The Weight of Our Sky(47)

All that time you spent worrying about your mother, the Djinn whispers, and in the end it was Saf you gave up.

My thoughts won’t stop racing, but one keeps coming up again and again: Was it all a trick? Was it Saf I was meant to be protecting with my rituals all along? But what about Mama?

Why think about her at all? She’ll be dead the minute you stop counting.

Shut up, I think. Shut up, shut up, shut up. I count the interlocking triangles decorating the stadium’s fa?ade in increasingly complicated groups and patterns, sweating slightly as I do it. It used to be that the numbers were what the Djinn demanded in return for keeping my mother alive; these days it seems they’re the only way I can keep him quiet long enough to see straight, long enough to take back my thoughts and make them mine again.

Silly girl, the Djinn says. Who says I’m ever going to leave you? You’re mine. And he wraps his arms around me in a tender embrace.

No. No, no, no. I double down on the counting, tapping lightly, furiously on my knees, a symphony of beats to accompany the numbers. I can see Vince observing me out of the corner of his eye as he drives, but he doesn’t say anything, so I ignore him.

I need to focus.

? ? ?

There’s a tap on Vince’s window as we roll up to the entrance. A uniformed police officer gestures for him to roll it down. “What’s your business here?” he asks pleasantly.

“I have a pass, sir,” Vincent says, handing over the slip of paper. “I’m just dropping her off.” He nods in my direction. “She’s looking for her mother, sir; they got separated when the troubles began.”

“Malay?” he asks, glancing in my direction. Vince nods.

The officer glances at the paper, nods, and hands it back. “All right, then,” he says. “Go ahead and drop her off, but you’d best be on your way. There are some who may not look too kindly on you in there.”

“Thank you, sir.”

I’ve been silent throughout this entire exchange, but only because I need to get this right. Concentrate, Melati. Deftly, my fingers tap and stroke, weaving my safety net all over the car, all over Vincent. If I can’t be with him, the least I can do is help protect him. Again, the Djinn says, wrapping cold fingers around the base of my spine. That’s not right. Again. I go over it again and again, counting and tapping until everything feels just right. Then I sit back and exhale.

Just in time. Vince pulls up to the main entrance and kills the engine. The sudden silence seems loud, unnatural, stilted. It’s like we haven’t just spent the past week in each other’s company.

“Well . . . ,” he begins, then stops, unsure of what to say next.

“Thank you,” I tell him. “Thank you for everything. You and your family, you all saved my life. I won’t forget that.” I can’t look at him. I think if I do I may cry.

“Take care of yourself,” he says.

“Good-bye,” I say.

And then there really isn’t much more to say. I open the door, slide off the cracked vinyl seat, and close it firmly. No silly nonsense, Melati; it’s better that you leave. You failed them. And you need to find Mama, so you won’t fail her, too.

I turn around and walk away without looking back, so that he doesn’t have to see the tears when I finally let myself cry.

It’s just you and me now, sayang, the Djinn purrs, reclining in the pit of my stomach, a look of smug satisfaction on his face.

? ? ?

When I finally push open the heavy double doors to the stadium, the first thing that hits me is just how much bigger it seems. Then I realize that it isn’t that the stadium is that much bigger—it’s that there are fewer people here. Unlike the packed walls of the Chin Woo Stadium, where people had to shrink themselves to fit somewhere between one another and their belongings besides, here families can move around more freely, taking up larger spaces to create some semblance of home for themselves. There is less tension in the air. There is room to breathe.

I head straight to the table in the corner where volunteers are presiding over food rations. “Excuse me,” I say timidly to one of them, his armband marking him as a member of the Red Cross, like Vince. Even thinking his name sends a sharp pang shooting through my chest.

No, stop, Melati. Don’t think about Vince, not now.

The man turns to look down at me, his expression impatient. “What is it?”

“I’m sorry to interrupt. I just got here. . . . I’m looking for my mother.”

He rubs the back of his neck. “Impossible for me to tell you where one person is in all this mess,” he says, gesturing to the hall. “No time to be flipping through lists and things. Why don’t you wander around and take a look? Let me know if you can’t find her and we’ll try to help.” Then he turns back to his work.

Okay. Let’s take a look.

I begin wandering the hall, picking my way through the pockets of spaces marked by the refugees. There may be fewer people here than at Chin Woo, but they all bear the same scars: cuts, bruises, bandaged limbs, tearful faces, haunted looks. I pass one old man with snow-white hair and his right arm in a sling, sitting with his back against the wall and his eyes shut, reciting passages from the Quran from memory. The melodious lilt of his voice wafts along behind me as I make my way through the hall.

I recognize the lines; this is surah Yasin, what my mother often refers to as the heart of the Quran. Every time I hear it, it conjures up memories of my father’s funeral and the house full of men and women swaying as they recited Yasin in unison around Abah’s stiff body, wrapped tightly in white cloth and laid out on a mattress in the middle of the room. Every week since, I’ve heard my mother recite the surah every Thursday night, her voice low and sweet. She says it’s in memory of Abah, and for her parents, the grandmother and grandfather who died before I was old enough to retain any memories of them. A dirge for the dead.