I read the things I couldn’t bring myself to read before—the words that had turned me fearful of libraries. Firsthand accounts I’d cowardly skipped. Pages I’d quickly closed.
I opened my eyes.
I learned about arms transfers and foreign policy and civil wars. I read about amnesty and tribunals, about prison conditions and mercenaries. Every article, every website, opened a new wormhole, and then another, and another. There was no end to what I didn’t know, it seemed. I googled “torture” and immediately wished I hadn’t.
I want to go back in time, to scour the words and the images from my mind. I wish to unsee what I have seen. But my brain keeps attacking me with what I have learned. I keep picturing Amir’s father, who I imagine as an older, broader version of him. I see him in jail, and I see him suffer. I can’t escape his pain.
At one point, late during the night, or perhaps very early in the morning, I looked over at Bastien sleeping soundly in his bed. He’d always been able to sleep through anything. But suddenly I wanted to wake him. I wanted him to get up, to tell me a silly story about his day at school or pester me to play basketball with him outside. I needed—desperately needed—some show of his sweetness. I needed proof that not everyone in my family was damned by the blood in their veins. That I wasn’t damned.
I let him sleep. One of us should.
Now I wait, my eyelids heavy with fatigue and my thoughts scorched with guilt. No matter what I do next, I betray someone. The question is who.
I finger the paper in my pocket as I finally spot Amir walking toward the school.
I’ve made my choice.
OUTCOMES
I can’t leave. I can’t bear the thought that I might miss something or even come back to find the apartment empty, my tiny, splintered family gone without me. My thoughts shift like a Rubik’s Cube—countless configurations of people and events clicking and twisting through my head until I’m dizzy and then numb.
The school calls twice. Mother ignores the ringing phone, so I pick up and pretend not to speak English and they stop calling. It occurs to me too late that they might report my truancy, that it might impact our legal status here, and then my worries bloom and multiply. I can’t move in any direction without risking disaster, it seems, so I sit as quietly as I can without moving, watching news reports that cycle through sporting events and political speeches and house fires and drug recalls and anything, it seems, except news from home.
Emmy calls once, too. It’s loud in the background—she’s calling from between classes—and she’s unusually aloof. She’s being a friend without being friendly. “I’m just calling to check in. You haven’t been at school for a couple of days, and Ian and I are worried about you.” She can’t maintain the icy stiffness, though, and a hint of warmth sneaks back into her voice. “Are you okay, Laila? I just don’t understand.”
I hear the question behind her question. “I’m sorry, Emmy. I just—” I pause. Try to think of a way to explain. But I can’t. “There’s just a lot going on here. At home, I mean. It’s complicated. I’m sorry I haven’t been a good friend lately.”
She does not disagree with me. “Well, I just wanted to see if you were okay.” I can barely hear her over the hallway noise.
“Will I see you later?”
I smile at the generosity of her vagueness. “Yes. Later. Goodbye, Emmy.” After we hang up, I play with scenarios in my mind. I tell her everything. Or I go to school and pretend nothing is wrong. Or I make up something completely false—some easy excuse for my distance lately. A dread disease, maybe, or a secret boyfriend. None of these scenarios play out well, though. It seems that I have never learned to be a true friend, and it’s too late to start now.
Ian does not call. I wish he would. I’m glad he doesn’t.
Mother is drinking tea again; her liquor bottles sit untouched in their cabinet. Her hands are shaky, and I wonder if the drinking was worse than I realized. Or maybe she’s nervous too, for whatever mysterious reasons she has to be nervous. I suspect we both have plenty of reasons, shared and unshared. We move about in distant silence, as if we have invisible bumpers around us that keep us from getting too close. In our small apartment this isn’t easy, and sometimes our efforts to avoid one another feel like an awkward dance. We’re two caged animals only barely managing to resist the instinct to turn on one another.
