I keep thinking of him. Last night, while watching fireworks at the beach with Mom, Audrey, and Janie. Today, while hanging out in the yard with Bambi. And tonight, as I walk to Aud’s for dinner.
Mom’s stuck on a climactic scene in which her story’s hero must race on horseback to an abandoned mine, where his heroine is being held by brutes who demand gold in exchange for her safe return. Mom’s better left alone when she’s in book mode, so Aud offered to feed me. She fixes grilled cheese and tomato soup; she may work in a restaurant known for its fine food, but she’s culinarily inept. We eat on the living room sofa while Janie sits in a miniature chair pulled up to the coffee table, surrounded by toys.
I like Audrey and Janie’s cottage much more than the one Mom and I share. The walls here are a soft honey color, the sofa is overstuffed and upholstered in sage twill, and the TV is mounted over a repurposed library catalog cabinet. There are framed black-and-white photographseverywhere, mostly my work, mostly images of Janie, plus a few of Audrey and Nick when they were in high school, and a few from the day they were married, eating frosted cupcakes, grinning like they’re in on a secret the rest of the world would be lucky to know.
While my mom pays rent on our cottage, Audrey owns hers free and clear. Turns out there’s a big payout to army spouses whose soldiers are killed in action, plus, Nick took out a hefty life insurance policy before he enlisted. A long time passed before Aud touched that money—it sat in a savings account collecting pennies of interest the whole time she and Janie lived with Mom and me—but when her heart had scabbed over enough for her to face the windfall without anxiety attacks, she put a chunk of it aside for Janie and spent what was left on their home. I only know this because I am, for all intents and purposes, Aud’s closest friend.
When we’re done with dinner and the kitchen’s mostly tidy, I put Janie to bed so Audrey can study. We go through her elaborate bedtime routine (bath, teeth, song, books, music box, night-light), and then I pepper her face with kisses and flip off the lamp. When I return to the living room, I find Aud with her nose in a textbook.
“You’re not leaving, are you?” she asks, barely glancing up from the note she’s scribbling across a cluttered sheet of paper.
“I’ll hang out if you want.”
“Sure, but give me thirty to finish this study guide, okay?”
While I wait, I use her laptop to check my email. It’s spam, plus a notice from Cypress Valley High, reminding me, again, of the New Student Orientation.
God,no.
I sign out of my account and think of how lucky Mati is to be finished with school, free to live his life as he pleases. After his father’s treatments are over, he’ll probably head back to his country and… what? What do Afghan boys do when their schooling is done? There’s not a lot of industry in Afghanistan, as far as I know, and I can’t imagine commerce is anything to write home about. Maybe he’ll farm parchedfields in a rural village. Or, maybe he’ll marry and reign like a lord. Or, he could join the Taliban and attack American soldiers—many of whom, like my brother, were deployed to Afghanistan to help.
But,no. Those are stereotypes propagated by surface-level journalism. With a jolt of shame, I realize that when it comes to Afghanistan, I don’t know anythingbutstereotypes.
I give Audrey a quick glance—she’s still wrapped up in her schoolwork—then typeAfghanistaninto an online search engine. A zillion links pop up, everything from war histories to harems, health care to housing. I dig deeper, scanning articles on poetry and proverbs, Islamic holidays, and popular Afghan cuisine—rice and soup, kebabs and lavash. I’m horrified to discover that the national infant mortality rate is dismal, and the literacy rate isn’t much better. I peruse paragraphs about the country’s complex tribal systems, the end of its monarchy, and the toll of the Soviet War. I learn about the subsequent civil war, the inception of the Taliban, made up in large part of Soviet War orphans, and the ongoing war in Afghanistan.
Since Nick’s death, I’ve pictured the arid South Asian country where he gasped for his last breath in monochrome shades of sinister and severe, but now, suddenly, Afghanistan is lit up in Technicolor. I’m not sure if my prejudice was ingrained in me by my mother, who’s feared Muslims since the Twin Towers fell—doubly after my brother was killed—or if I’ve chosen narrow-mindedness because it’s easier than acknowledging how utterly complex this world is, but I am certain of this: Nick would disapprove of complacent ignorance.
Once, when I was eleven, he took me to pick up groceries while our mom was in the weeds with edits. On our way home, laden with bags of food, he paused to fish a ten-dollar bill out of his pocket. He gave it to a homeless man—a war veteran, his sign declared—who loitered regularly a few blocks from our condo. I’d never seen my brother do such a thing, and I’d definitely never witnessed my mom giving money to the less fortunate; she always insisted we cross to the other side of the street when there were homeless people on the sidewalk. When Iasked Nicky why he’d given his hard-earned cash to a stranger, he said, “Because he’s a person, Elise. Somebody’s son. Somebody’s father, maybe, and I see him. I see how we’re connected, him and me, to each other, to this great big world.” He bumped me affectionately as we continued to make our way home. “Don’t walk through life blind, okay?”
I’m thinking about connections when Audrey snaps her book shut. “Whatcha looking at?”
I close the website I’ve been studying and, nonchalantly, clear the computer’s search history, too. “Just a photography blog.”
“How’s your portfolio coming?”
I will the guilty staccato of my heart to slow; I hate lying to Aud. “Not bad. Should be ready by the time I need it for applications.”
“Sticking with the death theme?”
I wrinkle my nose and set her laptop on the coffee table. “The theme is lifeamongdeath.”
She shudders. “Creepy.”
She doesn’t get my portfolio, and neither does my mom. I’m photographing cemeteries, yeah, but my goal is to capture the way lively subjects play off backgrounds of the grimmer variety. A black-and-orange butterfly perched atop a crumbling memorial, or a yellow pansy sprouting beside a marble headstone. Audrey and Mom think my work is morbid, but on good days, when the light’s just right and I’ve chosen the perfect aperture, capturing a blue bird roosting in the eaves of a centuries-old mausoleum, I think it might be brilliant.
“You’recreepy,” I say, nudging her foot with my own.
She laughs. “How’s the boy next door?”
“Hung up on his ex, which is fine by me.”
“Lissy, with that attitude, you’ll never find love.”
“I don’t want to find love—I want it to find me. I want it to crash into me. Knock me down.Seizeme.”
“Spoken like a true Parker.” She twirls her hair between her fingers. She still wears her wedding band on her left hand, and its modest diamonds glint in the lamplight. “Your brother was a romantic, too,and we all know how obsessed your mom is with yearning and passion and devotion—fictional, of course.”
“Of course.” I nestle further into the couch cushions. “Audrey, how’d you know? With Nick, I mean? How’d you know it was real love?”
