BY ITTO & MEKIYA OUTINI

Copyright is held by the author.

IT HAD never occurred to Jeanie, Jenn, or Jane to ask themselves why they were three, and not two, and not one, and so they were doubly startled the day when they came face to face with the answer, tucked in the pages of the letter that their mother had given them to read to Grandma Aisha and Grandpa Abdurrahman. They were startled not only by the answer, that is, but also the question.

They’d been awake for the last 30 hours and had been in their grandparents’ home for just under 12. They were not used to anything. The stiff seats had kept them awake on the plane. Their grandparents’ questions had kept them awake in the taxi. The suffocating heat had kept them awake in the room where their mother had slept as a girl, where there was no AC. They’d never imagined that their mother’s parents wouldn’t have AC. Back in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, everyone had AC.

The only grandparents they’d ever known were Grandpa Al and Grandma June. Grandpa Al lived alone in a tiny, barren cell of a room in a high-rise where the doors swelled shut all summer. He smoked copiously, usually straight into his bathroom fan since the high-rise did not permit smoking, and he did not know how to talk to children, but did know how to play checkers with them. Thanks to him, the girls were all masters at checkers.

Grandma June still occupied the brick two-storey where James, the girls’ father, had been born and raised. She didn’t live alone, she maintained, but with spirits. She wasn’t attached to the rubbish, the endless cuckoo clocks, and soap dishes, and macramé, and crockpots, and cat and toad and rooster figurines — on the contrary, she was indifferent to them — but the spirits liked them, so she kept them around. The spirits didn’t like to water the plants, though, or perhaps were unable to, so they always died in the winter, or during long dry spells, and had to be replaced so often that the woman at the local plant nursery used to joke that she was living off Grandpa Al’s alimony.

Grandma Aisha and Grandpa Abdurrahman weren’t at all like those grandparents. For one thing, they didn’t speak English. The girls’ mother had insisted that they speak Darija at home as well as English, coaching them relentlessly until they’d achieved impeccable pronunciation, but unless she was the one addressing them, they were still hard-pressed to make out a word. They could read and write well, but struggled with face-to-face communication.

For another, Grandma Aisha and Grandpa Abdurrahman were not divorced. It was not certain whether they loved each other, or even whether they liked each other, but they clearly were accustomed to putting up with each other. Their conflicts never seemed to boil over. Grandma Aisha spoke in the same stately, frictionless monotone no matter her mood, and Grandpa Abdurrahman went about chortling happily to himself so that no one else would feel obliged to think he was funny and laugh along with him.

For a third, they had a normal amount of things: not too much, not too little, but just right. The girls couldn’t be sure whether they believed in spirits, especially not after Grandpa Abdurrahman had asked them, seemingly in earnest, whether they were Jinns, but they certainly weren’t relying on spirits to water their plants for them.

When Jane, whose turn had come to read aloud, unwittingly annunciated the answer to the question that they’d never thought to ask, Abdurrahman began to chortle. He leapt up from his chair and paced in a little circle around the room, like a dog preparing for a nap, but instead of succumbing to the soporific effects of this maneuver, he grew more animated, stroking his long beard, slapping his thighs, and dabbing daintily at his eyes. He went out of the room, still laughing, and returned moments later with crumbs in his beard and a cookie in each hand, a bite out of each of them.

The girls exchanged quizzical looks with one another, then with Grandma Aisha. For all the difficulty presented by communicating with her, they were far closer to finding common ground with her than any of them were to understanding Abdurrahman.

“Well,” Aisha said finally, addressing her husband, “are you going to enlighten us? What is a — ” and she repeated the word that Jane had read.

Abdurrahman, ignoring her, went on chortling.

Whatever it was — and Jane and Jeannie and Jenn now thought they had a pretty good idea, though they’d only ever heard the English word — their mother had made three little holes in it with a sewing needle before giving it to their father to wear, and voila! Here they were.

“It’s not a nice thing,” said Abdurrahman, sobering suddenly. “You’d better just keep reading.”

It was Jenn’s turn. Holding the letter carefully in both hands, she read aloud, “You might think it was bad, what I did, but I didn’t feel bad. I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t love James, and he didn’t love me. There was no trust to be broken. I did what I had to do.”

Jenn was the fastest reader out of the three, but not the best reader. She heard the words as they rushed from her mouth, but grasped their meaning only several seconds later, and never completely.

“You gave me a mission,” she went on. “You told me to go to America. I was determined to fulfill that mission. Of course, you thought my brains would get me there. I also believed that. Our problem was ignorance. What none of us knew is that brains don’t mean anything once you’re done with high school. They’re like zucchinis that start rotting as soon as you turn 18.”

“Enough!” Abdurrahman snatched the letter from his granddaughter’s hand. “This is shameful.”

