A Sister to Honor

by Lucy Ferriss

  “I imagine.” Vertebrae, she thought. Could mean everything or nothing. At the least, he was out for the season. “Well, thanks, guys. I’ll head over. Is Shahid there?”

  “I—I left him voice mail,” Afran said with a quick glance at Carlos. “I think he’s on his way.”

  “Yeah, good.” She stopped at the door. Margot and Liza had stepped off the machines and gathered around Carlos. “You boys tell the team, okay? Send out a quick e-mail. I’ll announce the new lineup at practice.”

  “Right, Coach,” said Afran.

  As she scraped snow from her car, she realized. Gus must have been headed out to see Afia. How foolish, to risk country roads in this freezing slop. Did the girl know? Someone had reached Gus’s teammates. They should have started with the captain, with Shahid. But it was Afran who’d come to alert her. Could it be that, after his burst of enthusiasm at the start of the term, Shahid was so wrapped up in his own life, his own future at Harvard, that he would just abdicate, hang his coach and his teammates out to dry?

  “Selfish asshole,” she muttered to herself. Just when you think you’ve got the player of your dreams, the stuff of real leadership, he falls into drugs or infatuation or self-pity, and there goes everything you’ve tried to teach, all the honor of the team. She wanted to hammer her fists on Shahid Satar’s chest. To call him what he was: a traitor. Furiously she scraped at the windshield. When she was finished, she flung the scraper into the car. Then she leaned on the hood. She gathered her breath.

  This wasn’t about Shahid. She was the coach. She had a wounded athlete. Her job was to tend to him. And to pull the squad together. And to win, Shahid or no Shahid. “Got that, girl?” she said to herself. She sounded like her own coaches years ago, making herself snap out of it. She tucked herself into the dark car and headed through the snow-misted morning, toward Berkshire Medical Center.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Esmerelda was Afia’s favorite aunty from the Price Chopper, and also the one who lived halfway between Northampton and Devon, so it was from her that Afia had begged a ride to the Berkshire Medical Center. As the car pulled to the curb under the big Emergency sign, Esmerelda looked out suspiciously at the figure huddled below the awning. “Don’t like the looks of that one,” she said.

  “Oh,” said Afia, keeping her voice light, “that’s just my brother.” And promising Esmerelda she would call if she needed a ride back to Smith, she zipped up her puffy jacket and stepped out into the cold. The sun was sinking into the horizon, leaving a sky gone cobalt in the wake of the storm. Shahid stood by the revolving door, his hands balled into the pockets of his warm-up jacket. When she tried to step around him, he blocked her way.

  “Please, Shahid lala,” she said in Pashto. “Don’t let’s argue.”

  “You could have told me.” His voice came out tight. He must have been standing there in the cold, waiting for her—knowing she would come, she couldn’t stay away—for a long while.

  “Let me by,” she said.

  She strained for the door, and he caught hold of her wrist. “You have no idea,” he said, “what’s at stake here.”

  “What’s at stake is your teammate Gus!” He frightened her, but something in his grip told her he wasn’t all that sure of the ground he stood on. “Can’t you bother me later?” she said, lifting her chin. “He might have died.”

  At that word, died, Shahid’s grip tightened. “Afia, look,” he said, keeping his voice low. “I don’t want to fight. You lied to me—”

  “I never lied.”

  “It’s called a lie of omission. If you took a class in ethics you’d hear of it. You took me for a fool, and like a fool I went and pledged my life for you. Now we have a serious problem.”

  “My problem is I need to go through that door.”

  It was Taylor who’d told her about the accident—Taylor who checked Facebook the way other people checked their watches, Taylor who’d seen the post from Afran. And at once Afia had known. Gus was in the hospital because of her.

  “For what?” Shahid was saying. “Think you can satisfy your lust in the hospital, Afia?” His voice cracked; he was losing control. “Is that what you need? What you—”

  “It’s not lust, Shahid,” she interrupted. “It’s called love.” There, she had said the word. No hiding anymore.

  “Bullshit,” he said. “It’s a disease you’ve caught.”

  “Thank you, Baba.” With a sudden jerk, she managed to twist free of his hand. She rubbed her wrist. “Neither of you knows anything about it.”

