A Sister to Honor

by Lucy Ferriss

  “Thank you.” Her throat felt dry. Gus must have gone out a back way, she thought. Avoiding her: what she should have expected. No matter. All she wanted was to go home. Not to a dorm room or the aunties. Home. “I am sorry,” she said. “Very sorry. What I do to you.”

  “Careful, there.” Only when his arm went to her elbow did she feel the sinking in her knees. “Let’s sit down,” he said.

  He got her to a bench. He wore thick glasses, like hers, which enlarged his brown eyes, made him look curious or worried, she couldn’t tell. Quickly he fetched her water in a paper cone. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked when she had drunk it dry.

  She shook her head. “Only to say, it was not Coach Hayes’s fault.”

  “That’s between Lissy and me.” After an awkward beat, he added, “I imagine you were panicked.”

  She nodded, mute. The others drifted over. One by one, they said good-bye. Carlotta leaned down, pecked Afia on the cheek. Behind her, the reporter was pushing in. Coach’s husband stood up and shooed him away. Suddenly the atrium was empty. Even Sara Desfani had disappeared into an office. Only Coach, lingering behind her husband, and the security officer waiting for some sort of formal discharge. With a glance at her, Coach’s husband sat back down, next to Afia.

  “I understand,” he said gently, “you can go back to school.”

  “It is spring break,” she said. She did not say she could no longer imagine Smith, her classes, the labs.

  “Is there anywhere you can stay? Where you feel safe?”

  She couldn’t help it. As she lifted her head, her gaze slid past him, to Coach Hayes. Coach looked better than when she’d come to visit Afia. Her eyes still thirsted for an answer, but she had said her piece at the trial. I don’t think she shot her brother at all.

  Her husband sighed, as if something he’d known all along was coming to light. “I tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you come back with us for a few days? Till you get your bearings.”

  Coach’s hand crept onto his shoulder, and he reached back to touch her fingers.

  • • •

  It was strange to leave Glens Falls in a car, to hear the radio; as they pulled away from the courthouse, to pass ordinary people on ordinary sidewalks. As they merged onto the interstate, Afia kept looking into the side mirror, to see if a car might be following them. The light was fading, headlights coming on, and twin beams passed them one after the other. She couldn’t keep track. Khalid was out there, she knew, but he would find ways to circle wide of her and pin her down at the moment she failed to look. Best, after all, not to have seen Gus. To see Gus was to put Gus in danger.

  As they crossed the Hudson River, the river that had run by the cabin farther north, Coach shifted in her seat and said there was a Muslim cemetery nearby, in the town of Troy. She understood that Shahid had been laid to rest in it. When Afia was ready, she said, they could go there.

  Afia strained to look out the window, but night was falling, and all she made out were lights and billboards. “Did you—did you see him?” she asked.

  “I did.” This was Coach’s husband, who had told her to call him Ethan. “I don’t think he suffered, Afia. If that’s any comfort.”

  “Comfort,” Afia repeated. The word felt alien, like a cloud of gas. “No, I don’t think so. But thank you.”

  It was full dark when they got to the little house by the lake. The last place, Afia thought, where Coach had seen Shahid. Toys and books lay scattered, just as before, over the living room floor. Chloe was asleep, reported the babysitter—a squash player, Afia recognized her. While Ethan drove the girl home, Coach took Afia downstairs, to a sort of TV den on the ground floor, with its own exit toward the lake. There she unfolded a couch, laid out sheets and a blanket. There was only a half bath, Coach said, but she could rustle up a clean toothbrush for Afia, and paste, a set of towels, a nightgown that would be absurdly long but would have to do for now.

  “You are very kind,” Afia said when Coach returned with these things. She removed her glasses. Fatigue spread across her back, over her shoulders, down her torso to her hips.

  “You want something to eat?”

  “No, thank you, Coach. I cannot. Your husband . . . he is no more angry?”

  “Not with you. And I blame myself more than he ever can. So don’t worry about it.”

  “But I must worry.”

  “Worry later, then. Get some sleep. Tomorrow we can drive over to Smith, try to fetch your own clothes.”

