Chapter 10
“Who painted it, Mom?”
“Ach, Mitra-joon. I’m so sorry for what your father did. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, though I didn’t get to sleep until nearly dawn. I’m sorry I couldn’t stay to help you clean up.”
“It doesn’t matter, my daughter.”
“Who painted it, Mom?”
“Can you believe he took it to the framing gallery where you and Ana used to take art classes?”
“That old place is still there?”
“It seems so.”
“But the old witch who owned it died a while ago.”
“Mrs. Gold-e-blatt.”
“That’s right. She was awful, smelled like mothballs and turpentine, wore those orthopedic shoes. When she bent over, the rolled-down tops of her stockings showed.”
Shireen was laughing. “Mitra, you remember silly details. Anahita loved that woman.”
Of course she had. The pasty-faced German woman bestowed approval on Ana’s artistic talent from the get-go. On Mitra, she’d inflicted scorn. This, after administering an evaluative task—to draw a tree. Ana’s tree was surrounded by a green carpet of grass and possessed leaves of varying colors against a blue sky, with a bright yellow half orb of a sun perched in the top left corner of her paper. Mitra’s tree was—in answer to Goldblatt’s “Vat iz dis?”—a Winter Tree: drawn in charcoal, the trunk a totem pole of bumpy bark sprouting branches as crooked as lightning streaks, a lone crow near the top. Realistic. Goldblatt said she’d be happy to teach art to the younger fräulein, but not to the older. Ana blinked back tears of guilt for outdoing her sister, which made Mitra punch her arm. She was thrilled that Goldblatt didn’t want her in her musty basement classroom. She took her drawing home and added to it a front-gabled tree house with a dangling rope ladder.
“Anyway,” Shireen said, “your father told me it is a relative of Gold-e-blatt who is operating the shop, and that he met Anahita a few times when she went to have things framed. He has a good memory, I think. He painted her so well.”
Mitra’s stomach suddenly hurt and her chest bloomed with heat. The painter.
“Mitra-joon, are you still there?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“Please do not be upset about the painting. Your father is an emotional man; he cannot help himself. I apologize for him.”
“Listen, Mom, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you later, okay?”
Mitra hung up, waited a second, then called down to Libby’s garage for her rental.
* * *
On the sidewalk in Devon, Mitra swallowed an anxious queasiness. She’d become soft since Ana died. She used to wake up every morning, figure out what she feared doing most, and set out to tackle it. The idea of a challenge was what kept her moving forward; it was something she’d learned in childhood from her father. But in the past year, she’d stopped working on her projects, put off phone calls and emails, quit her gym membership, and avoided her small group of neighborhood friends. Most atypical of all, she was in what would seem to anyone a committed romantic relationship, and she’d opened her home to a pair of refugees, compromising her independence and her privacy, the things she valued most.
As she approached the corner shop, she realized that she’d spent the last year lamenting the fact that she’d never know more about the shocking secret her sister revealed the weekend before she died. Now, here was the possibility that she might learn something, as if her sister wasn’t entirely gone from her.
Goldblatt’s Art and Frame Shop. The old peeling script etched into the storefront glass had been refreshed in gold. The narrow entrance door, set in from the façade, had the same divided-light panes, but the wood was freshly stained and the glass new. In the front window, an easel like the one her father had displayed at the One Year stood on a floor of rippling sumptuous fabric; it held a portrait, spotlit from above, of a bespectacled boy and his golden retriever.
This was not the old store with its shopworn artwork and after-school basement classes. It was a neoquaint upscale boutique/ gallery for wealthy baby boomers who had Wall Street and Silicon Alley jobs, suburbanites with urban tastes.
