A Sister to Honor (33 page)

They were almost at the center of the span, now. On the other side, wire fencing rose higher than a man's head; but on this side there was a chest-high rail, nothing more. Thirty meters below, the cold water flowed southward. Khalid lifted the gun from the waist of his trousers. Holding it close to his body, not to draw attention from a passing car, he gestured with the stock. “Climb,” he said.

“Here?” Afia's voice went suddenly small. She backed against the fence. “Here, Khalid lala?” As if all this time she had been spinning a fiction, an idea of what would happen, only here it was and she could not believe it.

“The water,” he said. His hand had begun to shake. “The water will wash your sin clean, Afia. Climb.”

“Khalid, please.” Her eyes behind the glasses were huge, vulnerable. The wind whipped at her hijab. “I haven't finished telling you.”

“You've said enough. No point talking. Climb.”

“You are sure? Is there no other way—”

Now it was infecting him, this sense that all along he had been inventing what he would do, he had not believed in it. Like the time he had watched a martyr stride into the marketplace and detonate himself, and there were parts of bodies, real bodies, ordinary as meat and it was not an idea any more, it was real as dirt and blood. “No other way,” he choked out.

She had a hard time climbing the fence. He wanted to boost her, the way he used to help her climb the mulberry trees when she was little and wanted to grab some of the sweet berries before all the village women harvested them. His hand on her soft bottom, lifting her. But he made himself step back and watch. For a lucky moment, no cars came over the bridge. She got one leg across the rail, then the other. She stood with her hands on the rail, looking into his eyes. She had not met his eyes since she had appeared at the cemetery. He had the sensation of falling, falling from an enormous height. There was only about a foot's breadth between the railing and the drop. Carefully she turned away from him. The water swirled below, ready to suck the body down.

It came in a flash. Not this. Not this. Not the sight of Afia's arm lifting above the waves, then her head, then nothing. Not her lungs straining for air, filling with water. No. He couldn't. He threw an arm over and across her chest. Lifted her up and over the rail. The force of the hoist brought them both down. His shoulder hit one of the girders as they tumbled onto the walkway. The gun clattered to the pavement. Afia crab-walked away. She looked terrified, as she had not looked when she was prepared to jump. To end her life.

“There is another way,” Khalid said. Shouted, almost.

“What way?”

“To wash your shame. There is another way.” He rose. Energy streamed through his muscles. He could conquer
Amreeka
, he could conquer the world. He reached out a hand. But just as she stretched to take it, he pulled away. Moments before, he had gripped her soft chest, but that was to save her life. Now they must not touch.
He who touches the hand of a woman unlawfully will burn his palms at the Day of Judgment.
He stared at his own hand as, slowly, Afia rose. She came up only to his shoulder.

“Look at me,” he said, and her head jerked up. Her breath had the sour tang of fear. “I will marry you,” he said.

“What?”

“I will. Marry you. Don't you see? I will do it. I will make it right. You are not my sister, Afia. Not by blood. So you can be my wife. I will make you my wife.”

The cars streamed by. What the drivers who bothered to look saw, by the side of the road in the center of the bridge, was a young couple in the midst of a proposal. The young man clenched his hands together and bent one knee slightly, as if in a curtsy or a prayer. They did not see the gun lying on the pavement. They smiled at the prospect of love and returned their eyes to the road.

S
hort of stalking her, Lissy didn't know what she could do to get a response from Afia. Though her cell number had her outgoing message, she never picked up or returned calls. Shahid had used that cell plan to track his sister, but clearly she didn't want to be tracked, then or now.

For Lissy, nothing had healed. Night after night she woke from dreams in which she and not the Hadley patrolman had found Shahid's body, had found the receiver dangling from the kitchen wall, had dialed 911, had labored with what she knew of CPR until the medics came and pronounced Shahid dead. She would bend over him in the snow and he would vanish, and there would only be the pink stain, her breath steaming in the air.

Ethan had forgiven her. That was the one miracle. She hadn't understood until he offered Afia a place to stay, after the trial. She had abused his trust, had used the place of his happiest memories, had blundered ahead on her foolish course thinking more about a win over Harvard than about him or Chloe. All these things he had pointed out to her. When he drove her to the trial it had been a gesture, more than she had a right to expect. When he offered Afia safe harbor—then, Lissy knew, he had reached deep and had forgiven her.

And still nothing healed, not really. At Enright, Ernesto Salazar, the football coach, was taking over the athletic directorship until, in Don Shears's words, “things settle down.” Ernesto hated the paperwork, he told Lissy over lunch. “The whole business. The stats, the GPAs. The Ask. Get your butt back in the desk as soon as possible, is what I say, and let me back out on the field.”

“They'll probably do a search to replace me,” Lissy said, “once my contract runs out. There are people on the board—”

“There's Charlie Horton on the board. His kid should've been put on probation three semesters running. I didn't play him before, and I'm not playing him now. What about your guys?”

