The storm is over, and it feels as if the elements are coming back to their senses. Paris bathes in a soft spring light, and my father is taking me for a ride on one of his seven motorcycles. I pride myself on being a perfect passenger. I am only eight, so I cannot stretch my arms around my father's waist, but I grab his jacket and follow faithfully the curves of his body when he makes a turn. The roads are still wet, but soon the sun will warm us through our black leather suits. The purpose of our expedition is to visit the tunnel of a subway station. More specifically, to see the layers of torn and peeling posters that remain on an advertisement panel. When we get to the Metro station, my father goes straight to the booth and buys two tickets, as if we are indeed visiting a museum. Inside, above the track, I see my father's discovery: a giant kaleidoscope of colors in an otherwise dark and unappealing tunnel. Whatever information these posters had to give, whatever pictures were once there, have been hollowed out, ripped off, and covered over and over again, leaving an arresting patchwork of half-formed images and vivid colors. It's a jumbled puzzle. But my father sees public art. "Amazing!" he cries with childlike enthusiasm.

My father is a scientist, an intellectual, an original. A man living counter-clockwise, sleeping in the daytime and working at night. Lately he has been inventing a new method to play bridge, one of his passions along with riding motorcycles. He does not have a job. Our family is running out of money. I love my father but I hate being different from other kids at school who have working and functioning dads. I want him to come back from work in the evening, put on his slippers, and watch the news on TV. I want to climb onto his lap. I want him to ask my mother, "What's for dinner?" and to scold my older brother, Satchi, and me when we eat like little pigs. My father has applied for an engineering job at a company that manufactures toothpaste. He has the right profile for the job, and my mother has optimistically bought him new clothing. He looks handsome in his three-piece suit, with his green eyes and curly blond hair, when we see him off for his interview. Three hours later, the doorbell rings and the three of us run to the door to greet him and congratulate ourselves on our new life. But when the door opens, my father is standing there gripping his attache case as if it is his last grasp on his role as the head of our family. He is still handsome, but in his green eyes I see despair. He goes back to his room at the end of our three-room flat and stays there. This is two years after the 1973 oil crisis. Our mother tells us about how countries in the Middle East had stopped exporting oil to France and other Western nations to punish them for their support of Israel and the Yom Kippur War. "People worldwide are losing their jobs," she says. I try to pretend I understand what on earth she is talking about and how this relates to my father not getting work at the toothpaste place. Meanwhile, we are living off the money my grandfather sends us. The more money my dad's dad sends, the more my own father loses his self-esteem.

