“The Dentist’s Son”—a short story

We run into each other outside the only public library in town. It is the cusp of summer, the crabapples flowering like a dusting of snow. Maybe it’s to finish her cigarette or maybe it’s the comfort of seeing another Muslim in a strange place, but she lingers in conversation and I do too. It’s almost like we’re back at the law faculty all those years ago, before she dropped out. 

I shift the box of paperbacks awkwardly, from under one arm to the other. Maryam says she is in Picton to finish writing her novel. She tilts her head to the side. “You look different with a beard,” she says. “Trying desperately to be noticed around here?” She laughs, a restrained laugh. 

I cover my face with my free hand. I stopped shaving when my mother died, stopped praying too: eight months. The mosque reminds me of death. “Quite the opposite,” I say, ducking under the maple. “Desperate to stay out of the way.” Her smile makes me forget all the ways I am unideal for this place.

She seems different too. She once dared debate the professors that terrified us but now she hesitates before she speaks. She adjusts her purse strap; her eyes are wide like she is both looking for something and afraid to find it. “When we were in school, you said you were from here but I wasn’t sure exactly where.” She points diagonally across the road at my father’s clinic, Dr. Baker’s County Dental, the reason I’ve been avoiding Main Street since my return. “That’s how I remembered,” she says. “The dentist’s son.” 

“Yeah.” I bear down on a pebble under my foot. 

There is an uncomfortable silence between us. 

“You’re here visiting family?” 

I nod. I can’t bring myself to tell her that I am stuck in grief, that my prolonged leave has left me without a law career to return to, that Mama died suddenly and alone, surrounded by her hoarded grievances. Small, miserable life. Small, beautiful life. 

Maryam tells me about the heritage home where she’s staying for a summer-long residency, its inconvenient lack of air conditioning that brings her to the library to write. She doesn’t say anything about Ahmed. I assume they’re still separated. 

Her hands dance as she talks and her bangles tinkle. I am struck by how easy it is for us to take up conversation like this, like we used to, watching the snow fall on Queen’s Park as we smoked between classes. I later learned from Omar, a mutual friend, that she’d dropped out of the program after a summer volunteering in Palestine. I became ashamed of my inaction to the injustices of the world. The idea of faith—of something beyond my personal resentments—was foreign and laughable to me then.  

She says she has to start her writing day and we file up the steps. We agree to meet for breakfast the next day. Her bangles clink, clink, clink as she disappears into the stacks, reminding me of Mama’s bangles, how they distracted me as a child and comforted me as an adult, and I feel the memory of this encounter already forming in my mind, warm and impossible to grasp, like a ray of sun. 

One afternoon, while clearing out the basement, I find a prayer mat behind an old sofa. I unfurl it and dust particles fill the air. I’d only ever seen Mama praying once. It was just after the divorce. Her hands were cupped in her lap, a cotton scarf draped over her hair. I couldn’t make out what she was muttering. 

Why have I taken on this burden of emptying her house? Is this punishment or repentance? 

I fall back into my childhood bed and call Omar. His wife Dana picks up. In the background are sounds of evening commotion, of home.

“So, you’re really not giving this up, are you?” she asks.

From the corner of my eye, I see yet another stack of boxes to donate. Hoarding is the only sign that Mama was a descendent of displaced people. Her grandparents fled from the French in Syria to farmlands in southern Ontario. Saleh became Charlie and Widad became Winnie. Their Arabic and salat were lost in translation. 

“I have to be here, Dana.” I rub my palms, which throb from all the scrubbing. “Mama kept everything. Everything.” 

Dana sighs. “Do what you have to do, but don’t make yourself a martyr.”

Omar comes on the line. He talks about his cases. It reminds me how far I’ve drifted from law, the career I spent years building, in part, to spite my father. I flatten the spiderman duvet with my hand. “Maryam is here.”

“Ahmed’s Maryam?” I feel a pinch between my ribs. I hear him putting information together in the pause. “Things were shaky with them for some time but I didn’t think he’d actually do it.”

“He told you that he was going to break up with her?” The pinching twists. I’d assumed she had left him.

“Didn’t she used to smoke outside the library with us sometimes? I always thought she kind of scared you.”

“That was so long ago,” I smile. “I barely remember it at all.” 

“I wish I grew up like that, with a close family and community.”
“Yeah, well. It made me very lonely.”

At the diner the next morning, Maryam’s voice and hijab are each loud in their own way. As she fills our coffee mugs, the waitress gives us a tight-lipped smile and a look that is both uncertain and pointed. I do as Maryam does and try not to make myself smaller. Under the table, her knees brush against mine. 

