Gardens of Water (71 page)

“That’s not what happened,” he hesitated, “and you know it.”

“Keep your son in America,” Sinan said. “If I see him again, I
will
kill him.”

Chapter 57

I
N THE DAYS FOLLOWING
REM’S DEATH SINAN CONTEMPLATED
his own. In his mind he replayed the look on her face when she realized what he held in his hand—the way her eyes blinked with shock and then froze on him as though she were already dead. Why was it easier—he asked himself countless times—to hold the knife instead of his daughter? He never intended to use the knife, or at least that’s what he told himself. He wanted to believe it was
rem’s fault, that she misunderstood his actions on the beach, but then he remembered the knife in his hand and he knew she had seen what she had seen. If he could take it back, those few seconds of blinding anguish, he would take her in his arms and parade her in the streets of the camp as his beautiful, worthy daughter. God could judge him, but not these people, not these people anymore.

It would have been easier to give up, to swim out into the sea and never swim back, to drain the blood from his wrists, but what saved Sinan was
smail’s silence. The boy would not speak. In fact, he barely opened his mouth at all except to eat a bite of food, push the plate away, and draw strange, dark scenes in his coloring book.

By the end of the sixth day after the funeral, Sinan was afraid the boy would waste away, and it wasn’t until he began to worry about
smail that he knew he would survive
rem’s death.
smail’s arms—already skinny—were as thin as ropes, his ribs pushed against the skin of his chest. His skin was pasty and occasionally his gums bled. Sinan tried talking to him. He tried kicking the soccer ball with him. He bought him a toy gun from a Gypsy merchant selling plastic wares, but nothing would get the boy to speak.

“Eat,” Nilüfer said that night, forcing a spoonful of rice into his mouth only to watch him spit it out into the palm of his hand and place it on his plate. Since
rem’s death, she wouldn’t let the boy out of her sight for even a minute. He couldn’t play soccer with the boys or visit the school tent. She held his hand when she walked him to the water closet and held his hand again when returning to the tent. She held his hand everywhere, even sometimes at night while the boy fell asleep.

“Eat,” she tried again. He turned his cheek and Nilüfer smudged the rice into his skin and smeared it around his lips. But he would not take it. He simply wiped his face clean with his hands and rolled the remaining rice off his fingers.

Carrefour allowed Sinan two unpaid weeks off, but he refused to take the second week. He couldn’t sit around this camp, replaying the memories in his head, trying to figure out the maze of mistakes he had made leading up to that day. He would go crazy.

The first day back Yilmaz Bey brought him tea on his breaks, patted him on the shoulder as he made his rounds of the store, and offered to have Sinan’s family over to his house in Bebek for dinner. Even after a week,
rem’s picture was on the front page of the papers, and when the manager realized this, he apologized to Sinan and had all the papers removed from the bins. When Sinan got home, he found
smail buried deep in his sleeping bag, the fabric pulled over his head so that only a few strands of hair stuck out at the top.

“He’ll kill himself, too,” Nilüfer said, her eyes rimmed red from lack of sleep, her lips thin and chapped with worry.

“
smail,” Sinan said, patting the bulge beneath the fabric. “
smail, sit up.”