Summer 1976, a year later. It's August but we haven't left Paris yet for vacation. On a sunny afternoon, my father summons me to his room. My father's room is forbidden territory, a sort of cavern where he reigns like a bear; even my mom doesn't sleep there. Sometimes she joins my father in his hideout, and we hear them, my brother and I, screaming at each other until late at night. "We weren't screaming at each other, kids," my mother tells us in the morning. "We were just talking about politics." My father hasn't left his bed for the last few months. Apprehensive and shy, I open up the door into an impressive mess that is revealing of my father's personality. Old copies of Le Monde are scattered on the floor. Sheets of paper torn from a sketchpad are covered with small handwriting in black ink. Words are compacted, pressed against one another, hastily jotted down without space or punctuation, as if my father's hand could not keep pace with his head. There is a dirty plate on the floor. My father's fingertips are yellowed by nicotine. He is lying on the unkempt bed, putting out cigarette butts on the floor between the bed frame and the wall. The smell of cold tobacco seems to leave him undisturbed. "Sit down," he says, and I feel that this moment is solemn without knowing why. All he tells me, though, at least as I remember it, is that he finds me a bit overweight. And he makes me promise that when I grow up, I will go on a diet. I say, "Oui, Papa." I'd do anything to please him. "Now that's a good girl," my father says and he extends his hand to caress my cheek. It is an unusual gesture. My father is not cold; he is. just usually absent, half gone in a world without intimacy except with his own thoughts. Most of the time, physical contact seems to feel too real for him. His skin is rough, but there is an infinite sweetness in the way his hand lingers on my face while his green eyes penetrate my soul. My brother is then called in. My father is usually stricter with him, and when Satchi closes the door behind himself, I am a little worried. He can't possibly put Satchi on a diet; he is much too skinny. What kind of promise will our father ask of him? Their visit is as short as ours was. When Satchi comes out, he seems intrigued but proud of this unexpected exchange, just as I am. The next day, our mother tells us we are leaving for the south of France, where we will visit one of her women friends. The rest happens very fast. My mother, my brother, and I leave for Marseille. My brother and I are given color pens. My mother goes back to Paris almost immediately. What should she bring back for us, she wants to know. "Scrabble," says Satchi. "Bring back Daddy," I tell her. Four days later, she is back. She hasn't even stepped into the apartment where we are staying when I hear her say, "It's over, kids. Your daddy has died." My mother takes us to a bedroom and the three of us lie on a double bed. My face is wet with tears-mine and my brother's and my mother's run together in indefinable grief. We hold one another for a long time and fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon. While we are sleeping, I dream about my father. It is foggy and he is boarding a plane. I see his back, but he doesn't turn around. He doesn't say goodbye. I see his curly head disappear into the belly of the plane and the fog closes in around it, removing any trace of him from my sight. Satehi wants to go home, but there is no more home to go back to-at least not the same home. With the help of friends, my mom has already moved us. We return to Paris, to a new apartment. It is in the same building as the old one, but it is smaller, for just the three of us. There is no mysterious room at the end of the hall; there is no scent of cigarettes or scraps of scribbled paper. "You know your father ... " our mother begins, sighing. I am tempted to say, "No," but I don't. "The doctor had told him to quit taking sleeping pills, but he took them anyway and his heart couldn't stand it." She would like to protect us from everything, our mother, even from our own destiny. We never see a coffin or any clue to tell us where our father's body is. We never go to the cemetery to visit his grave. We very rarely talk abollt him; he has disappeared in a fog, as in my dream. My father was here. He is here no longer. Life goes on, and imagination takes over. Over the years I piece him together like a human puzzle, tearing bits from my memory and pasting them on, piece by piece, to try to make the picture whole. The father I create has curly hair. He often wears sandals and plays Cuban tunes on the guitar. He is a physicist, an engineer, Dutch, Jewish, a genius, a painter, a speaker of many languages, unfair with people weaker than he, a revolution's lover, absentminded, asocial, good at playing bridge. He is depressed, he is charming. He is a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes that I twist and turn against the light to make a coherent image. As I grow older, I look for him in other men. I feel betrayed by his sudden departure and the mystery of how and why he died. His memory is the source of a vague uneasiness built of guilt and distrust, an anxiety that I am learning to live with as I pursue the impossible quest of finding my father again in the men I meet. It is a painful process in which my childhood conflicts with the young woman I am trying to become. Still, my mother doesn't like to speak about him. "It's behind," she says. Eight years after his death, my dad will be the one to tell us the truth. It is fall, and our mother is out shopping. Satchi is sitting in the walk-in closet in our apartment, a small case full of documents open in front of him, going through some family archives. He opens a letter. Despite my mother's willed forgetting, I immediately recognize my father's scribbling; the memory of him consigning his nostalgia on torn-out pieces of paper comes back all at once. Satchi's hand shakes as he reads the letter, and he turns pale. It is a suicide note from my father, addressed to a psychiatrist friend whom we don't know. My father wrote: "When one sees a mountain, one wants to climb to the top. But once you are there, it is only to discover that the mountain has disappeared, you don't see it anymore." His words make as much sense to me as the subway art he took me to see long ago. What mountain? And what about us, his children? 

