And the Mountains Echoed (51 page)

“You don't think?”

“He's serving tea!”

“Yes, but that was—what do you call it?—it was from the past. From before. It was a …”

Flashback
, I mouth into my coffee cup.

“The game show is now, Abdullah. And when he was serving tea, that was before.”

Baba blinks vacantly. On the screen, Jamal and Salim are sitting atop a Mumbai high-rise, their feet dangling over the side.

Pari watches him as though waiting for a moment when something
will open in his eyes. “Let me ask you something, Abdullah,” she says. “If one day you win a million dollars, what would you do?”

Baba grimaces, shifting his weight, then stretches out farther in the recliner.

“I know what
I
would do,” Pari says.

Baba looks at her blankly.

“If I win a million dollars, I buy a house on this street. That way, we can be neighbors, you and me, and every day I come here and we watch TV together.”

Baba grins.

But it's only minutes later, when I am back in my room wearing earphones and typing, that I hear a loud shattering sound and Baba screaming something in Farsi. I rip the earphones off and rush to the kitchen. I see Pari backed up against the wall where the microwave is, hands bunched protectively under her chin, and Baba, wild-eyed, jabbing her in the shoulder with his cane. Broken shards of a drinking glass glitter at their feet.

“Get her out of here!” Baba cries when he sees me. “I want this woman out of my house!”

“Baba!”

Pari's cheeks have gone pale. Tears spring from her eyes.

“Put down the cane, Baba, for God's sake! And don't take a step. You'll cut your feet.”

I wrestle the cane from his hand but not before he gives me a good fight for it.

“I want this woman gone! She's a thief!”

“What is he saying?” Pari says miserably.

“She stole my pills!”

“Those are hers, Baba,” I say. I put a hand on his shoulder and guide him out of the kitchen. He shivers under my palm. As we
pass by Pari, he almost lunges at her again, and I have to restrain him. “All right, that's enough of that, Baba. And those are her pills, not yours. She takes them for her hands.” I grab a shopping catalog from the coffee table on the way to the recliner.

“I don't trust that woman,” Baba says, flopping into the recliner. “You don't know. But I know. I know a thief when I see one!” He pants as he grabs the catalog from my hand and starts violently flipping the pages. Then he slams it in his lap and looks up at me, his eyebrows shot high. “And a damn liar too. You know what she said to me, this woman? You know what she said? That she was my sister!
My sister!
Wait 'til Sultana hears about this one.”

“All right, Baba. We'll tell her together.”

“Crazy woman.”

“We'll tell Mother, and then us three will laugh the crazy woman right out the door. Now, you go on and relax, Baba. Everything is all right. There.”

I flip on the Weather Channel and sit beside him, stroking his shoulder, until his shaking ceases and his breathing slows. Less than five minutes pass before he dozes off.

Back in the kitchen, Pari sits slumped on the floor, back against the dishwasher. She looks shaken. She dabs at her eyes with a paper napkin.

“I am very sorry,” she says. “That was not prudent of me.”

“It's all right,” I say, reaching under the sink for the dustpan and brush. I find little pink-and-orange pills scattered on the floor among the broken glass. I pick them up one by one and sweep the glass off the linoleum.

“
Je suis une imbécile
. I wanted to tell him so much. I thought maybe if I tell him the truth … I don't know what I was thinking.”

I empty the broken glass into the trash bin. I kneel down, pull back the collar of Pari's shirt, and check her shoulder where Baba
had jabbed her. “That's going to bruise. And I speak with authority on the matter.” I sit on the floor beside her.

She opens her palm, and I pour the pills into it. “He is like this often?”

“He has his spit-and-vinegar days.”

“Maybe you think about finding professional help, no?”

I sigh, nodding. I have thought a lot lately of the inevitable morning when I will wake up to an empty house while Baba lies curled up on an unfamiliar bed, eyeing a breakfast tray brought to him by a stranger. Baba slumped behind a table in some activity room, nodding off.

“I know,” I say, “but not yet. I want to take care of him as long as I can.”

Pari smiles and blows her nose. “I understand that.”

I am not sure she does. I don't tell her the other reason. I can barely admit it to myself. Namely, how afraid I am to be free despite my frequent desire for it. Afraid of what will happen to me, what I will do with myself, when Baba is gone. All my life, I have lived like an aquarium fish in the safety of a glass tank, behind a barrier as impenetrable as it has been transparent. I have been free to observe the glimmering world on the other side, to picture myself in it, if I like. But I have always been contained, hemmed in, by the hard, unyielding confines of the existence that Baba has constructed for me, at first knowingly, when I was young, and now guilelessly, now that he is fading day by day. I think I have grown accustomed to the glass and am terrified that when it breaks, when I am alone, I will spill out into the wide open unknown and flop around, helpless, lost, gasping for breath.

The truth I rarely admit to is, I have always needed the weight of Baba on my back.

Why else had I so readily surrendered my dreams of art school,
hardly mounting a resistance when Baba asked me not to go to Baltimore? Why else had I left Neal, the man I was engaged to a few years ago? He owned a small solar-panel-installation company. He had a square-shaped, creased face I liked the moment I met him at Abe's Kabob House, when I asked for his order and he looked up from the menu and grinned. He was patient and friendly and even-tempered. It isn't true what I told Pari about him. Neal didn't leave me for someone more beautiful. I sabotaged things with him. Even when he promised to convert to Islam, to take Farsi classes, I found other faults, other excuses. I panicked, in the end, and ran back to all the familiar nooks and crannies, and crevasses, of my life at home.

Next to me, Pari begins to get up. I watch her flatten the wrinkles of her dress, and I am struck anew by what a miracle it is that she is here, standing inches from me.

“I want to show you something,” I say.

