Home Fire(7)

After the conversation with Aunty Naseem, Isma called her sister repeatedly, but it was late at night London time before she replied. The lamp at her bedside cast a small pool of light that illuminated the book resting on her chest—an Asterix comic, an old childhood favorite—but left her face in darkness.

“The Migrants have a new car. A BMW. A BMW in our driveway. What next? A pony? An AGA? An au pair?” When the tenants had moved into the house in which the siblings had grown up, and replaced the net curtains with obviously expensive blinds that were almost always lowered, Aneeka said she sympathized for the first time with residents of a neighborhood who felt aggrieved when migrants moved in. The nickname had stuck despite Isma’s attempts to change it.

“I’m surprised you noticed—Aunty Naseem says she hardly sees you. And neither do your uni friends.”

“I must really be behaving badly if Aunty Naseem is driven to complaining,” Aneeka said.

“She’s concerned, that’s all.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to worry her. Or you. It’s just easier being on my own these days. I suppose I’m learning why solitude has always been so appealing to you.”

“I’ll come home. Spring break is starting soon. We can at least have a week together.” The thought of London was oppressive, but Isma kept that out of her voice.

“You know you can’t afford it, and anyway, you don’t want to have to go through that airport interrogation again. What if they don’t let you board this time? Or if they give you a hard time when you return to Boston? Also, I’ve got papers due. That’s the main reason why no one’s seen me. I’m working. The law makes you work. Not like sociology, where you get to watch TV and call it research.”

“Since when do we lie to each other?”

“Since I was fourteen and said I was going to watch Parvaiz at cricket nets, but instead I went to meet Jimmy Singh at McDonald’s.”

“Jimmy-Singh-from-Poundland Jimmy Singh? Aneeka! Did Parvaiz know?”

“Course he knew. He always knew everything I did.”

The night they discovered what Parvaiz had done, Aneeka had allowed Isma to brush out her long dark hair as their mother used to do when she had a daughter in need of comforting, and partway through Aneeka leaned back into her sister and said, “He never explained why he didn’t tell me about the Ibsen tickets.” Months after their mother died, Parvaiz, a boy suddenly arrived into adolescence in a house where bills and grief filled all crevices, had decided he needed a laptop of his own so that his sisters wouldn’t disrupt his work on the sound projects that had recently become an obsession. One night he sneaked out of the house when everyone had gone to sleep, took the bus to Central London, and waited from midnight until mid-morning outside a theater in the West End for return tickets to the opening night of an Ibsen play that an actor recently elevated, via a superhero role, to the Hollywood A-list was using to reestablish his credentials as a serious thespian. Parvaiz bought two tickets with money he’d “borrowed” from the household account using Isma’s debit card, and quickly sold them both for an astronomical sum. He announced all this, sauntering into the house like a conquering hero, only to be confronted with his sisters’ rage. Isma’s anger came from the thought of the overtime she worked to keep the debt collector from the door, and from the thought of every horror that could befall a young boy in a world of racists and pedophiles; but Aneeka’s rage was far greater. “Why didn’t you tell me? I tell you everything—how could you not tell me?” Both Parvaiz and Isma, accustomed to Aneeka’s being the buffer between them, had been completely unprepared for this. Six years later, that story was all Aneeka could grasp to help her understand her brother’s subterfuge. Isma had an easier answer: his father’s son; a fecklessness in the gene pool.

“Boys are different from us,” Isma said. “They see what they want through tunnel vision.”

The screen became a place of confusion, all motion and shapes, for a few seconds, and then she saw her sister lying in bed, face turned toward the phone that had been settled in its dock.

“Maybe if we start looking now for cheap flights I could come to you for my Easter break,” Aneeka said, but Isma shook her head firmly before the sentence was finished.

“Don’t want me telling the security monkeys at Heathrow how much I admire the Queen’s color palette?”

“I do not.” Her muscles tightened at the thought of Aneeka in the interrogation room. “Are we really not going to talk about the fact that Parvaiz has reappeared on Skype?”

“If we talk about him we’ll argue. I don’t want to argue right now.”

“Neither do I. But I want to know if you’ve spoken to him.”

“He sent a chat message just to say he’s okay. You get the same?”

“No, I got nothing.”

“Oh, Isma. I was sure you had. I would have told you otherwise. Yes, just that. He’s okay. He must have assumed I’d tell you as soon as I heard.”

“That would imply he remembers how to think about anyone other than himself.”

“Don’t, please. I know anger is the way you express your concern but, just don’t.”

Anger is the way I express my anger, she would have said on another night, but tonight she said “I miss you.”