When my mother comes back, she finds us still sitting on the floor, reading the note over and over, trying to decipher from its spare words all that is unwritten. "You had to find out, I guess," she says, almost with anger. Finally, she tells us that our father died alone in his hideout in our flat. He swallowed barbiturates. He knew our brief visits to him in his room that summer afternoon would be the last. My mother doesn't offer any explanation for keeping the truth from us for so long. And we have learned not to ask her too many questions about our dad. Although I am now a teenage1; I suddenly see that something in me has remained stuck in the little girl who learned of her father's death that day in Marseille. I feel pain but also a strange relief, as if I had known all along that he killed himself, an intuition never confirmed by words until then. After I've read his letter, at last I am able to start mourning him and accepting his death. Long overdue tears, unshed since the day I heard of his death, pour out of my eyes. Until then my psychological survival had dictated that I remodel my father into an idealized, misunderstood, and romantic hero. Finding his letter allowed me to step into his reality, to begin scratching through the layers of silence for the truth. From family friends, I learn that he had struggled with his identity all his life. He was born a Jew in Amsterdam, at the beginning of the Second World War. To escape the Nazis, he and his mother walked all the way to the south of France, where he was raised in a Jesuit college in Cassis. He did not know who his father was. It turned out that my dad's dad had sex with my grandmother only once. In fact, my grandfather told us years after my father's death: he had had sex with a woman only once in his life. He was homosexual and lived forty-five years with his male lover. My grandfather pretended to be an uncle who showed up in my dad's childhood once in a while, always leaving behind money for him. But my father didn't like this man. He was forever hurt when he found out, at the age of fourteen, that this "uncle" was actually his biological. father. Like Satchi and me, my father had been scarred by having the truth about his father hidden from him. As my picture of my father fills in, my anger and incomprehension turn into understanding and even gratitude. I am able to give him back his humanity. I visit his solitudes, his anguishes. I learn how to love him and his existential doubts. My father becomes a real man, a man who knew great trauma and fear. Although at first I mistook him for a coward for having taken his own life, I now sense that he had actually tried his best to live the longest time possible. And having prolonged his life, he made the lives of his children possible. I wish I had known all this earlier, even if discussions of suicide don't befit childhood. My mother thought secrecy would protect us from the shame of it. But when the memory of your father is erased, there is an impossible void to fill-it is as if half of you has been confiscated. Even a desperado father is still a father. With the truth, he became a person again, and I became an adult. Twenty-three years after my father's death, the night before I am to be married, he appears to me for a second time in a dream. This time he is coming out of an airplane. This time the weather is magnificent. He has come to attend my wedding. My father looks young, tanned, happy, and relaxed. He takes me in his arms and we dive together into a swimming pool filled with turquoise water. Everyone in the dream is smiling and laughing. My future husband, Danny, is watching the scene with his quietly triumphant expression. It is the most beautiful dream I have ever had. And after I wake, I do not suffer from my father's absence again. May 2001. It is the monsoon in Mumbai, India-the air so moist that my hand sticks to the leather arms of the chair where Danny is sitting next to me. My husband and I moved to India about a year before, when Danny became South Asia bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. When I met Danny, I knew I was really in love for the first time. Danny didn't resemble my dad j any way, and I liked that. By then, I wasn't looking for a reflel tion of my pain or trying to fill a void. For the first time, I loved man for who he was and not for what my father had failed to bl Danny is crying over the novel he has been reading for a fe days. A big tear drops on the page, distorting the printed letters i its tiny pond. The world outside is hushed; there is only the tal ping of raindrops on the window and a few palm trees waving c the dirty playground across from our apartment. Inside our litt shelter, I feel great tenderness for Danny and his capacity 1 lament over the misery of a fictional character. We have been married for two years, and I know of Danny desire to become a father. Unlike him, I have never known for ce tain if I wanted to have a child. My father's suicide has left n unsure: You couldn't tell if a father would just disappear. But th( again, I never knew that I was going to love as hard as I love n husband. My father's suicide note taught me that to live doesn't me~ only to be alive. You have to have a sense of purpose that stronger than whatever obstacles you find in your way, strOl enough to carry you on to the next mountain and the next. S when your turn comes to give birth to a child, you must do mo than exercise a biological privilege. If you are to give pirth, y< must also give hope. This night, when I have never felt closer to my husband, I a him for the first and the only time, "Why do you want to have child?" "To continue," he answers without hesitation, "to perpetw: myself." I look at him, sitting at his handmade desk surrounded newspaper clippings, files, and notebooks. He is opening the fi bureau of the Journal in Mumbai, a daunting task that he faces wi optimism and courage. I realize there is no need for me to thi twice; I know I will have no problem giving hope to the child of su a man. I start dreaming of a little Danny running around. A few weeks later, I give myself a home pregnancy test. Wh I see the results, I scream and run out of the bathroom, forgetting to put my underwear back on. Danny is alarmed. I rush into his arms: There is a the beginning of a little us growing inside of me.

