CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Afia kept moving, moving. You had to keep moving. That was what the survivors had done in the Peshawar bazaar. You stayed and the second blast came, or the snipers. Smoke everywhere; behind her, large things crashed and splintered. Fire, behind the smoke, in the cold air. She kept moving. From the far side of the path came Coach Hayes’s weak cry: “Afia!” She crab-walked that way, stumbled over something large—the door, cracked in two—went down on her knees. She reached the car door, the passenger side. Her hand as it pulled the handle was gray with ash. Back out by the street, neighbors’ lights were blinking on.

“Miss Hayes,” she said when she’d made out the moving form in the snowbank by the hedge. “Coach Hayes, are you injured?” She knelt. Her clothes, she realized, were torn, her scarf gone. “Can you move? Can you speak?”

The coach’s face was black with ash, bleeding from the right cheekbone. She waved an arm at Afia. “I can’t hear you,” she said. She put a hand to her ear and drew it away. No blood there. “I can’t hear anything!”

Of course. That happened in the bazaar too, people deaf from the explosion. Strength surged through Afia’s limbs. They had to go, now. Shahid had lied. She loved him. She had submitted to him. She wanted to scream not in pain but in grief. If Shahid could harm her, she was lost, lost. And he was a Pashtun, he would not stop. She placed her arms under the coach’s shoulders, pulled her up, dragged her to the car, pushed her into the passenger seat, slammed the door.

Move. Fast. Don’t stop. Shahid could be coming, Shahid was surely coming, following them from the coach’s house, Shahid—oh, Shahid!—would kill them both. You should scare a little easier, he’d said. Her brother, her betrayer. The car’s motor still purred. Afia had been behind the wheel of a car once before, with Gus, in an empty Smith parking lot. Now she found the R on the steering column and pressed the accelerator. The car leaped backward, down the drive, into the street, and hit the curb on the other side before Afia found the brake, thank Allah the brake, and then the D and the accelerator again, and they jerked down the street.

Coach Hayes sat crumpled, her hands against her ears as if the sounds were too loud. Trying to control the steering wheel and the accelerator and the brake, the car bucking and heaving from Campus Avenue to Main Street to Pittsfield Road, Afia glanced fretfully to her right. Finally, at the corner of the state highway, Coach Hayes lifted her head. By then the windshield wipers were whipping back and forth: Afia had set them off and didn’t know how to stop them. A fire truck passed, its lights cartwheeling. “Can you hear?” Afia asked. “Did you hear the siren?”

“I’m not sure what you said,” Coach Hayes answered. “Your voice is a buzz. My ears keep ringing. Afia, a bomb went off in that house.”

“Yes, I know.”

Coach Hayes took her left hand away from where it had been rubbing her ear and placed it on the steering wheel. “Turn the car around, Afia. We’ve got to go to the police.”

“No.” What was she supposed to tell her? Shahid is killing me. Shahid has to kill me. Coach Hayes couldn’t hear those words. Afia couldn’t say them.

“Okay,” said the coach. “I’m getting some sound.”

Thank Allah. Both of them alive, neither deaf or shattered. Only Gus’s house gone, his animals dead, and Shahid—Shahid could be anywhere, he could be behind them, they had to keep moving. Afia pressed the accelerator again and turned onto Route 7.

“The police,” Coach Hayes said again, her hand still on the wheel. “The other way, Afia.”

Afia shook her head. Keeping her eyes on the dark road, she reached her right hand to the back of the coach’s head. A large bump there, and sticky; her hand came away smeared with blood. “You have hematoma,” she said. “Maybe concussion. It will heal.”

Coach Hayes let go the steering wheel and snatched Afia’s wrist. “Stop the goddamn car,” she said in a low tone. “Pull off on a side road if you want. This is my car. If someone got the plate, they’re going to look for me. Stop the fucking car.”

