Gardens of Water (20 page)

“Always spending his time at the
k
raathane
playing cards with the men,” she said. “What’s wrong with me?”

Dilek removed her hand from her mother’s shoulder, and placed her arms across her chest as though hugging herself.

“Your father’s a good man,” Yasemin said to
rem. “He’s always home with his family.”

“Anne,” Dilek said to her mother. “Please don’t speak poorly of father.”

“Do you know what it’s like?” she said, snapping her head toward Dilek. “Always gone to play cards, always gone on business, always gone into town.” She pushed her palms against her eye sockets. “He had a woman, I tell you.”

“He didn’t,” Dilek said. “Now stop it.”

“He did,” she said. “I know it. Always gone playing cards. Humph! If he’d been home,” she said, her face in her hands now. “He’d be here now.”

“I know, Anne,” Dilek said, stroking her shoulder again. “I know.”

They sat for a while, Dilek trying to calm her mother, and
rem staring at the Ferris wheel cars still hanging above the water. The submerged cars, mirror images of the ones above, floated beneath the surface like huge, brightly colored beetles.

“
rem and I are going for a walk.”

“Yes,” Dilek’s mother said. “Leave me here alone.”

“I’ll be back.”

“Yes, yes.”

Dilek took
rem’s hand and held it to her cheek as they walked along the broken waterfront. The sun was up now and the morning breeze stirred the smell of rot and gasoline.

“She’s driving me crazy,” Dilek said. “She won’t even let me cry for him. She just says, ‘You wouldn’t be crying if he had been home.’”

Then Dilek cried and
rem held her and pulled her head to her shoulder and watched buckets of ice cream float out from a half-submerged ice-cream shop. Some of the buckets had burst open and green swirls of pistachio glistened on the surface of the water. A moment later a bloated body floated through the swirls, its clothes bursting at the seams, its skin as white and pasty as bread dough.

Dilek tried to pull away from
rem, but
rem held her a few moments longer until the body bobbed past. “No one can protect us,” Dilek said, as they continued down the sea walk, the cement striated with cracks. “No one.”

rem blinked, and across the black screen of her closed eyelids the white skin of the floating body appeared. She tried to ignore it, but she was suddenly scared it was Dylan and she tried to remember, tried to see the body clearly to be sure it wasn’t him.

“I realize that now,” Dilek continued. “I used to think my father could keep me safe.”

They stopped at a four-foot fissure in the walkway. Three chickens clucked past and flapped themselves into the air just long enough to reach the other side.

“How’s Ay
e?”
rem asked. She had seen her friend alive just after the quake, but she hadn’t seen her since.

“She’s fine; her family is fine. Her parrot died.”

“Well, at least we won’t have to listen to that horrible squawking anymore.”

Ay
e used to hang the caged bird from a hook outside her bedroom window. From that perch two stories above the street, the bird let out the most horrible noise that was like listening to a child’s colicky tantrum. The water boys hated it because the parrot had a habit of aiming its droppings at the part in their slicked-back hair.