Sparks Like Stars

by Nadia Hashimi

  Before Adam, I’d dated only a handful of guys. School and residency didn’t leave much time or energy. I rarely made it past three dates with anyone. Usually about halfway through the second date, I would find myself making a mental list of everything I would be happier doing instead of forcing small talk over fajitas.

  Adam caught me by surprise. He suggested we go bowling on our second date even though he’s a terrible bowler. Two dates turned into four, then eight. He didn’t need to know everything about me all at once. I told Adam that Mom had adopted me when I was very young. I told him about her work at the State Department and all the many places I’d been with her. He liked hearing about her job, and I liked that he found her impressive.

  Adam’s apartment is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. My condo is in Queens. The fifteen miles between us easily take an hour to travel, and a minimum of three subway trains. And then we’ve got our schedules to contend with—the battle of working hours. I am in clinic or the hospital about sixty hours a week. Adam works around fifty hours each week and often has happy hours or dinner meetings to attend. But we have found our relationship groove and make the most out of what we can offer each other.

  Sometimes what we offer each other is patience. I’ve told Adam I never imagined myself getting married, which is true. I blame my job, though it is much more than that. He thinks I’m going to come around because that’s what people our age do. And while most of his friends are now fathers, he doesn’t want to have children. That’s fine with me. I’ve never thought it was safe for me to bring a child into this world, not with all my sharp edges and dark corners. I accepted long ago that I would be an endling, the last of my kind.

  “I want to talk to you about something,” Adam says after the barista has set our coffees on the refurbished chess table between us.

  “The wedding, I know.”

  I hate that I’ve kept him waiting on an answer for so long. We’ve gone away together just once so far, on a long weekend getaway to the Bahamas, where Adam convinced me to try scuba diving. He’s been going since he was a teenager and said that I looked like I’d be a natural. I took long breaths, slow and steady, through my mouth, but still felt like I was suffocating. Everything moved in slow motion underwater. It took forever to see who or what was behind me, or if I was alone. Back on the deck, Adam chuckled and told me it might have taken him a couple of times to get the hang of it too.

  “It’s not about the wedding,” Adam says. “You’ve got to come for the wedding. You missed the deadline to answer, and the default response is yes. So there we go.”

  “There’s no such thing as a default response for a wedding invitation,” I groan.

  This trip doesn’t involve an oxygen tank, but it does require immersing myself in his family for a long weekend in Connecticut. It’s safe to assume I’ll be hearing a whole lot about his father’s tennis elbow and having my hand squeezed by his mother while she tells me I work harder than any other young woman she knows.

  “My cousin’s marrying a woman who had to be talked out of an all-black Goth wedding. You are going to make me look amazing, and everyone will love you. But we can talk about that later. I wanted to talk to you about something else.”

  I curl my hands around my mug and lean back in my seat.

  “I’m ready. What’s the big news?”

  “So,” he says. “You know I’ve been working on getting some of the General Assembly folks to see the light on some of the banking legislation our office helped draft last year. I can’t get anyone to introduce anything in session.”

  I nod.

  “I’ve realized I don’t want to ask people to do something. I want to be in the seat to get it done. I’m going to run.”

  I blink twice before I find my voice.

  “What do you mean ‘run’?”

  “I mean run for office. Get my name on the ballot.”

  “Elections were a month ago. You mean for two years from now?”

  Adam nods, as if I’ve said something encouraging.

  “Exactly. The current assemblyman won his last term by the skin of his teeth. And he’s got a couple of small-time challengers, but no one serious. I talked it over with a few of my dad’s friends, some politicos, and they think that if I make my rounds in the right circles, I can get that seat.”

  “Adam,” I say slowly, “this is really big . . . and exciting.”

  He begins to outline the next steps for me. He’s already had a call with someone who might help run his campaign. I am stunned by how much has happened since I last saw him, just a week ago.

