I.

MY YOUNGER SISTER ALSO LOVES BLOND MEN BUT IS OTHERWISE unlike me.

I drive to the airport with my grandmother next to me. She is calm, and each time I take my eyes off the road to glance at her, she’s looking back. She has her hands in her lap and doesn’t say a word about Istanbul’s crazy drivers, usually her favorite topic. And she hasn’t expressed any worry about this being only my third time driving in Istanbul. She looks out at the tall steel buildings, the cemetery, the crumbling façades plastered with ads. As we were riding the elevator, she told me she was very relieved to have shared her story with me. I kissed her cheek and held her hand as we walked to the car. I had only known that her husband was an eye doctor who died in an earthquake. Alara and I thought she never loved him. We thought the old woman who spat at me was her friend, not this great-aunt. I can’t see my grandmother the way I used to, and this recognition fills me with hope. If she can be a different person, who was the same person this whole time, I can, too.

We pass the cemetery and she smiles. I tell her that some grave owners post online ads selling their family plots, many of which are already filled with bones.

People need money, she says sadly.

The new Istanbul skyline could be repurposed to accommodate the dead, I say.

Don’t be insane, my grandmother says.

I roll down our windows and my grandmother hangs out her arm.

IT’S ALWAYS MEN WAITING IN THE ARRIVALS HALL OF Atatürk Airport. Taxi drivers, private drivers, but usually dads or uncles or brothers. It smells like sweat. We’re the only women here and we’re hungry, so we buy börek to eat out of oily napkins. My grandmother hands me a wet towelette from her purse. Her hand is still shaking, and I realize that I had been hoping she would be less sick now, now that she had released something held inside for so long. She wipes her hands clean, then motions for my forehead to feel if I still have a fever.

Gone? I ask.

Gone, she says, patting my arm and proud. Now you feel like ice.

They’re coming towards us. Alara is wearing a long colorful dress, her hair piled on top of her head in a bun, her wide mouth open in a laugh. Her thin arms swing at her sides like oars. Deniz is scowling, but otherwise looks happy. His long hair grazes his shoulders in dark waves. He’s in a graphic T-shirt, a habit he often says he won’t kick. This one’s his favorite, a photograph of Nas, and Nas in turn wears a Supreme shirt. Deniz’s carrying her things.

Alara and Deniz close in on us, hugs happen around me, and my grandmother won’t shut up about how tired they must be, because it is her job to be the best grandmother to us, to take care of us before she takes care of herself, and I’m stuck thinking, again, of how I can be of any use to my elders when they throw themselves over to take care of us, and how I can transform the Turkish obsession with caring for the youth, who would be just fine, wouldn’t we, without all their care, when Alara and Deniz turn to me, smiling, their eyes wide and hopeful, and I surprise them, I take them both into a big hug.

THERE IS THE USUAL TRAFFIC ON THE DRIVE HOME. ALARA and Deniz point out the buildings they don’t recognize, ones newly built since last summer, and my grandmother shares what she remembers was once in each skyscraper’s place. She’s sitting tiny in the back seat, her seat belt cutting her long breasts in two, talking while her body remains entirely still. She’s back to her usual form of storytelling: geographical data, anthropological details, facts. My grandmother informs us that there used to be only a chocolate factory on the outskirts of the airport. Now there are miles of run-down, paint-chipped buildings, and I see a short man dressing a mannequin in the third-floor window of a clothing store. Alara and Deniz are angry at the new skyscrapers and malls sharing the hills with beige and gray apartment buildings, mosques and minarets. People use the Turkish verb for “planted” to describe the phenomenon of newly built skyscrapers, which have been rising for years now at a rapid, fatal pace. Fatal because the economy will not support them, and many of them—retail, business, residence—are too expensive to be used. And the steel buildings, thanks to this term, masquerade as some organic form of life.

I decide I will do whatever my grandmother tells me I should do.

If she told me to visit his grave, I would go.

One third of Parkinson’s patients suffer from depression. I cannot be responsible for making her illness worse.

