Rebecca returned on a warm afternoon in early October. When Daniel saw her emerge from the gate, he was both relieved and apprehensive. Her smile made him happier than anything, and every time he saw her after a prolonged absence, his stomach did the same somersaults it had when they’d first met. He’d feared she would still be angry at his refusal to come to the funeral, but it seemed his absence was forgiven. He held her hand as he toted her luggage to the car.
“Wait,” she said as he was about to start the car.
“How come?”
She squeezed his hand and climbed onto his lap. “I’m late.”
He glanced at his watch. “Only by a few minutes.”
She smiled, then stroked her belly and laid her forehead against his. “No, I’m later than that.”
They had never loved each other more. Over the next few months, he saw the change in the curve of her belly. Her skin appeared illuminated from within. She slept deeply at night. He found that his love for his unborn child pushed back the colorless rage that swelled inside him when he thought of the Feverdrops Slaughter. He remembered clearly for the first time when he had been part of a family. He’d had a father—and a mother, at least for a time. But it had all been too big somehow. His father’s name, his grand history and ambitions, the house, the gardens, Dorothy’s sudden departure, the car that took his father to prison, Sayed’s feud with kings. A happy home required smallness. Families were about indiscernible distances between people who claimed no greater ambition than each other’s happiness. Daniel hoped he would never forget this.
Rebecca saw friends more frequently than usual, especially Laila, who came and went, often with Peter. Daniel eventually wondered why he had ever been uneasy about Peter’s visit. Laila was the person whose presence grew more difficult with each minute. One day he asked her about the topic she never mentioned. “You’re a doctor. You save lives. You can’t honestly stay with a group that does such monstrous things.”
“Daniel, this isn’t who they are. It’s just a lunatic fringe.”
“You know this?”
“I know they believe in the equality of women.”
“So do plenty of non-murderers.”
She shook her head, not in dismissal but as if there was too much to explain.
“Daniel, do you remember the dog?” she said.
Yes, he remembered. Laila was breaking the promise they both had made never to speak of it again.
The dog had trotted into the Woodrow Wilson Academy one morning, ambling across the schoolyard. The children gathered around the animal, stroking its spiny back. But something was wrong with its gait, one leg shorter than the others. Daniel told the other kids to back away, because something else was wrong, too, and he saw it first. Saliva was foaming around the animal’s slack jaw. It lowered its body to the ground, forelegs splayed, baring its teeth at the retreating children. Daniel helped a girl climb into an oak but failed to convince Laila to take refuge. He stayed with her on the ground, refusing to leave her alone. She moved calmly, never taking her eyes off the dog, as the groundskeepers came with jump ropes, bats, and a blanket.
Teachers corralled kids into the building, and over Laila’s cries of protest, the groundskeepers threw a blanket over the dog while it barked and howled, twisting this way and that. They beat it until it collapsed. Then they dragged the dog to the road and tied it to a post some twenty yards from the school, where the injured creature spent two days winding the rope around the pole, snarling at passersby, some of whom threw stones. At home, Laila begged her father to send for the animal doctor, but it was no use. He was somewhere near Mazar-i-Sharif trying to save a rich man’s goats. There was no one else.
Late that night, Daniel woke to the sound of pebbles on his window. Laila was alone. They ran hand in hand through the night-soaked city. Clutching her father’s gun, she aimed the barrel at the snarling dog and pulled the trigger. Daniel wrapped his pinkie around hers, and they promised they would never tell. When they came to school the next day, they watched garbage collectors heave the dog onto a pile of trash.
“Should we say a prayer for the dog’s soul?” Daniel said, before quickly correcting himself. “Sorry, that was dumb. I know dogs don’t have souls.”
Laila disagreed. “Why shouldn’t they? People just want to pretend dogs don’t have souls so they can treat them badly.” She jutted her chin toward the other side of the street, where a trio of women walked together, hidden under their chaderi. “My father says it’s the same with girls. Some men want to hide them. When they’re hidden, you can pretend they’re not real. But we are real.”
Stunned at the simple truth of Laila’s words, twelve-year-old Daniel remembered that girls were wonderful, this one especially, and that he loved her. He wanted to tell her, but then Laila said, “The French have another name for rabies. They call it la rage. Rage. I think that’s a better word for it.” Something in her voice silenced him.
In the first months of her pregnancy, Rebecca was doing so well that she worked more instead of less, increasing her hours at the embassy. Laila wanted her to rest; it was hard not to think of her as breakable after the pain she had gone through last time. Almost six months had passed since that day. Maybe it no longer mattered, Rebecca’s body like new now, her scars healed.
But by November, she seemed weak. She had grown pale. Her body ached. First it was just her back and hips, then her legs, her feet, her neck. She either slept too much or too little. Laila referred her to a specialist, a Frenchman who sounded very sure of everything he said. He told Rebecca things were normal and advised her to rest. Still, Rebecca and Daniel grew cautious in their excitement. Like the staff at USADE, they refrained from talking about the future. They scarcely referred to the child and stopped discussing names. Rebecca had said she liked Matthew because it meant gift.
Daniel wondered which guest room to convert to the nursery and when the remodeling should start. When should he return to the abandoned crib in the shed? Every time he tried, he found that he couldn’t, and instead he worked on the table for Sherzai’s sandali. All of this he kept to himself. He read books he had always told himself he should read. Texts that were assigned at the Woodrow Wilson Academy or in college, or that Rebecca had told him about. She had left a stack on his nightstand, editions of Steinbeck and Austen, Nabokov, Fitzgerald, and, remarkably, Kafka. She wanted him to read an author who was haunted by wanting to get inside places that were forever closed to him.
She stopped working. She played the piano in the mornings, because her sickness came in the afternoons, and after she played she would linger on the bench, her eyes fixed on some unseen spot below the floor, and he wondered if she was having the same thoughts he was and keeping them to herself.