When my mother died, I turned to books, reading with an obsessiveness I hadn’t experienced since my teenage years. I started with the classics—Barthes and Didion, C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed—before moving on to Rilke and other poets, and then the memoirs on mother loss, some of which were written by poets. I soon broadened my reading to the death of a child, widows’ memoirs, grisly accounts of stillbirths and genetic disorders. I was envious of those who had been gifted ample warning of their loved one’s death, resentful of mothers with breast cancer who resisted treatment in favor of alternative medicine. I retained little that I read. The words entered my brain and vanished as soon as I flipped the page. I left the self-help books for last: my mother always had been suspicious of pop psychology. I had to keep reminding myself I would never see or talk to her again, so it didn’t matter what I read.
I read about complicated grief, which occurs when an individual is unable to accept the reality of their loss, and I hoped my extensive reading would curtail. I devoted more energy to grieving than the composition class I was teaching online. I didn’t start drinking, or shave my head, or meet strange men for hook-ups in dive-bar bathrooms, which I read about in the memoirs. I didn’t make self-destructive decisions that upended my life. Parviz and I didn’t break up. In our one-bedroom apartment, I spent hours reading on the couch, and then shuffled to the bedroom to try to conjure the mannerisms of my mother as vividly as I could: how she always sneezed seven or eight times in a row, the pet name she called me that no one else ever would, silly songs she made up for the cat. What I missed most was the way she patted my head to comfort me as a child, and shyly on my visits home as an adult, her hand running through my hair. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t replicate the feeling.
It was in the bedroom that Parviz would find me crying after coming home from work.
“You are your mother,” he said. He claimed she was embedded in my DNA. Was it true? Sometimes when I looked down at my arms and squinted, I could see her forearms in place of my own, a double exposure.
Grief made my world very small, but in other ways life expanded. I sent long unwieldy emails to a childhood friend named Emily, who’d lost her mother when she was twelve and reached out when she read my mother’s obituary in the paper. I could say anything in my emails to Emily, and often crouched in front of my laptop as I wrote rambling paragraphs about time and memory.
After our mothers’ deaths, we no longer believed in linearity. By this time, I’d moved on to books written by controversial physicists, skimming dense volumes on the Big Bang that hypothesized time was a wave we experienced in the same way as gravity. Any difference between past and future was only in our perception. In this sense, our memories of the past were unfolding forever in front of us. I searched childhood photographs for glimpses of my mother’s thick plastic frames and neon windbreaker, rewound home videos to listen to her voice complaining about the weight of the RCA camcorder on her shoulder. Emily and I found comfort in rejecting chronology, concluding that the past was just as real as the present moment and that the future already had occurred. I tried to explain this to my sister, Meredith, but the concept was difficult to grasp if you hadn’t read the books.
Parviz and I were having lunch at Meredith’s when she excused herself to use the bathroom, placing her squirming baby in my arms. My niece was heavier than I anticipated. Her head flopped backwards, and I didn’t know how to support her neck. I worried I would drop her as I readjusted my hold. Meanwhile, my nephew started choking on his avocado roll.
“Does he need CPR?” I asked Parviz.
Before he could answer, my sister rushed back into the room, her t-shirt tucked into her underwear. In a calm but firm tone I felt I could never replicate, she instructed her son to relax and chew his seaweed. The lunch continued with my nephew’s intermittent gagging, the baby safe in my sister’s arms, but I felt shaken, unable to calm my breathing even after we were in the car.
That night, as we shared a joint on the balcony, Parviz asked if I was ready to start house hunting again. His parents had recently moved back to Tehran, and Parviz was tasked with buying a new family home, somewhere they could stay when they visited. These conversations had been put on hold when my mother died, but now enough time had ostensibly passed to resume our search, and Parviz had arranged a showing for the next afternoon.
“Tomorrow?” I asked.
I went back inside, where I brought my laptop with me onto the couch. The night was so windy the door to our balcony kept bursting open, the wind shrieking through the glass.