Bastien is at school. Not long ago he would have begged to stay home with us, but not anymore. Today he slipped out the door five minutes ahead of schedule without needing a single reminder to brush his teeth or remember his math homework. He has become remarkably self-sufficient, and it bothers me that I can’t pinpoint when this change came about.
The date and time sent from my email account have come and gone. Minutes pass, then an hour, then two. My thoughts circle and twist, cycling between hope and despair and then back again, while I wait.
I don’t wait long. The news arrives in person, announced by sharp, angry knocks on the door.
I jump at the unexpected noise, my heart hammering in my chest, but Mother seems unsurprised. She stands slowly and takes a long moment to smooth her unwrinkled clothes and finger-comb her perfectly coiffed hair. She is regal. Calm. Unrushed by the impatient pounding.
But I see signs of tension that other people might not. I see the way her shoulders draw in and up. I see the way she pauses, hand on the doorknob, just long enough to take a deep, steadying breath before finally opening the door.
Mr. Gansler, fist still raised, looks as if he would like to knock again, only this time on Mother’s face instead of a closed door. I’m confused by his presence; I feel like I’m looking at his ghost. Isn’t he supposed to be halfway around the globe?
The meeting time was only hours ago—there’s no way he made it there and back already. He’s sweaty and disheveled, and he has on his war zone clothes—the cargo pants and desert boots he was wearing the first time I met him. He looks like a different person dressed this way, and I wonder just how many identities he has. How many secret lives he has to juggle, and who he is when he goes home at night.
“What the hell happened?” he roars as he pushes his way past Mother. She raises an eyebrow as he slams the door closed behind him, but she does not speak.
“What have you done?” he demands again. “I was on the plane, Yasmin. On the damn plane! They had to radio the pilot with the news. Ten minutes later and we would’ve been in the air.” A ropy vein pulses at his temple. “It’s a goddamn mess there. The whole country is falling apart.”
Mother still hasn’t moved from her place beside the door. She has a strange expression on her face—an odd sort of half smile. She’s too calm.
Mr. Gansler sees this. “What did you do, Yasmin?” His voice is a growl. But it’s the growl of a wounded, defeated dog—the face-saving growl of retreat, not attack.
“I did nothing, Darren. Nothing other than what we discussed. I sent the message exactly as you instructed me to do.” Her voice is smooth and soft; she might as well be remarking on the weather.
“The meeting was supposed to take place tomorrow. Tomorrow! So tell me why the hell the General showed up at the site twenty-four hours early?”
Mother’s eyes widen, and she seems to shrink. “The General? Alone?”
Mr. Gansler’s face is twisted with confused anger. He knows she’s done something, but he doesn’t know what. That makes two of us. “Of course the General. Your brother-in-law. The new and now former prime minister. He showed up twenty-four hours early to an ambush. It was a damn bloodbath—it’s all a goddamn disaster!”
Mother’s face pales, but she regains her strange smile. She looks … relieved. “Oh dear,” she says without a trace of regret in her voice. “I must have told him the wrong day. What a terrible mix-up.”
“Mix-up? You’re the one who told him to show up early?” Mr. Gansler is twitchy; he vibrates with rage. “And who else did you tell? How did the opposition know where to attack? Who did you tell, Ya
smin?”
He’s yelling so loudly that the next-door neighbor starts her familiar pounding on the wall. Bangbangbang. We all ignore it.
“I didn’t tell a soul. You have my word, Darren. I relayed the message only to him. I even avoided saying it over the phone, just as you advised.” She’s looking directly at him, challenging him with her honesty. “I admit that I made an error. I’ve never been good with dates. But I had nothing to do with an ambush.”
He stares at her for a long time, trying to find a crack, trying to find the lie in her words. They lock eyes, neither one willing to yield. Finally, Mr. Gansler does. He closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. He seems to sag, and he looks suddenly tired. “We’ll find out eventually, Yasmin,” he says. “This isn’t over.”
“But—” She stops herself, as if debating whether or not to speak. “But what happened? You said there was a … a bloodbath. What was the outcome?”
