A Late Arrival

Mariam

There was once a time where I believed that the beauty of life would not happen near me. That was until Amina's water broke, and I ended up being the unfortunate soul tasked with the job of keeping her sane till her husband arrived.

Where the hell is that bastard?

"Mariam, call... Subhan... please," pleaded Amina, breaths as weak as her ability to correlate her sentences. She was in labor for a couple hours now, but her tolerance to the pain kept the discomfort at bay. "Please."

I stared down at my disheveled friend in her hospital gown, round belly swollen, and cheeks flushed with physical stress.

"I'll try again, hold on," I promised, stepping out of the room.

The door shut behind me, nurses frantically running between the halls with more and more pregnant women. All at different points of their labor. Some walked around with their partners while others lacked the strength to when the pain encompassed them.

"Pick up, Subhan. Come on," I muttered to myself as my fingers shook trying to find his number in her contacts. The phone began to ring, and my prayers grew more urgent.

Allah, let him answer. Don't let Amina go through this pain without the support of her husband by her side.

Amina's groan of throbbing pain echoed into my ear, the sound rumbling in waves through the closed door, a testament to the struggle she was going through in order to give life to a newborn. I almost winced on her behalf.

"Assalamualaikum, sweetheart. Sorry that I've been-"

"Where the hell have you been?" I seethed, not even bothering to correct him.

He paused. "Wait a second. You're not my wife."

"No shit, Sherlock. Your wife is in labor!" I exclaimed, which earned me a few amused looks in my direction from the doctors and nurses. My cheeks burned in embarrassment. "Hurry up."

"She's in labor?" he yelled. "Amaar, we need to go."

Amaar is there?

There was some shuffling on the phone as Subhan panicked. A deeper, more calm voice spoke in a low tone to him. The ballast in my stomach seemed to grow in anticipation, my mind tuned to the voice that haunted my sleep at night, the man whose quiet demeanor knocked on the walls of my mind, shattering the frames with his voice, his cold eyes that grew warm with his friends.

My best friend's brother. It should be a crime to have a voice like that, a voice that makes a girl weak at the knees, the kind that makes a girl forget everything but the man before her.

"Mariam?" asked Amaar on the line. "You still there?"

I broke out of my daze. "Yeah. I'm still here."

"Send me the location of the hospital. How long has she been in labor?"

"About two or three hours. It took us a while to get here," I admitted. "I've been calling, but Subhan hasn't picked up until now."

"Amaar! My wife needs me, hurry up!" yelled Subhan from a distance, his voice far from his phone, panic coating his words. "Oh Allah, my wife is going to murder me if I'm not there soon."

"Hang on," said Amaar. "Mariam, keep her company till we get there."

"It's not like I've been doing that this whole time or anything," I remarked sarcastically. "I'll pray for Subhan's survival."

Amaar didn't even bother to dignity me with a response, which was casual of him. He simply hung up the phone.

Sighing, I walked back into Amina's hospital room, not believing how engrossed in this birth I was. Although her contractions were far apart, pain still lingered every now and then, and when the pain whisked her mind away, her body suffered at its clutching hands. Hearing her slow, labored breaths as she struggled time and time again caused my own chest to constrict.

I wished I could help, but this was a birth. There wasn't much for me to do other than whisper encouraging words to her.

Hearing my footsteps, she opened her eyes. "Did he answer?" she asked, so quiet I almost didn't hear her.

I nodded. "Amaar and Subhan are on their way. I called your parents earlier, so they should be here too."

"Thank... you."

Smiling, I held her trembling hands. "No need to thank me for doing my job as your friend. You just focus on pushing that baby out," I joked.

She laughed tiredly. "That won't be for another couple of hours."

"Even better," I grinned. "You have a couple more hours of daydreaming until the little guy is born."

"I don't think you understand how..." she winced for a couple seconds, squeezing her eyes shut. "That one hurt."

"Yeah, I think they're supposed to."

"Mariam, really?"

I winked playfully at her. "Hey, you're the soon-to-be doctor here, In Shaa Allah (if God wills it) of course, but still."

Instead of continuing our banter, Amina smiled at me, grateful to have my lighthearted jokes to distract her. We had gone through a lot thought out our time in college from crazy teachers to late night assignments to family drama to our pending futures. There were many lows and many highs.

I never had a friend who cared for me as a sister. I never had a friend whose smile managed to make my whole day brighter. Amina had a special way with people, her gentle nature broke the coldest of hearts, expelled the darkest evils.

She was perfect, flawless almost.

A looming cloud of doubt hung over my head, the storm thundering its insults until sinister words echoed through out my mind, an ongoing glare to the events of my life that stripped that innocence from me.