It was too much, too much. Afia’s leg started to shake. Ahead, a side road. She turned the wheel and the car skidded to the right. Brake, she thought, brake, and found it, and with a jolt the car drove into slush and rocked back. She pushed the lever into P. Filling her ears was the sound of the heater, the slup of the windshield wipers, the soft splat of wet snow falling from branches overhead, and their breaths—the breathing of two women, alive, a soft panting.

Reaching across her, Coach Hayes turned the windshield wipers off, then the headlights. The world went black. Afia gripped the steering wheel tight, to stop her hands from trembling. So. Whatever he had said about a plane ticket, Shahid had lied: He had meant to kill her. To kill her. Her breath sucked in at the thought of it. He would have driven her to get her things at Gus’s; would have gunned the car in reverse just as she triggered the bomb. Only because Coach Hayes was driving had he insisted, you are taking her straight to Northampton, because he didn’t want to kill his coach. He would succeed, eventually, just as the proverb said: Revenge took a hundred years, because I was impatient.

But Shahid had once brought her to America, had saved her that way. Maybe he would murder her. But to her last breath she would put herself between him and these Amreekans who could never understand.

“There’s a ringing in my ears,” the coach said, “but it’s dying down.” She lifted a lever, and the backrest reclined; she leaned her head back. In the darkness, Afia could not tell if her eyes were open or shut. “Try talking,” the coach said. “Try telling me what’s really going on.”

“I’m sorry,” Afia said. “Can you hear me?” She felt the coach nod; nothing else moved. “If you are promising, no police,” she continued, “you can leave me here. You don’t need for to be involved.”

“Shahid is my responsibility,” Coach Hayes said in a flat voice. “I am involved.” She reared up from the reclined seat and reached into the back of the car. She thrust a plastic bottle into Afia’s lap. “I’m thirsty,” she said.

Her own mouth, Afia realized, tasted of ash. Her throat felt burned. She uncapped the bottle, and for a moment both women drank. The water felt silky.

“And I can’t leave you off here,” the coach said. “It’s the middle of nowhere in February.” Her mobile rang with the sound of a black woman singing—shouting—about respect. When she pulled it out and flipped it open, the phone lit her face, gray with ash. She put it to her ear. “Shahid,” she said.

Afia gripped her arm. She shook her head, No, no.

Coach Hayes pulled away. “We’ll need you for the match,” she said into the phone. And then, “You’re letting me know now. That’s the point. Honesty, right?” After another pause, “The question isn’t whether you make Wednesday’s practice, Shahid. The question is whether you communicate . . . Okay, good . . . One more appointment with Dr. Springer . . . I don’t need to know what you talked about. But I wish—” She broke off. Having adjusted to the scant light, Afia could see Coach Hayes’s eyes as the coach regarded her. Bright in her ashy face, their expression was confused. “We need to trust each other, Shahid. Loyalty, remember?”

She replaced the phone. In a swift move, she turned off the ignition and pulled out the keys. She popped the seat back up and shifted sideways. “I’m stronger than you,” she said calmly to Afia, “so if I want us to go back to Devon and the police, that’s where we’ll go. If you want something else, you’d better talk to me. Now.”

How, Afia wondered, did you begin to fathom this woman? From the start—when Shahid confided in her that not just the coach, but the director of all athletics at Enright, was female—she’d thought Coach Hayes a freak. What sort of woman threw her body around like that? What sort chopped off her hair, shouted at men, let them smell her sweat? Even Coach Hayes’s stride, when Afia first saw her on a visit to Enright, looked wrong. The coach moved from the hip and kept her shoulders back, but loosely, not like a warrior. She had a narrow waist, breasts she did nothing to camouflage. She was married, she was a woman, not a perverse attempt at a man, yet this life of the body was what she had chosen. Afia had challenged all her teachers in Nasirabad. She had set her sights on being a doctor, no matter how many men teased or harassed her. Ignoring her mother’s cautions, she let everyone know she was smarter than her brothers. And still, Coach Hayes made no sense to her. But they were in Coach Hayes’s car, and Coach Hayes had just saved her life.

