My Accidental Jihad by Krista Bremer Read Free Book Online Page A

list of purchases we needed to make before my cervix yawned open another few centimeters: a crib and a changing table, a soft cotton layette and a tiny wardrobe, plush animals and hypoallergenic detergent, and a musical mobile to soothe our baby to sleep.
    With one hand on the wheel and the other resting over mine in my lap, Ismail tried to reassure me. “We’ll be fine—
Insha Allah
.” he said, rolling that rhyming, openmouthed Arabic phrase across his tongue, the soothing murmur he added to any statement involving the future. I knew it meant “God willing,” and normally I found it endearing, but today it exasperated me. God wasn’t going to prepare our nursery; God wouldn’t help us pick out baby clothes.
    “My mother gave birth to thirteen babies—each time at home—without any of those things,” he reminded me. I stared out the window and chewed the inside of my cheek. In the childhood memories he had shared with me from North Africa, the sound of his mother in labor was as familiar and constant as the sound of his Muslim father’s call to prayer. He’d told me this one night recently on our drive home from birthing class, where he had stared blankly at the words our birthing instructor wrote in capital letters on a chalkboard: BIRTH IS A NATURAL PROCESS
.
He’d glanced around at the expectant parents jotting notes on either side of him, then back at me with a baffled expression that said,
What else could birth possibly be?
But he had also told me that his mother had lost one of his siblings during birth, and four more had died in infancy or early childhood—facts that were so utterly incomprehensible to me that I had sputtered “What?” and stared and made him repeat himself.
    At the mall, we made a beeline toward the drugstore, where we knew we’d find the essentials we needed. As we passed a jewelry shop, Ismail tugged me spontaneously toward the door. “You need a ring to wear into the delivery room,” he announced, squeezing my hand.
    Throughout my pregnancy I had insisted I didn’t care about a ring, but when he pulled me toward the glass countertop and I looked down at row after row of glittering diamonds resting on blue velvet, I knew I had lied to both of us. My heart leapt with awe and anticipation, like a child’s on Christmas morning. For as long as I could remember, from movies, television, and magazines, I had known that only diamonds reflected the brilliant white light of true love. Over and over again I’d seen images of a beautiful woman’s eyes shining with gratitude and awe when a man presented her with a sparkling ring at least as precious and enduring as her own devotion.
    It was a stretch to imagine us as beautiful or radiantly happy as couples on commercials seemed to be. Actors on the screen fit together like two pieces of a perfect human puzzle; Ismail and I, on the other hand, kept bumping against one another’s rough edges as we struggled to make our lives fit together.
    Our relationship had been gestating along with the baby; for these past nine months we’d been getting to know one another in the waiting room of the obstetrician’s office, at birthing class, while unpacking the boxes that contained everything I owned in his small home. During these turbulent months, the evidence had been rapidly mounting in my life that fairy-tale endings only happened in picture books. There would be no Prince Charming to sweep me away into happily ever after, only this gentle and maddening Libyan man who was totally committed to the hard labor of making a home and raising a family with me. But a small voice deep inside still insisted that the jagged pieces would fit together if I wore a sparkling gem on my finger.
    I scanned the display case hungrily, my gaze landing on a square diamond in an antique platinum setting: not big enough to be ostentatious nor small enough to inspire pity. Its classic setting evoked a certain nostalgia, a purchased connection to the past. Its