  Then Coach did an odd thing. She stepped over to Afia and wrapped her long arms around Afia’s back. Pressing Afia to her, she kissed her hair where the scarf had fallen back. “You’re safe, now,” she said. “That’s the main thing.”

  The nightgown was midnight blue, like water flowing over Afia’s body. In the bathroom, she removed the hijab, and her hair caressed her shoulders, her collarbone. The mirror shocked her with her own nakedness, the shadow of breast diving into the silk, the soft delta of skin at her exposed underarm. She lifted the hem to regard her bare feet, the missing toe on the left a nick in the foot’s taper, the next toe strangely long and exposed. Sometimes she thought of the vanished toe as the part of her soul that went with Shahid, that would never grow back. Shutting off the light, she brushed her teeth in the dark.

  As soon as she had settled in the makeshift bed, sleep pulled her under. But she woke, alert and restless, with the sky paling. She peeked through the Venetian blinds on the outside door. Was Khalid nearby? From the lake came a chorus of spring peepers. The moon rode high, its reflection a shattered plate on the water. For four weeks, she had slept in a locked room and ventured outside only under guard. Here I am, Khalid, she thought. Silently, she opened the door and stepped out.

  The night air pricked her skin. Against the soles of her feet pressed a wet nubble of grass and weeds, the snow here entirely melted. She scanned all directions—the other houses perched by the shore, their night-lights glinting through the windows; the distant rasp of cars on the state highway; the gray birch branches arching away from the papery white of their trunks. Where ice had vanished from the lake, dwindling stars salted its dark surface. Across the water, movement—her heart listed—but it was only a doe and her fawn, drinking at the edge. From the trees came the lonely hoot of an owl, a flutter of smaller wings. Nothing else stirred. She crouched, hugging her knees around the thin silk. She needed to see, to hear, to taste all this—not for herself, but for Shahid, who never would. Shahid, who with his big strong body would dive into this water, would churn across to the other side and back and emerge, exultant. Run, he had ordered her. Run. He wanted her to live. But at what price, Shahid lala? What price should be paid, for her little life?

  She stretched out on the cold grass. Above, the sky was slate, then taupe. Inside slept a little family—not her family, but a family at least. The doe and fawn a family, the birds quick with their nesting. No one lived long without a family; you were like one of those patients missing kidneys or intestines, you could be kept going with various machines but soon enough you expired. You breathed while you could. You shut your eyes. You felt the world tilt toward the sun.

  And then there was Coach’s daughter, Chloe, shaking her on the wet grass, shouting, “Mommy! I found her! She’s sleeping outside!”

  • • •

  As it turned out, the dorms at Smith were open. Coach brought Afia there the next day. Patty’s Hello Kitty clock still rested on the shelf, her iPod in its dock by the leaded windows looking over the walkway where Gus had stood two months ago, begging to be let in. But the room felt achingly lonely. She had heard nothing from Patty or Taylor while in the jail. She imagined their wide eyes, their whispering behind her back: She, like, shot her own brother. That’s wacked, right? She packed up her books and a few clothes, her Qur’an.

  That she would return here after the break, that she would ever be a
student again, seemed impossible. What she wanted was to go to the Price Chopper, to see her aunties, even to pick up where she had left off, placing customers’ cans and wrapped cold cuts into bags, listening to Carlotta complain of her pothead sons. But she couldn’t ask Coach to drive her around all day.

  Coach shrugged at this statement. “Why not?” she said. “It’s not like I have a job to go to.”

  “Even now? Now that this trial is finished? Coach, I will go to the boss at Enright, I will explain to him—”

  Coach laughed for the first time since that fateful Sunday in February. “Afia, I’ll make you a deal,” she said. “When you start talking to me about what’s still got you so scared, I’ll talk to you about my job.”

