Kathryn led Michael into his kindergarten classroom for his first day of school. He joined other kids sitting cross legged in a circle on the floor, looking eagerly at each other.
“Michael, say goodbye to baby Andrew,” she patted the newborn in the sling across her breast.
Michael gave a distracted wave. Reluctantly, she turned to go, looked back to blow him a kiss, and then determinedly walked out of the classroom.
As she turned the key in the ignition, the radio sprung to life. A newscaster gave the usual litany of bad news, falling stock prices, acrimony in Congress, pirates off the coast of Somalia, U.S. forces killed a dozen Taliban near Afghanistan’s eastern border. She cut off the monotony of the daily news, with the press of a button. Instantly, the car filled with the familiar words of a singer, a melody she had memorized as a teenager. She relaxed, turned into the parking garage. As she pulled the key out of the ignition the radio went dead and a tiny cry from the baby echoed the last note of the song.
She hurried up two flights of stairs, the carseat—with the baby still buckled in—knocked against her leg with each rising step. She felt her milk coming into her breasts even before he cried for it. By the time she locked the front door behind her, two dark circles of milk had soaked through her Pakistani kurta. Irritated, she pulled the kurta off and dropped it on top of a pile of neglected dirty laundry. She didn’t bother to find another. She just might be able to finish her cold coffee and feed herself something before she nursed. The phone rang. The baby cried, an angry, hungry cry. The ringing continued as she fumbled with the car seat buckles and the baby’s kicking legs. She tried to ignore the ringing as she maneuvered the baby into position. She saw Andrew’s eyes open widely, wildly. Her coffee would have to wait. He latched on to her, relaxing almost immediately into the safety and pleasure of her milk.
The phone rang again. Irritated, she tried to ignore it. She exhaled as the ringing gave way to silence, only to begin again in another second. She swore under her breath and awkwardly pushed herself up.
“Hello?” she said into the phone. When no one responded, she repeated herself, preparing to hang up in frustration.
“Kathryn?” a man’s voice said unsteadily.
“Yes?”
“Kathryn? It’s me, Rashid.”
“What do you need? Why do you sound so strange?”
“Kathryn, have you seen the news?”
“I heard a bit on the way home from the school. Nothing new, why?”
“Did you hear about the attack? The U.S. Government is saying Taliban were killed.”
“OK. Look, Rashid, I’m trying to feed the baby. What do you need?”
“The attack, it wasn’t Taliban, it was a wedding…”
“So…?”
“They…he…the…” he could not find the words to start. “It was a wedding in the northwestern territories. It wasn’t in Afghanistan, it was on the Pakistan side of the border. It was a drone attack… and my father…was there.”
The baby pulled away from her breast, blissfully contented.
“Your father?” she asked.
“My father was a guest…he was killed. My father’s dead.”
She could not speak. Could not reconcile the comfort of this maternal moment with the horror of the words coming through the phone. She touched the baby—a half Pakistani baby. She closed her eyes hoping to shut out everything beyond her body and this baby.
“Kathryn, are you there?” he was almost pleading.
She sat down on the couch, slowly exhaling. “Are you sure? How do you know?”
“My brothers called me.”
“From Lahore?”
“Yes.”
“Then they weren’t at the wedding. How would they know? Maybe there’s a mistake.”
“My uncle called them. Not my real uncle, Shoukart’s father, the Pashtun man who protected my father during Partition. My father went for the youngest son’s wedding.”
“Oh God. Where’s your mother, was she with him?”
“No, she’s at home, only my father traveled for the wedding.”
She began to tremble. The pieces of his story slowly assembled in her mind. His father—dead, the killer—her country. She felt exposed, reached for a blanket to cover her breasts, the baby, her distant sense of culpability.
“Where are you? Can you come home?”
“I’m offshore on a rig. I told you I had a job in Ventura today. I’ll have to wait for the next ferry.”
She heard the helpless edge in his voice.