  He sighed. He didn’t move away from the door, but he didn’t try to grab her either. He said, “I’m not just your brother. All right? I’m your friend.”

  “Funny way of showing it.”

  “Afia, listen to me. They’ve found another picture.”

  She looked up, startled. His face had softened, the forehead knit with worry. “Who found a picture?” she said. “I’m not stupid, Shahid. I wouldn’t post—”

  “On Taylor’s Facebook? The photo you sent her, or the photo she took? I don’t care where it came from—”

  “None of my friends take photos of me.” Afia swallowed. Could Taylor have done something so idiotic? They paid no attention, these girls.

  “Well, someone did, and now it’s too late. We have no choices left, okay? I’m putting you on a plane.”

  “A plane?”

  “To Peshawar. I’ll get Uncle Omar to pick you up. And then—”

  It was too much, too much. She had broken this off, she had shoved love into a box and sealed it with tape. And now—now she would be punished? And Gus, punished? “I’m not getting on a plane,” she said, lifting her glasses to swipe at her eyes. “Gus is in hospital.”

  “I don’t give a shit. I’ll be in hospital, or worse, if this keeps up.”

  A car door slammed behind her. A pair of worried-looking parents got out. Both she and Shahid stepped aside, to let them through the revolving doors. Then she turned her gaze back on her brother. Her glasses had fogged up; his face was blurry. “How can I go back?” she asked at last. “They will kill me.”

  Shahid’s mouth twisted. He planted a hand on her shoulder. “Nonsense,” he said.

  “They will kill me,” she repeated. “Look what they’ve already done to Gus.”

  “You’re crazy. Who’s ‘they’?”

  She searched her brother’s face, but it betrayed nothing. Still she would press him. “Gus got his brakes checked two weeks ago.”

  “And there’s ice on the roads. He shouldn’t have been driving. If he hadn’t been coming to see you—”

  “I talked to him. The road was sanded. He was braking around a turn, and suddenly no brakes. They will kill me, Shahid.”

  His palms on her cheeks were cold. “Listen to me,” he said, leaning down to her. “This story you’re telling, this story about what happened to—to, you know. Your boyfriend.” He pushed the word out. “This story is crazy. But if you don’t go home? That is one scary true story, Afia. You can’t keep on like this. You’ll be cut off.” He let go her cheeks and seized a bit of air with his right fist. “Or worse.”

  “I can’t be responsible for what people say in Nasirabad, Shahid lala.”

  She tried to push past him, but he grabbed the edge of her jacket. His voice went sharp again. “You’ve betrayed your whole family,” he said. “Baba, Moray, our cousins, our uncles, everyone. You mark us. And still we’re being generous with you. When you go back to Nasirabad—”

  He spoke truth. That was the horror of it. Her shame would spread like poison gas, rapid and uncontainable. “Go back,” she repeated, “to be accidentally poisoned? Found dead in a car crash?”

  “Married, Afia. That’s all. Safely married.”

  She lifted burning eyes to him. “I turned him away, you know,” she said. “I told him I was enga
ged. I broke his heart. And for what, Shahid? For what? So someone could go break his body, too?”

  “Afia, the guy had an accident.”

  “Did he? Gus is a careful driver.”

  “Oh, you know that, do you? You’ve been driving places with him?”

  “Not for many weeks. And I’ve missed him. I’ll say that now, Shahid, no matter what you do to me. And if somebody hurt Gus so they could scare me away from him, they didn’t know me, not on the inside.”

  She had hit home. She saw it. He let go of her jacket. He wanted to be on her side, she could see that, but it would do no good. There were no sides, really, only honor or death. “You should scare a little easier than you do,” he whispered.

  She had no more words for him, not now. Turning, she pushed through the revolving door.

  • • •

  That night and the next, she slept in Gus’s garage. Or failed to sleep. It wasn’t the sound of garbage trucks, backing up in the parking lot on the other side of the fence, that kept her awake. It wasn’t the restless prowling of his cats, Ebay and Facebook. It wasn’t being alone, because the animals and the sense of Gus all around her kept her from feeling alone. It was anticipation. Any moment, she felt, the door would swing open and Shahid would stand there, his dark eyes glowing, in his hand a blade to scar her face the way Lema’s family had. She forced herself to get up, use Gus’s moldy bathroom, pour herself a glass of water. Finally the cats settled down on either side of her, and she drifted off.

