“So you’re saying that sometimes women are braver than men. And better doctors.”
“I’m saying that if you want to keep a man, you better hide his shoes every night so he can’t walk out on you.”
“I don’t understand.”
Deshi shook her head. Her romantic advice was worth a foreigner’s ransom, and here she was, giving it freely to a girl who couldn’t appreciate the hard-earned wisdom. “Just stay away from oncologists, okay?” she said, and led the girl to the waiting room. “If you just remember that, you’ll spare yourself the worst of it. Now, why don’t you get your notebook out and draw something?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Where would you most want to be right now?”
“My home,” she said. She thought the word meant only the four walls and roof that held her, but it spread out, filled in, Akhmed, the village, her parents, the forest, everything that wasn’t here. “A week ago.”
“And I’d rather be right here forty years ago, when they first offered me the job. I’d wag my finger right in the head nurse’s face and say, no, no, you won’t trick me, and I’d walk right out those doors.”
“It’s stupid. There are maps to show you how to get to the place where you want to be but no maps that show you how to get to the time when you want to be.”
“Why don’t you draw that map?”
“Only if you let me play on the fourth floor.”
“Child, if there was such a map, there would still be a fourth floor. Start drawing.”
The sharp, chemical-curtained corridor swallowed Deshi’s footsteps and Havaa was alone again. The notebook tilting on her legs, she thought of her father. She didn’t hate him. Thinking that, realizing it, feeling it crackle through her arm bones, her finger bones, feeling her arms wrapping around her chest, her fingers clasping her shoulders, this trembling inside her that was only the beat of her heart. Each night he would tell her tales about an alien green-bodied race whose faces consisted of a singular orifice through which they saw, ate, smelled, heard, thought, and spoke. Each night he told her a new chapter, and so many nights had gone by, so many chapters had been told, that they referred to it as chapters rather than story, because stories had endings and theirs had none. According to her father, the green-bodied aliens had destroyed their planet in an interstellar civil war and had migrated to the Moon to begin again. Each night, as civilization collapsed around them, he told her of a new one being built on the lunar surface. She hoped her father was there, among them, up on the Moon.
Sonja strode through the door, reeking of cigarette smoke, her eyelids puffy and her fingers jittering. “You’re here,” Sonja said, surprised.
“Yes,” Havaa agreed. “I’m here. This is the waiting room.”
Sonja glanced down to the floor, to the chairs, puzzling over this and then nodding. “You’re right. This is the waiting room,” she said, and sat in the folding chair beside Havaa.
“How was your day?” Havaa asked.
Sonja shrugged, sparked her cigarette lighter, and stared vacantly toward the wall. “It was an okay day. You?”
“It was okay.”
Sonja sighed, closed her eyes, and sparked her lighter in a slow, senseless rhythm.
“Are the Feds going to take me, too?” To ask the question was to acknowledge that it could happen, and in Havaa’s experience, any horror that could happen eventually did. Better to armor yourself with the unreal. Better to turn inward, hide in the dark waters among the sea anemones, down deep where the sharks can’t see you.
Sonja’s hand found hers between the chairs.
“Will the Feds take me to my father?” she asked, while knowing the question had no answer she wanted to hear. Her father was her door to the world; he was the singular opening through which she saw, heard, and felt. Without him she didn’t know what she saw, or what she heard, and what she felt; all she felt, was him gone.
“Let’s go to bed,” Sonja said. Still holding Havaa’s hand, she stood. “We close our eyes and there they are, right where we left them, in their own waiting room, waiting for us.”
CHAPTER 7
FOR EIGHTEEN DAYS Natasha slept as if her lidded dreamland were her true home, to which she was repatriated for fifteen hours a day. So what, then, could Sonja do? Natasha was here, safe, alive, and real enough to begin resenting. In the flat white light of morning she entered her sister’s bedroom, a cup of hot tea in her hand, and inspected her sister’s body as she might a corpse, or a comatose patient, or someone whom she had, once, long ago, envied. Her gaze crawled the curves of Natasha’s hips, the odd angle of elbows she could unhinge and bend at will, the bitten rims of fingernails, her legs, still long, still lithe, and the little brown hairs on her forearms, which, when they had first appeared in puberty, Sonja had used as evidence to convince Natasha she was turning into a boy. Natasha’s skin said what she wouldn’t. The scars of habitual heroin use webbed her toes. A buckshot of cigarette burns stippled her left shoulder. If Sonja found these scars on a patient in the hospital, she wouldn’t feel pity, but in Natasha’s bedroom, she felt it all over. For eighteen days she went to wake Natasha and turned back, afraid of the dreams her sister would rise from, leaving no alarm louder than a cup of tea cooling on the nightstand.
But Natasha wasn’t right. On the eighteenth evening, standing at the cutting board, chopping two onions and a potato, Sonja broached the subject. “I think you should talk to a psychiatrist or someone.”
From the look her sister gave her, she might have announced they’d be eating the cutting board for dinner.
“I just think it would be good for you to talk with someone. About what happened in Italy. About what it’s like being home,” Sonja said.
“Talking doesn’t do anything.”
“It might do one or two things.” Sonja punctuated her sentence with a chop.
“All the words in the world won’t put those onion halves back together.”
“The human mind is a little more complex than a yellow onion.”
Natasha held back her hair as she lit a cigarette from the hot plate her father had, twelve years earlier, purchased secondhand from a woman who would never find a flame that cooked an egg quite as well. “Some of us would be lucky to have something as large as a yellow onion between our ears.”
Sonja could see her sister backing away from her, from the subject, from whatever had happened in Italy. “Think of the mind as a muscle or bone instead,” she said, looking down to address the more respectful audience of cubed potatoes. “Emotional and mental trauma doesn’t heal itself any more than a broken bone left unset.”
Natasha nodded to the cutting board. “You talk those potatoes and onions into jumping in that frying pan and I’ll talk with a psychiatrist.”
Despite its monumental aggravation, Natasha’s resistance was a good sign, wasn’t it? The obstinacy was a pillar running alongside her spine that would support her when not lodged firmly in Sonja’s hindquarters. And while she might yearn for a little civility to grease the rusty gears of their relationship, she gladly endured the backtalk and eye-rolls to know that Natasha hadn’t lost the ability to drive her fucking crazy. Her sister was a snarky chain-smoking hermit crab that emerged from her shell in the safety of Sonja’s presence. When Natasha believed she was alone — those days when Sonja slammed the front door and stayed to spy on her — she searched for thicker shells. It was awful, watching Natasha through the keyhole as she divided her room into smaller increments of shelter. She moved the desk, bed, and bureau like a child arranging the furniture into a make-believe castle, even encircling the structure with a moat of water glasses. On the keyhole’s far side, Sonja prayed it would keep the dragons at bay; her heart, as if drawn on a piece of paper in her chest, crumpled every time. When she returned in the evening, the fortress was disassembled and the pieces of furniture had returned to their white rectangles of wall space. She never mentioned what she’d seen, holding it as a reminder to be gentle and patient as she prepared dinner. She whispered sweet nothings to the potatoes and onions, but the little fuckers were as stubborn as her sister, the great big fucker.