What were the laws in America? They executed people; that much she knew from Khalid. If strangers made trouble, they deported them. And they—not Coach Hayes, maybe, but the police, the judges—hated Muslims. “Someone,” she said softly, “is trying to kill me.”

“Who? Shahid?”

“No!” she said—too fast, too loud. “Someone else,” she added quickly. “My family. I don’t know.”

“How do you know they weren’t after Gus?”

“Maybe they were. It is the same thing.”

“Because you’re sleeping together.”

Afia hid her face. No one else had said those words, not even Gus. And they weren’t doing that, not the way Americans meant.

“Afia, don’t beat around the bush. A bomb just went off.”

“Maybe someone is hurting just Gus. But I do not think.” She shut her eyes. Gus, she tried to think. Brilliant and gentle and warm Gus, who loved her and would protect her, only now he was in the hospital and somehow she had put him there, and now all his pets were dead and she had killed them.

“Was that an accident Gus had?”

Run from the truth, Afia told herself. Run. “Yes,” she said. “An accident. He meant for to check those brakes. But he was busy with start of term. He should not have been coming to me,” she said. This much was true. “I have been telling him I am engaged, he must stay away. But it was this Valentine’s Day custom, he was wanting to bring flowers, chocolates. Chocolates,” she repeated, and it sounded like the saddest word in the world.

“I see,” said the coach, in a voice that said she was seeing what Afia did not want her to see. “But someone might be wanting to hurt Gus now. And you. And if you just take off—”

“If I am at Gus’s garage, they will think it was Shahid who sets a bomb. They will think, he is killing me for honor.”

“And if you take off, what will they think? Afia, get your head straight. You had the key to the garage. If you run away, the police will suspect you.”

That hit her head like a hammer blow. Afia drank more water while she thought it over. The water was icy and sweet. If they suspected her, she could be jailed for a time, maybe even deported. Of course, Gus would try to prove her innocence. And Coach Hayes would march up to the judge and tell him what really happened, how Afia couldn’t possibly set a bomb and then walk into it. But still. If she let them catch her on the run; if she confessed. She would turn attention away from Shahid for a few days at least. And in those few days, before they could arrest him, Shahid might leave the country. Because this was not a place where a brother could claim pashtunwali as a defense for attempted murder. This was America.

She still felt Shahid’s arms against her back, his breath on her shoulder. It was all she needed: to know he loved her. He could not hate her, no matter how tora she became, no matter how stained. He was simply obeying Baba. He was doing what brothers must do. Only she could save him from his awful duty.

“I will leave myself here,” she said. And with that she opened the car door and stepped out into six inches of frigid slush.

•   •   •

Hours later, Afia sat before a woodstove in a remote cabin, waiting for sleep to give her respite. In Coach Hayes, she thought, she had met her match. The coach had physical strength on her side, Afia strength of will. They shared a deep sense of loyalty, by which Afia would not betray her brother and Coach Hayes would not abandon her. Once Coach Hayes had wrestled her back into the car, they had agreed to one night’s truce. Coach Hayes would not report the incident; Afia would not claim to have set the bomb that had almost killed them both. Coach Hayes would find out if Shahid had a solid alibi. Then Afia could come forward with the truth of what had happened at Gus’s garage and not fear implicating her brother.

“We can go to Shahid right now,” Coach Hayes had said as she maneuvered the car back onto the road. “I just spoke with him. He didn’t even know we were going by Gus’s place. He thought we were on the road to Northampton.”

“Shahid cannot know where I am,” Afia had said, her voice firm. She had taken off her shoes and socks; the car’s heater blasted at her toes.

“Afia, he’ll be concerned. You said he had nothing to do with—with this awful thing.”

“Please, Coach Hayes. Just for one night. Do not tell anyone on the team.”

“Not even Gus?”

“Gus . . . he will be so sad. His pets.”

“Maybe the cats survived. And they were animals, Afia. Gus will worry about you.”

She could only shake her head. Shame was a tide, drowning her.