The bell tinkled as Mitra opened the door, bringing back the memory of coming to the shop with Shireen to drop off or pick up artwork Yusef wanted framed. The left wall had been covered (as it was now) in frame samples, vertical rows of boomerangs that Shireen took forever to contemplate and choose from. She always opted for something ornate, clearly much grander than what it was meant to hold. Mitra suddenly remembered how intense her preteen annoyance had been for every aspect of her mother’s being, from Shireen’s rolling r’s and dropped articles to the flabbiness of her late-in-the-day bun as she inclined her neck to compare the samples on the wall. And Goldblatt, her protuberant belly suspended like a shelf above skinny long legs, would always suggest something different from what Shireen had chosen. Mitra understood condescension, and it made her furious at the both of them, at Goldblatt’s Might I suggest a more appropriate style, Mrs. Jahani? and at Shireen’s capitulation to it. Her mother was a mouse with everyone, right down to the Esso owner who later proved to be adding a fee to her credit card each time he filled her tank; unbelievably, after being informed of this by a livid Yusef, she drove to the opposite end of town to get her gas rather than chance the owner seeing her across the street at the Mobil station—so as not to embarrass him. It never occurred to her that she didn’t deserve to be taken advantage of. Even back then, Mitra had wondered how, with a mother so blatantly submissive and apologetic, she’d ended up the opposite and Ana more or less the same.
Mitra looked away from the frame sample wall. Everything else about the shop was different.
The wood floor was glossy with polyurethane, the walls faux-painted in a textured beige-gold wash. In place of the hulking butcher block island that had held Goldblatt’s wooden money box, a collection of standing file folders, scissors hanging by a frayed ribbon, and rectangles of matting paper, there was a round table with a flower arrangement on it, flanked by two wing chairs upholstered in an understated off-white fabric. The remaining three walls were covered from floor to ceiling with framed portraits, mostly of children. Clearly, they’d all been painted by the same artist—beautifully done, the eyes of each child capturing a lively soul or a hidden mischief, eyes that were brilliant with secrets and desires, like the portrait of Anahita and the children.
In the old days, Goldblatt had displayed imposing oil paintings, their prices written on tiny labels Scotch-taped to the wall beneath them. The numbers were written in elaborate penmanship, the sevens with a line through the middle, the way Mitra’s parents wrote their numbers. Mitra hadn’t liked the paintings, dreary scapes of spired old European towns under gray skies, portraits of stiff men with red-rimmed eyes and ladies with sharp noses and thin lips, like Goldblatt herself.
“Be right with you,” said a male voice from beyond the door in the back. Mitra’s throat went dry. I’m about to meet my sister’s lover. She had an urge to bolt, as if she were about to commit a sin. She heard the squeak of an office chair, and then he was walking toward her.
“Good afternoon, Madame. Can I help you with something?”
Well, this can’t be him, Mitra thought, relieved. A man in his sixties, wavy silver hair combed back from a tanned face, dark eyebrows, chiseled cheekbones, attractive lines that came from experience and the outdoors. She relaxed. “I’m just browsing, thank you.”
“Of course,” he said, smiling. “Feel free. Take your time.” His teeth were white and straight, probably implants or veneers. Mitra placed his accent. She’d developed a knack for that, hiring laborers over the years. He was an Arab.
A telephone rang. “Excuse me for a moment,” he said, turning and walking to a Baroque desk in the far corner. He stood with his back to her and spoke into the receiver quietly . . . in Hebrew. Intrigued, she inspected him further: about six feet tall, wearing a black turtleneck tucked into ironed khaki trousers, a belt that showed off a flat stomach, and black thin-soled loafers. As he hung up, she caught the glint of a thick gold wedding band.
Mitra pretended to inspect the portraits on the wall, making her way toward the basement door and straining to hear for the presence of someone else. Would she have to come back to the shop over and over until the painter showed his face? Maybe he painted elsewhere. Of course, he must. She stood before a portrait depicting a young boy wearing an orange-and-black-checkered kaffiyeh.
“It is painted from the photo of a Palestinian boy,” the older man said from close behind her. “That is his father’s headdress.” He chuckled. “See how boastful he is, wearing it?”
Indeed, the boy’s chest was puffed out, his chin lifted, but his suppressed smile made him irresistibly cute.
“This was painted from a photograph?” she asked, stepping back so they were side by side.
“Yes.” He extended his arm to encompass the whole shop. “All of these portraits are painted from photographs, sometimes very poor photographs, even black and whites.”
“How interesting.”
“I think so.”
“How difficult.”
