by Lucy Ferriss
Three taps, at her door. She looked up at the grinning, freckled face of Gus Schneider. “Look, Mom,” he said, spreading his arms wide. “No crutches.”
“Good job.” She smiled at him. “I thought you dropped out of school.”
“Just for spring. I’ll be back in the fall. Thought I could practice with the team, you know, till I graduate in December.” He picked up a plaque from an open box, an award she’d gotten for assistant coaching, her last year at Indiana. “If you’re coaching, I mean.”
She snorted lightly. “I thought you considered me unqualified. After what happened.”
“Hey, Coach, cut me a little slack, okay? This was the winter from hell for me. I wanted to blame someone.”
“And did you?”
“Yeah. Finally. Myself.” He put the plaque back. In his right hand he held a squash racquet. He picked one of the hard balls out of her yellow basket and bounced it on the strings. “If I’d talked to Shahid in the first place, none of this shit would’ve gone down.”
“Only if you’d stayed away from Afia. And you loved her.”
His eyes followed the blue ball, up, up, up. “I did, yeah. Maybe I still do a little, but . . . I don’t know.” He caught the ball. “I think I’m ready to move on. She called me this morning.”
“Really.” She stuck the plaque in a drawer of the gray metal desk. Below it lay a pile of faded photos—her with the Rutgers team, her at eighteen with her hair in a dirty-blond ponytail, her dad at the one national tournament he attended. “She say anything about how she’s . . . adjusting?”
“She’s engaged again.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“I don’t know.” He began tossing the ball up with his free hand. “There’s something else going on,” he said. “My mom says it’s my imagination. She wants me to see, you know, like your husband.”
“You’ve been pretty traumatized.”
“It’s not that.” He dropped the ball back into the bin. “Look, she’s coming up here,” he said. Now his eyes lit up, a vestige of the old Gus, the puppy in love.
“Afia? You mean like to the squash center?”
“She wanted somewhere private. You going to be around awhile?”
“An hour or so.”
“Maybe we can hit. You know, after I talk to her.”
“I’d like that.” Her lips curled. “I’ve been smacking the ball myself, a little. It’s a great tension reliever.”
“I could use that.” He started out of the door, then turned back. “If things get weird, you know, between us? Me and Afia? Maybe we could stick our heads in here. Talk to you.”
“Sure,” Lissy said. Though as Gus went out, she considered what a lousy advisor she’d be—for a pair of star-crossed lovers, for a young man frightened of shadows, for a girl relieved to have the choice of a fixed marriage.
She’d have been happy to see Afia—to scold her, she supposed, for ingratitude, and to make one last vain attempt to learn the truth. But she shut her door to give them privacy. Reaching into the box, she pulled out another photo, framed: Shahid, three years ago. He’d just placed third in the nationwide individuals, and he showed his white teeth in a wide grin. Standing next to him, Lissy herself looked like the proverbial canary-fed cat, ready to burst.
You looked so fierce, Ethan said once, when she asked him why he’d first started talking to her on that train. And you looked so alone. It was a challenge.
Why had she cared so hugely, too hugely, about Shahid? Why was it her task to harbor Afia, or to save her now? Was it about honor? Or winning? Or pasting together a family? She ran her thumb over the glass protecting Shahid’s face. More than anything else, his family had been Afia.
She checked the clock. Two twenty. She realized she’d been hearing Gus, out in the squash center, hitting balls while he waited for Afia. But the slap of ball on wood had stopped some minutes ago. Afia was late. Now came the hum of the elevator rising from the lobby. Steps through the atrium. She cracked her door, listened for Afia’s voice. But what came was a man’s voice, harsh and accented.
“Your name,” the man said, “is Gus Schneider?”
“Yeah, man,” Gus said, sounding very young. “Who’re you?”
“I am Khalid. Brother to Afia. You destroy our family.”
“Now wait a second, dude. I don’t even know your family, and Afia and I—”
“Shut up.”