“What are you reading?” Parviz asked, crouching beside me.
“An article Emily sent,” I said. “It hypothesizes reality is a simulation.”
“That sounds fun. Is it peer reviewed?”
I didn’t respond, and he kissed my neck. “Don’t you want a little one of our own?”
I thought of the beansprout I had grown in a Styrofoam cup in the second grade. In the classroom the plant had thrived, but as soon as I brought it home, I’d overwatered it. Then, to fix my mistake, I tried to dry the water with a handheld fan. As soon as I turned on the plastic device, the whirring blades had sliced through the plant’s delicate stem, chopping off its head.
“You don’t have to decide right away,” he said. “But it might be good to get out of the apartment.”
I closed the laptop and agreed to come along.
◆
A competing realtor referred to them as the Ugly Sisters. One was thin with straw-blonde hair. The other was fat with dark hair. They were both shorter than I was and dressed in heels and Chanel pantsuits. We would spot their faces on benches around the city, and Parviz would say, “There’s the Ugly Sisters!” In person, they both had immaculate make-up and manicures. They pulled up at the properties in Porsche convertibles, wearing fur coats and Prada sunglasses. I was usually in jeans and sneakers; half the time I had forgotten to brush my teeth, tonguing at a breath mint.
“Salam,” Parviz called out the first day. The Ugly Sisters briefed him on the property as I trailed behind, running my fingers along the edge of a marble countertop, the stone mantle, a wall of family photographs, which showed the homeowners and their perfect teeth. The owners kept a pet chinchilla in the living room, and I knelt to stick my finger into its hutch. In the study, a framed MBA degree hung on the wall beside a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, blown up five times the original size. Parviz went outside to photograph the yard, the tarp covering the pool weighed down with snow and ice. I lingered in the daughter’s bedroom, with its pink matching furniture, and fantasized what it would have been like to grow up wealthy in the suburbs instead of in the inner city where I routinely fell asleep to the sound of police sirens. It wasn’t unusual to come to school on Monday and learn a classmate’s house had burned down, or their father had been murdered, or they had entered foster care, or been sent to live with relatives in another city.
I couldn’t imagine the butlers Parviz recounted from childhood, the indoor pool at his parents’ house in Tehran. Shortly after Parviz was born, bombs had gone off, and though Parviz didn’t remember any explosions, the stress of the Iran-Iraq war must have burrowed into his subconscious. I kept watch any time fireworks went off or a car engine backfired, but Parviz didn’t flinch. Another time, the police had raided their home and one of the officers pulled five-year-old Parviz from under the bed where he was hiding. He’d been in tears, but the officers had only laughed. Parviz didn’t seem traumatized by these events; his family smiled as they recounted how they’d served the officers tea.
The last conversation my mother and I had was about the house search. I’d typed out a long text message telling her the good news, but deleted it, fearful of her comments, which often filled me with self-doubt. My mother had a habit of instilling neutral or even positive news with uncertainty. I worried if I told her we were looking for a house, she might ask when we were getting married, or suggest that picking the right one would be overwhelming, and question how I would keep it clean. Worse, the news would cement what we both already knew: I wasn’t moving back home. Then, in a moment of impulsiveness, I retyped the message and clicked send, attaching a screenshot of one of the listings. Didn’t I owe her the opportunity to respond, the possibility of having changed? As my therapist reminded me, I wasn’t responsible for others’ feelings. In moments, she replied, telling me Parviz’s parents were very generous. She was excited for me, she said. The house I had sent her looked “really fancy.”
The next day, my father called to say what had happened. My mother had experienced a cardiac event, and the ambulance hadn’t come in time. I couldn’t bear to recollect the details of the phone call, my father apologizing, my voice distant as I reassured him that I would be okay. I felt a part of myself leaving the room, already darkening around me. In the days that followed, I ruminated on the details of the phone call, as though by returning to the moment of its telling, my mother’s death could be undone. Fragments of the phone call came to me in the exercise rooms and wine cellars of the expensive houses Parviz and I toured.