“Occasionally.”
“I’d love to meet the artist.”
He threw back his head and laughed, then turned to her and bowed. “At your service, Madame.”
“Oh.”
He peered at her, still smiling. “I am sorry. You are disappointed.”
“What? No! Of course not! Just surprised. I . . . I always picture artists holed up in garrets, hunched in front of their easels.”
“Yes, yes.” He touched his jaw. “With unshaven faces and haunted eyes.”
She forced a smile and exhaled. “Exactly.”
“Well, in my case, the studio is downstairs, and I’m not fond of myself with a beard. I’m usually down there, but the saleswoman is ill today.”
“Your . . . your portraits are beautiful.” Her mouth was so dry she could hear her tongue unsticking from her palate.
“Thank you, Madame. Are you interested? I can ship to any location in the world.”
“I . . . I . . .” she stumbled. “I’d like to look a little longer.” And she managed to turn toward another portrait. Her voice sounded stiff and far away.
“By all means. Take as long as you like.”
She felt him drift away and tried hard to collect herself and rearrange her thoughts. Suddenly it seemed obvious that Anahita would have been attracted to an older man—it was Mitra’s own tastes that had influenced her expectations, and Ana was always her opposite. Mitra also hadn’t expected him to be married, but that was her rule too. Biting the inside of her cheek, she approached the desk, where the man was leafing through some papers. He looked up. “Actually,” she said, “I grew up in this town. I remember the woman who used to own this shop.”
“She was my wife’s aunt,” he said.
“Well, it’s really different from the way I remember it. My sister used to take art lessons in the basement.”
His demeanor suddenly changed. He frowned, staring into Mitra’s face as if to look under her skin. The silence was awkward. Finally, he said, “You are Mitra.”
He pronounced it the Persian way, as if he’d known her all her life, as if Anahita had told him everything about her. And of course she had. Tears welled up in Mitra’s eyes and she fought them in vain. He came around the desk, guided her to one of the two customer chairs, and placed a box of tissues in her lap. She blinked and blinked, but the tears kept rising up. He walked to the front door, bolted it, flipped the Open sign to Closed, lowered the shade, and shut off the overhead lights. A lamp on the desk cast a warm gold tint.
He sat in the other customer chair and leaned toward Mitra, arms on his thighs. She wiped her eyes and nose. “When you first came in,” he said quietly, “I felt I had met you. But it is the photograph I recognize you from.”
She nodded. Thankfully, the tears had stopped. “The photograph you used to not paint me.”
“Yes,” he said with a sigh of regret. “It was your father’s wish.”
“I know.”
“It was not right of him to do that.”
Mitra raised her chin. “It doesn’t matter.”
“No, it doesn’t. I used to tell Ana the same thing. I also had a difficult father. Some people cannot abandon their misery.”
Mitra studied him. His face was drawn, his mouth pulled down on either end. “Is that how you justify their behavior?”
“No, it is how I keep from hating them. Hate takes too much energy.”
She looked away, rested an elbow on the arm of the chair. “This is too weird. I don’t even know your name.”
“Aden,” he said.
“She wouldn’t tell me anything about you.”
“She didn’t want you to feel complicit.”
“But she told you about me,” she said, hating herself for sounding jealous.
“Yes. To know her, I had to know about you.”
Though no one had ever said this and Mitra didn’t remember ever thinking it, she was stunned by its truth, not only for Ana, but for herself.
He stood up. “I’ll get us some tea,” he said. “It is a Persian blend; I brew it in the back.”
Mitra was about to say that she wasn’t here for a fucking social visit, but her sudden craving for a tea fix kept her silent. He came back with a tray holding two delicate glasses of dark tea and a dessert plate of Milano Mints, which Mitra loathed but Ana had loved. Mitra imagined Aden serving tea to all his best customers, certainly to her father, who would have appreciated an Old World bazaari touch. She shivered at the notion that she was probably sitting exactly where her father had sat to order the portrait. And then it dawned on her that Anahita had managed—from the grave—to humiliate their father in the most inconspicuous way, and this made her want to laugh. How utterly devastated her father would be if he knew he’d negotiated with his virtuous daughter’s lover.