My smiles never felt genuine anymore. My heart never felt satisfied with all that I accomplished.

Yet, the more time I spent with Amina and Subhan, the more I started to believe in a happily ever after like their's, the more I started to believe in their hope and in Islam. Allah could cure the darkest of hearts. Allah could heal my fragmented one and piece it back together.

I had to keep trying.

* * * *

Awkward was the only word to describe this situation.

Amina's mother and Subhan were in the room with her, the final hours of labor finally approaching after a long, tiring day. There was the occasional scream or exhausted groan, but those would subside after a while. Behind those doors, I had no idea what was going on except that my friend was in pain and her husband was in sheer panic mode trying to comfort his wife.

Subhan even fainted at one point. This man, I thought, shaking my head. If I didn't know any better, I'd say he was the one giving birth.

But that surprisingly wasn't the awkward part.

Amaar sat across from me in the waiting room, his head resting back against the chair, eyes shut and lips mumbling soft, quiet verses to himself. He didn't acknowledge my presence, let alone spared me any glance.

Since the first day I met Amaar when I studied with Amina, he intrigued me. For some reason, his personality lured me closer to my impending doom like a siren's call but reversed. Instead of the man falling into the depths of his desire, it was me, but what I felt wasn't just desire.

I didn't know what it was, but I knew he would never feel the same, and whatever this fantasy I had was a fairytale I created in my grief, a rebound of sorts. I found love once, and I lost it within an instant.

I stared down the hall, wide, white doors beckoning the start to a new life, a newborn, mothers graciously holding their babies, eyes welling with tears. The corridor seemed to stretch on like time passing for eternity, a journey to the unknown. There was a bittersweet sense of joy, the calm after a storm.

Meanwhile, my body felt ignited. Flames scorched my skin, and discomfort reigned as I tried to formulate the right words. I didn't want to seem desperate for his attention, but I couldn't take his deafening silence.

All I heard were the hushed voices of nurses, the soft hurried footsteps of doctors and assistants making their rounds to the women in the delivery room, the constant of their laptops and pagers, and all the panicked family members who urged their loved one to continue through the struggle.

It was chaos. There was no other word to describe a hospital, except chaos. It held the fate of those alive and dead, carried the new and the old, witnessed their birth and their demise.

The only peace surrounded the aura around Amaar. Silence stretched between us, and I suffocated in his presence, in his quiet resolve.

My eyes traced across his features, followed the length of his lashes, chased the waves of his hair, the swept, bed-head look he wore with ease.

What do I say? Would he even talk to me?

I bit my lip, drowning under my ambivalent emotions. I was never one to freak out when talking to anyone, but this was different. Amaar wasn't just anyone. He was someone special, yet I was nothing to him except a friend of his sister. I was just another girl to pass his eye.

I cleared my throat. "So?" I drawled, leaning back against my seat. "Are you worried?"

Amaar opened his eyes, narrowing them. "I don't need to be," he said. "She's strong, and her husband is there."

"That doesn't mean you can't worry."

He shrugged, a faraway look in his dark, mysterious eyes. Looking into them lured me away from the world that I knew because in his abyss, there was more than just loneliness lingering, there was an unimaginable pain, one that I could relate to. There was regret lining his eyes, a memory that dictated his life.

I understood it like a foreign language on my tongue, but Amaar would never see that in me. He never noticed me. He never would.

"You don't talk much, do you?" I cut into the silence once more.

His brows furrowed. "Not quite sure what that has to do with anything."

"I mean, instead of worrying our asses off, we could make do with small talk."

He frowned. "That seems unnecessary."

Sighing, I crossed my arms, leaning back against my seat. Of course there was no breaking his walls. He was as hard-headed, stubborn, and a stoic man of hulk as usual. Without another word, I dug into my purse to play on my phone. Although my heart broke with how easily he dismissed me, I had to admire his grip on his own emotions.

He was distressed about his little sister, but he'd never let it show.

"Mariam," his voice spoke, "thank you."

I gazed up from my phone, arching a brow. "For what? I did nothing, except sit in this chair."

A ghost of a smile feathered his lips, gentle and slow. "No, you were there for Amina."

Ah, back to the sister, I see.

I pushed down the bubble of disappointment that rose in my chest. "Yeah," I tightly smiled. "I'm glad I can help in whatever way I can."

He flashed a grateful smile my way before returning to his previous state of silence and thought, eyes closed, and lips murmuring verses under his breath, a defense mechanism of his that I noticed. Amaar's mind was in a faraway land, his thoughts focused entirely on the well-being of his sister.

There was no space in his heart for someone as broken as me. My smile was a mask, one that even he couldn't see through. I came too late into his line of sight.

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