Under the Olive Tree

Epilogue

Three years later,

Amani quietly crept out of the bathroom, a small plastic object clasped between her fingers as she made her way through the silent apartment. Outside, she heard a distant conversation of teenage boys walking through the streets an hour before the dawn prayer. Everyone else slept but she would have to wake Muhsin soon so he could get ready for his prayer as well.

She made her way past the normally sealed room and paused at the shadowy figure looming within. It was a bedroom that had belonged to the younger sister killed years before, and its door ceased to open now that all her siblings had moved past her absence. It had suffocated and ripped at their strength until even the littlest Ezzo grew distant.

Now, Muhsin hardly ever spoke of Fayza. Amjad and Ezzo had been forced to grow twice their ages when they heard of the unjust murder of their beloved sister. Amjad was colder now, more unforgiving. Though he'd matured to take on the responsibility of the family alongside Muhsin, his trust and love in people had been stolen away along with his sister. Ezzo had detached... from all of it. He was only beginning to return to his friends but, in the first year following Fayza's death, had cried and screamed for her every night.

They hardly spoke of her.

Almost as if she'd been dream they'd all shared but never spoke about lest they'd been the only ones who'd known her. Lest she truly become a dream.

In the home, only one person remained who continued to remember the taken girl. Um Muhsin sat in the room once again, the chair creaking beneath her as she rocked in the fading scent of her stolen daughter. Amani peered through the crack of the door, seeing the aged woman in her usual place near the open window. She looked out onto the night sky, nodding and speaking to herself as if she sat in the company of all those stripped from her.

"­Eh, ya rouhy," she nodded, calling out to the daughter she reached out to every night. But UmMuhsin had not lost her grasp on reality as the doctors had tried to say. In the morning, she was herself, looking after her sons and watching the television beside Amani as they wrapped grape leaves and carved out the squash for its stuffing. Amani felt for the mother who'd lost the man she'd loved, the sister she'd grown up with, and now the daughter she'd birthed and raised.

It was a pain only a mother could understand.

Amani pushed the door open and stepped in, carefully approaching the humming woman. She placed a gentle hand on her shoulder to warn her of her presence. "You haven't slept, amti?" Amani asked gently.

Um Muhsin turned to her, the tears silently streaming down her cheeks reflecting the brightness of the high moon. "How am I to sleep, ya binty?" She replied to Amani, placing her palm over the girl's hand. "How am I to sleep without smelling the hair of all my children? I must wait for Fayza to come home. She will need someone to open the door."

"Amti," Amani felt her own eyes stinging at the words she heard time and time again from the heartbroken mother. "Amti, Fayza is gone."

Um Muhsin shook her head and returned her gaze out to the stars stretching above them. "I cannot sleep. Until they return my daughter to me, until I smell her hair and kiss her brow, I cannot. She must have gotten lost. Ya Amani, wake Muhsin to go look for her. It's too late for a girl like her to be out on the street by herself. Muhsin will retrieve her."

Though she nodded, Amani knew she could not wake her husband. She knew that every time his mother crept into the room to wake him from his sleep to find his sister, the guilt of losing her grew within him once again. "I'll wake him, but you need to sleep, Amti. What will Fayza think if she returns and you are tired like this? You should rest so you can open the door."