The second time Naz nearly kills us, I choose to keep my eyes shut. Grand Lucy is teaching her how to drive in the dark, and I’ve come along in the backseat because Maa won’t be home for another hour, and Grand Lucy promised McFlurries. Naz told me before that Grand Lucy was an overanxious instructor—white-knuckling the window handle, jerking her knee up at stop signs—and at first, I was inclined to believe her. Grand Lucy spent her first decade here working in a factory that employed teenage migrants on the sly. She’s seen too many lobbed off appendages to trust a child behind heavy machinery.
Now that I’m in the car, though, I understand where she’s coming from. Naz steers like a getaway driver. Ten minutes in, bored, I thumb on the ceiling light, and she threatens murder. After that, I slide from the middle seat to the side, just in case. My sister could make a launch through the windshield look like an accident. When Grand Lucy notices, she reaches back and squeezes my leg without saying anything, so now we are conspirators. Allegiance shifts quickly around here.
It’s been warm the last few days, one of those rare stretches in March that actually lives up to the expectations of spring. The crags of blackened ice that have piled up over the winter are thawing down into small heaps, and brown meltwater has saturated the town. Naz is trying to get in some practice before the streets freeze again. Already, the nighttime chill is reclaiming its territory.
In the car, the heaters don’t quite reach the back, so the vinyl seat is still cold and stiff beneath my thighs. I puff on my window and frost retreats to its corners. With my eyes closed, I pay close attention to the vehicle’s movements, trying to see if I can map out town without looking. If I open my eyes and we are where I guessed, I win. I hold my breath, too, because I’ve been practicing for if I ever need to stay underwater awhile. The lack of oxygen helps, I think, sharpen my navigational skills.
A right, a long pause; the intersection by the Stewart’s. Lurching forward, then the sound of a blinker; turning toward the middle school—next year’s stomping grounds. Another five minutes going straight means we’re approaching the McDonald’s. A truck rumbles by. I keep my eyes shut until the timing is right and then open one eye to confirm.
I am met with headlights and Grand Lucy’s cries as we swerve sharply to avoid an oncoming eighteen-wheeler. Once we are safe and squarely in the right lane, Grand Lucy retracts her arm from where it has been flung across my sister’s lap and instructs Naz to pull over, to switch seats with her. Naz complies.
“I know that was bad,” she says quietly, once she is back on the passenger side.
“Are you trying to kill someone, Nazreen?”
I can’t see Grand Lucy from behind her seat, but I know from looking at my sister what face she’s pulling. I peer around to see the clock. The green dashes read 10:00. I say that I’m hungry, to diffuse the situation, and to remind them of the aforementioned McFlurries. Grand Lucy says that our mother will be home soon, that we should head back too. Then it’s quiet, save for the car groaning back onto the road. I twist around in my seatbelt for one last look. Out the rear window, the golden arches peer back with a luminous frown.
Dad was supposed to be the one to teach Naz how to drive. The question of why he is not here to do so is a contentious one in this family, but the simple answer is that he is competing on Survivor in order to win and bring home one million dollars to us. There’s not much we can know for sure, because the studio can’t have spoilers leak before the new season airs.
When we pull up to the house, the light is on inside. Our home is number seven from the left of nineteen row houses on the edge of town, dwellings that vary in color and material but almost nothing else. Each has two stories, three street-facing windows, one plot of land out front, sundered by a narrow walkway linking chain-link fence to door. Some neighbors have grass, others a garden, like us, and some just leave it to concrete. It takes me exactly four strides to cross the front yard. Our house is the color of butter and has an American flag out front, which Dad put up a couple years ago, after the Twin Towers, because everyone else was doing it. He kept it up because he thought it was important that we seem patriotic. Behind the block of houses is an empty lot, its asphalt cracked from the expansion of nearby tree roots. No one ventures through this barren wasteland but me, and occasionally Naz, if she’s in a good mood and agrees to come draw on the pavement. Beyond that is the Fahari Bazaar and the Polish deli. The owners sometimes visit if I’m in the lot for a long time, bringing samosas and pierogi in greasy paper bags, carefully stepping over the crests and divets in the ground. Maa says they hate each other, but they don’t talk about that with me.
Maa is on the phone when we walk into the kitchen. The troops are still silent and cheerless from the near-death experience. Seeing us, Maa tucks the phone under her chin and flicks off the whistling valve on the pressure cooker, waving us in and steam from the nozzle out. She says her goodbyes, I assume, to whoever is on the line—I don’t know enough Urdu to understand this particular phone conversation, and if Naz does, she doesn’t clue me in. She is angry, at herself for being a bad driver or maybe at Grand Lucy for not being Dad. When Maa reaches out to smooth her hair, she ducks and sulks to her room. She is a capricious ally, but Maa works late and Grand Lucy’s knees limit her. I need her.
