Wahaj's POV
"You won't enter the house," Mama Ghada spoke as Aunt Miray tried to guide all of us back into the house to rationally talk this through and to not wake up Mrs Chamberlain who was in the mansion.
"I was falsely accused," he hissed, "I don't deserve to be treated like this Ummi, after twenty years you still haven't looked at my face, not even once," He seemed to be broken as he said those words.
"Enough, A criminal wouldn't justify his evil doings," Mama Ghada spoke in sorrow, "He would simply deny it,"
"Am I misunderstanding or did you know that he was alive all this time? " I asked Mama Ghada in soreness.
She lifted her face to look at mine, "He didn't deserve you," as she says those words, I could remember my father telling them to me, but I couldn't remember when or to what situation.
"What is going on ?" Aunt Seren asked in utter chaos.
Aunt Miray spoke this time, "W-Wahaj, your father raped a girl when he was young-" She was interrupted by my father.
As soon as I heard the words, my whole world crashed around me. Everything that I held dear in my life, everything that I ever knew...was a lie. Why would they do this to me? What did I do to deserve this? Why him, the person that I looked up to most out of everyone in the world?
"LIES, That's not true, You know these are lies, that girl made them up when she couldn't justify it to her parents," He shouted as if he wanted to get me to stop hearing those words. Still, unfortunately, he didn't succeed, and as I listened to these words, my guts began to turn, my vision began to blur, and my head began to feel light in weight.
" There is a tiny detail, though. Akhi (Brother)," Miray says in bitterness as she air quote brother, "She didn't need to," Miray finishes.
"I have a right to meet my daughter,"
"You EARNED the right to meet NO ONE! The day you attacked the girl was the day, you lost your ability to meet anyone of this family. Your father and I erased you from our lives; your father would probably shoot you if he sees you standing here now. " Mama Ghada shouted from the top of her lungs; she seemed to be hurt by him as she wanted to hurt him just as bad as he hurt her.
"Wahaj? Wahaj?"
A hand taps my cheek, but its touch is tender.
"Wahaj? Can you hear me?"
At last, my eyes open and meet my father's blue gaze. He's worried, frowning and asking me if I'm alright. My eyes dart left to meet my grandmother who seemed to be violently hitting my father's back and blaming him while on the right I sow both my aunts trying to calm down my grandmother and remove her from my father, but my father seems to be unbothered.
How can his gentle appearance hide so much evil?
I wondered as I looked into his eyes. I struggle to push him away as I draw all my strength to push him back, and he went into the grass, and so did I.
"You fainted. You should probably stay lying down for a few minutes." Aunt Seren advised as Miray yells, "Leave Muhmmad, leave." She roars.
I do as I'm told and lay down on the grass because I'm in no state to argue. My mind is lost, my thoughts are chaotic, and I wonder now as I look around if I'd what was said was what I heard or was I dreaming.
"You believe me, Wahaj don't you ?" He asks immediately.
I want to nod my face to ease his mind, but I couldn't. My grandmother's face held so much love and loath that it hurt her to hurt him and for my sweet, gentle grandmother to yell and kick like that means that what he did was unforgivable.
I plucked up the grass and threw it as hard as I could toward him as it shattered my heart to do this, but he needed to leave.
Why couldn't I have been a normal girl with an average family who loved me and didn't go off dying or hating each other? It wasn't a life anymore; it was a constant reminder that life wasn't supposed to be a happy ending; it is what it is like most things in life, a test.
****************
"He shouldn't have come back," My grandmother says as we sat in the living room facing each other, not having a single word to say as they looked at me for a reaction when my father left after the confrontation in the garden.
"I needed to pray, to ease my mind," I mummer as I try to lift myself to move, but my legs couldn't carry me even if they tried.
"This isn't normal, Wahaj," Aunt Miray announced, "You need to deal with this immediately, you haven't spoken a word since -" My aunt Seren elbows her sister to stop her from continuing her conversation as my aunt Seren hide it with, "the events that happened,"
"Speak Habibti, say something, this isn't healthy to keep everything bottled inside," My grandmother gentle voice finally spoke in awe.
