“If I thought there was a chance,” he continues, “I would stay. Even with curfew.”
And she knows this is true. And the fact that he is ready to go means that it’s over. Delan will not come home today. So she stands, and the rushing water pushes her as she leaves.
Into the silence of the drive, Soran tells her they loved going to the cinema. His words feel loose, a string pulled from something in his mind, and the past tense bothers her—but of course he’s talking about his childhood, which is in the past. Everything is fine. There was just a mix-up. Confusion. The timing most likely was not right, Soran told her. It is all about timing.
“Delan talked about the movies,” she says. Films from the United States, Egypt, and India screened in his hometown. “There was a nut that people would chew—”
“Qazwan.”
“And people threw the shells on the ground.”
He smiles. “He did tell you. Walking the aisles, everyone heard you. You did not want to move. Even to go to the bathroom, you would not. Or everyone would turn and see you.”
“And the balcony seats were best. The most expensive.”
“Perfect view. But under the balcony—did he tell you this?” She shakes her head, and he continues. “There were little rooms, and whole families would bring dinner. A curtain covered the rooms and opened when the movie began. So it was private. Sometimes you might meet a girl there.” He smiles, embarrassed. “Girls and boys at a certain age do not go places together, as you noticed. So to meet a girl, it was in secret. And you had to leave before the movie ended, to not be caught.”
I never saw the end of To Kill a Mockingbird, Delan told her. But I saw the rest of it three times. It hadn’t made sense until now. “To Kill a Mockingbird. I had no idea what he meant. How it was even possible to not see the end of a movie three times.”
Now he smiles. “Mostly we had to sit in the front. Forty fils for those seats because your neck hurt at the end.”
“When he didn’t see the end, was that the girl he rode in a tank for?”
“The tank?”
“He said he rode through a restricted area in a tank to be with someone he loved.”
At first she thinks he’s going to say it never happened, and she realizes there’s a part of her that’s been waiting for that. Denials. Reveal of embellishments. But he continues.
“No. My mother’s sister, not the one you met in Baghdad, a different one, she’s political. When she was arrested, my mother went to visit her. Delan did not want her to be alone. But he was teaching theater in Baghdad. The only way past the restricted area was, well, not proper.”
To be with someone he loved. And she’d assumed it romantic—but it was his mother.
Then there is another question within her, and though she doesn’t even want to form the words, she forces them out. “Have they given him that bath? The sulfuric acid?”
He doesn’t look surprised. It’s not a shocking question, not out of the realm of possibility. “No. They would not have done that. He is better for them alive.”
“You promise?”
Now he turns to her, just for a second. “I would feel it if he were gone.”
And she believes him. Because she would feel it as well. A magnetic tug or a slow, dangerous drag in her heart.
The next morning, Lailan and Olivia are in the garden, shredding fallen bark into thin strips for a project of whose details Olivia isn’t certain. Soran talked to friends and learned that a man had come around asking about Delan, wanting to see a photo of him. He tells her this as she stands in the sun.
“It was the man who came to me,” he says. “Delan’s friends, they thought they were helping, showing him a photograph. But what they did was provide him with what Delan looks like. The man was a swindler,” he adds, and despite the situation, Olivia smiles, softened by the old-fashioned word that carries with it only a fraction of the evil it should.
Day six. A bludgeoning tally within her. There is no denying it. This is not normal. Choices may have to be made. Would she leave without him? She would have to. To go home and get the State Department involved. To gather his friends to action. To do something.
Soran snaps a baseball-size purple allium from its stalk. He touches Lailan on her shoulder to get her attention, presents the flower to her, and at once her eyes go to the plants behind him, to the one that’s now missing its flower. Her face collapses, lips quivering. Olivia stands too quickly, and the world tilts. Head down, she takes a moment before going to the girl but still feels off, strangely slow, as if she’s lifting her legs against an increasing gravity. Already Soran is kneeling and has his arms wrapped around Lailan, talking in a soft voice.
“What happened?” Olivia asks.
“I did not know what you were doing. And I took it from the plant.”
Their project. The materials they’ve collected: bark that was already off the trees, leaves that had fallen, twigs that had blown free from branches. An unspoken rule, it appears, was that their collections involved only what had already been cast off, just the discarded bits of the world.
Lailan points to her chest and says slowly, “I hate heart.”
Olivia starts to shake her head but stops when a pain sets in. “Why would you hate your heart?”
“This heart too big.”
Everything feels faint, smudged out. That saying, that was Olivia, wasn’t it? The day of the picnic. She’d told Lailan she had a big heart when she’d helped something. A caterpillar.
Olivia picks her up, and the girl hooks her legs around her waist. “Your heart is perfect. You’re sad for the flower, for the plant?”
Lailan nods into her shoulder, and Olivia tries