As Aden carefully placed the tea and cookies on the desk, Mitra wondered how she would cut through the false congeniality and taciturn formality that stood for good etiquette in both their cultures. If he thinks I’m as malleable as my sister, he’s in for a surprise. If they couldn’t get beyond the social veneer, Mitra would leave here with nothing, though she didn’t have a clear idea of what the something she sought was. She noticed how his silver hair fell like bird feathers over the back of his shirt collar. He hiked his trouser legs up before sitting back in the chair, a thing only men from an older generation did. She admitted again that he was handsome, but what had Ana seen in him to make her risk everything?
Aden sipped his tea noisily, and so did Mitra, as if they were competing. She wrapped her hand around the hot glass, rested it in her lap, and steeled herself. “You saw my sister the day she died.”
“I did.” He looked away, not to avoid her gaze, it seemed, but to calm himself. “She left here to pick up the children. It was raining. Thunderstorms were in the forecast. I told her to drive carefully.” His voice was choked. “I didn’t know about the accident until the next day. Marjorie—my saleswoman—showed me the article in the local newspaper.”
“Your saleswoman knew about your affair?” Mitra couldn’t keep the disgust out of her voice.
“Of course not,” he said, his eyes flaring. “She showed me the article because it was a terrible tragedy in the town. A young mother and her two children. The car so mangled. Later, I burned the paper.”
That’s it? You burned the fucking paper? How dramatic. Mitra bit her cheek again, hoping for the taste of salty blood. She swigged the rest of her tea and let her eyes drift to the ring on his left hand. “Did you love my sister?”
“Very much.”
“Should I believe you?”
“That’s your choice,” he said, holding her gaze.
Olga used to say that a liar could never hold her gaze. Mitra wanted to believe him, and yet she wanted him to persuade her, tell her all the reasons he’d loved Anahita. Every detail.
He said, “I will tell you anything you want to know.”
How accommodating. His words swung Mitra’s mood, and she reminded herself why she was here. This man was not her friend; he was the man who’d seduced her sister into betraying her husband, her children, and yes, Mitra too. She was not here to listen to the romantic story of their relationship; she was here to find the truth. Without hesitation now, she blurted, “Do you feel any responsibility for my sister’s death?”
Aden paled. “What?”
“I spoke to her while she was in the car that day. She was distraught about your relationship. It was tearing her apart.”
His face turned hard as sculpture. “Perhaps that is how you read it. If she seemed distraught, I believe it was because you had learned about . . . us.”
Mitra struggled to stay seated and keep from raising her voice. “Oh, so you’re saying I’m the one who’s responsible? It was because of me that she was upset and distracted, not because she was cheating on her husband?”
He flinched, and she readied herself for his retort. His knuckles were white on the arms of the chair, but he looked away, toward the far end of the shop. He took a tight breath through his nose, then looked back at her and exhaled. “I know this game,” he said softly. “I played it myself.”
She was confused but dared not show it. She kept his gaze and said nothing.
“I wracked my brain for what transpired between Ana and me before she left here. Did we argue? No. Could I have said something that hurt her? On the contrary, we talked about how your reaction to our affair pained her, how she wished she’d lied to you, but then she decided she was relieved that you finally knew, and hopeful that you would eventually understand and accept. I even asked her if she wished that we not see one another for a time, and she said of course not, one thing had nothing to do with the other. She said, I know my sister, she needs time for it to sink in. She was smiling when she walked out the door.”
Mitra wanted to run, but her body was frozen.
“You know,” he continued, “I found the boy who was driving the van that struck Ana’s car. A kid, not more than twenty-two or so. He’d been working only a week for the phone company. It was terrible of me to seek him out, to lie that I was a psychologist from the state sent to check on his mental health after such a tragedy. Yes, I’d read the news reports describing the accident. I’d even seen the police report because I have a friend in the department. But it wasn’t enough. You see, Mitra, I had to try to absolve myself too.
“I told the boy he should describe what he remembered of the accident. I said that telling could be a form of healing. This may or may not be true, but at the time I didn’t care what pain I caused. In my eyes, he was Ana’s murderer. I wanted to be certain of it.