  “It’s wild. I mean, I’ve had this in the back of my mind for a while now, but waiting isn’t going to change anything. I think this is the right time.”

  I am at a loss for words, which is strange for me.

  Adam talks about signatures. Fundraisers. Brochures. Party nominations. Kingmakers.

  A small knot forms in my stomach, no bigger than a pebble. I shift in my seat and try to focus on what he is saying.

  “I can be that guy,” Adam insists.

  I look at Adam as if for the first time and try to imagine him as a politician. I’m surprised I didn’t see it earlier. He is comfortable in a suit and can certainly work a room with his personality. He’ll meet someone once and remember the person’s name and alma mater and preferred beverage. He makes people feel important for the few minutes they chat with him.

  “Of course you can. You’d be great. You will be great. I don’t know why I’m surprised.”

  “I know politics isn’t your thing, Ary, but it’ll still be fun for you to have a front-row seat to it all,” he says, putting his hands over mine and landing a kiss on my lips. I touch his cheek and laugh with him because I want to get this moment right.

  Adam asks me about my week, checking in on the status of patients I’d described to him. He’s so caring that way, remembering details I’ve relayed. He hears everything I say. He doesn’t tune out while I complain about the new electronic charts at the hospital, or when I tell him the neighbor’s cat crawled through the torn screen of my bedroom window for the third time this month.

  We leave the coffee shop. Adam is buzzing with a new energy, an excitement he wants to share, and yet I can’t help feeling blindsided. We’re not married, and even if we were, I wouldn’t dream of stopping him. We thrive this way. I have a one-bedroom apartment to my name, and Adam has a place his father passed down to him. We let each other keep our ambitions and independence, even if it keeps us in two different boroughs.

  I’ve carved the life I have out of stone, and stones are not easily carved.

  It is Saturday night and neither of us is working tomorrow, so Adam stays over. He has Thai food delivered while I slip away for a quick run. We watch a movie together, and I can see his eyes trained on the car chase on the television screen. His feet are propped on the coffee table, and mine are curled under me, the scar on my sole hidden from him just like the box in my closet.

  Though I want to reveal it all to him, it will not be tonight. I envy the look on his face, the ability to focus all his attention in a single direction. I only feel that way in the operating room. Anywhere else, my thoughts are restless and fleeting.

  I fall asleep with my head resting on Adam’s shoulder, tilted toward him, though I sense we will spend the night dreaming in opposite directions.

  Chapter 36

  “And that’s with only one girls’ school. If this model were to be replicated, well, I don’t have to do the math for you.”

  Mom is the least retired retiree there is, which is why I can call her at seven in the morning and chat with her as I’m getting ready for clinic. She doesn’t play bridge or watch game shows. She might not be able to keep a plant alive for more than forty-eight hours, but she can get a hundred families to keep their girls in school after they get their periods. She volunteers and serves on boards and still finds time to check in on me.

  “Anyway, that’s what’s on my plat
e. How are things going on your end?”

  “Good enough,” I reply. I slip into a pair of black pants and a Kelly green blouse. “Work has been busy. Adam was over this weekend. He had some pretty big news for me.”

  I see sparks of light in the periphery of my vision. I find an orange bottle in my bag and throw back two white tablets with a swig of water. I don’t have time for a migraine today.

  “Oh, really? What kind of big news?”

  Mom likes Adam, but certainly doesn’t fawn over him. I think she’s waiting for me to declare that I will love him forever before she vows to do the same, but I worry sometimes that without Mom’s explicit approval, I might never take that step.

  “He wants to run for a seat in the General Assembly. By the end of next week, it should be official.”

  “Well, that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise,” Mom says.

  “What do you mean?” I put Mom on speakerphone and tie my hair up in a bun, taming the strays with a touch of hairspray.

  “Because he can knock off every box on the politician checklist. Legal background, family connections, friends with money. Not to mention the way he parts his hair. He’s got candidate hair.”

