The Weight of Our Sky(16)

“Is this how you say hello to guests now, Frankie?” Auntie Bee regards him calmly, her hand hovering protectively on my shoulder. “This is Melati. She’ll be staying with us until we can figure out how to get her home. Now, where’s Baba?”

“Not home,” Frankie says sullenly. “He hasn’t come back yet. And we can’t call him. All the phone lines are down.”

My heart sinks at this; I was just about to ask if I could use the phone to call the hospital and speak to my mother. She’s not there anyway, the Djinn insists, jabbing at my stomach with sharp spikes of fear. She’s dead. You didn’t protect her. Just like you didn’t protect Saf.

My eyes fill with tears, and I concentrate even harder on the way the tiles fit together, counting off their perfect squares in threes.

“Okay, then—home soon, I’m sure,” Auntie Bee says, making her way into the house and gesturing for me to follow. “Better make sure we have dinner ready by the time he gets here. He’ll be hungry. Come, Melati,” she says, turning to me. “I have some clothes you can change into.”

I drift along behind her as she leads me down a long, narrow corridor. We pass three closed doors before she opens one on the right. It’s a box of a room, just big enough to fit a narrow bed, a small vanity with an oval mirror and a white stool, and a chest of drawers. Auntie Bee rummages about in this for a while before emerging with a white blouse and a gray skirt. “My niece’s clothes,” she explains, handing them to me. “She studies at the university. Her parents are in Johor, so she stays here sometimes when she has a break. Aiya—” She breaks off suddenly, clicking her tongue. “I’d better find some way to contact her and make sure she’s safe,” she mutters. “The bathroom is there, across the hall. You change and come to the kitchen when you’re ready, girl.”

She disappears down the hall and I quickly slip into the bathroom. After I use the toilet, I wash my hands at the clean white sink and stare at myself in the mirror, taking in my disheveled hair, half out of its usual braid; the blue shadows under my eyes; the tracks of clean lines my tears have left in the layer of soot and dirt on my face. The face of a betrayer, the Djinn snarls, a traitor, a deserter, a girl who runs away when the people she loves need her.

I squeeze my eyes shut, gripping the sides of the sink for balance, tapping each with my fingers, three times on this side, then the other, then again, then again, then again. Then I strip off my filthy school uniform, folding the blouse and pinafore, which reek faintly of drain water, and placing them neatly on a little table by the door. I grab a blue washcloth hanging on a knob by the sink, and I scrub and scrub and scrub until my skin tingles and the stranger in the mirror disappears.

Back in the room, there are no underclothes, so I suppose the ones I’m wearing will have to do. Then I put on the other girl’s clothes. The blouse is some type of linen, scratchy against my skin; I tuck it into the cotton skirt, which stops below my knees. I rebraid my hair, tidy myself up as best I can, and make my way out of the room, trying to ignore the fact that the Djinn hasn’t stopped his steady stream of dark whispers and that my heart hasn’t stopped its exaggerated beats since I got here. I don’t even realize that I’m tapping to them as I walk, my fingers hidden in the depths of some strange girl’s pockets.

In the kitchen, Auntie Bee has changed out of her elegant cheongsam into a high-necked cotton blouse in a soft blue gray and loose black pants. She whirls about, adding a pinch of salt here, tasting there, stirring this, chopping that. “Oh good, they fit!” she says when she sees me. “Come, help me get this dinner on the table. Uncle will be hungry when he comes home.” She says this calmly, but I have a lot of practice in hiding how I feel, and I can spot the telltale signs of worry any day: the white knuckles that grip the dishes tightly as she sets the table, the pauses between conversations that go just a hair longer than they should.

For lack of anything else to do, and desperate for something else to focus on so I can shut the Djinn up, I drift along in her wake, picking things up, putting them down again, tapping everything secretly three times, pretending that this can somehow be construed as helping.

There was a time when I loved being in a kitchen, when it was the center of our household, emanating delicious, mouthwatering smells and filled with laughter and conversation. Once upon a lifetime ago, I wasn’t totally useless, either—I’m handy with a knife, which Abah taught me how to use properly years ago. “You hold it like this, Melati,” he’d say, demonstrating. “You see? Curl your fingers against the blade like this, and then cut the onion like this.” And there they were—perfect slices, every time.

These days, there’s not that much laughter, and I’m not that much use. In my defense, it’s hard to be much help to Mama when the Djinn keeps screaming ominous warnings and portents of doom: That knife could slice a major artery and she would be dead before you know it. She could have a previously unknown, fatal allergy to one of her ingredients for this curry she’s made a million times. She could choke, she could burn, she could scald. Mama’s kitchen is a cacophony of hazards, and I am too deafened and defeated by them, too busy saving Mama’s life with my never-ending number chains to bother with such commonplace tasks as slicing onions.

“Lazybones,” Mama would tease me as I sat watching her wash the rice for dinner, mesmerized by the sure, graceful movement of her hands sifting through the grains to remove the dirt and grit. I’d just laugh and let her believe it, counting each grain as it slipped through her fingers.