“Come home,” she said. “We’ll all be waiting.”
Rashid hung up the phone, clenched his fists until his fingernails dug into his flesh. His brothers had reached him so easily by phone, delivering the news with unbearable efficiency. For him to reach his mother would take long days, anxious nights.
He unzipped his coveralls, stepped out, letting them crumple on the rig floor. Out of habit he reached to make sure his plastic radiation exposure badge was in place on the waistband of his jeans.
He ignored the shouts of his rig team calling him back to his work. The series of small explosions they had meticulously planned to perforate the oil well no longer mattered. He could only think of getting to Pakistan. Should he bring Michael? Kathryn and the baby were out of the question. Even though they had traveled to Lahore with Michael when he was still an infant—had presented his father with the only male heir to carry the family name—he couldn’t bear to overlap the birth of his second son with the death of his father.
He looked at his watch, at least two hours until the noon ferry would deliver him to shore. He paced back and forth along the edge of the rig dock like a caged lion, spat into the water. The ocean accepted his bitter expression. He remembered his father—once he had failed to react when Rashid hit him in anger over the slaughter of a beloved goat for the Eid feast marking the end of Ramadan. “Our emotions come and go, beta,” his father had said with infinite patience to his young son, “what matters is action, how those emotions take form in action that others can see. That goat is dead now. But you can make sure it is cooked with reverence, the meat shared, so the goat’s sacrifice has meaning.”
Angrily, Rashid punched at the tiny keypad on his phone, brusquely asked the operator to connect him with the international airlines that would carry him to the land of his birth. “I need the next flight to Islamabad, and a connection to Lahore. I must arrive as soon as possible.”
“Let me check, sir…” the agent spoke with a South Asian accent. “We have one flight a day to Islamabad, through Dubai. Today’s flight has just departed. Can I reserve a seat on tomorrow’s flight for you?”
“My father’s body will already be in the ground by the time I get there,” Rashid said quietly.
“I’m sorry, sir?”
“My father was killed last night. I need to get to my mother, my family. But I’ll miss the burial.”
The agent let out a sigh, “Oh, I am so sorry, brother.” He spoked quietly now, “I missed my own father’s funeral. I was working in Dubai. My employer held my passport and wouldn’t interrupt his holiday weekend to retrieve it so I could fly back to Karachi.”
“Really?” Rashid asked indignantly.
“How could I ever forgive my employer? I quit, full stop. I’ll make sure you’re on tomorrow’s flight, sir.”
Rashid knocked. Kathryn opened the door almost immediately. When he saw her, the baby content in her arms, Michael, looking so grown up at her side with his expression of serious concern, Rashid could no longer contain his emotions. He reached for his family. They embraced him before the door slid closed behind him. He wept. Michael wrapped his arms around his father’s waist. “I’m sorry Baba, don’t be too sad. We’re all sorry, even baby Andrew’s sorry.”
Rashid pulled back from Kathryn, knelt down to look at his elder son. He stroked Michael’s hair, laid his hands on his shoulders. “You don’t need to be sorry, beta. It’s not your fault. But we’re all sorry, we’ll miss Babu.”
“Can we see him again?” Michael asked.
“No, not in this world. He’s gone, no one can bring back my father.”
Kathryn bit her lip, let the tears roll down her face.
“I need to go to my mother now, to help her and be close to my brothers.”
“In Pakistan?” Michael pronounced it just the way his father did.
“Yes, in Pakistan.”
“Then I’ll need to be with my mother here, to help her and to be close to my baby brother.”
Rashid embraced the boy, marveling at how the infant he had seen enter the world had become a little man, a son already aware of his role in the family.
“You’ll come back, right?”
Rashid felt his son’s question, the vibrations of the boy’s anxious voice pressing into his chest, as much as he heard the question.
“Of course,” he held Michael’s head with one hand, reached out for Kathryn with the other, “of course.”