Read Online Something Like Beautiful by asha bandele - Free Book Online Page B

that have somehow spun into a decade—and a child—I have agreed to fight alongside him, stand up for him and with him to anyone, anything. I will push back, pull forward, keep the faith even on the days when the faith wasn’t keeping me. After all that work, how could this be our here andnow? Rashid under a deportation order and there can be no hearing to say, But I have children in this country, a brand-new baby, a wife. No provision in the law for that, for Nisa, for me.
    I am thinking these things as Rashid talks to me and I am thinking, bitterly, He sold me a lie. And that anger will sit there, it will grow tumorlike and malignant for years until it occurs to me that we all do it—that I do it—the same thing. It occurs to me one evening when I am selling Nisa the dream she most wants. It’s my negotiation tactic with her: I need to write and she needs attention, she needs to make noise.
    When she tells me, as she does most evenings, “Mommy, I need to jump and when I jump this sound has to come out,” I know she is not lying, my wild-as-the-wind Aries girl, my tiny, magical dragon. She came into this world with so much of her personality already affixed. Early in my pregnancy when I went for a sonogram that normally takes about fifteen minutes, it became a two-day trek back and forth to the hospital for me and an ordeal for the technician, who sighed, exasperated, “She just won’t stay still.” Nisa in the womb was already who she was destined to be. That I know.
    Which is another reason why I try more often than not to negotiate with her rather than yell at her to be quiet. On many a night, many a day, you can hear me and I am saying to her that Mommy is trying to figure it all out: how to buy her house, a home with more than one floor, a backyard big enough to put a swing set in. And, of course, this biggest of all promises: her very own puppy. I tell Nisa to trust me, I’m trying. I tell her if we work together as a team, we can make them happen, the dreams we have for ourselves.
    That’s when it occurs to me that I am doing to my baby what was done to me: the offering up of the idea of a life, a bigger life, a life outsize in its proportion of joy, if only she has faith, hope, an impossible sort of patience and perseverance, even on this one brilliant summer weekend when I am writing and she is holed up in the house. And as I settle into this practice, this practice of negotiating in what I would only consider good faith, I finally get it, finally I realize what Rashid did with me.
    He asked me to hold on, to hold out for a dream he thought he could really make happen. He’d asked me before and then again, that July fifteenth: “Just hang in there, baby. I am going to fix it. I promise you. I promise you.” I said okay. I said I would, but there was nothing inside of me that allowed me to make a rational decision in the wake of that news. In the wake of disaster, we may say anything to send it all away—the unfolding reality before us. But a few days out, shock and denial turned to anger and it would be years before it diffused. Years and years.
    At first I said OK. I said I could endure it, fight it with him. I mean, what else had I ever done? But then I found I couldn’t even say the word, the terrible, brutal, life-altering word, deportation, without my throat, my stomach tightening, without feeling as though I might lose my ability to breathe right then, right there. When he called in the days just after, I changed my tone, though slightly. All I could say to Rashid, all I could say to myself was this: I can’t. Can’t talk, can’t think, can’t plan, can’t stay, can’t run. I can’t believe. That was the bottom line. I couldn’t believe. I did not say that aloud though. Not to him. Not to myself.
    When I was able to lurch toward some level of engagementwith Rashid, then all I could say was, I’m tired.