Aisha moved even faster than he, plucking it from him before he could tear it up or thrust it into the fire. “Our daughter is speaking,” she said. “She’s been busy for 13 years, and now she’s speaking. You’d better think twice before you do anything to that letter. Whatever you do to it, you mark my words, I’ll do right back to you.”

Without lowering himself into his chair, Abdurrahman put the remaining cookie in his mouth and chewed.

“Here.” Aisha passed the letter to Jeannie, possibly mistaking her for Jenn. “You can keep reading.”

The girls were frightened now, all vibrating together at the same wretched frequency. In the 12 years of life they’d shared, they’d borne witness to plenty of domestic quarrels, watching their mother storm through the trailer, flinging dishes left and right, the plastic ones that didn’t break, and raging at their father, sometimes in his presence, more often in his absence, though his presence had been just like his absence near the end, after he’d returned, before he’d gone away again, and their mother had made the postal worker take their photos, and packed their bags, called their grandma, told her they were coming, and let them know which suitcase they would find the letter in, and put them on the plane, and now they trembled at the thought that it might all be starting again, only this time they would have no other refuge, no other place to go.

Grasping what was wanted of her, if not what would happen if she failed to do it, Jeannie took the letter, found the place where Jenn had left off, and began to read:

“Of course, that may be a generalization. I haven’t tested it everywhere. What I know for a fact is that brains don’t mean anything at Al Akhawayn. Everything about that place is a myth. The website looks nice, the campus is beautiful, and all the rich kids go there, but once you’re in, the way to advance is not to study hard, read lots of books, and master every subject. The way to advance is to dress well, wear lots of makeup, go to all the right parties, find a guy, and do what I did. If you’ve got money, you can skip the last part, but we all know I didn’t have money.”

The grey-bronze flesh of Aisha’s forehead became a ridge between her thumb and index finger, pinching, squeezing.

“Truth be told,” Jeannie read on, her cheeks turning crimson, “James was a good-looking man. There was always talk about him. Rumours. I heard it all before I ever met him. The other girls liked him for his looks. I never noticed. He said my English was better than his. I’m sure that worked on the other girls, but I’d heard it before, from teachers who didn’t want anything from me. I found him charming only once he got me drunk, and I didn’t let him get me drunk until I’d made my plan.”

“She’s accusing us,” burst out Abdurrahman. “She’s accusing us of telling her to go and be a whore!”

“She’s not accusing us,” said Aisha.

“I won’t have it! Not under my roof!”

“She’s not accusing anyone,” said Aisha. “Listen.”

Encouraged by a nod from her grandmother, Jeannie continued: “Ask anyone at Al Akhawayn. They’ll tell you that I never liked to drink, I never went to parties, I never wanted anything to do with men my first semester. I was interested only in my studies. But then I got my grades back, and I realized I’d made a mistake. Things were going wrong.”

Breaking off mid-paragraph, Jeannie handed the letter back to Jane, who took a moment to find her sister’s place before resuming:

“Did you know that they grade you on those things at Al Akhawayn? They don’t call it drinking and parties, of course. They call it participation. But that’s what they mean.

“It really shook me up, getting those grades. It had me questioning myself, my work ethic, my intelligence — everything. I’m grateful, though, because it taught me a valuable lesson. What I’d been doing wasn’t working. I had to change my strategy if I was to fulfill my mission.”

“Why is she talking like that?” demanded Abdurrahman. “Why is she talking like she’s in some spy movie? We wanted her to have a better life. That’s all. What does that have to do with her sneaking around, poking holes in things?”

If the girls’ mother had been there to hear him, she’d have been surprised. When she’d left home in 2012, he’d never seen a spy movie. He’d bought his first TV in 2016, with the money he’d saved after years of delivering vegetables from sunrise to sunset, rain or shine, sick or healthy, 365 days a year. He’d gone on saving even after his daughter was admitted to Al Akhawayn on a full scholarship, just in case. Only in 2016, the year she’d supposedly graduated, had he felt comfortable enough to spend the money on himself.

“Shh,” said Aisha to her husband. “Listen. She’s trying to explain.”

“I did what I had to do,” read Jane. “I didn’t feel anything. No. That’s not true. I felt something. Excitement. I felt excited to be going to America. I’d never heard of Bartlesville, but I knew that it was in America. That was enough. I really was ignorant! I thought Bartlesville was right next to New York, and Oklahoma was right next to California!

“James wasn’t interested in educating me any more than he was interested in being a father or husband. He just wanted freedom. I never held that against him. We were both after freedom, after all, in different ways. There once was a famous philosopher who said that your freedom begins where mine ends. We were the proof of that, me and James. For me, America was freedom, and Morocco was a prison. For James, it was the other way around.”

Jane stopped reading and passed the letter on to Jenn, who sat hunched-up between her sisters, wet-eyed and jelly-jawed. She was catching almost nothing when she wasn’t reading, and only 50 percent when she was, and this only added to her misery, making her feel like an outsider, but not sparing her the mortifying gist of things.

