A Sister to Honor (19 page)

“Shahid cannot know where I am,” Afia had said, her voice firm. She had taken off her shoes and socks; the car's heater blasted at her toes.

“Afia, he'll be concerned. You said he had nothing to do with—with this awful thing.”

“Please, Coach Hayes. Just for one night. Do not tell anyone on the team.”

“Not even Gus?”

“Gus . . . he will be so sad. His pets.”

“Maybe the cats survived. And they were
animals
, Afia. Gus will worry about
you
.”

She could only shake her head. Shame was a tide, drowning her.

The coach pressed on. “Why not tell Shahid? You think he might . . . might . . . inform someone else? Someone who is trying to hurt you?”

“I do not know,” Afia said, shutting her eyes, “what Shahid will do.”

It was the easiest answer, and the truest. After a long pause, Coach Hayes had said, “Okay then. I know where we'll go.”

Soon after, Afia had fallen asleep. She had not slept, really, in three nights, not since she'd heard about Gus's accident. Vaguely it occurred to her that Gus might think she, too, had died in the blast. From that thought she drifted into uneasy dreams in which she was dead, only no one seemed to know it. She was tugging at Shahid's sleeve, then Moray's, then Gus's. Baba was in the room, and her uncles, her sisters, all her family. She tried to get them to see how she was dead, her body already rotting. Only one person—Khalid, with his own dead eyes—saw her for the corpse she had become.

She woke with a start. She was in Coach Hayes's car, alone. She sat up. Her hip hurt, and her elbow, where she'd landed hard after fleeing the garage. Outside, the rain had stopped. In front was a convenience shop, lit with cold fluorescence. Swallowing hard—so dead, she had felt, and at the moment she dreamt of Khalid's seeing her, truly dead—she fished her mobile from her pocketbook. Three calls, all from Shahid. Had she slept through the rings, or had they driven through a dead zone? She peered through the window at the two other cars lined up by the shop. Both had New York plates. Then Coach Hayes emerged, a large grocery bag cradled in one arm and her mobile held to her ear with the other. As she opened the driver's door, the interior light came on. The right side of her face was streaked with red, abraded from her fall against the icy snowbank. She handed Afia the grocery bag.

“Just held up here a little,” she said into the phone. “Yeah, I think we're making some headway. I'll grab a bite before I drive home. Kiss Chloe. Thanks, sweetheart.”

Then she was gone, back to the shop. She returned with two huge plastic jugs of water, which she placed among the athletic gear in the backseat.

“Not a happy dream life you've got there,” she said as she slid into the car.

“I'm sorry,” Afia said. “Did my phone ring?”

Coach Hayes frowned. She had wiped the black soot from her face. But the abrasion on her cheek was deep and needed cleaning; the one on the back of her head as well. “Once, maybe twice,” she said. “I didn't think you'd want—”

“No. I would not be taking a call. Where are we?”

Coach Hayes started up the car. “Hadley, New York,” she said. “I picked up some stuff to eat. I figure you haven't had dinner.” She turned onto a country road and put on her high beams. “We've got a camp nearby.”

“A camp? For refugees?”

“A weekend house. It's in my husband's family. No one's here in winter. I thought, rather than check in at a motel . . .”

She let the sentence hang. Afia understood: To check in at a motel would be to give a name, a credit card, information that could be traced. The coach was honoring her promise not to let the police know, even by mistake. She was practicing
nanawate
, safe harbor. “Your face is injured,” Afia said.

“I picked up some peroxide. We both need disinfecting.”

“I'm sorry. You—you should not anything have to do with me.”

“I didn't come looking for this. That's for sure.” Then, as if realizing she sounded harsh, the coach reached over and squeezed Afia's clammy hand. “Shit happens,” she said, the American words of comfort. “We'll figure it out.”

