A Sister to Honor (34 page)

She felt her jaw clench. Grief crystallized to a point. “Afia did not kill Shahid,” she said.

“Yeah, I got that. I'm on your page about that.”

“So someone else did. Right? That guy who talked to me at the trial. Who came to the door. He's a murderer, and he's out there. And Shahid is dead. And I loved him, Ethan. Not just as a player. But as a boy. As a man. Not like a lover but—but like something. And I want—”

A wave of frustration shook her body. She butted her head into Ethan's chest. As he reached up to stroke her hair, the truth pushed its way out.

“Justice, dammit,” she said. “I want blood.”

T
he sun rose. The hours crawled by. The sun set. The only advantage, as far as Afia could see, of attending classes was that being at Smith gave her a place to sleep away from Khalid.

Poised over the river, she had been ready for death. A moment in the cold water, a brief struggle. But he had plucked her away—her brother, her killer, her brother's killer, and now . . . her husband? That was death, truly. To marry Khalid. To marry your murderer. If the man who ran from Damascus to Aleppo had been a woman, would this have been waiting for her? Death, transformed into a bridegroom?

But oh, how it fit with tradition. If she told Patty the circumstances of her engagement, Patty would be horrified. Marry your first cousin? Marry your brother's murderer? And yet how many thousands of marriages had been contracted out of just those relations? Marrying such a man as Khalid was a time-honored solution. It kept the
khel
together. It prevented
badal
and further bloodshed. It produced children who would bind the old wounds.

But how could she. How could she.
Oh, Shahid lala
, she whispered to herself in the shortening nights, but she had run out of things to say to her brother's ghost.

Her only hope lay in the dilemma of money. Khalid wanted—he had told her this over a cheap dinner at a restaurant that billed itself as Indian but was run by a family from Karachi—to bring them both home to Nasirabad in time for Eid, at the end of Ramadan, in June. There, he would ask Baba formally for her hand. It was not proper for Afia to marry for a year after her brother's death, but as an engaged woman she could be welcomed back into the family. Khalid would leave the training camp, finish his degree. Eventually he would take over the farm, while Afia remained safely in purdah.

But Baba did not and must not know that Khalid was in the United States. And Khalid knew better than to leave Afia alone here. She was weak; she had demonstrated that; she would only bring further shame on their heads, and he would have to end her life. Khalid was thinking aloud as he said these things. His fingers had drummed noisily on the Formica tabletop. He needed money, he said, and he needed to get it here, where he could keep an eye on her. He wanted to know her class schedule; the names of her friends; the code for her dorm building. When Afia, knowing the answer, asked what financial resources he'd found to bring him to the United States in the first place, he told her not to be wondering. That funding option, he said, was closed now. And Afia, being the foolish woman she was, had wasted the money Shahid had left them.

The money Shahid left us.
She shuddered later, remembering those words. As if Shahid were not her one full, beloved brother and Khalid's bloody victim, but a rich elder who had endowed them with a way back home. She should have been relieved, she supposed, to learn that Uncle Omar wasn't firing advice, or funds, from across the globe. Relieved that Khalid was scheming ways to get money and not ways to kill her. But rather than death, she faced this limbo: the days, the nights, the classes where she failed to concentrate. She faced the meals Khalid insisted on, twice a week, where he stared at her the way she had seen Gus's lizard stare at a cricket before darting out its tongue to snap the insect into its mouth. Oh, where could she go, where? Not to Coach Hayes, whose life she had already almost destroyed. Not to Gus, who no longer loved her. Except for the dinners with Khalid, she had left campus only once, with Patty, to buy tampons at the Price Chopper, where she got to see her aunties. But as soon as she had told them of her engagement, they had gotten so happy and excited, she couldn't bear to explain the stranglehold she felt herself in.

At least, with Khalid, she would be able to go home. So she told herself, over and over. Home to Moray and Baba, to Sobia and Muska, to Lema . . . if she were allowed to see Lema, which she never would be.

