Gabriel stood in front of the car, his hands fumbling with the buttons of his pants. Between his tears and trembling fingers, he was struggling.
“I thought he was in a hurry to go,” Everett sighed. He looked off into the distance for a second, as if contemplating this matter. Then, without another word, he clapped the heel of his hand against the steering wheel and the blare of the car horn made Shawna and me jump in our seats. Even Janet looked startled.
Gabriel let out a wail. His sniffles turned to tears then, and I saw a dark spot bloom on the front of his pants, even as his fingers continued to work on the zipper. He relieved himself of whatever urine was left in his bladder and then returned to the car. He was crying, quietly but for the sniffles.
“That’s just filthy,” Everett said when Gabriel started to climb back into the backseat.
“Shawna,” Janet said. “Let Gabriel sit on your cardigan. We don’t need piss on the seats. If I’d known we’d have to be potty training when we agreed to take him in . . .”
Gabriel sat on Shawna’s sweater, his eyes bleary and repentant. Everett’s cologne masked the smell of urine and was more offensive anyway. When we arrived at the house, Janet instructed us to change out of our church clothes. Gabriel brought his soiled pants to the sink in the mudroom. He stood on a stool and scrubbed powdered detergent on his pants, dunked them into hot water, and scrubbed some more. He’d leaned so far into the deep sink that it seemed he might fall into it. And, in fact, he looked like he wouldn’t mind disappearing into the murky water.
We were sent to the backyard, where Shawna showed me how to pull weeds from the soil so that none of the root was left behind. Janet had on a pair of gardening gloves and was weeding the flower beds in front of the house. We’d been tasked with the backyard.
The early afternoon sun warmed my skin. Beads of sweat gathered down the middle of my back and along my forehead. We were on our knees, listening to the faint sounds of birds chirping and children playing somewhere out of view. Gabriel worked between us, Shawna filling the silence with small conversations about subjects she seemed to pluck from the sky.
“Do you think rabbits live back here? I’ve never seen one, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t. I did see a groundhog once.”
Gabriel said nothing. I wished I could do something to lift his spirits.
“You are fast,” I told him, looking at the pile of uprooted weeds in front of his feet. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He was so young and yet still older than my brother would ever be.
“No, I’m not,” he muttered. “She’ll probably get mad at me for this too.”
I looked at the three piles of weeds we’d collected, at the troubling inequality of them. I took some of my pile and added it to his, evening them in size. Shawna paused, a strangled weed in her right hand. She tossed it onto Gabriel’s heap, then added some more from hers in a moment of complicity.
“She thinks her flowers don’t grow because deer eat them. But I think the flowers don’t grow because they don’t want to look at her,” Shawna said. Her voice sharpened in mockery. “Oh, roses! Please come out! Tulips, where are you?”
Gabriel’s eyes crinkled at the corners. His tiny, pearly teeth shone as he laughed.
In that hour, even as we toiled, each of us reverted to our disparate origins. The deeper we dug, the closer we got to our true selves. We unearthed worms and beetles and a dozen other defenseless creatures. Grass stained our knees. The sun warmed our scalps. Thorny wildflowers pricked our fingers, and yet we did not bleed because, in that brilliant hour, we believed we were God’s children.
Chapter 32
My back ached from an hour of hunching over in the garden. I tossed and turned in bed but couldn’t find a comfortable position. Shawna and Gabriel would be off to school in the morning. I missed them already. More than anything, I didn’t want to fall asleep in a dark bedroom. But when Janet passed the room, she reached in and flicked the light off.
“Shawna?” I whispered.
“Yes?”
“You are not sleep?”
“No.”
I wasn’t sure what I wanted to ask her. I was afraid of questions, unsure if my asking some would end in more questions being asked of me.
“How long you are here?”
“You mean in this house?”
“Yes.”
“One year,” Shawna said, her voice resigned. “It is not a good place. But I haven’t been in a good place in a long time.”
