt, forever on the horizon.

“This weekend then,” she said firmly, using her lawyer voice. “Let’s buy the tickets. Talk to them tonight and I’ll call you tomorrow.”

That Saturday morning, Leila dialed Nabil, nervous, but her father’s phone sent her straight to voicemail. She tried again. Same thing. On her third try, she left a message: Hi Baba. Let’s do this. I’m so excited. I love you.

The weekend passed, and he didn’t call her back. She panicked that she had pushed him too far, that she had spooked him somehow. On Monday, after working herself up into a frothy anger to cover her concern, she dialed Magda’s number. Magda was a doctor and divorcée herself, and over the decades, she had resignedly taken charge of her second husband’s life.

Magda clucked with excitement at Leila’s voice. “Is he okay?” Leila asked.

“Watching the news. Typical,” she said. “Did the dermatologist check your mole this year, habibti?”

“I’m worried,” Leila said, picking at her big toenail. “His phone is off.”

Magda laughed thickly. “He microwaved it,” she said. “He thought it was his Campbell’s Chunky.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s red. Same color as his phone case.”

Magda called out to Nabil in Egyptian Arabic Leila couldn’t parse. Nabil took the phone, cheery and without apology. Leila pushed down her anger. “Are you okay, Baba?” she asked.

“My cellular device,” Nabil said. “It sparked like you would not believe. Like fireworks.” She was alarmed by the comedy Magda and Nabil both seemed to see in the situation, and when she hung up, she sat on her couch staring into her carpet. She had forgotten to ask about the trip.

▴ ▴ ▴

In October, Leila and her mother fought about #MeToo. “Attention seeking,” Lynn groused. Lynn didn’t know Leila had been assaulted in college. They didn’t speak for over a month. During one of their calls, Nabil blurted out, “Why don’t you call your mother?” This prompted a furious line of questioning from Leila. It turned out all roads led back to Magda, who kept in touch with Lynn and prescribed her Z-Paks and Tretinoin cream, no questions asked. Lynn had confided in Magda, who had instructed Nabil to encourage a reconciliation. But Leila wouldn’t budge.

On her thirtieth birthday, the week before Thanksgiving, Leila waited by the phone for her mother’s call. Surely, enough was enough. By late afternoon, she still hadn’t heard from her. When Leila received a call from an unknown Chicago number, she thought, delusionally, maybe my mom is using someone else’s phone.

Magda greeted her with a flurry of praises to God, a happy birthday. “Your father has been enjoying your calls so much. Owee owee,” Magda said. “It’s all I hear about.” In a newly purchased notebook, Leila had begun recording his memories as close to verbatim as she could get them.

Leila picked at the skin around her thumbnail and teared up. “We’ve been talking about going to Egypt,” Leila said. “Maybe sometime next summer. Would you come?”

Magda clucked her tongue. “But summer is too hot.” It seemed this was the first time Magda had considered such a trip.

Leila pressed on. “Fall could work,” she said. “Or even winter. I want to see the village in Upper Egypt where Gido worked.”

“Wallahi they’ve ruined it,” Magda said, without making clear who the “they” was. “Those places don’t exist anymore.” Leila was beginning to understand why the trip hadn’t yet been booked.

“California will be much nicer,” Magda said. “Did you buy tickets yet?”

Leila didn’t know what she was talking about. “I told your father to tell you,” Magda said, exasperation in her voice. A cousin, Mohammed, unknown to Leila, was getting married in May.

Magda tilted away from the phone receiver and screamed out in Arabic. “It’s your daughter’s birthday, come say something.” Leila had just completed level two of fusha and could understand up to three words strung together. Nabil got on the phone, wished her happy birthday, and said he would pay for her ticket to San Diego. Her mother called an hour later, and Leila told Lynn about the trip.

“Magda’s a good influence on that man,” was all Lynn said. At least Leila and her mother were on speaking terms again.

▴ ▴ ▴

In May of 2018, Leila boarded her flight to San Diego with new resolve. Since she spoke to Magda, she had leaned harder into being half-Arab, whatever that meant, signing up for level three of fusha and changing her Instagram profile name to include the Arabic spelling of “Leila” and the evil-eye emoji. She was determined to go to Egypt to burnish her renewed sense of identity. A homecoming to a place she’d never known. She planned to persuade Magda, understanding she held all the power, and, in the event that failed, Moustafa and Shireen. The only people who held power over Magda were her own children, who she spoiled relentlessly. It had always been a bit off-putting to Leila and her mother, the fuss she placed on them, but now Leila could use it to her advantage.