“What’s wrong with her?” Maa asks. Hours spent standing at the cafeteria have made her body settle on top of itself, but her face, underneath the patina of wear, is still pretty like Naz’s, heart-shaped and apple-cheeked. She doesn’t understand my sister, doesn’t have the time or vocabulary, but she tries, which counts too.
Grand Lucy is standing with her back against the door. I haven’t decided if I’ve forgiven her for the milkshake yet, and I’m feeling sympathetic toward my sister. I wonder for a moment if Grand Lucy will betray us both tonight by telling Maa that Naz almost killed us, which will upset her, and by making empty dessert promises.
“She’ll be alright,” Grand Lucy says, sucking her teeth. “You know teenagers. It’s always scary to learn a new thing. Especially when you think you’re grown and know everything.” She winks at me, and I relax a bit. I don’t want Naz and Maa fighting.
Freed from my role as witness, I slink toward the couch and turn on the TV. It is late, past my bedtime, but they show Survivor reruns at midnight, and I still have the trauma of the eighteen-wheeler in my back pocket. The adults murmur about the day’s events for a few minutes in the kitchen, then Grand Lucy calls out her goodnights and heads home.
She lives down the street, in the fourteenth row house. I don’t know when we started calling her Grand Lucy, but she got Maa her job at the cafeteria in Albany before she retired, and now she helps us out with most other things too. She is of an ambiguous age and an ambiguous race, from an island in the Caribbean (we think) where it was harder to keep track of those things. She says “boy” like bai and “car” like ky-ar, and it sounds like she’s singing even when she’s not. Naz bets she’s under seventy-five and just a pale Black lady. I suspect she’s older, maybe even ancient, and sort of Indian, like the Guyanese kids are. Maa says she’s just American, which is her way of convincing herself that we are too.
On the TV, tribal grunts and drumming fade into song as the camera pans over a sloping, green island. Marquesas, season four. Maa comes in and sinks beside me on the sofa, sliding a bowl of dal and rice into my lap and tucking into her own.
“Which one is this?”
“Marquesas.”
“Marquesas?”
“French Polynesia. The one with Boston Rob.”
This jogs her memory.
“Oh, yes. Boston Rob. Very handsome.” Boston Rob is the best competitor the show’s ever had. He won most of the immunity challenges in his season, which was good, because everyone always wanted to eliminate him for being a bad worker back at camp and for being a threat. He’s Dad’s favorite too.
Maa doesn’t keep up with the show like us, but when she does, she catches on quickly and asks sensible questions. I can tell she is tired tonight because she leans her head back and keeps her eyes mostly closed, even when Boston Rob is on the screen, shirtless and running after a chicken. The sofa sags beneath her, mirroring its occupant.
“How was work?” I ask, as each tribe competes to remove stones weighing down a canoe on the ocean floor. The camera follows them beneath the water to a blue submarine world, where the tropical sun casts a wobbling net of light over everything.
“Fine, beta,” she says, her eyes still closed. She sighs. “They’re still having me clean the bacon grease from the griddle.”
Maa is a cook at the capital building in Albany, which seems to me, in general, like a very haram place to work. I give her hand a pat, which is dry and scaly from all the hot water. I sympathize, though I don’t totally understand. She capitulated on my and Naz’s diets a few years ago, after Naz launched a moving defense of the sausage McMuffin, which she had tried in secret with Dad, who had become less and less Muslim until finally, he decided, he was not Muslim at all. There were a lot of fights, and tears on Maa’s part. This was a game-changer for the family. Before that, we could only order Filet-O-Fish.
“Do you think Nazreen is OK?”
I shrug. Naz seems the same to me as always. I think that’s why she is confusing to the adults. Everyone was always warning them about what would happen to her when she got older in a country like this, without an extended family to rein her in. Boys, tank tops, alcohol, etc. They talked about it so much that I expected it too. But Naaz doesn’t care about any of those things. She cares about soccer and getting her license.
“I think it has been hard for her,” Maa starts, “with Papa.”
