The Tyrant's Daughter (12 page)

Red blotches bloom on Emmy’s neck, and she won’t meet
my eyes. I can tell I’ve offended her, but I don’t apologize. I want to hear her answer first, and then I’ll make amends.

“I don’t know.… I just thought you were interesting. And maybe kind of glamorous too, especially when I found out who your father was.” She looks up, and her eyes are brimming with tears. “And you were so jumpy that first day. You walked around with this terrified look on your face like there might be an assassin around every corner. Aargh!” She winces and then slaps her forehead. “Bad choice of words. I’m sorry, Laila, I wasn’t even thinking. I didn’t mean
literally
—”

I can’t stand to watch her crumpling before my eyes. She deserves better. “It’s okay. Please don’t apologize. I’m the one who should be sorry. I think I’ve been taking advantage of your friendship. I don’t have much practice at it. Being a friend, I mean.”

Emmy’s tears spill over. “Oh, just shut up and give me a hug. I’m the one having a crappy day, remember?” She manages to laugh through her tears—a show of strength I immediately admire. “And by the way, I did drama club in junior high, you big jerk. So you have me as a friend for as long as you can stand it.”

I hug her. It’s a graceless, stiff embrace—my fault, I’m sure. But it also feels genuine, and genuine is a quality I’m coming to appreciate more and more. I shove a paper towel at her. “Here, wipe your eyes.” She takes the towel, and I can’t help but smile.

I have a genuine friend.

There used to be someone for everything. We had people to cook, to clean, to serve, to drive, to garden, to protect, to advise. There were people to manage the other people, and someone else to manage those who were managing. Our household was a busy human pyramid.

I suppose it’s only natural, then, that none of us remembered to pay the rent.

Mother and I are equally surprised to see the eviction notice on the door when we return home from Bastien’s party. It isn’t
really
an eviction notice. Technically. It’s a warning that we
will
receive an eviction notice if we fail to pay the overdue rent within fifteen days, though. Since that’s impossible, the terse note on the door might as well say it’s time to pack our bags.

Where will we go?
I see my own anxious thoughts mirrored on Mother’s face. She’s wide-eyed and pinch-lipped—
this is not a problem she can outcharm or outwait, and she knows it.

I don’t have to say it, since we’re obviously both thinking it: we would have enough money if she hadn’t bought the car.

She’d awoken one day, determined. She scanned the classified ads, then called a number. Hindered by the language and confused by the currency, her negotiations were brief and ineffective. I was hovering nearby, ready to help, but she surprised me by testily agreeing to pay cash as long as the owner would bring the vehicle to us. “But it had better be clean. I’m not paying that much money for a filthy car.” She ended the call with a face-saving demand, looking pleased with herself as she hung up.

And so it was that a mostly shiny, presumably functional ten-year-old Audi was delivered to us within the hour, like a very expensive pizza. I say presumably functional because my mother does not know how to drive. The car has been sitting, untouched, in the parking lot for a week now, waiting until one of us has the ambition to do something with it.

So the money is gone. We could call Mr. Gansler to ask for yet another advance, but by now our credit is surely strained to its limits. He’s unlikely to sympathize anyway, since Mother has been avoiding his phone calls for the last few days.

“What will we do?” I ask, even though I know she has no answers. I’m speaking more to the universe at large than I am to her.

She ignores me and heads for the cabinet to pull out an unopened bottle—gin, I think. My father’s favorite brand. There’d been a mostly full bottle of it sitting on the table just
yesterday. And an empty bottle in the trash two days before that. My mother has become a magician—bottles appear and vanish with a wave of her hand and a tip of her glass.

I think it’s a lot. I think she is drinking too much. But I can’t be sure. That’s the problem with forbidden things—it’s impossible to recognize warning signs when you’re always looking the other direction. Besides, she’s never sloppy or loud the way drunks are on TV. She’s just a blurry version of herself. And that, I suppose, is precisely why she drinks. To blur. To make the past and the future go out of focus.

She takes a sip, and I feel myself blur before her eyes.

“Mother?” I whisper it, but she cringes as if I’d screamed in her ear.

