Pain swerved at her then, physical, bringing her to her knees. Hira moved toward her but Isma held up a hand, lay back in the snow, and allowed the pain to roil through her while the hail and icicles continued their synthetic-edged symphony. Parvaiz, a boy never seen without his headphones and a mic, would have lain out here for as long as the song continued, the wet of snow seeping through his clothes, the thud of hail beating down on him, uncaring of anything except capturing something previously unheard, eyes hazy with pleasure.
That had been the only time she had truly, purely missed her brother without adjectives such as “ungrateful” and “selfish” slicing through the feeling of loss. Now she looked at his name on the screen, her mouth forming prayers to keep Aneeka from logging on, the adjectives thick in her mind. Aneeka must learn to think of him as lost forever. It was possible to do this with someone you loved, Isma had learned that early on. But you could learn it only if there was a complete vacuum where the other person had been.
His name vanished from the screen. She touched her shoulder, muscles knotted beneath the skin. Pressed down, and knew what it was to be without family; no one’s hands but your own to minister to your suffering. We’ll be in touch all the time, she and Aneeka had said to each other in the weeks before she had left. But “touch” was the one thing modern technology didn’t allow, and without it she and her sister had lost something vital to their way of being together. Touch was where it had started with them—as an infant, Aneeka was bathed and changed and fed and rocked to sleep by her grandmother and nine-year-old sister while Parvaiz, the weaker, sicklier twin, was the one who suckled at their mother’s breast (she produced only enough milk for one) and cried unless she was the one to tend to him. When the twins grew older and formed their own self-enclosed universe, there was less and less Aneeka needed from Isma, but even so, there remained a physical closeness—Parvaiz was the person Aneeka talked to about all her griefs and worries, but it was Isma she came to for an embrace, or a hand to rub her back, or a body to curl up against on the sofa. And when the burden of the universe seemed too great for Isma to bear—particularly in those early days after their grandmother and mother had died within the space of a year, leaving Isma to parent and provide for two grief-struck twelve-year-olds—it was Aneeka who would place her hands on her sister’s shoulders and massage away the ache.
Clicking her tongue against her teeth in remonstration of her self-pity, Isma pulled up the essay she was writing and returned to the refuge of work.
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By midafternoon the temperature had passed the 50 degree Fahrenheit mark, which sounded, and felt, far warmer than 11 degrees Celsius, and a bout of spring madness had largely emptied the café basement. Isma tilted her post-lunch mug of coffee toward herself, touched the tip of her finger to the liquid, considered how much of a faux pas it might be to ask to have it microwaved. She had just decided she would risk the opprobrium when the door opened and the scent of cigarettes curled in from the smoking area outside, followed by a young man of startling looks.
His looks weren’t startling because they were exceptional—thick dark hair, milky-tea skin, well-proportioned features, good height, nice shoulders. Stand on any street corner in Wembley long enough and you’d see a version of this, though rarely attached to such an air of privilege. No, what was startling was the stomach-turning familiarity of the man’s features.
In her uncle’s house—not an uncle by blood or even affection, merely by the habitual nature of his presence in her family’s life—there was a photograph from the 1970s of a neighborhood cricket team posing with a trophy; it was a photograph Isma had sometimes stopped to look at as a child, wondering at the contrast between the glorious, swaggering boys and the unprepossessing middle-aged men they’d grown into. It was really only the ones she knew as middle-aged men she paid much attention to, and so she’d never given particular thought to the unsmiling one in the badly fitting clothes until the day her grandmother stood in front of the picture and said, “Shameless!” poking her finger at the young man.
“Oh yes, the new MP,” the uncle said, coming to see what had drawn out a pronouncement of such uncharacteristic venom. “On the day of the final we were a player short and this one, Mr. Serious, was visiting his cousin, our wicketkeeper, so we said, Okay, you play for us, and gave him our injured batsman’s uniform. Did nothing all match except drop a catch, and then ended up holding the trophy in this official photograph, which went into the local newspaper. We were just being polite to offer it to him, since he was an outsider, and only because we were sure he’d have enough manners to say thanks but the captain—that was me—should be the one to hold it. We should have known then he would grow up to be a politician. Twenty pounds says he has it framed on his wall and tells everyone he was man-of-the-match.”
