The Weight of Our Sky(64)
Together, we play a quick, painstaking game of musical chairs: I move Ethan carefully to the front seat, where he rests his head against Mama’s shoulder, May on his other side. Then we settle Frankie into the back seat, his head on Vincent’s lap, and I squeeze in next to May, who immediately reaches for my hand and clings to it as if it’s some kind of lifeline.
“Let’s go, Mama,” I say, and she nods and floors it. In the rearview mirror, I watch as Vince strokes his older brother’s hair gently. “Don’t worry, Kor Kor,” he says softly. “Don’t worry, big brother. We will be there soon. Don’t worry.”
As the Standard speeds off, the chaos of Petaling Street behind us and the promise of safety ahead, I swallow the painful lump in my throat and try not to cry.
? ? ?
The rest of it is a blur.
I know we somehow make it to the hospital.
I know the Djinn stirs when we arrive, emboldened by the specters and spectacles of death at every turn. But I also know that I ignore him.
I know there is a great flurry of activity as doctors and nurses whisk Ethan off in one direction and Frankie in the other; Vince takes my hand and holds it tightly for just one moment before he heads quickly after his brother, and the ghost of his touch lingers long after he’s gone.
A nurse comes to check May for any injuries, and I have to spend a good ten minutes prizing her hand from mine, convincing her that it’s okay to go, that I’ll wait for her, that I won’t disappear.
And then at last, it’s quiet, and it’s just me and Mama under the harsh, flickering fluorescent lights, in a corridor that smells of disease and disinfectant, and maybe even death. Oddly enough, the thought doesn’t scare me as much as it used to.
Mama looks at me. “So,” she says, drawing in a deep breath, “how was your week?”
And before I know it we’ve fallen into each other’s arms, sobbing and laughing and holding on to each other like we’ll never let go.
EPILOGUE
THE TOMBSTONES ARE PURE WHITE, and they gleam with newness in the morning light, the sun’s rays playing off the curves and peaks of the headstone and footstone upon which her name is engraved: SAFIYAH, DAUGHTER OF ADNAN AND MARIAM, 3 APRIL, 1953–13 MAY, 1969.
It’s my first time visiting her.
I stayed away when she was buried two months ago, unable—unwilling, really—to face Pak Adnan’s wrath again. He’ll never be able to look at me without thinking of his daughter, without wondering why it is that I lived and Saf died. The least I could do was allow him to grieve in peace.
Instead, I sat in my new room in a house still too unfamiliar to really feel like home, nursing my own sorrow, playing record after record and remembering my friend. Through my haze of tears, I heard my mother speaking to a friend in a low voice. “They were some of the lucky ones,” she said. “They have something to bury.”
When the hospital was too full of bodies and too caught up in chaos to ensure they were returned to their families, the government had taken drastic measures. They had the corpses carted off and interred into mass graves: one giant hole for everyone, a final resting place crowded with companions. There was no way to protest, and no way to know if someone you loved was one of them. At least Saf’s family had something concrete to mourn.
According to the government, the official numbers from that intense, chaotic week, when the city cracked wide open and the streets filled with blood and bodies, are 439 people injured, 196 killed. Auntie Bee and Uncle Chong and Vincent had come to visit the day the report was released, for moral support, Auntie Bee said, though she didn’t mention if they were providing the support or needed it themselves.
Frankie didn’t come. He never comes with them on these visits, and when we go to their house he makes himself scarce. I’m not sure we’ll ever be friends, Frankie and me. But he saved us, and we saved him, and that is a connection that we could never sever, whether we like it or not.
In my room, the Beatles playing softly in the background, Vince squeezed my hand as I heard Mama scoff. “I saw the bodies with my own eyes,” she said, tapping the paper in her hand and shaking her head. “No way there were only one hundred ninety-six. No way.”
“Must save face mah,” Uncle Chong said quietly. He had grown thinner since we’d last seen him, and Auntie Bee limped along with a cane now, a slender, elegant thing of dark wood topped with carved ivory. Mama hadn’t wanted me to read it, but I did anyway. Of the dead, the report said, most were Chinese. A handful were Indian. Twenty-five were Malay.
Saf was one of them.
As I stand there, staring at her headstone, I can feel the Djinn stir. Your fault, he whispers. Your fault. I tap a finger three times against Saf’s name, and then I tell him to keep still, and he does. I’ve come to accept that the Djinn and I are always going to be locked in a battle for control of my brain and my body, that he will never truly go away and leave me in peace. But I also know now that I’m capable of fighting these skirmishes with him each day, and that more days than not, I’m capable of winning them.
I started praying again yesterday.
I kneel down in the dirt, as close to her as I can. “I miss you, Saf. I miss you every day, sometimes so much that it actually hurts.” I take a deep breath. “But I’m going to keep fighting, and I’m going to keep living, in your memory. I’ll listen to music and laugh out loud, and I’ll even watch every Paul Newman movie that comes out, even though Paul McCartney is still the best Paul there is.” I can almost hear her laughter, loud and free, in my head. I touch the headstone gently, running a finger once more over the curling Arabic letters that spell out her name. “And we’ll meet again, someday, won’t we?” I whisper. “You’ll wait for me there, and it’ll be like we were never apart.”