The coach pressed on. “Why not tell Shahid? You think he might . . . might . . . inform someone else? Someone who is trying to hurt you?”

“I do not know,” Afia said, shutting her eyes, “what Shahid will do.”

It was the easiest answer, and the truest. After a long pause, Coach Hayes had said, “Okay then. I know where we’ll go.”

Soon after, Afia had fallen asleep. She had not slept, really, in three nights, not since she’d heard about Gus’s accident. Vaguely it occurred to her that Gus might think she, too, had died in the blast. From that thought she drifted into uneasy dreams in which she was dead, only no one seemed to know it. She was tugging at Shahid’s sleeve, then Moray’s, then Gus’s. Baba was in the room, and her uncles, her sisters, all her family. She tried to get them to see how she was dead, her body already rotting. Only one person—Khalid, with his own dead eyes—saw her for the corpse she had become.

She woke with a start. She was in Coach Hayes’s car, alone. She sat up. Her hip hurt, and her elbow, where she’d landed hard after fleeing the garage. Outside, the rain had stopped. In front was a convenience shop, lit with cold fluorescence. Swallowing hard—so dead, she had felt, and at the moment she dreamt of Khalid’s seeing her, truly dead—she fished her mobile from her pocketbook. Three calls, all from Shahid. Had she slept through the rings, or had they driven through a dead zone? She peered through the window at the two other cars lined up by the shop. Both had New York plates. Then Coach Hayes emerged, a large grocery bag cradled in one arm and her mobile held to her ear with the other. As she opened the driver’s door, the interior light came on. The right side of her face was streaked with red, abraded from her fall against the icy snowbank. She handed Afia the grocery bag.

“Just held up here a little,” she said into the phone. “Yeah, I think we’re making some headway. I’ll grab a bite before I drive home. Kiss Chloe. Thanks, sweetheart.”

Then she was gone, back to the shop. She returned with two huge plastic jugs of water, which she placed among the athletic gear in the backseat.

“Not a happy dream life you’ve got there,” she said as she slid into the car.

“I’m sorry,” Afia said. “Did my phone ring?”

Coach Hayes frowned. She had wiped the black soot from her face. But the abrasion on her cheek was deep and needed cleaning; the one on the back of her head as well. “Once, maybe twice,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d want—”

“No. I would not be taking a call. Where are we?”

Coach Hayes started up the car. “Hadley, New York,” she said. “I picked up some stuff to eat. I figure you haven’t had dinner.” She turned onto a country road and put on her high beams. “We’ve got a camp nearby.”

“A camp? For refugees?”

“A weekend house. It’s in my husband’s family. No one’s here in winter. I thought, rather than check in at a motel . . .”

She let the sentence hang. Afia understood: To check in at a motel would be to give a name, a credit card, information that could be traced. The coach was honoring her promise not to let the police know, even by mistake. She was practicing nanawate, safe harbor. “Your face is injured,” Afia said.

“I picked up some peroxide. We both need disinfecting.”

“I’m sorry. You—you should not anything have to do with me.”

“I didn’t come looking for this. That’s for sure.” Then, as if realizing she sounded harsh, the coach reached over and squeezed Afia’s clammy hand. “Shit happens,” she said, the American words of comfort. “We’ll figure it out.”

Banks of snow rose on either side of the road, but the pavement itself was damp with melt. Holding the groceries, Afia realized she was hungry. She had fetched food from the hospital cafeteria for Gus, but she could not bear to eat more than a few bites herself. He had been so angry, this morning. He never should’ve trusted his mom’s Nissan, he said, she didn’t know anything about mechanics, he should’ve got Charlie at the Gulf station to do a once-over, and now he was out for the season, did Afia get that? And he had all these fucking vet school applications to finish, and you couldn’t fall behind in Organic Chem, and what exactly was Shahid’s problem anyway, he sure didn’t need his teammate acting like a jealous husband especially when Coach would kiss Shahid’s butt, and was Afia sure she wasn’t overfeeding the fish? Because if he lost that African cichlid he was going to be majorly pissed. And why was Afia looking at him like that, what the hell was wrong with her? First she broke up with him, now she was back. Why couldn’t she look him in the eye?