I drench my pancakes in syrup and drag my knife through the stack, cutting tranches. Maryam eats one pancake at a time, unstacking as she goes. 

“It’s my mother,” she says, looking down at her buzzing phone screen. Her dark lashes cast shadows on her cheeks. She taps the red button. “She’s been calling me three times a day since I’ve been here.” 

“She’s just worried about you.” My mother will never be on the other end of a phone call.  

“She says I should consider getting remarried soon.” Maryam pauses to take a bite. “It follows me everywhere, the pressure.” She goes to take a bite of pancake then withdraws. She points her knife at me. “Good for you for staying in law school. Building a stable life for yourself. You did the right thing.” 

The pancakes suddenly feel too sweet. I push my plate away. 

“But you, you went after what you wanted… you became a writer.”

She wipes syrup from the corners of her mouth with a napkin and reclines into the booth. “Wanting something and it being good for you are two different things.” 

I think of Emma, my law school girlfriend who did not tell me about the abortion until the end of the semester. The nurse practitioner had prescribed her two pills. A blue box and an orange box. Later, I knew she must have been bleeding under the fluorescence of the exam center. A whole life unlived. Mine or the child’s, I wasn’t sure.

I wasn’t ready to be a father then but still, I felt I had lost something. Lost a chance to show her I would not conflate love with domination, like my father did. Once suspicious of Dana and Omar’s stubborn love, I wondered what kind of husband and father I would be. I borrowed a book of Sufi poetry from the library that summer and then an English translation of the Quran, and soon after, started praying with increasing regularity. Prostrating, in salat, five times a day, I found answers for how life should be.

The waitress hesitates when she brings the bill to the table. I reach over for it, knocking over the bottle of ketchup. Maryam sets it back up right. “Don’t worry,” she laughs. “I’m not going to fight you for it.” 

Afterwards, in the alley by the post office, Maryam lights a cigarette. She offers me one. I shake my head, “I quit a few years ago actually.” 

“Look at you getting your life together.” 

I turn to face Maryam completely. “Can I see you again?” 

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” She exhales to the side. The breeze carries the smoke away. When she pulls the cigarette from her mouth I notice lipstick smudged on the filter. Was she wearing lipstick yesterday? 

“Is it Ahmed?” 

“Ahmed doesn’t know how to be bored.” The hurt is audible in her voice. She flicks the cigarette two times in quick succession. “He’s with someone new.” 

 “And you?”  

“I’m on a deadline.”

“How about the evenings?”

She looks away, then back at me, then away again. “I can’t afford to be late on this draft.”

“Afternoons?”

She draws on her cigarette. “Were you always this persistent?”

“No. I’m more of a quitter actually.” She catches my eye and I hold back a smile. Her eyes are black and brilliant, scared and scary all at once. 

“I don’t think that’s true.” She leans in closer and whispers: “But you’re not quite like I remember either.” 

I feel her breath on my cheek and a whole life passes. I imagine waking up to her smell. I imagine planting lavender that we pick in July and tomatoes we eat in thick slabs in late August when our skin tingles with heat, pleasure slick as sweat and fickle as the seasons. I imagine being a different kind of man than my father, than all the men who hurt the women they claim to love. I imagine building a life worth inheriting.

“I have this feeling like I’m going to see you again, whether I like it or not.” She puts out the cigarette with her foot. She raises an eyebrow and points at my father’s clinic behind me. “Seems neither of us can escape this place.” 

It’s hard to look at her for long. There is longing but there is something else too. Shame. Shame for what I’ve let grief make of me. 

I trace a line from my dad’s dread, to Emma’s terminated pregnancy, to my fractured law career to the plants at our feet. How desperately I crave community and how desperately Maryam wants out.

When I see Maryam at the thrift store, she asks if I’ll read her pages. She sends them over and I read them quickly. Her novel is set in a nearby town. A close-knit Muslim community is reckoning with a Quran teacher who’s been abusing students. I am disturbed this is the story she’s chosen to tell. We email back and forth all night, until the sky above my laptop is mauve, then navy, then black.

Isn’t this what people already think of us? That we’re violent and messed up,  I write. 

We can’t only write happy stories. Tradition can give us meaning but sometimes it hurts us.

I think about what she’s said until the white of dawn appears outside. I find myself in front of the bathroom mirror making wudu to pray fajr. The water tastes metallic. When my hands go up to call God, I don’t get an answer but I am finally reaching for something. 