She had not seen the Al-Hamedi family, including her father, since Moustafa’s wedding to Grace, a half-Jewish graphic designer, three years earlier. In the Naperville banquet hall, she had fantasized about Moustafa finding her in the coat closet, admitting he’d been in love with her for years. But he was all oblivious puppy dog. His son Parker was eight months old now.

At the San Diego airport, Leila met the family at the Hertz station and was immediately inundated with kisses. They’d gotten a Chevy Suburban for the weekend. The next day, on the way to the wedding, Leila sat in the middle between Moustafa and Shireen, while Grace fumbled in the third row with Parker’s car seat. Magda and Nabil, in a heavily beaded dress and tuxedo, were in front. Leila held her breath as Nabil switched lanes on Highway One without using his turn signal.

“Baba, pay attention,” Shireen said as she jolted forward, releasing a spicy cloud of hair product into the air. The day before, driving from the airport to the hotel, Nabil had already drawn the ire of several passing motorists for going too slow in the fast lane.

“He’s not used to this car,” Magda said, ending the conversation.

When they pulled into the parking lot, Shireen raised her eyebrows at Leila, as if to say thank God. Outside the banquet hall, two Egyptian men had set up a hookah smoking station with tufted chairs from the dining tables inside. When the two smoking men spotted Nabil, they shot up from their seats, kissing him on each cheek. One had tears in his eyes as he clutched Nabil’s face. In Arabic, they joked he’d gotten old, the remaining halo of hair on his head had gone white.

In the banquet hall, Nabil and Magda were swept up in the trills of the older Egyptians. The bride, a white woman, came from a military family, and it seemed as if half the men were in full uniform, hair cut to a glittering buzz. Grace and Moustafa disappeared to the restrooms to change Parker’s diaper. Shireen stuck close to Leila, linking their arms, as they settled under a speaker pumping Arabic pop music. Shireen asked Leila basic biographical questions while corkscrewing her tight curls around her forefinger, seeming a bit sheepish at not already knowing the answers. Shireen, twenty-three, had finished her second year of medical school. She was living at home, a good Egyptian daughter. Leila shimmied to the music, saying, “I was thinking about a trip to Egypt, maybe this winter.” Leila hated her own shaky voice, weak like a middle school loser asking to sit at the cool table. But she needed Shireen on her side.

Shireen bit the inside of her cheek. “I kind of hate it there,” she said. “Ever since I grew boobs I have to, like, get written permission from, like, four different uncles to cross the street.”

“Maybe we could do it our own way,” Leila insisted as she adjusted the digging strap of her dress. “We’re two adult women with professional degrees. They can’t be mad at us.”

“Unmarried professional women,” Shireen said, barking a laugh. Seeing Leila’s disappointment, Shireen softened. “Fuck it,” she said. “Let’s do it. I haven’t been since before Tahrir.”

Shireen asked Leila if she drank, and when Leila responded in the positive, Shireen raised her eyebrows devilishly and said, “Let’s go find some secret alcohol.” They found Grace in the back corner of the banquet hall, surrounded by the groom’s family members in line for the cash bar. Grace had a streak of pink in her dark hair and tattoos along her arm. When she saw Shireen, she downed the rest of her plastic cup of white wine and said, “It’s feeling very MAGA in here.”

▴ ▴ ▴

After a dull ceremony, save for men in uniform creating an arch of sabers down the aisle, the fun began. Ten minutes into cocktail hour, a line of men with silly red fez and drums strapped across their chests emerged with a belly dancer wearing a candelabra on her head. Leila hooted along with the rest of the Egyptian side of the wedding, eager to show her allegiance, and Nabil was the first to enter the dance circle. He won everybody over, shimmying with the belly dancer, who handed him a plastic cane to pump into the air. The crowd loved it, and even the most stoic among the groom’s side began clapping to the drums. Moustafa trilled into the air, cheering on his stepfather.

