I Left My Husband Bleeding, and the Mob Boss Said Good novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Forty Nights

In a brick house off Michigan Avenue she is searched, questioned and bitten by a toddler; she names forty nights, a lock on the inside and nobody's hands on her unless she says, and at 2 a.m. she crosses the hall to say it.

The Tahoe didn't follow us out of the lot.

The driver's car had pulled across the exit, and in the mirror I watched my brother-in-law stop and sit there with his lights on.

Marwan Karam drove himself, with one hand, and did not say a word until we turned onto Michigan Avenue.

"Her name is Yara," he said. "She's three. She hasn't let a stranger touch her since my father died."

"She's asleep on me," I said.

"I noticed."

His house was brick, behind a gate, with an icon of the Virgin over the front door and a light left on in the hall.

A woman in her sixties met us on the step in a housecoat and a headscarf.

She took Yara from my arms one finger at a time, because the child would not let go of my scarf even asleep.

Then she took my bag, and my coat, and she put both hands on me.

She went through my pockets first.

She ran her thumbs down the seams of my coat and then along the band of my bra, hard, looking for a phone or a wire.

I stood with my arms out and looked at the wall.

Marwan stood in the kitchen doorway with his arms folded and looked at the wall too.

He didn't tell her to stop.

The housekeeper laid out what was in my bag on the table.

There were two hundred and twelve dollars, a passport, a phone charger with no phone, and clean underwear.

At the bottom, folded flat, was my mother's scarf, red and green thread on cream cotton.

"Nothing," the housekeeper said in Arabic, and left with the child.

I put the scarf back in the bag myself.

"Sit," Marwan said.

I sat. He stayed standing, because I found out later he always did.

"Did you come to open my door?" he said.

"If I wanted your door open," I said, "I'd have left the Buick where it was and let his brother drive up your street behind us."

"Then what do you want?"

"Forty nights."

He waited.

"A room with a lock on the inside, and the key is mine," I said. "And nobody touches me unless I say."

"Why forty?"

"I don't know. It sounded like enough."

Something that was almost a smile moved in his beard and went away.

"In my father's village a guest ate for forty days before anyone asked her business," he said. "That is my rule too."

"That's not a real custom."

"It is now."

I looked at him.

He was thirty-four, I guessed, and had not slept in a while.

"Mine," he said. "You tell me the truth. If anyone from his house calls, you hand me the phone."

"I don't have a phone."

"Then it will be easy."

He put a glass of tea in front of me.

My hand shook so badly that tea slopped over the rim.

He looked at it, and then he crossed the kitchen and put his hand around mine on the glass.

It was a big hand, scarred across the knuckles, and warm all the way through.

He held it there until the shaking stopped.

I saw a pulse jump once in his throat, under the beard.

He hadn't slept, I told myself.

Then he took his hand away and said, "Eat. Then sleep. Nobody comes through that gate."

I slept fourteen hours.

The room was upstairs, at the far end of the hall.

It had a lock on the inside and a brass key in it.

I turned the key and sat on the bed and looked at it, until I stopped hearing a kitchen in Sterling Heights.

When I woke it was dark and something small was standing on my chest.

Yara looked down at me with her red cup held in both hands.

"Nahnah," she said, which was as close as she could get to my name, and she put my wrist in her mouth and bit down.

I bit her back, on the soft part of her thumb, not hard.

She stared at me, outraged.

Then she laughed, so hard she sat down on my stomach.

Marwan was in the hall when I opened the door, in the chair he had pulled up across from it, with his coat still on.

He stood up when he saw me.

"She's never done that," he said.

"Bitten someone?"

"Laughed at someone who bit her back."

I ate his housekeeper's soup standing at the counter, because he did, and he watched every spoonful go in.

That night I locked my door, and lay awake, and heard the chair creak in the hall every time I turned over.

At two I got up.

I turned the key.

He was in the chair with his elbows on his knees and his eyes open.

He didn't say anything.

"I said nobody touches me unless I say," I told him.

I walked past him, across the landing, to his bedroom door, and put my hand flat on the wood.

"I'm saying."

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