We drop Deniz off in the neighborhood next to ours, where he’s staying with his grandmother. Anytime a family member lands in Istanbul, an arrival ceremony commences at my grandmother’s apartment, where we feast on tea and pastries and ice cream, and each time, after we’re already full of pastries, my grandmother reveals the second feast, dinner, which she has spent all day preparing. Deniz’s will be conducted in a similar fashion, and his aunties will ask him if he has a girlfriend, if the girlfriend is Kurdish, if he is going to propose. Deniz has only ever dated blond white girls, but never seriously enough for his family in Istanbul to know.

Alara and I try to help my grandmother, but she bats us out of the kitchen. Alara’s moving through each room of the small apartment, eating a dribbly peach, and talking of the distinct smell of this place, a smell she can recognize only on the first day she returns. She runs her hand over a photograph of my grandmother marrying my grandfather. She asks me if I think Grandma was the thinnest in the family back then and I shrug. She leafs through my test books before throwing her bag down on our bed. In the living room, she opens and closes the dark wooden cabinet with my grandmother’s lifelong collection of porcelain plates. When we were little, my grandmother filled us up with carbs, cheese, meat, and sugar, adding enough weight to change our body types. I used to think I came to Istanbul each summer only to eat. Now I’m thinking food is medicine. Trota, Galen, al-Razi, Ibn Sina, they administered bloodletting, of course, but the majority of treatments concerned adapting your diet in accordance to your liquid makeup, as well as the season. Sugar made a person instantly happy, and it instilled that person with enough energy to do physical work. I begin to tell Alara this and how they used to think sugar was very healthy, but she pretends not to hear me. I will keep trying, because it’s time. We have never spoken about this, her eating disorder, because within weeks of Baba dying in the kitchen while boiling water for tea, she’d already spun a strong defensive narrative. She justified her new lack of sugar, as well as a long, unspoken list of other carbohydrates, as healthy. Ibn Sina would agree with her. He was the first to measure sugar in urine in order to diagnose diabetes.

My grandmother’s hand shakes as she lines up stuffed grape leaves in a pot to boil. When we attempt to help again she tells us we’re embarrassing her. We protest, but she starts smacking us with a wooden spoon. There’s hardly enough room for three of us in there anyway. We sit on the floor of the balcony instead, where wet sweater sets and blouses and my grandmother’s big beige bras hang around us, and we talk about Cooper.

You know, Alara says, sucking a peach pit clean in her mouth, I could never tell—seriously, never—if Cooper was genuinely nice, or if it was all an act. You know, to appear nice because it’s more socially comfortable than being rude. I thought it was an act at first, when you first introduced him to us. Baba thought so, too. But then I thought differently. Especially after winter break. He always knew what to say. He never pushed us. You.

And now? I ask.

She licks her peach pit. I’ll admit, I do still think it’s genuine. Do you miss him?

Alara’s still in her stylish airplane outfit but her face looks yellow and oily. I want to tell her that it scares me that the other night was the first time Cooper and I had ever fought, and does that mean he really wants to give up so easily? Do I?

Jesus, Sibel. Hello? You don’t know, do you? So fucking typical of you to not know.

No, I insist. I do know. It wasn’t working.

She spits out the pit and begins to eat another peach. The smell of lamb and buttered rice from the kitchen fills the balcony. Alara is right, I don’t know if this is better. I know I miss him. And I know I’m an idiot.

Aren’t those full of sugar? I point at her peach.

I didn’t eat on the plane, she replies. You know, when you first called me weeks ago, saying you weren’t going to volunteer at the hospital after all, I wasn’t surprised, exactly, I just felt sad.

I’m still interested in medicine, I say, and I recite my favorite fact, that your periods don’t necessarily add up to an expiration date for childbearing, but that many of my friends still think they’re losing future baby chances with each period.

Alara rolls her eyes but I continue.

When there is no baby, I say, which is most of the time, your uterus sheds the newly formed lining. Some eggs may be nestled in that lining, but it’s not a drastic loss of eggs. Really, the eggs die on their own.

