by Lucy Ferriss
But she wasn’t home. She was in the bad dream.
She would not let the name Khalid escape her lips. The Americans, if they knew the facts, would want to punish Khalid. But Khalid, for all he’d done to paint the picture of Afia’s shame, was not the truly guilty one. She was the guilty one. She was the one who had abandoned her namus, who had put Shahid at risk in the first place. If a tree falls in the woods, her philosophy teacher had asked, and no one to hear it, does it make a sound? If a woman pollutes herself, she could have echoed, and no one to know it, has she brought shame to her family?
The answer, it would seem, was yes.
Shutting her eyes, she saw Shahid’s blood on the snow behind the cabin. Run, he had cried out, dying. Run.
Where should she run now?
From her family, silence. The district attorney, she learned, had spoken to them. All Sara knew was that they had protested Shahid’s innocence—he could not have set a bomb, he would not have threatened his sister. They had sent no money for bail. They would not speak with Afia. Sara did not mention Khalid, so Baba must not have mentioned him. Maybe he thought Khalid was still in the mountains; maybe he knew the truth; maybe he had lied to Shahid and sent Khalid to America himself. Afia did not ask.
Alone at night, in her cell, which was never fully dark, always the lights in the hall, she heard her brother’s voice, smelled his sweat, rested her closed eyes on the face he always brought home from Peshawar, from the squash tour, from America. His too-wide, silly smile, showing the gums above his teeth. His brown eyes gleaming as she unwrapped her present—a necklace from Dubai, a pair of slippers from America. The tiny mole by his mouth, echoing hers by her eye. Oh Shahid, Shahid, she whispered into the silence.
Because of her, Shahid was dead. Shahid had tried to send her home, to save her. But she—she had been in love! With Gus! Even now, in her white room, with her books and her prayer mat—even now with Shahid dead—she felt the secret shame of wanting Gus. He had said all the dear words to her, lying on his bed, their sweat sticking them together. That he loved her. He wanted always to be with her. He would protect her from her family, from her jealous brother. She was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. He would marry her. How could she ever have thought such foulness sweet, such danger safe?
Gus had not tried to see her, and no wonder. To the police she had claimed she was the one tampering with his brakes, setting a bomb to explode in his home. Why? the police asked. Because, she said, he liked another girl. She was jealous, crazy with jealousy. They claimed she was lying. But could she blame Gus if he believed such a story? A knife pierced her gut every time she thought of him, which was many times every day.
She would never be a doctor now. She would help no one. She had brought death and shame; now she had nothing but death and shame to offer. If they would let her, she thought in the wee hours of the night, under the light they never turned off, she would take poison and be rid of herself.
• • •
Once a day they let the women out in the exercise yard. From the back, the building was faced with blond brick; the outside walls were of stone topped by clay tiles. A female guard stood by while Afia walked with Thalia in the cold yard. Thalia talked about revenge. She’d been set up, she said. This guy Hammer had done her boyfriend, all over a bag of coke. When she got out she had a gun stashed away, and she knew how to shoot it and she’d take care of Hammer in a way that she’d never get caught, no ma’am. Thalia talked and Afia tried to listen. Snow banked the gravel path. Toward the center sat a stone fountain that must have been used once as a birdbath, the ice in it slowly melting.
Afia didn’t remember much about coming here. That night, at the cabin, she had run until her breath could carry her no farther. There had been stones beneath the stones, sharp twigs, branches that cut her shins and made her fall and rise, fall and rise again. Then she had walked, stumbled, seen the yellow glow of a house lighting its barn. Below her knees, she had felt nothing. She had slipped through the barn door to the familiar odor of animals—a horse, chickens, a pair of goats. In a rough blanket she had rolled herself and spent the night shivering in the stall of the horse, who poked and nuzzled her. In the morning the old man had found her and cried for his wife. By then she was too stiff to move. After rubbing her feet and legs, the wife had swaddled them in a pair of thick wool socks. They had driven her to a hospital. When or how the police came for her, she couldn’t remember. When they had pronounced Shahid’s name to her, she broke out weeping and would not stop—not in the hospital when they peppered her with questions, not when they pulled her hands behind her back and cuffed her wrists. In the back of the car that brought her to a prison, a different room, she had wept herself to sleep. At some point after that—days, a week, more?—the blisters on her feet proved infected, and they treated her with antibiotics and a stinking plaster. The little toe on her left foot was far gone with frostbite, the doctor reported, and a few days later he gave her an injection to deaden the pain while he cut it off.
