The oxygen machine breathed for him in a rhythm I knew better than my own. Hiss, click, hiss. It sat on the carpet by the bed like a beige dog, and every time it clicked, the tube jumped a little on his chest.
I was where I always was, close in by his right ear, where the hair grew out white and stiff and he never let the barber touch it.
"Your son," I said. "You remember the road. You remember what you were doing the night he died."
He remembered. I felt it go through him, a small hitch under the ribs. Eighty-one years old, ninety-eight pounds, a catheter, and I could still find the soft place in one try. I'd had a lot of practice.
Samira sat in the plastic chair from the kitchen with the Quran open on her knees, reading in Arabic, low and steady. She was twenty-four and she read like her grandmother had, every letter given its full weight, no hurry. I had to lean in under it the way a man leans into rain. It pressed on me, and it made every word I put into his ear come out smaller.
"She's tired," I said. "Look at her. A year of this, of washing you and lifting you. She has a life. You're keeping her from it. You could just let go and stop being a burden. Nobody would blame you."
That one used to work on him. In the old days it would have had him staring at the ceiling for an hour.
His lips moved. Nothing came out.
"Twenty-two years of praying," I said. "Five times a day. Forehead on the floor. And look at you now, in a diaper in your own back bedroom, and He hasn't sent you anything but this. What was it for?"
Samira stopped reading. She'd seen his mouth.
"Jiddo?" She put her hand flat on his chest, over the tube. "Jiddo, I'm here."
His eyes opened. They were brown gone milky at the rims. They didn't look at her. They looked at the corner of the ceiling over the wardrobe, where the paint had bubbled in the storm of 2011, and something in them went very still.
I knew that stillness. I had spent eighty-one years trying to keep it out of him.
"Don't," I said. "Ibrahim. Don't."
He said in Arabic, clearly, the way he'd said it at the end of every prayer for twenty-two years: "I bear witness that there is no god but Allah, and I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah."
The machine clicked. Hiss.
Then it went on clicking for nobody.
Something came in through the ceiling.
The room filled from the top down, the way a glass fills from the bottom up, and what it filled with was nothing I was made to look at. It had no heat. It was cold and clean, like the air in a walk-in refrigerator, and it smelled of something green that had just been cut. My whole body turned away from it the way your hand jerks off a stove.
And then I was out.
I had never been out. Not once, not for a night. When he slept I slept in him, high up in the nose, where it's dark and warm and you can hear the blood. When he prayed I waited at the edge of the prayer, close, ready, for the moment his mind slid off the words and onto the electricity bill. When he washed his nose for prayer in the mornings, three times, snorting it out, I'd hang on and come back the moment he finished drying his face. Eighty-one years. You get used to a place.
Now I was in the corner by the door with the coats, and he was on the bed, and Samira was saying, "Jiddo, Jiddo," with her hand on his face.
I went back to him. I went back the way I always went, along the cheek to the nose.
The nose was closed.
The nostrils were open, a little crusted, the way they'd been all week, and there was still no way in. It was like walking into the glass door of a bank. I tried again. I tried the ear. The ear was closed too. The whole man was closed, top to bottom, like a shop with the grille down.
Samira put her forehead against his shoulder and made a sound I hadn't heard from her since she was two, the night they brought her to this house.
I remember the first time.
Ramallah, November 1944. A stone room with a charcoal brazier, and a midwife with forearms like a baker's. A woman screaming in the next room for her mother. And then a slick, purple, furious thing in a towel, the size of a loaf, with its fists up by its face.
I touched him first. That's the job. Every child born of Adam gets touched, and every one of them screams for it. He screamed like a kettle. The midwife laughed and said, "Listen to those lungs," and I settled in, high in the tiny nose, in a dark the size of a thimble, and I said the first thing I ever said to him.
I said, "Cry. They're not coming."
He cried. His mother came anyway. She took him on her chest and said a name into his ear, Allah's name, the call to prayer in Arabic, the whole thing, quietly, the way they did it then, and I sat very small and waited for her to finish.
I was patient. I was the only one in the world assigned to him, and I had his whole life.
Hala came at nine in the morning in a grey coat, with her phone already at her ear. Samira had called her at six. Hala had told her to call the funeral home and the imam, in that order, and then she'd driven down from Wayne in under twenty minutes.
"No, the washing's at the mosque," she said into the phone, in the hallway, with her keys still in her hand. "Today. Before the noon prayer. Yes."
She hadn't said anything at the door. She never had. She came into her father's house the way she came into anyone's house, wiping her feet and talking, and I liked her for it. It let me stay. I sat on the stairs and watched her stand in the bedroom doorway and not go in.
She looked at him for a long time.
"He looks small," she said.
"He was small," Samira said. She was sitting on the floor against the bed. "He's been small for a year. You didn't come."
"I came."
"On Sundays."
Hala didn't answer that. She went into the kitchen and filled the kettle and stood with her back to the room while it boiled. She took two mugs down, then a third, then stood looking at the third one.
It was his mug. Brown, chipped at the handle, PATERSON GREAT FALLS on the side in white. He took his tea in it with four sugars until the doctor said no, and then with four sugars when Samira wasn't looking. I used to sit in the steam from it. A thing like me has no business caring about tea, and I cared about that tea.
The doorbell went. The men from the funeral home, and behind them Imam Yasin, with his beard trimmed square.
"In the name of Allah," the imam said in Arabic, on the step, before he'd even crossed it. "Peace be upon this house."
It hit me like a shovel.
I went down the stairs and through the hall and out under the door the way water goes down a drain, and I fetched up on the front path by the dead geraniums, flat, with the cold of the morning coming up through me.
Through the window I could see them lifting him onto the gurney. Samira held the door. Hala held the third mug.
Someone was standing behind me on the path. I hadn't heard him come. He smelled of wet stone and photocopier toner, and he was holding a clipboard.
"Mansour?" he said, and checked it. "You're late for processing."