Alara’s confused now but absorbed. She finished three peaches and has their pits laid on her lap like hard, tiny brains. I thought your period meant you flushed out your unused eggs?

No, I say. Alara is not listening to me. I tell her how a baby girl is born with every egg she’ll ever possess. This means that when our grandmother gave birth to our mother at home, the eggs that made us were already in existence.

Alara nods, then asks again about Cooper. She tells me I’m being very elusive, very annoying. She throws a peach pit at my face.

Fine, I say. I haven’t seen him since our fight. All I know is he’s going to Georgia. That’s what Grandma told me. They’re still talking, and I think she’s sacrificing her protectiveness to, you know, be my informant. But sometimes she won’t answer his calls.

Alara asks me how the hell I manage to compartmentalize my feelings, and I say I don’t, not really, I can’t, and I can’t tell if I need him or want him. I can’t tell what I would ever do without him.

Oh, she says. Yeah, that’s bad.

We’re quiet. My grandmother washes her beige bras with so much more regularity than I do. There is always at least one giant bra out here drying next to the plants.

Wait, hold on, Alara says. Georgia, the state?

No, no. Georgia. I nod my head to the left, as if we’re sitting on a paper map of the world. He’s going to Tbilisi.

What will he understand about Georgia? she asks. She gets excited again and asks me if I knew that Baba’s grandfather was from Georgia.

Did I already tell you that? I ask. Which grandfather?

What are you talking about? Wait, but why is Cooper going to Georgia?

The balcony is too small for both of us, and the plants are touching our legs and arms and the smell of butter floats in from the kitchen and I feel hungry and sick and I have no idea how everyone else can carry tightly sealed packages full of stories around, never to open them, and how that doesn’t make everyone else feel so fat and bloated, full of phlegm and feverish, and I am tired, I am so tired of trying to do the same. I want to start a new way of being a family, so I begin to tell her what Grandmother told me. I can’t tell it as well, with all the details, but my sister’s face is beautiful in that it is remarkably easy to read. She’s listening, her mouth popped open, her eyes filmy and bulging like rain clouds, as her tears—she always cried more than me, she cried to get what she wanted, sometimes she cried for me to get what I wanted—slide down over the bones in her face.

ALARA CONFESSES THAT SHE DOESN’T KNOW HOW SHE’LL sit through this dinner without asking every family member what they knew and why they never told us. She waves the white tablecloth over the dining table and I secure the edges. I feel differently. It’s not their story to tell, I say, a bit unsure of myself, and she gets angry. We begin setting the plates. It’s our story, Alara says, and they should have told us. No, it’s her story, I reply, and I mention that most of these family members are on our mom’s side anyway, but she disagrees, she says most of them are Aunt Pinar and her kids, and she asks me if I know where Refika is now, and I tell her what my grandmother told me, that Refika can’t talk well because of her throat hole but she still lives in the same apartment building, the old Cotton Apartments. Alara says, well, we have to see her, and I say, absolutely not, because earlier, when my grandmother spoke of where Refika was now, her hand shook violently, she lost control entirely, and she had to lie down before she could resume her story. I tell Alara this, that each time she proceeded to mention Refika, she looked confused and afraid, as if Refika had entered the room. Alara is listening but remains stubborn. She still wants to talk about this with our grandmother. She still wants to see Refika, which I would never want to do, and we continue arguing like this in English so my grandmother can’t follow along, but if my grandmother is capable of hiding the fact that she didn’t even fucking raise my father, she is definitely capable of hiding that she knows English.

But why couldn’t Baba have told us? Alara hisses at me. My grandmother is in the hallway, opening the door.

We have to find Refika, Alara repeats.

You need to stop talking about this, Alara.

She glares at me.

