Her eyes go to the gift Hewar gave her, still wrapped in brown paper, propped against the wall by her desk. Wait, then, Rebecca said when Olivia admitted she was afraid to open it. Wait till the trip doesn’t make you fucking cry and then open it, because he intended it as a good thing, not something to make you sad. But even looking at the brown paper, now dulled with a settling of dust, makes her want to cry, so she grabs the package, opens her closet, and sets it toward the back. Passing her dresser, she sees the gold and silver chains and beads that hang on a brass necklace tree. Lailan. What’s she doing now? Maybe collecting bits and pieces for her art. Sitting on the path below the pomegranate tree, watching the leaves turn against a fading day. Or feeding the chukars leftover fruit. Back in bed, Olivia closes her eyes and remembers the smell of the melon the birds loved, the hint of pineapple from the white flesh. She sees the orange netted rind held in Lailan’s fingers, the small beds of her nails. Hi-lo. Even the memory of the word is an undoing.
A sound starts up. Coyotes. A pack of them. Yipping. A haunting call that means they’ve got something. Someone’s cat, most likely. But they have to eat too, Delan always said. This is life. This sound—there used to be a time when it was the most chilling thing she’d heard in the night. Now she listens to their celebratory chaos, the clamor that says something horrible has happened, and thinks it is night, because she knows that night is when danger slips in, unseen.
A few days later, all the photos that were submitted are displayed in a long glass case that lines the hall. The images catch her off guard. She’d forgotten this would happen. People cluster, whispering, pointing, and boasting. And though there are no names attached to the images, just numbers below each entry, it makes no difference because hints by subject or location provide obvious clues. Kyle Rudger and his LAPD photos. Hannity and his street scenes. Trevor Miller and his dying grandmother. And Olivia’s. Scattered throughout the others, each of her photographs is of Kurds. Obvious. Seeing them there, it’s as if a fierce and sudden wind has rushed around her. Everyone, she thinks, is looking at her. She will not meet their eyes, so she studies the other entries, some that were shot with wide-angled lenses and seem to ramble, jumbled with subject matter. Others that are landscapes with the horizon smack in the middle so any tension is erased and the composition’s static. And many that are portraits with the subject’s shadows pointing in different directions from too many sources of light. When she turns back to her photos, it’s as if she’s seeking the comfort of friends. And indeed she does feel comforted, just looking at their faces, but then gutted by them here, on a wall.
Delan, at their home in Los Angeles, the morning he sat reading the paper with tears on his face. His father, wearing the Kurdish turban, watching the bird outside, eyes bright with bliss as he found beauty in a world that should’ve proven anything but. And the family, sitting on the floor of the kitchen during the raid, faces turned to the window, the knobs of the stove bright. None of the photos blazes with risk or circumstance, but every image made her cry, and she figured perhaps even a tiny bit of her emotion would find its way to others.
Now she sees her mistake. People look at her on her way to her desk, and they’re disappointed. Here she came back as if shell-shocked and provided only what amounts to portraits. They expected danger and death. Guns and explosions. A justification for her difference, for the change in her that’s had her keep to herself, that’s made her grit her teeth and stare back at people whose eyes she should avoid. Even that beige-haired office manager had whispered a warning as if she’d sensed Olivia nearing a cliff. Careful now.
She wants to go home. But there’s too much to do. Before her is her steno pad with a to-do list that’s fourteen items long, and as she tries to make sense of the words, she realizes it’s someone else’s because the handwriting is all sloppy loops, everything curling and tumbling and on a slope as if gathering speed on an incline. But then she focuses and recognizes the day’s chores as her own. Flips back a handful of pages and sees that it is in fact hers, that she is the person with the untrained hand and the scattered mind.
For a moment, she sits with her confusion. Then gets up, needing coffee.
In the break room, Hannity and Miller are loading doughnuts onto plates.
Miller looks up, sugar on his lips. “Our Middle Eastern correspondent
