I take a long, slow sip of water and shake my head.
“It’s not just HIPAA. You know I like my boundaries, Adam.”
Adam exhales, his lips form a tight circle.
“All right, all right. Forget I asked,” he says. Our waiter swirls a cocktail glass of ceviche in the space above the table and then sets it gingerly on the table. I take the first bite—lunch left me hungry.
“But I need you to be part of this. There are other ways to help. I’ve been working my contact list so I can show some good fundraising numbers, but I have to widen the circle.”
“This is what you wanted to talk about the other day,” I say, remembering the text about dollars.
“Right. So here’s the thing,” Adam says, with a sheepish grin. “Can you put me in touch with your colleagues? Hospital executives, star surgeons . . . I’ve got to pitch the campaign to them, and I’m sure I can win them over on health-care issues. I’m sure some of them would want to have a future assemblyman as a friend,” Adam offers.
“You want me to ask my colleagues to give you money?” I ask, taken aback. “I can’t ask them to do that.”
“Why not? This is how it works, Ary. Some of them have probably already done this for other politicians. I could use your help finessing a pitch to them. What issue matters most to physicians, and how can I angle myself so that they’ll be motivated to support my run?”
I put down my fork.
“Adam, I didn’t ask for this, and I don’t want to be part of it. No, I won’t be the token demographic on your arm, and I’m not going to cold-call my colleagues for you.”
Adam looks at me for a beat, then slides back in his chair. He has his hands on either side of the table, as if he’ll be blown away if he doesn’t hold on.
“Wow,” he says finally. “That’s incredibly supportive of you.”
“Are you serious? You didn’t want to come with me to our holiday party last year, but now you want to schmooze with my coworkers? You’re asking me to do things that make me cringe, to put it mildly. That’s a big deal, and it’s too bad you can’t see it.”
“This would be good for both of us, Aryana. We could get in with the kind of people who make things move, the kind of people who matter in this city. To get there requires stepping out of our comfort zones. And it’s not exactly sinister to try to get a leg up on my opponents.”
“You’re doing this for both of us but didn’t bother to ask me if I wanted to be in with these special people. You didn’t ask me if I wanted any of this.”
Adam taps his fingers against the table. His ceviche sits untouched.
A long stretch of silence passes.
“Why did marriage just come up now? Did it really have anything to do with your lease or is it about the campaign?” I ask.
“C’mon, Aryana,” Adam says. “Are you serious?”
By the look on my face, he can see that I am serious. And by the way he avoids answering, I can see that I’m right.
“Aryana, be smart,” he says in a low voice. “Strategy isn’t a sin. People vote for people they like. We are the kind of couple people would like. And we were headed that way, weren’t we?”
My head drops. I can see now with such clarity that it feels like a cataract has been removed. Somewhere along the line, I became a pawn in a game I never wanted to play. I take my napkin off my lap and set it on the table. I open my tote and take out two $20 bills. I place them on the edge of the table and rise, slipping one arm and then another into the sleeves of my coat as Adam stares at the money I’ve left on the table.
“Maybe we were,” I tell Adam. And with those three little words, I have changed everything.
Chapter 46
The midday sun is warm on our faces, even if we are only days away from Christmas. Over breakfast, Mom suggested we go to Randalls Island. It’s my first Saturday off in two weeks, and I don’t want to waste it indoors.
Mom’s sunglasses are large and round, her cheekbones high. She walks with her hands stuffed in her pockets. She swears yoga has kept her posture upright, and I believe it. She’s the reason I’ve been meaning to start yoga for the past five years.
“Hell Gate,” Mom muses as we stroll the asphalt path. “That’s what this stretch of water was called. Do you know why?”
“Probably sank a good number of ships trying to get through here.”
“True, but that’s not where its name came from,” she replies. “It’s Dutch for ‘bright strait’ or something like that.” We follow the walkway along the water’s edge, the brink of the island.
“Poor Hell Gate. An innocent waterway with a bad name.”
“Not all that innocent. She was a watery grave for plenty.” Wispy clouds drift away from the sun. Mom shields her eyes from the bright glare on the water. “They blasted the straits with a ridiculous amount of explosives over a hundred years ago. People all the way in Princeton, New Jersey, felt the blast. They used the rubble to make that little island right there.”
In my second year in an American school, I learned the word “rubble.” I’d mistaken it for the name of Russian currency, which made my ESL teacher laugh. She’d flipped through pages of a textbook until she found a grainy photograph of a tattered child standing on a pile of bricks in Poland during the Second World War.
Rubble, she’d said, so brightly she could have been revealing a birthday cake. Not ruble! This is rubble.
I’d gone home early that day, having spent half an hour on a cot in the nurse’s office with a stomachache.
I’d like to think I’m less affected by words now.
“How was last night?” I ask instead.
Mom laughs.
“Speaking of misfits,” she says slyly, then stuffs her hands in her pockets and curls her shoulders in. “So much reminiscing last night. A gaggle of women who can’t sit back and watch the sunset. Do you remember Evelyn? She’s the one who suggested Randalls Island for a walk. She told us stories of the insane asylums and orphanages they had here. They moved cemeteries from Bryant Park and Madison Square to this island. Thousands of bodies relocated.”
