He narrowed the scar on her forehead. It took two hours. Then Miller lifted the skin around her nose and examined it. He announced that he was going to sew the skin together. When he finished, he stepped back to see how she looked.
He turned to me and clenched his fist. "You know what?" he said. "We're done. It's just going to be a few more stitches, and then we're done. This is all I can do for her."
When Marwa healed, she would have a fine nose.
He would check her in a year, if he could, and make any necessary adjustments. Otherwise, her surgeries were over.
Time for farewells
AFTER the operation, Marwa spoke to Saad so rudely that he sent her to her room -- more than once. She hugged her teddy bear, clutched a photograph of her father and wept.
Finally, Saad asked Salam and Sahar Ali, an Iraqi American couple in Mission Viejo, to keep her while she healed and until she could go home.
"I should not have brought her to stay with me," Saad told me one afternoon. "I would not do this again. She has brought it all to my face: the war, the suffering. I was trying to deal with the guilt I have for not being in Iraq, for not helping enough. But with her behavior and her pain, I have seen in front of me the tragedy of Iraq."
Tears pooled in his eyes.
The Alis took Marwa to a mosque, where she heard an imam speak about honoring mothers. She knelt and cried. "In heaven," she asked, "will I see my mother?"
Worried about her sadness, the Alis let her watch satellite TV. They took her to Disneyland, to Chuck E. Cheese's, to Starbucks and to an outdoor mall in Irvine, where she rode a carousel for the first time and spent an hour at a computer store.
She went to Al Ridah, an Islamic school, where Marwa helped students with their Arabic.
Now it was only a matter of weeks. On the phone, I spoke with her father in Iraq. Gunfire and explosions were a constant part of life. He had seen a man being kidnapped. An American tank patrolling his street had rolled over his car and destroyed it.
"I am very scared of what it is going to be like when she comes back," he said. He knew that Marwa had grown accustomed to America and liked it. He wondered if she could handle the hardship in Iraq, even if she had a nose. "I am afraid."
But he needed her. She had to help take care of the house and her older brother and two younger sisters -- even if it meant that she could not go back to school. He needed her to wake the other children, make them breakfast, clean the house....