“You mean the squash team.”

“No, I mean your ducklings. Of course the squash team. Men and women both. Your men beat Harvard, for fuck's sake. If I have to be A.D., the least I can demand is that you stay with those squads.”

Her squads. Nothing healed, there, though she'd gone to each of them for forgiveness. Chander had been tough. He was graduating and saw his last year as ruined. Jamil was easy, a young man who cried easily and hugged hard. Others, like Yanik, were simply confounded. “What're you asking us to forgive?” he'd said when she met him on campus. “You didn't gun him down.”

That was debatable, she thought. Gus Schneider seemed to think she'd killed Shahid as surely as if her finger had been on the trigger. And Afran accused her of bad faith. She'd made him feel, he told Lissy, like they were all members of a family. And okay, Afia was the innocent one, she'd acted in self-defense, whatever. But she hadn't been part of the family, and Shahid had. How could Coach choose her over Shahid?

She didn't, she told him, think she was choosing.

“Oh, dude, Coach, one of them was going to die.” Afran shook his head. “You get to that point, someone dies.”

Margot, from the girls' squash team, sent Lissy a poem by Theodore Roethke, about a student who had fallen from a horse. Roethke mourned the girl's death but claimed he had “no rights in the matter, neither father nor lover.”

“Shahid, Shahid,” Lissy whispered aloud on the cold deck under the brooding spring sky, the lake patterned with melting ice cakes. “What did I want for you? The world, the universe. What did you want, Shahid? What did you want? What did I take from you?”

Shutting her eyes, she saw the sweat in the hollow of his collarbone, the span of his shoulders, his small ears that always needed cleaning. She was no poet. She had no words that added up to Shahid alive, that could put their arms around the whole of him and name the canyon of loss. She fell into it and tried to claw her way out, and fell again, and there seemed no bottom to it.

•   •   •

T
hen the stranger showed up at their door, looking for Afia, and suddenly grief gave way to a renewed suspicion. He'd thought she was being paranoid, Ethan said. But looking into the guy's wolfish eyes, he recognized the man who'd sat next to him on the bleachers, at the Harvard match. “Something about him,” he said when Lissy returned from taking Afia to Smith. “Both times I laid eyes on him. Made my blood run cold. I don't know if he killed Shahid, but he was definitely after that girl.”

Now Afia didn't return calls, and she seemed to have disappeared from Smith. Lissy's mood began to swing, from panic that whoever was after Afia had found her; to relief that this time, Ethan shared her suspicions; to panic that she ought to be doing something, anything, to derail some ghost train of disaster. When the panic seized at her throat, she changed to shorts and went up into the empty squash center, where she banged balls against the cool surfaces of the court. Even now she preferred the hard, fast ball of her childhood, pitching back at her furiously, to the softer ones the pros all played with these days. She came home sweaty and spent. At night she lay on her back next to Ethan, neither of them sleeping.

“We should try the police again,” she said after a fortnight.

“With what?” Ethan's voice, in the night, was heavy with patience. “A blue Hyundai, no plate numbers? A guy who says he's majoring in engineering and you've got no engineering school? Not exactly a criminal case, Liss.”

“You think his hair was dyed.”

“Definitely. And still, something . . . He was South Asian, but more than that. Some kind of family resemblance to Shahid. Tall, angular, you know, and then maybe the shape of the jaw. Not like a brother, but a sort of family resemblance.”

He reached out and pushed at the mobile hanging over their bed. Chloe had made it, in preschool, during the awful month between the murder and the trial. Chloe knew that one of Mommy's players had died and Mommy was sad. She started acting out, crying furiously at small boo-boos, wetting her bed. At school, they were making “hearts and flowers,” dropping tiny plastic beads onto a pegboard with preset designs, which the teachers ironed until the beads fused together into a shape the children could bring home. Chloe had brought home a great stack, and one noontime Lissy had woken—she lay in bed later and later during those weeks, grief pressing her into a limbo between sleep and waking—to find the hearts and flowers dangling above her head from a set of wire hangers that Ethan must have strung up.
Now you will feel better
, Chloe had said that day, climbing onto the bed to blow at the mobile.
When you wake up, you can see flowers and hearts, and you won't be so sad.

“You know how Afia printed something, on your computer?” Lissy said now, while the plastic shapes spun. “I bet it was a boarding pass. Her roommate at Smith said she saw her for ten minutes. Afia told her she was going on a trip. She packed a small suitcase, like for a weekend.”

“Well, we can't file a missing person report,” Ethan said. “Not with testimony like that. Not when we don't have a claim on her.”

“She's got to be somewhere.”

“Somewhere alive? Or somewhere dead?”

Lissy shuddered. “Can you kill someone in Massachusetts and dump her body? And have no one ever know?”

“Happens all the time. Those guys I used to work with, at the prison? Someone cared about the women they went after. Barring that . . .”

