Beside her, Soran leans forward to peer through her window. “If that is you, then I’m the one beside you.”
Outside the car, the sound booms, air wet with particles. Alongside the falls are vertical layers of rocks that jut straight up like stripes, and at the bottom the cascade widens, water like white streaks of fur on a giant splayed paw. She takes it in for a moment, searching for Delan, before they climb stairs that rise alongside the falls to a small platform with a view. Families on their way back down barely glance in their direction, but a few shake their heads and point to the sky in silent warning.
The face of Olivia’s watch glistens. “We’re early,” she announces, but Soran, too, is scanning the thinning crowds. “What if it rains? Will he not come?”
“If that man wants money, he will be here.”
There are chairs on the platform, and so they sit, from here able to see anyone arriving as well as the soldiers stationed on the road. The floor rushes with water. Each minute is a subtraction of possibility, a moment closer to something she can’t even consider.
And then they see him. Just the back of his head, those loose, dark curls. She stands, waving, about to call for him, until the man turns and it’s not Delan at all.
An unraveling inside her.
“Tell me about Lailan,” she says. A distraction. Even thoughts of the girl are a comfort.
When Lailan was a baby, Soran tells her, her mother and father and even Lailan were taken from the mountain village where they lived, a place that harbored Peshmerga.
“The Peshmerga are in the mountains, and villagers love them,” he says. “Everyone loves them. They are heroes. They protect us. But the government knows this, and they punish the villagers for helping them. There, like I said, you cannot have lights on at night or you are a target. Whole families have been taken as punishment for harboring Peshmerga. So Lailan’s father was killed. Given a sulfuric acid bath, if I venture to guess. But Lailan’s mother, she was kept with the other women and one day had a stroke—or that is what they thought. She slept and did not wake. Peaceful but with her baby left behind, only weeks old. Miriam was there. Miriam had just had a baby who was born into a room where the only cries came from the parents. So she didn’t have her child, but she did have her milk. And there was a baby who was hungry.”
Suddenly, as if pushed too far, the sky gives up, and rain starts to fall in a downpour. Quickly, Soran ushers Olivia toward an area covered with tin siding, and the furious pings against the makeshift roof battle the noise of the falls.
“Just like that,” Olivia asks, “she took her? Nobody cared?”
“Who would care? The soldiers who wanted the baby to stop crying? A baby needed a mother, and a mother longed for a baby. Kurds do that. They help another’s child. Shereena, you’ve not met her, she lives in Halabja with her husband, but her mother and my mother were very close. And her mother could not feed her, so my mother stepped in because I had just been born, and she had her milk. This storm will be fast. I can tell.”
Olivia faces the trees that obscure their view. “But we can’t see from here. If they came.”
He confirms this with a nod. “Then I will stand there.”
A spot where the roof doesn’t reach. Within seconds, his shirt is soaked and his hair pushed around his face. Olivia stands as close to him as possible while staying under cover, watching as he scans the base of the falls while being pummeled with rain. Despite everything, it makes her smile. This man who loves his brother like she does. She wants to wrap her arms around him and thank him, but he’d hate it. He’d turn shy and bashful and lose his words, a thought that makes her love him even more.
“What I was saying,” he continues, pushing his voice through the noise. “Shereena became what we call our milk sister. You cannot marry a milk sister or brother. Because you shared the same milk, you become related, even if not technical.”
“Did she feel like your sister?”
“She was our sister. Is. As far as we are concerned. Off-limits. And beautiful too. Bad luck for us, but it’s nice to have a sister.” After a moment, he adds, “Family sometimes just happens.”
Swiping his hair from his eyes, he leans forward. A flash of hope. Silently he watches something below, intent, and Olivia steps out into the rain, shielding her eyes with her hand.
“No, no,” he yells, reaching his arm to stop her. “It’s not him. Go back.”
There is only the roar of the falls and the beating of the rain. Still, he watches, his neck shining with water as he swallows, drops hanging from his chin. If he were crying, she couldn’t tell.
The sun, when it appears, emerges in a place that tells them the end of the day is approaching. Five days she’d not been able to imagine, but now there will be more. She takes it further: there’s a little over a week and a half left of her trip, and with that brings the question of what she’ll do if he’s still not returned, an idea that makes her physically sick. How could she leave?
When finally Soran stands, there is only a faint, half-hearted glare on the water. She won’t look at him, as if the lack of acknowledgment means it’s not time to go.
“Olivia,” he finally says.
Getting back in the car without Delan would be
