When the Moon was Ours(58)

He offered as much of a laugh as he could. When he was seven or eight, it used to make him laugh every time, the reminder that his father had wanted to come to this country because of the squid that defied him. He’d been born into a family of fishermen famous for their skill catching squid as red as wine-colored velvet. They rose close enough to the surface to catch only when the moon was a dark ring in the sky, and his father’s family was known throughout Campania for night fishing, filling the hulls of their boats before sunrise.

But not his father. When his father went out with his brothers, the squid scattered like minnows. The brothers returned at dawn, their boat light and bobbing, to the taunts of other fishermen.

Sam used to think that was a stupid reason for his father to leave where he was from. But then he thought of his great-grandparents, their fields, the skill it took to plant the corms. This had been their family’s trade. There would have been shame in their brothers or sisters lacking the skill to grow those crocuses, or having hands too clumsy to pluck out the saffron threads that cost more for their weight than gold.

His father had come to this country both to escape from what he was not and to discover what he might be.

“What if…” Those two words, and Sam’s mouth felt as dry as when he woke during a fever, his tongue parched. He had to force the words out.

His mother looked up from the olives.

Her gaze, neither indifferent nor intent, made him look down at his shirt.

Bacha posh were words he’d first heard from his mother’s mother. If he didn’t follow the path set out by those words, he might forget her drawings of saffron crocuses, or how sure her hands looked separating mint leaves from their stems, the green never bruising. He’d been so sure he could become Samira if he gritted his teeth hard enough, wished it hard enough, pressed his fingernails into the heels of his hands so hard his knuckles paled. And now, if he didn’t, he might forget how his grandmother sat with him, spread out his set of crayons on the kitchen table until she found the deepest gold and purple, showing him the shape and color of those crocus petals.

He would have to admit that whenever his grandmother told him the story of the two lovers at Saif-ul-Malook, he’d thought more often of being the prince than of being the fairy.

He wondered if it would be a kind of betrayal to his grandmother, shrugging away the name she had asked his mother to give him. If he lived his life without it, if he altered it even by one letter, he worried that part of him would disappear. He would become someone his grandmother would not recognize. The blood he shared with that old woman he loved even though he barely remembered her might drain away like dust and ice and light stripped away from a comet.

But he wouldn’t know unless he said it. His grandmother wasn’t here to listen, but his mother, his grandmother’s daughter, was.

“What if I”—his breathing was turning shallow—“wanted to”—now it was stinging his lungs—“stay”—the words would come only one or two at a time—“this way?”

“What?” his mother asked, those fine wrinkles appearing again, this time with wondering instead of smiling.

He tried to even out his breathing. But it stayed quick and gasping, and he had to tear the words out. “What if I wanted to stay this way?”

The words came out in a rush of air, and he started coughing. His mouth felt like orange pith, bitter and wrung-out.

He folded his tongue against his teeth, bracing for her questions. Her asking what he meant, and him having to tell her that he wanted not to go back to being Samira, but to go forward as Samir. That being a bacha posh had been a lie he told himself to pretend he was like the girls whose mothers and fathers dressed them as boys, but who then grew up to be women. That he had made the mistake of believing his discomfort would be like theirs; theirs was less often a wish that they could be boys, and more a longing for the way boys were allowed to take up as much space as their bodies could fill.

But he wanted both. He wanted to be a boy who grew into a man, and for there to be space in the world for him.

His mother set down the knife. “Is that really what you want?”

Sam’s mouth was still too dry, his breath too used up from saying the words all at once, to answer. The inside of him was cracking and crumbling like the glass and paper frames of his moons.

Later, they would have to talk about this. They would have to talk about how he did not know if he wanted to change his body but he knew he wanted to change his name. How they would have to change his papers to say what they had made everyone believe they already did.

How there was no letting go of Samira, because now she felt like a friend he had imagined to fill the empty space before Miel. But he could not be her.

There was still a part of him, spinning and wondering, that wanted to know how long his mother’s calm and patience would stand, how long until it fell or crumbled beneath everything he was. Would it hold if, one day, he drew closer to the faith of her father’s family, or her mother’s, both these faiths she’d rejected because she was so sure God was bigger than religion? Would it stay if, one day, he left this town to hang moons every place on earth there were trees, or if he never lived anywhere but this place his mother had given him? Would it stand no matter what he became or did not become?

But for right now, that one sentence—What if I wanted to stay this way?—was all he had in him. He’d used up all his words.