Banks of snow rose on either side of the road, but the pavement itself was damp with melt. Holding the groceries, Afia realized she was hungry. She had fetched food from the hospital cafeteria for Gus, but she could not bear to eat more than a few bites herself. He had been so angry, this morning. He never should've trusted his mom's Nissan, he said, she didn't know anything about mechanics, he should've got Charlie at the Gulf station to do a once-over, and now he was out for the season, did Afia get that? And he had all these fucking vet school applications to finish, and you couldn't fall behind in Organic Chem, and what exactly was Shahid's problem anyway, he sure didn't need his teammate acting like a jealous husband especially when Coach would kiss Shahid's butt, and was Afia sure she wasn't overfeeding the fish? Because if he lost that African cichlid he was going to be majorly pissed. And why was Afia looking at him like that, what the hell was wrong with her? First she broke up with him, now she was back. Why couldn't she look him in the eye?

Because I think my brother tried to kill you
, she'd wanted to say, but she'd only sat there, her gaze focused somewhere midway between his chin and the thin hospital blanket. When Gus was dozing, she'd sat by the hospital bed holding his fingers lightly, watching his eyes flutter with dreams.

When Coach Hayes finally bumped onto a short driveway and cut the engine, Afia stepped out into a cold that bit her nostrils. Above, the sky had cleared. For the first time since coming to America, Afia looked up at stars like the stars she used to see on the high plains around Nasirabad—streaming, running together in a thin, cosmic milk.

The coach had left the headlights on. They lit a rambling wooden cabin with a screened porch. Snow rose over the steps. From the back of the car, she pulled out a shovel and proceeded to clear a narrow path, working as fast as a man. “Bring the groceries,” she called back to Afia, who quickly obeyed. On the porch, Coach Hayes stomped her feet, protected only by track shoes. She reached up to a beam that supported the porch ceiling. By the side of a door locked with a hasp, she flipped a switch, and yellow light shone over the floorboards, a set of dusty wicker furniture, and a welcome mat that read
Hi. I'm Mat
. “Good thing,” Coach Hayes said as she worked a tiny key into the padlock on the door, “the key's still in the same place.”

She pushed the door open. Even in the sharp cold, the smell of dead mice overran Afia's senses. Coach Hayes disappeared into the dark space. Afia heard a click, then “Damn” from the coach. A moment later, a floor lamp flickered and came on, its light white and cold compared with the light on the porch. Coach Hayes surveyed the room, then Afia. “Just put those down in there,” she said, indicating the groceries.

Afia crossed to a small kitchen in the back, where she heard something scurrying in the cupboards as she set the bag down in the dim light seeping from the main room. Suddenly she wanted to go back—back anywhere, almost, to Northampton or Devon or even Nasirabad, somewhere familiar and clean where she could sort herself out. But that was crazy thinking. She could not go anywhere.

“We'll have to gather wood,” the coach called from the main room. She was rooting around somewhere. In another moment a light went on from the lamp that must have burned out its bulb. “I'll get the dead mice. I've got gloves. You can shake out the mattress, check the bathroom. No, skip that. We don't have water.”

“No water? But—” Afia stepped to the doorway just as Coach Hayes was heading outside. The coach turned.

“It's not winterized,” she said. “You have to drain the place down, or the pipes'll freeze. That's why I brought those jugs. And there's the river, for washing.”

Then she was gone. Dazed, Afia looked around the cabin. On the walls were a dozen framed photographs, black-and-whites of an elderly couple and a crowd of children in cotton shirts and plaid shorts; color pictures of the coach and her husband, looking much younger and golden-skinned; other young couples, children, in swimsuits and summer dresses. The main room had a cathedral ceiling with skylights covered in snow; high above the main window hung a crossed pair of wooden racquets. Hesitantly she opened a closet door. Inside stood a broom and dustpan, behind which bed linens were neatly stacked. She pulled out the broom and stepped through another doorway, into a bedroom. There was one bed, double size, on a fine oak frame with a carved headboard. Immediately Afia thought of her bed in Nasirabad. Homesickness washed over her. Baba must have ordered her destroyed, and still she missed him and Moray with an ache deep in her gut. Had Moray wanted her killed, also? What shame she had brought, what disgrace. A family does what it must, and it is the brother who must do it. No
nanawate
for
tora
. Afia was
tor
, she was black, she was rotten.

