“Ya’ll Come Back Now”—fiction

I had not been back to my parents’ home in the suburbs of Southern California since my son was born and my father died. Now it was Thanksgiving. When we arrived, some of our relatives greeted my son as if he were my father returned, kissing his forehead with reverence. I scoffed. 

My wife took our sleeping son up to my parents’ bedroom. In the dining room, the table was set. The turkey, golden yet dry, was poised at the center on a larger silver tray with vegetables on either side. Surrounding the turkey were the stuffed grape leaves, tabbouli, hummus covered with olive oil and paprika, and, as usual, my mom’s salmon and tahini dish—a recipe she had invented somewhere between Alaska and Saudi Arabia. Sprinkled on top of the dish were famous pine nuts from Falougha, my father’s village. Each dish on the table brought back memories. The cranberry sauce that made my father squirm (he never believed in the marriage of sweet and meat), the parsley cut the way he liked it, the grape leaves thin as pinky fingers, the way his sisters made them in Falougha.

“Put the tabbouli on the table and tell the guests tfaddalu,” my mother said. Her kohl smudged along her cheeks, and I realized she had been crying.

The tfaddalus were said, and everyone rushed to the table. My mother came out of the kitchen, her eyes freshly dried. She looked around at everyone gathered together. “We all miss him today,” she said. “And upstairs, his first grandchild sleeps in peace—al hamdillah.” The words passed from mouth to mouth around the table, al hamdillah, al hamdillah—praise God, the answer to everything, a birth, a meal, a parking spot—until the room was full of nothing else.

The cries of our one-month-old drifted down. I stood up, quietly excusing myself from the table, which had erupted in platitudes.

My heartbeat quickened as I opened the door to my parents’ bedroom. Aunt Maheba’s words at my father’s funeral echoed in my mind. He will come back as your son, inshallah.

My son was fast asleep on my parents’ bed. As I approached, his eyes flew open, startled, and I recalled how my father had startled the same way when he was in the hospital. The sudden body shake, the eyes opening for a moment, both hands shooting up as if in defense. Then back to sleep again, as if nothing had happened. 

My father had died without knowing much about me. When he was in a coma for two days, I had wanted to tell him everything. With my son, I wanted the opposite.

My son’s eyes were now closed. His small chest rose and fell gently, and I relaxed. His eyelashes resembled my father’s, and it occurred to me then how much I had felt my father’s spirit during the last month of the pregnancy. 

My father belonged to the Druze, a sect of Islam that believes the soul returns. He believed it too. When I was young, my parents talked about reincarnation all the time. My father believed it was what made the Druze such courageous fighters, like those who carried out missions against the French tanks at the end of World War II. When I ate with my hands instead of a knife and fork, he called me his little Bedouin and joked that in my past life I must have been a Bedouin in the village named Mi’riz. 

I stopped believing in reincarnation during high school, when a full-blooded Druze from ‘48 Palestine told me that my past life was most likely sinful because my father had married outside the faith.

During trips back to Lebanon, I had heard stories about the natiqs, the children who remembered their past lives. There was the boy from the Golan Heights, born with a long red birthmark across his head. At three years old he told his family he had been murdered with an axe in a previous life. The boy walked up to a man he’d never met and called him by his name. 

“I was once your neighbor,” the child said. “We had a fight and you killed me with an axe.” 

The man went white. The boy led them to a pile of stones in a field. 

“He buried my body under these stones,” he said, “and the axe is buried there.” Beneath the rocks they found a skeleton with a split in the skull matching the boy’s birthmark exactly. They also found the axe. The man confessed. 

I also heard stories about a girl who found treasure where her old body had hidden it, about an uncle who still had a scar on his head because he had fallen into a well in his past life. I never believed any of these tales.

I stopped believing in reincarnation during high school, when a full-blooded Druze from ‘48 Palestine told me that my past life was most likely sinful because my father had married outside the faith. Marrying my mother had been my father’s greatest transgression. Even at his funeral, we overheard mourners marvel at how my sister and I turned out fine considering our mother was Christian. I had never talked to my father about these things, even though he must have known people had such thoughts.

