Chapter 11: The Hollow Filled

March 2011

By March the snow had stopped its relentless falling, but it had not gone anywhere. It lay deep and packed over the whole of the pass, blue in the mornings and gold in the late light, sealing the valley off from the world as completely as a stone rolled across a tomb. The trails were gone. The village down-valley might as well have been across an ocean. The only world that existed was the stone house and the five people in it and the white silence pressing at the shutters, and within that small world, life had narrowed to its essentials — warmth, food, and one another.

The food was the daily arithmetic now, and it was Mariam’s, the way most hard arithmetic was. She stood at the stores along the far wall most mornings and counted with her eyes the way a banker counts — the sacks of flour gone soft at the corners, the dried mutton dwindling, the oil, the lentils, the last of the dried apricots she was rationing for the two who were carrying because they needed it more. She had laid the stores in for five through a winter. She had not laid them in for seven, which was what they would be by summer, and the math of it sat behind her eyes even when she smiled. They would manage. They always managed. But she counted, and recounted, and said nothing, because frightening the others changed nothing and feeding them was her job.

Mariam and Nadia were rounding now, the pair of them, low and close and only a week or two apart in their carrying. It had changed the shape of the household. The two of them tired faster, slept heavier, moved more carefully on the cold stone floors, and the labor that had been spread across four women now fell mostly on two — Yasmin and Dina — without anyone ever quite deciding it should. It simply happened, the way water finds its level. Yasmin took the fetching and the carrying and the bending. Dina, the strongest of them, took the wood and the water and the heavy outdoor work, breaking the ice on the trough each morning, hauling the snow they melted for washing.

And Dina, doing it, was alone in a way she hadn’t been since before Omar came.

It crept up on her through that long month. She was glad for Mariam and Nadia — she was, she’d have fought anyone who said otherwise. But a house reorganizing itself around two pregnancies is a house that, without meaning to, makes a center of the carrying, and Dina was not at that center. She watched the two of them get the gentle hands, the feet propped up, the best of the apricots, the soft particular tenderness the whole house turned toward a pregnant woman — and she hauled the water and broke the ice and did her private arithmetic in the cold.

Thursday was hers. She had been with Omar these weeks like the others. And nothing had come of it yet, and the old voice she’d spent twenty-one years listening to — you, never you, you were never the one anything good happened to — had started up again in the back of her skull, quieter now but not gone, never quite gone. She told herself it was early. She told herself not every woman caught the first month. She told herself she didn’t even know if she wanted the misery of it, the sickness and the swelling, and that was a lie and she knew it was a lie, and she broke the ice on the trough with rather more force than the job required.

She said none of this to anyone. Dina’s whole life had been carrying the load alone, and old habits don’t die because someone finally offers to share them; they just get quieter. So she hauled and broke and counted in silence, and was glad for the others, and ached, and let no one see.

Yasmin, meanwhile, was being slowly undone by tenderness, and didn’t notice it was undoing her own body too.