Chapter 15: The Long Two Weeks

April 2011

After Omar walked over the ridge and did not come back, the house learned a new way to live, which was to live in two times at once: the ordinary time of chores and meals and the turning spring, and underneath it, always, the other time — the counting time, the waiting time, the time that measured itself in how many days were left before the thing everyone feared arrived ahead of the thing everyone hoped for.

Mariam set the rule the first night, and it held. They would go on as though nothing had changed, because anything else would draw eyes. The smoke would rise from the chimney the usual amount. The goats would be put out and brought in on the usual schedule. If anyone came down-valley — a peddler, a cousin, one of the watchful men who noticed things — they would see four women keeping a house the way four women had kept it all winter, and nothing more. Grief and fear were luxuries to be taken out only after dark, behind a barred door, and put away again before the light.

But behind the barred door, at night, they packed.

It had to be done by feel and by halves, because there could be no sign of a household preparing to flee. So they packed the way you’d pack a wound — carefully, invisibly, a little at a time. Mariam went through their few possessions and divided them with a cold practicality that brooked no sentiment: this comes, this stays, this we cannot be seen carrying. What comes must fit on our backs and the backs of women who are carrying children, over bad ground, fast, in the dark. There would be no wagon. There would be no second trip. Each of them made up a single bundle of the irreducible things — documents where they had them, the small heirlooms that were all that remained of who they’d been before, what little gold could be sewn into a hem — and those bundles lived hidden, ready, by the door that didn’t open, and the rest of their lives they left behind in the open as bait, so the house would look lived-in to the last hour.

“We leave it looking like we’ll be back by supper,” Mariam said. “That’s the trick of it. A house that looks abandoned tells a story. A house that looks like the women just stepped out tells none.”

The nights were the hard part, because the nights were when the wanting and the fearing had nothing to push against.

Yasmin felt his absence like a missing tooth — her tongue going to the gap a hundred times a day. She’d run after him through the snow and let him go with her own hands and stood with her chin up the way Mariam taught her, and she was proud of that, would be proud of it the rest of her life. But pride didn’t fill a bed at night, and she lay in the dark with her hand over the small new curve of her belly and talked to him in her head, told him about her day, asked him when, when, when. The old fear circled her — men leave, men leave, you wanted one to stay and look — and every night she had to fight it back down with the only weapon she had, which was the memory of his voice on the open trail. A man does not walk away from you. Not anymore. I’m going first, and then I’m bringing you through. She held that like a coal against the cold and most nights it was enough.

Nadia waited the way she did everything — quietly, with that unnerving certainty of hers intact. She had always believed he’d come back to them, from the very first, and she saw no reason to stop now just because the waiting had gotten harder. She tended her cousin’s nerves and Mariam’s aching back and the goats, and she did her share of the night packing with her one good hand, and she slept, mostly, which the others marveled at and resented a little and were grateful for, because somebody in the house being certain made it easier for the rest to be afraid.