Later that day, Isma overheard her grandmother talking to her best friend and neighbor, Aunty Naseem, and learned the real reason for that “Shameless!” It was not the unsmiling one’s choice of career but a cruelty he’d recently shown to their family when it would have been easy for him to act otherwise. In the years after that, she’d paid close attention to him—the only one in the picture to grow up slim and sharp, bigger and brighter trophies forever in his sights. And now here he was, walking across the café floor—not the hated-admired figure he’d grown into but a slightly older version of the boy posing with the team, except his hair floppier and his expression more open. This must be, had to be, the son. She’d seen a photo that included him as well, but he’d ducked his head so that the floppy hair obscured his features—she’d wondered then whether that was by design. Eamonn, that was his name. How they’d laughed in Wembley when the newspaper article accompanying the family picture revealed this detail. An Irish spelling to disguise a Muslim name—“Ayman” become “Eamonn” so that people would know the father had integrated. (His Irish-American wife was seen as another indicator of this integrationist posing rather than an explanation for the son’s name.)
The son was standing at the counter, in blue jeans and a quilted olive-green jacket, waiting.
She stood up, mug in hand, and walked over to him. “They only open up this counter when it’s busy.”
“Thanks. Kind of you to say. Where is—?” His vowels unashamedly posh where she had expected the more class-obscuring London accent of his father.
“Upstairs. I’ll show you. I mean, I’m sure you understand ‘upstairs.’ I should have said, I’m going there myself. Coffee’s cold.” Why so many words?
He took the mug from her hand with unexpected familiarity. “Allow me. As thanks for rescuing me from being the Englishman Who Stood at the Counter for All Eternity. Who you could be forgiven for confusing with the Englishman Who Gets Lost Going Upstairs.”
“I just want it heated up.”
“Right you are.” He sniffed the contents of the mug, another overfamiliar gesture. “Smells amazing. What is it? I wouldn’t know an Ethiopian from a Colombian if . . .” He stopped. “That sentence doesn’t know where to go from there.”
“Probably just as well. It’s the house brew.”
She stood where she was a moment, watching him walk up the stairs, which were bracketed on one side by potted ferns and on the other by a wall with ferns painted on it. When he glanced down toward her, mouthing “Not lost yet,” she pretended she had simply been preoccupied by her thoughts and returned to the little table in the alcove, angling her body so that her own shadow kept the sunlight from her computer screen. Slid her fingers over the wooden tabletop, its knots, its burns. Guess who, she started to type into her phone, then stopped and deleted it. She could too easily imagine the tone of Aneeka’s response: Ugh! she’d say, or Why did you even talk to him?
He didn’t return. She imagined him seeing a short line at the counter and placing her mug down with a shrug before walking out the upstairs exit; it left her both vindicated and disappointed. She wen
t up to buy herself another coffee and found that the machine had broken down, so had to settle for hot water and a tea bag that leaked color into it. Returning downstairs, she saw a mug of fresh coffee at her table and a man folded into the chair next to it, legs thrown over the arm, reading a book in the shape of the gap in the bookshelf above his head.
“What is it?” he said, looking at the cup of tea she set down on an empty table. He examined the tag at the end of the tea bag. “Ruby Red. Not even pretending it’s a flavor.”
She held up the mug in thanks. The coffee wasn’t as hot as it could have been, but he must have had to carry it down the street. “How much do I owe you?”
“Five minutes of conversation. That’s what I spent standing in the queue. But after you’re finished with whatever you’re doing.”
“That could be a while.”
“Good. Gives me time to catch up on essential reading about . . .” He shut the book, looked at its cover. “The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries. Complete in One Volume. Feminist Witchcraft, Goddess Rituals, Spellcasting, and Other Womanly Arts . . .”
One of the undergraduates looked up, glared.
Isma slung the laptop into her backpack, downed her coffee. “You can walk to the supermarket with me.”
