And even though I want to, I don’t move out of the shadows. I don’t hold Eli and tell him it’s okay. That he isn’t alone. That I’m here and will do anything for him because he’s my brother. I don’t tell him I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. My brain screams and my body doesn’t move and I watch his hand.
I just have to keep watching until Harvey comes back with help. Harvey will come back any second now. I keep watching, all curled over on my side in the dirt, watching his hand, keeping my eyes on his hand. If I do that, if I just keep watching, then everything will be all right. I just have to keep watching.
I keep watching. I keep waiting.
And then I guess I stop.
The next thing I know it’s hot afternoon and Queeny is there and her head is bleeding but she must be okay because she is screaming for Harvey so loud that it hurts my ears.
“Harvey! He’s here! I’ve got him!” Queeny shakes me and my teeth rattle in my head. I don’t want Harvey. I want Eli. I pull on Queeny as hard as I can, bringing her into me, and when she moves, holding me tight and my head on her shoulder, I can see Eli still lying there with people all around. Someone has put a jacket over his head so no one sees what Beaver did.
Harvey is here. My body goes floppy. He picks me up and carries me, and I see all the rest that happened the whole time my brain stopped and closed down. There’s no fire now, just a puddle of burnt, and a smell that sours my nose and gets in my mouth and burns my throat. The fences are down, but no one is trying to leave anymore. They are just sitting and lying and crying and moaning and the whole world has lost the plot and dropped their load and shy of their bricks and crazy and wrong and rotten.
All through the Visitor Center, people are hurt on the ground. Some are burned or bleeding. Some have their hands tied or cuffed behind their backs so their arms are all twisted. Some are calling for help or water. Some are holding their eyes, and I can see the angry on their skin where they have been sprayed with the chili spray that the Jackets sometimes use when people get too upset and loud. Doctors and ambulances are gathered around and checking people and the fire truck is still there with its hose out even though there’s no fire anymore. People are bleeding and crying and calling out, but Harvey pushes me through to the ambulance and tells them to check me over first.
They want to look at Queeny before me. “It’s the ones who are bleeding the most that win in here,” one of doctors says. But Queeny won’t. She says she’ll go ahead and bleed all over their stupid floor and die if they don’t check me over right now this instant. Those doctors must deal with people like Queeny a lot, because they look at each other once and don’t even try to argue.
“Are you hurt, kid?” the doctor asks. I can’t do anything, not even shake my head. The doctor looks at me and says I’m fine, and then Harvey carries me out again. I want to wait with Queeny, but they are already fussing over her head.
Harvey doesn’t take me to Family Three. He takes me to the very back of the kitchen. They should be getting ready for dinner by now, but they can’t because it’s been half destroyed in the fire. There are boxes of food and boxes of water piled up on a table, but no one touches any of them because nobody cares about eating anymore.
“What happened, Subhi? Were you there? Did you see? Tell me, Subhi. What did you see?” Harvey’s voice gets louder and he squeezes my arms. I look right into his eyes and wish he could pull the words out of my brain because they aren’t coming out by themselves.
If this is the real world Queeny keeps telling me about, then I don’t want to be part of it. I want to think on a story, but even my stories are gone. Vanished from my head. All I’m left with is an echoing kind of empty, and my stomach feels as though it has been kicked by a truck, and I get what Eli meant about his heart bleeding because mine is doing that right now. I hurt more than I thought anything could hurt.
“Subhi? What did you see, kid?” Harvey’s words push themselves through the hot, wet air, getting heavier and heavier. My brain starts fizzing. I can’t make sense of the buzzing and beating in my head. Harvey won’t let my eyes look away. Everything is pushing and banging against me. All the treasures, Jimmie, Beaver, the knife, the forest, the gum tree, the fences, Eli. Forever Eli. Harvey grabs my arms and squeezes them tight. The look on his face is madder even than when he looked at Beaver. As mad as a cut snake. Harvey taught me that one too.