Because I think my brother tried to kill you, she’d wanted to say, but she’d only sat there, her gaze focused somewhere midway between his chin and the thin hospital blanket. When Gus was dozing, she’d sat by the hospital bed holding his fingers lightly, watching his eyes flutter with dreams.

When Coach Hayes finally bumped onto a short driveway and cut the engine, Afia stepped out into a cold that bit her nostrils. Above, the sky had cleared. For the first time since coming to America, Afia looked up at stars like the stars she used to see on the high plains around Nasirabad—streaming, running together in a thin, cosmic milk.

The coach had left the headlights on. They lit a rambling wooden cabin with a screened porch. Snow rose over the steps. From the back of the car, she pulled out a shovel and proceeded to clear a narrow path, working as fast as a man. “Bring the groceries,” she called back to Afia, who quickly obeyed. On the porch, Coach Hayes stomped her feet, protected only by track shoes. She reached up to a beam that supported the porch ceiling. By the side of a door locked with a hasp, she flipped a switch, and yellow light shone over the floorboards, a set of dusty wicker furniture, and a welcome mat that read Hi. I’m Mat. “Good thing,” Coach Hayes said as she worked a tiny key into the padlock on the door, “the key’s still in the same place.”

She pushed the door open. Even in the sharp cold, the smell of dead mice overran Afia’s senses. Coach Hayes disappeared into the dark space. Afia heard a click, then “Damn” from the coach. A moment later, a floor lamp flickered and came on, its light white and cold compared with the light on the porch. Coach Hayes surveyed the room, then Afia. “Just put those down in there,” she said, indicating the groceries.

Afia crossed to a small kitchen in the back, where she heard something scurrying in the cupboards as she set the bag down in the dim light seeping from the main room. Suddenly she wanted to go back—back anywhere, almost, to Northampton or Devon or even Nasirabad, somewhere familiar and clean where she could sort herself out. But that was crazy thinking. She could not go anywhere.

“We’ll have to gather wood,” the coach called from the main room. She was rooting around somewhere. In another moment a light went on from the lamp that must have burned out its bulb. “I’ll get the dead mice. I’ve got gloves. You can shake out the mattress, check the bathroom. No, skip that. We don’t have water.”

“No water? But—” Afia stepped to the doorway just as Coach Hayes was heading outside. The coach turned.

“It’s not winterized,” she said. “You have to drain the place down, or the pipes’ll freeze. That’s why I brought those jugs. And there’s the river, for washing.”

Then she was gone. Dazed, Afia looked around the cabin. On the walls were a dozen framed photographs, black-and-whites of an elderly couple and a crowd of children in cotton shirts and plaid shorts; color pictures of the coach and her husband, looking much younger and golden-skinned; other young couples, children, in swimsuits and summer dresses. The main room had a cathedral ceiling with skylights covered in snow; high above the main window hung a crossed pair of wooden racquets. Hesitantly she opened a closet door. Inside stood a broom and dustpan, behind which bed linens were neatly stacked. She pulled out the broom and stepped through another doorway, into a bedroom. There was one bed, double size, on a fine oak frame with a carved headboard. Immediately Afia thought of her bed in Nasirabad. Homesickness washed over her. Baba must have ordered her destroyed, and still she missed him and Moray with an ache deep in her gut. Had Moray wanted her killed, also? What shame she had brought, what disgrace. A family does what it must, and it is the brother who must do it. No nanawate for tora. Afia was tor, she was black, she was rotten.