  In the driveway by the lake, a blue police car sat waiting. Afia shrank back into her seat. But when Coach Hayes went to talk to the officers who emerged, it seemed they didn’t want anything from either of them. The case of the explosion at Gus’s garage, one of them explained, was closed. In the back of their car they had the things they had confiscated from Shahid’s locker and dorm room—his books, clothes, computer, the sports bag with his wallet in it. The Honda, they said, was still in New York State, but as Shahid’s next of kin Afia could reclaim it. They were sorry, they said, for her loss.

  At first, Afia recoiled. The officers brought the boxes onto the ground floor of the house and set them in the corner, but she could not touch Shahid’s things. It felt like touching the dead. The boxes seemed to whisper to her—of Shahid’s life, his little notes and his Facebook page and the assignments still due to his classes, the life he was supposed to be leading.

  She opened her own boxes, tried to read Jane Eyre, to memorize molecular formulae. She sat on the floor with Chloe and played games. Chloe was like Muska when she was little, bouncy and curious. Did Afia know about Dora? Did she think Purple Monkey was a boy or a girl? Did Afia like purple better, or pink? Could she try Afia’s glasses? Why did they make the world look all funny?

  Over the next few days she took Chloe to the playground, which was sunny and unseasonably warm. She cooked the family a meal of spicy kebabs and minted raita. She took the bus back to Smith to meet with each of her professors and with the dean, who promised her scholarship would continue through the spring, no matter what her family said or did. She picked up the phone to call Moray in Nasirabad, and put it down; she opened a file on Shahid’s laptop to write Moray a letter, and after staring at the blinking cursor, clicked it closed. She was not afraid of what her mother would say, she told Coach. She was afraid of what a phone call, or a letter, would do to her mother. Coach thought she meant grief, hurt feelings. She didn’t know what a blackened daughter was, how she could wither whatever part of her family she touched.

  Gus called once, twice, three times, and when she would not come to the phone he drove to Coach’s house. She sat with him outside, on the deck, a public place where no touching would happen. He still walked with crutches. He had dropped out of school for the spring. Maybe in the fall he’d finish. Vet school the next year, if he was lucky. His eyes flicked over her, then moved to the pattern of wind on the lake, moving cakes of ice around like paper boats. She focused on his sweater, one of those Irish cable knits that she used to see in American movies about blond couples falling in love.

  “Without me,” she said, “luck will come back to you.”

  “Is that what you think you brought me, M’Afia? Bad luck?”

  “You must not call me that,” she said. She kept her voice steady by picturing it as a set of molecules that she had to move carefully in a petri dish, gripping the tweezers hard but never too hard. “I have caused you only pain,” she said.

  “Hey, you didn’t plant a bomb. You didn’t mess with my car.”

  “But you told the police—”

  “That it was possible, yeah. But anything’s possible, right? You’d run off. The detective said you’d confessed.” He leaned across the wrought-iron table on the deck. She could smell his specific odor, the tangy scent that filled her nostrils when they’d lain side by side in his wide bed. “Shahid did the number on my brakes, and I get why. Really. I wasn’t paying attention. I put you guys at risk. I messed with your whole family.”

  She looked at him then. So young, he looked. His face round and full, patchy beard growth around his jawline, freckles framing the short nose.

  “My family, you know,” he went on, “it’s just my mom, plus my dad who’s never around. That’s it. I used to envy you. All those uncles you had, all those cousins you e-mailed with. And Shahid. I used to imagine being in a little corner of your family. Then I did things—well, the way we do here, you know, guys and girls. Shahid tried to stop me. I didn’t listen, so he did what he did. And then Coach . . .” He exhaled a long breath. He looked out over the lake, the sun shooting it with silver between ice cakes. “She never believed in the team,” he said. “She believed in Shahid. If she comes back to Enright—”

  “Gus, you must blame me. Not her. She wanted all for the best. The team, too.”

  “Maybe. But I won’t play for her anymore. That is, if I can ever play again.”

  He set his hand flat on the table. She couldn’t help herself. She put her own hand over it. Then she lifted it, bent her head toward the fingers, smelled them, touched her lips to his palm.

