Minutes later, she watches as he pulls off his shirt. At the airport, she’d bought a white T-shirt and red sweatpants, since her nightgown is stuck with her luggage, wherever that is, and already she’s changed into them. When he moves his arm down, shirt in hand, the face of his wristwatch flashes with the streetlight’s glare.
“This is the last night we’ll be sleeping in the same bed,” he says, nodding to what she’s wearing. “Which means you wasted good money.”
A smile as she pulls the covers back. It’s supposed to fade, she knows. Chemistry lasts only so long. The fact that what’s between them is still so present, so remarkable, is a slight, nagging worry, as if its brilliance is only due to a dullness elsewhere within their relationship. Or, worse, perhaps he was like this with every woman he’s been with—an equally nullifying thought. But of course, this is what she does—invents problems—and so she wills herself to stop thinking.
“Will they be worried,” she asks, “when we don’t show up as planned?”
“Do you know there’s no word in Kurdish for plan? You get worried if someone’s on time, because it means they have bad news. Or they want something. Also, I said I might come. Not that I would.”
A car’s headlight flashes through his hair. “I think what’s most surprising is that I’m not surprised.”
“But if I say I’m coming,” he continues, getting in bed, “then the government ears that listen to the calls know I’m coming. And know to start watching us in case Aras visits. It’s fine. My mother knew what I meant.”
“And me? Did you say I might be there too?”
“Of course. Don’t worry. They’d expect you.”
“You and your American girlfriend.”
“They will love you.”
“But they’ll wish I was Kurdish.”
“They will love you,” he says again.
She curls into him, her hand on his chest, fingers dragging against him. Beyond their door is the rumbled roll of a suitcase being wheeled.
“Olivia.”
Her hand stills. He never calls her that. Always Liv. The sound of her full name from him is beautiful but unnerving, and his accent—slight after all these years—is somehow heavier on the O. It makes her think of all the accents he can do so well—Irish, English, South African, Spanish—which then makes her realize that in fact what she hears from him every day could be an accent, an act, or an effort.
“If I tell you something, will you not make a big deal of it? I just need to hear myself say it so I can decide what I think.”
She’s about to chide him—you only want to hear yourself talk?—till she realizes he’s serious. “What?”
“Last year, I had a dream.”
She waits. Delan is notorious for his dreams, long tales told over breakfast or in bars that involve symbols and metaphors, nature always a main character, so in-depth that there are intricate plotlines and places he’s never been to but where he returns. Almost always the dreams can be interpreted—by him—in such a way as to prove they came true. An entire catalog of hindsight prophecies.
“In the dream, my brother wasn’t in England. He was back in my hometown. Nailed to a tree in our yard. A big fig tree we have. Blood dripped down the trunk onto the rocks. He was left there, barely alive, and all I could hear was my mother’s voice calling me to help him, but I couldn’t move.”
Olivia waits for more, for the thunder or lightning or earthquake, the drama that always accompanies his dreams and renders them simply great tall tales. Instead she hears only his heartbeat, and there is a feeling that this dream is different from the rest. Still, she wants to reassure him, so she props herself up on her elbow and gives him her attention.
“Anxiety. You feel disconnected. They’re far away. That’s why you felt helpless, why you couldn’t move. You talk to your brother after the dream?”
“Sure. He was in London, happy. Everything was good. Good grades. He’s got a girlfriend there. The one, he said.”
“There you go.”
“But the dream was one of the reasons I agreed to go. My mother calling me. There was something wrong with my family. I feel like I should’ve told you. All disclosure.”
“You dream in metaphor. He’s not there, and your mother wasn’t needing you. That was guilt and your general inability to help, your worry that if something did go wrong, you couldn’t get there. And it’s full disclosure.”
“I have a feeling we shouldn’t go.”
Now she lies back, and as he speaks, she studies the tin-tiled ceiling.
“I read the dream wrong.”
“It was a dream.”
“We should stay here. Forget the trip.”
“You’re serious?”
“Would you do that? I would make it up to you. You and me, here. This in itself is amazing. Maybe it is fate. We just have to listen to what it’s saying.”
Destiny, he likes to go on about, referring to it like a friend he’d run into who’d whispered ale-soaked secrets late at night. But it’s strange, this twist in him. Usually so bold, he’s the first one out of the car, the first one through a door, the first to speak when tempers spark the air. That now he lies there, asking her what she thinks, admitting he’s essentially scared, it undoes something within her.
The part that will shame her later is that in this moment, there is a certain appeal of being, for once, the one who is brave. But it’s more than this. Only a month from now, she will sit in her father’s car back home in Washington, a May day of rain and not much else, and watch the drops hit the windshield. In one spot on the glass is something invisible—grease, a light dust—something that makes the drops skirt around it, dividing off into little jagged explorations down the glass. And it’s this moment in Geneva that she’ll think of, this seemingly invisible moment that caused the