“Whoa. Dude. Put those away, okay? I never touched her. Honest. This is all a mistake, this—”
Lissy shut off her light. Gingerly she stepped into the dark hallway. Directly in front of her, next to the bleachers, stood the tall man who had been in the top bleacher at the Harvard game. His long face the face at the wheel of the blue Hyundai. In both his hands, centered in front of his chest, a black handgun. From where she stood, she couldn’t see Gus, but the light was shining from the third court. Her hand went to the cell phone in her pocket. But there was no time to call for help.
“You must know why you die. You must know”—the tall man’s hands shook just a little, holding the gun—“what filth you do to her.”
Khalid, she thought. On the top bleacher; driving the blue Hyundai. Ethan had encountered him at their front door. His name was Khalid.
“Don’t shoot me, man. Please. This is like a misunderstanding. I’m my mom’s only kid. Please.”
“Get your knees on.”
She needed a weapon, any weapon. Silently she stepped back into her office. In the blue glow of the computer she spotted her squash racquet, and the yellow bin of hard balls. She’d almost thrown them away when she packed her office. Now she reached and plucked three from the pile. Two she slipped into her pocket. The third she kept in her left hand. Silently she stepped back into the dark hallway. Gus was facing her, but she hoped he couldn’t make her out, or at least that a flicker of his eyes would not give her away.
“Her I forgive,” Khalid was saying. “Her I marry.”
“You? You’re the guy she’s marrying? Not the guy in—”
“Shut up.”
“I mean, congratulations, man. I have all respect for you. Honest.”
“Shut up.”
The light silhouetted his back. He stood maybe thirty feet away, the length of a squash court. She had one chance. Overhead serve, the high-risk serve. She lowered her left arm, lifted the blue ball. It rose, going dark and then invisible, into the high space, as her knees bent. Her right arm arced back, looking for power. Muscle memory, the blindfold over the eyes. She sprang. At the pock of the strings, Khalid started to turn, but too late. Ninety miles an hour. The hard ball hit between his shoulder blades.
“Ungh,” he breathed. His back arched. The hand with the gun flung upward. A shot exploded into the glass wall of the squash court. Gus began to rise from his knees—too slowly, his leg still weak. Lissy dropped the racquet. Her legs churned. Khalid was recovering; he still had the gun, he was wheeling around. She hurtled forward. Her head connected with his torso, her arms on his hips. He was taller than she was, but not strong like Shahid. She felt the breath push out of him as he staggered, and they both went down. Over her head, the world exploded. Her head whipped back, struck the carpet. Above her she saw Khalid regain his feet. His shoulder blazed red. He was waving his weapon, firing. Lissy sliced out with her right leg, catching him at the ankle, and then he was down, and she pulled up from the floor, her head clanging, and with a great lurch she landed on top of him, her arms pinning his arms, the rich soup of blood filling her shirt, the stench of it, and Khalid’s choked breath at her mouth, and she was grunting and sobbing at once until she heard Gus say, “Okay, Coach. It’s okay. I got the gun.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
In the years to come, Afia would lose count of the times she woke from a dream with the horrible knowledge that she had killed her brothe
r, that he was gone forever, that no power on earth or in heaven would bring him back. She would lie in the dark and breathe rapidly, then more slowly. At last, in the ordinary silence, she would realize it had been only a dream and that Khalid was still alive, though not likely ever to walk the earth as a free man.
Or sometimes she would have the same dream and wake to realize, yet again, that it was a dream only in its details—details where she wielded a knife or cut a rope, or watched her brother drown—and that he was indeed snuffed out, his life no more than the shape of a cloud that dissipates with the next gust of wind. Shahid, she would whisper, Shahid, as if he could answer her and forgive her. But again there was only the most dull and ordinary silence in the gray light before dawn.
