A Sister to Honor (37 page)

Kaitlin brought out the clean cupcake pan. She was a midsized, muscular girl with curly brown hair flecked gold by the sun and skin that had tanned nut-brown. “Hey, Coach. Looking forward to training in a few weeks.”

“You know I can't coach the team till November.”

“And by then you'll be back in the A.D.'s office. You'll barely have time for us.”

Lissy's heart hurt, when her players talked this way. They saw only a division between innocent and guilty, victim and victimizer. They loved her. They would do their utmost for her. Last week, construction had begun on the fitness center. With Shahid exonerated, Lissy's series of missteps last winter presented itself to the world as gutsy instinct. Already Ernesto had promised he wouldn't arm-wrestle her. “I like my boys,” he'd said, “but I can't deal with these suits.” And Jeff Stubnick was threatening to withdraw his pledge if Coach Hayes was not reinstated. In her heart, she felt the pull toward her vocation. The joy of the kids—okay, they weren't kids, but once a day or twice a week they got to play as if they were. And she was good at managing the department, massaging the other coaches' egos, subduing resentments, stoking hopes. She was even good, apparently, at the Ask.

But she didn't know, yet, if she trusted herself to keep her priorities straight.

“You might go out for soccer in the fall,” she said to Kaitlin. “It would help your footwork.”

“Naw, Gus has got me playing tennis,” Kaitlin said. “We want to set up a club league. Mixed doubles.”

“Not a bad idea. How is Gus?”

They'd been dating, she knew, since midsummer. She wondered if Afia knew. It had to seem strange to her, the joining and unjoining of young Americans, meeting and parting as casually as bees and flowers.

“He's great. He aced the bio GRE. Oh, and he's been coaching Tom. Tom's dying to be a starter this year.”

“He keeps working, he'll have a shot. You?”

“I'm your girl. And we want the honor speech. You know, the one you always give.”

Lissy grinned, to hide the dagger of dread that drove home that word. “I'll tell you this,” she said. “You and the rest. It's going to be my honor to work with you.”

“Bye, Kaitlin!” Chloe singsonged.

“Happy birthday, Monkey,” Kaitlin said. She leaned down to kiss Chloe's head.

They called her Monkey, Chloe reported as they drove home, not because of Purple Monkey—whom she still held tight, ragged though he was getting—but because of the bars. And she wanted squash lessons. Didn't Mommy start playing squash when she turned four?

“Tennis at first, and I was five. And I didn't take lessons.”

“Why not?”

Because, Lissy thought, there was no money. And no thought of tall, willful little girls being athletes. “Sometimes,” she said, “it's fun to just play.”

“Kaitlin says you like to win.”

Lissy chuckled. “She should talk.”

Chloe had stopped wetting the bed. Today she was turning four, another petal unfolded from the swirled knot. They would all grow bigger soon enough, or older, ready for the perils of being fully open. Meanwhile Shahid was still dead, would always be dead, that bloom cut off in its first flowering.

She turned into the driveway. Balloons hung from the porch, a
Happy Birthday
banner from the lintel. Chloe clapped her hands. “Do you think there's cake?” she said. “Can we eat it outside?”

From trimming the hedges, Ethan straightened. He wore a faded Obama T-shirt and a pair of cutoffs. His legs, burnished with a summer tan, were ropy and taut. His neck glowed with sweat. He pulled off his glasses and wiped his face with a handkerchief from his back pocket. While Chloe banged into the house, he would pull Lissy to him and kiss her, his mouth smelling of beer and sweat, his shirt dampening hers. He knew, now, that she could lie to him. He knew and he loved her regardless. “We can eat wherever you like,” Lissy said to her daughter, and gratitude lifted her from the car, onto the green lawn.

•   •   •

I
n Nasirabad, Farishta put the finishing touches on her letter. She had written it on paper she'd found on her husband's desk and tucked it into an envelope from his drawer, adding two extra stamps from the roll in his basket of paper clips and tape. It didn't say much, only news of the farm, the girls' work in school, how Anâ was slowly failing. But Afia would know, at least, that someone still thought of her from home. Painstakingly she copied the English address from the slip of paper Afia had given her:
Afia Satar, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, USA
. She tucked it behind the stacks of spices she kept on the far side of the counter. Tayyab might see it, but he wouldn't disturb the paper without asking her.

Then she set to arranging her receiving room. With Ramadan over, her visitors would revel in the pleasure of cakes and tea in midafternoon. Sobia was too young for a commitment to marry. Everyone knew that. Her monthly cycle had started less than a year ago; she had just fasted through her first Ramadan. The visiting family—the Munawars, her husband's cousins through his grandfather, on his mother's side—was setting out more to prove to the community that Satar's second daughter was marriageable than to make an offer. Young Tahir Munawar was at the university in Peshawar, studying to be an engineer. His mother and aunties had plenty of time for teas, for the light conversations that led to negotiations. But it was generous of them to come first to Farishta. It reestablished her.

And in light of the request to come to tea, her husband had forgiven her. Forgiven her failure to bring up a virtuous daughter, her setting in motion the cascade of kismet that had left him without sons. More than any restored honor in the eyes of the community, his forgiveness gave her back her strength. He had been a good husband. Not as successful in business as her brother, but a landowner with a
khel
that went back many centuries on this land, and the quiet dignity that came with such history. He had not once held the specter of Badrai over her, but had treated her as his life partner from the day of their marriage.

Looking back, she saw she had begun to lose his respect when she failed with Khalid—failed to take the earnest, watchful, motherless boy and find a way to make him love her. It was easy to say it was Khalid who had brought on the tragedy in America. But the fact remained that Farishta had failed with him, and failed with her own child too, when Afia forgot everything she had been so carefully taught.