When the belly dancer pulled Leila into the dance circle, she fought off her self-consciousness and shimmied her hips in time with the dabke drum. The crowd clapped and hooted, which encouraged Leila, and she lost herself, for just a moment, in the music. When she exited the dance circle, flushed, she fell into Shireen and Moustafa, who squeezed her shoulder. Leila saw two men staring at her from across the circle, and she peered down to see the straps of her dress had fallen, revealing the satin cup of her bra. She readjusted her dress.

At dinner, Leila sat next to her stepbrother. “We can’t let it go this long again, sis,” Moustafa said.

“Would you want to go to Egypt?” she blurted out.

“Fuck yeah,” Moustafa said. He wiped up béchamel sauce with his last chunk of crusty salmon. “The boy’s got to know the motherland,” he said. Nabil, across the round table from Leila, swiped his bread directly in the butter dish and smiled at her.

“This winter,” Leila said, speaking louder. “We’re doing it. We’re going to Egypt. What do you think, Baba?”

“Absolutely,” Nabil said, a light entering his eyes. “I must see my sister.”

“Inshallah,” Magda said, as she expertly removed a tiny bone from her salmon filet with her fork and knife.

Everyone—Nabil, Shireen, Moustafa, and even Leila herself—murmured inshallah in response.

After coffee and tea, one of the staring men approached Leila and her father. He introduced himself first to Nabil, then to Leila. He asked after her hometown, her job, her ability to speak Arabic. When she said she did corporate real estate law, he said, “Oh la la” with a real French flair. Leila smiled, close-lipped, and he kissed her hand goodbye.

“These real Egyptians are so aggro,” Grace said, having watched the interaction. “One grabbed my butt right in front of Moose last time we were at one of these.”

Leila took three trips to the bathroom, scrolling on her phone in her stall, until finally it was time to leave. As they walked to the parking lot, Nabil took Leila’s arm in his. “Did you like him?” Nabil asked, pointing to the man who had introduced himself as Adnan. “He is interested in marriage.”

Shireen linked arms with Leila from behind. “Stop it, Baba,” she said.

Nabil put a hand on his chest, pure innocence. “This is how it’s done,” Nabil said. “It’s how I met your mother.”

“I thought you met at Kmart,” Leila said.

“He means my mother,” Moustafa explained. “Don’t you, Baba?” He patted Nabil on the back like a high school basketball coach.

Leila was aware of everybody watching her, but she couldn’t help herself. “I didn’t realize my being single bothered you so much,” she said coldly.

“Habibti,” Nabil said. “I want you taken care of.”

“I’m a lawyer,” Leila said. “I’m fine.”

“To be happy and to have children, that’s all,” Nabil said.

“What if I don’t want kids?” Leila said.

“Everybody wants kids,” he said, smiling his face into its most wrinkled form. Leila walked ahead of him to the car, to clear her head. She stood outside the Suburban, her forehead pressed against the window of the back seat. When Nabil arrived at the car, he squeezed Leila’s hand in his. Leila stood upright as Nabil opened the driver’s door, releasing a wave of new car fumes, and began fussing with his seat belt.

“Baba, I want to drive,” Shireen called out, standing behind Leila. Leila couldn’t help but think: big girl voice.

Magda clucked her tongue, tiptoeing to eye Shireen from the front passenger side of the SUV. “You’re not on the rental agreement,” Magda said as she heaved herself into her seat.

Grace, strapped with Parker and Moustafa in the way back, yelled, “I’d like it if you drove, Shireen.”

Magda ignored her. Shireen got into the car next to Leila. Nabil started the car, heavy cough of exhaust, and Magda patted him on the hand. Quiet, the Suburban exited the parking lot and turned onto the highway. Leila grew sleepy, her head falling onto her half sister’s shoulder.

Leila was deeply asleep when Grace’s scream jolted her awake. The Suburban, with all its awkward heft, was swerving hard left, avoiding a metal caterpillar of a truck honking its head off. Leila caught the truck driver’s exasperated face turned to them, one hand up in the air, as if to say the fuck is your problem. Parker launched into an incredible crying fit, zero to sixty.

Magda stared straight, onto the road ahead of them. And Nabil, for his part, drove as if the road was empty, calm and almost bored.

“We almost just died,” Grace screamed over Parker. Shireen sighed big and dramatic, and clutched Leila’s hand.

Grace stage-whispered to Moustafa, “I don’t want him driving Parker. His car seat isn’t even installed right.”