Her hands are clasped to her chest; her eyes are pleading and wide. Every inch of my mother, a woman who has never shown a moment’s interest in religion, seems to be praying for a specific answer. She doesn’t look to be breathing.
“He’s dead.” There’s no emotion in Mr. Gansler’s voice as he walks toward the door. “A lot of people are dead. There was nowhere to go. That’s why we picked that spot, remember? There was nothing for them to do but shoot at each other until most of them were dead.”
“Wait,” Mother says, rushing over to put her hand on the door so that he can’t open it. “Who else is dead? Besides him?”
He yanks the door open hard enough that she has to pull her hand away and step back. “I don’t know. He brought people. They brought people. They shot at each other. The whole country has gone to hell. Does it even matter?”
He’s already gone when she whispers her answer. “I suppose it doesn’t.” She closes the door gently, almost gingerly, and then sinks to the floor. She’s so bloodlessly pale now I can hardly believe she’s conscious. She slumps and drops her face into shaking hands. And then she begins to wail.
Great, gulping sobs shake her shoulders, and she’s crying harder than I’ve ever seen anyone cry. Her pain sounds otherworldly. She is haunted—an unfamiliar portrait of despair.
I watch her, frozen in place. I have seen her glassy-eyed and covered with my father’s blood. I have seen her chased from her own home. I have seen her threatened and struck. But I have never seen her like this. Like all the grief in the world has been bottled inside her, only to pour out now, all at once, in ugly, agonizing waves.
I understand nothing. Nothing at all. But that doesn’t stop the tears from forming in my own eyes, from coursing down my face and splashing to the floor beside my sobbing mother. There are so many different possible explanations both for the news brought by Mr. Gansler and for her grief. But I can’t think of a single one that doesn’t call for tears.
GATHERINGS
It seems that the Invisible Queen has accidentally sparked a revolution.
Life speeds up around me. The phone rings and rings, visitors of all accents come and go, and only my mother stands still. She is the eye of the storm.
Before the storm began, before these loud visitors arrived with their unbelievable quantities of food and paperwork, she allowed herself exactly ten minutes of despair. At the height of it—or perhaps the depth of it—I started to worry. Surely no one could recover from this sort of grief. She sounded hysterical, like a wounded animal, and I was certain that she had lost herself, that it was all simply too much even for her. My pessimistic mind was already racing ahead with questions of what to do next, who to call, how to manage—if nothing else, the recent weeks have made me resourceful. But my concern was premature. After ten minutes she picked herself up off the floor, walked to the cabinet, and poured two glasses of Father’s favorite Scotch.
I watched her, puzzled. Was she pouring a drink for me? In truth, I hoped so. I’ve never liked the taste of liquor, but in that moment I craved its blur. I needed the edges of life to soften. But the second glass wasn’t for me. Instead, she raised it high above her head and whispered my father’s name. Standing over the sink, she poured it down the drain in a long, steady stream—an amber waterfall of a toast. Her liquid tribute complete, she emptied the second glass in a single gulp, dropped the half-full liquor bottle into the trash, then walked over and pulled me into her arms. “The hardest part is over, Laila. The worst is over,” she murmured into my hair, holding me so tightly that it ached.
I admit the embrace weakened me. I stood still and let my mind go blank while she held me, basking in a rare empty moment. For the first time in so many weeks, I did not wonder. I did not doubt. I was safe, and I was loved. Nothing else mattered.
But such moments never last, and now the storm has struck. The answers I have wanted for so long are blowing in, and from the conversations swirling around me, from the visitors who talk over and in spite of me, I finally begin to understand.
There’s been a betrayal.
No. It’s more than that. It’s an infinity knot of betrayal—an endless loop of double crosses. It was a setup from the beginning, with my mother betraying Mr. Gansler in order to betray my uncle, who started all this by betraying my father. And let us not forget the crimes that took place closer to home: she betrayed me, tricking me into betraying her. It’s a bottomless pit of treachery—a twisted tangle of deceit and lies.