How hard it had been to turn her away! Afia had dared what Farishta could never have dreamed: to make the journey across oceans and continents, through a day and a night, unprotected, among men of no scruples and no honor. And not only that, but to walk alone into the most dangerous place on earth for a blackened woman, her family home. But to embrace her would have been to condemn her—and not only that, to put Sobia and Muska, and Tofan's livelihood, under threat. Foolish, foolish girl, that she thought her mother could do otherwise than to send her off with a warning. Some mothers—she thought of her sister-in-law Gautana—might have put an end to the girl themselves.

For weeks after, she had wondered. Was her girl on the streets of Peshawar, barefoot like the Gypsies, her thin hands held out for rupees? Had the money Farishta gave her helped her to safety? Or had she been beaten and robbed, like too many girls in the cities? Had she given up on everything and found her way to Karachi, where she could sell her body to the Iranians who brought their goods into port? Where could a girl go, without family?

Back to
Amreeka
, of course. Farishta should have known. But in all her prayers, all her appeals for a vision, a dream at least, where she could glimpse Afia and know what had become of her, she had never thought her daughter could find the strength to retrace her journey to the jaws of the beast who would devour her. Nor would she have known without the news that came, five weeks after Farishta watched Afia leave the courtyard forever, of Khalid's arrest.

Strange, so strange. The moment Tofan got the shocking news, he forgave Farishta. At first she had been puzzled to the point of alarm. Then the story filtered down, by way of Roshan to his son Azlan and then to Tayyab and back to Farishta: Khalid had been engaged in jihad, planning a great action against the military who rained drones down upon innocent families in the mountains. He might be tortured, he might be detained for life in
Amreeka
, but he was a hero. Everyone in Nasirabad sang his praises and gave credit to his family. Their reputation was restored.

Nothing in this fantastic story had mentioned Afia. But Farishta knew from her husband's grave, unspoken relief that the arrest of Khalid meant the end of retribution. It meant that Afia—though dead to them, as dead as Shahid in his cold grave half a world away—would live.
The greatest love is a father's love for his daughter.
And there were still the two girls at home to bring them hope. A month ago, Tofan had come back to Farishta's bed just as the sunset gave them permission, and he had tasted of her before he tasted of either food or water.

She went in to Tayyab. “The English cakes look very sweet,” she said.

The old man nodded and made a little bow. “Yes, memsahib, but we have the salty biscuits as well, and little pots of kheer.”

“Now, I don't want you carrying the tray. That's Sobia's job.”

“Yes, memsahib.”

Sobia was in her room, trying on one shalwar kameez after another. It was all still pretend, to the girl. For some time she had longed for her big sister and would retreat, weeping, to her new room when she was scolded for mentioning Afia's name. But now she was enjoying the role of the big sister, the first who would be married—not now, of course, too soon, but whenever her mother decreed it was time. She would go, then Muska would go, and then it would be only Farishta and her husband unless Khalid was released and made his triumphant return.

That last thought sent a shudder through Farishta's body. Strange, how Shahid had been a hero to lead an American squash team and be on his way to a Harvard degree; and now Khalid was a hero for supposedly performing jihad in America, where Omar's money had sent him. When Farishta thought of the Eid celebration that had ended Ramadan, she felt ill. It was the one time each year that Omar and her mother came to Nasirabad, for the great feast. Tofan had never liked his brother-in-law. He would have been relieved to skip the invitation, the lavish meal, Omar's flaunting of his cosmopolitan wealth. But if he ever came to understand why Farishta would not, could not, break bread again with her only brother, he would set out to kill Omar, and no power in the world would hold him back. So she had treaded softly; she had forced her bile down; remembering the children she had left, she had allowed her brother to cross her threshold without harm.

The sitting room was perfect. Sobia, in a cherry-red shalwar kameez with embroidery of gold and royal blue, was in the kitchen practicing tea service with Tayyab. Farishta stepped onto the veranda that looked over the valley and the mulberry trees, stripped now of their fruit. Sometimes, when she squinted, she could see Shahid and Afia climbing the trees barefoot with their baskets, gobbling as many berries as they gathered. Now, along the dirt road that ran by the orchard, she spied a village boy on a bicycle, sheaves of sugarcane strapped to the back fender. He was going into town, to supply the sugarcane wallah. “Boy!” she cried out. “Boy, come here!”

While the boy pushed his bicycle up the long slope, Farishta retreated to the kitchen. “What do you think, Moray?” Sobia said, turning in her outfit.

“Pretty,” Farishta said. “But let's curl a couple of locks”—licking a finger, she drew her daughter's bangs out from her dupatta and wrapped them into spirals—“to decorate your forehead. I'll be right back,” she said.

She pulled the stamped envelope out from behind the spices. If Tayyab saw her, he gave no sign. He was, he could always claim later, half blind. From the drawer she pulled out a ten-rupee coin. Then she strode quickly back to the veranda. The boy had leaned his bike against a tree and made the rest of his way up on foot. “Yes, memsahib?” he said eagerly. For the Satars were still, or again, known as a big family, and if the mistress of the family wanted you, it must be for a lucrative errand.

“Tuck this envelope in your kameez,” she told the boy. “But do not get your sweat on it. When you pass the post box by the sugarcane wallah, you take this out and pass it through the slot. If anyone asks you, you say you have written away to a contest. You understand?”

The boy nodded. She slipped the envelope under his shirt, by his thin chest—thin as Shahid's, at that age—and offered the coin. His eyes danced. “Allah's blessings on you, memsahib,” he said.

“Allah hafez,” Farishta said. And she watched him spin away down the road, carrying her words across the world to her child.

A SISTER TO HONOR

by Lucy Ferriss