I see heaps of upturned earth and tilted headstones in my mind. I doubt Shair will come back to clinic. I’m going to have to find another way to push him for answers.
Mom interrupts my wandering thoughts.
“Are you ever going to tell me what happened between you and Adam?” Her lips pull to the side as she slides her shades down just enough that I can see her eyes. “Honey, I’ve been gazing at this lovely face for years. I can tell when something’s bugging you.”
And like everyone at a retirement party watching a slide show, I’m struck by a wave of nostalgia, the sepia-toned moments of our lives together, and the violent way we came to be mother and daughter. I cannot imagine where or what I would be if she’d not taken me in.
“I broke up with Adam,” I say.
“I see,” she replies, reserving judgment as she always does.
“I never wanted to be a politician’s wife. I certainly don’t want to be a worm on a hook,” I explain.
“Oh, Ary. I’m so sorry.”
“I hadn’t gone to meet him with the intention of ending things. But the way he saw me fitting into his campaign, I just couldn’t stomach it.”
In the distance, I hear a child babbling. A family has come around the bend, a couple wearing puffer coats and pushing a stroller. I estimate it has taken no less than a million miracles to create this moment.
“And now that you’ve had a chance to sleep on it, do you still feel the same way?”
“Completely,” I reply without hesitation. “But I also think I may not be built for relationships. Maybe I’m meant to be married to my work.”
“It is one way to live,” Mom says. “But I don’t know if I’d recommend it.”
Mom had a couple of relationships over the years, none that made it to matrimony. I’ve always thought I was somehow the reason for that.
“I’m sorry,” I
say. “If it weren’t for me—”
“If it weren’t for you, Aryana, I would be spinning in circles. You didn’t keep me from some storybook romance. I never wanted to be responsible for a husband and a family. Maybe I knew I was a little too much like Tilly. So I chose a career that I thought would ensure I never had a chance to screw up a marriage or a child.”
It saddens me that Mom had such little faith in herself and that she felt so hurt by her mother. But she’s also been my role model. I learned from her how to throw myself into my career.
“Aryana, I could never fill in the missing pieces of your life. I’ve always known that. The holes were just too big for me to even think I could come close. But you—you filled a giant hole in my life and made me the proudest mom. There’s so much I got to do because of you, so much I had the chance to experience.”
I feel a tightness in my chest. Tears blur my vision and turn the world into swirls of gray and blue.
I wrap my arms around Mom and catch the light scent of her perfume. Even in the middle of winter, she smells like crushed flowers and nectar.
“I love you, Mom,” I say, through a clenched throat. Her arms hold me tight, as they always have. Over the years she’s told me not to follow in her footsteps. She’s hinted and said outright that I would be a great mother. Every time I’ve told Mom that I’m not suited for motherhood, she’s looked like I’ve revealed a fresh tragedy to her. Even now, I can see she still holds out hope.
We walk slowly, the weight of the island’s history pulling at my feet. Maybe it’s the thousands of damaged people—the war veterans, the orphans, the mentally ill—wanting someone to hear their stories.
Mom clears her throat.
“There’s something I want to share with you,” she says. “The Afghan government formed a commission to search for the bodies of those killed in the revolution. They’re officially searching, though they don’t have a lot of information yet. Thirty years later, everyone who knew anything is either dead, gone, or scared.”
I’m halted by this news. I’ve kept up my own searches and haven’t seen an announcement about this government search.
“Where did you hear this?” I ask Mom. “And why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want this news to toy with you. I heard from someone I used to work with at the embassy. If they’d found anything, I would have let you know. I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”
“Who was it? Does he know if they’ve found anything?”
“No, he hasn’t heard anything and wouldn’t hear anything directly. It’s people he knows passing info along. But maybe the investigation will turn something up. It’s been long enough.”
I look at her.
“Mom, who is ‘he’?”
Mom looks from me to the choppy water and back.
“Leo.”
Leo Harris, from the Islamabad embassy. Mom hasn’t mentioned him in a while. I remember sitting across a desk from him with Tilly. He went from stalling our request for a passport to escorting us to the tarmac to board a diverted plane. I remember him watching us board, hands on his hips and shirt darkened with sweat.
“Leo was CIA, wasn’t he?” I say. I don’t know why I’ve asked that way, as if I already know the answer. It’s never occurred to me that Leo was anything but a Foreign Service officer.
Mom nods.
“He couldn’t tell me much then, but he’s been able to share a bit more now.”
“Was he involved? Did he know what was coming?” I ask.
“No. No, he didn’t know. And he was not involved. Not then. Later,” she says, her voice dropping. “Later, things changed. I think he helped get money and supplies to the mujahideen and rouse support from Uzbekistan.”
Uzbekistan. The CIA had probably sent guns and Qur’ans to the Uzbeks. The director seemed to think that stirring up their religious fervor would inspire them to fight harder against the Communists.