“We’re almost there,” Moustafa said, an edge in his voice that Leila had never heard before.

“Pull over,” Leila said, startling herself. “Now.”

Nabil didn’t react, but kept barreling ahead, past the praying mantis lights of the highway, casting rhythmic shadows as they tottered by.

“Khalas,” Leila said. “Enough.” Magda whispered something to Nabil in Arabic. “Khalas,” Magda said, almost mocking. “I didn’t realize you were serious.”

Leila undid her seat belt and leaned between her father and Magda. “I’m going to drive now, okay?”

Nabil pulled over to the shoulder and turned off the car. Shireen exited the car, clutching her biceps on the windy highway, so Leila could switch seats with her father. Nabil, mumbling to himself, stood from the driver’s seat, but his seat belt was still partially strapped, which pulled him backward like a windup doll and softened Leila’s anger.

“Let me, Baba,” she said, undoing his seat belt.

Once she was situated in the front, she did not turn to look at Magda. She flipped the ignition, adjusted the mirrors, restarted the directions on the Garmin, and drove with a meditative focus, keeping her hands on ten and two for the remainder of the eighteen-minute ride. Nabil hummed an old song from the back seat, and Shireen hushed him. “Parker’s trying to sleep,” she said. They rode in silence, save for the Garmin lady commanding her to merge in one thousand feet.

▴ ▴ ▴

The next morning, the family slowly gathered at the breakfast buffet. Leila arrived first, then Magda, who sat down with a spare plate of dry toast, a plastic yogurt, and a single slice of cantaloupe. “You are absolutely right,” Magda said, beginning in the middle of a conversation Leila didn’t understand.

“Excuse me?” asked Leila. She felt sheepish for the way she’d acted toward Magda the night before.

“I think we should go to Egypt,” Magda said, placing a hand on Leila’s. “Parker has never been. And Grace has only been once.” Leila didn’t remind her that she also had only been once. She sensed some strange penance was taking place, but tried not to dwell on it. Leila pressed the side of her fork into her hard scrambled eggs and pierced the weird mass with the tines. When Shireen and Moustafa arrived at their table, with their schizophrenic buffet plates, Magda announced the plan. They both reacted politely, and Leila felt the need to bolster Magda’s newfound commitment to the trip.

“We could cruise Luxor and Aswan too,” Leila offered sweetly.

Magda clapped her hands. “They’ve never been,” she said, excitedly. “Something new for everyone.” Magda and Leila were working together, and Leila’s heart flapped with exhilaration, a little fear. The power was on her side.

Shireen smiled at Leila and widened her big, almond eyes. “I’m down, but I don’t have those kind of vacation days until after I graduate.”

Leila’s heart sputtered out. Shireen was two years away from earning her medical degree. That would be, what, spring 2020, a lifetime away. Moustafa crunched down hard on a piece of buttered toast. “Perfect,” he said, sawdust spewing from his mouth. “Parker will be old enough to remember.”

“Inshallah,” Magda added. Nabil, who had joined the table around the discussion of the cruise, smiled and held Leila’s hand. “Fairuz,” he said. “My sister. Do you remember her?”

Leila, shuffling all of this new information in her head, decided she liked this arrangement. She could complete the Arabic courses available at Ohio State, get a conversation partner. In two years, she would be able to greet Fairuz in perfect Egyptian dialect.

▴ ▴ ▴

After the wedding, Leila maintained an active text thread with Shireen and Moustafa. Leila started it, nervously, after she saw a Buzzfeed list “You Know You Grew Up in an Arab Household if…” and she texted #12, the only item with which she felt she had definitive experience, related to the lawless driving patterns of Arabs in America. Moustafa and Shireen both sent back laughing crying emojis. They sent each other little memes about Middle Eastern parents, and Leila sent tourist videos she found of boutique Nile cruises, private charters from Luxor to Aswan on the cheap. With Moustafa and Shireen’s blessing, Leila eventually emailed the entire family, after speaking to a Cairene travel agent in her broken Arabic, saying she’d gotten a great group deal, they each needed to put down an $800 deposit. The summer and spring were too hot, so the trip, in fact, would have to be pushed back further. No one responded.

“They never check their email,” Shireen explained of her parents and half brother. Shireen offered to pester her family in Chicago, and collect the money from them. She said she’d send it in one big chunk to Leila, and three weeks later, she did.

