Home Fire(6)

Her foot slipped on the slick surface of the branch, and she had to drop to her knees to keep from falling in. The cold water a spray on her hands and sleeves. She walked back cautiously, registering the anxiety in Eamonn’s expression.

After that, he asked more direct questions about her life, as though seeing her walk away from him across a fallen tree had brought her into focus. She gave him the easiest version: Grew up in North London, as he already knew because of the bus routes—the Preston Road neighborhood to be precise, which was obviously too precise for him. Two siblings—much younger. Raised by her mother and grandmother, now both dead; she’d never really known her father. She was here for a PhD program, fully funded, with a stipend from a position as a research assistant that would give her enough to live on. She’d applied too late for the autumn semester, but her former tutor Dr. Shah had arranged permission for her to start in January, and here she now was.

“And so you’re doing what you want to be doing? You lucky thing!”

“Yes,” she said. “Very lucky.” She wondered if she should respond to his questions about her life with some about his. But then he might mention his father, of whom she couldn’t pretend to be unaware, and that might lead them down a road she didn’t want to travel.

The river was dark now, the first indication that the day was ending although there was still abundant light in the sky. She led the way back onto the road, bringing them out near the high school, where long-limbed teenagers were running on the outdoor track, piles of muddy snow pushed to the corners of the field.

“Can I ask you something?” he said. “The turban. Is that a style thing or a Muslim thing?”

“You know, the only two people in Massachusetts who have ever asked me about it both wanted to know if it’s a style thing or a chemo thing.”

Laughing, he said, “Cancer or Islam—which is the greater affliction?”

There were still moments when a statement like that could catch a person off-guard. He held his hands up quickly in apology. “Jesus. I mean, sorry. That came out really badly. I meant, it must be difficult to be Muslim in the world these days.”

“I’d find it more difficult to not be Muslim,” she said, and after that they walked on in a silence that became more than a little uncomfortable by the time they were back on Main Street. She had assumed that in some way, however secular, however political rather than religious, he identified as Muslim. Though what a foolish thing to assume of his father’s son.

“Well, good-bye,” she said as they approached the café, holding out a hand for him to shake, aware that the gesture was strangely formal only after she’d made it.

“Thanks for the company. Perhaps we’ll run into each other again,” he said, extracting his shoes and delivering the backpack into her extended hand as though that’s what it was there for. Assuming women who wore turbans as “a Muslim thing” couldn’t possibly shake hands with men. As she walked home she thought how much more pleasant life was when you lived among foreigners whose subtexts you couldn’t hear. That way you didn’t need to know that “Perhaps we’ll run into each other again” really meant “I have no particular wish to see you after this.”

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Aunty Naseem, the neighbor who had taken the place of their grandmother when she died and with whom Aneeka was now staying, called to say she didn’t want to worry Isma but could she check on Aneeka? “She stays out so often now, and I thought she was with her friends, but I just saw Gita and she says the friends don’t see her very much at all anymore.”

Gita of Preston Road was a link between Aneeka’s home and university lives—a year older than the twins and with a new stepmother who didn’t want her around, she had a room in student halls to which Aneeka had a spare key; Gita herself never used the room because she was living with her boyfriend, though none of the older generation of Preston Road knew this.

When Aneeka had first started staying over at Gita’s, because Aneeka was in the library or out socializing in one way or another until after the tube stopped running, Isma hadn’t been happy about it. All those boys at university, whose families no one knew. And unlike Isma, Aneeka had always been someone boys looked at—and someone who looked back. More than looked, though Aneeka always guarded that part of her life from her sister, who was, perhaps, too inclined to lecture. It was Parvaiz who had talked Isma into accepting it—if there was anything worrying going on with Aneeka he’d know, and would tell Isma if he needed backup in talking sense to his twin. But there was no need to start having nightmares about Aneeka out alone in the cold, impersonal heart of London—she’d always been good at finding people who would look out for her. There was an instant appeal in her contradictory characteristics: sharp-tongued and considerate, serious-minded and capable of unbridled goofiness, as open to absorbing other people’s pain as she was incapable of acknowledging the damage of having been abandoned and orphaned (“I have you and P. That’s enough”). Whereas Parvaiz and Isma stayed at the margins of all groups so that no one would start to ask questions about their lives (“Where is your father? Are the rumors about him true?”), Aneeka simply knew how to place herself in the middle of a gathering, delineate her boundaries, and fashion intimacies around the no-go areas. Even as a young girl she’d known how to do this: someone would approach the subject of their father, and Aneeka would turn cold—an experience so disconcerting to those accustomed to her warmth that they’d quickly back away and be rewarded with the return of the Aneeka they knew. But now Parvaiz was a no-go area too, and not one that Aneeka could confine to a little corner of her life.