She swept the floor. Clouds of cold dust billowed before the straw broom. Mouse droppings peppered the kitchen counter. When she pulled the thin mattress from the bed and tried to shake it, she discovered a hole near the bottom, where mice had dug in and stolen stuffing for their nests. Moving quickly as much to keep warm as to get the job done, she continued through the living room and into the sparse kitchen, the pile of refuse before her growing—dead insects and bees, bird feathers, three shriveled mouse carcasses, sawdust that had drifted from the ceiling where insects had bored. She found the kitchen light, an overhead fluorescent that flickered and snapped. A back door was bolted from the inside. She wrenched it open and swept the pile onto the snow-laden stoop. Across a stretch of yard, by the woods, she made out the figure of Coach Hayes, lugging a log carrier. Through the branches of the trees, in the distance, a ribbon of silver: the river. The coach bent to grab a stick of downed wood, then knocked it against a tree trunk to shake off the snow. In the starlight she looked small, too tiny to fight off whatever might come at her in the snow.

By the time Coach Hayes had brought firewood indoors, Afia had dared to open the cupboards. Under the unusable sink she found two live mice, casually nibbling a bar of soap. Immediately she thought of the mouse she’d dropped into Pearl’s cage, only yesterday. Pearl, lost now in the snow. The mice scuttled away from the soap. One disappeared behind the cupboard; the other she managed to bludgeon with the broom and sweep into the pan.

“Now let’s hope we don’t have birds nesting in the stovepipe,” the coach said as she crouched before the woodstove jutting out from a stone fireplace.

“There’s newspaper,” said Afia, practically the only words she had uttered since entering.

“Thank God for that.”

As the coach crumpled sheets and shoved them into the stove, Afia noticed the shelves full of board games, books, a box of toys. This was a place for summer vacations, for children to be carefree. “Should I prepare food?” she asked.

Coach Hayes nodded. “Hamburgers was the best I could do at the store. There’s propane in the tank, I checked. Should be an iron skillet under the stove. You’ll need to light the pilot. You know how?”

Afia nodded. “At home, we have propane.” She had been crouching next to the coach, watching her break twigs and tuck them in with the yellowed paper. “Miss Hayes,” she began.

“Just call me Coach. Everyone else does.”

“Coach, I want to thank you.”

Coach shook her head. “I’ve been telling myself the whole way that I’m crazy. Bringing you here.”

“If you understood us—my brother and me—you would not think yourself crazy.”

“Well, explain this to me, then.” She glanced up, her face pummeled and ashy. “Just this much. You are engaged.”

“Yes.”

“But not to someone you care about.”

“I do not know him, really.”

“So this is, what, a forced marriage?”

Afia smiled nervously. “Not forced, no. People here, they use that word, forced. It is more an arrangement. A promise the family makes.”

“But you have no say in it.”

“I do have say. I say yes, or I say no.”

“Then why, for all the tea in China,” Coach said, lighting the paper, “did you say yes?”

Afia tried explaining about the photograph on the Smith site, about Khalid’s showing it to Baba. She imagined, again, her little sisters having stones, or feces, thrown at them as they tried to walk to school. Her mother meeting a sudden silence when she went to the market. “I—I tried,” she said. “To do as I must. And then Gus, he is hurt—”

“Right. And now someone’s trying to hurt you.”

“Shahid says there is another photo. Two more photos.”

“Online? But, Afia, if you’re still posting—”

“Not me. I think—” Afia caught her breath. She was crouching, watching the match flame lick at the corners of newspaper. She remembered the photo now, the one that had appeared on Taylor’s Facebook timeline last week. Some guy from Dartmouth had put it there, Taylor had said. But that couldn’t be right. There were a dozen people apple-picking that day, including a couple of Chase’s friends. But when Afia was on Gus’s shoulders, he’d called to Patty to take a picture, and Patty had grabbed Afia’s mobile and snapped it. Afia had never sent the photo anywhere. The only way it could have gotten to Taylor’s page was if someone had taken her phone and uploaded the photo before she erased it. That same person had risked even greater shame with a third photo. That same person had armed the device that went off in Gus’s garage. Only one person could have done all those things: Shahid. But why? How could he want so badly to expose her ruin, that he would ruin their whole family? It made no sense.

“Afia?”