FIRST, UNCLE YLMAZ COMES OVER WITH AUNT SEVGI, Dilek, and Emre. They bring Aunt Meral, Aunt Sevgi’s mother. She is very old, older than my grandmother, and she doesn’t know who I am. Alara compliments Dilek on her weight loss and her long shiny hair and Dilek, in turn, shows Alara pictures of herself on the beach in Çesme. Then Aunt Pinar comes over with her two sons. Demir, the recently divorced son, is accompanied by his new girlfriend, who makes the mistake of wearing strong perfume that everyone will complain about each time she leaves the room; the other son is with his children. My grandmother, Alara, and I stand in a line to kiss each family member on each cheek. Everyone has slipped off their shoes and lined them up on a mat in the entrance. The sun set long ago and the call to prayer fills the room. The baby runs from one person to another to present small objects she’s found in the room as personalized gifts: an unused ashtray, a notepad, a framed photograph of my father. I was once this baby. Alara was once this baby. Dilek was once this baby, although because she was a baby at the same time I was a baby, and because I came here only for the summers, the summer baby, I realize she was the star baby. The open windows bring the breeze into the hot living room, and my grandmother; I’m not sure what she told her sister, or if my calm energy is radiating, because my family is not surveilling me. As usual, my grandmother takes one million trips to the kitchen to bring out small banana cakes, pound cake, baklava, cherries, plums, and peaches. We’re drinking enough tea to make a small river flow with caffeine. Alara explains to everyone what she is doing in her premed classes, and how of course she will help everyone out when she is a doctor. Finally, a doctor in the family! Everyone turns to me.

Me too, I say.

Dilek, who thinks all I do is watch soap operas with my grandmother, gracefully changes the topic to the latest news of how the prime minister cursed Europe out for closing its doors to the Syrian refugees. One of our cousins, who is a nurse in Bursa, tells us that at her hospital, two thirds of the beds are filled by Syrian children, and their mothers have limited Turkish—some know no Turkish at all because why would they, they never had to know Turkish until now—so when she’s treating each child, she can’t explain to the child’s mother what she’s doing, and each mother must trust her regardless, without Turkish. Dilek mentions that that is one of her goals, and she looks at her mother as she says this, assimilating refugees with respect to language. She wants to coordinate volunteer translators to ensure that this Syrian mother in Bursa can understand her child’s nurse and doctor. Everybody agrees. Some of my aunts and great-aunts knock on the coffee table’s wood. Sevgi’s ancient mother pulls on my arm to ask me who this girl is.

Your granddaughter, I reply.

My daughter? Aunt Meral asks.

No, your granddaughter. My cousin.

And she doesn’t want to be a doctor?

No, I say. She’s lazy.

She’s no good if she’s lazy, Aunt Meral says, shaking her bald head.

Meanwhile Uncle Yılmaz commends Dilek for working on such an important issue, one that Turks—especially, he says, the older generation—are keen to ignore. The older generation protests, and my grandmother urges everyone to stop praising Dilek lest nazar should hit. There are so many things we do against nazar. In this room alone, four evil eyes hang on different walls, pinned up for mandatory duty. One in the shape of a heart. Another eye, its glass blown blue, pressed into a hand of Fatma. Anxiety is nothing new, because we have always been obsessed with fate and chance and the superstitions we’ve fashioned to combat uncertainty. My mother, a scientist, makes sure Alara and I always leave the house with an evil eye pinned to the inside of a handbag or bra.

By the time we sit to eat dinner—lamb stewed with eggplant and tomato, buttered rice, string beans cooked in olive oil, the grape leaves my grandmother spent all day stuffing, and bread, lots of bread—no one has yet mentioned Cooper. Alara, meanwhile, talks as much as possible in order to navigate the attention of everyone, especially the women, away from the truth that she is eating next to nothing. She is definitely under one hundred pounds. She brings up Deniz, shooting a knowing look at Dilek, who in turn rolls her eyes, and the older women determine they must go to see his grandmother for tea. I’m watching her, and so is my grandmother. Aunt Pinar keeps asking Alara whether she likes the food. Alara replies by saying she had so many peaches just now and also ate on the flight. She spoons a swollen grilled tomato onto her plate and glares at me until I look away.

Demir’s new girlfriend stands to use the restroom, and Aunt Pinar leans in on her son and tells him that her perfume smells like a baby’s diaper.