I hum noncommittally. I’m not taking any sides. The challenge is neck and neck, and because I can’t remember who wins, I’ve got to pay attention. Eventually, the Maraamu tribe pulls ahead, but they make the mistake of flipping the canoe underwater and then have to bail the water out. Because of that, the Rotu tribe wins and secures fishing gear as their reward. Maa lets me watch until the end of the episode, on the off chance that there’s a tie and they have to make fire to decide elimination. She knows that’s my favorite part. I have seen this season before, and I know that Forced Fire tiebreakers don’t happen until the final four, but Maa doesn’t. Forced Fire is always exciting because they only have flint, steel, coconut husks, and kindling, and the stakes are very high. Dad even gave me my own flint stone before he left, and I’ve been getting pretty good at making sparks.
When the episode ends, Maa shuts off the TV. Then she rests her head on the back of the couch and sort of winces.
I say, “I can talk to her tomorrow, if you want.”
Maa touches my cheek with her lizard hand.
“You’re a sweet boy,” she says, as she struggles against the couch’s gravity. Her kameez has gotten wedged between the cushions, and I help her pull it out. She stands and smooths the fabric, then limps down the hall, flicking off lights as she goes. “You can thank me for that.”
The next morning, I knock on Naz’s door.
“What do you want?” she says through the wall. It is a Saturday and Maa is at work, so Naz knows it must be me.
“I brought you toaster waffles,” I say.
The knob turns enough for the door to release, but she doesn’t open it for me. When I move inside, she’s already back on her bed, listening to her Walkman, sulking underneath a Buffy the Vampire Slayer poster. Naz likes to keep her room dark, but vertical slats of light are pushing through the blinds anyway, resting on her body and bed, casting her in a cell of shadows. I approach cautiously and toss her one disc of waffle, then sit cross-legged on her floor to eat my own.
“Thanks,” she says, picking at her food with chipped black nails. In the last year, she’s started wearing her hair short and choppy, with diagonal bangs that cover her eyebrows. Naz is four years older. She dresses weird now, but when we were little, we looked exactly alike, both of us boyish and girlish at the same time: long eyelashes; heavy brows; hairy arms; and strong, short legs. Dad used to call her the son he never had, even when I was right there, because she was better at soccer and carrying chairs and grocery bags, and because even as a baby, she refused to let Maa put kajal on her eyes.
When, the summer she turned thirteen, Naz’s face started morphing into a movie star’s, it was a shock to everyone, probably Naz most of all. Dad joked that she’d been replaced in the middle of the night, even though she still acted the same and liked all of the same things. Grand Lucy suggested that she start learning how to cook. Dad stopped talking to her about soccer and started talking to me about Survivor instead. I was happy for the attention, but after that, Naz really dug her heels in, wearing boys’ clothing, scowling with open contempt at men who stared on the street. Looking like a girl was probably the worst thing to ever happen to her. I wouldn’t want it to happen to me either.
“Maa wanted me to check on you,” I say, cautious.
Naz removes her foam headphones. “I’m fine,” she frowns.
I wait.
“Sorry I almost killed you and Grand Lucy.”
“That’s OK,” I say. She keeps her hands on the headset and looks at me, like she’s waiting for me to say something else before she can put them back on. I get the sense that she would be more open to talking if I were not standing in her room with the door open. “I’m going to draw in the lot, if you want to come.”
She takes another bite of waffle and nods. “Let me finish this track,” she says.
It’s cold again today, and the sky hangs low and colorless. I am standing over the trash can at the north-east corner of the lot, which, upon my request, has been filled with the paper recyclables of the Bazaar and the Polish deli. I shuck the pieces of flint between my cold, red hands, feeling at the brink of ingenuity.
“Hey!” Naz calls from the backdoor. I pocket the stones. “Do you have the chalk?”
I nod hard, so she can see from her perch. She trudges out, bangs in her eyes, hands in her sweatshirt sleeves. We convene at the usual spot and exchange sustenance and supplies (a handful of dates, a white brick of chalk). She doesn’t say anything else and I don’t pry—it doesn’t work, and I’ve got my own life to worry about anyway. I assign her the sky portion of this particular landscape, appointing myself the ground. We get to work.
Twenty minutes in, I can see the issue with our lack of communication. It’s generally understood that when we draw, we draw places far away, places from stories or science books: the tundra, the rainforest, Mount Olympus. I realize, as I work my way up to the forest canopy, that Naz has gone off-script. Wedged into our Amazon is a city’s bustling downtown.
I consider this. I am not the boss here, clearly, but this drawing doesn’t make a lot of sense, and the buildings give the whole place a dystopian bent. I try to broach the subject gently.
“Is that Albany?” I ask.
Naz looks up for the first time since we started, her eyes wide. Then she groans and moves like she’s in pain until she’s lying on her back, covering her face with her hands.