The months, then years, passed. The text thread turned consistent, like white noise in the background of Leila’s life, and personal—cute video of Parker learning to walk; Shireen in her white coat, surrounded by medical school friends; the deed for the apartment Leila bought in downtown Columbus with her own money. Leila and her father still spoke on the phone, with less regularity—Nabil was repeating the same old stories of minor triumph with his brothers against schoolyard bullies—but another possibility unlocked when Leila asked her father to practice Arabic with her. She felt stupid that she hadn’t considered him a potential conversation partner before. Moomken enta bititikilimni Aaraby? Nabil, who had spent part of his childhood with his doctor father in the south of Egypt, which was counterintuitively called Upper Egypt, was surprisingly knowledgeable about regional dialect and etymology. Leila loved listening to him explain the pronunciations, the subtle sound differences between gamel, gammal, and gameel.

The pandemic came for them, as it did for everyone. The trip to Egypt, in Leila’s mind, was obviously off. She was too distracted by fussing over her mother, Pop, and Dotty in Columbus to dwell; everything seemed unreal anyway. But when Shireen organized a family Zoom meeting in April, Magda and Nabil both wondered why they couldn’t just go to Egypt. Shireen privately chatted Leila.

they fr go to the grocery store unmasked every day and i don’t know what to do they won’t stop hugging me after i come home from the LITERAL hospital its fcked

Leila felt duty bound to respect COVID restrictions. She had been among the most hardline for them at her law office, what would it look like if she flouted her convictions and posted a transatlantic trip? There was the option not to post, but after all this time, that was part of her fantasy: the photos. So Leila was firm: we can reschedule. I’ll get the deposit back from the Nile cruise. When Nabil lamented missing his sister, Magda interrupted to divulge all the relatives that had gone MAGA in Egypt. Fairuz, chiefly, among them. “Complete conspiracy theorist,” Magda said.

It took some finagling, but in August Leila received the refund for the chartered boat, which Leila dispersed to the family. No one, especially Leila, had to feel guilty about trips not made. It was a global crisis. Being a good person, for once, simply meant staying in place.

In September, on one of their standard calls, Nabil mentioned offhand that his sister Fairuz had died, two weeks before. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Leila asked.

“I didn’t want to upset you.”

“You’re upsetting me now.”

“See? I shouldn’t have told you,” Nabil said.

As the weather grew cold again, Leila became weird and mangy alone in her apartment. When she spoke to people, she could feel how rabid, how desperate she was for another person to absorb her voice.

▴ ▴ ▴

The week before her thirty-third birthday, Leila received a call from Shireen. “We have to tell him he can’t drive anymore.” Shireen sighed. “My mom is an enabler.” Nabil, she explained, had hit a pedestrian in the parking lot of a Culver’s. In the background, Leila could hear the digital whooshes and whistles of the hospital where Shireen worked, now as a resident. Leila and Shireen agreed they’d hold an intervention, in person, in Lake Forest, where the Al-Hamedi’s had lived since Nabil married Magda.

▴ ▴ ▴

Leila quarantined diligently for two weeks. On the drive up, she packed snacks and a paper plate of lemon squares, covered in aluminum foil, baked by Lynn. On I-65, Leila pulled over to pee in a cup, forgoing convenience in the name of protecting Magda and Nabil. When she walked into their house, they slobbered her with kisses and, if she flinched, they didn’t seem to notice or care.

Shireen, Magda explained, was still sleeping after an overnight shift at the hospital.

Magda and Leila sat at the kitchen table while Nabil shuffled around in his galabeya, preparing tea. “We’re being sued,” Magda said quietly, like she was gossiping about someone else. “This guy is claiming ‘psychological distress.’” Magda groused. “Yanni it’s phooey.”

“Where’s the car?” In the driveway was a Rav4, not the white Mercedes Leila had always associated so closely with her father.

“Totaled,” Magda said, even quieter now. “Don’t remind him.” Magda had stopped dyeing her hair, so her scalp shifted dramatically from white to black like a yin-yang, or a baby’s toy.

