I put down my cup, began to speak, but she cut me off.
I’m telling you now, aren’t I? That’s all that matters. Your father has his reasons. I’m sure you can figure them out, you give it some time. Important thing is, he has a half brother and he’s been sending him money to help out.
She told me how, for years now, Baba had been sending this Iqbal—my half uncle, I thought with an inner lurch—a thousand dollars every three months, going down to Western Union, wiring the money to a bank in Peshawar.
Why are you telling me now? I asked.
Because I think you should know even if he doesn’t. Also, you will have to take over the finances soon and then you would find out anyway.
I turned away, watched a cat, its tail erect, sidle up to the Ping-Pong couple. The girl reached to pet it and the cat tensed up at first. But then it curled up on the railing, let the girl run her hands over its ears, down its back. My mind was reeling. I had family outside of the U.S.
You’ll be doing the books for a long time yet, Mother, I said. I did my best to disguise the wobble in my voice.
There was a dense pause. When she spoke again, it was in a lower tone, slower, like when I was little and we would go to the mosque for a funeral and she would hunker down next to me beforehand and patiently explain how I had to remove my shoes at the entrance, how I had to keep quiet during prayers and not fidget, not complain, and how I should use the bathroom now so I wouldn’t have to later.
I won’t, she said. And don’t you go thinking I will. The time has come, you have to be ready for it.
I blew out a gush of air; a hardness lodged in my throat. Somewhere, a chain saw buzzed to life, the crescendo of its whine at violent odds with the stillness of the woods.
Your father is like a child. Terrified of being abandoned. He would lose his way without you, Pari, and never find his way back.
I made myself look at the trees, the wash of sunlight falling on the feathery leaves, the rough bark of the trunks. I slid my tongue between the incisors and bit down hard. My eyes watered, and the coppery taste of blood flooded my mouth.
A brother, I said.
Yes.
I have a lot of questions.
Ask me tonight. When I’m not as tired. I’ll tell you everything I know.
I nodded. I gulped the rest of my tea, which had gone cold. At a nearby table, a middle-aged couple traded pages of the newspaper. The woman, red-haired and open-faced, was quietly watching us over the top of her broadsheet, her eyes switching from me to my gray-faced mother, her beanie hat, her hands mapped with bruises, her sunken eyes and skeletal grin. When I met her gaze, the woman smiled just a tad like there was a secret knowledge between us, and I knew that she had done this too.
So what do you think, Mother? The fair, are you up for it?
Mother’s gaze lingered on me. Her eyes looked too big for her head and her head too big for her shoulders.
I could use a new hat, she said.
I tossed the napkin on the table and pushed back my chair, walked around to the other side. I released the brake on the wheelchair and pulled the chair away from the table.
Pari? Mother said.
Yes?
She rolled her head all the way back to look up at me. Sunlight pushed through the leaves of the trees and pinpricked her face. Do you even know how strong God has made you? she said. How strong and good He has made you?
There is no accounting for how the mind works. This moment, for instance. Of the thousands and thousands of moments my mother and I shared together through all the years, this is the one that shines the brightest, the one that vibrates with the loudest hum at the back of my mind: my mother looking up at me over her shoulder, her face upside down, all those dazzling points of light shimmering on her skin, her asking did I know how good and strong God had made me.
…
After Baba falls asleep on the recliner, Pari gently zips up his cardigan and pulls up the shawl to cover his torso. She tucks a loose strand of hair behind his ear and stands over him, watching him sleep for a while. I like watching him sleep too because then you can’t tell something is wrong. With his eyes closed, the blankness is lifted, and the lackluster, absent gaze too, and Baba looks more familiar. Asleep, he looks more alert and present, as if something of his old self has seeped back into him. I wonder if Pari can picture it, looking at his face resting on the pillow, how he used to be, how he used to laugh.
We move from the living room to the kitchen. I fetch a pot from the cabinet and fill it at the sink.
“I want to show you some of these,” Pari says, a charge of excitement in her voice. She’s sitting at the table, busily flipping through a photo album that she fished from her suitcase earlier.
“I’m afraid the coffee won’t be up to Parisian standards,” I say over my shoulder, pouring water from the pot into the coffeemaker.
“I promise you I am not a coffee snob.” She has taken off the yellow scarf and put on reading glasses, through which she is peering at pictures.
When the coffeemaker begins to gurgle, I take my seat at the kitchen table beside Pari. “Ah oui. Voilà. Here it is,” she says. She flips the album around and pushes it over to me. She taps on a picture. “This is the place. Where your father and I were born. And our brother Iqbal too.”
When she first called me from Paris, she mentioned Iqbal’s name—as proof, perhaps, to convince me she was not lying about who she said she was. But I already knew she was telling the truth. I knew it the moment I picked up the receiver and she spoke my father’s name into my ear and asked whether it was his residence she had reached. And I said, Yes, who is this? and she said, I am his sister. My heart kicked violently. I fumbled for a chair to drop into, everything around me suddenly pin-drop quiet. It was a shock, yes, the sort of third-act theatrical thing that rarely happens to people in real life. But on another plane—a plane that defies rationalizing, a more fragile plane, one whose essence would fracture and splinter if I even vocalized it—I wasn’t surprised that she was calling. As if I had expected it, even, my whole life, that through some dizzying fit of design, or circumstance, or chance, or fate, or whatever name you want to slap on it, we would find each other, she and I.
I carried the receiver with me to the backyard then and sat on a chair by the vegetable patch, where I have kept growing the bell peppers and giant squash my mother had planted. The sun warmed my neck as I lit a cigarette with quivering hands.
I know who you are, I said. I’ve known all my life.
There was silence at the other end, but I had the impression she was weeping soundlessly, that she had rolled her head away from the phone to do it.