She cared about none of it. For a long while, when they came in to ask her questions, she only looked at them and shrugged. Eventually they coaxed words out of her. Eventually she understood: She had to confess that it was she who had killed Shahid, and Shahid who had tried to kill her. That story was the only way to spare her family more grief, just as this was the only place safe from Khalid.
Two weeks had passed; now it was March, the advent of spring. She was watching a red cardinal on the stone fountain when a guard came to lead the women back inside. She had a visitor, the guard said. All the guards, except Officer Jane, were like this one, chunky white women who stood with their arms folded across their chests and barked announcements—LOCKDOWN! LIGHTS OUT! HEAD COUNT!—even when no one stood more than ten feet from them. The cardinal flew off, and she followed the guard to the room with the tables, where other women whispered to their husbands or their lawyers, and more guards stood by the walls. When Coach Hayes came through the armored door, she rose from her folding chair, her knees shaking.
Coach looked like a different woman. Older, paler, her shoulders curled forward as if they bore weight. “Afia,” she said when she drew close, and her voice had a rasp in it.
They sat. They were not allowed to touch. All the bad things Afia had done seemed to lie on the table between them. That she had left the cabin. That she had called Gus. That she had failed to lock the back door. But these were not the worst thing. The worst, she had to remind herself, was that she had loosed the bullet to kill Shahid. An easy story to tell—for had she not, in the end, brought death to her brother?—until Coach lifted her pale face and fixed her with those blue eyes. “It’s my fault,” she said.
Afia’s heart squeezed against the wall of her chest. “No,” she managed to say.
“Yes. I should have gone to the police. Right away. They would have arrested him. We would have lost the Harvard match.” Coach’s mouth trembled. She looked down, picked at something on her hand. “And Shahid would be alive.”
And I would be dead, Afia thought. But she said only, “You could not know, Coach.” And then, because a mountain of lies rose between her and the woman who had tried to rescue her, she said, “How is your family?”
“My family?” Coach snorted. “That was my husband’s cabin, where you were hiding. I told him to trust me, that I knew what I was doing.”
“He is angry with you.”
“You blame him?” She lifted her eyes again. She studied Afia’s clothes, the hijab and the black chador. “I never kept anything from Ethan before,” she said. Bitterness edged her voice. “It’s a . . . a point of honor with us. You people don’t have a monopoly on honor.”
“I know that, Coach.”
“Do you? Then tell me.” Coach lifted her forearms to the table, as if she would take Afia’s hands. Her tone softened. “What really happened, Afia? Who tried to kill you? How did Shahid die?�
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“I—I can’t explain.” Afia began to weep. Coach Hayes had given her kindness, and she had repaid her with horror and grief. “I never thought to put him in danger.”
“But you did. And I did. And he died. Afia, listen to me.” Coach Hayes dug in her pocket and pulled out a crumpled tissue, which she passed across the table. “I tried to keep you a secret, and it didn’t work out. Now you’re keeping a secret. I know you are. My husband tells me I’m imagining things. I go on about a man in a blue car that kept following me, but nobody else saw this man. I’m supposed to believe that Shahid Satar, who I knew like my own son, who I loved—” She broke off. As if a string had been pulled, she sank back in her chair, her large hand over her face. Then she grimaced and sat upright. “I loved him,” she repeated, “and I am supposed to believe he was capable of attempted murder. That’s what your lawyer wants me to suggest.”