Nabil did not talk of the crash, though Leila saw the fading purple of a bruise on his right cheek. They sat and drank their milky tea and talked about whether Trump would leave office, about the vaccines arriving in pharmacies. Magda said she and Shireen already had theirs, medical workers. Shireen tumbled down the stairs in a big T-shirt and boxers, hugged Leila, and started whining about no one making her tea. Nabil kept cupping Leila’s face in his hands, remarking on her beauty, until Moustafa and Parker entered through the back porch, all big-little stomps and swishing plastic bags.

“Where’s Grace?” Leila asked.

As Moustafa opened a fruit pouch Magda said, “She’s taking some time for herself.” This was news to Leila, and her mind immediately traveled to her worst fantasies. Moustafa knocking on the door of her guest room late at night. Leila moving to Chicago to help raise Parker as her own, helping him navigate the tricky waters of half-Egyptian identity in ways Grace could never understand.

At dinner, they passed around trays of lamb and Tupperware of cheese, pickles, and old rice. Parker smacked his hands on his high chair as Magda shook a piece of meat in his face and said, lah-mah. He looked up at the ceiling, unresponsive. “Tah-rah-bay-za,” Magda tried again, pointing down at the table. Then Nabil said the word, tarabeza, in the same Frankenstein voice he used on Leila when she was young, back when her five-foot-five father seemed like a towering trunk of a man. The boy giggled, full of love. Magda tsked at her husband and tried again.

Leila pointed at the knife in her hand. “Sekena,” she said at Parker.

Everyone oohed and ahhed. “Very good,” Magda said, as if Leila were a toddler.

After dinner, Leila wandered around the kitchen island, not sure of what to do next, if there was any formality to the whole “intervention” proceedings. As Nabil washed the dishes, Shireen pulled on the hem of Leila’s shirt and whispered, “Now?”

Nabil, standing like a black bear over the sink, didn’t hear her. Magda, however, had stopped stacking Tupperware. “Eh da?”

Shireen pulled Leila into the laundry room. “Does Magda know?” Leila asked.

“I didn’t know how to bring it up,” Shireen said, staring at the pile of crumpled dryer sheet cardboard on the floor. Leila’s body went hot with the realization that she was expected to come in like a consultant and patch up this family.

“Don’t be mad at me,” Shireen said.

Leila pulled back her shoulders and stared down at the dryer lint detritus in a tiny waste basket. This was a foreign house, foreign to her. “Fine,” she said, and left Shireen standing in the laundry room.

They gathered in the living room. Leila sat on a wood-footed couch and Nabil in the Queen Victoria chair to her left. Once Moustafa put Parker to bed and joined them, Leila summoned her lawyer persona.

“Baba,” she said. It didn’t sound right.

She tried again. “Dad, we are worried about you.”

“Me?” he said, as if he’d just been awarded a medal of honor.

“We don’t think you should be driving anymore. Me and Shireen, I’m assuming Moustafa too,” Leila said while staring down at the glass coffee table.

Shireen interjected. “We don’t want you to drive at night.”

Moustafa agreed, looking at Magda as he spoke. “Or if you are going to drive at night, you need to call us to say where you are going and when you arrive.”

Leila glared at Shireen. What was she doing here? Magda turned to Nabil and said something in Arabic and then in English. She nodded at Leila and did not look at her other children. “They don’t want you to drive anymore,” she said. “It’s over. You need to listen. Listen to your daughter.”

Nabil rubbed his hands together and brought them to his lips. He blew air through his clasped fingers and said, “As you wish.”

He stood up and smiled at Leila. “I’m so happy you’re here, habibti.”

▴ ▴ ▴

The next morning Leila felt hungover, though she’d had nothing to drink the night before. Groggy, she descended to the kitchen where Magda and Nabil sat alone at the table. “Is there coffee?” she asked.

“You like your tea with milk,” Nabil said cheerily. “That’s right. I remember.”

Leila smiled. “Not now. I need coffee,” she said.

Magda clucked her tongue. “I will help you.” Magda walked to the basement, the sound of her traveling down the wooden steps shaking the house.

When she returned, she was carrying a black plastic Keurig machine. “I took it from my office,” Magda said proudly. Magda opened every drawer and cupboard in the kitchen, until she presented a single Keurig cup, dusty and stained, in the air like an Olympic torch.

By the grace of God, the Keurig didn’t work. It gurgled and hissed and squealed, it dribbled out dirty water and steamed, but it did not produce a full cup of coffee.

