“I got a dress,” she says. A stupid thing to say. She’s never been at a loss for words with him, and she’s never cared for dresses, but there is a vacancy inside that part that used to know how to be with him. In the distance, a flock of birds makes a vee that folds and reorganizes in a turn.
“I heard,” he says. “And I hear it’s beautiful.”
“Do you still want to go?”
He glances at her, confused. “Sure. It’s why we’re here.”
Please be okay, she thinks.
I love you.
But she says nothing, holding the words inside as if clenched within a fist, because I love you should not be said to someone as a means to keep them going or as reward for how far they’ve come, and if she says them now, she worries that’s how they’ll be heard. As incentive. Or apology. So she stays silent and steps to him, about to link her arm in his, but he moves away from her. Just slightly, his arm straightens at his side. The move, though barely perceivable, hits her, and she must watch the path as she walks. So this is what it is.
“You had a lot of time with my brother,” he says, moving a rock off the path with his foot.
“Not like that. Is that what you’re saying?”
“I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“Well, don’t.”
They fall to silence. Walking the garden, separate and fragile. Straightening plants, patting back soil that’s been dug up from animals, finding ways to occupy their hands and give their minds direction. The air is clean but surprisingly hot, rushed and rain-chased from a storm she’d not known had hit them. At the window, she catches Hewar watching them, then quickly lifting his binoculars to the trees.
“Your dad is spying on us.” When she turns, she sees Delan was watching her as well, and she realizes that they are observing one another, searching for injury.
Again, he shrugs. “We’re two ghosts walking in a garden. He’s watching to make sure we don’t disappear.”
“You don’t have to talk about it. If you don’t want.”
“I won’t. I haven’t. I never told you why I don’t go into the basement at home, did I?”
“I thought spiders. Ghosts.”
He looks at her, and a corner of his mouth raises. One of his first smiles. A half smile that slowly becomes full. “You thought spiders? You didn’t.”
“Or ghosts. I said ghosts too.”
“No,” he says. “No. Basements are where people are tortured.”
She flinches at the word, which was unexpected yet expected all at once.
“At some point,” he continues, smile gone, “everyone, I think, has been tortured. Even just a little.” With his fingers, he indicates a little, a measurement like half an inch. Then he motions next door. “Ask Miriam what she went through. No, don’t. It doesn’t matter. I’m here.”
She thinks of the man with one arm and wonders if she imagined it. Fever-wrought inventions. Delirium in its true sense. Testing, she says, “Not everyone made it.”
“No,” he says, but then his step falters, and she thinks he’s about to say more, to at last let the words out, but he’s looking to their house.
By the back door is a man in a Kurdish turban with a Brno Rifle. And above, in the open window of her room, another man with a rifle trained toward the garden. Olivia’s reaching for Delan, for his arm, when she spots someone else walking toward them with black curls that dip past his turban in a widow’s peak and a gold watch that catches the light in a moment of shock. His arms are open, and he is smiling.
And Delan, beside her, begins to cry.
She steps away. Goes to the side of the house where Gaziza has opened the door for her but is also watching her son. There is an embrace of the long-lost, of the rarely-seens. Olivia knows who this is—the man who need only glance at Delan’s scars to remember the blood—and she knows that this is who he needs right now. His best friend. And at this moment, she is not that person.
CHAPTER 10
The day grew hot. Delan spent the rest of the afternoon with Aras, drinking tea, eating, laughing, even, giving him the gift he’d brought and then huddling close, whispering in a fading light. Olivia gave them space and only went back outside long enough to meet him. The lines on Aras’s face looked deeper than they should be for someone Delan’s age, etched with a heavier kind of time, but his eyes were rich and brown and took her in as someone he’d expected to meet, which was the smallest, thinnest thread of comfort.
That evening, Delan seems lightened. A pain shared, perhaps. Understood. He jokes with Soran, whose car is parked outside under what looks like a desert of dust and a mountain of bird droppings. He helps in the kitchen, slicing cucumbers and adding more seasoning to the meat when his mother’s not looking, then holds the cage when his father lets the pigeon go, his face tilted toward the sky as the bird turns on a current. Still, there’s a distance Olivia feels with him. A space of uncertainty. When he looks in her direction, he won’t meet her eye.
After dinner, he quietly takes her aside.
“Was it him?” she asks, and he looks confused. “Was it Aras who got you out?”
“No. He said he didn’t know, that the second he found out, he came. But he told me to put the books in the ground. Now. The books we have that are—”
“Something’s going to happen.” A raid. Soldiers pounding on the door.
“He said to be safe. For all I know, nothing will happen. But we listen to him, of course.”
In the living room, Soran had showed her, there are certain shelves that would need to be emptied, all the books clustered