One prayer a day, then two. That’s how July begins. In sujood, I notice clumps of dust gathering under the sofa. I think of how often Mama vacuumed. An unbearable sadness enters my chest, shooting upwards, burning my throat until I am screaming—no, trying to—curling into myself on the hardwood floors.

They are always there when I check on them, Mama’s gold bangles—given to her by her mother—wrapped in an embroidered handkerchief, tucked in the Damascene box. The fabric smells less like her every time I bring it to my nose.

I bake sourdough in my mother’s dutch oven. I have been eating a slice of every loaf then freezing the rest in resealable bags, like I am preparing for the end of something. 

The days are a smudge, and though I can’t tell exactly when, sometime that month I start to imagine Maryam’s face when I think of the word wife.

On Saturday mornings, I take up my mom’s role as a volunteer gardener at a community garden next-door to a restaurant in Waupoos. I text Maryam that I’ll be there—that we could get the famous tacos after. I pack her a hot, fresh loaf of bread. 

The sun is blazing. I yank weeds from the soil and pick what feels ripe. I kick open the gate to refill my watering can and find Maryam crossing the road from the bus stop. Lake Ontario silver behind her. I wave my muddied hand and she waves back, her clinking bangles breaking up the soundless heat. 

She sidles up to the outdoor sink. “You found me,” I joke over the sound of the gushing water. The dirt from my hands vanishes down the drain. 

She tilts her chin in the direction of the seasonal shack next door. “I came for the fish tacos.”

“Yeah, right.” I smile. 

“I was bored of myself. Don’t make it weird.” 

At a picnic table, the sun white above us, we eat perch tacos and share a basket of waffle fries, dragging them like butterfly nets through homemade chipotle mustard.

“So why did you come?” I ask. “Why choose the County, specifically?”

“I wanted to be somewhere like the setting of my novel. And, I wanted to be near the water. Ahmed couldn’t swim so he didn’t care for the lake.” 

I nod, my mouth full of fish. The sides of our arms are touching. 

“How about you? I heard you were kind of a big shot. What are you still doing here?” 

For the first time in years, I crave a cigarette. “I still have things to take care of.”  

“Like harvesting arugula?” she laughs. I shrug and pick at a blackened fry. 

“That’s all I’m going to get?” She squints to keep the sun out of her eyes. “I guess I didn’t get to the part in law school where you get good at asking questions.”

“That’s alright. I like you better this way.” I nudge her with my shoulder. 

She pulls away to look at me carefully. “So it was that bad then? Growing up here? I thought you’d get to be so free in a place like this. Without everyone watching.” 

Across the road, the fields are the most vivid shade of green. Soybeans, sweet corn. How can a place be so striking and make you feel so ugly? 

“My dad used to tell my brothers and I to never say anything about being Muslim.” After 9/11, he’d grabbed me by the shoulders, shaken me hard, and told me never to mention my grandparents to anyone at school. Fear is a mother tongue, inherited like bone marrow.

“What changed for you? Since then?” Maryam asks.  

“After Emma… I had to believe in something bigger than myself. I thought I found some really important answers and felt connected to the past and the future at the same time.” 

Maryam nods. “I heard from some of the girls after,” she says, flattening out an oil-stained napkin against the picnic table.

“You chose something too. You quit law school, to do what you really want. And even now, to still wear hijab—”  

She frowns. “Don’t—don’t make me seem like… You think I wear this because I have all the answers?” She tugs at the fabric of her scarf. “Muslim men treat us like we’re some sort of saints for wearing hijab, like we don’t want and need what other women do.” 

“You seem so… unafraid of the world. So sure, about it all.”

“Everybody thinks they already know something about me when they see this. But really, what it’s done is make it hard to know myself, to know what I want. I’ve always been surrounded by people who’ve known me since I was a girl.” 

“I wish I grew up like that, with a close family and community.”

“Yeah, well. It made me very lonely.” 

She sounds lonely, but angry too. I want to ask if it was her marriage that suffocated her, but it is getting too loud, the patio filling up. We loop around to the back garden. She crouches down in front of the herb garden and runs her hand through a bush of herbs, then inhales the scent that comes off in her palm. 

“Rosemary,” she whispers. 

“We’ll need more volunteers to help with the harvest in August, if you’re still around.” 

She doesn’t say anything. I want Maryam to stay for me. I want her to escape this place. I trace a line from my dad’s dread, to Emma’s terminated pregnancy, to my fractured law career to the plants at our feet. How desperately I crave community and how desperately Maryam wants out. 

