When Will We Go Home?

The waiting room smelled like bleach and old bread. Lina, seven years old, sat on a plastic chair that was too big for her, her sneakers swinging just above the floor. She clutched a purple backpack missing one zipper. Inside: a toothbrush, a photograph of a dog, and half a granola bar.

"When will we go home?" she asked.

Her brother Samir, eleven, didn't look up from the window. Outside, rain slid down the glass like tears that didn't belong to anyone. "Soon," he said. He'd been saying "soon" for three days.

A woman in a blue uniform walked past with a clipboard. She smiled at Lina the way adults smile when they don't have answers. Lina didn't smile back.

Their father had put them on a bus Tuesday morning. He'd kissed Lina's forehead twice—he never kissed her twice—and told Samir to hold her hand until he came back. Then the doors closed, and the bus pulled away, and Lina watched their father grow smaller and smaller until he was just a speck in the dust behind them.

That was a hundred years ago. Or maybe four days. Lina couldn't tell anymore.

"Do you think he's okay?" she whispered.

Samir turned from the window. For a second, his face looked old—older than the man at the front desk with the gray beard. "Yes."

"Promise?"

He reached over and hooked his pinky around hers. "Promise."

The door at the end of the hallway opened. A man in a wrinkled suit stepped out, holding a piece of paper. He looked at Samir, then at Lina, then back at the paper.

"Your father's name is Adnan?" the man asked.

Samir stood up. His chair scraped the floor like an animal crying. "Yes."

The man nodded slowly. He folded the paper and put it in his pocket. "Come with me," he said. "I have a phone you can use."

Lina grabbed Samir's hand. They followed the man down the long hallway, past doors with numbers she couldn't read, past a water fountain that dripped, drip, drip, into a drain that never seemed to get full.

"When will we go home?" she asked again.

Samir squeezed her fingers. He didn't say "soon" this time.

Instead, he said, "When the rain stops."

Lina looked out the window at the end of the hall. The rain was still falling. But somewhere behind the clouds, she thought she saw a crack of light.