  She was staying at the garage through the weekend so she could feed Gus’s animals. She was missing a day of classes, but she had her books with her. It wasn’t possible to go back and forth by bus; the buses stopped in Springfield, taking three hours for a forty-mile trip. And she had to be at Gus’s side, at least until the doctors were sure he would be all right, he would walk and run again, he would miss nothing more than the squash season. The team would be absent two players this weekend, because Shahid was being banned from the Trinity match. Afia knew because Shahid had rang her mobile to tell her, again, that he was taking her to the airport, sending her home—and, he’d added, if it weren’t for her, he’d have led his team to victory. But no, she’d messed that up, and she’d mess up his whole life if he let her stay in America.

  She had to get off the phone, she told Shahid; she was at the library, studying. He didn’t believe this lie, but she didn’t care. If she had only a few days left in America, she would spend them with Gus. Even if his accident had been just that, an accident, she was still to blame. He had been bringing her a Valentine’s present, a big box of chocolates and a slim gold bracelet that sat, now, on the crate serving as a bedside table. She hadn’t broken off with him convincingly enough; he’d thought he could win her back. And now either Shahid or kismet had caused his car to go off the road. She wanted to think kismet, but Shahid’s face had loomed at her at the hospital entrance: You should scare a little easier than you do.

  This photograph Shahid scolded her about—there it was, on Taylor’s Facebook timeline. Some Dartmouth guy named Kent Star had tagged Taylor, but the photo centered on Afia, perched on Gus’s shoulders, last fall at the apple orchard where they’d gone, a group of them from Smith and Dartmouth. One of her happiest days, soured now. Friday night she called Taylor and ordered her to erase it. “Jeez, girl, calm down,” Taylor said. “I don’t even know this Kent dude, he just friended me. Must be one of Chase’s crowd.”

  “Just take it down, Taylor. Please.”

  “Where are you, anyway?”

  “Gus is in hospital. An auto accident.”

  “Ooh. Ouch. I thought you broke up with him. Can I borrow one of your scarves?”

  “Take away this photo, first. Then yes, please, of course.”

  Saturday morning, she cleaned the lizard’s cage and sprinkled flakes on the surface of the aquarium. The fish rose, nibbled delicately. The trickiest was Pearl, the snake, who was due for a mouse. The mice lived in a tiny cage under the table. Gus bought a dozen at a time, on the same days when he bought crickets for the lizard; they lived as food-in-waiting. Quickly, blocking all thought, Afia opened the top of the mouse cage and thrust her hand in. She wasn’t squeamish about death. She had dissected plenty of frogs and fetal pigs, and on the farm in Nasirabad you saw death on a regular basis. But choosing which creature’s life would end in these next five minutes felt like playing God. Blindly she clutched a hairless tail, swung the gray creature over to Pearl’s cage, and dropped her in. Then she went to brush her teeth. If she had been half the scientist that Gus was, she’d have stayed to watch the snake’s jaws unhinge as he took the mouse whole. Instead she brushed her hair, threaded earrings into her lobes, and emerged when the snake’s middle sported a telltale bulge.

  When she’d fortified herself with orange juice and a stale bagel from Gus’s fridge, she bundled into her down jacket and the delicious boots Shahid had bought her. She lifted her bag over her shoulders. It was a two-mile walk to the hospital, and the air outside cold enough to pinch her nose shut. Today and tomorrow she would study at Gus’s side, in the hospital; tonight she would care for Gus’s animals, then sleep for the last time in sheets smelling of Gus. When they discharged him from the hospital it would be to his mother’s home, not the garage—but Afia would be back at Smith by then. At Smith, or in Nasirabad. What would happen with Shahid’s threats to take her away she didn’t know, but she couldn’t stop her life while she waited to find out.