Then Khalid would drive her back to the campus in the rental car that he seemed to be sleeping in—it reeked of body odor and stale food—and watch as she reentered her dorm. He kept his gun tucked into his pants at all times. Once, as he went inside a gas station to pay for his gas, she opened the glove box to see the rental agreement, in case he would be arrested for stealing the car. And there, in the shallow pocket, lay another gun. A small black one, like a toy. She lifted it out; it lay heavy in her palm. Then, as she saw him walking back, she slipped it into her pocketbook and shut the glove box. Now, at least, she had a way to end her own life quickly, if she could only summon the courage.

•   •   •

A
fia, stay a minute,” Sue Glasgow said this afternoon as they all rose from their desks in Organic Chemistry. It had been more than two weeks since the awful moment on the bridge. Classes were starting to wrap up. Afia had shifted to the back of the room, where she hoped she would not be called on. Now she gathered her library textbooks and made her way to the front.

“I have failed the exam,” she said as Sue Glasgow lifted a sheet from the pile on her desk. She had been allowed to take the midterm late, but the questions had swum in her vision.
Suppose you allowed cyclohexene to react with Br
2
in water. What would you expect?
You would expect nothing, because you would be in purdah, pregnant with your enemy's child. “I am sorry.”

“I'm not worried about the exam, Afia. I'm worried about you. You had a terrible winter. Terrible. And now you look ill. Should you be in school right now?”

“Professor Glasgow.” Afia tugged at her hijab. She felt warm on her neck. “I have nowhere else to go.”

“Well, there's the hospital.”

A little snort escaped her. “They have no medicine for me, Professor.”

“Talk to me about it. Afia, please. I know you're estranged from your family, but—”

“It is private, Professor. I cannot.”

“I thought we were friends.”

Afia managed to lift her eyes. Friends? Here stood this well-meaning, brilliant teacher, ignorant as a rock. “Perhaps I should not come to class—”

“That's absurd.” Sue Glasgow waved the sheet, filled with red
X
's, then slid it across the desk at Afia. “I'm going to speak with Dean Myers,” she said.

Afia nodded. She took the exam, its F circled at the top. She stepped out into the cool sunshine. How startling it had been, more than a year ago when she first came here, to see bright blue sky and yet walk out into frigid air. Now she was used to it. She pulled her wool cardigan close. Three months ago, she would have felt devastated to hear Sue Glasgow speak to her that way. Now it felt like her missing toe, an absence of what should have been pain.

Her eyes were on the walkway when she heard a familiar voice. “I thought you agreed I could be, like, your brother.”

She looked up. “Afran!”

He held out a cardboard cup. “Tea?”

She surveyed the area before accepting it. Khalid had not admitted watching her movements on campus, but neither had he told her what he did all day, except to say he was getting the money. She imagined he was dealing drugs, up at the state university where there were plenty of buyers. Looking nervously around, all she saw were American girls chattering as they hustled between classes. “What—what brings you here?” she asked.

But his eyes had followed hers, flicking left and right. “Let's step into another building,” he said.

“Afran, I cannot invite you—”

“Not your dorm. Here.” He gestured with his head at the library. “They let you bring tea partway inside. I checked.”

The feeling as she followed him up the steps to the library was so alien that she had trouble naming it. Happiness. She was happy to see him. Happy as she would not have been to see Coach Hayes, or even Gus, the thought of whom made her gut constrict in shame and confusion. Afran found a bench in a corner outside the main desk and motioned her to sit. She uncapped the tea and sipped. It was hot, sweet, spiced. They called this
chai
in America, not knowing that all tea, in Pakistan, was chai. It tasted delicious, and she said so.

Afran nodded. He'd reverted to his squash clothes, the blue warm-up jacket and loose pants. The uniform Shahid had died in. He looked older than she remembered him. Quieter, somehow. “Coach might lose her job,” he said, as if this were an answer to a comment about tea.