From what I’ve seen, the CIA likes to be very secretive about the elections it rearranges, the dictators it seats or unseats, and the conflicts it fuels. But once a couple of decades have passed, they open their files, knowing there remains little energy for outrage or shock once that much time has gone by.
I’ve spent more time than I care to admit digging through declassified CIA reports on Afghanistan—summaries about President Daoud Khan’s popular support and which ministry leaders might not have been loyal to him, briefings about air bases the Soviets hoped to build on Afghan soil, and newspaper articles about the coup. I recognized a couple of names in the documents but never found my father, which told me that the CIA hadn’t figured out which advisers were closest to President Daoud Khan.
“I can’t believe you never told me what he was,” I say.
“I had my suspicions but wasn’t sure,” Mom replies heavily. “And I didn’t want to cause him any trouble.”
“No. Causing trouble was his job.”
Mom presses her lips into a thin line. She shivers as a cool wind whips our hair into our eyes.
“It’s complicated,” she says.
I’m an American now, but one who sees clearly what the CIA’s meddling has done across the globe. I am no less grateful that Antonia is my mom, and that here I can be the doctor my father dreamed I would become. Sure, I’ve been saved here. But maybe I wouldn’t have needed saving if people like Leo hadn’t been so anxious about the creep of communism.
“You’re right,” I repeat. “It is complicated.”
Mom nods.
“There might be a way to help the investigation,” I say. The cold has me sniffling. “I found him.”
“You found who?” she asks, handing me a tissue from her pocket.
“Or he found me, actually. After all these years. He didn’t even recognize me.”
Mom stops walking and faces me.
“Aryana, what are you talking about?” she asks.
“The soldier, Shair. He came to see me in clinic as a patient. I confronted him.” Mom’s jaw goes slack. I don’t know if she’s more surprised that he reappeared or that I didn’t tell her about this right away. I tell her every last detail about our encounters, even confessing that I’d gone to his apartment building. “That monster has just been living his life. He’s never had to pay for what he did that night.”
“Aryana, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be in contact with him. And you certainly can’t be his doctor.”
As expected, Mom is protective and rational.
“I know. But he might be my only chance to find my family, to know who killed them.”
Mom looks conflicted.
“Look, I know it’s hard to think of it this way, but he did get you out of there that night. And he took a lot of risks to get you to me.”
This is not the first time Mom has tried to get me to see things this way.
I think of the way Shair looked at me in the hospital, the way he corrected the security guard who mistook me for a nurse. But I am still angry.
“I’m not interested in being his redemption,” I say, my voice carried south in the breeze. “I’m going to make him tell me everything.”
A congregation of ring-billed gulls skitters over the choppy waters, then returns to the ground in search of food.
“What if he doesn’t have the answers you’re looking for?”
“He does. He has to,” I say resolutely. “Otherwise, why would he show up in my life now? The universe can’t be that sadistic.”
I dare not blame God, even though I am not a religious person. Sometimes I regret that the faith I was raised in slipped away from me like a silk robe. I hold on only to the core, the belief that there exists a Creator and that heaven and hell are real.
Necessity isn’t just the mother of invention. She’s the mother of faith too.
The rest of it, the fasting, prayers, and holidays, mean nothing without my family or even a community. Growing up, Mom opted for a Unitarian church, an institution that probably grew o
ut of necessity too.
“What if I speak with him?” Mom suggests. “Maybe I can get him to open up. What do you think?”
She isn’t surprised when I shake my head. I will make him answer me, even if I must go to dangerous lengths to do it.
There are people in this world who return to watery graveyards—weary doctors, shell-shocked journalists, children of war. These are the people willing to cross hell’s gates to prove life and loss are intertwined currents, capsizing some ships and righting others.
Chapter 47
I dream it is winter. I’m standing on the sidewalk in the quiet of night watching lush, velvety flakes melt onto concrete steps, car windshields, and painted benches. I am a nine-year-old with happy bruises on my shins and silk ribbons in my hair. I catch the falling snow on my tongue because letting it fall to the ground seems the crazier thing to do.
I drift in and out of sleep all night. Awake at four o’clock in the morning, I decide to get up and go squeeze in a run. Overnight, rain has slicked the city.
When I return, I find Mom in the living room.
“You’re up,” I say. Her feet are in the air, her weight balanced on her shoulders. “Correction. You’re upside down.”
With a graceful scissoring motion, Mom’s legs return to the floor. She sits cross-legged, her face flushed.
“You put the twenty-something-year-olds at the studio down the street to shame.”
Her bangs cling to her moist forehead.
“Eh. I don’t think I have much in common with those LaLaLime gals,” she says, wrapping a towel around her neck. She points to Clay Porter’s book on the coffee table. “Is this what you’re reading now?”
“Yes, he did a talk downtown,” I tell her. Pouring myself a glass of water, I try to finish my thought before I take a sip. “The way he writes about the people affected by the combat, the children racing to the top of a heap of rubble, it’s like . . . it’s like he shows you the tiny flower growing through cracked concrete.”
Mom picks up the book and turns it over to look at the back cover.
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