Page 204 - A Woman Is No Man

father? Beaten to death in their home, in the very rooms where she and her
sisters spent their days? Why hadn’t she acted on her suspicions after
reading Isra’s letter? Why hadn’t she questioned Fareeda until she’d

admitted the truth? How had she believed her so easily? After all the lies
she knew Fareeda to be capable of. Did she not have a mind of her own?
Could she not think for herself? How had she lived her entire life letting
Fareeda make her choices for her? Because she was a fool.
Deya clenched the newspaper clipping tight. Then she was screaming
again, banging her fists against the train window. Her father had killed her
mother. He had killed her, taken her life, stolen her away from them. Then

the coward had taken his own life! How could he? Deya closed her eyes,
tried to picture Baba’s face. The most clearly she could remember him was
the day of her seventh birthday. He had come home with a Carvel ice cream
cake, smiling as he sang her a birthday melody in Arabic. The way he had
looked at her, the way he had smiled—the memory had always comforted
Deya on a bad day.

Now she wanted to rip the memory out of her head. How could that
same man have killed her mother? And how could her grandparents have
covered for him? How could they have hidden the truth from his daughters
all these years? And, as if that wasn’t enough, how could they have urged
her to get married young and quickly, as her parents had done? How could
they risk something like this happening again? Happening to her? She
shuddered at the thought.

“No,” Deya said aloud when the train stopped at Bay Ridge Avenue. As
soon as the metal doors slid open, she ran. “No!” she screamed. It would
not happen again. Not to her. Not to her sisters. Isra’s story would not
become theirs. She ran until she reached the bus stop, telling herself again
and again: I will not repeat my mother’s life. As the bus turned the corner
and she watched her sisters climb down its steps, Deya realized that Sarah

was right: her life was her own, and only she controlled it.