"I'm so sorry, Wahaj. We didn't want you to find out this way," Aunt Miray lower lips quivered in a struggle to control her emotions, her eyes filling with sympathy for me.
"Why is keeping things bottled inside not healthy when you have been lying to my face for the past fifteen years, telling me my father is dead when he is clearly alive," I bit out.
"I know you are angry, Wahaj," Aunt Seren said, "But this isn't a way to talk to your elders." She finished.
I couldn't control my emotions as I frustratingly said, "I begged for fifteen years for you all to belive me that my father was shot, but you dismissed it and said that it was all a bad dream and that my father died in a car accident," I added,
"He was shot in the basment after he hid me in the cabinet as I watched his killer leave the basement and I sat there with his blood in my hands as I shivered in fear and kept crying for him not to leave me,"
"That killer was Mr Black, the man whose daughter Muhammad attacked" Aunt Miray adds to my knowledge.
"Why? Why did you take me away from him, away from my father? Why would you believe a stranger instead of your own son ?" I asked in confusion, waiting for an answer to my main questions.
"Your father kidnapped you from me," My grandmother began as she grieved in her place. "You lived with his for five years in that basement, hidden from the world as he was wanted for rapping Mr Black daughter after he was found guilty of it. When he almost died, one of his friends gave you back to me as he faked his death so Mr black won't find him or you," She explained the whole story as she seemed to find it difficult to pronounce all the bad things she had to say about her son.
"We wanted to believe him, after all, he is our brother, and we didn't want to belive he was a monster, but all the evidence pointed out to him," Miray imposed into the conversation.
"I told you these lies so you can live like we haven't" Grandmother added as tears fall from her eyes. "I wished he was dead rather than him dragging our reputation to the ground," She finally adds.
I decided then that I had enough with the meeting. "I have to get out of here; I just can't do this right now," I muttered and stormed out of the living room, leaving both my aunts and grandmother behind who gaped at my sudden departure.
I ran as fast as my legs could carry me, stumbling a little as I pushed the door to my room and locked it. I then went to the bathroom inside my room and performed wudu before I put my praying mat on the floor and began to pray that Allah SWT will take that pain away from my heart.
I didn't care what I was saying as I spoke from the heart in sujood. After an hour, my feet were aching. Eylul seemed to be pushing the door to open since it was a shared room between her and me.
I couldn't face her now; I couldn't meet anyone. I wanted a sign that everything would be okay before I could talk to anyone else.
After I finished praying, I took a deep breath and shook out my hair from the tight bun and removed my hijab and let it cascade down in waves around my shoulders and back.
I ran a comb hurriedly through the loose curls until they tamed somewhat and then I twisted them up in a loose chignon and secured it with a large pin, pulling a few loose strands around my ears to soften the effect. I then faced time Aisha and Mariam not to tell them about the event that happened but for them to tell me about their day so I could have a sense of what a healthy life should look like.
"Joje," Aisha, my old-neighbour and childhood friend began with the nickname she always called me. "How have you been, how is life, how is school ?" She started with questions.
"A-isha, can you talk about your day ?" I asked in destruction.
"What is wrong ?" She hurriedly said. "You only want to hear about my day when you have a hard time sleeping and when you want to forget something," She knew me so well that I just nodded and let her talk.
Mariam joined the face time call.
"Ohh you want to sleep ?" She said to me when she heard Aisha talking about her day. "Ummm, I need to go, Ummi (Mother) is calling me," She quickly said as she tried to avoid listing to Aisha's day.
I laughed as Aisha said, "That little witch," She began as she continued complaining about her day and then moved on to talk about married life and to work in the cafe shop and to be a mom.
She was the same age as I was, twenty years old soon to be twenty-one, but to her family, getting married was a priority, so she got married young at the age of sixteen when we were in high school. She had her first child at the age of eighteen and settled with her daughter and husband instead of going to university.
As Aisha slept on our face time call from exhaustion, I closed the phone call, and then I ate my medication for my short term memory that with time began to get better as I wished that it would continue and I could forget. I then sat there, reading the Quran for it to ease my mind as I wanted to believe in my father's innocence.