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During the short walk to the supermarket, she learned that he’d quit his job with a management consultancy and was taking some time to live life beyond office walls—which included visiting his maternal grandparents in Amherst, a town he loved for its association with childhood summer holidays.
While she tried to choose between one variety of unconvincing tomato and another for tonight’s pasta sauce, Eamonn wandered off and brought back a can of plum tomatoes, as well as leaves for the salad she hadn’t intended to make. “Arugula,” he said, rolling the r extravagantly. “Halfway between a Latin American dance and an ointment for verrucas.” She couldn’t tell if he was trying to impress her or if he was the kind of man in love with his own charm. When she had finished placing the shopping in her backpack he picked it up from the checkout counter and looped it over one shoulder, saying he liked the schoolboy feeling of it, would she mind very much if he carried it for a while? She thought he was making a show of the polished manners that passed as virtue among people like him, but when she said there was no need for such chivalry he said it was the opposite of chivalry to burden a woman with his company just because he was feeling lonely and a London accent was the best possible antidote. So they continued on together, walking toward the nearby woods since the day was so lovely. On the way he asked for a detour via Main Street (he said the name with the slight deprecation of someone newly arrived from a metropolis) so they could stop at an outdoor-clothing store, and in little more than the time it took her to cross the street and withdraw twenty dollars from the ATM he was out again, wearing expensive walking shoes, the backpack more weighed down than previously.
The woods were slushy, but the light piercing through between scrabbling branches was a pleasure, and the river, swollen with snowmelt, roared. They turned up their collars against the dripping from the branches; he didn’t seem to mind yelping when fat, cold drops fell on his head, merely commented on the stylish protection of her wool turban and called her “Greta Garbo.” Every now and then they heard the whump! of a section of dislodged snow landing on the ground, but they felt safe enough to keep going. Their talk was insubstantial—the weather, the overfriendliness of strangers in America, favorite London bus routes (which revealed nothing so much as the distinct geography of their lives)—but even so, the Englishness of his humor, and his cultural references, were a greater treat than she would have expected. Small talk came more naturally to him than to her, but he was careful not to dominate the conversation—listening with interest to even her most banal observations, asking follow-up questions rather than using her lines as springboards to monologues of his own in the manner of most of the men she knew. Someone raised him the way I tried to raise Parvaiz, she couldn’t stop herself from thinking.
Along one of the calmer stretches of water, a fallen tree extended out twenty or more feet from the bank. Isma walked across it, arms out for balance, while he remained behind, making noises that were half anxious, half admiring, wholly pleasing to hear. The sky was a rich blue, the water surged like blood leaving a heart, a lean young man from a world very distant from hers was waiting for her to walk back to him. She breathed in the moment, tried to catch her reflection in the water, but it was too quick, nothing like the slow-moving waterways to which she was accustomed.
She came from a city veined with canals: that had been the revelation of her adolescence while her school friends were embarking on other kinds of discovery that discomforted more than appealed to her. In Alperton, two miles from her old home, she could descend into waterside avenues of calm, unpeopled in comparison to the streets, thick with noise, she’d traveled to arrive there. She knew her mother and grandmother would say it was dangerous, a lone girl walking past industrial estates and along silent stretches with no company other than the foliage, as in the countryside (to her family nowhere was more dangerous than the countryside, where you could scream for help without being heard), so she never said anything more specific than “I’m going for a walk,” which they found both amusing and unthreatening.
Her foot slipped on the slick surface of the branch, and she had to drop to her knees to keep from falling in. The cold water a spray on her hands and sleeves. She walked back cautiously, registering the anxiety in Eamonn’s expression.
After that, he asked more direct questions about her life, as though seeing her walk away from him across a fallen tree had brought her into focus. She gave him the easiest version: Grew up in North London, as he already knew because of the bus routes—the Preston Road neighborhood to be precise, which was obviously too precise for him. Two siblings—much younger. Raised by her mother and grandmother, now both dead; she’d never really known her father. She was here for a PhD program, fully funded, with a stipend from a position as a research assistant that would give her enough to live on. She’d applied too late for the autumn semester, but her former tutor Dr. Shah had arranged permission for her to start in January, and here she now was.