“It is . . . it is enemies in Pakistan, I think.”

“Which is where Shahid means to send you, tomorrow.”

Afia felt herself snagged in her half truths. If she had lost Shahid, she had lost everything. I am the walking dead, she wanted to say to Coach Hayes. Let me go to the police and tell them it was me who lit a fuse at Gus’s garage.

“Okay, then.” The wood in the stove had caught fire. Coach closed the door and stood. She was taller than Baba, Afia thought, maybe taller even than Shahid. “Can you make burgers?”

Afia remembered eating with Gus at Local Burger. She’d wolfed the hot sandwich, along with a steaming pile of French fries. Though she had thought she would be sick after, she had kept it all down. But she had never cooked a burger. Now the slimy worms of fat-marbled meat repulsed her. She tried to form them into patties without touching them, using the rusted spoons and spatula she found in a drawer next to the stove. She found matches, got the pilot to sputter to life, and lit two burners. The blue flames, dry and gassy, began to lessen the cold. She found a skillet and swabbed it out with a rag dabbed wet with bottled water, and when it was hot she lifted her ill-formed cakes of meat and dropped them to hiss and spit on the hot iron. She fished heavy stoneware plates from the bottom of the stack in the cupboard, figuring them to be cleaner. In the shopping bag she found a bottle of red wine with a screw top. She filled a tumbler for the coach. Then, pressing her lips together, she filled one for herself.

Her patties fell apart as soon as she tried to nudge them from the skillet. Still, seated at the rickety round table with two lit candle stubs, Coach pronounced them delicious. She also popped open the bag of chips, sour cream and onion, that she’d bought in Hadley. “There’s instant coffee for breakfast,” Coach said, “and, God help me, Pop-Tarts.”

Afia didn’t know what a Pop-Tart was, but she nodded. The wine tasted like rotten fruit laced with formaldehyde; she swallowed it and clenched her teeth. Gingerly she ate a chip, the sides of her tongue tasting the artificial flavors. “In living room,” she said. “Your husband’s family?”

Coach took a bite of her hamburger. “Two sisters. We take turns using the camp. Though no one’s been up here recently. They’re both married to guys in the city, busy down there.”

Afia nodded. “Is the same with us.”

“What, your family has a summer place no one uses anymore?”

“No. I mean, when a girl marries. We call it a gham. A sorrow,” she explained when Coach looked puzzled. “Because your family, they lose you forever. You belong now with your husband. His family.”

Coach glanced out at the living room, where the glass frames of the pictures reflected the flames dancing in the woodstove. “I’m from the Midwest,” she said. “My mother died when I was twelve.”

“Oh. I am sorry.”

“Thank you. But I mean I don’t have much sense of my own family. And we don’t see much of Ethan’s. Maybe we should, but it doesn’t work out much. Anyway, I don’t feel as though I belong to them. I guess Ethan and I just belong to each other.”

Coach gave a short laugh, as if she knew how silly and forlorn that sounded. The fire in the woodstove had infused the air with warmth. “We should tend to your wounds,” Afia said when they had eaten.

“They’re hardly wounds.”

“They are very much wounds. Where is brightest light?”

They tried the bathroom, but the bulb had blown out. Bringing a candle, Afia managed to find two wrapped sterile pads and a roll of tape in the medicine chest. She positioned Coach Hayes on the edge of the bed, under the floor lamp. She took what seemed like a clean cloth from the closet, doused it with peroxide, and gently dabbed and stroked the woman’s face and the back of her head until the smoke stain and newly formed scabs sloughed off. The head would heal on its own, but the cheek now showed two inches of raw skin that gently oozed blood. Coach Hayes held still, wincing only as the peroxide came near her eye. For all her height and toughness, Afia realized as she set about fitting gauze and tape to the cheek, the coach was a lovely woman, with sculpted cheekbones and the sort of firm, wide jaw Pashtun men admired.

“Tomorrow you should change the dressing,” Afia said when she’d finished.

“Thank you.”