This frightened me. What if it took Tilly a very long time to get better? Would they move me to some other place that was worse than this? Would Everett sit on the edge of my bed while I tried to sleep too?
Before I could ask any more, Shawna rolled over and turned her back to me. I listened to the quiet, trying to imagine where Janet and Everett were in the house and what they were doing. I could make out their voices coming from the kitchen.
I thought back to the church and understood that I’d lost myself in that stained-glass window because I was thinking of my mother. I’d wanted to feel what she’d felt when she had sat in an American church for the first time, watching color and light radiate over people looking for God. Had she prayed in church? Why hadn’t I asked her this?
I fell asleep crying, wondering if I was right or wrong to have bowed my head during the service. I’d prayed to the only God I’d ever prayed to. I’d prayed for Tilly to get better and Antonia to come for me and for God to take good care of my parents and brother. But I’d felt nothing, not the tiny comfort that came from praying beside my mother or hearing the familiar song of the Qur’an being read. Maybe, I’d wondered, I’d gone too far from home for God to hear me.
In the morning, Shawna and Gabriel readied themselves for school. I stayed in bed until Shawna came back upstairs.
“It’s very late. I told Janet you were washing up and changing your clothes, so please hurry.”
I pulled the blanket over my face, not wanting her to see my face.
“Aryana?” she said gently. “Aren’t you going to get up? They’ll be upset.”
I could hear the concern in her voice, even if I couldn’t feel particularly moved by it this morning.
“Please. You still . . . you still have to get up.”
Maybe because of her, I shuffled my way to the bathroom, where I washed up and changed into a fresh pair of clothes. We ate breakfast together, dry cereal with one slice of apple for each of us. Hungry as I’d been when I’d gone to bed the night before, I barely touched a flake.
“Why aren’t you eating, Anna?” Janet asked, standing over me with her hands on her hips. “We will not allow wastefulness here. Surely you can understand that, coming from the kind of place you come from.”
I forced half a spoon of cereal into my mouth.
Gabriel gave me a hug before he left. He looked up at me with eyes round with hope, urging me to remember the earthworm he had dangled in front of me while we were in the garden and the rock Shawna had found that glittered with flecks of gold and silver. She’d slipped it into her pocket to ask her science teacher to confirm the treasure.
But that had been before last night. That seemed so long ago.
“Look under my bed. I have something special there. You can have one if you want,” Shawna whispered to me once she made sure Janet wasn’t close enough to hear.
I nodded and mumbled something in response. They were gone. I watched them from the living room window, their backpacks bouncing with every step, as they turned the corner. I was left alone with Janet. Everett had left early in the morning to assist with something at the church. I wondered if he would wear a short-sleeved shirt, as he had on Sunday, or if he would wear something to conceal the scratches I hoped I’d left on his forearms. I wondered if the God in the church would know where the scratches had come from.
Janet poured herself a cup of coffee and cream, the metal spoon scraping the inside of the cup as she swirled dark and light into one.
/> “I’m waiting on word from Ann,” she said, as if I’d asked her a question. “We’ll get you into school soon enough. I have some lovely books you can read until then to help guide you.”
I plodded back up the stairs, feeling as heavy and out of place as an elephant in this house.
I sat on the corner of my bed, looking at the bed where Shawna had slept, her quilt now perfectly tucked in at the corners. I knelt on the floor and looked under the bed, where I spied a small metallic cylinder. I pulled it into the light and saw that it was a roll of round candies, the same ones Everett kept in his jacket pocket and sucked on as we drove to church the previous morning.
I let the roll drop from my fingers and tumble back under the bed. I pulled my knees to my chest and leaned against the nightstand, watching dust motes float in the sunlight. Janet hummed downstairs, a tune that didn’t seem to have a melody.
I thought I had felt every shade of dark in the weeks since the coup, but I’d been wrong.
