A Sister to Honor (22 page)

“And if you don't, what happens?” Afran ate his Twizzler, chewing thoughtfully. “Let me imagine. Your father is angry with you. Your uncle—what is his name?”

“Omar.”

“Uncle Omar withdraws his financial support. You go to financial aid and you explain your position. This is a dramatic tragedy. Americans respond nicely to drama. And they do not want headlines about runaway Muslim squash players. You get my drift?”

“I am really not thinking,” Shahid said, his hands on top of the steering wheel and his forehead on the back of his palms, “about how I pay for college, right now.”

“Nothing else to think about, man. No one's hurt right now. Well, Gus with his accident, but he'll live. You bought that ticket last week?” Shahid nodded, rubbing his forehead against his hands. “Refundable, then. No harm done. You are not your sister's keeper.”

“That's exactly”—Shahid lifted his head, then banged it onto his hands to punctuate each word—“what—I—am.”

“Oops, then.” Afran pulled out another Twizzler. When Shahid wouldn't take it, he laid it gently on the dash. “That's what you say in this country. Oops.”

•   •   •

B
ack in his room, Shahid checked the family map again. The bubble popped up on his phone's screen:
Afia is out of range or her phone is off. Please try again later.
Again he texted her; again called and got her voice mail. He stood by the window looking onto the quad. In Nasirabad, it was eight in the morning. Shutting his eyes as he pressed the numbers by heart, he phoned his father.

“I have been so anxious,” Baba said when they had made their way past greetings. “Have you bought this ticket, to send her home? I was thinking perhaps she should come into Islamabad. I could drive there, give us the time on the road to talk about what she has done to us, how she can still set things right.”

“I—I have bought a ticket, yes, Baba.” Did his father know nothing? Or was he pretending, softening Shahid so he would send Afia back to be sacrificed? For Shahid to admit that he had lost track of his sister . . . no. He pressed his forehead against the cold windowpane as he spoke. “But we—we need a few more days.”

“She is a clever girl, my son. You need to be strong. This is not her decision.”

“I know that, Baba.”

“I am a modern man. I listen to my daughter as well as my sons. But she forfeited the right to my listening ear when she forfeited our honor.”

“Baba, we still don't know if—”

“No!” his father shouted. “I am tired of discussing this! First I must defend myself—me, the chief of the household!—against a brother-in-law who tells me I fail to do pashtun. Then I have your mother moaning that she will be invited nowhere, she is reduced to ashes. Then my older son telling me I have placed my hopes in the wrong offspring, and what should I have said to him?”

A tear rolled down Shahid's cheek. However short he had fallen of his life's ambitions, never before had he failed to please his father. “What did you say to him?” he asked at last.

“I said,” Baba answered, “he had my blessing.”

“Blessing?”

Baba sighed. “He has left again. For a longer time, he says. For jihad.”

What sort of jihad
, Shahid wanted to ask,
is killing your sister?
“But he sent you the third photograph,” Shahid said. “I understand, it means a punishment—”

“What third photograph? Your uncle in Peshawar has the Internet. He's said nothing about another photograph.”

With the phone to his ear, Shahid opened his laptop. One-handed he typed in his sister's name and clicked
Images
. Photos of Afia brand corn oil popped up; of women named Afia Mazhar and Nura Afia. He checked Facebook pages for Taylor; for Taylor's boyfriend, Chase; for Gus. No photos of Afia, whether kissing Gus in a bed or reaching for apples. “What of Zardad's family?” he managed to ask his father as he tapped keys.

“Inshallah, they still know nothing. No one in town suspects my daughter of anything but ambition. What third photo do you speak of?”

No photos on the Smith College website. On Campusconnect, a pasted version of the image from the old site, Afia with her hand in someone else's, in Gus's. Nothing more. “I—I don't know, Baba. Maybe I am just losing track. She is so sad, to be leaving her studies—”

“She brings it on herself. Get her home soon as you can. Before any third photo, or something worse. I count on you.”

