He has to send her away.
She resists. She won’t go. She’ll work for her keep—why won’t he let her work for her keep? Her uncle has lost his mind. What could a poor Jewish orphan possibly be to the king of Persia? He won’t pick her, and then what? So maybe he likes Marduk’s figs. He might sell Esther, or kill her. Her uncle laughs and says, Unlikely. What, then? Esther asks. What? But he won’t answer, and her aunt doesn’t meet her eyes. Please, she says, gesturing toward the tent’s open flaps, as if bickering in the camp is ever done in private. Itz lies meekly in one corner. He was down by the river earlier, hiding in the women’s washing, but then the Persians marched through, overturning buckets and barrels, and Itz was rolled home beneath a pile of bedclothes. His skin, which used to be brown, gives off a green pallor. Esther unties the flaps—made of bright, beautiful fabric her aunt’s mother’s mother wove—and lets them fall. The tent goes dark. “The night station,” she says, as it strikes her.
No one speaks.
She can’t believe at first what she’s hearing. She wants to shout, to tell them that her father was teaching her to read when he died, that her mother, when Esther was very small, tried to teach her a little magic. Her parents imagined that she would be like them—learned but modest, unconcerned with status or wealth. Better, in other words, than most people. But that will sound like boasting—it will only make her uncle happier to send her away. He doesn’t like her. How has she not realized this before? She feels ashamed, for herself and for her parents. She says, more quietly now, “This isn’t what they wanted.”
Still, no one answers.
Esther stamps her foot and her uncle slaps her.
A little while later, Esther and her aunt sit by the river as her aunt, humming, holds a wet rag to her niece’s cheek. It’s swollen already—Esther can feel the extra weight of fluid building under her skin. She scans the camp for Nadav. The sun has started to fall. Miles away, at the horizon, a red shimmer stands up off the sand. The last women doing washing today pack up their bundles and heft them back toward the camp. Her aunt stops humming to say, “I wish it were different.”
“Then make it different,” Esther says.
Her aunt resumes humming. She dips the rag again and wrings it, but this time, without warning, she pulls Esther’s head into her lap. Her hands are at once gentle, which is like her, and also firm, which is less like her, and Esther regrets her rudeness. Her aunt has been nothing but kind to her. She made space on her pallet for her, fed her, taught her to cook. When Esther began to bleed, a few months after she arrived, her aunt showed her what to do. She was simple but, unlike Marduk, she did not seem to resent that Esther was not. Esther understands this about her uncle now. Thinking of it heightens her shame. Water drips from her aunt’s rag into her mouth, and she swallows it helplessly, thinking of other people she may have misread. Maybe the other girls her age whisper behind her back: an orphan, unwanted. Maybe when Nadav kisses her he is mocking her, and she is too lustful to realize. Maybe he mocks her for her wanting, for the fact that she kisses him back without any official betrothal—maybe, when she tells him what her uncle is making her do, he won’t be surprised. Maybe the pride her parents instilled in her has made her blind.
Esther seizes when her aunt begins to stroke her forehead. It doesn’t seem right to allow herself this when tomorrow she will have to go. But her aunt’s fingers feel good, almost embarrassingly good, and she lets herself stay for a moment, curled on her side on the bank, and then, because she is so tired, she stays for another moment, and then another. Soon, she is sinking. She is swimming in a river, not this river but the river of her childhood, in the city; she is underwater but breathing, as easily as a fish, and seeing, through the sunlight that falls into the water, a pair of feet, illuminated, her father’s perhaps, or her mother’s. She is swimming fast for them when her aunt’s voice cuts in, silky and, for the first time, false. “Don’t worry. You are beautiful. Anything is possible.”
Of course, this is not true. Earth cannot turn into water. The sun cannot be caught. (Not yet.) Dust cannot be banished from the desert, only blown and swept into a different order.
She doesn’t sleep. Tomorrow, her uncle told her, he’ll take her to the palace gate. She should be ready, he said, in her aunt’s best cloth. She should comb her hair. He didn’t look at her. Then he looked. A feeling of some kind washed through his eyes: doubt, or maybe fear. Then he walked away, calling back, Comb your hair!
Esther twists on her pallet. She pulls her sheet down, then up. On either side of her, the girls breathe. Across the tent, the boys lie like cats, curled around each other, except for Itz. Itz is still lying in the corner by the flaps. Esther watches the long, still rope of him. Itz has always been her favorite. He reminds her of her father, his way of wandering, occupied by some idea, how little he cared what others did or thought. She has assumed a quiet greatness in Itz, something that will reveal itself as he grows older. Above him, on a clothesline, is her aunt’s muslin cloth, and draped next to that a linen belt. In Esther’s hand—gifted to her before bed—her aunt’s good comb, cut from a turtle’s
