Kathryn’s eyelids close and her knees buckle. Rashid responds instantly, reaching out for her in a gesture part embrace part rescue. Rashid had not expected Kathryn in his arms so quickly, nor had he imagined that he would hold her unconscious. For a few moments he can feel her heat, smell her perfume, follow the graceful line of her hair. When she revives she does not react, simply allows herself to be lifted to her feet, only nods as Rashid motions toward the stairs. He supports her as they walk together toward her home. Inside, he sets her on the sofa. In the kitchen he opens all the cupboards until he finds a glass, then brings her water. She watches his movements. Even in his nervous unfamiliarity, she can see the elegant strength of the man she knew. As he offers her the glass she carefully avoids his fingers, as if he might be a mirage that could vanish with the slightest provocation.
“You cannot be Rashid, he’s dead, he blew himself up in a terrorist bombing.”
He closes his eyes, wondering how to navigate the wasteland of wounds between them. “I didn’t die in the bombing.”
“I don’t believe you’re him.” Her rational mind will not allow her to accept what she knew the moment she saw his eyes. “The Rashid I knew would never have stayed away for so long. But I didn’t think the Rashid I knew would blow up a freeway either.” Quietly, as if to herself, “Maybe I never knew who Rashid was.” More forcefully she looks again at him, “But I don’t believe you are Rashid Siddique.”
“The hotel room where we spent our first night together was the Grace Hotel. The chunni you wore when you first met my family was a sapphire blue. When your mother came to Pakistan for our wedding, she could eat the spicy food, but hated the sweet ladoos.” He recounts these intimate memories—which had sustained him during his exile—as evidence of his identity.
She holds up her hand, closes her eyes to stop the assault of details from a past she has long since buried. “Then how…why,” she opens her eyes lowering her upturned palms to encompass the entire image of the man standing miraculously before her.
He sits in a chair before her, clasps and unclasps his hands. How many times had he rehearsed this explanation? He thinks of Noor’s warning not to talk too much, her counsel to listen.
“You owe me an explanation, everything,” Kathryn says with steely resolve.
He hesitates.
“I’m waiting.” She flares her nostrils in anger.
“Let me start at the beginning, when I returned to Pakistan for my father’s funeral.”
She nods, prepared to listen.
“My mother was waiting for me. She had already planned that I would be the one to take revenge for his death. She couldn’t live with the idea that the injustice of his death wouldn’t be answered.” He continued in this way, explaining his protests, his brother’s challenge to his honor. When the story moved back to America, to the times when Kathryn would have figured into the story, she looks at her hands or closes her eyes. She wills herself to listen to the whole story, the whole absurd distortion he details, before she questions any specific part of it. His description of Ali, the bombing, his flight and his exile are cursory, just a few sentences. He just wants to finish. Her expression is inscrutable.
“And today, I finally took the last step, I came to see you. When you saw me, I was thinking to turn back, to just leave the money and go.” He falls silent, his whole story unwound.
She looks down at her hands again, running her eyes across the lines in her hands as if she were trying to read a book in a foreign language. “So why come back? Why now?”
He also looks down, sees the outline of his father’s hands in his long fingers. “Because I didn’t want to die in that little courtyard in Peshawar like a coward, I didn’t want to die without speaking to you one more time, before I had seen my sons as men.” His chin trembles, his breathing grows shallow as he realizes the alternative ending, a quiet extinguishing of his life in Peshawar, will not happen.
Kathryn rises, moves to stand in front of him. She lifts his head with a hand under his bearded chin. She brings her face close enough that he can imagine her kiss. A great sense of relief fills him, how easily they are reunited. He closes his eyes, waiting for the warmth of her lips. When he hears the crack of her palm against his cheek he is unguarded, bewildered. But when her blows come again and again, he starts to fathom her silence during his monologue was a deep gathering of rage.
“You have no idea what you’ve done to me,” she delivers another blow, “what you’ve done to my sons,” he turns his cheek and accepts another blow. “And now you come back because you’re afraid of your own death as a lonely old man.” Another blow. “Some kind of withered terrorist.”
He raises his arms to protect his face, so she directs her anger at his chest, pummeling against the cloth of his occupied shirt as she did so long ago against his empty shirts.
“You son of a bitch. You’re still dead to me,” she gasps, choking back tears, “and the woman who was your wife, that Kathryn, you killed her too when that bomb exploded on the freeway!”
He has no words to respond to her force. He stands, backs toward the door. He steps outside, but holds her gaze. “I still want to see our sons. I’ll come back when…when you’ve had some time.”
He closes the door behind him, hears her bang her fists against the inside of the door. “They’re not your sons,” she screams.
She resists the impulse to open the door and continue her invective.
Both alone now, on either side of the door, they each carry the image, the undeniable reality of the other with them.
She walks to the kitchen for water, to the bathroom to use the toilet. Back and forth through the rooms she walks, not knowing what to do next, what to think, what to fear.
He walks down the stairs and out to the street, not recognizing anything around him from what he had seen on the way in. He walks for nearly a mile before reaching a restaurant where he asks a waitress to request a car. Despite the welts he can feel burning on his cheeks, he feels a glimmer of calm. He has done it.