As he hung up, Shahid felt his head explode. How blind he had been! He had said it himself to Khalid in Nasirabad:
Shame casts a wide net.
Khalid wasn't about to blast incriminating photos of his sister all over the Internet—he would lose face himself. And at the hospital Afia had said the truth:
There haven't been any other pictures. I'm not stupid.
Afia had not posted the photo he'd seen, briefly—and Baba had seen as well—on Facebook. Khalid had posted it. Khalid had gotten hold of the photo somehow. When? The image had appeared on Taylor's timeline in early January, but it was a photo from fall, an apple orchard. Afia must have had it on her phone, in Nasirabad. You post to a Facebook timeline, there's little chance that the world of Nasirabad will see the photo, but every chance that your siblings in America will, and you can always show it to Baba. You can set things in motion to have your sister's dreams crushed, or even get her killed. You do this not because you want your sister dead. You do not care one way or the other about her; she is nothing. You do it because it will put the brother you hate in a vise. He will bear the brunt of the shame, and if you are very lucky, he will be forced to wield the weapon.

He, Shahid, was the stupid one, the gullible one. His father's business was intact. His little sisters were going to school unmolested. His mother was worried, yes, but she was always worried; no one refused to extend her invitations. Khalid would cause Afia's death not to preserve honor, but to mortify Shahid, setting it up so that Shahid would execute his sister for a crime that no one—save Khalid—had yet condemned. How could he not have seen through this? He clicked on his computer's calendar. Ten days ago, he had spoken with his father, had learned of the photo that Khalid must have posted to Taylor's page. So Khalid could not have arrived in the States earlier than a week ago. Yet there Khalid had been, four days ago, claiming that a photograph that he alone could have taken—after he had tracked down Afia, followed her to the hospital—had already wreaked destruction on all the Satars.

What was that play Afia had helped him with, for his Shakespeare class, where there hadn't been time for the bad things to have happened?
Othello
, that was it. Iago, the serpent, convincing his master that Desdemona had been unfaithful once, twice, thrice, and only a single afternoon had passed. Khalid was Iago; he, the gullible Othello. “That guy's an idiot,” one of the students had said, and they had all laughed, laughed at Othello.

He could kill Khalid with his bare hands. The jealous serpent, the betrayer.

He checked his family map again. Tried Afia's number again. Texted again.

Next morning, his heart like a boulder in his chest, he gathered his books and went to class. Across the quad, he felt eyes following him. But when he turned around, the two cops who'd questioned him were nowhere to be seen. Nothing but bright young students on the thin white carpet of snow, their heads bare to the frigid afternoon sun.

T
hursday night Afia lay awake, conjuring her fate. Enright would play their big game against Harvard Friday afternoon. In another world, she would have persuaded Patty to drive with her to Devon to watch the battle; she would have jumped up and clapped for Shahid at each point, no matter if he won or lost. That world had blown up. The match would happen without her. Maybe without Shahid, if the police had rejected his alibi. If they arrested him, Coach Hayes would step in. To save Shahid, the coach would tell them she was hiding Afia. The police, or the FBI, would soon be driving the winding road up through Hadley. Or no—Shahid would hear of her hiding place, and the moment the police let him go he would take that same road. He could be heading here right now, determined to do his duty to Baba.

Her death was inevitable. No
nanawate
for
tora
. She needed to focus, to prepare herself for it.

In the darkness she lay rigid on her back, expecting the sound of wheels in the icy drive. Footfalls, a knock at the door. But she heard only the owl hoot in the cold trees, the burning wood crack in the stove. The forty-eight hours had come and gone, and Coach Hayes had not fetched her back, had not forced her to make good on her promise to talk to the police. But that was only because of the Harvard match. After the match, Coach Hayes would lose her patience. She would return and bring the police with her. Escaping the bed for a glass of water and to tuck another log into the stove, Afia stared at the wall phone in the kitchen, lit only by moonlight. She knew Gus's number by heart. At the thought of his voice greeting her, the little pet names he used,
M'Afia
,
Afiance
, she felt a burning ache below her ribs. If she couldn't have his touch, she hungered for his voice. But calls from a landline could be traced; she'd seen it, on television. Holding herself back, she listened hard. Only the wind, the owl again, her own staccato breathing.

Shivering, she returned to the bed and huddled, her knees against her chest. Dead, she would be with Allah, she would rest wherever he took her. But where was that, if she was so blackened? She drifted into sleep, startled awake at a dream that vanished, drifted again. As darkness lifted away from the window, she pulled herself from bed and fired up the stove. It was hard to stay focused on death, to prepare yourself for a blow with no set arrival time. By full light, she had warmed her belly with tea, found a pair of clean socks in the bedroom dresser, and laced up the boots Shahid had bought for her. Swathed in all the clothing she had, she unlocked the door and stepped out into pale February light.