I get up and go to my room. One of the quirks of never leaving home is that no one cleans out your old room and sells your toys at a garage sale, no one gives away the clothes you have outgrown. I know that for a woman who is nearly thirty, I have too many relics of my childhood sitting around, most of them stuffed in a large chest at the foot of my bed whose lid I now lift. Inside are old dolls, the pink pony that came with a mane I could brush, the picture books, all the Happy Birthday and Valentine's cards I had made my parents in elementary school with kidney beans and glitter and little sparkling stars. The last time we spoke, Neal and I, when I broke things off, he said,
I can't wait for you, Pari. I won't wait around for you to grow up
.

I shut the lid and go back to the living room, where Pari has settled into the couch across from Baba. I take a seat next to her.

“Here,” I say, handing her the stack of postcards.

She reaches for her reading glasses sitting on the side table and yanks off the rubber band holding the postcards together. Looking at the first one, she frowns. It is a picture of Las Vegas, of Caesars Palace at night, all glitter and lights. She flips it over and reads the note aloud.

July 21, 1992

Dear Pari
,

You wouldn't believe how hot this place gets. Today Baba got a blister when he put his palm down on the hood of our rental car! Mother had to put toothpaste on it. In Caesars Palace, they have Roman soldiers with swords and helmets and red capes. Baba kept trying to get Mother to take a picture with them but she wouldn't. But I did! I'll show you when I get home. That's it for now. I miss you. Wish you were here
.

Pari

P.S. I'm having the most awesome ice cream sundae as I write this
.

She flips to the next postcard. Hearst Castle. She reads the note under her breath now.
Had his own zoo! How cool is that? Kangaroos, zebras, antelopes, Bactrian camels—they're the ones with two humps!
One of Disneyland, Mickey in the wizard's hat, waving a wand.
Mother screamed when the hanged guy fell from the ceiling! You should have heard her!
La Jolla Cove. Big Sur. 17 Mile Drive. Muir Woods. Lake Tahoe.
Miss you. You would have loved it for sure. Wish you were here
.

I wish you were here
.

I wish you were here
.

Pari takes off her glasses. “You wrote postcards to yourself?”

I shake my head. “To you.” I laugh. “This is embarrassing.”

Pari puts the postcards down on the coffee table and nudges closer to me. “Tell me.”

I look down at my hands and rotate my watch around on my wrist. “I used to pretend we were twin sisters, you and I. No one could see you but me. I told you everything. All my secrets. You were real to me, always so near. I felt less alone because of you. Like we were
Doppelgänger
s. Do you know that word?”

A smile comes to her eyes. “Yes.”

I used to picture us as two leaves, blowing miles apart in the wind yet bound by the deep tangled roots of the tree from which we had both fallen.

“For me, it was the contrary,” Pari says. “You say you felt a presence, but I sensed only an absence. A vague pain without a source. I was like the patient who cannot explain to the doctor where it hurts, only that it does.” She puts her hand on mine, and neither of us says anything for a minute.

From the recliner, Baba groans and shifts.

“I'm really sorry,” I say.

“Why are you sorry?”

“That you found each other too late.”

“But we
have
found each other, no?” she says, her voice cracking with emotion. “And this is who he is now. It's all right. I feel happy. I have found a part of myself that was lost.” She squeezes my hand. “And I found you, Pari.”

Her words tug at my childhood longings. I remember how when I felt lonely, I would whisper her name—
our
name—and
hold my breath, waiting for an echo, certain that it would come someday. Hearing her speak my name now, in this living room, it is as though all the years that divided us are rapidly folding over one another again and again, time accordioning itself down to nothing but the width of a photograph, a postcard, ferrying the most shining relic of my childhood to sit beside me, to hold my hand, and say my name. Our name. I feel a tilting, something clicking into place. Something ripped apart long ago being sealed again. And I feel a soft lurch in my chest, the muffled thump of another heart kick-starting anew next to my own.

In the recliner, Baba props himself up on his elbows. He rubs his eyes, looks over to us. “What are you girls plotting?”

He grins.

Another nursery rhyme. This one about the bridge in Avignon.

Pari hums the tune for me, then recites the lyrics:

Sur le pont d'Avignon

L'on y danse, l'on y danse

Sur le pont d'Avignon

L'on y danse tous en rond
.

“Maman taught it to me when I was little,” she says, tightening the knot of her scarf against a sweeping gust of cold wind. The day is chilly but the sky blue and the sun strong. It strikes the gray-metal-colored Rhône broadside and breaks on its surface into little shards of brightness. “Every French child knows this song.”

We are sitting on a wooden park bench facing the water. As she translates the words, I marvel at the city across the river. Having recently discovered my own history, I am awestruck to find myself in a place so chockful of it, all of it documented, preserved. It's miraculous. Everything about this city is. I feel wonder at the clarity of the air, at the wind swooping down on the river, making the water slap against the stony banks, at how full and rich the light is and how it seems to shine from every direction. From the park bench, I can see the old ramparts ringing the ancient town center and its tangle of narrow, crooked streets; the west tower of the Avignon Cathedral, the gilded statue of the Virgin Mary gleaming atop it.

Pari tells me the history of the bridge—the young shepherd who, in the twelfth century, claimed that angels told him to build a bridge across the river and who demonstrated the validity of his claim by lifting up a massive rock and hurling it in the water. She tells me about the boatmen on the Rhône who climbed the bridge to honor their patron, Saint Nicholas. And about all the floods over the centuries that ate away at the bridge's arches and caused them to collapse. She says these words with the same rapid, nervous energy she had earlier in the day when she led me through the Gothic Palais des Papes. Lifting the audio-guide headphones to point to a fresco, tapping my elbow to draw my attention to an interesting carving, stained glass, the intersecting ribs overhead.