Summary: Children believe the world is innocent and just, that good people prosper and the evil are punished, and death is a rumor that has yet to be proven true. This was the day Beryl was no longer a child.
Warnings: Deals with heavy themes (death, racism, islamophobia). If you feel any of them haven’t been dealt with appropriately, please tell me.
She doesn’t remember much about the day it happened.
She remembers she was ten.
She remembers coming home from school with Jade, the two walking in on an eerily quiet home that looked nothing like theirs.
She remembers her father, silent and composed, pulling them aside and doing his best to explain why the world seemed to hate them.
She remembers her sister yelling, running up the stairs, locking herself in her room and ignoring the pounding of tiny fists on her door, the pleas of a ten year old just trying to hold onto something concrete and feeling more and more alone.
But most of all, she remembers her mother.
She remembers walking into the bedroom, the curtains drawn and everything in shadows, a hunched wisp of a woman sitting on the edge of the bed, looking like her mother but smaller, broken. She remembers calling out softly, only to get no response, only to watch the sobs shake what was left of her mother as she clutched an old photo of two sisters growing up together in a world of conflict and complication. She remembers her mother’s tears, never ending but remaining silent, even as she repeated her lost sister’s name over and over because that was all that was left.
The police came. Beryl hated all of them, from the way they brushed past her, to the way they rolled their eyes at her parents’ sorrow. She overheard them talking on the patio; it was the first time she had heard the word “terrorist”, and she would grow to get used to the word like one gets used to a broken leg, trying to move on but always crawling with it, wanting nothing more than to rip it off.
Jade still wasn’t talking to her. Her father did his best to soothe her, but he had to hold her mother. Her mother only spoke in whispers, and still clutched the old photo, tracing the outline of Esther’s young face, a bright smile that didn’t seem possible to extinguish.
She saw the photos. When no one was looking, and because she wanted answers and she wanted to be an adult (even if it meant growing up too quickly), she stood on her tip-toes and looked at the crime scene photographs splayed across the kitchen counter. Her legs grew weak and her stomach flipped and her vision blurred because she had never seen such violence, such hate, such wickedness.
She ran and vomited in the upstairs bathroom, and locked herself in and cried for an hour, covering her ears because she didn’t want to hear the officers downstairs anymore, didn’t want to hear the ugly words that were entering her life and would never quite leave, tainting memories with murder and laughter with hate crime and success with terrorist.
And she came back out only to sit in her room and curl up in her bed wondering why the world was allowed to be so cruel.
This was when she learned about “passing”, about “looking white”.
They were forced upon her by Jade, when she finally opened her bedroom door only to yell at the small girl in front of her, her rage needing an escape and finding no better target.
Beryl remembers flinching and crying and shaking her head, denying things she didn’t quite understand but knew she wanted no part of.
“You don’t get it,” Jade had shrieked, throwing a pillow and her own tears escaping, “You’ll never get it because you aren’t like mom or me. You don’t look like us. You don’t have to skip school because you’re afraid that you’re next, that they’re going to come after you just like they did with Aunt Esther!”
They cried, chasms separating them. She had run out of the room, ignoring her older sister’s cries to come back, her pleas for apology, her realizations that she was just an angry girl looking to hurt something or someone as much as she had been hurt.
And Beryl spent the night staring at herself in the mirror and hating everything about her reflection, and hating her father for his genes, and hating herself for thinking she could ever understand the pain, and hating, hating, hating.
Her mother started wearing hijab.
The first morning she came downstairs in it, they said nothing.
“Esther was robbed of the days she got to wear it,” she whispered.
That was all that was needed on the matter.
She remembers when the door to her room opened and her older sister stood, hunched and apologetic and regretful. And she let her in and they held each other and cried, saying sorry and trying to apologize for the things that were and weren’t in their control.
The funeral had to be a small service, an American service, and her family despised every inch of it because this was a country that had proved the power of hate, but they held their tongues and released their tears because they couldn’t risk defiance so close to a death.
Her father held her, her sister sheltered her, but it was her mother who taught her.
She watched her, small but proud, broken but rebuilt, place a hand on the tombstone when all was said and done. And she knelt, whispering promises to her sister’s spirit, and she shed one last tear as she placed a hand on the dirt in a final farewell. When she stood once more, she was taller, and gone was her suffering as she turned to her children and embraced them with so much love that they could forget about the hate that brought them to this moment.
She began reading, her sister began boxing, and with their parents guiding them, they began healing.
“They tried to take her away,” her mother whispered as she held her after another night of nightmares, “They tried to take away our safety, our trust, our hope. But we know the truth.”
And so she created the truth of having a sister to confide in, learned the truth of loving oneself as the best way to combat others’ hate, and praised the truths of acceptance and forgiveness.
They never caught who did it, but then they never really tried, and sometimes she wonders if it was because of the shade of their skin or her mother’s accent or her aunt’s religion. But she knows one thing, one concrete, undeniable fact about “the day” as she has come to call it.