Can’t you smell it? she asks. Demir shrugs and fills his plate up. He looks miserable.

Who is she? Aunt Meral asks me again, this time about Alara.

When Aunt Sevgi mentions the work Cooper’s doing with refugees, the table goes quiet.

This time Alara takes over. She’s wielding her fork and knife into the grilled tomato with great precision as she begins to defend my honor. She pivots from discussing Cooper, how he’s betrayed not only me but also the family, to politics and the upcoming election. Yesterday, the prime minister was officially nominated to be a presidential candidate, surprising no one. Dilek pokes my arm with her dirty fork and asks, Didn’t you break up with him? I hiss back, Well, it was pretty mutual. Alara says we have to consider that there’s never been a leader of the Muslim world in modern civilization. It makes sense the prime minister wants to be the first. His supporters, not just Turks, but also Muslims across the Middle East, they go to bed muttering his name in prayer, the same way we Americans, Alara nods at me, love our president and what he stands for, but this is all superficial. It’s celebrity, Alara says, I actually hate the way Obama has dropped more bombs on the Middle East than any other president, even Bush, but whatever. They, she continues, meaning the conservative Turks, had been economically shunted out of modern Turkey for decades, no? And now his policies have boosted their income, by just a fraction, but a fraction is the difference between being able to pay for new school supplies for their children or fresh meat for the week. Between acquiring the proper medications for a sick grandmother or renovating a moldy ceiling. Do those choices not matter?

Some of our male cousins have answers to her questions. Some of them mention Gezi, and how that energy could be summoned again, and they begin to discuss the future of Turkey. Uncle Yılmaz argues that the government was able to usurp Gezi because the movement had no official leaders. Alara thinks that the fragile truce with the Kurds is sure to break, and soon. Dilek mentions that it is not really fair for Alara to criticize Turkey so much, and pretend to care, when she’s not the one who has to live here.

You get to come to Turkey for vacation, Dilek says. You get to leave.

She’s right, but I am so sick of this conversation. It is the same every time.

WHEN THE FIRST PERSON KISSES EVERYONE GOODBYE ON the cheek, everyone else comments on how late it is and begins to mobilize. Alara wanted to ask Dilek about my grandmother, but I threatened her in a way that terrified me. I pulled on her hair while we were clearing the dishes until her neck began to bow back slowly, but her hair has been falling out lately and when I unclenched my hand and began apologizing, Alara said that’s okay, that’s okay, Sibel, and we both stood there in the kitchen staring at the black clump in my fist until Alara said Dilek would probably make some rude comment about Baba not being her side of the family anyway. Now we’re back in the living room: Me, Dilek, and Alara. We’re sitting in the corner, playing with the baby, who’s in my lap and sucking on my finger.

So, Sibel, Dilek says, I need to tell you something. I’m having a birthday party, for Cooper. I figure it will be good to do something, because you know, he has nobody here.

Jesus Christ, Alara says.

Am I invited? I ask. I hand the baby to Alara.

I’m offended, Dilek says. I’m offended that you think I wouldn’t invite my own cousin.

Sorry, I say. You’ve just never done anything for my birthday.

Your birthday is in October. I never see you in October.

That’s a good point, Alara offers.

I’m leaving, Dilek says. Ciao.

MY SISTER IS HERE FOR ONLY A FEW WEEKS, SO SHE WANTS to do everything she can’t do in New York. She wants to see every family member. She wants to walk around the city. She says she wants to eat Turkish ice cream. I’m relieved because it’s important to screen her body and mood in a variety of settings. I’ve been sizing her up in our shared bed, where she sleeps with her back towards me, creating a wall with her spine jutting out of her skin. And it’s not that she’s breathing heavily and sweating, it’s this spine. I’m afraid of her spine. At night the streetlights illuminate the room and fasten on to each notch of spine through her shirt, and there isn’t enough space between us. I feel her body like a part of mine, but I’m unsure if she feels the same way. She would not want my yeasty, melancholic body. She would not want my fats, my headaches, and, she told me today when she caught me staring at her arms, she would not want to waste time reading about ancient, useless medicine.