“Khoda fez,” he’d called out to the Ugly Sisters when I pointed out the yard looked onto the neighbor’s porch or adjoined a noisy road. In the car, he commended me for my diligence.
The house we came closest to buying sat on a corner lot, which the Ugly Sisters said was bad feng shui, but had lilac bushes reaching over the fence. Lilacs grew beside my childhood home, and I felt nostalgic for their scent, the way my father clipped boughs of the delicate blossoms for my mother each spring. This house still had its original chandeliers and sconces, hardwood floors, and crown moulding. We used our phones to light the basement, illuminating the orange couches and the mirrored walls, as if the room were a set for a 70s porn shoot.
We returned a few times, taking pictures of the spiral staircase and the wood moulding, the library, and the promise of its empty shelves. Before my mother died, it had felt daunting to envision having a child, but not entirely impossible. Touring houses with Parviz, we’d imagined where the crib might go, and later, which rooms would be decorated with Ikea play furniture. Occasionally, I had even allowed myself to imagine the children themselves, running up and down the hallways, scattered with their toys, or sleeping sweetly in their beds.
“This will be good for the mooshes,” Parviz would say upon entering a bright living room or a private yet spacious yard.
Sometimes we would enter a bedroom decorated with pale pink curtains and stuffed animals and would share a smile before one of us uttered the word, “moosh.” The Farsi word for “mouse” was our pet name for one another—as well as our future children—and had become a kind of shorthand for the joyful future that no doubt awaited us.
Now in the homes we toured, I avoided children’s bedrooms, and took to asking whether the electric wiring was up to code, whether the gas stoves could be replaced with induction cooktops. Parviz assured me the houses would pass inspection, but sometimes after I pointed out water damage in the corner of a ceiling, Parviz’s brow would furrow, and he’d rebuke the Ugly Sisters in a stream of Farsi.
We returned to the corner-lot, where Parviz had the Ugly Sisters draw up the paperwork, but I couldn’t get rid of the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. A few hours later, Parviz called to cancel the deal; I had discovered a bus stop in front of the house, and I envisioned the bus’s giant wheels running over our future children, my mind flitting to the unimaginable.
◆
Parviz and I visited my childhood home for Christmas, but Meredith stayed in Toronto, not wanting to travel with a baby. My father met us at the airport, and as I hugged his thin frame, I realized he hadn’t been eating. He shook Parviz’s hand and took my suitcase from me. Though I’d tried to warn Parviz the prairies were colder than Toronto, he was in no way prepared for the -20 temperatures. The wind stung his face as we hurried across the parking lot. It was a short drive home, and my father told us he’d started skiing down the alleyways early in the morning. He had to find new ways to stay busy.
At home, the fridge was empty, the freezer full of frozen soup. I got to work, making a stew with the pale vegetables in the crisper, cans of chickpeas, and tomatoes. In the cupboard, I found the boxed stuffing my mother had bought for Thanksgiving, her containers of spices, opened bags of pasta. Upstairs, the comb with strands of her hair, her shampoo. I gathered the items and put them in the closet.
Downstairs, Parviz and my father were discussing his work. Parviz was an architect, but complained about the menial tasks he’d been assigned, which seemed mainly to involve technical drawings of handrails and bathroom layouts.
“You have to put your time in,” my father said. “You can’t expect to be promoted right away.”
“No,” Parviz said. “I don’t expect that.”
