Beneath the Same Heaven Read online

  Kathryn looked at the photo again. She just wanted to cry, to lay down in the bed, and wake up back in Dubai, back in the international life they had made for themselves.

  “Kathy, Robert, come for dinner,” Margaret called out.

  “Come, let’s eat,” he said and walked out.

  At the dinner table Kathryn’s father raised his wine glass, looked from his daughter to his son-in-law, “Welcome home, welcome to our country. I hope you’ll both find comfort, opportunity, and prosperity here.”

  “And happiness,” her mother added.

  “I hope so too,” said Rashid.

  “Insha’allah,” Kathryn said out of habit as she raised her glass.

  “Kathryn,” Rashid said, amused, “we’re not in an Islamic country anymore. You Americans don’t wait for Allah, you make things happen. Is Walmart successful because of Allah? No, somebody hustled, somebody worked hard, and the system is set up for business like this. I can only imagine what my father’s business would have looked like if he had started it here with this kind of big capitalism.”

  Kathryn’s stomach turned as she brought her glass to her lips, hoping to conceal the tears welling up in her eyes. This was not the Rashid she had fallen in love with.

  “Rashid, have you checked in with your company yet?” Margaret changed the subject. “When will you start?”

  “I called my manager yesterday, and he’d like me to start as soon as possible, but I can’t until I complete the test for my hazardous materials license and my FBI clearance comes.”

  “FBI clearance?” Kathryn’s father asked, “What for?”

  “Some of our tools use radioactive materials to take measurements in the well,” he explained.

  Kathryn shoved her chair back and rushed to the bathroom. Rashid tried not to look irritated, Kathryn had been so moody since they had moved to America.

  Kathryn heard only muffled voices as she knelt over the toilet, retching. As the nausea passed, she sat on the chilly tiled floor and tried to cry, to express some nameless shapeless grief, but the tears would not come.

  That night, after her parents had gone to their hotel, Kathryn and Rashid lay in bed, willing their bodies to synchronize with the local time zone. He wrapped his arm around her. Wordlessly, she turned her back to him so they fit together like two spoons.

  He caressed her belly, her hips, the curve of her backside. He touched her breasts, discovering an unexpected fullness in one and then the other. She startled him with a little cry of pain as he squeezed her nipple. He smiled to himself, turned her over so he could place his head on her belly.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  He lifted his head to look at her, laughed a little and said, “You’re pregnant, yes?”

  The next day a home pregnancy test kit, blinking a little blue plus sign, confirmed his intuition. He laughed and embraced her, picked her up and spun around. “Let’s call my family in Pakistan, my father will be too happy!”

  “No, not yet. You’re not supposed to tell people so early. You have to make sure the pregnancy continues without a miscarriage.”

  “Are you sure? How long?”

  “I don’t know,” she placed a hand tentatively on her belly, trying to feel what might be happening inside. “I’ll ask my mother.”

  “You just said we shouldn’t tell anyone.”

  “Oh, you’re right,” she sat down wearily. “I guess I’ll have to get a book about pregnancy.” She looked up at him. “Do you want to have a baby?”

  He responded to the fear in her expression by wrapping his arms around her shoulders, leaning down to kiss her head. “Of course I want a baby, especially with you.”

  “But we’ve been arguing about everything since we came to America.”

  “Habibti,” the Arabic term of endearment always made her smile, “we are arguing about politics, economics. This, this is family.”

  She smiled, fleetingly. “You know, everything will change once the baby comes.”

  “Everything always changes. That’s life. Imagine, I was in Pakistan, then in London, then in Dubai. Now I am here in America, with my American wife. Until now I have wanted my life to change. This change is a blessing.”

  She looked up at the playful sparkle in his eye. She tilted her head, ready to kiss him.

  He leaned down, close enough that she could feel his breath on her lips and said, “Now can I call Pakistan and tell them?”