“I knew his guilt was stronger than mine. Only a psychopath would feel otherwise. One look at his haunted face and I could see that his life was ruined, but I had no pity, not then. We sat in his parents’ overheated living room on furniture protected by plastic covers. Instant coffee and pound cake sat untouched. I’m ashamed to say that I interrogated him calmly and relentlessly. Every detail, from the moment he climbed into the van for his shift to the moment the paramedics stopped him from trying to revive Nikku in the grass on the side of the highway. When the tears rolled down his cheeks, I gave him a packet of tissues. When he couldn’t catch his breath, I laid my hand on his shoulder. As if I cared. As if I could vanquish from my imagination the desire to wrap my hands around his neck.”
Mitra’s peripheral vision collapsed, and Aden’s face seemed disembodied. His throaty voice competed with a ringing in her ears. He sighed. “In the end, I discovered nothing helpful. The van skidded or hydroplaned into Anahita. It was the rain or the oil on the road or the nearly bald tires or a bolt of lightning that momentarily blinded the boy. He tried to regain control; he did the right things. It all happened so fast that Ana had no time to react. She was a careful driver, Mitra, especially when the kids were in the car. Still, the boy would never forgive himself. He too yearned to know the why of it, but that will remain a mystery, like so many things. All we can do is grieve and survive for those who remain. It’s the human story. Random. An accident, Mitra. Neither you nor I are to blame.”
She felt disagreeably near to him, felt the heat of his skin radiating. She hadn’t synthesized the logic of his words yet; the scene of the crash was around her and inside her head. He stood and left the room, as if to give her privacy. She hadn’t felt so hot with grief since the funeral.
He returned with a bottle of brandy, took her empty tea glass, and poured an inch of the liquid into it. Her fingers trembled as she took it. She sipped and shuddered. He sat down across from her again, his face awash with pity. And that—that expression—turned her insides. How dare he? Did he think his heartrending little story would convince her that the two of them were on par where Anahita was concerned? Yes, he obviously had cared for her sister. Yes, she wanted very much to believe that the deaths had been a random accident, pure and simple. But to be forced into such intimacy with a man she didn’t know, the man who’d seduced her sister?
Through clenched teeth, she said, “Tell me, Aden, how did you do it? How did you manage to get her to fall for you? She was crazy about her husband.”
He stiffened almost imperceptibly; he was irritated. Good, Mitra thought. “I’m afraid that isn’t true,” he said.
“Oh, really? That’s what you convinced yourself of, that she didn’t love Bijan? Well, I know she did, I witnessed it.”
Now he looked ready to slap her. “There were things she didn’t tell you. Things from long ago.”
“I doubt it. I knew everything about my sister.” Mitra paused. “If you’re implying that Bijan treated her badly, I won’t believe it. He was the best thing that ever happened to her.”
“When she married him, yes he was. You and he saved her. But not in the way you think.” Aden suddenly looked doleful, as if he regretted every word as he spoke it. “Your cousin,” he said quietly. “The one who . . . wanted her.”
She shivered. “What are you talking about?” she demanded in a hoarse, accusatory tone.
“I know you saved her from him. You told her no one should touch her that way. You said all the right things. But you were a child yourself then. You didn’t have the power to prevent him from continuing. That one time, you stopped him. She never forgot that. But he was persistent. All molesters are. He simply found more wily and secretive ways. And Ana, well, we both know she was easily manipulated. Already he’d made her feel complicit.”
Mitra couldn’t speak. Her anger was gone. She didn’t know what she felt. She didn’t even know how to think about what she felt.
Aden went on. “I’m sorry to tell you. Ana never wanted you to know, but I think it’s only fair now, so you can understand who she was, why she led the life she did.”
“But I don’t understand!” Mitra nearly screeched. “How long? How long . . . did he . . . did this go on?”
Aden sighed again. “Until she met Bijan.”
Mitra stared at her lap, thoughts swirling, and swigged the rest of her brandy. “Wait,” she said, as if to herself. “Ana didn’t meet Bijan until she was seventeen. That was five years after I discovered Kareem molesting her in the basement!” She looked at Aden. “Are you saying that he molested her for five more years?” She waited, held her breath.