“Miss Desfani? She speaks to you?”
“She’s preparing a case, Afia. She has to. And the worse Shahid looks, the better the case she wants to build. Well, I’m not buying it, Afia. Not from my husband. Or the police. Or you.”
Afia felt as if spiders crawled over her skin. A blue car. Khalid. “Please, Coach,” she begged. “No good comes of this. You have your work. You must forget me and—”
Coach’s face twisted; a laugh erupted and died. “What work, Afia?”
“The team. The friends of Shahid, they need you—”
“Apparently not that badly. Afia, think about it. I withheld evidence in a criminal investigation. No one thinks I’ll go to jail, but it’s a scandal. I’m on leave, honey. Administrative leave.”
“Leave? That means?”
“Means I don’t work, so I won’t embarrass the university. Six months from now, we see if this has blown over. Until then . . .” She snorted. She looked away. “I wallow in grief and get eaten up with curiosity. My daughter wets the bed, and my husband . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“I am so sorry, Coach.”
“Now do you see? Why it’s so important for me to know?”
But Afia felt a wall go up inside her, implacable. She had betrayed everything and everyone else. She would not betray Baba’s only son. “I cannot tell you anything,” she said, “that would help.”
• • •
She felt awful about Coach Hayes. When she saw Sara Desfani, two days later, she asked her not to bother the coach; to make the case without her. “Don’t be silly,” Sara replied. She had cut and colored her hair since their last meeting. It lifted gently off her forehead and swirled in dark chestnut past her ears. Afia tightened her hijab. “Coach Hayes,” Sara went on, “was there when that bomb exploded. Her testimony’s essential. She’ll come around. Are they giving you time for prayers, here?”
“Yes. But if Coach doesn’t want to—”
“Afia, you worry about your own story. Let me worry about the big picture. By the time Ramadan comes—”
“I don’t care about Ramadan.”
“Neither do I, except to get you out of here by then.” Sara glanced at her notes. She tapped a pencil against the side of the table. Her face reminded Afia of Tayyab’s wife: full lips and low-slung cheekbones, pouches below the eyes. A stubborn face. No point arguing with her about Coach Hayes. “Your friends at Smith don’t consider you especially religious,” Sara said.
“I may not have been.”
“So it’s just since incarceration.”
Afia remembered Maryam’s wedding. She had spotted her cousin Gulnar wearing full niqab and had wondered how it happened, that those who went away came back more pious. “I cannot explain,” she said. “I believe the same as before. But this way”—she demonstrated her clothes, but she meant the Qur’an, the prayer rug, the rituals allotted to her—“I am not so lonely.”
“Well, when we go to trial, it would help a lot if you can find your way back to Western clothes. Meanwhile”—Sara opened a folder on the table—“I have some news about your case in Massachusetts.”
“Massachusetts,” Afia repeated. She had trouble keeping this straight. Shahid had been killed in the state of New York. The explosion at Gus’s house and the failure of his brakes had happened in the state of Massachusetts. In Massachusetts no one was charging her with anything, not yet. But the Massachusetts people and the New York ones weren’t different tribes, like the Baluchis and the Pashtuns. There was no reason for them to have different laws; they just did.
“No matter what you claim,” Sara was going on, “you’re off the hook on the brakes. That’s good news, sweetheart. Someone from the district attorney’s office got hold of a surveillance tape, from the TrueValue just outside Devon.”
“I don’t want to hear this,” Afia said. Like a child, she placed her hands over her ears.
“Honey, he tried to kill you for doing what comes naturally to young people all over the world. And you defended yourself, and now he’s dead. You don’t have to protect him anymore. He can’t hurt you.”
Slowly Afia removed her hands. Her eyes widened. Could she mean Khalid, that Khalid was dead? Could the lawyer know about him? She had never mentioned Khalid.