“We’d been in Bartlesville for less than a year,” she read swiftly, urgently, “when James left. He said he’d learned his lesson, he would never give another woman a chance to do what I’d done, and anyway, even if she did, the joke would be on her because Korea doesn’t force you to marry like Morocco does. A university over there had offered him a teaching position. I asked if he was planning to send any money. He said no, America has social services, go ahead and use them. So, I got on social services.”

Jenn was comprehending more now than she would’ve liked. To put a stop to this, she passed the letter on to Jeannie. She could always read it again later, when she was more prepared.

“That’s where the government gives you money,” read Jeannie. “It sounds like a nice thing, but when Americans find out you’re on social services, they start to hate you. They hate everyone who uses those services, even Americans. They hated me more. I learned pretty quickly not to share this with anyone, but I’d already told James’s parents. After that, things fell apart with them. The funny thing was that they were also on social services! They said they’d earned it, though, and maybe that was true. It is their country. For me, it was never about what I’d earned. It was about survival. Doing what I had to do. I couldn’t get papers, I couldn’t find work, but I could get those services. I got them, and we didn’t starve. And I will say this for my in-laws: they were still good with the girls. They didn’t hate them. I think because I gave them American names.”

“American names.” Abdurrahman snorted. “What’s this jeem, jeem, jeem all about? Don’t they have any other letters in English?”

“She’s telling you,” said Aisha. “She’s explaining. Listen, and you’ll understand.”

Jeannie passed the letter to Jane.

“I know it wasn’t easy for you,” Jane read, “seeing us only twice a year. By the way, it’s not true, what I told you. WhatsApp lets you make international calls all year round. I only told you that so that I wouldn’t have to lie about a lot of other things. I didn’t mind lying to James, I think because lying in English is easy, and I never really cared about him, but when I lied to you… afterward, sometimes, I would lie in bed for days. The filth would just accumulate around me. The girls would be eating from cans. I felt so ashamed. There was never any solution except to get back on my feet when I could and start cooking and cleaning again, so that’s what I did.

“Girls, since you’re reading this, I want you to know something.” Jane hesitated, swallowing, then continued: “I wish you could hear this directly from me, but I’m afraid that’s no longer possible. You’re just going to have to hear it from yourself. I want you to read this together.” Obedient as flowers turning toward the sun, Jeannie and Jenn leaned in and read aloud with Jane: “‘We’re proud of our patience. Our strength. Our resilience. We’re proud of knowing how to read and write. We’re proud of speaking English and Darija. We’re proud, and we’ve made our mother proud.’”

Jane’s voice cracked. Snatching the letter as if plucking out a splinter, the faster the better, Jenn took over reading:

“It’s true. You’ve made me proud. I want you to carry that with you. I’m sorry to say I’ve lied to you a thousand times, but I’m not lying now. Do you trust me? I don’t blame you if you don’t, but let me show you. Your father never loved you. There. I’ve said it. If I were lying, don’t you think I would’ve told you that he did? You deserve the truth. The truth is that he never loved you. That’s not your fault. He never chose to be your father any more than you chose to be his daughters. You can’t love what you didn’t choose. I’m convinced of that. Your father loved one thing above all, his freedom, and in the end, it was taken away from him. You might think he loved his parents, but the truth is that he couldn’t wait to get away from them as well as me. I used to think he loved Morocco, but I don’t think so anymore. We hurt him. I’m sure Korea hurt him, too, though he never told me anything about Korea. If they hadn’t, he never would’ve come back. He hated Bartlesville.

“I’m not writing this to hurt you. I’m writing this to help you understand. Two things have hurt me more than anything: ignorance and lies. Going forward, I want you to have as little of both as possible. I know I’ve done my part. I’ve made a mess of things. I hope to undo some of it with this letter. I — ”

Breathless, Jenn broke off mid-sentence and passed the letter on to Jeannie, who, mechanically, began to read:

“I didn’t believe him when he said what he would do. That sounds awful now, but put yourself in my shoes: wouldn’t you think it just sounded ridiculous? If someone told you, ‘I’m going to kill myself, and I’m going to do it by jumping into the Grand Canyon,’ would you believe him? The Grand Canyon is nowhere near Bartlesville. You have to drive for days and days, past plenty of other cliffs and holes. But he had his heart set on the Grand Canyon. If he’d said, ‘I’m going to shoot myself,’ I might’ve believed him. Americans love their guns. If he’d said, ‘I’m going to take all my sleeping pills,’ I might’ve cleaned out the medicine cabinet. But what was I supposed to do about the Grand Canyon? It was truly genius. He wasn’t just trying to get attention. He really meant to follow through. That was the proof, right there. Well. He did it.”