My hometown never felt more like an outpost. One day we met Emily for lunch, and she drove us around, passing fields of snow where strip malls and movie theaters once had stood. We ate at a brewery where a hockey game was playing on TV. Parviz didn’t understand why everyone was wearing pajama pants. We drove to the oil refinery on the edge of town and watched its billows of smoke. At home, my father had closed the hole in my bedroom where asbestos had fallen through the ceiling. When my sister and I were kids, he would take us up to the attic, and the vermiculite had looked like rows of pebbles surrounded by fluffy pink fiberglass walls. Now he’d sealed off the door with sheets of heavy plastic. I worried that years of breathing in the asbestos had given my father lung cancer, and when I queried him over a persistent cough, he confessed he’d started smoking again.
The smoke drifted from the backyard up to my bedroom, where I had shelves of Anne of Green Gables, A Little Princess, and Heidi, stories about child orphans with the emotional fortitude I lacked. The longer we stayed at the house, the more I worried the weight of the books was pressing through the ceiling. Late at night, I imagined the second story of the house caving in, killing my father as he watched TV on the living room couch below. Parviz reassured me that the framing could sustain the weight of my bookcases. On Christmas, my father lit a fire, and told us he just had to stick to the plan.
“What plan?” I asked, warming my hands by the fireplace.
“Not to throw myself off a bridge,” my father said. “To stay busy.”
“That’s a good plan,” Parviz said.
My stomach flipped with panic. I looked to Parviz, who was not only unfazed, but rather seemed to expect such an admission. My mother would be horrified that I’d failed to consider the possibility that my father could be taken from me, too. My niece could die of SIDs. My sister could fall on the icy streets of Toronto. With my mother gone, I became the keeper of her worries. I remembered an article she’d sent me about raccoons living in the chimney of a house. Their nest had blocked the carbon monoxide from escaping and poisoned a family of five while they slept. I went to let the dog outside and stood in the snow as my face numbed, making sure the chimney was unobstructed.
When I came back inside, my father was telling Parviz about our mouse problem. He’d filled the gaps in the porch with steel wool and wedged thick paperbacks of Anne Rice and Stephen King in the space between the microwave and the dishwasher, but he was still finding droppings. When I was younger, my mother would catch the mice in humane traps, releasing them in the graveyard. When the weather became too cold, she would keep the mice in glass aquariums with wood chips until the spring. After my sister and I moved away, she called them her babies, joking that the mice had replaced us.
Parviz flew to Tehran for New Year’s to help his father with his factories, and I sorted through my mother’s closet, finding the clothing she had worn when she was young. On my next birthday I would be thirty-two, the same age she’d been when she had me. I unzipped garment bags of my mother’s homecoming dress, a powder-blue gown with puffed sleeves. In her hope chest, I found pictures of our family camping trips, and the time before I was born. There were only a handful of photos of her, which wasn’t unusual for mothers of a certain generation, but her absence still stung. I read the postcards her father had sent from England. My mother had been nineteen when he died of lung cancer. He’d worked as a refrigerator repairman and gotten cancer from the freon. In high school, my mother had given speeches on the importance of refrigerator safety, namely removing the doors from discarded appliances so children didn’t die in them playing Hide and Seek. Other times, she recounted how she and her sister used to play with mercury in their palms, as though it were silly putty.
I thought of the times my mother had become quiet on Father’s Day, how excluded I had felt by her sadness. I had never known the depth of her grief until I experienced it myself, something that made me feel both closer to her and farther away. She was the only one who could comfort me, and now she was gone. In those moments, wearing the dresses she had worn and looking at the pictures of her, I felt her hand on the top of my head, stroking my hair as she had done when I was a child. I felt that she was with me then, and I emailed Emily a description of what I had experienced. Maybe my mother’s spirit was looking over me, or some essence of her was caught between dimensions. I had left my physics books in Toronto, but there must have been some explanation for the sensation.
“She loves you the way that you love her,” my friend Emily wrote. “Love is a circle.”
“Just like time,” I wrote back.
The closest we came to talking about my mother’s heart attack, I told my father he should make a doctor’s appointment. Now that my mother was gone, I was responsible for checking up on him. I worried his weight loss was a sign of illness, especially since he’d started smoking again. He responded that he’d rather not know. He didn’t want to be hooked up to machines and tubes in a hospital; he’d rather just drop dead one day. I remembered my mother making similar pronouncements as she vacuumed the living room, the machine emitting the smell of burnt hair.