  “No!” she slapped him with mock force. He allowed her to wrestle him to the floor, laughing and shrieking, moving between the furniture and the boxes, until, panting, she stopped resisting. He rolled her onto her back, unbuttoned her shirt so he could kiss her just below her belly button, paused and unzipped her jeans.

  She watched him undress himself, as she had so many times now, admiring his strong frame, his deliberate, confident movements. She opened her legs to allow him in, feeling the presence of this man, who had been her lover, was now her husband, would be the father of their child.

  He moved gently with her, shyly almost, feeling they were not alone. He responded to the pressure of her hip turning him over so she could straddle him. The late morning sunlight coming through the window cast diagonals of light and shadow across her face and torso. He held her breasts with something like awe. She closed her eyes in pleasure and he noticed a radiance in her skin, independent of the light, impervious to the shadow. From deep within he felt a swirl of passion; pride, protectiveness, as he thought about the life inside her.

  She rode him with increasing intensity, feeling herself approaching some precipice. As she let go, she moved in suspension, tentacles of warmth unfurling from her pelvis.

  He waited until her movements slowed, like a receding tide, before rolling back above her. He finished quickly, then rolled off and lay next to her on the floor, breathing heavily.

  “If the child is born here, he’ll be an American,” she said.

  “He or she,” Rashid said.

  “He or she will be American by nationality,” she continued, “but also Pakistani by heritage. We’ll have to make sure the child is both, not half and half, and not neither.”

  “Of course.”

  A stack of books about pregnancy, birth, and babies grew on Kathryn’s bedside table faster than her expanding belly. Rashid teased her one night as she opened yet another book. “Do you really need to read more? What else is there to know?”

  The pregnancy had brought about a truce in their political debates, so she tried not to take offense.

  “I want to be prepared.” She fluffed the pillow behind her. “And you’re gone all the time working, so what’s the harm in reading?”

  “In Pakistan, no one reads books about pregnancy and birth. Is it so much more complicated in America?” He sat next to her on the bed.

  “In Pakistan your sisters-in-law have your mother around, their aunties, all their female relatives probably explain everything to them. My mother is three hundred miles away and none of my close friends have been pregnant while I was around them.”

  “OK,” he said playfully turning her book upside down.

  “And in some ways it is more complicated in America,” she righted the book. “The obstetricians are so quick to cut women open.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Cesarean sections. In the last three weeks, every single woman I’ve met in the park or the grocery store who talks to me about pregnancy has had a caesarian section.”

  “What for?”

  “Maybe because the doctors are impatient with a slow labor, or women get scared about how long things take because they’ve never seen a birth before. In Los Angeles the c-section rate is almost thirty percent.”

  He thought for a moment, perplexed. “So why don’t you go to Pakistan to have the baby? Mummyji will take care of you. I’ve only heard of surgeries in Pakistan for emergencies.”

  She closed her book thoughtfully. “But she’s not my mother. Maybe my mom could come for
the birth.”

  “Our girls always go to their mothers in the last month of their pregnancy. They leave their husband’s family until the baby is a month or two old.”

  “I’m thinking,” she said tentatively, grasping the book protectively, “I’m thinking the surest way to keep a doctor from cutting me open is not to be in the hospital, to have the baby at home.” She braced herself for his reaction. “With a professional midwife of course.”

  He shrugged his shoulders, “Sure, why not? My parents were both born at home.”

  She felt the baby move, and pulled Rashid’s hand over her belly. Rashid curled up next to her, waiting.

  “That’s it?” she said incredulously. “You agree that we can have the baby at home? You aren’t going to argue with me about it?”

  “No. Do you want me to?” he said with a grin.

  Chapter 5

  Los Angeles, California.

  The year of the bombing

  * * *

  Kathryn led Michael into his kindergarten classroom for his first day of school. He joined other kids sitting cross legged in a circle on the floor, looking eagerly at each other.