“I’ll go get some for you,” Nabil said, and he slipped on his sandals near the garage door and clutched Magda’s car keys off the wall hook. Leila looked for Magda’s eye, but Magda was picking crumbs off the kitchen table.

“I can drive,” Leila said. “I’m blocking you in anyway.”

She led her father to her car, a blue Chevrolet. Nabil studied the door handle.

“I’ll be darned. This is my first car too,” he said. “We all start with a Chevy.” She didn’t feel like correcting him. This was her fourth car, not a first at all, and she was pretty sure the first make of this car was in 2011. Leila made sure her father was seat belted and reversed out of the driveway in silence.

The roads in Lake Forest were winding and almost obscenely leafy. It had been a long time since Leila and Nabil were alone together, and Leila, without thinking, reverted to the questions about Egypt, his childhood.

“What did your brother Reda do in the army?” she asked.

Nabil turned to face her. “You know I had four brothers, right?” He recited the names, all of which she knew.

“Yes, but I am asking about Reda, specifically.”

“He was an air force commander,” he answered, returning his gaze to the road. After a beat he turned to her, as if a lightbulb had been turned on, and said, “You know I had four brothers, right?”

“On our trip,” Nabil said. “You can meet them.”

“What trip?”

“To Egypt?”

“Baba that was canceled,” she said, growing uneasy.

“I’ll be darned,” he said.

She didn’t add: And because they are fucking dead. She rolled her shoulders back and pressed them into her seat, inhaling the corn chip smell of her car, as if it could crowd out whatever she didn’t want inside of her. “Turn left here,” Nabil said, holding an invisible steering wheel of his own as she cut the car into the Starbucks parking lot.

In the Starbucks, Leila reminded Nabil to put on a mask, which he put on upside down and below his nose. Nabil poured three packets of sugar into his cup, spilling cream on the station and loudly humming the folk song playing through the speakers, one he surely didn’t know. Leila laughed despite herself. Here was this five foot five inches of a man who had borne witness to so much history, who had played his own small part in it, with a heart that still beat and a laugh that still boomed.

When Leila and Nabil moved to leave, a perky older woman with perfectly horizontal wrinkles on her forehead, as if drawn on her face by a geometry student, approached them in an N-95.

“Mr. Al Hamedi!” she yelled. “Didn’t I tell you to remove your fallen trees from my yard last week?” She smiled at Leila and laughed with a manic intensity.

Her father looked around himself. “This is my daughter,” he said.

Leila smiled and extended her hand. “Lovely,” the woman said. “Oh, I’m just kidding about the trees. How’s Magda? How are you?”

“This is my daughter,” Nabil said again. This time it was him grinning like a maniac. The woman extended her hand to Leila and said, “I love your father. Love.”

“Same,” Leila said.

“He’s always going on walks around the neighborhood, asking where the ice cream is,” the woman laughed, then she steeled her shoulders, made her hands into fists, and mime-walked with purpose. She removed her mask and adopted a bad accent and said, “Oh, oh excuse me, excuse me, do you know where the ice-cream truck is.”

Leila laughed and regretted it immediately, like she was making fun of her father.

The woman hit Leila’s chest with her gloves and smiled. “I’ve got to get this latte to Mark, or he’s liable to divorce me! You two take care now.” She rushed away and climbed into her large SUV. After she backed out of her spot, she rolled down the window and said, “Love your father. Bye, Mr. Hamedi.”

As they watched her turn out of the parking lot, Nabil turned to Leila. “Is she a friend of yours?”

Leila didn’t answer. “What are you talking about?”

“That lady,” her father said. “Who is she?” He looked concerned, like someone receiving bad news. “Doesn’t she work with your mother?”

“Magda?”

“Yes, Magda.”

Leila finally understood. What Magda was not telling her. Nabil, always forgetful, had slid into another realm. Leila’s throat swelled as she realized, this, right now, was the best it would ever be.

“Yeah,” Leila said, unable to look at her father. “That must be it.”

They walked through the parking lot, Leila carrying their tray of drinks. She was determined to not be afraid. “Yeah, that must be it,” she repeated, though Nabil had stopped listening. When Leila clicked her car unlocked, she handed the keys to her father, and asked him to drive her home. This was her family, and, for once, she was going to act like it.