Alara and I decide to go to Cihangir for the day. We call Deniz to see if he wants to join us, but he’s hanging out with his cousins. When Cooper calls the house again, Alara picks up, and she speaks in sharp, loud words, the whole time looking at me and miming smacking someone with the hot iron she’s using on a pair of expensive pants she found at the outdoor market for cheap. What did he say? I ask her. Oh, nothing, she says, dodging my eyes. Alara, I say more forcefully, tell me what he said.

Cooper is leaving for Georgia for a week and, it turns out, wants to see me before he goes. He wants to make things better, Alara admits, but I personally don’t think you should. At least not yet. You should be alone right now. Independent. Huh, I say, but isn’t my big problem that I’m too alone? In my head? Withdrawn? Alara emphasizes finding myself and mentions that I’ve had a boyfriend for my entire postpubescent life, basically, and do I really know how to support myself emotionally without a significant other? No, I say, but I have other support. I’m emotionally resourceful. She ignores me. Those weren’t real boyfriends, I add, in high school. She ignores me again. I circle around her as she’s ironing, asking her if she herself knows how to be alone, but she tells me she’s really not in the mood to talk about boys. Well, we’re not talking about boys, I say, we’re talking about being alone. She rolls her eyes. Once she manages to get the fancy crease down the front of each green pant leg, we leave for the metro that stops near the museum recommended to me by Esra. Apparently the museum engages with a blurring of fiction and reality. We pass the mother and her children on the quilt, and the youngest girl takes my hand and runs alongside us but I pretend not to know her. Alara gives the girl a few coins, and when she sees me turn my head and mouth sorry to the mother across the street, she furrows her brows but says nothing. We descend into the metro and head towards the museum. The novelist Orhan Pamuk created this museum to be a physical representation of his novel of the same name. Each chapter corresponds to a panel set up behind a glass box populated with objects, and there are three floors through which the narrator visually tells the story of how he, although engaged to a woman named Sibel, has fallen in love with a younger, more beautiful woman who is a shopkeeper. The author has collected many objects—objects representative of the narrator’s love for the younger, more beautiful woman—from an Istanbul of years past. There are newspaper clippings, silk scarves, lipstick tubes, glasses of tea, and smoked, crumpled cigarettes. Alara is fascinated by what is real in the writer’s life and what he fictionalizes—like this panel, she says, pointing to a placard that reads, “My Father’s Death.” Whose Turkish Airlines tickets were those? What about the bottle of kolonya? And the ulcer medication?

I don’t know if it matters, I say, but Alara is not listening. She’s walked away to the next panel and is looking at herself in the mirror above a dirty sink.

Do you know, Esra is writing a novel, I say, and it’s about a girl and her boyfriend.

Wow, Alara says. Of course she is.

The boyfriend is her boyfriend, Alp. Do you think that’s fucked up?

Sure, yeah. But I guess she has nothing else to write about.

Alara doesn’t like Esra. She thinks she is pretentious.

Cooper is fascinated by objects and puts great meaning in his own: his two blue towels from the outdoor market, his green backpack, his grandfather’s white safari-style shirt. If he were here, he’d mention the weight of objects, how we can misplace feelings in them without knowing that we’ve given up something of value inside us. I’d point to a panel where somebody had lined up toiletries, razor, soap, toothpaste, and cologne, on a shelf above the sink. What did these objects take? I’d ask Cooper. He’d think about it but would confess that he doesn’t know. That’s what I love most about him, that he confesses what he doesn’t know. I’m about to text him secretly but Alara points to a panel near the ground with the chapter title “A Few Unpalatable Anthropological Truths.” It depicts women’s faces cut out from newspapers, and the faces are attached to hanging strings. Each woman has black bands covering her eyes.

What the fuck is this, Alara says. Is this Grandma’s time?