  It’s easy to picture Adam shaking hands and kissing babies, standing before a podium and flashing a winning smile to a crowd. If I’d let myself, I would have seen this coming too.

  “Candidate hair? Mom, you’re terrible. Any other premonitions you care to share with me?”

  “I’ll check my crystal ball later and get back to you. But tell me, Aryana, how do you feel about this?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, it’s his decision and his career.”

  I slip into a pair of black patent leather shoes with a low heel. I check my bag for my ID badge.

  “Aryana,” Mom says. “This is more than just his decision. If he’s running for office, that means you’ll be involved too. People will want to know everything about him first, but then they’ll want to meet his very lovely and accomplished significant other. Did he talk to you about that at all?”

  I am silent, which answers Mom’s question. I didn’t think Adam’s run would affect me beyond cutting into our time together.

  “Just think about it. Figure out where you stand and discuss it with him,” Mom advises. “And if this isn’t a good time for me to come down and stay with you, let me know. I can make other arrangements.”

  Mom lives two hours outside the city, in a quaint town where kids can go on hayrides in the fall and strawberry picking in the summer. There’s a main street and a sandwich shop where people know each other by name. She moved there for the quiet nights, the deer that graze in her backyard, and the icicles that form along the eaves of her house in winter.

  And it’s only a quick train ride away, which gives us both comfort.

  “Mom, don’t be silly. I can’t wait for you to come. I’ve already made plans for us for that Thursday night.”

  She’s coming into town for her friend’s retirement party, but it will also be Mom’s birthday. I’ve bought us tickets to see a revival of Oklahoma!, which surprised her. She’s noticed that I’ve been wading further and further away from shore lately, revisiting some moments I haven’t thought about in years. The relief in her voice makes me wonder if she’d been thinking I wasn’t okay until I volunteered to sit in a theater and watch a musical that reminds me of the night I snuck into my parents’ empty home in Kabul.

  Mom has reason to worry.

  When I was fourteen years old, we lived in Istanbul. Antonia had befriended a circle of English-speaking friends with a few children among them. Even though being around people my own age only made me feel more awkward, I forced myself to engage for Mom’s sake. I didn’t want her friends wondering what was wrong with her adopted daughter. So I laughed at jokes, traded bracelets, and sang happy birthday—all of which consumed massive amounts of energy.

  One night I was one of four girls invited to a birthday celebration by a British girl named Katie. It was a Friday night, and we were holed up in her room listening to Nirvana. Katie and the friends she had invited over from our international school were the good girls, satisfied by a bottle of iridescent nail polish. I had mostly lost my accent by then and looked and spoke like an ordinary American girl, even if I did struggle a bit with slang.

  Katie’s mom called us downstairs for homemade pizza. We came down the carpeted steps on our heels, our freshly lacquered toes flared. Katie’s father, a British businessman, was stretched out on the sofa in the adjoining room watching an old film. We each took a slice and sauntered into the living room.

  The actress was dainty and blond, her hair tied back with a black ribbon. She wore an eggshell blouse with a frilly neck and buttons running the length of her back. Her long black skirt swished as she walked. She spoke with a Russian accent, which caught my ear.

  What’s this movie about, Mr. Shipman? one of the girls had asked.

  Anastasia Romanov, he’d said, keeping his voice low and his eyes on the screen. A Russian princess.

  But Dad, I thought you hated the Russians, Katie had teased, as she descended to the floor cross-legged, a curled slice of pizza in her hand. The rest of us followed the birthday girl’s lead.

  Mr. Shipman explained that the film was about a woman pretending to be Princess Anastasia, the sole survivor of the execution of the Romanov family during the Russian revolution. No one could confirm her identity because the entire Romanov family had been taken to the depths of a palace and murdered after months of captivity.

  I made sure no one noticed that my hands had begun to tremble, that I hadn’t taken a second bite of my slice. I slipped away to the bathroom, ran the faucet, and pressed a towel over my mouth to muffle my cries.

