Home Fire(12)

“Stupid,” she said, and turned her attention to loading the dishwasher.

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Eamonn opened his mouth and the sound that came out was that of a grasshopper. Say something, she said. Chirp. Isma opened her eyes from one darkness into another that was interrupted by a rectangle of light. It was 2:17 a.m. Why was Aneeka calling at this hour? No, no, no, no, no. Her baby, her brother, the child she’d raised. She grabbed at the phone—images in her mind of his death, violent, unbearable—and pressed the answer button. Aneeka’s face a death mask.

“It was you,” her sister said.

“Parvaiz?” her own voice strange with sleep and fear.

“You were the one who told the police what he’d done.”

One kind of panic ending, another beginning. “Who told you that?”

“Aunty Naseem is on the phone talking to Razia Apa about it. So you admit it?”

“They would have found out anyway.”

“You don’t know that.” Her sister’s voice all hurt and confusion. “They might not have. And then he could have come home. He could just have turned around the moment he knew he’d made a mistake and come home. You’ve made him not able to come home.” She cried out, as if she’d only just then felt the wound that had been delivered to her. “Isma, you’ve made our brother not able to come home.”

Isma touched her sister’s face on the screen, felt the cold glass. “Shh, listen to me. People in the neighborhood knew. The police would have found out. There was nothing I could do for him, so I did what I could for you, for us.”

“For me?”

“We’re in no position to let the state question our loyalties. Don’t you understand that? If you cooperate, it makes a difference. I wasn’t going to let him make you suffer for the choices he’d made.”

“Is this me not suffering? Parvaiz is gone.”

“He did that, not me. When they treat us this way the only thing we can do for our own sanity is let them go.”

“Parvaiz is not our father. He’s my twin. He’s me. But you, you’re not our sister anymore.”

“Aneeka . . .”

“I mean it. You betrayed us, both of us. And then you tried to hide it from me. Don’t call, don’t text, don’t send me pictures, don’t fly across the ocean and expect me to ever agree to see your face again. We have no sister.”

One moment her face was there, enraged, and then it was replaced by Isma’s phone’s wallpaper: yellow and green leaves floating on the surface of the Grand Union Canal. Isma tried FaceTime, Skype, WhatsApp, and even the expense of an international phone call, not with any hope of Aneeka answering but to let her sister know how desperately she wanted to communicate.

Finally, when the sound of ringing became more than she could bear, she lay back in bed, wrapping the duvet tightly around her. The stars were cold above her head. A verse from the Quran came to mind: By the sky and the night visitor! And what is the night visitor? A piercingly bright star. She got up, pulled the prayer rug out from under her bed, and knelt down on it. “Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim.” The Arabic words her companions since childhood, passed on to her within her grandmother’s embrace when no one thought she was old enough to learn them. In the name of Allah the Beneficent, the Merciful. This rocking motion that accompanied her prayers was her grandmother rocking her to sleep, whispering these verses to protect her. At first the words were just a language she didn’t know, but as she continued, closing her eyes to shut out the world, they burrowed inside her, flared into light, dispelled the darkness. And then the light softened, diffused, enveloping her in the peace that comes from knowing your own powerlessness.

At least, that’s how it usually worked. But today she couldn’t make them anything other than words in a foreign language, spoken out loud in a room that didn’t anticipate anyone’s being out from under covers at this hour, and so was too cold. She returned to bed, hugged a pillow close to her chest, placed another against her back. She had only been fooling herself that night when she thought she still knew how to calm the frantic pacing of her sister’s heart. Aneeka’s had learned to beat in the company of her twin brother, in the world of their mother’s womb. As children the twins would lie in the garden, fingers on each other’s pulses, listening to the trains go by on the tracks behind their house. Waiting for those moments when their hearts were synchronized, first with each other and then with the sound of the train pulling out of Preston Road station.

Please call me please call me please call me she Skyped, WhatsApped, texted her sister.

Aunty Naseem called, horrified at her own role in what had happened. She and her daughter Razia had been discussing something in the news and she had said what a good thing it was, in this climate, that Isma had reported what Parvaiz had done. She hadn’t heard Aneeka come in the night before and assumed she was miles away, at Gita’s. “She was rude to me,” Aunty Naseem said, the sentence conveying a whole universe and its behavior patterns upturned.

So then Isma had to convince her that it was a mistake easily made, and that there was nothing to forgive, and Aneeka would come around eventually, when really she wanted to shout into the phone How could you have been so careless! When the call finally ended she felt as tired as she’d ever been. She leaned into the pillow against her back, Eamonn holding her tight. “Oh,” she said, surprised and not. This wasn’t the first time she’d found him there, but she’d always banished him before. Now she pressed herself closer, taking the comfort it was suddenly obvious only he could give. At first, and for a long time, it was warmth that spread through her limbs, then, eventually, heat. She turned toward him in the darkness. By the time the first light appeared in the sky she felt herself transformed by the desire to be known, completely. Before the day and its realities could dispel this headiness, she reached for the phone and sent Eamonn a text: I’m sorry. I envy you your father. Mine died while being taken to Guantánamo. I want to explain it all to you.