Free Something Like Beautiful by asha bandele Page B

surroundings, relaxing when she’s rocked, this is all new to him, and if I am to understand the wonder I see in his eyes, we are nearly holy. He bathes us and he washes our hair and he cooks for me and feeds me, a fork he lifts to my mouth. He changes Nisa and insists he be the one to hold her until she falls asleep, which she finally does on his chest, moving peacefully with the rhythm of his breathing.
    He places her in a crib in the next room and comes back to me and this is when we make love, late, late into the visit, so unlike our other visits, our pre-Nisa life when sex was immediate and constant and wild. Now it happens on our daughter’s clock, and we laugh about this and we embrace the change. Butfinally when we are certain Nisa will sleep for at least a couple of hours, this is when it happens.
    Somehow, then, that time, it was more intimate, our sex, more musical. It was nearly like a rescue, the way we made love, the kind of touching where you leave nothing behind. You leave everything right there in your lover’s hands, his mouth. We were more generous than we’d ever been, more gracious, and when we moved together we cried, both of us did, to know how this is what we needed, how this was what we needed daily, how this was what kept us in contact with our own humanity, in contact with the best of ourselves. And yet it was exactly this thing that we could not have.
    But for forty-four hours in September of 2000, we did, we had it. Deportation was set aside; parole issues and money issues, they were beyond our consciousness. We set aside everything, everything that was hard, we didn’t even glance at them and we really lived, however briefly, however falsely even, but for us, we lived a lifetime in a moment, and a moment in the space we had always sought to occupy. For forty-four hours, the world was animate and it was ours and everywhere it was safe and everywhere it was shining.
    In short, we sipped the wine. Perhaps we should not have. Because as the old adage warned, the sipping made it all the worse. It made it all the more shocking when we could not have it the night after that or the night after that. It was more shocking than even before, before we had a child, because now Rashid’s presence was bigger than my desire for him. Now there were two of us and desire was coupled with absolute need and that need could not be fulfilled and although logically Iunderstand that I should not have been shocked, I was. I could not believe that I would not wake the next morning and find him there, there with us, and suddenly one night became two and two nights became years.
    Years passed and that September became a memory that recessed into the shadows and I realized that yes, wow, that time back then was the last time for us and had we known, had I known, I would have surely have marked the date on the calendar, noted it as a sad anniversary each year, observed a moment of silence, told close friends and loved ones about what happened. I surely would have mourned.
    But none of that happened and we spent those forty-four hours and perhaps even a short time after as though we, us, our family was going to be possible. Rashid spoke in defiant terms about beating the deportation order and was just as certain he would make parole. And after our visit, briefly I was a believer again. Encouraged by my perennially optimistic husband, I started thinking about how I could juggle work, parenting, writing, and a husband who was in prison. He wouldn’t be there for very much longer, I told myself.
    But it was then, in the midst of those thoughts, that the reality of our life came along and made things all so simple. Rashid was transferred to a prison nearly impossible to get to. Never in all the years that we had been together, in all of the years before he became Nisa’s father, had Rashid ever been made so inaccessible.
    As always, I receive the news like this: I get a phone call from one of