“Seriously, Saamer?” Her voice comes out muffled. “Fucking Albany?”
I pretend that her cursing doesn’t shock me, and scan the drawing again. There are no architectural markers to give it context, no Eiffel Tower or Taj Mahal. Just tall, rectangular buildings, with rows of little Ls making up the windows.
“What is it then?” I ask. I move around the side to see it from a different angle. The buildings are too tall and new to be Troy.
She replaces her hands with the back of her forearm, shielding her eyes from the white sky. “I don’t know,” she sighs. “Somewhere farther away than Albany. New York, maybe. I guess.”
“Oh,” I say. “Right.”
We’re quiet after that. I go back to sketching my flora and fauna. Then, I hear a sniff and realize that she’s crying.
“I just really need to get my license,” she says finally, pulling herself up by her torso, back to a seated position, releasing a few shaky exhales. “Sorry,” she mutters. She presses the heels of her palms into her eyes. “I don’t know why I’m crying.”
Now I am confused. I think of the week before Dad left for Survivor, when Maa started crying out of nowhere over a pot of rice. When I asked him about it later, on the couch, he wouldn’t get into it. By then he had stopped going to mosque in order to prepare. “Women are crazy, Saami,” he said. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”
In the lot, I offer up this notion to Naz; that she might be crying because she’s a woman now. “Women’s emotions are unstable,” I say, feeling very wise.
This gets her to put her hands down, but when she does, her eyes are red and rimmed with fury. A muscle jumps in her jaw. I sense I have made a mistake.
“What, did you get that from Dad?”
I don’t say anything, so as not to incriminate myself further. But she’s not done.
“You know he isn’t going to show up on Survivor, right? Let alone come back with a million dollars. You can stop playing along with his crazy fantasies. ”
I’m dumbstruck for a moment, not because of what she says, but how she says it. Getting older has made her cruel. She spits this out. She means for it to hurt me.
But she’s wrong.
I have proof, a secret I’ve been keeping for myself, polishing it in my head like a precious stone. I look at her, in her weepy, confused state, and consider sharing.
“He is,” I say. She opens her mouth, but before she can cut me off, I tell her. “I know he is because I filmed his audition video.” If we were to check, the MP4 would probably still be on the library’s desktop computer.
“He asked me to film it, before he left,” I say again, and her mouth shuts, then presses into a watery line.
It’s real, Dad in his best button-down shirt, standing in the front garden, the flag flapping dutifully behind him. We filmed it together on a Tuesday, when Maa still thought he was going in to work. I remember it as clearly as yesterday, the swell of pride I felt when I swore I wouldn’t tell, knowing we were a team here.
Instead of saying anything, Naz stands up and walks back into the house. I feel cold all of a sudden, so I tuck my hands underneath my knees. I’ll show her, I think. When she comes back, we can go to the library and she’ll see.
When Naz does eventually return, she’s holding a glossy magazine, rolled up into a tube.
“Here,” she says, smacking it on the ground in front of me. “This was in the nurse’s office at school.” She thumbs to a page that has been dog-eared. She reads the headline out loud, pointing out each word like a lawyer, and my eyes follow: “Meet This Season’s Survivor Contestants!”
My eyes scan down the page. There is a nurse practitioner from San Diego, a firefighter from Cambridge, an esthetician from Naples, and a guy with an Italian name from Chicago who could be Dad if you squinted. But there’s no Dad.
“He’s not some dumb hero, Saami,” says Naz. “He just couldn’t hack it.”
When I look up at her, there’s no triumph on her face, just some inscrutable sadness there, close to pity but not quite. I look at the page one more time, flipping to the back, just to be sure, tracing a finger over the Italian guy’s grainy headshot. Then I stand up and walk back to the house, slowly enough that Naz doesn’t get what’s happening until it’s too late.
On the show, all of the contestants are given one cup of rice per day, so that they don’t starve and they have enough energy to compete in the challenges. Aside from that, they have to forage, hunt, and fish. I have taken one container of old rice from the fridge. Given that there’s nothing to forage in Watervliet in winter, I have also taken a pint of leftover beef curry. One has to adapt readily to one’s circumstances, and I’m no amateur. I can hack it.
Also in my backpack: a blanket, four Eggo waffles, a brick of chalk, and a manila folder full of blank paper for kindling. I’m keeping the flint in my pocket, where it’s safer.