“I can call the doctor,” I said. “I can make the appointment.”
“I don’t think so,” he said, grabbing the carton of cigarettes and going outside to smoke.
◆
Parviz’s parents were visiting in the summer, and he started to panic about not finding a home in time. He feared he was letting down his father, demonstrating that he couldn’t be trusted with this important task. I understood this was about more than a house; it was about whether Parviz’s father could trust him, and in turn, whether Parviz could trust me.
I stopped going to view the houses, instead scanning the listings for yards that opened onto steep ravines, pools that lacked safety fences. Despite my wariness, Parviz was determined to find a home, one day coming across a half-timber house we’d viewed early on. It had been relisted, and when Parviz asked the Ugly Sisters about it, they informed him the deal hadn’t gone through.
“It’s a sign,” I told Parviz. “This is the one I sent to my mom before she died.”
“You never told me that,” he said.
“It was the only one I sent her,” I said. “We need to buy this house.”
I couldn’t explain my certainty. I only knew this was the listing I had sent to my mother, and now like magic, it was back on the market. I told Parviz to call the Ugly Sisters, and when he hesitated, reminded him of his parents’ impending arrival.
“This isn’t a sign from your mother,” he said, getting out his phone. “It’s just a house. You know that, right?”
We did an inspection with the Ugly Sisters at the end of June, while the husband was sleeping on a mattress in the master bedroom, his dress shirts hanging in the walk-in closet. The wife already had moved out, which explained the expedited sale.
On the stairwell, we made small talk. The husband was a bankruptcy lawyer, which Parviz found fascinating.
“I’ve never met a bankruptcy lawyer before. What exactly do you work on?”
“I represent clients during liquidation and restructuring.”
“Oh, you mean Chapter 7, Chapter 11 stuff.”
“Yes, when companies reach bankruptcy, my team manages the split between creditors.”
“Kind of like what happened here,” Parviz said to me with a little laugh.
Between us, the Ugly Sisters started arguing with the broker. The sconces had been removed from the walls and the decorative stone urns were missing from the front yard. The broker repeated that the house was being sold as-is, but the Ugly Sisters had a disagreement over the definition of “as-is.” The older Ugly Sister argued that “as-is” referred to the property when we first viewed it over six months earlier, not when it had been re-listed.
“It’s a four-million-dollar house,” the broker said. “Do a few sconces really matter?”
“Four point two,” the older Ugly Sister said. “It’s about respect. You don’t remove the light fixtures.”
They went back and forth like this, barking like dogs. The numbers were so unimaginable that it felt like make-believe, as though we were actors in a play. Later, Parviz would fixate on this moment as the Ugly Sisters showboating that they had our best interests at heart while failing to advise that we were overpaying by around 500K.
“Why don’t we show you the yard?” the wife asked. She wanted to speak to Parviz privately, to ask if he was interested in buying a massive stone table that was too heavy to move, but the Ugly Sisters followed us outside.
“We’re not leaving our client,” the younger Ugly Sister said.
“Fine, but can we leave the drama behind?” the wife asked.
She offered us the deck furniture, showed Parviz how to operate the pool lights and waterfall, and both parties seemed satisfied. The wife asked if I would be living there, too. Parviz said I was his girlfriend; we’d be moving in to get the house ready for his parents’ arrival.
“I hope you’ll be very happy here,” she said.