“Laila, darling. I’m so very, very sorry,” she’d said at the end of our embrace. “I couldn’t do it any other way. It had to come from you.” She pulled away from me then, a sad smile on her face as she smoothed my hair. “And I’m sorry to tell you, my love, but you are a terrible liar. Truly awful. Your face gives you away every time. I needed you to believe the story so that Amir would believe you.”
Corrosive guilt churns in my gut, and I taste stomach acid. Amir. I have also betrayed Amir. I fed him the poisonous information that was fed to me. The two of us are the lowest links of this wretched food chain, and together we have been deceived. I am suddenly desperate to find him—to put things right. But I’m not a fool. I know it’s too late. He will blame me. Of course he will.
There was a meeting planned—that much was true. Mr. Gansler was to meet with the General, an unofficial rendezvous outside the capital, away from prying eyes. Money was to be handed over; weapons, too. It was an ugly move in an ugly game, prompted by the need to control a situation spiraling out of control. A civil war in an oil-soaked nation leads to an excess of interested parties, from profiteers to Peace Corps, and everyone in between. The General—my hateful, murderous uncle—was chosen to emerge the victor for no other reason than because he was already there. A cruel and lazy choice if ever there was one.
But Mother had other plans. Twenty-four hours before Mr. Gansler could buy himself a king, my mother moved the chess pieces. My uncle and the rebels were slid into place a day early. A “mix-up,” claims Mother, though we all know better. One day before the money and the guns arrived, two groups faced off. My uncle and the opposition. They had allied once against my father. Now they stood as enemies.
Both sides wanted the treasure; both sides were willing to fight to the death.
And so they did.
Information comes in bursts. Television news reports are too slow for this crowd. Instead, cell phones ring and beep and twitter relentlessly; our apartment sounds like a cage full of robotic birds. Who are all these people, anyway? Where did they come from?
Actually, I know where they come from, even if I don’t recognize their faces. The room is filled with the language of home, though it’s a burbling stew of regional accents. The air even smells like home—the aroma of the food I can only look at, since I doubt I could keep it down. Here gather the expatriates. The escapees who wish to go home; people who, judging from their callused hands and weary faces, work very hard in exchange for their refuge here. The fact that most of them fled during my father’s reign is lost on no one. In spite of th
e noise—festive raised voices when the incoming rumors are good, and low mutters and quiet curses when the rumors are bad—no one really talks to anyone else. Facts are exchanged and names compared, but loyalties and opinions are kept safely tucked away. There is an undercurrent of suspicion and fear. Among these people my mother rises. She is the center. I am ignored completely.
The mood changes when Bastien walks through the door. School is out, and the King has arrived.
Dear Bastien, small for his age and teetering under the mountain of his overstuffed backpack, enters the storm with a seven-year-old’s snack-hungry eyes and secret-joke smile, and something happens in the room. People look up. Conversations pause. Cell phones go unanswered. Bastien grins at the crowd. He grins at the cookies. He drops his backpack near the table and grabs a handful of sweets—as far as he’s concerned, this is a party. The crowd, shy at first, slowly circles him, then swallows him altogether.
I watch this happen from where I’m sitting, perched on the kitchen counter. Am I the only one who sees the lunacy in this? In the making of a child-king? But that is unmistakably what is happening.
“He’s the one. You can see it already. Watch how everyone rallies around him.” It’s Mr. Gansler, whose true name no longer matters to me. He’s a nonentity. A representer of interests. A deliverer of other people’s messages and other people’s money. After he left here, something—or someone—must have convinced him to return and act civil. He’s changed back into his Washington clothes—he’s one of only a few men wearing ties here, and he looks out of place.
“He’s seven.”
Mr. Gansler shrugs. “He has the right name. That’s what matters there, even if it shouldn’t. And as much as people hated the last guy, they already hate the General even more.” Too late, it occurs to him whom he’s speaking to, and he flushes a little. “Sorry. But your father wasn’t exactly winning hearts and minds at the end.”
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