Gardens of Water (30 page)

rem noticed crying coming from the tent.

“She always complained about him when he was alive, but now all she does is cry.”

The girls swung the rope again, and it arched in the sky before slapping the ground and swinging around again. The sound of the rope and the girls jumping disguised the crying, but she could still hear it, and, for a moment, everything that had happened—the collapsed buildings, her dead cousins, her brother buried alive—crowded in on her.

“Have you seen him today?” Dilek asked, smiling now.

“Shh,”
rem said.

“I have,” she said.

“Where?”
rem grabbed her friend’s elbow, but Dilek pulled away and jumped into the rope and skipped above it as it hit the ground; a puff of dust jumped from the ground where the rope struck it.
rem hadn’t talked to Dylan for two days. He was too busy working in the camp with his father. Dilek just smiled back, her hair flying up and down in the air, her thin body skipping above the ground as though she were still a child.

“Jump in,” she said.

rem rolled her eyes at Dilek. She knew
rem couldn’t jump rope, yet she asked.
rem loved Dilek, but she had a way of reminding
rem that her parents were the backward conservatives.

“I’m leaving,”
rem said.

She checked the soccer field again and stuck her head inside the school tent. She walked down a couple rows of tents and began to stroll down the third, when she saw Dylan and his father ducking out of one of the tents. Dylan carried a white case with a red cross painted on the side. He smiled when he saw her and she stopped in the middle of the street. Then, turning away in surprise, she saw an old man watching her, his wrinkled hand resting on a wooden cane. She pretended to be lost and did a circle in the middle of the dirt path, acting as though she were trying to find her way while watching Dylan. He followed his father, but he looked over his shoulder toward her, that smile of his flashing down the aisle.

“Have you lost your way?” the old man asked.

“Efendim?”

With a shaky hand, he pointed his cane, the tip of it bouncing around in the air.

“Tents down there, tents down here. Everything’s gone,” he said.

He was crazy, she could tell, but he scared her and she walked quickly down one of the aisles, out past the soccer field, down a short path that took her downhill to the beach.

It was a small beach, barely a beach at all, really, just a strip of pebbles and the foamy edge of the sea. She felt the sun through her long-sleeve blouse and she wanted that warmth on her bare skin. There were so many things she hadn’t noticed since she was a child and she hadn’t paid attention to them then because they had always been there: the layers of blue sky, the yellow sun like a circle of fabric pasted in the sky, the water glittering like sequined dresses she’d seen in the magazines Dilek showed her. The wet pebbles on the beach and the sound of the waves shushing against them. The white sails of a ship unfurling on four masts. The pungent salt breeze taste on her tongue. The landscape had been lost to her, replaced by square windows and walls and doors and triangled rooftops eclipsing the sky, and she found herself hoping that they would never move back into an apartment in some concrete neighborhood. She would live in a tent forever if she could have this.

Crouching near the water’s edge, she watched the waves turn white pebbles gray. A group of transparent fish swam in the shallows. She saw the skeletons through their skin and the little round shadowlike things that were their organs. She wanted to say, “Look, Dylan. A school of fish.” And he would say something like, “Yeah,
rem, I’ve seen fish before.” But that didn’t matter. She sort of liked the way he was bored with everything. It made him seem more sophisticated, like he had seen something in the world, like, if she was lucky, he would show her those things, too.

She laughed at herself and slapped the water, scattering the fish. So stupid!
Aptal!
Why would an American boy be interested in her?

She filled her palms with water and splashed it against her face and the cool drops ran down her neck.

She looked around now. No one was on the beach, so she took off her shoes, looked behind her again, and then took off her socks, too. She pulled up her skirt bottom to reveal her white legs and felt the sun beat upon her skin. She liked her calves. They were thin at the ankles and curved into perfect ovals at the muscle. She tried to imagine them in high heels, and flexed her toes and unflexed her toes to admire the way the muscle moved. Smiling, she tilted her head back and let the sun beat down on her skin. Little beads of perspiration gathered along her calves, and when her skin began to turn pink she stood and dipped her legs in the water, so cool and oily feeling.