The Girl With Borrowed Wings (21 page)

I winced at that. She knew I was sensitive about my imaginary wings.

“Now,” she said, “you should start walking to art class.” She handed me her notebook with the timetable inside.

She didn’t say another word to me for the rest of the day.

I went through my classes thinking that Anju must have gone mad. She had snapped under the stress of moving to Qatar. Or her brain had fried in the heat. I would have to be extra-nice to her for the next week to keep her from breaking down in hysterics.

But that afternoon, my father picked me up after school. And the second I got into the car, I knew that she had pinpointed the source of the problem. Because the minute I saw my father and sat in the same air as him, with my mind still echoing Anju’s easy words,
Daddy, I love you,
I started to choke and my heart seized up under the stress. I was ashamed of even thinking those words. They were like maggots in my head. I thought my father would be able to sense them as something unnatural, monstrous, inside of me. I shut my eyes and leaned against the car window. It was worse than being kissed by Sangris. This was the swollen, beating heart of my inhibitions, right here.
He can’t hear the words in my head,
I reminded myself. I forced myself to breathe. But I wasn’t convinced. I let the words, quickly, run through my mind again.
Daddy, I love you.

I flinched straightaway. He didn’t react. His eyes were on the road. With one hand he adjusted his sunglasses.

I let myself think the words again.
Daddy
 . . . And still nothing happened. I found that I could breathe almost naturally.

I didn’t say anything to him, though. I couldn’t. I watched him uneasily until we got home, and then I escaped straight into my room. Didn’t Anju know how . . .
wrong
it would be to say those words to my father? That night I was so disturbed, I couldn’t read. My fingers went automatically to a book on my shelf, but the minute I opened it I threw it down again. My thoughts couldn’t settle on anything except what Anju had told me about Sangris.

Sangris
. That was a word I could latch on to. I would see him at the midnight beginning of next Monday. I sank down onto my bed.

I wanted to love Sangris. I thought of the heather and the sunflowers and the almond-scented tree, and I was taken aback by how much I wanted to love him. I could see, dimly, as if through a foggy glass wall, what it would be like to be with Sangris. I had caught glimmers of it, from time to time—that shade of red I couldn’t hold inside of me.

I didn’t eat at dinner. I couldn’t. My father was sitting opposite me, and the disgusting words still hung in my head.

I left the dining room early. I went into the kitchen. My mother was sitting alone at her table. I hesitated. She’d married him, there must have been
something,
once. I knelt beside her chair. “Mom,” I whispered.

She turned her eyes to me in mild disapproval.

“Mom, do you . . .” I lowered my voice still further. “Do you love him?”

As I said it I realized that I desperately wanted her to answer yes.

Her eyes, usually narrow and black, shot open wide in shock. She looked at me as if she thought I was being coarse. I thought I was too.

“Who?” she said suspiciously.

“My dad,” I whispered.

Her mouth dropped open. “Go to your room,” she said.

I stood uncertainly. “Don’t tell him,” I pleaded.

I knew she would.

“Go to your room,” she said.

She turned back to focus on the surface of the table. I was at the door when she said, “Besides, don’t you assume that
I
went after him.”

I jolted to a halt. I was afraid that if I looked directly at her she might stop talking, so I only half turned, staring at the door frame. “Sorry?”

“He loved
me
. Chased me,” she said quietly, speaking fast. “He’ll never forgive me for that.”

I couldn’t picture my father that way at all. “I don’t—”

“You think he would’ve chosen me if he didn’t adore me? For his precious future daughter, wouldn’t he want the best possible woman as a mother?”

I’d never considered that. I wasn’t able to keep my eyes on the door frame anymore. I swiveled. She was still hunched over her table, a strand of black hair frizzing out of her bun. We looked at each other.

“What happened?”

She didn’t speak for a moment. Then—“No one can live up to his expectations,” she said, and twisted her mouth into something that was almost a smirk, except that it was sad. “You know that, yes?”

I opened my mouth to reply, probably something clumsy and eager, but a change in Mom’s face made me spin around.

He was right there.

My heart contracted. “I—”

“Go to your room,” he said to me. His expressionless eyes were on my mom.

I went. Through my closed bedroom door I heard them talking in low tones. I felt as if my clothes had fallen off in public. I sat on the bed, heart racing. Something was going to happen.

After half an hour, when he’d finished with her, my father came in. He stopped in the doorway and looked at me like I was a baboon in a zoo. “Do you have something you want to discuss with me?”

I shook my head. Then I said, apologetically, “I was just asking.”

“Why?” he demanded.

“Because . . . we never use the L word in the house. I was curious.” I kept my eyes on the floor as I spoke.

“‘Love’ is a very private matter,” he said. Like rude body parts.

“But I’m family,” I said. “A daughter wants to know about her parents.”

From the look on his face, you would think I’d just asked to hear a graphic blow-by-blow account of how I’d ended up in my mother’s body.

“Don’t be disgusting,” he said. The door slammed shut behind him. With a real
bang
.

He didn’t talk to me for the next few days. He kept his distance, looking at me guardedly, as if I was a bomb that might explode at any minute and spew messy fluids all over the room.

On the last day of the week, Wednesday, Anju said to me, “Have you done it yet?”

I didn’t need to ask her what she was talking about. I’d been having nightmares about
it
. “He’ll be furious,” I whispered.

She hit me on the arm. I jumped in my flimsy plastic chair.

On Thursday I kept myself closed in my room. I still couldn’t read. My books had transformed into lumpy, dead things. I sat on my bed, closed my eyes, and concentrated on coating my mind in steel. I needed armor for my ordeal ahead. I thought of the sunflowers and of the Nenner who could be bold. It didn’t seem to work. I thought of being able to give Sangris my love, like a gift, when Monday began. But it was like visualizing how beautiful a unicorn would be. It didn’t actually help.