Everything I’d accumulated in the past few years fit in the third-floor office, which looked out over the pool; Parviz called it my birdhouse. I arranged my Ikea bookshelves, my desk and couch, my yoga mat on the carpet. We heard strange scraping noises we later learned were raccoons and found a pile of their droppings on the balcony. Parviz needed a couple days to move his parents’ furniture out of storage, to lay out the carpets and hang his sister’s artwork, put their silver in the cabinets. After closing, his parents had bought their flights, and we did our best to make the house feel cozy. I arranged pictures of my mother on a shelf upstairs alongside a small metal Buddha she had given me the year before she died, a gold-plated heart locket she’d bought from Paris Jeweller’s in the mall, an angel in a pink plastic frame she’d cross-stitched for me as a baby. I arranged these items, making an altar to her, and then, when looking at them became too painful, put them in a drawer.
Parviz worked nights and weekends to meet a deadline. During the day, I kept the curtains closed so the sun didn’t damage the carpets and spent the afternoons stoned, floating in the pool. One of my students had complained about my cancelling too many classes, and I wasn’t offered a new section of College English. I enrolled in online Farsi lessons, diligently completing my homework at the kitchen table. I started wondering if life was fake. I was developing a theory that events in the future ricocheted through time, so our memories of the past only felt significant because of what happened later, which was unfolding at the exact same moment. My theory was difficult to explain, even to Emily.
Once a week, I rode the subway to Meredith’s apartment. I sat cross-legged on her couch and held my niece, a warm, beating heart I clutched to my chest, her eyes closed delicately.
“You’re not going to break her,” Meredith said, and I unclenched my jaw.
I told my therapist I was worried I had died at some point and simply hadn’t noticed: maybe one of the times I’d blacked out drinking, or an airplane I’d taken had crashed. I was afraid the world could vanish at any moment—that one day all its trees and flowers would be gone. Wasn’t this more or less what had happened to my mother? My therapist said it sounded like I was depressed. I decided to stop smoking so much weed.
◆
The night before my birthday, I dreamed my mother had faked her death and was living in Texas, where she’d taken up swimming. Excitedly, I texted my sister the dream.
“She hated flying,” Meredith wrote back. “She was afraid of the plane crashing.”
“Maybe she drove,” I replied.
That afternoon, Parviz’s parents arrived from Tehran. They threw me a small birthday dinner, ordering food from their favorite Persian restaurant and inviting his aunt. To celebrate the occasion, I wore one of my mother’s dresses I’d brought from home. While Parviz and his father went through the house, tearing out the wiring for the obsolete sound system, I sat with his mother on their leather chesterfield, which they’d already rearranged.
“I wanted to tell you how sorry I am for your loss,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate that.”
“You know, your mother is always with you,” she said, patting my arm. “She would want you to be happy. You can have your own family, have your own babies, and you will feel the love that she felt for you.”
I smiled, uncertain that I would. I felt incapable of caring for anyone, though late at night when I asked him, Parviz assured me this wasn’t true.
Parviz and his father came downstairs, holding needle-nose pliers and the long cords of wire they had pulled out of the walls. Parviz wound the wire around his arm as his father connected Alexa to his phone. Parviz’s father asked Alexa to play Michael Jackson, and then Googoosh. His parents started dancing in the middle of the living room, and Parviz joined in. After a few minutes, his father reached for my hand. Awkwardly, I rose from the sofa. I was a bad dancer, self-conscious and too rigid. I looked to Parviz, who smiled and nodded as if he were encouraging a child.
“Haha,” I said, dancing with one hand as his father spun me around. “Okay.”
His father grabbed both hands, and I said I was all danced out. I retreated to the kitchen, where I put on the kettle and when the song ended, Parviz stood beside me.
“Why didn’t you dance?” he asked in a whisper. “You hurt his feelings.”
“I don’t really feel like dancing right now.”
“All this is to celebrate your birthday,” he said.
“I didn’t ask for any of it.”
“We’re just trying to coax you out of your head.”
“Well, maybe I don’t want to be coaxed,” I said, and when Parviz looked wounded, worried I was being cruel.
“Amazon, stop,” his father said in the living room. “Alexa, stop—Alexa, play Chopin.”