But he isn’t angry with me. I know because he pulls me into his chest and holds me tight.
Harvey picks me up in his arms and carries me back to Maá.
I sleep. I can hear Queeny and Harvey talking over me. For a moment I think I hear Maá, but it can’t be. I can’t remember the last time Maá talked for real and not just in my memories.
After a while, I stop trying to hear, and I sleep.
The fences are back up. Every one. The Jackets have a book of photos, and they’ve gone around collecting all the people in the photos, even though the photos aren’t good or clear. I know because I saw some when they collected Ilhan from Family Three. Her kids were crying and trying to keep holding on to their maá.
None of them has come back yet. No one knows when they will. If they will. The Jackets say the people they rounded up are the troublemakers. The ones who started the riot.
They had a photo of Eli in their book. I guess they didn’t know it was him under the jacket. Or maybe they didn’t know it was him in the photo. I knew because, even with the photo all blurred up, I’d know Eli anywhere. In the photo you can see his little brother’s red glove in his pocket. He reckoned it gave him good luck and that was why he won Towers of Rah and Target all the time.
I am asleep and remembering.
I’m remembering when I was little, and Maá and me, we’d walk around Family and Maá would point to a bird and say, “You hear what bird just say?” She used to hear everything. And I would shake my head, and Maá would smile at me and tell me just what she’d heard. Stories the birds carried from one place to the next, or secrets whispered on the wind, or songs the rain played in the warm notes of water falling from the sky. I’m remembering Maá singing the tarana songs in Rohingya, and all of us joining in, and Eli listening and drumming his fingers in time, and Queeny getting up and dancing and pulling me to my feet to dance with her. Even the Jackets coming past smiled at us, and one of them went and got his guitar and joined in as well. In my remembering we’re singing, If we all sing together, our song can light up the dark.
I open my eyes. The song is still going. And there is Maá. Awake and beautiful, her eyes smiling at me through the tired, her voice ringing. No one else is in the tent. It’s just us. For a moment my breathing stops and my chest is heavier than a million bricks sinking me lower and lower with its pulling. I wonder if maybe I am about to die.
But then my maá pulls me into her arms, and she talks to me in words all mixed up in English and Rohingya, and even though I can’t understand the words, I understand the sorry and the promises in them, and I want her to never, ever, ever let me go.
They say it was Eli’s fault. They say he started all the craziness. But he was just a kid. He didn’t want to be grown yet.
They are saying Eli was on the roof. That he was angry. They are saying he went for Beaver. That he fell. That Beaver tried to save him. They are saying…
Harvey doesn’t say they are wrong. Harvey doesn’t say anything.
My heart won’t stop bleeding.
Harvey asks me again if I can talk about it. About what I saw. He asks if I was there when it happened. I don’t say anything. I don’t say a single word. There are too many words in my head for me to get even a single one out past the sad sticking in my throat. But I make my eyes work themselves all the way up until I’m looking right at Harvey. Right inside him. And he knows. Without me saying a single word, Harvey knows.
Harvey sucks in his breath and pulls me into his chest, and I can smell his skin and clothes and soap, and I reckon he had curry for dinner last night because I can smell th
at too. “I tried,” he says. His voice comes out all strangled by his crying. I know he wants me to nod, to tell him I understand, but I can’t.
Inside I’m screaming and hearing Eli tell me they’re not worth spit and telling me how one day we’ll be hot-chocolate chefs.
And I want to see Jimmie. To know if she’s okay. To tell her about Eli, about the knife, about Beaver. About Harvey. To tell her no one knows what happened except me. And Harvey. But he hasn’t said and…I could tell Jimmie. I could tell her everything.
To see her, is all. I just want to see her.
I look at Harvey. I think of Oto and Anka and Iliya and Ba and Maá and Queeny and Eli and all of us. All of them all that time ago, and all of us now. Just trying to find somewhere to be safe. Just walking our journey to peace. I can hear Queeny’s words in my head and now they make sense. I get it now.
