Page 203 - A Woman Is No Man

Deya

Winter 2008

Deya ran out of the bookstore, the newspaper clipping crushed in her fist.

At the subway station, she paced up and down the platform as she waited
for the R train. Once on board she paced in circles by the metal door. She
shoved past people down the center aisle, her fear and deference forgotten.
At the back of the train, she opened the exit door—ignoring the EMERGENCY
ONLY sign—and crossed into the next train car, even as the tracks rattled
under her feet in the dark tunnel. In the next car she did the same—pacing,
shoving, escaping from one car to the next as though the next car might

hold a different story, any other story, so long as it was one in which her
mother had not been murdered by her father.
When she finally paused, all she could do was stare again at the
newspaper clipping in her hands:

MOTHER OF FOUR MURDERED IN BROOKLYN BASEMENT

Brooklyn, NY. October 17, 1997—Isra Ra’ad, twenty-five-year-old
mother of four, was found beaten to death in Bay Ridge late
Wednesday night. The victim appeared to have been beaten by her
husband, thirty-eight-year-old Adam Ra’ad, who fled the scene of
the crime. Police found his body in the East River Thursday
morning after witnesses saw him jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.

How many times did Deya read the words and burst into tears? How
many times did she scream in the middle of the train, stopping only when

she realized that people around her were staring? What did they see when
they looked at her? Did they see what she saw, staring at her darkened
reflection in the glass window, the face of a fool? For now Deya saw how
foolish she’d been. How could she have lived with her grandparents all
these years and not known that her mother had been murdered by her own