“Maryam.” I like how her name sounds in my mouth. But what I like more is having her attention, her curious eyes searching for some truth in my words. I am drawn to her fear. A fear not like my father’s—a fear I run towards.

“My mother died last November. I haven’t been back to the city since.”

She searches my face for an answer and I let her see me. 

“You’re doing all this for her,” she says.

The tears are there now in the back of my throat. If I was another type of man, I would have let myself cry. 

Fear is a mother tongue, inherited like bone marrow.

After that we talk almost every night. Maryam’s laugh on speaker phone brightens the house. I tell her about my mom and she tells me about Ahmed; there is loss but something else too: wild, green laughter. I almost ask her to come over one evening but it’s not proper. Instead, I imagine a girl between Maryam and I on the couch, her crooked teeth peeking out of a smile as wide as her mother’s. 

I have been praying again and, on some days, the movement does not just live in my limbs anymore, it’s a warmth in my chest. I decide to change the textures of the house. I start inviting my brothers and their kids for pizza and a movie on Sunday afternoons. All night long, the adults and kids both look at screens that are not the TV. Perhaps love is simple, but family is not. 

“You’ve been seeing her?” Omar asks when he calls me back to suggest contractors. In the background, I can hear Dana’s voice: “She must be taller than him. What? I’m not calling him short. She’s just tall, that’s all.”

I frown at my pot of boiling water. “I can hear you. Forget I said—” The water sputters and foams when I throw the pasta in. “I can’t do anything about it anyway.” 

Dana gives an exaggerated exhale. “You’re a thirty-three-year-old man.” 

“I’m living in my dead mother’s house.” The foam spills over the pot’s lip. 

“Listen,” Omar says. “Don’t let this be just another thing that happens to you.” 

Maryam asks me to take her to the local mosque; she wants to set a scene of her novel there. I agree, though the thought of its dusty red carpets still terrifies me. On Friday morning, before I pick her up, I shave for the first time in months. The blade is cool on my neck. There is hair all over the sink, an army of ants convening on the porcelain. 

I pick out a collared shirt, iron it like my mother taught me. I fish out a bottle of cologne from the bottom of my toiletries bag and spray some at my neck. It stings the fresh flesh there. I keep the bottle out on the counter, for next jummah, I tell myself. My prayers have ebbed and flowed but I don’t feel like a fraud returning to the mosque. I take one important box with me, the rest, stacked high all over the house, will have to wait. 

I find Maryam on the front porch, stretching her hamstrings. She is slightly out of breath, her face blotchy. 

“Finally decided to run away?” 

“When I have an inkling for a cigarette, I go for a run instead.”

“You’re trying to quit?” 

“Not really.” She tinkers with her smart watch. “Yes. I don’t know.” Her eyes flick up to meet mine. “You shaved.” 

“I thought you wouldn’t notice.”

“How could I not? You’re a whole different person.” 

While she’s upstairs getting ready, I talk with the other writers, who seem to have just woken up, sulking around in pajamas, fixing bowls of oatmeal from a communal rice cooker. One of them asks if I’m a banker. I laugh but don’t correct him. 

Maryam returns in a dress and we begin our drive to Trenton. To our right is farmland lush with green barley and marshes with blue herons. We pass crumbling barns inland and sprawling bungalows built on the cliffside. When the road curves north, the land disappears and the open water breaks through, shimmering. Maryam looks out the window most of the drive. I don’t know what to say so I say nothing at all. 

The mosque is a converted church. The steeple and façade seem completely unchanged, though above the arcade, a green sign welcomes visitors in Arabic and English to Masjid Isa. 

I shift in my seat. The last time I was here, the sky was grey and dark. November is a completely different place.

In the parking lot, I watch people embrace and catch up. Kids in kurtas chase each other in circles. I envy these children’s proximity to faith from a young age, their comfort with the mosque. 

“The last time I was here my mother was in a box.” Simple, pine, in the belly of the prayer hall. In a few years, her body and the earth will be indistinguishable. “The mosque ladies asked if I had an aunt, or a sister, or a wife, a woman from the family who could help wash her. But there was no one.” 

“You can let yourself be angry.” Maryam tries to take my hand to console me. I brush her away. She looks hurt. 

Maryam joins the women in the back and I join the men up front. Some men smile at me and I wonder if they were at my mother’s janazah, if they were one of the many hands that shook mine. I search the imam’s khutba for some relief, but I don’t find it. When I bow, my forehead is heavy, tethering me to the ground. It doesn’t make everything go away, but I feel big and small at the same time. I am re-learning how to be here.

On the way out, a woman at the doorway hands out Turkish delight. The piece is stale but I eat it anyway. 