“We’re the dead rats, Harvey. Just like Queeny said. Left out to rot so no one else bothers to try. There’s no keeping safe for us.”
Harvey looks at me like he’s never seen me before. But he doesn’t say I’m wrong. At last, he gets up and leaves me on my own with the duck.
“It seems to me that you have a simple choice,” the duck says. “Do nothing or tell what happened.”
I don’t want to think about choices anymore. Sometimes that duck should just learn to shut up.
“Of course,” he goes on, not paying any attention to my snarling at him, “if you say what happened, Harvey’s done for. Food for the fishes and all that. Because if you say what happened, then they’ll have to ask why Harvey didn’t say anything straight off. And they’ll have to ask why Harvey didn’t come back to help Eli. They’ll say he is as guilty as Beaver.” Now the duck looks thoughtful and talks as though I’m not even really there. “Then again, if you don’t say anything, no one will know the truth about Eli.” The duck pauses. “Or maybe your sister is right. Maybe no one even cares. Maybe you don’t really exist after all.”
I throw the duck so far that I don’t hear the squeak when he hits the ground.
When I wake up it is night. Everyone is asleep. There are more people in here than before because Family Four was destroyed in the fire, and even still, there isn’t a single eye blinking.
I can hear something coming. Water galloping toward us. Charging louder and faster. I whisper to Maá, “Can you hear it? Can you hear the waves, Maá?”
There is a sucking sound and a shadow moves up the walls of the tent. The sound turns into thunder and the wave grows huge and just when I’m starting to think that it’s going to wash away our entire camp, the shadow of the wave starts getting smaller and the noise gets softer. It’s not thundering anymore. I can hear my breathing again and my heart punching against my chest.
Even though the wave has died right down so that it isn’t going to wash us away, that Night Sea sneaks in through the zips and the flaps of the tent, puddling on the floor. And it keeps coming. Water fills the tent, like Harvey with the plastic pool. I can feel my cot lifting. The wave keeps coming. All of us float in our beds, rocking back and forth, and the people piled on the floor float on their blankets. No one but me is awake to see.
My hand drops down out of the bed, and I can feel those waves lapping at my fingers. Thousands of tiny fish nibble at the dead skin on my hand. I jump in and push through the water, the fish darting out of the way. I swish through the tent, the water making my pants and shirt stick to my body and the sand drifting in and out from between my toes.
Outside the tent, the stars are the brightest they’ve ever been. Thousands of them, lighting up the world. All the creatures in the Night Sea are lined up outside, their heads popping out of the water. Like they’ve been waiting for me a long time. And I don’t know what they want me to do. I don’t know what anyone wants me to do. I can’t do anything. I didn’t do anything. Everything is happening and I didn’t do a single thing. Even though the water is only up to my waist, I can’t breathe properly anymore. The heaviness in my chest is pushing harder and harder, and I can’t get enough air in.
And there he is, the whale, looking just the way Eli said. As big as a country and as beautiful as anything. That water is spinning and turning, but he is as still as can be. He’s not singing. He’s watching me, his mouth turned upside down and his big eyes shining my face back at me. I touch his face and feel his breath, hot and wet on my face.
Eli’s whale sees inside my head and reads through my memories. A tear, deep and dark red like the Night Sea, swells in the whale’s eye and rolls down his cheek and disappears into the water.
“I’m sorry,” I say, over and over, and I can feel my tears falling, deep and dark and as red as the whale’s, all the blood from my heart aching out through my eyes and mixing into the waves.
I see every moment I ever had with Eli reflected in the whale’s eyes and hear every word we ever spoke, every look, every laugh, echoing in the sound of the waves. My body shakes. I can only say sorry, over and over and over, and those tears keep falling faster and faster, and I wonder if the ache will ever, ever go. There is a fierce inside me, holding on to that ache. Holding it there forever. So I never, ever forget.
The whale raises his head so his eyes are level with mine, and in the whale’s eye I see exactly what I have to do. For Eli. So everyone everywhere can feel that ache, fierce and strong. So no one ever forgets.