I am six months pregnant when my husband is kidnapped by Al Qaeda terrorists. We are living in Karachi. It is four months after the attacks on the World Trade Center, and most journalists covering South Asia have followed the story here, to Pakistan. It is no mystery that hte country has links to Muslim fundamentalists and those who harbor them.

Danny is writing a story about the "shoe bomber," Richard Reid, whose attempt to blow up a flight from France to the United States was thwarted when airport authorities in Paris found explosives hidden in his shoe. Danny discovered that Reid had been taking orders from someone based in Karachi, and he was investigating the kind of support Reid had received from Pakistan. Danny thought he was meeting someone who would introduce him to a Muslim leader he wished to interview, but he was lured into a trap by a British-born Al Qaeda terrorist, Omar Sheikh, who led him to his captors. 

When Danny is abducted, I spend every minute of the next five weeks in Karachi fighting his captors. I fight like I have never fought anyone--with all my might, using everything I have learned about life and death, love and faith. I put together an investigative team that for the first time ever unites journalists with Pakistani police and FBI agents in a rescue effort. I spend a week without sleep, searching Danny's computer for clues; I pour my emotional energy in to supporting the task force, so no one will give up hope.

Inside myself, I go beyond fear to a place where the terrorists can't reach me or even separate Danny from me. In my heart, I know my husband is defying them as much as I am. I don't know whether we will both make it out alive, but I know our spiritual victory over those who have him is certain. Everywhere I go and in everything I do, our child is with me. It is already as if our three souls have merged into one. 

I am thirty-four years old when I become a window, two years younger than my mother was when my father took his own life. Danny's captors killed him. First the accused him of being a CIA agent and then a spy from Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. No one believed these claims -- not even the terrorists, I learned later. But Danny didn't need to be guilty of anything for them to kill him; he just needed to be American or Jewish or part of whatever group the terrorists wanted to target with their hatred. They wanted to terrify Jews and Americans. So they took Danny's life, decapitating him on camera, hoping that television channels around the world would broadcast the tape of the murder.

Two months later, I am alone in the delivery room oat the Maternite des Lilas, in Paris, the clinic Danny and I had chosen. For me, this moment is an intense encounter between life and death, wtih me between them. I am lying on the delivery table, silently addressing my two men--one unborn, the other dead. In the days that preceded the first tidal waves of labor announcing the baby's arrival, I stayed alone. I called it my "jihad." In Islam, the most honorable holy fight is the one a person leads within his- or herself. I know that by killing my husband, the terrorists expect to break my life, too, and that of my son. But I am fighting the holiest of fights, and I win. Giving birth to our baby is my ultimate act of anti-terrorism. I am perpetuating Danny. This is what I tell Danny as our son, Adam, finds his way out into the world.

Through the pain of childbirth and the time preceding it, I know that there is only one answer to those who killed Danny: life. That gives me the courage to deny the terrorists their goal. I write my beliefs down for myself:

They want to silence me; therefore I will speak out. They want to kill joy in me; therefore I will laugh. They want to paralyze me; therefore I will take action. They want war; therefore I will fight for peace. Someday I will pass these words onto my son.