When I get to the top of our street, I have a decision to make. West, toward the mountains, or east toward the river. On Survivor, there’s usually one camp in each terrain. I try to think of which teams have historically done better. Mountains give you security; water, freedom. Both directions look cold and beige. My knowledge of tropical rainforests isn’t helping me here.
I go with the river, where the houses are still shabby, but closer together, more like ours than the sinking farmhouses on the other edge of town. There is a park wedged beneath the intersection of 787 and the 18th street bridge, which is the closest I’ll get to the wild on foot. When I arrive, there are a few people milling around—a group of teenagers drinking at a picnic table, a man dressed in many layers nodding off at the base of the bridge.
I settle on a patch of brown grass by the riverbank and assess. The ground is littered with Styrofoam cups and M&M wrappers, but along the path, the first crocuses are beginning to push out of the dirt. Across the river, a concrete parking garage looms, swallowing up the early evening light and giving nothing back.
My mind drifts to a scenario I think about a lot: The Family Visit episode of Survivor, when the producers fly out every contestant’s favorite person and they go running, jumping into their arms or lifting them up, depending on their size and enthusiasm. Sometimes, the family member even gets to compete in the challenge with them, like water basketball or balancing a coconut on a stick until someone collapses from exhaustion. Dad and I agreed that if either of us were ever on, we would fly the other one out, because Maa and Naz don’t know enough about the challenges and also because it would be the most fun.
The thought curdles into anger almost immediately, but my fury feels rudderless and small. How could they let this happen? Each of them deceiving me in their own way, indulging my delusions. I dream up revenge on Naz. I crush my eyes shut and pray that she never gets her driver’s license, that she’s stuck here forever, that she can never leave. It feels good for a minute, and then it feels like nothing.
I stand up and brush the twigs and pine needles off of my pants, letting my backpack go slack beside me. I peer over the sidewalk, down to the murky river, where small, muddy fish dart around a plastic clamshell container, trapped beneath a gloss of oil. On the show, someone like Boston Rob would go spearfishing or fashion a net out of palm fronds. I experimentally poke the water with a branch, and my catch disappears in a flash. We are not in Marquesas. These river fish are wiley and untrusting, with years of fear and chemicals embedded in their DNA. They vanish when they sense a shadow, back into the cloudy depths.
I settle back along the shore and inspect the contents of my backpack. It’s getting cold now, so I wiggle my toes inside my sneakers, testing for feeling. I puff up my cheeks and let the air escape slowly. The containers of rice and beef are already cooled, beaded with condensation. What now?
Inside the manila folder, the printer paper is crisp. On the tab, someone has scrawled something in Urdu. It could be a clue to Dad, but the Urdu looks like Maa’s handwriting, which means it probably just says “documents” or “permission slips.” I take out a few leaves and crumple them loosely, stuffing them in a nearby park grill. I scrape the edges of my flint together, forming tiny, jittery sparks that fizzle out before they even reach the grates. By the picnic tables, the cluster of teenagers grows louder as another one joins the fray. I can see that they have lighters, but I keep chipping away. Finally, a glint of heat strong enough to survive the leap jumps from my fingers to the paper. The papers alight, the flame licking high and burning fast without wood to stabilize it. Frantic, I grab some nearby twigs, and stuff them into the grate, arranging the larger sticks in a pyramid on top of the grill. The fire steadies. I breathe out a laugh and get up close to my creation, basking in its mighty, miniature heat. I feel like an inventor. I feel like a toaster waffle.
So taken am I by my own success, I don’t realize someone’s coming until I hear the footsteps right behind me. I grab one of the flaming sticks and whirl around, displaying it more than wielding it.
Naz looks back at me, her eyes flickering. She flinches a bit at the torch, but then she recovers. “The old ladies are pitching a fit,” she says, crossing her legs and neatly lowering herself to the ground. “We can’t have two runaways in this house.”
I return the branch to the grill and sit down next to her. I swallow and try to think of something to say. If possible, I would like to take this bravely.
Eventually, I go with: “I hate him.” It does not sound convincing, not even to me. I hadn’t realized holding on to the feeling would require real exertion. In the span of the walk to the river, my anger has lost its shape. Now I can practically hear it whizzing away from me, like air from a balloon that’s been untied. If Naz can hear it, too, she doesn’t say anything. She just stares out at the water, quiet and still.
We stay like this for a while, the two of us hip to hip as sunlight drifts up the landscape of Troy and then disappears altogether. Heat laps off of the grill in waves, and then in little spurts. I draw a dark tree on the sidewalk with the burnt end of a stick. Our fingers grow stiff from the cold. Across the river, down the bend, lives lie in wait for us, thrilling and dangerous.