In the car I blast the air conditioning and we sit in uneasy silence, listening to the whir of the fan. I am unsure how to apologize.

“I want to show you something,” I finally say, reaching around to the back seat. I hand her my mother’s Damascene box. Maryam traces the mother-of-pearl inlay with her fingertips. The sun comes through the windshield, the pieces of family history I exhumed from my mother’s walk-in closet laid out on Maryam’s lap.

“You have your grandmother’s nose,” she says. 

“I have her bangles too. My mom wore them her whole life.”

“Where are they now?” 

“I’m keeping them safe. She willed them for my future wife.” 

For lunch, we go to a shawarma shop in Belleville owned by a Syrian family who came to Canada as refugees. We share a chicken platter. I enjoy watching Maryam eat with her hands. She seems much more comfortable here than at the diner. The parsley from the tabbouleh gets in between her bottom teeth. 

The owner comes over to our table and introduces himself. He and Maryam speak in Arabic. She tells him about the shawarma she ate in Jerusalem and his eyes fill with tears. It’s month eighteen of the genocide and our guilt and pain are intertwined. 

Maryam reaches her hand towards him. I forget they have just met. But is that not what grief does? Makes strangers known to one another. 

“Insha Allah, we will live to see all our countries free.” His voice is syrupy. Insha Allah, we echo.

“I don’t know what my rage is worth anymore,” she says when he leaves our table. 

“I hoped to find some… I don’t know… stillness at the mosque,” I say. “But it’s not what I wanted it to be.” 

“You know the woman with the Turkish Delight? She’s celebrating her daughter’s acceptance to university. The first in the whole family. She wanted everyone to know. ” There is softness around Maryam’s eyes. There are no perfect places, only people that remind us to hope.  

On a stormy afternoon in the third week of August, after I’ve met with my mother’s lawyer to settle her estate, I pick Maryam up at the library and we drive to Sandbanks Provincial Park. I want her to see the dunes without the usual summertime crowds. 

She is wearing an aggressively yellow rain jacket. “It’s from the thrift store,” she explains when she jumps into the truck. “I got it earlier this week when the rain started.” She pushes the hood back to reveal the full moon of her face and all of her—yellow jacket, bangles, big black eyes —makes me smile. I love her. It scares me. God, I love her. 

I park the truck. There are no children building sandcastles or fathers barbecuing or seagulls picking at piles of garbage. Neither one of us gets out.

“It’s like we’re not supposed to be here,” she says. 

From here, we can see the expanse of the bay, dreary under the clouds. Boats and dinghies are neatly tied up on the docks. The dunes appear sinister in the gradient fog. “I’ve always liked it better here in the winter.” 

Rain hits the roof hard. 

“This park is a whole universe,” I say. The white sand, the warm shallow water, the dense forest with its cedar and its lichen. “I didn’t notice all this when my mother brought me to swim when I was a kid. You forget how beautiful a place is when you’ve seen it so many times.” 

“You do,” she nods.

When the rain thins, we get out of the car and set off towards the dunes. Maryam and I take our own paths exploring, walking between the beachgrass and sand cherry. At the top of a dune, I stand by an eastern cottonwood. A resilient tree. Its leaves whip furiously in the wind. 

“I forget how much I like the rain,” she says when I find her again, walking to the edge of the water. “In the city, it’s so easy to stay indoors when it pours.”

She tilts her chin up to push the hood back from her eyes. Her cheeks are damp. Has she been crying or is it the slanted rain? I want to dry her off, hold her face in my hands. 

“Can we come back? In the sun?” she asks. 

“We can come back anytime. I’m not selling the house. I’m not going back to the city. I’m staying here.” My heart beats louder in my chest, and the rain falls faster—nearly horizontal now. She doesn’t flinch at the downpour. I don’t move either. I feel a deep stillness, like in prayer, but this time it is not inside of me but in the space between us. “We can get married, Maryam. You can be by the water every day if you want.” 

“You’re sweet.” She says this like it’s a bad thing. “But you don’t have to save me.” 

We walk to the car, the question hanging between us unanswered, a trail of our footprints in the wet sand. What would life look like with Maryam? Would we pray together? Would her mother teach our kids Arabic? Would I ever forget how beautiful she was?

On the drive home, my tears break the surface. I blink and the countryside in the periphery goes blurry. Maryam puts her hand on mine, I let her, and our hands rest on the center console, perfectly still, a peninsula, like they are part of us but their own world entirely. 

Read an interview with Barâa Arar about “The Dentist’s Son.”