  Before the girls noticed I was gone, I had already run across two neighborhoods of Istanbul and back into Antonia’s arms. Mom fixed it all with a phone call. She’d become very good at explaining my curious behaviors by then.

  Anastasia Romanov’s story tortured me. I needed to know everything about her. The more I read, the more obsessed I became with her story.

  In 1918, after months of being held captive in a palace by the Bolsheviks, all members of the Romanov family were executed. Rumors circulated that seventeen-year-old Grand Duchess Anastasia managed to survive the firing squad and had escaped from the palace. Over the years several women had come forward claiming to be Anastasia. A suicidal woman pulled from a Berlin canal lived in an asylum for two years before declaring that she was the grand duchess and had arrived in New York City in 1928. She submitted the scars on her body as proof, claiming they were from wounds inflicted on her by the Bolsheviks.

  I remember looking down at my own body when I’d read that, thinking there wasn’t a single mark on me, not even the one on my foot, that could prove my identity. And if I told anyone my story, they might think me insane as well.

  A year after I’d lost my family, a determined geologist, following a series of clues, found the remains of the Romanov family. The bodies had been buried, unburied, burned, and doused with sulfuric acid before being buried again. But instead of broadcasting his discovery, the geologist ran a few secret tests on the bones and buried them once more. There was still fear, even six decades later, that revealing the truth about the executions would invite punishment.

  It wasn’t until 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, that the government allowed an investigation of the remains of the Romanovs. I was training to become a surgeon when their remains were exhumed one final time. I showed up at the pathology laboratory to evaluate thin slices of tumors after reading that the Romanovs had been buried in the Peter and Paul Cathedral and declared saints. No matter how I adjusted the dials of the microscope, I could not bring the slides into focus.

  Though two Romanov bodies were still unaccounted for, the world finally knew what had been done to them.

  I was happy for the dead Romanovs—and envious too.

  I wish I could say I stopped chasing t
heir story then. But the internet had become my private sandbox where I could go digging into the past—both Anastasia’s and mine.

  There wasn’t much to find on what had happened in Arg that night. Most of it was speculation and didn’t offer names of those assumed dead except President Daoud and his brother. I searched for my parents’ names, my brother’s name, and my own. I found nothing. No one was looking for me, nor had anyone written about my father. And though I was sure someone knew where they’d been buried, I couldn’t find a scrap of information about it.

  The only news I found was a single line in an online discussion thread stating that my uncle had been killed after the Soviet invasion. There were no other mentions of my extended family.

  But I didn’t just search for news of my family. I scoured newspapers and the internet for any updates on my homeland. I’d been doing it even when I was still adjusting to life with Mom. Without fail, every tidbit of information I read made me wish I could turn around and share it with my parents, to see their reactions and thoughts.

  I cried when I read about the Soviet invasion. A Communist government took over in Kabul. I recognized the man who led the committee. I’d seen him at some events and remember my father saying it was a shame he kept such poor company. He and the Communist committee didn’t last. People cried for God’s return, for an Afghanistan free of Soviets. The mujahideen answered the call—as did Hollywood. Rambo, with his oiled biceps and oiled machine gun, stood side by side with freedom fighters.

  It didn’t end when the last weary Russian soldier limped out of Afghanistan. The country was tattered and overrun with militias. From that morass emerged the Taliban with their extreme prescriptions.

  The news coming out of the country was gut-wrenching but didn’t get much ink. No one seemed to care anymore. The Cold War had been a phenomenon of the eighties and not as interesting after the fall of the Soviet Union. Rambo had gone home, mission accomplished.

  It wasn’t until the 9/11 attacks that Americans turned their attention back to Afghanistan’s caves. I couldn’t get away from the country’s news then—a manhunt in the caves of Tora Bora, airstrikes on remote villages, girls liberated. Sure, some civilians were dying, but it probably wasn’t that many. Who had time for that math? More important were the grandmothers who had walked miles to choose their next president with an inked finger.