Queeny is wrong. We do exist. Eli existed. And now he’s gone. And everyone needs to know, to feel that pain tearing at them, even if just for a bit. Just so they know that once there lived a Limbo kid named Eli, and he had something important to do.
I scream out my tears now, and the sea thrashes and the Night Creatures are screeching, whirling and heaving themselves in and out of the water. All the little fish roll onto their backs and pop up to the surface of the sea, their eyes cloudy, their gills still. The whale bellows, a noise so loud it goes right into my head, right down to the very bottom of my skull, and I can feel that bellow echoing in my brain and hurting, hurting, hurting. I close my eyes and the noise gets softer. But not gone. Never gone.
When I open my eyes, the whale is no more than a shadow, and the tide has pulled the sea so far away that I can only hear its waves like a soft whisper in my brain.
But all the way back to the fence, those dead fish are scattered, still and silent. I pick one up and bring it to my lips, and when I kiss it, I can smell the sea, right down deep inside.
I wake up. Queeny is there. She looks at me and wipes my hair away from my forehead like she used to when I was little.
When she looks at me, her eyes are so sad it hurts.
“That girl. The one you were making the pictures for. She’s real, isn’t she?” When I nod, I can see her eyes are watery and red. I turn away.
“I’m sorry, Subhi. I should’ve listened.” She fidgets around under Maá’s bed, looking for something. When she finds it and pulls out a book, I feel the pressure on my chest hiccup, and the tightness lets up for just a second.
“It’s Ba’s,” she says. “It’s his poems. It’s the last treasure.” She touches the cover of the book with the very tips of her fingers. The way she says it makes me understand.
My treasures didn’t come from the Night Sea at all. Or from my ba. My treasures came from Queeny. Somehow that makes them even more special.
I wonder if Eli knew.
“When old Asiya came to the camp last year, Subhi, she told us Ba was dead. He’d been killed. She knew it was true because she saw him.” Queeny looks at me with eyes so soft I can’t remember ever seeing them like that. Not even when I was little. “I’m sorry, Subhi. But Maá…Maá wanted to tell you herself. She kept saying she would, that she just wanted to find the right time. And then she started sleeping more and…I guess she just never found the right time.” Queeny shrugs. But I understand.
“All your treasures, they were Ba’s. He kept them in his bag. And the book—he took it everywhere with him in his pocket. Everywhere.” She stops.
“Subhi. I know you thought he was coming. But he’s not.”
I get it. I guess I’ve known for a while now that Ba wasn’t coming. Not for real.
“It doesn’t matter that you didn’t meet him,” she says. “You are so much like him.”
I can feel the tears falling and I don’t bother to wipe them away, even though I hate crying in front of Queeny. Because I’m not like him. I’m not like him at all. My ba was strong and brave. He never would have let anyone see his scared. He never would have hidden. My ba would have stood up. My ba would have stopped Beaver. I’m not like him at all.
My head keeps going around and around, and I keep seeing Eli, keep seeing his hand—
I’m not like him. But maybe Someday I can be. Maybe today.
Queeny pulls me into her so my head is resting on her shoulder, and she starts to tell me everything there is to know about our ba. When she’s telling, the screaming in my head quietens, just that little bit.
I don’t know how long we sit there, with Queeny telling me tale after tale of things our ba had done or said or heard or told. She talks until her voice goes all rough and whispery.
All through the telling, I have my eyes shut, and then suddenly he’s there. Right there. My ba. Even though all the pictures of my ba were left behind when Maá and Queeny had to run, even though I never ever saw my ba, not even for a second, I know this is him.
I can tell you every single hair and line on his face, and the big veins on his hands that wrap up his arms like snakes. I can feel the heat and heaviness of his body close up to mine and Queeny’s. I can smell a smell that is like Harvey and Maá and Eli and the dirt and rain all mixed up together. And I do know him. I’ve known him all along.
The Bone Sparrow Page 15