“She did not think she would.”

“That's because she's being nice to you.” He drank the tea the way men did from a teacup in Nasirabad, lifting the rim with thumb and fingers and sucking out the liquid. “You going to call her?”

Afia felt her neck grow hot. Of the unanswered calls on her mobile, at least half were from Coach Hayes. Before, she had been the one to prod the coach into taking her to a place of safety. This time, she feared, the opposite would be true. And yet of all the people Afia knew in America, Coach Hayes was the one she wanted most to talk to. Like her, Coach had loved Shahid first and foremost. If anyone could see a way to honor Shahid now, it would be Coach. “I will try,” she said lamely. “I have been so busy.”

“Busy? Like, with school?”

“School, yes.” She stared into the dark tea, the silhouette of her face reflected on its surface.

“No more . . . legal stuff.”

“No.”

“You're missing Shahid, aren't you?”

“Every day.” For a moment, the image of Shahid flung backward onto the snow floated into her mind. They came, these awful apparitions, and she squeezed her eyes shut and tried to make them go away.

“Coach doesn't think you killed him.”

“Coach does not know everything.”

“Maybe because you don't tell her.” Afran set his cup down. He turned to her. “You still engaged?”

“I . . .” Her hand holding the tea shook; she steadied it with the other hand. Then she remembered: Zardad. “Yes,” she said, her voice tight. “Still engaged.”

“To some guy in Pakistan, Gus said.”

She hesitated. But they would be in Pakistan, when it really happened. “Yes.”

“And what about your brother? Your other one, I mean.”

“I don't understand you, Afran.”

“I think you do.” He reached across the bench. He touched her fingers. Even as a charge of fear went through her, she didn't draw them away. “You're hiding something, Afia. Shahid was hiding things, too. Not your brother—he told me you guys had a brother. But he hid other stuff. And it didn't work out very well.”

She couldn't lie to him. Any moment now, he would say again,
your other brother
, and her flinch would give her away. “This is to do with me only,” she said. “And it is for the best, Afran. No one else is at risk—”

“You think not?” He withdrew his fingers. He was shaking his head quickly, as if to rid himself of confusion. “Then why is Gus getting this creepy feeling?”

“What creepy feeling?”

“Like he's being followed everywhere. Like this car that ran a red light in Pittsfield, right where he was crossing the street from his doctor's office, wasn't just some crazy dude. Another guy yanked him back or he'd've been dead. I mean, if anyone's got a right to paranoia, it's our boy Gus. On the other hand”—he tipped his head and smirked—“I know the rule.”

She couldn't help herself. Her heart burned. “What kind of car?”

“Ah. So that matters.”

She pressed her lips together. She needed to think.

“The rule,” Afran went on, “is you don't just punish the girl. Not if you want a clean slate. The guy has to go, too. Even if they're not . . . you know. The fact is it happened. To make it unhappen, you've got to go after everyone.”

She struggled to stick to a lie that kept everyone safe. A story where there was no Khalid, no murder of Shahid, no engagement to Khalid. Any other story put Afran, too, in danger. She looked at him. He had offered to be her brother. He did not look afraid. But he was not her brother, and this
badal
was not his. “Tell Gus,” she said, “I will phone him.”

“That'd be a start.”

Afia reached out and took Afran's hand. She squeezed it too hard, and for a very long time.

•   •   •

S
he needed a plan. It would be weeks before Khalid earned—or begged, or stole—enough to fly them both to Nasirabad. Weeks of Khalid's regarding her like brother and sister, like warden and captive, before he could marry her and possess her body. During those weeks, it was unlikely she could meet Gus for tea, go with Taylor to watch him play squash, even walk down the sidewalk by his side without Khalid being driven to murderous rage. No, worse. The longer Khalid needed to guard her, here, the more his
badal
would turn toward Gus, the man who had seduced her and paid no price beyond a broken leg and a lost home. And Ramadan would only stiffen his resolve.