I planned to say the words to my father on Sunday, the last possible day. I didn’t know how I would do it, though. Maybe I’d just blurt them out and run. Lock myself in the bathroom or something. The fact is that no one in my family ever smiled sappily, or held hands, or touched. No one used pet names. And no one in my family
ever
said “I love you.”

On Friday, the last day of the weekend, my mother came into my room. It was the first time we’d spoken since the kitchen, and I was shy. I expected her to be awkward too, but even though her words were my father’s, if anything, she spoke to me more easily than she had in years. “You will come grocery shopping with us today,” she said. “Your father decided that you should get out more often.” So that I wouldn’t be stewing dangerously in my bedroom, thinking about forbidden things like the L word, she meant.

“All right,” I said, because I didn’t have a choice.

In silence we got into the car. In silence my father drove us to Al Lou Lou
Center. I sat in the backseat, watching my father’s reflection in the rearview mirror. I remembered him telling me that, above all things, Frenenqer Paje should be meek. And love, in my father’s eyes, was something violent and indecent. This was about more than his idea of propriety, it was about his idea of
me
.

So what was his idea of me? What was I? I couldn’t put it into words. The sunflowers, the sky, me cutting out my heart for him. I kept my eyes on my father’s reflection.

I trailed behind my parents while they walked through the crowded, air-conditioned aisles of Al Lou Lou
Center. I was deep in thought, and I didn’t feel my feet as I walked.

“Push the shopping cart,” my mother said to me. I pushed it.

My father took his sunglasses off. His eyes were old and crinkled behind them. “Do we need detergent?” he said. He was always vague on household matters. My mom did everything.

“Yes,” she said.

“All right. Frenenqer, go get some detergent.”

It was just down the aisle. I floated through the crowd of strangers and took hold of a handle. My parents watched closely. “Not that brand!” said my mother. “Get the red one.”

The almond-scented tree in the sky, that awful tight feeling I’d had in my stomach whenever Sangris had tried to be soft with me, unable to want him because I’d known I had to slap him away, the harder the better, before I could respect myself. And I was only seventeen now. What would I be like in ten years? In twenty? I glanced over my shoulder at my father and found him watching me.

I was watching me too. Falling into the wadi in Oman with my shirt rushing around my skin, Sangris’s eyes amber on Heritage as he struggled to tell me something important, and most of all, the closet with the cobwebs, crying after the kiss, horrified that I might have come close to feeling warmth. And my father calling me disgusting, slamming the door. Like I’d done to Sangris in the closet. Like I’d been doing to myself since I was eleven.

And that’s how it happened that, very simply, I came to understand everything I needed to know about my father. He wasn’t some enormous mystery. How could a person like him come into being? Like this, just like this.

I carried the detergent back.

“Put it in the cart,” Mom said. Where else would I put it?

“Do we need stationery?” my father said. Ye gods, he really was clueless, I thought. This must have been the first time he’d come grocery shopping in months. Usually he just sat at the computer at home. I envisioned him as a thin, dark spider, controlling the strands of his web without moving out of his chair.

“No,” my mom said.

“We never need stationery,” I said.

He gave me a stern look. He thought I was showing disrespect. “Frenenqer, get us some milk.”

I was familiar with the brand this time. I went to get milk, then walked back. I put it in the cart in front of my father.

“All right,” he said, “do we need—?”

“Dad,” I said.

He didn’t respond for a moment. He was taking a huge carton of yogurt from my mother and putting it in the cart. People milled all around us. “What?”

My heart throbbed hard.

“I love you,” I said.

He jumped a little bit. His gaze quickly flickered to the strangers standing around. Many were dressed in intimidating white dishdasha
s
. They might have heard me. “Er, that’s nice,” he said. “Go get some flour.”

We didn’t need flour. I watched in amazement as the man who had controlled all of my movements for every year of my life squirmed like a stuck bug. His gaze was fixed on the floor.

“Didn’t you hear?” I said, raising my voice. “Daddy, I love you!”

A couple of heads turned.

“Frenenqer,” he growled, “we will discuss this when we get home. Go fetch some flour.”

“You silly daddy,” I said. “We don’t need flour.”

He found my tone of affection disrespectful. “Frenenqer—”

“He is silly,” I said to a random passerby. She looked away and quickened her step.

My father dragged me into a corner and slapped me across my face. Quick and flat. He didn’t want anyone to see, but he didn’t particularly mind if they did. “You’re too old for this nonsense,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” I said, touching my stinging cheek. “I love you anyway.”

“Is this your idea of fun?” he said. His voice was frozen. It was the voice that always made me feel as though I’d swallowed cold lead.

It didn’t do that today. I’d seen his flash of embarrassment. Even now he was slightly awkward. He kept his eyes too steady on my face, afraid of showing weakness. Human. He was human and capable of being embarrassed. A grouchy old man. I burst out of my body, soared up high.

“You’re not omnipotent at all,” I said to him.

“What?”

I grabbed the sleeve of a passing woman. She turned and looked at me in surprise. I said to her, “I love my dad.”

My pulse was so giddy, flying so fast, that I could afford to feel a spurt of real affection. “He’s forty-seven and his name is Tiberio,” I said. “He’s an ordinary person.”

She muttered something in Urdu and dashed away.

That stunt earned me another slap.

“Fine,” I said, my left cheek burning. “I’ll keep it in the family. I won’t tell anyone other than you and Mom that I love you.” The more I said it, the more I felt as though I was kicking down walls, an incredible kind of power.