Jeannie stopped reading. Her eyes were wide. Her grandfather teetered on the edge of his seat, precarious, forward-hunching, utterly captivated. Aisha’s hand covered her mouth. The girls stared at one another.

“We didn’t know,” said Jane, addressing her grandparents, but forgetting which language to use.

Jeannie said it again, in Darija: “We didn’t know.”

“Oh,” said Aisha, less a word than an involuntary rush of sound. “Oh. You poor girls.”

“This isn’t right,” said Abdurrahman. “This isn’t how things should be done.”

“They shouldn’t be reading this,” said Aisha. “We should ask someone else. We should hire someone.”

“No.” Jane’s voice was flat and cold, not a woman’s, but also not a girl’s anymore, as concrete and unyielding as a landscape, a tundra. “Give it to me.” She took the letter from her sister’s frozen hands. “She told us to read it.”

“You don’t have to,” said Aisha. “We’ll find someone else, God willing — ”

“She told us to read it,” said Jane. “That’s our mission.” Returning her eyes to the page, she read, her voice almost as flat as before, but lilting ever so slightly in response to the formation of their mother’s sentences:

“One day, he disappeared. A week later, it was all over the news. Not for long, of course, because that was October, and the only thing on anyone’s mind was the election. Can you guess what James’s mother sent me the day he died? An article about what real Americans should do to stop illegal immigrants from voting!

“‘Well,’ I thought the night he won, ‘I’ll never be an American now.’ I guess that wasn’t really news. They’d denied me twice already, first under Trump, then again under Biden. They thought it was suspicious, how James was always in Korea, and I didn’t even have his banking information. I thought having three children would prove we were married, but I guess that isn’t proof of anything. Not in America, anyway.

“The election just made me admit what I already knew. I had failed. I had failed to carry out my mission. I had failed to give my girls even what you gave me, much less something more. It wasn’t from laziness. I want you to know that. It wasn’t from lack of trying. I did everything. I sacrificed everything. Take it from me that self-respect and dignity are the hardest things to lose. Now my heart is broken. My mind is broken. My body, for some reason, is still working. You might think that with no mind and no heart, a body wouldn’t be of much use, but the truth is, it’s gotten a lot done. Booked the flights. Applied for the passports. Packed the girls’ bags. I know they’re not Moroccans, but they might as well not be Americans, either, the way things are going. At least I know that you’ll love them and care for them because you loved and cared for me. Their Darija’s good and getting better. They’ll be speaking like natives from Meknes in no time. James’s parents were good with them, but those were different times. Everyone’s looking out for themselves now.

“I know this isn’t fair. I know it’s not what you deserve, or what you’ve worked for all those years, but I promise that the girls will care for you. You’ll care for each other. I do believe that. I believe that once the shock wears off, you’ll all find yourselves living much happier lives without me there, ruining things. The girls deserve to be loved by a father as I was, a kind, wise, responsible man.

“I hope I’ve answered your questions to satisfaction. Unfortunately, by the time you read this letter, I’ll no longer be able to clarify things, but everything is up to God. I didn’t clean out the medicine cabinet before, but I will now. Your daughter, your mother, with undying love.”

The way Jane fell silent, abruptly, made it sound as if there would be more.

“Is that all?” asked Jenn.

Not looking at her sister, not looking at anyone, Jane folded the letter and laid it on the coffee table.

“There’s nothing else?” Jenn demanded in English. “Let me see.” She snatched the letter, held it in both hands, then turned it over, scrutinizing with a furrowed brow. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Have you checked inside the envelope? There’s got to be another page.”

Jane said nothing. Jeannie said nothing.

“It just cuts off.” Jenn’s voice was tremulous, but certain. “She said she was answering questions,” she said, “but she didn’t answer anything. She didn’t answer anything.”

In a moment, Abdurrahman was gone. To the girls, jetlagged and bleary-eyed, it seemed he hadn’t so much left as disappeared: there one minute, and the next, his chair was empty.

In his place, there was only a sound. It wasn’t English, wasn’t Darija. It was older than either. It was older than language, an undercurrent seeping through the earth beneath borders, lapping at the pillars that held up the world.

It was the sound of an old woman, weeping.

***

Itto and Mekiya Outini write about America, Morocco, and all those caught in between. They’ve published in The North American Review, Modern Literature, Fourth Genre, The Good River Review, MQR, Hobart, Lunch Ticket, Chautauqua, The Stonecoast Review, Mount Hope, Jewish Life, The Brussels Review, Eunoia Review, New Contrast, ExPat Press, DarkWinter, Lotus-Eater, Gargoyle Magazine, and elsewhere. Their work has received support from the MacDowell Foundation, the Steinbeck Fellowship Program, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. They’re collaborating on several books, running The DateKeepers, an author support platform, and co-hosting the podcast Let’s Have a Renaissance.