  “Michael, say goodbye to baby Andrew,” she patted the newborn in the sling across her breast.

  Michael gave a distracted wave. Reluctantly, she turned to go, looked back to blow him a kiss, and then determinedly walked out of the classroom.

  As she turned the key in the ignition, the radio sprung to life. A newscaster gave the usual litany of bad news, falling stock prices, acrimony in Congress, pirates off the coast of Somalia, U.S. forces killed a dozen Taliban near Afghanistan’s eastern border. She cut off the monotony of the daily news, with the press of a button. Instantly, the car filled with the familiar words of a singer, a melody she had memorized as a teenager. She relaxed, turned into the parking garage. As she pulled the key out of the ignition the radio went dead and a tiny cry from the baby echoed the last note of the song.

  She hurried up two flights of stairs, the carseat—with the baby still buckled in—knocked against her leg with each rising step. She felt her milk coming into her breasts even before he cried for it. By the time she locked the front door behind her, two dark circles of milk had soaked through her Pakistani kurta. Irritated, she pulled the kurta off and dropped it on top of a pile of neglected dirty laundry. She didn’t bother to find another. She just might be able to finish her cold coffee and feed herself something before she nursed. The phone rang. The baby cried, an angry, hungry cry. The ringing continued as she fumbled with the car seat buckles and the baby’s kicking legs. She tried to ignore the ringing as she maneuvered the baby into position. She saw Andrew’s eyes open widely, wildly. Her coffee would have to wait. He latched on to her, relaxing almost immediately into the safety and pleasure of her milk.

  The phone rang again. Irritated, she tried to ignore it. She exhaled as the ringing gave way to silence, only to begin again in another second. She swore under her breath and awkwardly pushed herself up.

  “Hello?” she said into the phone. When no one responded, she repeated herself, preparing to hang up in frustration.

  “Kathryn?” a man’s voice said unsteadily.

  “Yes?”

  “Kathryn? It’s me, Rashid.”

  “What do you need? Why do you sound so strange?”

  “Kathryn, have you seen the news?”

  “I heard a bit on the way home from the school. Nothing new, why?”

  “Did you hear about the attack? The U.S. Government is saying Taliban were killed.”

  “OK. Look, Rashid, I’m trying to feed the baby. What do you need?”

  “The attack, it wasn’t Taliban, it was a wedding…”

  “So…?”

  “They…he…the…” he could not find the words to start. “It was a wedding in the northwestern territories. It wasn’t in Afghanistan, it was on the Pakistan side of the border. It was a drone attack… and my father…was there.”

  The baby pulled away from her breast, blissfully contented.

  “Your father?” she asked.

  “My father was a guest…he was killed. My father’s dead.”

  She could not speak. Could not reconcile the comfort of this maternal moment with the horror of the words coming through the phone. She touched the baby—a half Pakistani baby. She closed her eyes hoping to shut out everything beyond her body and this baby.

  “Kathryn, are you there?” he was almost pleading.

  She sat down on the couch, slowly exhaling. “Are you sure? How do you know?”

  “My brothers called me.”

  “From Lahore?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then they weren’t at the wedding. How would they know? Maybe there’s a mistake.”

  “My uncle called them. Not my real uncle, Shoukart’s father, the Pashtun man who protected my father during Partition. My father went for the youngest son’s wedding.”

  “Oh God. Where’s your mother, was she with him?”

  “No, she’s at home, only my father traveled for the wedding.”

  She began to tremble. The pieces of his story slowly assembled in her mind. His father—dead, the killer—her country. She felt exposed, reached for a blanket to cover her breasts, the baby, her distant sense of culpability.

  “Where are you? Can you come home?”

  “I’m offshore on a rig. I told you I had a job in Ventura today. I’ll have to wait for the next ferry.”

  She heard the helpless edge in his voice.

  “Come home,” she said. “We’ll all be waiting.”