“Please, Laila. Just let me think for a while. Please.” She pulls her legs up on the couch and curls into a ball. She looks small and defeated, something I know she doesn’t want anyone to witness, so I turn to leave the room. The sound of ice cubes rattling in her glass follows me down the hall.

Bastien has already taken refuge in our bedroom. He’s pretending to be engrossed in putting together a plastic model of some sort, but his little shoulders are tensed practically up to his ears and he’s gnawing on his thumbnail as he reads the instructions. I kiss him on the top of his head, and he acknowledges me with a one-sided shadow of a smile.

Money
. Where will it come from?
Who
will it come from? My options are depressingly limited—grim evidence of my untethered life. Emmy has her own problems, and for once our roles are reversed: I will protect
her
by refusing to bring her into my family’s mess. I’m sure that Ian would want to help me, but I don’t know him nearly well enough to ask. Morgan and Tori are also off-limits. Their friendship is technical, impersonal, and asking them would be almost as bad as asking for rent money from strangers—humiliating and too easily denied.

I’m left with only the unlikeliest of heroes. Amir.

I have no idea how to contact him, though.

“Bastien?” I call across the room. “Do you know where Mother keeps phone numbers? Does she have an address book, maybe?”

“I don’t know.” He’s still focused on the plastic pieces in front of him. I’ve already given up on him when his head snaps up. “Why? Who do you want to call?”

“Amir.”

Bastien’s face lights up. “I know how you can call him.” I wait for an explanation, but he wants to draw out the mystery.

“How, Bastien?” I indulge him with exaggerated curiosity.

He’s grinning, feeling clever. “
Redial
. Mother called Amir’s house right before we left for my party. No one has used the phone since then, so just hit Redial.”

I kiss him again. “Smart boy,” I say as I ruffle his hair.

I dart through the living room to grab the cordless phone. Mother doesn’t even glance in my direction. I head back to the bedroom and then stop. Bastien doesn’t need to hear this conversation. He already has more worries than any seven-year-old ought to. I step into the bathroom and shut the door. The harsh overhead light makes my face look sharp and weasel-like in the mirror, so I turn my back on my reflection and hit the button before I can come up with an excuse not to.

My stomach lurches as the call goes through. I haven’t even thought about what I’m going to say. Do I make small talk? Get right to the point? I’m about to hang up when someone finally answers. There’s a clatter and then muted background voices—it sounds as if a hand is being pressed over
the receiver. After one more loud crack—was the phone just dropped?—a voice deep with suspicion and fear says hello. I instantly feel sympathy for anyone who finds something as ordinary as a phone call threatening—the person on the other end has received bad news more than once by telephone, I suspect.

I ask for Amir in my native language, and I can practically feel the man relax. His voice is calmer as he yells for Amir. There are more clatters, muffled rustlings, and even a shrill beep as someone hits a button on the phone, and then Amir comes on the line. “Hello?” His voice is so hard I almost hang up for the second time. How can I even think of asking for help from someone who openly despises me?

But I’m out of options, so I begin to speak. I’ve hardly stammered my way through an awkward greeting when he interrupts. “Laila, we’re waiting for an important phone call here. An international call. So I can’t stay on the line. What do you want?”

I go mute with embarrassment, and Amir softens his tone. “I’m sorry. But I really do have to go. You can come here if you need to talk.” He rattles off an address and then hangs up without saying goodbye.

I look up the address online. It’s not far, but it’s in a part of town I haven’t visited before. I curse, yet again, my lack of bus fare as I pull on my shoes. This new life of mine is hard on the feet.

The address is on a different planet. Or it might as well be. Our apartment may be small, but it’s clean and quiet. Amir lives in a building that looks like a grimy patchwork quilt. Various shades of paint have been slapped on, then abandoned, and cardboard is taped under broken glass panes. It’s a house crookedly subdivided into apartments, and names are handwritten on strips of masking tape stuck to dented mailboxes. Each of the boxes has a thick layer of these makeshift labels, evidence of the rapid turnover of the building’s occupants. In the entranceway, a damp smell bubbles up from the warped floor tiles.