They stood. “I made up the bed,” Afia said, glancing at it. “About other rooms, I don’t know—”

“Oh, I’m not staying,” said Coach. She looked at herself in the cloudy oval mirror that hung on the wall. “I need to be home with my family. I’ll say I dropped you in Northampton. What happened to you after, I have no idea. I can’t believe I’ll lie to them,” she said as she moved out into the sitting room. “I never lie.”

“I never have sleep alone, in a house before.” Following her, Afia said this almost to herself. She could not bother Coach Hayes further. If Coach was lying, it was Afia’s fault. Everything was her fault. But she trembled. She stood in the doorway to the bedroom. “I will not sleep,” she said.

Coach turned. The light of the woodstove flickered. “You were alone at Gus’s place.”

“There were the animals.” Saying this, the awfulness of it came thundering through her. Pearl, her body white as an intestine. Voltaire, the iguana, with his throat that fluttered like a leaf in the breeze. Percy, the rat who shared the cage with Voltaire, whom Gus liked to tease her with, by wearing Percy on his head like a beady-eyed cap. And the fish, their radiant colors and translucent bellies, the tiny organs tucked inside, and their eyes round, all-seeing. They were Gus’s family, and they were gone, blasted away, like the bodies in the Peshawar bazaar. The morning of one attack, Tayyab had come back early from shopping, his clothes in smoky tatters, his cheeks hollow with fear. A hand, he’d said, there was a hand, and then a head, the head was rolling.

“Look, I’ll call after practice tomorrow,” Coach said. “That should give you some time to think over your situation. I doubt there’s cell service here, but there’s a landline.” She nodded toward the wall by the unplugged refrigerator, where an ancient black phone hung with its tangled cord. “The number’s unlisted, so no one else will be trying it. You can go to the river for water or melt some snow, to wash your face. Jugs are for drinking. If you pee in the toilet, don’t flush it. Don’t go far, because I’ll be calling you.” As she crouched before the woodstove, her voice gentled. “You should plan on speaking to the police tomorrow. They can protect you, Afia.”

“But you will not say anything to Shahid. Will you?”

Coach poked the embers and shoved in two more thick, damp branches. “You ever been on a team, Afia?”

“No. But I know there is no I in team.”

“A team”—Coach smiled as she shut the door—“is about honor. Honor as loyalty, as respect, as honesty. I have always respected your brother. I am trying to be loyal to him, honest with him. And you. But you both make it very, very difficult.”

“Coach, I—”

“It’s all right. I made a choice. But I had to say that. Your people are not the only ones concerned with honor. Now try to sleep. When the fire dies down in the stove, shove some more wood in it.”

“Thank you,” Afia said.

But Coach had stepped away, was gathering her things, was out the door and starting the car. Afia watched the red taillights disappear down the road. Then she switched off the electric light.

Now she watched flames dance behind the glass door of the woodstove. They were a miniature version, she thought, of the flames that had raged through Gus’s house. One set of flames warmed, the other destroyed. Someone would have woken Gus, at the hospital, to tell him of the catastrophe at his garage. He might have rung her. No such call had come, but she was in a dead zone; Coach had said so.

Tomorrow, if she kept her promise to Coach Hayes, she would have to call the police. But call them to say what? That she had not set the bomb, that she had no idea how to make a bomb? That she had run because of fear? Fear of what? The police would guess, soon enough. They would arrest Shahid, who had no idea how to make a bomb either—but this one hadn’t worked properly, it had not killed her. They would find evidence and try Shahid, sentence him. They might execute him here, or they might deport him to Pakistan, where Khalid would take him up on his pledge and kill him.

No, she couldn’t go to the Devon police. Coach would, eventually, but not until Afia had figured out where to flee, how to disappear. How to find some money, maybe, and cut or dye her hair. Hitchhike onto the highways of America. Send a message to Gus that she would always love him and she was sorry, sorry, so very sorry. And then—she thought as the fire settled and winter’s chill retook the room—let Shahid track her down.