Gardens of Water (56 page)

“So is Dylan’s mother in Heaven?” The boy looked up at him, his eyebrows knitted together. Sinan didn’t know. Christians were people of the Book, but they worshipped God imperfectly.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” Sinan said. “He was a good boy and now he’s in Paradise with God.”

“He wasn’t my friend,”
smail said. “Just a boy I played soccer with.

He was kind of mean.”

It was silent a moment. They watched the soccer game break up and the field became nothing but a bleached plot of dirt.

“If Derin’s in Heaven, then Sarah Han
m must be, right?”

“Yes,
smail. Sarah Han
m is in Heaven.”

“Good,”
smail said. “Good.” “Baba?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to die.” He kicked the ball once and it rolled to a stop a couple of feet away. “Sometimes when I sleep, I feel like I’m stuck under the broken houses again and I think I’m going to die. I’m curled up and the space keeps getting smaller and my legs and arms get squeezed tighter and tighter and I can’t breathe. It feels heavy and dark and lonely, and my bones hurt. I don’t want to die.”

He wanted to lie to his son, he wanted to tell him that he wouldn’t die, but the boy already knew the truth and there was no comforting him about this fact.

“I don’t want you to die, either,” Sinan said. “But we all die someday and then we get our reward.”

smail rubbed his knuckles across his eyes, and Sinan ignored the tears so that he wouldn’t embarrass his son.

“Let me tell you,
smail, about Heaven.” This, though, was a lie he could tell. One lie, especially a hopeful one, was okay. “Heaven is very green, the brightest green of the most beautiful trees. There are gardens of water with rivers and lakes and tall waterfalls that sparkle like a million cascading diamonds. When you peer into the water, thousands of brightly colored fish stare back at you. The mountains are tall and covered in snow, but it’s not cold. You can slide down the face of the mountains, but the snow is as warm as bathwater. The sun always shines, but it never hurts your eyes and the sky is so blue it looks like it’s been painted with hundreds of coats of paint. There is every kind of fruit you can imagine to eat, and even more you haven’t imagined yet, and all of them, every single one of them, tastes like candy.”

The boy was smiling now, looking out toward the cool white of the floodlit field, but his eyes looked distant, Sinan thought, distant as though he were looking beyond the field, out into the blackness of the nighttime sea, and imagining the perfect Heaven, building it in his mind out of the ugliness of this earth.

Chapter 42

REM SAT IN THE DARKNESS FOR A WHILE, JUST OUTSIDE THE
glare of the floodlights and watched her brother and her father. They kicked the ball to each other, and she felt a pang of sadness for her father—his foot made him so awkward and she suddenly felt embarrassed for him. But
smail was beautiful—the way he moved with the ball was so elegant for a young boy, the way he balanced on one foot and popped the ball back in the air with the perfect arc to land on his knee, the way he danced above the ball when dribbling. He was beautiful and she could, at this moment, understand her parents’ love for him because she felt it, too.

They played for a while and she tried to remember what it was like to play with her father. He had taken her fishing as a girl, in the stream that ran down from the mountains. She didn’t remember ever catching anything, but both of their lines dangled together in the rushing water, and the snowcapped mountains shone above them like white teeth in the sun. They took naps in the afternoon sun and he held her hand as he snored on the riverbank, and even though the soldiers were just on the other embankment and jets occasionally passed overhead, she felt safe and happy, as though these terrible forces had no power over her crippled father.

“
rem,” she heard a voice say.

She turned around and found Dilek rushing toward her. They hugged and kissed and held each other for a few moments.

“People said you were out,” Dilek said.

“Not for long,”
rem said. “What are they saying?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I know anyway,”
rem said.

“Ignore them. It’s mostly the
i
man teyzeler
with missing teeth and breasts down to here.” She held her hands like she were supporting heavy bags of water near her waist. “You weren’t asleep the other day, right?”

“I almost called to you, but it would have made my mother furious.”

“Dylan wants to see you.”

“I know. I want to see him, too.”

“No,” Dilek said. “He wants to see you tonight. He said you’d know where.”

rem watched her father and brother. They were sitting now, two small figures in a pool of blinding light, looking out at the dusty field. Her father placed his hand on
smail’s back and something about that made her want to cry. She should have been excited about Dylan, but all she could think was that she wanted that touch from her father, that public display of affection.

“My father wants to go back to the village,”
rem said. Saying it out loud for the first time made a lump rise in her throat. “He thinks there will be a Kurdistan or something stupid like that.”

“It’s no good here now,” Dilek said.

rem stared at her. “Do you know what it’s like there?” she said, anger in her voice. “There’s nothing there, Dilek. It’s desert and mountains and in the winter you’ve got to sleep next to goats because they’ll die outside in the cold. It smells like shit—all the time!”

Dilek laughed.
rem had never cussed before and it made her feel good in a guilty way.