“And so you’re doing what you want to be doing? You lucky thing!”
“Yes,” she said. “Very lucky.” She wondered if she should respond to his questions about her life with some about his. But then he might mention his father, of whom she couldn’t pretend to be unaware, and that might lead them down a road she didn’t want to travel.
The river was dark now, the first indication that the day was ending although there was still abundant light in the sky. She led the way back onto the road, bringing them out near the high school, where long-limbed teenagers were running on the outdoor track, piles of muddy snow pushed to the corners of the field.
“Can I ask you something?” he said. “The turban. Is that a style thing or a Muslim thing?”
“You know, the only two people in Massachusetts who have ever asked me about it both wanted to know if it’s a style thing or a chemo thing.”
Laughing, he said, “Cancer or Islam—which is the greater affliction?”
There were still moments when a statement like that could catch a person off-guard. He held his hands up quickly in apology. “Jesus. I mean, sorry. That came out really badly. I meant, it must be difficult to be Muslim in the world these days.”
“I’d find it more difficult to not be Muslim,” she said, and after that they walked on in a silence that became more than a little uncomfortable by the time they were back on Main Street. She had assumed that in some way, however secular, however political rather than religious, he identified as Muslim. Though what a foolish thing to assume of his father’s son.
“Well, good-bye,” she said as they approached the café, holding out a hand for him to shake, aware that the gesture was
strangely formal only after she’d made it.
“Thanks for the company. Perhaps we’ll run into each other again,” he said, extracting his shoes and delivering the backpack into her extended hand as though that’s what it was there for. Assuming women who wore turbans as “a Muslim thing” couldn’t possibly shake hands with men. As she walked home she thought how much more pleasant life was when you lived among foreigners whose subtexts you couldn’t hear. That way you didn’t need to know that “Perhaps we’ll run into each other again” really meant “I have no particular wish to see you after this.”
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Aunty Naseem, the neighbor who had taken the place of their grandmother when she died and with whom Aneeka was now staying, called to say she didn’t want to worry Isma but could she check on Aneeka? “She stays out so often now, and I thought she was with her friends, but I just saw Gita and she says the friends don’t see her very much at all anymore.”
Gita of Preston Road was a link between Aneeka’s home and university lives—a year older than the twins and with a new stepmother who didn’t want her around, she had a room in student halls to which Aneeka had a spare key; Gita herself never used the room because she was living with her boyfriend, though none of the older generation of Preston Road knew this.
When Aneeka had first started staying over at Gita’s, because Aneeka was in the library or out socializing in one way or another until after the tube stopped running, Isma hadn’t been happy about it. All those boys at university, whose families no one knew. And unlike Isma, Aneeka had always been someone boys looked at—and someone who looked back. More than looked, though Aneeka always guarded that part of her life from her sister, who was, perhaps, too inclined to lecture. It was Parvaiz who had talked Isma into accepting it—if there was anything worrying going on with Aneeka he’d know, and would tell Isma if he needed backup in talking sense to his twin. But there was no need to start having nightmares about Aneeka out alone in the cold, impersonal heart of London—she’d always been good at finding people who would look out for her. There was an instant appeal in her contradictory characteristics: sharp-tongued and considerate, serious-minded and capable of unbridled goofiness, as open to absorbing other people’s pain as she was incapable of acknowledging the damage of having been abandoned and orphaned (“I have you and P. That’s enough”). Whereas Parvaiz and Isma stayed at the margins of all groups so that no one would start to ask questions about their lives (“Where is your father? Are the rumors about him true?”), Aneeka simply knew how to place herself in the middle of a gathering, delineate her boundaries, and fashion intimacies around the no-go areas. Even as a young girl she’d known how to do this: someone would approach the subject of their father, and Aneeka would turn cold—an experience so disconcerting to those accustomed to her warmth that they’d quickly back away and be rewarded with the return of the Aneeka they knew. But now Parvaiz was a no-go area too, and not one that Aneeka could confine to a little corner of her life.
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