What was I thinking?
How self-centered to imagine for even a moment that I could ask Amir and his family for money. Compared to them, we
still
live like royalty.

Shamed, I start to leave when a middle-aged couple walks in the building. She’s unsteady on her feet, and her hair—
yellow-blond with two inches of dark roots—hangs in her eyes. The man’s face is pitted and pink, and he grins an unfriendly sneer at me. “Surprise, surprise, it’s another one. It’s like a goddamn clown car in that unit. How many are they up to now?”

I back against the door. I can’t tell if he’s talking to me or the woman.

She stumbles closer to me. “Where’s your thing?” she asks, pointing to my head, then drawing an air circle with her finger around her own head. “Your head thingy. The scarf, or whatever it is you people wear.”

I haven’t worn a veil since we stepped off the airplane. It wasn’t even a conscious decision—more like an assumption: that was how I dressed there, and this is how I dress here. These people, these lurching, bloodshot giants, make me glad for it, glad that I have managed to avoid this ugly scrutiny up until now.

I whirl back toward the door and knock sharply, the decision to stay made simple by my sweatshirt-clad tormentors. Amir answers and I shove past him. “Say hi to the rest of the terrorists in there,” the man calls out, and Amir slams the door.

“Sorry about that,” he says.

“Friendly neighborhood.” I try to hide the fact that my voice is shaky, that
I’m
shaky, from the encounter, but I fail.

“Come in.” He leads me down the short hallway to a sparse, windowless room. Several chairs are arranged in a circle, as if a meeting had just disbanded. It occurs to me for the first time that my mother’s little gatherings may not be the only game in town.

I hear voices and clattering sounds coming from the kitchen, but Amir doesn’t seem inclined to make introductions, so I choose a chair and sit.

“Do you want something? Tea? Water? I think that’s all we have.” He’s almost polite. Apparently my status as a guest trumps my status as an enemy.

I shake my head. “Where did you go?” I blurt out. “You left Bastien’s party in a hurry.”

It’s the wrong thing to say. Amir’s temporary civility vanishes. “It was a child’s party, and I’m tired of being treated like a child.”

I scurry back to what I hope is less controversial territory. “So you live with your cousins? How many do you have here?”

He raises an eyebrow; it seems I’ve offended him again. “According to the neighbors, we’re like a litter of rats living here, too many to count.”

My eyes drop. Every possible topic is a cliff, and every word out of my mouth is a leap. I get the feeling that even talking about school or the weather would somehow have an unintended double meaning. There seems to be no room for casual conversation between us, and I’m failing before I even get started.

Amir must have the same thought, because he relents. “There are twelve of us here now. In a three-bedroom apartment. Sometimes there are six, sometimes twenty. Someone is always passing through; someone always needs a place to stay.”

“They’re all your relatives? Your cousins?” I’m a rare specimen in my country—someone without a large extended
family—so I find it difficult to comprehend this revolving door type of a home.

Amir sighs and then sits down, finally resigned to having this conversation with me. “They’re cousins in a loose sense of the word. We come from a small village, so almost everyone has someone in common.”

“And your parents?”

He stares at the floor in silence for so long that I’m about to change the subject when he finally answers. “Back home. I think they are, anyway. They were supposed to call today. That’s the phone call I told you we were waiting for. They didn’t, though.”

The need to reassure is reflexive. “Oh, I’m sure they’re fine. You know how bad the phone service is there. They probably just can’t get through.”

Amir shrugs off my comment. “Yeah, probably.” He is unconvinced.

There’s no opening, no invitation for me to enter his life, but I jump ahead anyway. “Why are you here, Amir? In this country? In this apartment?” I steel myself for rejection before I even finish.

But this time he doesn’t reject me. He leans back in his chair, eyes closed and hands to his temples, and he thinks for a moment. After a few seconds he leans forward and stares me in the face. “Do you really want to know the answer to that question, Laila? Really?”

I open my mouth to answer, the word
yes
forming on my lips without consideration. But there is something about his question that makes me pause. He’s not being difficult or evasive.
I think that he’s offering me an out. A chance to remain unaware. I see in his eyes that he intends this gift of ignorance to be an act of kindness.