I don’t believe in reincarnation, I reminded myself, as my eyes fell on my grandfather’s picture on the dresser, easily recognizable from the tarbush on his head. He had died four years after my father arrived in West Virginia. My father said he would always regret never seeing his father before he died.

Did we have to be with someone when they were dying? Did it really matter in the end?

The sound of the conversations downstairs pulled me back. Reaching around my son’s body to check his diaper, I noticed his eyes were half open. Suddenly, his eyes opened and locked on mine. In the hospital, I had turned away from my father’s silent eyes. I pushed the thought away, my hands twitching as I unfastened the diaper. My father had always criticized the twitch in my hands, how I struggled to tie my shoes, or use my fork to eat. In the hospital, my hands had also twitched when I touched the hair on my father’s arm. He did not say anything then, the painkillers were too strong. As I caressed my son now, I prayed for my hands to free themselves of the twitch, of the past. I wanted to hold him steadily.

Suddenly, my son’s hand reached up. His fingers found my face and touched my cheek in a specific way: three fingers—index, middle, and ring—starting at my nose, moving up toward my temple. It was the exact gesture my father used when he wanted to comfort me, the motion he had made a thousand times when I was upset, when I’d failed at something, when I needed to know someone believed in me.

I pulled back, my hands shaking. 

My son’s half-open eyes remained locked on mine. They appeared dark and ancient. His hand dropped. Then slowly, thumb and index finger came together in a circle, the other three slightly curled in. My father’s gesture, the one he’d make when he was thinking, when he was about to tell a story, when he was deciding whether to share important news. 

I remembered watching TV on the same bed five months earlier. The whole day had been spent with oncologists and pharmacies. All I could do was send emails inquiring about different free trials for pancreatic cancer around the country. 

My father had been watching the film Three Kings, a scathing critique of the American empire. I was on my laptop with my sister, planning his final trip back to his village in Lebanon. He never made it. 

At one point, my father turned away from the TV and said, “Do you know your hands look like your jiddu’s? You do the same movements.” I looked down, where I was gently tapping each finger on my left hand to the corresponding finger on my right hand. 

My son’s hands were doing the exact same thing. Thumb to thumb, index to index, finger to finger until the pinky, then again in reverse. 

I massaged my son’s hands. I picked him up and rocked him close to my body. I talked to him in a loud voice, walking back and forth in the same bedroom where my father once told me about his father.

“Your jiddu had his first Thanksgiving shortly after arriving in Concord, West Virginia,” I said. “He was a nineteen-year-old village boy from Lebanon—fresh off the plane, still thinking his p’s were b’s, and on his first walk in New York City, thought a ‘No Parking’ sign was meant for dogs. His Baba had sold the land of the mulberry trees to send him here, so he could become a doctor. He never did. He drove with a friend from his village to celebrate Thanksgiving at his English teacher’s house. His friend had a crush on the teacher and insisted they make tabbouli for the guests. But they couldn’t find any bulgur, so they used some type of small Italian rice. He said it was the worst tabbouli he had ever tasted and vowed never to let anyone else make it in his home.

Over dinner, the host asked about Lebanese food as if my father had come from The Arabian Nights. She kept saying that the turkey and the tabbouli went well together and that this would be the beginning of a Thanksgiving tradition. While heading to their car after dinner, he and his friend heard their Appalachian teacher call out, ‘Y’all come back now.’ Your jiddu would say it was like Dolly Parton.

“Maybe she meant for us to come back?” your grandfather’s friend asked in the car. They weren’t sure what she meant so they ended up going back and knocking on her door.

“Did you boys forget something?” she asked, surprised.

“No, you said ‘You all come back now,’” your jiddu replied. She explained she just wanted them to know that her relatives loved their company. Just the West Virginian way! 

Y’all come back now. Y’all come back now. Y’all come back now. Y’all come back now…” 

I repeated this, over and over, my accent changing from Arabic to Southern, until it was a jumble of the two. 

Suddenly, my son squeezed my hand. Three times. Just like my father had in the hospital. One for “I’m here.” Two for “I hear you.” Three for “I love you.”

I bit my lip to stop my tears. I tasted blood. 

I squeezed back. 

One. Two. Three.