April 2007: Essaouira, Marrakech, Casablanca

You didn’t grieve your son’s death, not for one full year, because you didn’t realize that he was dead. You went to the burial, you tucked your head into Driss’s shoulder and wept, but it wasn’t a weeping for the loss of your son, because at any moment your son was going to come running back through the front door of your house saying Oumi I want a drink of water. You were weeping because of the mass hysteria all around you; you were weeping because the wind cut so cold against your chest; you were weeping because the words of the imam sounded so crisp and insensitive against the wailing of your own mother. Or, more honestly: you didn’t know why you were weeping. You found the water there in your eyes, felt it brimming over until it was running down your cheeks, and once the tears fell, it felt like such a relief that you found you could not stop.

But you didn’t understand why your son had died, and so you didn’t understand that he had died at all, and you weren’t bitter, not once in that year, because your arms still held the muscle memory of holding him, and for you, he was not gone, not in any way that was final. He’d just wandered off, quickly as his toddling legs would let him, and fallen off a ledge between houses. And you didn’t know, either, how he’d even climbed up there, which made it less likely that the fall, and then the death, had actually happened. But in some other plane of existence he fell, and he made enough of a fuss that you went out to the side yard and scooped him up. He stopped crying as soon as you did so, and in any case there were no tears, but just to be safe you closed the front door and told him to play in the living room. He bounced his little blue ball for half an hour, until you heard something fall over, and you already knew something terrible was happening but you finished scouring the pot anyway—he wasn’t crying, after all—and by the time you got to the living room he was shaking in seizures and then there was screaming telephoning hurrying pounding running shaking voices and more screaming, and then the emergency crew was carrying him away with a sheet over his sweet little angel’s face, and they were telling you how sorry they were but you were telling them that nothing had happened and they need not be sorry, you were screaming it at them, only it turned out you were only screaming it in your own head and no one was hearing and they were all just looking at you, who was lying on your own divan, you a speechless woman whose high olive skin had blanched all the way to white.

And then, almost a year later, it happened to a man driving on the route from Marrakech: he hit a bump and his car flipped over and though it was said that his face wasn’t even bruised, he died, of massive, invisible bleeding in the brain, such as apparently happened occasionally to people on the planet earth. It was only then that you realized what had happened to your son, only then that you would shut yourself up in your bedroom for days when you heard of another pregnancy in the neighborhood, only then that you would see small children walking with their mothers into Savons Mogador and have to look away. Driss would take their orders, their money, their credit cards. You would retreat to the back of the shop and count gift labels.

And then the young girl showed up one day at Nasr’s shop with a child exactly the same size as your son, who was frozen in time now at the age of twenty-seven months. The young woman showed up again the next day, and the day after that—she’d come...