“So all this time”—she smiles—“you’ve been the romantic.”
Juice courses down his wrist as he tears the orange into rough sections. Gently, he places a slice in her mouth. A burst of California and home and their life together that is so hard to comprehend at this moment but that she’s beginning to believe was fated from the start. And then it’s as if something is coiled within her, and suddenly she is all urge and takes his arm and runs her tongue along his skin. Orange, salt, dirt. She eyes him as she pauses at the base of his thumb and sees him smiling, enthralled.
“Keep going,” he says. “Please. But if they see us, it will be our wedding.”
She smiles. “That’s right. We’re engaged, aren’t we?”
“He told you. I knew he couldn’t resist. I should’ve even said we were married because none of this is proper, but I want that to be real. When that happens,” he adds.
In the field, she catches a flash of silver: the bride’s sisters and friends are dancing with knives. “They’re dancing with knives.”
He turns. “They’re about to cut the cake. That’s to let him know they can handle knives. That he should be good to their sister. That they will protect her.”
“A warning.”
“Kurds aren’t known for being subtle.”
When he leans in for a kiss, she stops thinking. There’s just the creek in the background, a sound that shimmers like a celebration, and him.
At Miriam’s front step, a bird calls in the falling evening. The street is empty, everyone tucked in for curfew, and the moon is heavy, resting on the bough of a fig tree. The party will continue tomorrow, Olivia’s told. A celebration that will last for days. We can go, Delan said, or we could stay behind and do other things in an empty house. A wink.
While Delan knocks on the door, Lailan is asleep against his brother’s shoulder. Already their parents have gone to their own house, and lamps flick on, the bright quiver of television on a wall. Discreetly, Olivia leans in to kiss Delan, and Soran shifts his weight and smiles to the door, pretending not to notice.
At last, Miriam is there. Soran turns to show her Lailan’s face, that she’s asleep, and as he does, the light from the street falls just so, and Miriam stops in her tracks. Her eyes take in her daughter, whose energy is at last spent, whose face is all ease and glow and who’s fallen into that delicate, unguarded sleep of a child. There is an echo of roundness in Lailan’s cheeks, a last vestige of infancy, and with one hand, Miriam reaches out to feel the soft curve, gazing with the awed amazement of a parent who is taken aback now and then by the wonder of their child. By the time Miriam reaches for the girl, Olivia’s lifted her camera from around her neck and is ready. The woman holds her daughter against her chest, her thick hand against the back of the girl’s head, and closes her eyes briefly, in prayer or thanks or maybe just simple happiness. Even as she takes the photo, Olivia knows the composition is off, but it doesn’t matter. All she wants is the look on Miriam’s face, her plain and ferocious love.
Back at the house, they watch a TV show that makes no sense to Olivia but is a comfort all the same and then find their ways to their rooms, the night cool enough to be back inside. Olivia undresses and puts on her white nightgown, the one Delan nicknamed her Little House on the Prairie nightgown, then stands at her window, facing the garden. The tops of leaves hold the sky’s sheen and again she thinks of his confession, that he’d always known, and then thinks of his kisses of cardamom and orange and the vow of tomorrow with the empty house.
He’s mere feet away. There’s a charge at her back with the thought, and so she goes to her door, quietly turning the knob and peering into the hall. There he is. Standing in the threshold of his own room, still dressed, smiling. With a finger to his lips, he motions for her to come to him so they’re farthest from his parents’ room, and right as she takes a step, a plane thunders overhead.
She freezes. Delan, even, looks up.
But it’s night. She remembers the security of the dark hours, the time Soran had said people were safe, but then remembers that the mountain villages are still bombed at night. But they’re not a mountain village and they’re not a target. Unless this is what Aras warned about. Without moving, she watches the ceiling until the sound fades. Another step, then another. Delan leans against the doorframe, watching her. Then he’s closing his door behind her.
In his room, she spots herself in his dresser mirror, caught in a gold light from his lamp. For a moment, she sees what he must, rather than what she’s always felt. Hair that’s a dark blaze to her elbows. A white cotton nightgown that’s actually quite sheer—the thin straps mere ribbons that fall loose on her shoulders. Hollows of her collarbone shadowed. He sees her looking at the mirror and moves behind her, eyes on their reflection as he rests his chin on her shoulder.
“You’ve always killed me with this thing,” he says, running his hand on the neckline of her nightgown.
Then his hand slips under the fabric, and she closes her eyes, breathing into the moment. “I thought you were making fun of it.”
“God, no. You have no idea what it’s done to me.”
With his hand on her thigh, he bunches the cotton of her nightgown, and she turns to him, lifting his shirt up and over his head and running her hand along his chest.