Boba had read me the epic Shahnameh in parcels, reciting couplets about kings and queens and mythical winged creatures. On my fortieth day of life, my father had held me in his arms. Milk-drunk and dressed in a pink crocheted sweater knitted by my grandmother, I had seemed to him to bear a striking resemblance to Rudabeh, daughter to the king of Kabul in the Shahnameh. Like her, I had eyelashes like a raven’s wings and a face that glowed like the moon.
Does that make you a king, Boba?
A crown wouldn’t fit a square head like mine, he had replied, rapping his knuckles against his head. I’d laughed, because Boba made the funniest faces when he talked about himself. And besides, crowns come and go despite men’s best efforts. He had cleared his throat and recited a verse from the Shahnameh:
Luxury and caresses, one’s fortune had been
Before cast into an abyss he’d never seen;
Another lifted from the pit and placed on a throne
Upon his head, a crown of glittering stone
In the turning of tides, the world takes no shame
It is prompt to dole out both pleasure and pain.
I was standing. I felt fresh air on my face. With the window open, nothing stood between me and the sky. I tilted my head back and inhaled sharply, the air tasting as sweet as the roses in the palace gardens and as liberating as the first breath I’d taken coming out of the hatch at the Islamabad embassy.
I’ve come so far, I thought. But maybe I hadn’t gone far enough. I slid one leg over the window ledge, then the other, and sat perched on the narrow sill.
My heels tapped against the side of the house. I felt a tingle on the sole of my foot where the skin had thickened. It wasn’t pain—just a new somatic awareness. My body was conscious in a way it had never been before. My hands seemed impossibly small. My breathing felt labored, my bones porous and brittle. I felt a thousand years old and longed for rest.
I didn’t hear the doorbell ring or Janet’s insincere greeting. I didn’t notice the footsteps coming up the stairs. I didn’t even hear my sister’s name called, with all its syllables intact.
I had come so far. Perhaps I needed only to go a little further.
I teetered, as if I were on a Kabul rooftop while the room filled with the bitter smoke of desire and dissent, while sin and solitude dragged their talons across my flesh, while my flailing arms sought both refuge and revenge.
I longed for the crystalline prophesies of my father and released my hands from the window ledge.
Catch me, I cried to the wind, to the freedom in its current. Catch me!
Part II
November 2008
Chapter 33
Nia could have filed some reports with her higher-ups in the State Department and gone back to Kabul or moved on to a new post. She could have believed the foster care system was better equipped to raise a child than a woman who had already decided family life wasn’t for her.
But she didn’t walk away. She’s the type to run toward a fire, after all. Antonia claimed me, with all my scars and fears and outbursts.
Our years together have been anything but easy.
We started off in Tilly’s cottage outside of Annapolis with pictures of her and Nia as a child framed against the floral wallpaper. She had pictures of Nia’s father too, teaching Nia how to hold a fishing line, or sitting at a desk, fingers hovering over a typewriter. Sometimes, when she didn’t know I was watching, I’d spot Nia staring at the photographs too. Most of the time, Nia pored over paperwork and went back and forth on the phone with a lawyer. She tried to hide her red-rimmed eyes. She took calls on the phone in another room. She kept a steady rotation of library books on parenting and loss in her nightstand drawer. But the walls of Tilly’s home were thin. We could hear each other crying. We watched each other pick at food.
Whether by blood, by fire, or by default, to become a mother is no easy feat.
And I don’t think I ever thought of Nia as my mother. I certainly never called her Madar. But somewhere along the line she became Mom, a distinct and hard-earned title.
About a year after I’d arrived in the U.S., Mom took me to a therapist. It was only in that small, wood-paneled room with a set of building blocks and two blond-haired dolls in the corner that anyone talked to me about what had happened the year I turned ten. In that space, with Antonia on the other side of a plywood door, I was asked to talk about the specific events that had me grinding my teeth in my sleep and vomiting at the sight of a uniform.
