Home Fire(21)

“And what does your brother say about this?” he asked.

In Eamonn’s mind this brother—Parvaiz—was a slippery ghost, sometimes an ally, sometimes a rival. The slipperiness came from the fractured nature of Aneeka’s stories about him. In her tales of growing up he was her ever-present partner in crime, the shadow who sometimes strode ahead, sometimes followed behind, without ever becoming detached from their twinness, an introspective boy who disapproved of her relationships (“always with older boys, of course”) but helped her keep them hidden from her sister and Aunty Naseem, while remaining perpetually in love with one or another of Aneeka’s friends, who all insisted they loved him as a brother. (Eamonn knew well the pain of this, thanks to his sister’s childhood friend Tilly, of the long legs and bee-stung lips—“I don’t want to know about it,” Aneeka said, which was a balm to her mention of the older boys.) But after school, their lives diverged. Unlike Aneeka, Parvaiz hadn’t received any scholarships; unwilling to start his adult life by taking on crippling loans, he’d instead gone traveling, in the time-honored fashion of drifting British boys. Here he disappeared from her stories.

“I haven’t told him what she did. When he comes back, I will.”

“And when is he coming back?”

She shrugged, and continued clicking through the photographs on his computer, watching his life from childhood to the present day—all the family holidays, all the girlfriends, all the hairstyles and fashion choices and unguarded moments.

“I can’t actually tell if you’re on better terms with him than you are with your sister.”

She zoomed in on a picture of Eamonn with his arm around his father’s shoulder, both in matching T-shirts with the words LONE STAR written on them, the resemblance between them everywhere, from smile to stance. Unlike her sister, Aneeka didn’t seem to have much of an opinion of his father as a political figure, and he sometimes wondered if she’d been too young when her own father had died to have been told what Karamat Lone had said about him.

“He knew Isma was leaving and then he went and left too. It’s nothing I won’t forgive when he comes back. Until then, I’m holding it against him.”

It struck him as unfair to take issue with a nineteen-year-old boy wanting to see the world instead of sitting at home keeping his sister company. But then Aneeka clicked to the next photograph—the Lone parents and children hamming it up for the camera in Addams Family Halloween costumes—and he reminded himself that growing up an orphan obviously created an interdependence between siblings that he, with his affectionate yet disengaged relationship to his sister, couldn’t understand.

There was, in fact, a great deal about her he didn’t understand. Most days that was part of her allure, but one morning, less than two weeks after they’d first met, he woke up resentful. The previous afternoon he had returned from the bakery around the corner to find a note she’d slipped through the communal letter slot in the front door saying “Was here. Left.” He canceled his evening plans in case she came back, but she hadn’t, and all that secrecy he’d been enjoying suddenly seemed a tiresome game in which she held all the power. Impulsively, he packed his bags for a week away and caught the train to an old school friend’s home in Norfolk. To begin with, he enjoyed the thought of her returning repeatedly to his front door only to find him gone. Let her know what it felt like to be the one who did the waiting around. But on the second night, when his hosts were asleep, he called his father’s personal assistant and asked him to find a cab company nearby that could get him back to London.

He arrived home at nearly three a.m., half asleep as he came up the stairs to his front door, and saw a figure curled up on the landing, his doormat rolled up as a pillow. He crouched down next to her, and when she opened her eyes her relief was both shaming and thrilling.

Once they were inside he walked straight to the living room, withdrew a set of keys from a ceramic bowl on a shelf, and handed it to her, saying it was hers to use anytime, day or night. She butted her head against his shoulder and said, “Don’t be this nice.” He asked her what she meant and she replied by kissing him, slow and intense.

Something shifted between them that night. When he woke up the next morning and walked toward the sound of Aneeka making breakfast in the kitchen, she left off blending a smoothie to show him the chart she’d made of all the blocks of time when he shouldn’t expect to see her—times when she was on campus, or in study groups, or the Wednesday evenings when Aunty Naseem insisted on a family dinner, and any day between three and five p.m. “Why not then?” he said, and she nipped his shoulder and said, “Let a woman hold on to her mystique!”

“Okay, okay. Block out Sunday afternoons too,” he said.

She kissed his shoulder where she had nipped at it. “The weekly Lone family lunch in Holland Park. Is it very civilized? Do you say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry’ and talk about the weather?”

“Why don’t you come some Sunday and see for yourself.”

She stepped back. She was wearing nothing but his T-shirt, and the tightening of her shoulders transformed the look from sexy to vulnerable. So she did know about her father and his. He caught her hands in his, reassuring them both that they could survive the conversation he knew they had to have. “I know that’ll be difficult for you. Isma told me. About your father. And about what my father said about him.”