  “Afia, tell me what you’re feeling. Can you feel anything for me—”

  She set his hand down. Her own went to her ears. Gus looked shocked. She struggled for the words. “Feelings!” she blurted, louder than she’d meant. “Why does everyone ask me about these feelings? To my family I am dead. And Shahid, he is dead, really dead. There is a—a path. That we follow. I am off that path. No way back. Like—like the bird we saw when we were picking apples. The bird that broke its wing. It sits on the ground, and it will die, because it is not flying, and it is supposed to fly. What does it matter, what that bird feels?”

  “Afia, you’re not going to die.”

  “Please. Stop talking this way.”

  “Stop talking about us, you mean.”

  She looked at his hands, still on the table. She wanted to lift the other hand, to touch her lips to it. She pushed herself up, opened the sliding door to the house, stepped inside. When she turned around, he was gone.

  That night, she opened Shahid’s computer. She had helped him with his homework enough that she knew the password, my1Nasirabad. There on the desktop were his unfinished papers, his video games, his library of hip-hop and Pashtun songs, the action photos of him leaping for the squash ball, diving to dig it out from the corner. In his goggles he looked like an old-fashioned aviator. That he was cold and dead, under the ground, seemed impossible. A grave in Troy, like the city where Achilles died, also far from home. She should go there, beg his forgiveness. Upstairs, she could hear Coach and Ethan talking softly. Spring break would be over in a few days. They would want her to go back to Smith, to pick up her studies as if the world had not broken into pieces.

  She opened Shahid’s e-mail. She was spying now, but on what? Could a dead brother have secrets? More than a month ago, he had made a plea to Uncle Omar for funds, that he might go with her as far as Doha. No answer had come. For the first time since her fleeing, she remembered the plan to send her home. “Zardad,” she murmured.

  Another e-mail, this time to one of his teammates—Carlos, she wasn’t sure which one that was. I can pay u back by graduation man I swear it, Shahid had written. Yknow what its like, family emergency. The response was the record of a funds transfer, two thousand dollars. Then Shahid’s note, Youre the best man, I got yr back anytime. Then, sure enough, two tickets, bought at the full rate. Her heart swelled and sank. What Baba must have sacrificed, to send Shahid the funds to ship her home! And this boy Carlos, she would owe him now. She opened the file for Shahid’s bank account with the same password—silly brother, not bothering to think of a different
one—and discovered another five hundred dollars, what was left from the allowance Uncle Omar sent every month. All wasted now, all gone.

  • • •

  Next morning, she told Coach Hayes she was ready to return to Smith. It was a Saturday. Her roommates would be back by now. She could not burden the coach’s family any longer.

  “You want to go today?” Coach said.

  “No!” said Chloe. She grabbed hold of Afia’s leg. “I will miss you too much!”

  Chloe was a demanding child, Afia thought, crouching down to her. She needed siblings, other small humans with big needs to keep hers in check. “I’ll come back and play with you,” she promised. “You will teach me Spanish. Sí?”

  Coach was meeting the girls’ squash team that morning, she said. It was the only responsibility left to her, at the moment. She wanted to know which starters would be returning in the fall. She’d take Afia to Smith in the afternoon.

  When she’d left, Afia went downstairs. She heard Coach’s car pull out—then, five minutes later, another car pull in. She glanced out the window of her room but could not see around to the drive. Upstairs, the doorbell sounded, a lackluster buzz. Heavy steps—Ethan’s—to the door.

  Then his voice. Khalid’s. Afia’s chest froze. “Hello. Dr. Springer? I am Shahid friend. From Enright University?”

  “You’re a friend of Shahid’s?” Ethan’s voice was faint; he was standing at the door, directing his words outside. He was not opening the door to Khalid. “Are you on the team?”

  “No, sir, no.” Something like a chuckle, from Khalid. “I am not excellent at squash. Not like my unfortunate friend Shahid. No, I am international student. Very close with Shahid.”

  There was a pause; Ethan said something she couldn’t hear. She had backed into a corner, in the shadow by the stairwell.

  Then Khalid again. “Yes, very sad. I am close with him. And Afia. He always tell me, ‘Take care of Afia.’ So now I try. She is here, yes?”