We squat down to look at their faces more closely. The novel starts in the 1970s, more than a decade after my grandmother was, as far as we know, sexually active. At the top of the panel, the author has written that these are the faces of shamed women, women whose exploits—sex with a married man, sex before marriage, committing adultery, being a prostitute, being raped—led the newspaper to publish their crimes along with their censored faces. We learn that if a woman under the age of eighteen slept with a man outside of marriage, and that man then refused to marry her, the woman’s father would make sure to open a legal case and bind the young man to marriage. My grandmother’s father threatened to do the same when he found out about the eye doctor, before they learned he was a distant relative. And he didn’t even know she was pregnant.

If a woman was raped, it was still customary for the newspaper to run her photograph with a black banner over her eyes in order to protect the woman from, ironically, being shamed.

Jesus, Alara says. This reminds me of it, of Grandma.

Of Refika, you mean, what she did?

Maybe it was better, then. Maybe what Refika did protected her?

I don’t know, I say. I don’t know anything about this country, I admit.

Me neither, Alara says sadly.

An elderly man with a big smile walks towards us and clears his throat. He wants to see the shamed women. We shuffle to the next panel of cigarettes, prayer beads, and a half-filled teacup in front of a photograph of the Bosphorus. Alara mentions that it’s weird how Refika has never tried to meet us or talk to us. I say yeah, that is weird, although could we call spitting phlegm talking? Alara says hmm, very loudly and slowly, then reminds me of what she did to Refika. How she pushed Refika. She says she hates remembering this. She says she can’t get Refika out of her mind and especially her throat and I turn to her and say, same, but maybe we should try to forget. Alara’s angry now. She says, no, Sibel, why do you always do this? We have to confront the things that scare us, not run away. I’m sorry, I say, but she swats my hand off and turns her back to me. I follow her up the final staircase to the top floor of the museum, where there is a small room with an unmade cot in which the supposed protagonist and author of this museum’s novel slept as he supposedly wrote this book. I’m confused now as to who is whom. Who made this museum? What’s more real, the museum or the book? The smell is funny in here, damp as well as musty, like a person was just here but will never come back.

Tell me that’s not supposed to be his bed, Alara says, her voice hushed. She reaches for my hand in alarm, and her fingers are freezing despite it being hot in the museum.

Why are you so cold? I ask.

Alara rips her hand out of mine. I feel fine, she snaps. Let’s go to the gift shop.

Okay, I say, following her down the narrow stairs, my hand on the railing. Is there something you want to buy?

She shrugs. Maybe there will be something.

In the gift shop there are copies of every novel Orhan Pamuk has written, as well as old and new maps of Istanbul. A tall blond man who has great posture, like Cooper, is reaching high for an anthology of traveler’s tales by famous Europeans who visited Istanbul. There’s a giant pomegranate on the cover. Alara runs her hand over every item, flips the books open to random pages, and asks the man behind the desk whether he sells any posters.

We leave the shop with nothing. We’re climbing a hilly street where wooden buildings with bay windows flank us. There are cafés, too, with small tables outdoors, and some clothing stores. I’m trying to ask Alara what she thinks about Dilek and Cooper, and why she thinks Dilek is really throwing Cooper a birthday party, but she won’t indulge me.

Plus, Alara says, panting, Dilek has a huge crush on Deniz. Remember? How she left the nightclub crying when he said he just wants to be friends? Anyway, at least you’re not an unpaid translator anymore. Now that Cooper knows Turkish.

I liked translating for him, I say. But Alara’s right. And Dilek has been trying to make plans with us even more now that Deniz’s here.

I’m sure, Alara says. I’m sure you love that you can lie when you want to. You can be silent when you want to. You know, Sibel, it’s good to keep things from each other because it won’t work for you, you know, being totally honest. You’re just not an honest person anymore. She squints at me. You used to be. You used to talk about feelings so easily, openly. Honestly, you were really powerful.

Powerful?

She looks guilty, my sister.

Yeah, you said whatever you wanted. You were never embarrassed. You made crying seem good for you. And you were the only one who ever yelled back at Baba. I think he loved you for that.

