A Sister to Honor (36 page)

I
n 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 brother, 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 saying, “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.”

•   •   •

L
issy left the diner and drove back along sun-dappled roads to Devon. Had she kept her nose out of Shahid Satar's affairs, she thought, Afia would be dead and Shahid alive. End of story. No, not the end. Gus dead, too. Khalid at large, and the feud between brothers set to end the way it ended for the Greeks in their tragedies.

What if, what if. An hour northward, Khalid Satar was pacing his cell at the maximum-security unit in Shirley. The D.A. at the trial, Mike Kelley, had told Lissy the feds might render the guy to the Pakistanis, who were not likely to treat him as well as the State of Massachusetts. But what if Tofan Satar had influence, over there, and managed eventually to free his son? Had Khalid's thirst been satisfied? Or would he again try to wipe out the stain that was Afia, to erase the sacrifice of Shahid? Even now, it took only the name in her head,
Shahid
, to knot her heart.

As, clearly, it knotted Afia's. The girl's healing was still pasted together, still fragile. The bones of her face stood out more than before, and the eyes behind the glasses shone less brilliantly. Hesitance and a weary cynicism had replaced the stubbornness and gumption she'd had that distant night, when they'd driven to Lissy's cabin. Then, of course, Afia had believed herself a loved woman. From now on she might prove a hard woman to love.

Lissy swung into the parking lot by Chloe's day care. For a moment, while the big beech tree shading the playground hid her car, she watched her daughter. Chloe was gripping the monkey bars, swinging her legs, getting her momentum up to grapple her way across. She let go with her left hand, gripped the next bar, swung her right hand ahead, lost her grip, and dropped to the sand. “You okay, honey?” called one of the teachers—Kaitlin, from the Enright squash team. “Fine,” Chloe called back. She stood up, dusted off the sand, climbed back up the ladder, reached again, clambered across two rungs, fell. Behind her, a chunky girl in a yellow dress followed and tried to swing from the bars; falling right away, the girl burst into tears. Chloe crouched by her, patted her back. Pulling her up, she led the girl over to the sand table. She was shooting a longing glance back toward the monkey bars when she spotted Lissy. “Mommy!” she cried.

“Hey, cutie.”

“You're
early
.”

“Is that okay?” Lissy unlatched the playground gate and stepped in. “Today's a big day.”

“I know,” Chloe said matter-of-factly. She took Lissy's hand; hers was grainy with sand. “We sang to me,” she said, “at lunch.”

“Did your friends like Daddy's cupcakes?”

Chloe nodded. “Specially the sprinkles.”

“I saw you on those monkey bars. You're really getting it.”

Chloe pulled her down. She whispered, “But we can't do it now, Mommy. Megan'll follow me and fall, and when she cries I cry.”