Somewhere, in these hills, there had to be a mobile phone signal. The authorities couldn't trace a mobile number—or if they could, it would take them longer. Gus would recognize that she was ringing; he would clutch his phone to his ear, overjoyed that she was alive. He would help her. He would give her the right ideas. In any case, she thought as she crunched clumsily down the road southward, she could not go another day without hearing his voice.

There had been fresh snow most of yesterday, and for at least two miles Afia saw no sign of tire tracks or any human activity—only shuttered country cabins sleeping in the trees. Through the bare trunks, now and then, she glimpsed the silvery snake of the Hudson River, flowing to the sea. She crossed train tracks that ran alongside the road, then crossed back again. At one point thick truck marks emerged from a long driveway that stretched up a steep hill from the road. She checked her phone: no signal. Fifteen minutes later, a truck passed her. The driver, in a checkered cap, waved before spraying a wake of cold white. The day was bright, as it so often was in this country the day after a snowfall, and even in the thin air she began to sweat. She loosened her jacket and wool scarf. A thin white cotton mantle she'd found in a cabin drawer served to cover her hair. She kept checking the phone. No signal at the turn in the road where she saw three deer; no signal where the power lines cut across the road and carved a swath descending the hill into the blue distance; no signal by the ramshackle house with smoke coming from its chimney and a pit bull growling and snapping from a chain on a clothesline.

The sun rose higher. Snow melted and dripped from the conifers. For the first time in her life, no one in her family knew even remotely where she was. Had Zardad's family broken the engagement yet? She remembered the girls in her hall at Smith asking her about arranged marriage, the first semester she'd been there. “Let me get this straight,” one of them had said. “You've never kissed a guy, no guy has ever touched you anywhere under your clothes. But the very first night you meet this man someone else picked out for you, you're going to have sex with him.”

She had been so flustered. Yes, she had admitted, it was like that, but it wasn't like that. It was two families, joining, it wasn't about what happened that particular night. It was a matter of trust, she'd said, of trusting your parents.

Her parents, who had trusted her. Her eyes burned, thinking of it.

“Just consider this,” one of the girls—it might have been Taylor—asked after Afia had done her best to explain how marriage was for Pashtuns. “Consider that there's this guy you really love, and he suggests you try it out.”

She had frowned. “Try what out?”

“Marriage. For like a year. Set up housekeeping, live together. See if you're like really compatible. How would that sound, to you?”

Her mouth had gaped, trying to take in what this American girl was proposing. Then she had managed to say, glancing from one pale, eager face to the next, “Not . . .
physically
.”

They had laughed. They had all laughed. Now she had some idea what they had been laughing about. And it was something to be ashamed of, something that should make you want to die from shame. But she didn't want to die. She wanted to hear Gus's voice.

She felt a blister growing on her left heel. The houses appeared more often, ranch houses by the road, cars gleaming in the driveways. “You okay, sweetheart?” called one woman shoveling her stoop.

As brightly as she could, Afia called back, “Fine, thanks!”

Finally—after four hours' walking, according to the phone she kept flipping open with her clumsy gloves—she reached the sign for Hadley, and the tiny half pyramid of horizontal lines on the top left of her screen began dancing up and down. Ahead, she saw a sign for the Hadley General Store. Her exhaustion suddenly gone, she trotted along the road and let herself into the shop's warm space. Her eyes, accustomed to the bright sunlight off the snow, blinked in what felt like sudden darkness. In the front, half-bare shelves and a wall of coolers. Toward the back, a counter, a gas fireplace, four little round tables with chairs.

“Sit down, honey,” said a thin woman with sandy hair pinned back and a pencil over her ear. “You want coffee?”

“Soup?” Afia tried.

“We got chicken noodle.”

“Yes, thank you, please. Chicken noodle.”

She slid out a chair and sat. Her toes had gone numb. Her face flushed in the sudden warmth. She was terribly thirsty, and when the thin waitress put a plastic glass of water in front of her she gulped it down.

“Where you from, hon?”

“Just . . . around,” she said.

The woman's face roamed over her improvised dupatta, her dark eyebrows. “Didn't see your car pull up.”

“I walked.”

The woman gave a little bark of a laugh. “Where from? Nobody in this town I don't know.”

“I sort of . . . went for a hike,” Afia said, trying to Americanize her accent.