She swept the floor. Clouds of cold dust billowed before the straw broom. Mouse droppings peppered the kitchen counter. When she pulled the thin mattress from the bed and tried to shake it, she discovered a hole near the bottom, where mice had dug in and stolen stuffing for their nests. Moving quickly as much to keep warm as to get the job done, she continued through the living room and into the sparse kitchen, the pile of refuse before her growing—dead insects and bees, bird feathers, three shriveled mouse carcasses, sawdust that had drifted from the ceiling where insects had bored. She found the kitchen light, an overhead fluorescent that flickered and snapped. A back door was bolted from the inside. She wrenched it open and swept the pile onto the snow-laden stoop. Across a stretch of yard, by the woods, she made out the figure of Coach Hayes, lugging a log carrier. Through the branches of the trees, in the distance, a ribbon of silver: the river. The coach bent to grab a stick of downed wood, then knocked it against a tree trunk to shake off the snow. In the starlight she looked small, too tiny to fight off whatever might come at her in the snow.

By the time Coach Hayes had brought firewood indoors, Afia had dared to open the cupboards. Under the unusable sink she found two live mice, casually nibbling a bar of soap. Immediately she thought of the mouse she'd dropped into Pearl's cage, only yesterday. Pearl, lost now in the snow. The mice scuttled away from the soap. One disappeared behind the cupboard; the other she managed to bludgeon with the broom and sweep into the pan.

“Now let's hope we don't have birds nesting in the stovepipe,” the coach said as she crouched before the woodstove jutting out from a stone fireplace.

“There's newspaper,” said Afia, practically the only words she had uttered since entering.

“Thank God for that.”

As the coach crumpled sheets and shoved them into the stove, Afia noticed the shelves full of board games, books, a box of toys. This was a place for summer vacations, for children to be carefree. “Should I prepare food?” she asked.

Coach Hayes nodded. “Hamburgers was the best I could do at the store. There's propane in the tank, I checked. Should be an iron skillet under the stove. You'll need to light the pilot. You know how?”

Afia nodded. “At home, we have propane.” She had been crouching next to the coach, watching her break twigs and tuck them in with the yellowed paper. “Miss Hayes,” she began.

“Just call me Coach. Everyone else does.”

“Coach, I want to thank you.”

Coach shook her head. “I've been telling myself the whole way that I'm crazy. Bringing you here.”

“If you understood us—my brother and me—you would not think yourself crazy.”

“Well, explain this to me, then.” She glanced up, her face pummeled and ashy. “Just this much. You are engaged.”

“Yes.”

“But not to someone you care about.”

“I do not know him, really.”

“So this is, what, a forced marriage?”

Afia smiled nervously. “Not forced, no. People here, they use that word,
forced
. It is more an arrangement. A promise the family makes.”

“But you have no say in it.”

“I do have say. I say yes, or I say no.”

“Then why, for all the tea in China,” Coach said, lighting the paper, “did you say yes?”

Afia tried explaining about the photograph on the Smith site, about Khalid's showing it to Baba. She imagined, again, her little sisters having stones, or feces, thrown at them as they tried to walk to school. Her mother meeting a sudden silence when she went to the market. “I—I tried,” she said. “To do as I must. And then Gus, he is hurt—”

“Right. And now someone's trying to hurt you.”

“Shahid says there is another photo. Two more photos.”

“Online? But, Afia, if you're still posting—”

“Not me. I think—” Afia caught her breath. She was crouching, watching the match flame lick at the corners of newspaper. She remembered the photo now, the one that had appeared on Taylor's Facebook timeline last week. Some guy from Dartmouth had put it there, Taylor had said. But that couldn't be right. There were a dozen people apple-picking that day, including a couple of Chase's friends. But when Afia was on Gus's shoulders, he'd called to Patty to take a picture, and Patty had grabbed Afia's mobile and snapped it. Afia had never sent the photo anywhere. The only way it could have gotten to Taylor's page was if someone had taken her phone and uploaded the photo before she erased it. That same person had risked even greater shame with a third photo. That same person had armed the device that went off in Gus's garage. Only one person could have done all those things: Shahid. But why? How could he want so badly to expose her ruin, that he would ruin their whole family? It made no sense.