“But someone cares about Afia. I mean, we do. Other people, too. She's got a family.”

“That,” Ethan said, “could be the main problem here.”

•   •   •

W
hen Lissy went to the Devon Price Chopper the next week, she wasn't looking for Afia, but for decent lettuce. As she held the two wilted, stringy heads of green and red leaf, she debated driving to Guido's Market in Pittsfield; considered that she didn't have a paycheck to splurge on organic produce flown up from Mexico; pondered the differences among Price Choppers; and remembered. The Price Chopper ladies, the ones who'd sat in the courtroom.

She put the lettuce back and left her grocery cart empty. The roads were clear, the snow visible only in shady patches under the green-tipped trees. In Northampton, the Price Chopper was bigger and shinier than Devon's. Lissy scanned the checkout lanes. At the third one over, an older woman with severely dyed black hair moved items across her scanner while she gossiped with the bagger, an obese black kid with a complicated haircut.
Carlotta
, her name tag read. Lissy loitered until the customer had paid and the lane was empty. Before she could speak, the woman's face brightened.

“I know you!” she said. “You're the one testified for Afia! Professor, right?”

“No, I'm . . .” Lissy paused. “I was her brother's coach.”

“Well, you have my condolences.” Carlotta leaned close. Cupping a leathery hand dramatically by her mouth, she whispered, “Though he must've been a piece of work. That poor girl.”

“Have you seen anything of her? Since the verdict?”

“Funny you should ask. 'Scuse me a moment.”

A customer loaded a large cart's worth of groceries onto the belt. While Carlotta was scanning them, another checkout worker closed her station and stepped over. Her name tag read
Esmerelda
. “I'm going on break,” she said in a gravelly voice. She looked at Lissy. “Land sakes,” she said.

“Tell her,” Carlotta said as she turned a package of frozen chicken nuggets around, trying to get the machine to read its code, “about our girl.”

Esmerelda's hair was dyed the color of cornsilk and piled onto her head. “What a puzzle that girl is,” she said.

“You've seen her?” Lissy said.

Esmerelda motioned Lissy to step outside with her. There, she lit a Newport and inhaled gratefully. “She come in yesterday,” she said, crossing her free arm across her torso and balancing the other elbow on her wrist. She took another drag, squinting against the smoke. “She's back in school, that's the good news. Got a lot of catching up to do, but that is one smart girl. She could make it if she wanted.”

Lissy's heart lifted. “She's living in the dorms?”

“And going to her classes.” Esmerelda stared at the cigarette's filter as if she'd like to break it off.

“What's the bad news then?”

“Shouldn't be bad news. She's engaged.”

Lissy felt her head jerk up, as if yanked by a string. “You mean, like, to be—”

“Married, yeah.”

Shahid in her house, she remembered. Begging his sister, finally ordering her—to go back home, to be married to some man she'd never met. Afia with her head bent, acquiescing. Never, back then, would Lissy have seen this as a good outcome. But now. She did have a family, after all. “So she'll be returning to Pakistan?”

“She says she's marrying some cousin. Guess they do that, those people. But I tell you, Professor, she don't look like a happy bride. She was my daughter, I'd take her to get her head examined.” Esmerelda took a last drag and ground the Newport under her sneaker. “Must be losing her brother made her so crazy. But I tell you. She looks like the firing squad's coming at dawn.”

•   •   •

G
ood news, Lissy kept saying to Ethan that evening. Good news that Afia was safe, was at school, was going to classes. Good, even, that she was engaged. It meant her family was speaking to her again, welcoming her back into the fold. “But you know, I went by her dorm after, and I left an urgent message for her to call me. She has no reason not to. I mean, we did nothing except to help the girl, right? You offered her a place to stay—”

“Maybe she's not comfortable with you, Liss. You were horrified the first time, remember? About the engagement?”

“That's not it. That's not it. I'm sure that's not it.” Lissy was pacing the living room. Downstairs, in the room where Afia had slept, Chloe was watching a Dora cartoon. Her giggles floated up the stairwell. “Someone's threatening her. That guy at the door, most likely. And last time she leaned on me for protection, it didn't work out so well, you know, her brother ended up dead. So now she's keeping her head down, but it doesn't mean she's safe, it means—”

“Lissy. Liss.” Ethan had been washing dishes. He dried his hands and stepped into the sitting room. Blocking her path, he took her by the elbows. His glasses were steamed from the hot water of the sink. His hands were warm. The pressure of his thumbs on her inner elbows halted her monologue, stripped away her agitation. “I understand,” he said with a wobble in his voice, “that you came to care about this girl. You think she's in danger, and you want to help. You're a good person. You're a coach. You're a natural-born rescuer. But it's not the danger to this girl that's got you so worked up. You know better than to tie yourself in knots helping someone who doesn't want it. When other kids don't return your phone calls, you call them rude and let it go. So what's this really about?”