“Mitra, he’d been molesting her for some time before you discovered them. In total, it was eight years. Until she married Bijan. Until you made it possible for her to marry Bijan.”
Rage stuck in her throat, pulsed through her hands, which suddenly felt wet. She looked into her lap. Crimson seeped through her fingers. She’d shattered the tea glass.
Aden gasped and looked around for something to catch the dripping blood. Mitra kept staring at her lap, as if watching a violent episode in a film. Then Aden was pulling his shirt over his head, bunching it up, and sliding it under her hands. He began picking out the fine shards of glass from her palms and dropping them into a wastebasket under the desk.
“Shit,” Mitra said.
“Don’t move,” he ordered. “I’m getting the larger pieces first, but we must go to the sink downstairs. The light is better, and I have disinfectant.”
She could smell his hair. Herbal Essence. The shampoo she and Ana used when they were teenagers. His bare shoulders had a smooth, olive tone, with fine dark hairs curling up from them, burnished in the light. Had Ana liked that? Bijan was hairy too. How bizarre this was. Her sister’s lover, shirtless, bending over her, ministering to her like a nurse.
He shepherded her to the rickety staircase that led to the art room, holding the bloody shirt around her hand as they descended. The handwritten School sign that had hung from the sloped ceiling was gone, but the pungent odor of oil paint and turpentine wafted from below.
At the deep sink, Aden held her hand under a stream of warm water. He donned a pair of rimless eyeglasses and examined the skin for small slivers. “Damned Turkish tea glasses,” he said. “Thin as paper.”
His hands were soft, nails cut so short. Satisfied that he’d removed all the glass, he gently washed the wound with soap. “Is it stinging?” he asked.
“No, just feels numb.”
He patted her skin with a white hand towel, folded it neatly into a square, and pressed it against her palm. “Bend your fingers and apply pressure for a bit until we can be sure the bleeding is stopped.” He opened the cabinet beneath the sink and pulled out a metal first aid box. “Then we’ll put on antiseptic ointment and a bandage. Thank God you don’t need stitches.”
He led her to a chair next to a drafting table. Smudges of blood adorned the thighs of her dark jeans. Aden sat in a chair next to a long table covered with a sheet of Kenized cloth. The room was nothing like it had been in Mitra’s childhood. It was white and spare, with track lighting and pendants to compensate for the lack of natural light, a wooden bench easel, a wall of shelving packed neatly with supplies, and several mobile storage carts holding palettes, brushes, and tubes of paint. Against the walls rested rows of canvases, many unfinished.
Aden looked different in the bright light, a little yellow. “Sorry about your shirt,” she said as he reached under the table and pulled out a black gym bag.
“It’s nothing,” he said, extracting a white polo shirt and pulling it over his head. “I carry a spare.” He flashed a smile that didn’t reach his still-worried eyes. “Where I come from, we’re always prepared to lose our shirts and begin again.”
She forced a smile, then looked down. “I’m sorry, Aden . . . for my anger . . . for my . . . ignorance.” She felt raw, as if she’d been loofahed head to toe, dipped in ice water, and just now thawing. Still not looking at him, she asked, “Did Ana never love Bijan?”
“Of course she did, Mitra. But not in the passionate way everyone thought. He was her husband, the father of her children, a good man. But he was traditional, not in an extreme sense, but probably not capable of understanding or accepting what had been done to her—the physical and emotional blackmail—as abuse or molestation. If she’d told him, I’m afraid he would have labeled it differently. This is not the sort of thing that’s easily understood by those to whom it has not happened.”
He looked away, but she saw a flash of discomfort cross his face. He had his own secrets, but it wasn’t her place to ask him about them.
“The sad truth is,” he continued, exhaling, “such things go on in most families. And if not in the household, then at school or in the neighborhood or the church, the synagogue, the mosque. Places where children feel safe, where adults like to believe they are safe. To imagine otherwise would be to shatter the necessary fantasy of the communal identity. For many years, even Ana didn’t think of what Kareem did to her as a crime. It wasn’t until we—”
He hesitated, and she finished the sentence for him. “Began the affair.”