  One thing she knew: She did scare easy. Nothing else bad could happen to Gus, or she would never forgive herself, whether for shaming her brother or for offending Allah or simply for tipping the scales toward bad luck. Never again would she run her fingers down the chiton-like ridge of Gus’s vertebrae; never again would she taste the salt left behind by the soft press of his thumb on her lower lip. This thing that her roommates found so important—this romantic love—she could give up. What she couldn’t give up was Gus’s own bright future, clear as a vision in the Cup of Jamshid that Anâ used to tell stories about.

  • • •

  At the hospital, they brought Gus a lunch of egg salad sandwich and applesauce that his mother, Mrs. Schneider, kept urging him to eat. “Mom, please,” Gus said, lifting the yolky mess with a plastic fork and letting it dribble onto the small square plate. “It smells like cat food.”

  “It shouldn’t go to waste,” said Mrs. Schneider. She tipped her head toward Afia with a what-can-you-do expression. This was Afia’s second encounter with Mrs. Schneider. The first had been Thursday, the day of the accident, when she had rushed past Shahid and his threats to learn that Gus was in the casting room. She had taken a seat in the waiting room across from an ample woman with deep red hair who set aside her magazine and her reading glasses to say, “So you must be Afia.” She might as well have said, So you left the gates unlocked, so resigned and accusatory was her low, rich voice. Afia had wanted to sink several floors down, below the hospital’s basement. But once her views were known, Mrs. Schneider made no further issue of Afia’s presence. She asked about her studies and what she wanted from the cafeteria. When Gus was settled in his room and visiting hours were due to end, Mrs. Schneider had said simply, “I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone,” and left the room, taking her judgment with her.

  “You must keep up your strength, Gus,” Afia said now, eager to agree with his mother.

  “Really?” Gus said. “For what? For the squash match I’ll be playing against Harvard?”

  Afia reddened. Her eyes traveled to the floor.

  “I’m sorry, M’Afia. Honey? Don’t cry. I’m just pissy,” Gus said. “They keep asking me how fast I was going. Jesus. I know how to drive in snow. I was doing maybe forty. I wanted to get to you, not go ass up in some ravine—”

  “Gus, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry that this happens.”

  “Just come here, okay? Here.”

  He he
ld out his arms. Frightened to touch him in any setting but his garage, Afia turned to Mrs. Schneider. But Gus’s mom was looking away, at a magazine in her lap. The door to the room stood ajar. Quickly Afia leaned over the lunch tray and let Gus kiss away the tears gleaming on her cheeks.

  Midway through the afternoon, Mrs. Schneider left. While Gus was wheeled out for tests, Afia wrote notes from her organic chemistry textbook. She tried to puzzle out her Introduction to Thermodynamics, though it gave her a headache. She turned to Jane Eyre. Jane had been rescued by the Rivers sisters, but now they were leaving her alone with their brother. When Gus was wheeled back, she played games of hangman with him. She had never played hangman before. It was just a spelling game, she knew, but the way Gus drew X’s for eyes and a tongue lolling out of the mouth of the hanged stick figure gave her chills.

  “You should head back,” he said when he’d finished an equally bland supper—lasagne with a sweetish tomato sauce, pale salad, chalky brownie. “I’ll call Afran or Carlos, they can give you a ride.”

  “No, no,” she said. The idea of being left at the garage by one of Gus’s teammates terrified her. “I like to walk.”

  “Afia, it’s below freezing outside.”

  “I have my boots. I will be fine.”

  “Well, okay. Look, maybe my mom can pick you up tomorrow, and you can sneak Pearl in. She needs to be handled.”

  “I—I can handle her.”

  “Afia, you hate touching her.”

  “I fed her a mouse this morning.”

  “Thank you.” He reached out his hand, and she took it. Still holding on, he said, “I might sleep now.”

  “You should do that. I will stay, a little bit.”

  As he drifted off, his hand slipped away, and she tucked it under the blanket. She took up Jane Eyre. Now and then, she looked up to watch Gus’s face in sleep, its creamy skin with freckles like clusters of cinnamon.

  “How’s he doing?” came a familiar voice.

  Quickly Afia closed the book. With a glance at Gus, she started to stand.