But Sara was lifting another sheet of paper from the folder. “The tape shows your brother Shahid,” she said, turning the report in Afia’s direction, “buying a wrench, a pair of metal cutters, pliers, a flashlight. Everything you need to drain the brake fluid from a car.”
Afia pushed away from the table. She felt blood drain from her face. “You are sure? There was Shahid on a tape? Buying these things?”
“We can’t enter this into evidence here. But I’ve got a buddy over in the Berkshires, he sent me this report. They don’t know if your brother was acting alone, but—”
Afia stood up. She walked in a tight circle. She had known, of course; in her heart, she had known. To scare her into acting as she should, Shahid had been ready to take Gus’s life. The cruel twist being that she had been acting as she should, only when she learned Gus was injured her heart had flown from her chest and gone to him. Shahid had scared her in the wrong direction. “He did,” she managed now, emotion strangling her voice, “what he had to.”
“What, try to kill your boyfriend? Afia, honey, this sort of code is primitive. Believe me. I know. Before my family left Iran—”
“I am not from Iran. I am Pashtun.” Afia was surprised by the heat in her voice. Spinning around, moving in on Sara with her thick lips and dyed hair, her mud-brown eyes, she could have struck her a blow. She gripped the back of the chair to steady herself. “Gus was makhtoray. Our great poet, he says it, the Pashtun man must shoot the seducer of his sister and walk proud to British gallows. Only so do we keep the peace.”
“America,” Sara said steadily, tightening her red lips, “isn’t a British colony. And that is a funny kind of peace.”
“My brother loved me.”
“All right.” Sara nodded, as if Afia had proposed a project. “He loved you. And I’m sure you wish you hadn’t had to shoot him.”
“I did not—” Afia began. But she saw the trap before she stepped into it. “What is to happen now?”
“With this in hand,” Sara said, “I think the rest of the state’s case collapses, in Massachusetts. We’re left with self-defense. The trial should be scheduled soon.”
“And Coach Hayes will testify?”
“I’ll subpoena her, if I have to.”
“And Gus? Will Gus speak?”
Sara had risen. “I think he has to, honey. Shahid threatened him, and now there’s evidence that Shahid meant him harm. His testimony demonstrates your brother’s capacity for violence.”
“Shahid is not violent!” Afia shouted. From the corner of her eye, she saw a guard, moving toward her. Painfully, she lowered her voice. “He . . . was . . . not violent,” she managed. “He had to—” She looked away, at the high window, the b
right blue of the sky. Was, she thought. She felt again how Shahid had pushed her aside, out of harm’s way, when the gun flashed. She hadn’t had the strength to push back. “He knew,” she said as if to herself, “where his duty lay.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
His sister’s trial was like no kind of judgment Khalid had ever witnessed. Here was no jirga, no gathering of elders in equal and shared responsibility for the administration of justice. Here, the sides in the dispute—Afia as the wrongdoer and Shahid’s supporters as the ones wronged—seemed voiceless in the proceedings. A woman sat high up behind a wooden wall, and the council that would decide the matter—not elders but people of all ages, women alongside men—sat silent and to the side. Those questioning the witnesses had no apparent role in determining the outcome, though they bullied and badgered the people called to the stand as if every word out of a witness’s mouth were a snake to be ground beneath the heel.
The issue at hand, he saw immediately, was a foolish misapprehension of Afia for the murderer of Shahid. Somewhere the minions of the devil were laughing. From the bench where he sat, in the rear of the courtroom, Khalid could see the back of Afia’s head, covered by a sheer scarf of lavender and blue. Next to her, a stocky Turkish-looking woman in heavy makeup rose to address the woman sitting on high as Judge, though she did not perform the role of a judge so much as an administrator, allowing certain procedures and disallowing others. The question at hand, as the stocky woman and her counterpart, a slope-shouldered man with a whine in his voice, made clear, was not who had committed the killing, but why. The stocky woman argued strenuously for self-defense.