Sometimes it would breed in her a white fury that Khalid should still stand and walk, even in a cell, while Shahid lay still forever. The brother who had opened his heart lay cold in his grave; the brother obsessed with jealousy and revenge dined every night on his success. If she had pulled the gun from her backpack and aimed it, instead of handing it meekly over, Khalid, too, would be under the ground. And then she would rise shakily from her bed and fetch a glass of cold water. In the bathroom she would remember Baba, who would never again speak to her, and be glad that at least he had a son living, that he could look out at the moon and imagine Khalid looking at that same moon in the mirror image of his day.
Through the mornings after these restless nights she would stumble with dry, itching eyes and a strain at the hinge of her jaw. If she had more than two or three bad nights in a row she would pop a blue pill and drift to the bottom of an ocean, pressed down by the weight of sleep, rising only when her alarm chimed and she was late to work.
Work was Malloy’s diner, on the edge of downtown Northampton, a place where early-morning truckers and late-night students crossed paths in the summer dawn. She had told Coach Hayes she would stay on at Smith. She had petitioned for asylum. The cascade of events had cost her her scholarship, but Dean Myers said they would work with her. They didn’t hang their people out to dry, the dean had said. Afia didn’t know this expression, but she pictured herself, thin and hollow and hanging on a clothesline, the breeze trying to blow her off and only the clothespins at her shoulders keeping her in place. Many days, that was how she felt.
Some of the truckers tried to flirt with her, when she had an early shift. But she kept her head down, and they ended up saying things about Indian girls, how uptight they were. She didn’t tell them she was not Indian.
“I think it will take me too long to finish the degree,” she said to Coach Hayes when the coach came to see her in August. She had withdrawn from the spring semester, but now she was getting ready to register for fall classes. She was living in a furnished room, a block from campus. She would take only Immunology and Advanced Calculus, which was all the new scholarship money would cover. “And when it’s all done, I won’t be able to go back. To Pakistan, I mean.”
“No need to rush,” Coach said. “And why would you want to go back?”
It’s my home, Afia thought of saying. And now that she could never return, she missed the house in Nasirabad with an ache so painful she had to bite her fist, sometimes, to silence a wail of longing. She missed the garlic and cumin of her mother’s cooking, the chatter of Sobia and Muska, even the clack of Anâ’s knitting needles and the quiet sobs of Tayyab when he thought no one could hear him. She missed the damp-wool odor of her bedroom rug during monsoon. She missed her carved bed, the particular squeak of the springs on the side toward the wall. She missed the way the sun glanced off the walls of their compound. The sweet lament of the muezzin she missed, every night as the sun set. The wildly painted rickshaws, the call of the sugarcane juice wallah, the night watchman’s whistle, the odor of petrol and sugar and dust in the air. The ripe purple strings of the mulberries, the flat disks of drying dung on the village walls, the shouts of the lucky boys who were allowed to jump into the stream, its water milky with limestone runoff. Lema. Her uncles with their cruel giggles and their warm, rough hands.
But Nasirabad, she knew, was not her home any longer. Her mother had turned her away after she’d made the exhausting journey back, ready to marry Zardad, ready to do whatever was needed to make the past recede and the future begin. She had not even been allowed to set foot inside her home. Only the back of Tayyab’s hut, on the pallet next to Panra, and that for one night only. “I wanted,” she told Coach, “to help the women in the villages. They cannot see male doctors, and there are not enough females. People die because of this.”
“They die in a lot of places, all around the world,” Coach said. “You’re going to make a big contribution, Afia.”
“I don’t know,” Afia said. She lingered with Coach, in a booth at the back of the diner. Coach had given her a framed photo of herself and Shahid, from the first year he’d come to America. She’d insisted Afia should have it. And so Shahid’s nineteen-year-old self smiled up from the table, holding a shiny trophy. Afia couldn’t look at it, but neither would she turn the photo over and bury Shahid’s face.
It was the end of her shift; she still wore the apron the diner gave her, and the little name tag above her left breast. She covered her head, but with a bandanna, like the other waitresses; the Arab thing, the owner had said, made customers nervous. She made better money than in the Price Chopper. Some days the aunties stopped in after their shift, to drink Cokes and eat French fries. Other days, Afran stopped and had hot tea at the counter. “I might not be able to complete the degree. Without . . .”