“Hmph,” the woman said. She retreated behind the counter. Afia noted a phone on the wall. Would she call the police? Afia needed to make her call and get out. She rubbed her hands together, to get the fingers working. There were twenty-one missed calls on her mobile, six from Gus. He'd never rung her mobile before. He knew the number, but she worried Shahid could ask to check her phone. Now it didn't matter. She highlighted the call and pressed the green button. He picked up after two rings. “M'Afia.”

She began to cry. “I had to run away,” she managed to say. “I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.”

“Where
are
you?”

“Somewhere . . . I don't know.”

“You all right? I've been nuts, since Sunday night—”

“I am sorry, to be worrying you. Are you out of hospital?”

“Since Monday, for what good that does. I have no home, which you obviously know.”

His voice sounded strange—more nasal than usual, as if he were twisting something inside. “I—I do know,” Afia said. The waitress brought over the soup and left it on the edge of the table, as if she would rather not come too close. Afia lowered her voice. “I was there, when the bomb went off. It was terrifying. When I think of your pets—”

“What do you mean, you were there? Coach said she took you to Northampton!”

“She—she did. I—I came back. I left my books so I, I borrowed a car. And came back. That's when it happened.” Afia's brain felt like the centrifuge they used in bio lab, the words whirring around so fast they lost hold of their meaning.

“And then you just . . . ran off?”

“I sort of, well, I panicked.” She should never have phoned, she saw that now. He must suspect her of the worst thing—of setting a bomb at his garage, to explode when he returned there from the hospital. That was what Shahid had done, unless Shahid had meant to bring Afia first to the garage. She would never know which of their deaths, really, her brother had been after. Now Gus's voice sounded full of doubt, and her lying wasn't clearing the doubt away. But she couldn't hang up, not yet. “What of your injuries? You can walk?”

“On crutches, yeah. And they've plastered a brace onto my back. I'm at my mom's place. I should get ninety percent of my mobility back.”

“Oh, Gus, I am so glad.”

“Where the hell are you, Afia? Why would you
run
?”

“It is complicated. Soon I'm going to be back.”

“Well, you'd better. Cops are investigating everything. You're not around, so they're after you. Aren't you hurt?”

“No, no, I'm fine. Some scrapes, yes, but fine. These . . . cops. What do they think happened?”

“They don't know.” An edge of irritation in his voice. “That's why it's called an investigation, Afia. You know everyone died but Ebay.”

“I did not know. But I thought probably. Yes. I am so, so—”

“And you know what else they're investigating.”

That didn't sound like a question, but he paused. Afia lifted a spoonful of soup to her mouth and burned her tongue. “What else?” she said, reaching for the glass of water.

“They're investigating my so-called car accident. They found signs of foul play, Afia.”

She didn't like how he kept using her name. It scared her. It reminded her of how her mother had kept using her name, when she first talked about becoming engaged to Zardad. Now Gus was going on about what the police had found. Damage to his brake line; fluid had leaked. They were asking him about enemies he might have, people he might owe money to, crap like that. Trying to tie the two incidents together, the car accident and the explosion.
The brakes
, Afia thought. Twice, Shahid had tried—to kill Gus? To kill her? It hardly mattered. “And all we really know,” Gus said, “is that you disappeared. Afia, the fuzz are getting a little curious here.”

The nasal edge to his voice hadn't changed.
Fuzz
, what was fuzz? She needed him so badly, and the voice on the other end was listing only her faults. “Gus,” she said, tears beginning to drop into the soup, “I love you.”

“I love you too, Afiance, but this is not adding up.”

“I want to explain everything to you. You can help me so I know what to do.”

“What to do was go to the police, Afia. You were at the house when a freaking
bomb
went off, and you didn't go to the police!” His voice was rising, in sound and pitch. “If you have nothing to do with the brakes or that bomb—well shit, Afia, why would you run off? Why don't you come back right now and tell the cops everything?”

Afia tried the soup again. It was warm and salty. She checked the clock on the wall: 1:30
P.M.
on a Friday. Normally Gus would be in class. She would just be going to Victorian Lit, where they were finishing
Jane Eyre
with a discussion of Jane's final power over Mr. Rochester. “I do not think,” she said softly, “I can ever come back.”

“I don't get you, Afia. Two really bad things happen to me, and then you disappear.”

“One of those,” Afia tried to say, though her voice felt thick, “happened to me. I was almost killed.”

“Baby, I know. I know. But we've got to trust each other, okay? You need to tell me where you are.”