December 2018
Nur’s two weeks are nearly up, and he still hasn’t said it. It’s the day before he has to go back, returning to a question that he will not know how to answer.
There can only be one answer.
He is sitting at the top of the stairs, and it is nearly midnight; his parents are in the living room, waiting for the fireworks to start. He’d said he was going to get his phone. That was ten minutes ago. In a few minutes, the celebrations will begin.
Ever since he can remember, his family has sat in front of their TV together on New Year’s Eve, counted down to midnight, and watched the fireworks in London. Every single year. Nur has offered to take his entire family to London before, to pay for the train tickets and the hotel, let them see in real life what they have so often watched through a screen, but each time they have refused, saying it is too much money. His mother reminds him she does not like to travel on trains, his father asking what they will get from watching it in real life that they won’t get from the TV, his brother saying thanks but he’d rather stay in, his sister saying she doesn’t mind, and so he doesn’t offer anymore. If he’s being honest, there is something about watching together, about sitting there, year after year at home, that even he likes.
But he wishes he had offered again this year. He wishes they had taken him up on it, said yes, so that he could lie when he got back after the break, say he had no time to talk, that he had taken his family to London to see the fireworks, that he’d always wanted to take them, that this was the first time they’d said yes and he couldn’t disrupt that by telling them his news.
Maybe that would have worked.
Maybe it wouldn’t.
“Nur!” comes a shout from the living room. His mother’s voice, urgent. “It’s about to begin! Come down!” Nur loves how she gets so excited about something that could so easily become mundane to other people, the same year in, year out. He loves that she makes them all sit there, her husband and their three children, in a family tradition crafted from something that only she truly enjoys.
Nur walks down the stairs, making sure to step on every creak and warp in the floorboards, learned from all his years living here, to make as much noise as possible. His phone is in his pocket, heavy against his leg.
He walks into the room, three minutes left. Khalil, his younger brother, is on the floor, sitting with his back against the wall. His younger sister, Mariam, is on the sofa, phone on her stomach as she lies there, watching blankly.
As always, Nani is in the other room, asleep, her light snoring a familiar background noise for them. Every year, they invite her, and every year she comes demanding to know why she is here, saying this is not her new year, that she only celebrates the Islamic New Year. And every year, she falls asleep long before midnight.
His mother, Hina, pats the seat on the sofa next to her, and Nur takes it, his father, Mahmoud, on the other side of him, and all sat there like that, they might strike an onlooker as the right kind of family. The right kind of brown family who have stayed up to watch the fireworks, waiting to see the celebration of the end of one Western year and the ringing in of a new one.
The tightness in Nur’s chest grows as he watches the screen. It has been there ever since he stepped off the train onto the platform, Uber already ordered, driven home by a stranger who looked too much like his father, keys shaking slightly as he twisted them to open the front door. There when he hugged his parents in the hall, pushed Khalil affectionately, ruffled Mariam’s hair, laughing at the way she scrunched up her face in response. Each night at home, he has gone to bed with this tightness pinning him down, like his lungs can’t pull in enough air.
He almost wishes that there were something wrong with him, that he might have to go to the hospital after fainting somewhere, delivered to sterile white corridors, be told there are cancerous cells swarming his body. Maybe then everything would be okay, because his secret would not be the biggest thing in their world, and maybe he would be able to make everything work.
But there is no dash to the hospital. The secret remains.
The countdown flips to the last minute, and his mother leans forward in her seat. She watches the screen as though she is trying to find something in the view of the London Eye and the cityscape, a message hidden there just for her.
Nur watches her out of the corner of his eye. They share the same nose, he and his mother; the same curve leaping downward, as if gravity had grabbed on to it with both hands. He has inherited his father’s thick eyebrows but with his mother’s shape. He is often told that his eyebrows are good, because there is space between them, because they look well-kept, but he tells people they are simply well-behaved. His eyes are all Nani’s, a lighter brown, like gold, which marks him apart from his siblings.
The clock counts down and down until there are only single digits left, and then there is nothing and there is noise. Fireworks flash and fill their screen, are so loud that they may as well be in the room with them. His mother laughs, shouts, “Happy New Year!” and they all shout it back. Mariam takes a video on her phone, and Nur sees but doesn’t mind because he knows that one day he’d like to look back at this moment and know what it was like before he changed everything. To see what his world looked like before it crumbled around him.
He waits until they get bored of the fireworks, which happens quickly. Khalil and Mariam turn to their phones, his parents watch the TV with tired eyes, waiting for it to be over.
Nur’s guts twist. He glances at his siblings, fails to get their attention, so fires off a quick message to their group chat:
Need to talk to mum and dad about something
Can you guys leave
Plz
Now
Their phones buzz, and Khalil looks up at him first, eyes narrowed, questioning. Nur shakes his head a fraction, both at him and at Mariam, who is now staring at him too. But he isn’t ready to explain this to them, not yet. Slowly they get up, tell their parents they’ll see them in the morning, and as they leave the room Khalil locks eyes with Nur again, his curiosity burning. Regret begins to tug then, as Nur wonders if he should have told them first, tested it with them, but that moment has long passed.
“When do you go back?” his father asks. His mother reaches for the remote, muting the TV so that the fireworks continue but no sound comes from the bright lights.
“Work starts on the third, so I’ll have to leave tomorrow,” Nur says.
“You should have taken some more time off,” his father says. “It’s nice having you home, makes it feel like it used to.”
“I miss having you here,” his mother says, and a sharp guilt pierces Nur. Even now, after all these years living apart from his family, he still feels it. It’s impossible not to.
He wishes he could stay here, not in the house itself but closer than where he is now. That he didn’t have to travel for two hours to get home to see them, that he could be around his family more often.
Copyright © 2022 by Kasim Ali