“Yes. I suspected . . . so she finally told me.”
“You suspected?”
“Because of her . . . difficulties . . . with sex.”
Mitra swallowed. “Difficulties?”
“It is a consequence,” he said.
Mitra’s head ached, and she had a sudden desire to lie down and close her eyes. She noticed the exposed water pipes along the ceiling, painted black. She remembered Kareem grinding against Ana in the boiler room, and then she imagined what she now knew must have gone on: Kareem pulling Ana into a closet or a bathroom, creeping into her bed when Mitra hung out in Olga’s room, fondling her under the dinner table while all of them—always such a full house!—watched sitcoms and gossiped over tea and played backgammon and read books and slept and sunbathed. “I want to ruin him,” she snarled.
“That’s exactly what Ana didn’t want. Please don’t make me sorry I’ve told you.”
“It’s what he deserves, Aden! For the whole family to know what he did. For everyone to know that he was a child molester.”
“Are you quite sure that’s how he would be viewed? Especially now that Ana isn’t alive to tell her side?”
He was right. She had no response. She gritted her teeth.
“Mitra, she didn’t believe you could stop it then, and she wouldn’t believe you could expose the crime now. Not justly, anyway. Even if she thought there was a chance that Kareem would get his due, she wouldn’t want to face the possibility that you would fail. When a child—when a person—has been abused, their thoughts are not logical. The shame is a pit of quicksand.”
“So Kareem stopped after she started seeing Bijan.”
“Yes, but he became furious and more determined. She knew that becoming someone else’s wife was the only way to shut him out completely. Sadly, your father then created the obstacle of your marriage. In the end, your crazy plan—your sacrifice—worked. You rescued her. And you did it for a lesser reason than you thought. You did it simply because you thought she was in love and it would make her happy.”
“It wasn’t such a sacrifice. I never wanted to marry, to be trapped like my mother. Denying Anahita her wish as a way to manipulate me was cruel. My father deserved payback for that, and I deserved—everyone deserves—the freedom to make their own destiny.”
He nodded. “That may be true, but it doesn’t nullify what you did for her.”
“Fine. Whatever.” The last thing she wanted to hear now was praise; she was a fool.
He leaned forward and unwound the towel over her hand. “Doesn’t look too bad.” He reached into the first aid box at his feet and brought out a roll of gauze and surgical tape. “Now I get to show you what I learned in the IDF.”
Sometimes, Mitra thought, an unexpected event could make people intimate. Like when a child falls down on a playground and all the mothers rush to help no matter whose child it is. Or when a man faints in an airport and within seconds there’s a jacket under his head, a backpack under his feet, a woolen coat tucked around him—he’s no one’s stranger and everyone’s responsibility, all this without hesitation or judgment. Mitra wondered if it was true what the Sufis said, that we are all connected by good intentions.
Aden stood. “I want to show you something, Mitra.” He grasped the corners of the cloth that covered the long table and carefully peeled it off the way a mother might uncover her sleeping child.
A scintillation of gems took Mitra’s breath away. A sea of pavé and baguette diamonds, of filigreed precious metals, of intricate chains. And in every piece—earrings, bracelets, necklaces, rings—was Persian turquoise, smooth and veinless like no other turquoise in the world. Mitra slowly slid off her chair and approached the table. The creations were all unique and meticulously detailed, all linked by an avian theme. Libby had been wrong; Ana had not tired of birds, she’d only tired of painting them.
Mitra’s eyes filled and the jewelry blurred. She saw Anahita’s graceful, steady fingers manipulating the delicate tools. She saw the poised hunch of her shoulders, her lips pressed tightly together in concentration, her eyes squinting, dark ringlets escaping from a thick hair clip onto the milky back of her neck. She reached out to touch the vision and stumbled forward.
Aden came around the table quickly, saying her name. She hugged herself and tried to slow her breath. Ana’s presence, effulgent as her jewels, felt as close as Aden’s calming voice. “You see, Mitra, she is still here.”