“Without Shahid,” Coach finished for her.
“I betrayed him,” Afia said, her voice going flat the way it always did when guilt pressed its hot weight upon her. “And for what? A boy who told me I was pretty.”
“You know what we call your relationship with Gus?” Coach asked. Afia shook her head. “Puppy love,” Coach said. “Here we consider it a kind of practice.”
“Practice for what?”
“For love. The real thing. We think it’s good to have a sort of warm-up game, before you choose a life partner. Shahid had some puppy love too, you know.”
Afia tipped her head, frowned. “I did not know.”
“Sure. With a girl, Valerie, I think, and they broke up. I don’t think he was betraying you.”
“It is different for a man. Even here, it is different. This is a shame I will never wipe clean, Coach. Do not try with me.”
Coach moved the saltshaker around the table. “Would you really have married him?”
“Khalid?” Afia nodded. At Coach’s shocked look, she said, “It is like a mathematical equation, no? I am shame. Khalid kills Shahid. To . . . to nullify?” Coach nodded. “To nullify the badal, the revenge, you know, someone must seek revenge for him killing my brother. To nullify the revenge he can marry me, erase the shame. Khalid is my brother step—”
“Stepbrother,” Coach interrupted.
“Stepbrother, but also we are cousins. This is good, in my culture, to marry one cousin. To keep family together. Now my father can give forgiveness to Khalid, and my mother has no more shame. It is small, this—what do you call it?—sacrifice.”
Her eyes slid over to the photo of Shahid. What would he have wanted? For a day and a night she’d cried for help from the closet Khalid had locked her into, at the Pioneer Motel outside Northampton where he’d been staying. Only when the cleaning woman, ignoring the Do Not Disturb sign in the morning, had turned the latch did Afia burst out and beg the manager to call the police in Devon.
By then it was all over. No more did she need to imagine Gus lying in a pool of blood. Never again would her body shrink in on itself as she pictured Khalid pounding babies into her, back in Nasirabad, while her mind tunneled underground. Coach Hayes had saved her, a second time.
In the diner, Coach was stirring her coffee. She was still talking about love. “Romance,” she was sayi
ng, “may not be the best foundation for marriage. But people fall in love everywhere, Afia. Here and in Pakistan, and now and since forever. Sometimes it’s great and sometimes it hurts like hell. But it’s the opposite of a betrayal. It’s a kind of . . . of keeping faith. With the heart.”
Afia’s own heart took a small skip. At least twice a week, now, Afran drove out from his summer job in Boston. They went for walks along the old logging roads west of town. He did not touch her. But he no longer offered to behave toward her like a brother. He told her about his home in Turkey, the olive groves and the mountains rising up from the Black Sea. He would go back, he said, but to Istanbul, where there was money to be made.
“Afia,” Coach said, “you’re smiling.”
“I am thinking,” Afia said, blushing, “that Shahid had this romance.”
“So what about you?”
“Me?”
“You’ve got your life ahead of you, don’t you? You going to spend it beating yourself up?”
Afia looked around the coffee shop. Her life. Would it be here, in this place smelling of pork fat and coffee beans? Even when she had lain in Gus’s arms, she had never imagined the rest of her life without her parents, her uncles and aunts, her brothers. Now she had only the molded tables with their shiny surfaces, and a glimmer of salvaged light in the courses at Smith. And, she thought with a tiny sliver of hope, Afran. Maybe this, after all, was what Shahid would have wanted . . . but then Shahid had never wanted, like her, to be dead. “Maybe,” she said.
“So you’d rather have stayed home in Pakistan, let your parents arrange a marriage, give up your dreams of being a doctor.”
Afia looked at her in gentle surprise. “And have Shahid alive?” Her eyes went to the photo, to her young, exultant brother. “Oh yes, Coach. Forever, yes.”