The doorbell rang, and Parviz’s aunt arrived. We ate in the dining room, where his parents had hung paintings over the missing sconces. Parviz began talking to his parents in Farsi, and his aunt showed me a lengthy animated film on her phone. I excused myself and went up to the birdhouse, where I got out the album of pictures. I thought of all the meals my mother had made for me throughout the years, the birthday cakes she’d baked, sheets of sugar cookies to bring to school on Valentine’s Day and Halloween, the pink-and-white cupcakes for my sister’s wedding. She made elaborate meals at Christmas that inevitably involved burning her forearms on the oven door, cursing loudly as she dropped the baking sheet.
I got out my phone and searched for my mother’s name. Reading our emails had been too painful after she died. I worried I would scroll back through the months and years of our messages and discover nothing of substance had been said between us. Better not to look than to realize the ways that words and language had failed us.
But now, I yearned for her voice. I clicked on the birthday email she had sent the year before. She had written about the warm, sunny Sunday I was born. I had looked “so wise and so worried,” with a head of dark hair. At times, raising two daughters had been overwhelming, but I had made her life feel full.
◆
I heard Parviz’s mother cleaning up in the kitchen, and I came downstairs, hoping I had not been gone too long. His aunt was making Turkish coffee on the stove. We sat in the living room and, after drinking our coffees, put the cups upside down on the saucer. I sat next to Parviz, and he immediately got up and went with his father into the study, closing the door behind him. He was disappointed with the imperfect ways I had performed, my interactions with his family self-conscious and distanced. Apparently, his expectations for the evening had not been met. I went into self-preservation mode, telling myself I had to only get through the night and then I could cry in bed alone.
His mother put on her glasses and said she would read my fortune. I handed her my coffee cup, and she lifted the cup off the saucer. She turned it around and around, gazing into the images the coffee grounds made on the porcelain surface.
“I see a woman with a big head,” she said. “Her head is full of thoughts. It’s full of so many thoughts, all separate and whirling around in her head. But the thoughts don’t upset her. She likes having all these thoughts in her head.”
I looked to Parviz’s aunt, who was smiling.
“I see many concerns, but she doesn’t have to worry about them,” his mother continued. “Everything will work out.”
“That’s reassuring,” I said.
She turned the cup in her hands, carefully examining the grounds before speaking again. “I see an older man,” she said. “He is not a romantic interest. He is a father, and he has sorrow in his heart. The daughter is concerned for him. But he is protected, by another figure. The daughter does not need to worry about him anymore. He will be okay.”
“That’s beautiful,” I said.
She looked again in the cup. “I see a figure, a woman. But it looks as though she has wings,” she said. “She is hidden in the clouds. I think she is—she is a guardian angel looking after you from above. Yes, she has two giant wings. I can see them now. She will protect you always. She will be there, looking down.”
I said nothing, and Parviz’s mother looked again into the cup, turning it around and around in her hands.
“When did you learn to read fortunes?” I asked.
“Oh, it was taught to me a long time ago.”
“Our mother read fortunes,” Parviz’s aunt said. “They said she could read the future.”
After two or three minutes, Parviz’s mother spoke again: “I see four figures,” she said. “Two are larger, and two are smaller. And there is such a feeling of love. I feel the love radiating between the figures. They are together, and they have a happy life together with so many adventures, these four of them.”
“I wonder what that means,” I said, trying not to cry. I thought if I kept smiling, I wouldn’t betray how badly I desired the future she described, how much I feared it would never be mine.
“It’s very interesting,” Parviz’s aunt agreed.
Parviz’s mother turned the cup around and around in her hands, telling me the images she saw in the coffee grounds, her hopes for my future with her son. She saw seemingly endless scenes inside the cup: an airplane and a busy city, a house filled with happy memories, a landscape of trees.