After the fifth visit, I begged Mom not to take me anymore. My headaches were coming twice as often and hitting me twice as hard. My appetite had shriveled, and my concentration was shot. I was a taut string, vibrating at the lightest touch.
Mom stopped the appointments. She could hardly afford them anyway. She had been forced to take a leave from work until they could figure out where to place her. Just ten years earlier, women officers were made to resign if they got married. A single mother was a hard sell. Mom’s superiors suggested she leave the Foreign Service and focus on finding a husband.
But even had she wanted to, Mom could hardly search for love and marriage when I needed so much.
Grief is a tarry substance, and I was covered in it, head to toe. Everything stuck to me—a sideways glance, a phrase beyond my grasp, the sight of a girl running into her mother’s arms. And if I had tried to strip myself of it, I would have lost flesh in the process.
I had much to figure out. In my head, I was ten-year-old Sitara. To this new world, I was twelve-year-old Aryana. And in truth, I wasn’t strong enough to shoulder two identities and two nationalities. I survived by letting Sitara go, adding her to the body count of the palace coup. I tucked away the family I’d lost, the childhood I’d had.
I became Aryana. We told the world that Mom had adopted me and we knew little about my background. As soon as I said those words, people usually remembered something they needed to do or told me about an adopted cousin who was so beloved by all their family. Few asked any more questions.
I learned to eat new foods. I learned to speak new words. I learned to (mostly) sleep through the night and survive the brutal headaches.
I took on Mom’s last name and officially became Aryana Shephard, the girl who fell from the sky.
Mom became my therapist, my teacher, and my parent. She bought pads of paper and watercolor paints. We would sit on a bench and try to re-create the fleet of white sails in the sparkling Chesapeake Bay. We hiked in the fall and pressed sunset-colored leaves into the pages of books. We made a fire and dug through Tilly’s scrapbooks, filled with newspaper clippings, programs, and pictures of her in various costumes.
I felt less alone. I began to wake feeling better rested. I spent less time in a dark room waiting for the pills to loosen the vise on my head.
Mom noticed the difference too. When we couldn’t hike, she would still insist on a long walk.
“Want to race?” she asked playfully one day. The sidewalk stretched long and clear ahead of us. When I laug
hed, she put her hands on her hips and issued a challenge. “Do you think I’m too fast for you?”
She broke into a jog.
I broke into a run.
I ran daily after that, despite the pain I felt when the knobby flesh on the sole of my foot pounded against concrete. I ran to feel like the girl who used to think the world was hers to run through. I ran to confirm that nothing was holding me by my ankles. After every run, I would lean over with my hands on my thighs and take long, heaving gulps of air until the burn in my lungs dissipated. I’d lived until then not realizing what a privilege it was to be able to catch my breath.
One day Mom sat me down and told me she’d been offered a post in Turkey.
I ran right out the front door and down the street. I ran with my chest on fire, with tears streaming down my cheeks. I ran past the school where kids mocked me when I slipped and said al-jabr instead of algebra in math class. They thought I was too dumb to pronounce it correctly.
“Al-jabr” means the reunion of broken parts, Boba had taught me. It was a term first used for broken bones, then later to describe a mathematical equation.
I was still a floating variable, the x that stood alone and undefined. If Mom left me now, I didn’t see how I could survive. I certainly wouldn’t go back to Everett and Janet. I pressed the heels of my hands against my temples trying to hold myself together.
“Aryana!” Mom cried, breathless and flushed. She had caught up with me.
“You want to leave me!” I’d shouted. I watched her closely, without her noticing. I’d seen the exhaustion, the frustration, the resentment in her face. I knew there were moments she regretted making me her problem. I had long wondered if I might one day find that social worker sitting in our living room ready to cart me off to a new home.
“No, no. Not at all! I will not leave you!” she said, kneeling in the grass. “I will only go if you go with me. That’s what I wanted to ask you.”
Sparks Like Stars Page 19