Alara stops. Two cats graze our feet. We’re on a street selling antiques, surrounded by wooden cabinets with intricate carved flowers, metal tables, framed portraits of long-dead women. Men sit at tables spilling out onto the sidewalk, smoking, bringing tea glasses up to their mouths, watching us. We’ve been here before, with my father. Years ago, Alara and I sat here with him as my mother ransacked the place. I feel as if I’ve found my body on the side of the road. Alara, she realizes this, too. She touches my elbow. She leads us to the antique furniture piled up outside a shop and we fold our knees under a low wooden table.

Then Alara leans in, close enough for me to hear her heavy breathing.

When should we go to the cemetery? she asks.

We can go on the way back, she says, or do you want to wait for Grandma?

Hello? Sibel? I know you haven’t gone. Mom told me.

Alara’s shaking her foot fast enough to make the antique table tremble, and each tendon looks strained and hard under her skin. She sees me looking, and says, What?

Let’s go now, I say.

Alara looks wary, unsure as to whether she should believe me. I repeat myself. Let’s go, I say, and her body seems to sag or give in a little, her face muscles look loose, she stands with me, and we walk to the bus that stops at the white cemetery gates.

MY FATHER’S HEADSTONE IS WHITE MARBLE, WITH A rounded edge at the top. He’s next to his father, the eye doctor. Alara places down flowers we bought on the walk to the bus. Tulips. We still don’t know if tulips are the right flowers or whether any flower is fine. We still don’t know the right Arabic prayer but Alara asks me if I can please lead one. My tongue feels gummy and the prayer sounds like a song. I’m distracted. I’m often distracted, but distractions help you disappear. Alara doesn’t believe in this. In disappearing. Neither does Cooper. But it is impossible to disappear now. There are whirring engines and honks from the highway beyond the cemetery’s rear gate, and a group of women are gossiping nearby, over the grave of someone who I think might be their friend. Maybe they are the dead woman’s sisters-in-law, because they keep saying she ruined their brother’s life and his potential for a successful career. Am I always so distracted?

The cemetery is unrecognizable without snow, and it is bigger than I remembered, with rows and rows of white marble headstones. Ancient Islamic hospitals used to be the only way the Istanbul municipality could collect data on how many people were dying. The dead bodies carted out of the hospitals were the best form of counting, but I don’t know where they were buried.

When doctors and philosophers began illustrating the human body during the Enlightenment, they were very confused. Where is the visible soul? they asked one another.

The brain?

The blood?

The liver?

The lymph nodes?

The nerves?

The fingers?

The feet?

The grave?

The eye doctor’s grave is next to his parents’ grave. Where will my grandmother be buried, I wonder, but I am terrified of asking her a question like that, and I think we all are, me, Alara, my mother. We are so afraid of being honest with one another about her sickness. When we went shopping in one of the modern malls the other day, my grandmother called for my help from the dressing room. She is usually very discreet about getting dressed, so I peeked in politely, coyly. She was sitting there with the beautiful plaid pants we picked out halfway up her thighs. My grandmother looked at me.

Why is this happening to me? she’d asked. We’ll go to the doctor again, I told her, and I came in to help her out of the pants. She clucked her tongue no. I said, You do not have a soul; you are a soul, but you have a body for now, and she smiled. That’s very spiritual of you, Sibel, and we laughed. It was a light laugh. I helped her back into her clothes and we took a taxi back home instead of walking.

ALARA SAYS SHE’S READY TO GO.

Me too, I say.

Alara’s already walking away when I see them. Two women, one old, one young.

It’s Refika. She’s much taller than I remembered, and she’s arm-in-arm with a young woman. Refika is wearing a headscarf, patterned in blue and red flowers, and even from this distance I see that the knot covers her throat hole.

Alara keeps walking. I yell out to her. I say, You go, I’ll meet you at home, and Alara turns and looks at me through wet eyes but nods, nods, and keeps walking until she’s at the bus stop.

When I turn back, they’re already walking away. I’m not frozen this time. I know what I should do. I begin to follow them out of the cemetery.