I wanted to believe that the images she saw would materialize into reality, that she was doing more than telling me a story, and by voicing these hopes, she would cause them to ricochet through time, altering the past to ensure their future occurrences. I took comfort in the images, transparent as a fairy tale, unspooling before me. Not until much later did I wonder whether she had been describing a future that awaited me, scenes from a life with Parviz that had yet to transpire, but another life—one that already had passed, overflowing with love.
◆
After his parents had gone to bed, I found Parviz at his desk in the study, clicking on a spreadsheet. He’d decided to quit his job. His father was converting one of his factories in Tehran to manufacture blades for wind turbines and Parviz would lead the project.
“So you’re just leaving me here?” I asked. “What about the house? Did we do all of this for nothing?”
“I may have to fly there more often, but most of it I can do from abroad,” he said. “If I do have to go, there’s no reason you can’t come with.”
“Oh,” I said. “Congratulations.”
“Do you see what you just did? I told you good news and all you did was respond with fear and doubt.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s exciting news, I just got scared.”
“You’re a bad moosh.” He continued clicking, making tiny adjustments to the document.
“Don’t you see how it’s hard for me to be around your family, laughing and having fun?” I asked. “My mother is dead.”
Parviz looked up from the screen and frowned. I started to cry, and he got up from his desk. He hugged me, but his embrace wasn’t enough.
“Can you pat my head?” I asked.
He patted my head, but the feeling wasn’t the same. “Like this.” I held his hand and stroked my head with his hand. I couldn’t recapture the feeling. I tried again and again, moving his hand over my head.
“I’m not your mother,” he said. “I can’t comfort you that way.”
I pressed my body against Parviz’s, squeezing my eyes tightly shut. It was a relief to cry without the possibility of being comforted. When finally my tears ended, I’d left a wet imprint on Parviz’s shirt: two eyes and a gaping mouth. I followed Parviz into the kitchen, where he put on the kettle for tea and started rooting through the cupboards.
My mother had read fortunes, too. My sister and I would nag her to imitate the scene from The Simpsons until finally she’d give in, sliding her glasses on her forehead and, because I was younger and always went first, holding my hand in hers. There, on the surface of my palm, she would point out the house where I would live with my husband. The children I would have. The garden. We would start giggling until there, in the middle of my palm, she would point out the swimming pool where, pursing her lips, a drop of her saliva would land.
What if I’d only absorbed her worries, and none of her playfulness? I slid open the glass door, dirty with fingerprints, and went out onto the deck. The air was cool, and the garden lights illuminated the dark green leaves of the plants along the fence. I put my feet in the water, and then climbed down the steps into the pool, still warm from the sun. My dress expanded around me like the bell of a jellyfish. I floated in the water, looking up at the dark clouds. I remembered my mother floating in the lagoon near the forest where we’d camped when my sister and I were young. That’s where she’d been when she’d died, too far away for the ambulance to reach her.
I thought of me and Meredith capturing tadpoles in our hands, their fat heads bumping against our skin or tickling our legs as we waded into the water. When we’d fight on the shore, throwing handfuls of sand or pulling one another’s hair, my mother would yell at us to cut it out. I remembered how we’d sit on our towels and eat salmonberries from the bushes along the lagoon or potato chips my mother had brought in a shopping bag, mica glinting on our skin when the water dried. We’d read trashy celebrity magazines, gossiping over who was pregnant and who was getting divorced and the other trivial details of rich people’s lives.
This memory was always available to me. I could go back to it whenever I liked, remembering how my mother would rise from her towel to swim across the lagoon, the powerful, even strokes of her arms like blades in the water. She became a tiny dot across its surface, but as far as she swam, she never disappeared completely. I would lay my head back down, trusting she would return, and soon I would hear her footsteps in the sand before she collapsed with a sigh on the towel beside me. The image was as clear as though it were happening for the first time. I didn’t want to look up and disrupt my vision of her, but when I did, Parviz was standing at the edge of the pool. He was calling out to me, holding a glass of tea and a towel. It was after midnight, and a new day had come.