Through this life-and-death struggle, Buddhism is my walking stick. Buddhism teaches that life is about climbing mountains, and that only by doing so can you embrace who you are. It also acknowledges the endless cycle of life and death, and the connection of individuals beyond life and death.

So Danny dies, and Adam is born. When I first see Adam, his eyes wide open, staring at me, I can immediately tell he has the same self-confidence as his dad. We look at each other for a few seconds and then we both cry. For me it is the cry of humanity triumphing over evil. Now I understand that there is something between people who love each other and that even death can't erase. Maybe therein lies the definition of hope. 

For the first time, I call our son by his name, Adam. "We should call him Adam, after the first man," Danny had said. He wanted to celebrate the many bloodlines that would define our son. From his dad's side, Adam is one-quarter Iraqi and one-quarter Polish. From me, he has Cuban and Dutch blood. He was born in France, conceived in India; his mother is French, and his dad was American. Adam is the antithesis of the message perpetrated by fundamentalist terrorists; he is the anti-clash of civilization.

In the last picture ever taken of Danny, a photo that traveled the world in an instant on the Internet, he has a gun pointed at his head and a smile on his face. While everyone around me looked at the gun, I saw the smile. I smiled with him, and I cried. 

Adam is almost two years old. He runs all over the place, hates his diapers, and has the open beauty of angels. I like the way he extends his arms to strangers. He wants to be picked up, confident that whoever holds him will love him. 

"What will you tell him?" people ask me constantly. Most of the people asking this question feel so sad they can't even look at Adam. But Adam puts his face right up into theirs, as if playfully searching their souls. It's a look that reminds me of his father, a glance both unapologetic and sweet.

"I have no choice but to tell him the truth," I say, because I have learned that you cannot escape from your own story, no matter how hard you try. My father tried very, very hard. My mother tried to keep the truth from my brother and me.

But which truth will I tell Adam? The one conveyed by terrorists who sent out the videotape of my husband's gruesome killing, in order to intimidate and paralyze the rest of us? In that case, Danny's life would be defined by the way he died. All his beliefs, ideals and passion would have died with him, torn to bits and pieces, as the terrorists tried to do when they destroyed his body. 

Or will I tell my son the truth Danny fought so hard to convey, they whole truth? If someone put a gun to your head, and you had no doubt he would use it, would you smile? And if you smiled, what would it mean? Would you smile to your unborn child? What would that smile convey about how you lived your life and even how you believed you should die?

I believe that in Danny's courage at that crucial moment--to show that his captors could not destroy his soul--lies the future of our child. I wiill try to raise Adam to smile in the face of life as Danny smiled in the face of death. Each of our smiles is a blow to terrorism, just like Danny's smile, his last one.

Omar Sheikh, the terrorist who organized Danny's abduction, has a son a few months older than Adam. They will grow up in the world at the same time. I wonder what Omar Sheikh will tell his son. A few days before Adam's birth, Danny's father shared with me his thoughts: "The children of those murderers will come to admire pursuers of truth like Danny and will despise their fathers for their arrogance and cowardice."

Adam will never get to believe this is a perfect or even a safe world. He will know before others that you can encounter absolute evil. But he will also know you can defy it even in the worst circumstances. He will understand that you have to choose your truth and live up to it. 

The French writer Michel de Montaigne wrote, "The great and glorious masterpiece of men is to live with a purpose." My father could not find a purpose and he lost himself in despair. Now I wish I could tell him that with each mountain you climb, you reach a new summit within yourself. My husband knew his purpose and he gave his life for it. Danny was silenced, but the whole world knows who he was and what he stood for. "Our son is going to change the world," Danny predicted, in his happy and confident way. Adam sometimes looks at Danny's pictures and blows kisses to him. Unlike my mother, I have hung pictures of my child's father in his room, happy ones. And when the day comes for Adam to see the photos of his dad in captivity, I will not try to hide him from the truth. I will point at the last picture of Danny and I'll say to our son, "See that smile, baby? That smile is our souL" And I know Adam will understand. I can see it already in his smile.