Gardens of Water (41 page)

“
rem, don’t treat me like I’m stupid.”

She pulled the headphones from her jacket, quietly laid them on top of the player, and gripped the device tightly in her hands. He waited a moment, both of them sitting there quiet and still, the silence growing in his ears.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You were hurt and I became angry with you.”

“It didn’t hurt,”
rem said, sitting rigid in the chair. Even in the darkness he could see her grinding her teeth against him. He tried to think how best to tell her what he wanted to say.

He looked out at the water and the lights blurred in the currents. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,
can
m.
”

“I said you didn’t hurt me.”

“
rem, I’m tired of arguing with you.”

She looked at him. Her eyes catching the light from the soup kitchen blazed the way they did the day he returned from the German hospital: scared, angry—betrayed eyes, he suddenly realized. She turned away, presenting him with the side of her face. He wondered what it was like for her those four days after the earthquake, and a memory of her begging him to help her flashed in his mind.
smail was buried, he was panicked with fear, he had a concussion, but that didn’t matter: he had chosen
smail over his daughter. It was not a conscious choice; it was forced upon him by circumstance, but he had made it all the same and
rem knew it. His stomach seized in a cramp.

“I haven’t been a good father to you,” he said, pressing three fingers into his belly.

rem lifted her head a little, but she kept her face hidden.

He wanted to apologize to her—being loved less was a burden a child shouldn’t bear—but he couldn’t bring himself to admit such a thing to her face.

“I just want you to live a good life, to be happy,” he said.

“Which do you want more, Baba?” She looked at him now, her chin raised against him. Her eyes, reflecting the light, shone like polished steel. “Me living a good life or me happy?”

“I want both.”

She looked away again.

“I will try harder,
can
m,
to be a good father.”

She offered nothing—no thank-yous, no apologies for her actions, no “I love you”s—just silence and the defiance of the side of her face.

“Hear how quiet it is now?” They listened together for a few seconds and it
was
truly silent, except for the distant drone of dock cranes lifting containers from the backs of Chinese cargo ships. “Back home—did I tell you this? Did I ever tell you how quiet it is?”

“Yes, a hundred times,” she said.

“You don’t remember. You were too young.”

“I remember. I wasn’t
that
young.”

“It’s so quiet at night it’s like the earth has stopped spinning. Like everything terrible in the world has just fallen away.” He looked up at the sky. “Someday we’ll go back there and you’ll hear it and you’ll understand.”

“I don’t want to go back there.”

He almost ripped the compact disc player out of her hands.

“It’s your home,
rem.”

“It’s not my home. There’s nothing there.”

He felt the anger rise in him, a flood of blood pumping into his chest.

“Come inside and go to bed, please.”

She blew air out her mouth and tossed her head in annoyance, but she got up and ducked inside the tent. He listened to her rustle around inside the bag—her frustrated kicks and sighs, her tosses and turns—until it was silent again, and he was left alone with the grinding echo of dock cranes and the two cats fighting over the scales left clinging to bones.

HE WAS SUPPOSED TO
work a double shift the next day. He slept little that night and spent the early shift sipping tea at every break to get him through his duties. At lunch he was still thinking about
rem, and during his break he found himself in the electronics section of Carrefour, the headphones to a portable CD player cupped inside his ears. The music was a crashing of noise, like a band of carpenters had gotten together to record the banging of their tools. Things screeched and screamed, other things clanged like controlled explosions, yet there was a moment—one beautiful moment—where the music fell to a dramatic rumble, the banging notes dropped to a sustained chord, and a singer whispered something in English that sounded like a pleading, like a man begging for help. The sound of that desperate voice touched something in him; comforted him in a way he couldn’t explain. He pressed rewind and listened to that moment again, and then pressed rewind and listened once more, until the voice faded out with the noise at the end of the song.