Samira took the tie out of her coat pocket and laid it on the Healer's table, flat, the way you'd lay out something at a shop counter for a man to look at.
It was the Friday tie. Navy, with a small grey stripe, gone shiny at the knot from twenty years of the same knot. I knew the stain on the back of the wide end. Hummus, 2019, the day the shop closed.
The Healer turned the lamp off. There was one candle left, and the cone of incense smoking in its dish, and the velvet curtain behind me with the noise of Lakeview Avenue coming through it, a bus braking, somebody laughing at a phone. It was a little after seven. The sun had been down forty minutes and I felt it the way you feel a weight come off your chest. At night I was nearly what I used to be.
The two helpers sat on the radiator. The one in the bomber jacket held a pen light over my script so I could read it in the dark, which was kind of him, or else he wanted to watch me read.
Samira closed her eyes. Her lips moved, and I knew the shape before it came out. She began everything with the Name. She'd begun her driving test with it.
"Don't," the Kid said in her ear. "Don't say anything. You'll scare him off. They're shy when they're new."
She closed her mouth on it.
"Grandfather," the Healer said, to the ceiling, in a deep, slow voice that wasn't the one he'd used about the money. "Your granddaughter is here. Speak to her."
Separation had typed eleven lines for me, with stage directions in brackets: (Let her cry.) (Do not answer questions about the funeral.) (If she says the Name, stop and wait.) Somebody there had done this before, a lot.
I looked at the first line. I'd read it forty times in the toilet block. I knew how he'd say it. I knew the breath he took before a hard sentence, a little catch at the top, like a man stepping off a curb in the dark.
"Samira," I said, from the corner by the curtain, in his voice. "The prayers are hurting me."
She made a sound that wasn't a word. Her hands went flat on the table on either side of the tie.
"Jiddo?"
"When you read over me it burns. Every night you read and it burns." That was line two. Line three: "Stop reading for me, my darling. Let me rest."
"I didn't know." She was crying already. She cried the way she did everything, straight at it, without wiping her face. "I didn't know, Jiddo, they told me it helps, the imam said it helps."
"The imam doesn't know what it's like here."
"What is it like?"
That wasn't on the page. The one in the bomber jacket ran his pen light down the script, found nothing, and shrugged at me. So I gave her the next line anyway, as if it were an answer.
"Come back next Thursday. I'll be stronger next Thursday."
The Healer, who had heard only that there would be another sitting, smiled at the ceiling.
The Kid laughed in her ear, a short wet sound. The woman in the nurse's tunic nodded at me, the way you nod at a waiter who's brought the right dish.
She was seven the first time she prayed beside him, in 2009, in the front room on Twentieth Avenue, on the green mat that faced the corner with the radiator. That was where Mecca was from Paterson, more or less, if you trusted the compass on Ibrahim's phone, which he did.
"Do what I do," he told her. "Only what I do. Don't look at me, look at the floor."
She looked at him the whole time. She stood a little behind his right shoulder in a white scarf of Nadia's that came down past her knees, and when he bowed she bowed a second late, and when he went down to the floor she went down so fast she bumped her forehead and said ow.
I was in the hall. That's where I waited when he prayed in those years, out past the edge of it, by the coats. I'd tried. In the first months after 2004 I'd tried every prayer. The shop, the bills, the noise from the street, the itch on his calf. By 2009 he'd got so I had about as much purchase on him in prayer as a fly on a window.
So I stood in the hall and counted the coat hooks, which were six. I'd counted them before. Nadia stood in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel and watched the two of them, and she was smiling with her whole face, and she didn't come in, because she didn't want Samira to stop.
He recited the opening chapter in Arabic, slowly, a word at a time, so the child could follow. She followed about one word in three and filled the rest with humming.
When it was over she sat back on her heels with the scarf all crooked.
"Jiddo, where does it go?"
"Where does what go?"
"The praying. When you finish."
He took her chin in his hand and straightened the scarf with the other, pinning it under her jaw the way he'd pin a hem.
"To Allah," he said. "Where else would it go?"
I took the coat hooks from the left, the second time. Still six.
Page two of the script had a paper clip on it. Somebody at Separation had circled one line in red, and in the margin, in Mr. Harrow's round hand, it said: PAID FOR. USE IT.
I knew the line. I'd sold it to him. I'd told him about March, and the three in the morning, and the plastic chair, and what she'd said with her face in her hands when she thought the old man was asleep. He'd given me a good price.
"Samira," I said. "I heard you. That night in March. You said you wanted it to be over."
She stopped breathing. I watched it happen. The candle didn't move and she didn't move, and the Kid in her ear went so still I could hear the dryers at the laundromat in my head, miles off, turning.
"I forgive you, my darling," I said. "For wishing I would die."
She put her face down on the tie. Her shoulders went, and no sound came, and the woman in the tunic wrote something on a little pad.
I felt it land. In the old days, when a whisper went home in Ibrahim, I felt him give under it, the way a floorboard gives. This was the same give. I had missed it for twenty-two years, and I was glad to have it back, and I'm not going to pretend I wasn't.
Next on the script was the boy.
"Tariq isn't right for you," I said. "I never told you. I didn't like him."
I said it well. Tariq was a decent boy with a maths degree who called Ibrahim sir and fixed the Wi-Fi, and I made him sound like a man who'd sell her car.
Then I added a thing that wasn't on any page. A good forgery needs one true stitch. That's what I told myself.
"You tie it too tight," I said. "You always did. The first time you were thirteen. Eleven at night, the week your grandmother died, with your phone propped on the sink, playing a man from Ohio tying his. You made me stand still for an hour. You said, 'Don't breathe, Jiddo.' And I didn't."
The man in the bomber jacket clicked his pen light off and on. The Kid said, "What's that? That's not in it. What is that?"
Samira lifted her head off the tie. Her face was wet and blotched and twenty-four years old, and she looked at the corner where I was, straight at it, though she couldn't see anything there but the curtain.
"Jiddo," she said. "Are you in pain?"
I knew the answer on the page. I'd read it in the toilet block forty times. Line eleven: "Yes, every time you pray."
I opened my mouth to say it, and heard myself, in his voice, say, "No."