  Rashid hung up the phone, clenched his fists until his fingernails dug into his flesh. His brothers had reached him so easily by phone, delivering the news with unbearable efficiency. For him to reach his mother would take long days, anxious nights.

  He unzipped his coveralls, stepped out, letting them crumple on the rig floor. Out of habit he reached to make sure his plastic radiation exposure badge was in place on the waistband of his jeans.

  He ignored the shouts of his rig team calling him back to his work. The series of small explosions they had meticulously planned to perforate the oil well no longer mattered. He could only think of getting to Pakistan. Should he bring Michael? Kathryn and the baby were out of the question. Even though they had traveled to Lahore with Michael when he was still an infant—had presented his father with the only male heir to carry the family name—he couldn’t bear to overlap the birth of his second son with the death of his father.

  He looked at his watch, at least two hours until the noon ferry would deliver him to shore. He paced back and forth along the edge of the rig dock like a caged lion, spat into the water. The ocean accepted his bitter expression. He remembered his father—once he had failed to react when Rashid hit him in anger over the slaughter of a beloved goat for the Eid feast marking the end of Ramadan. “Our emotions come and go, beta,” his father had said with infinite patience to his young son, “what matters is action, how those emotions take form in action that others can see. That goat is dead now. But you can make sure it is cooked with reverence, the meat shared, so the goat’s sacrifice has meaning.”

  Angrily, Rashid punched at the tiny keypad on his phone, brusquely asked the operator to connect him with the international airlines that would carry him to the land of his birth. “I need the next flight to Islamabad, and a connection to Lahore. I must arrive as soon as possible.”

  “Let me check, sir…” the agent spoke with a South Asian accent. “We have one flight a day to Islamabad, through Dubai. Today’s flight has just departed. Can I reserve a seat on tomorrow’s flight for you?”

  “My father’s body will already be in the ground by the time I get there,” Rashid said quietly.

  “I’m sorry, sir?”

  “My father was killed last night. I need to get to my mother, my family. But I’ll miss the burial.”

  The agent let out a sigh, “Oh, I am so sorry, brother.” He spoked quietly now, “I missed my o
wn father’s funeral. I was working in Dubai. My employer held my passport and wouldn’t interrupt his holiday weekend to retrieve it so I could fly back to Karachi.”

  “Really?” Rashid asked indignantly.

  “How could I ever forgive my employer? I quit, full stop. I’ll make sure you’re on tomorrow’s flight, sir.”

  Rashid knocked. Kathryn opened the door almost immediately. When he saw her, the baby content in her arms, Michael, looking so grown up at her side with his expression of serious concern, Rashid could no longer contain his emotions. He reached for his family. They embraced him before the door slid closed behind him. He wept. Michael wrapped his arms around his father’s waist. “I’m sorry Baba, don’t be too sad. We’re all sorry, even baby Andrew’s sorry.”

  Rashid pulled back from Kathryn, knelt down to look at his elder son. He stroked Michael’s hair, laid his hands on his shoulders. “You don’t need to be sorry, beta. It’s not your fault. But we’re all sorry, we’ll miss Babu.”

  “Can we see him again?” Michael asked.

  “No, not in this world. He’s gone, no one can bring back my father.”

  Kathryn bit her lip, let the tears roll down her face.

  “I need to go to my mother now, to help her and be close to my brothers.”

  “In Pakistan?” Michael pronounced it just the way his father did.

  “Yes, in Pakistan.”

  “Then I’ll need to be with my mother here, to help her and to be close to my baby brother.”

  Rashid embraced the boy, marveling at how the infant he had seen enter the world had become a little man, a son already aware of his role in the family.

  “You’ll come back, right?”

  Rashid felt his son’s question, the vibrations of the boy’s anxious voice pressing into his chest, as much as he heard the question.

  “Of course,” he held Michael’s head with one hand, reached out for Kathryn with the other, “of course.”

  Chapter 6