“All right, Baba. We’ll tell her together.”
“Crazy woman.”
“We’ll tell Mother, and then us three will laugh the crazy woman right out the door. Now, you go on and relax, Baba. Everything is all right. There.”
I flip on the Weather Channel and sit beside him, stroking his shoulder, until his shaking ceases and his breathing slows. Less than five minutes pass before he dozes off.
Back in the kitchen, Pari sits slumped on the floor, back against the dishwasher. She looks shaken. She dabs at her eyes with a paper napkin.
“I am very sorry,” she says. “That was not prudent of me.”
“It’s all right,” I say, reaching under the sink for the dustpan and brush. I find little pink-and-orange pills scattered on the floor among the broken glass. I pick them up one by one and sweep the glass off the linoleum.
“Je suis une imbécile. I wanted to tell him so much. I thought maybe if I tell him the truth … I don’t know what I was thinking.”
I empty the broken glass into the trash bin. I kneel down, pull back the collar of Pari’s shirt, and check her shoulder where Baba had jabbed her. “That’s going to bruise. And I speak with authority on the matter.” I sit on the floor beside her.
She opens her palm, and I pour the pills into it. “He is like this often?”
“He has his spit-and-vinegar days.”
“Maybe you think about finding professional help, no?”
I sigh, nodding. I have thought a lot lately of the inevitable morning when I will wake up to an empty house while Baba lies curled up on an unfamiliar bed, eyeing a breakfast tray brought to him by a stranger. Baba slumped behind a table in some activity room, nodding off.
“I know,” I say, “but not yet. I want to take care of him as long as I can.”
Pari smiles and blows her nose. “I understand that.”
I am not sure she does. I don’t tell her the other reason. I can barely admit it to myself. Namely, how afraid I am to be free despite my frequent desire for it. Afraid of what will happen to me, what I will do with myself, when Baba is gone. All my life, I have lived like an aquarium fish in the safety of a glass tank, behind a barrier as impenetrable as it has been transparent. I have been free to observe the glimmering world on the other side, to picture myself in it, if I like. But I have always been contained, hemmed in, by the hard, unyielding confines of the existence that Baba has constructed for me, at first knowingly, when I was young, and now guilelessly, now that he is fading day by day. I think I have grown accustomed to the glass and am terrified that when it breaks, when I am alone, I will spill out into the wide open unknown and flop around, helpless, lost, gasping for breath.
The truth I rarely admit to is, I have always needed the weight of Baba on my back.
Why else had I so readily surrendered my dreams of art school, hardly mounting a resistance when Baba asked me not to go to Baltimore? Why else had I left Neal, the man I was engaged to a few years ago? He owned a small solar-panel-installation company. He had a square-shaped, creased face I liked the moment I met him at Abe’s Kabob House, when I asked for his order and he looked up from the menu and grinned. He was patient and friendly and even-tempered. It isn’t true what I told Pari about him. Neal didn’t leave me for someone more beautiful. I sabotaged things with him. Even when he promised to convert to Islam, to take Farsi classes, I found other faults, other excuses. I panicked, in the end, and ran back to all the familiar nooks and crannies, and crevasses, of my life at home.
Next to me, Pari begins to get up. I watch her flatten the wrinkles of her dress, and I am struck anew by what a miracle it is that she is here, standing inches from me.
“I want to show you something,” I say.
I get up and go to my room. One of the quirks of never leaving home is that no one cleans out your old room and sells your toys at a garage sale, no one gives away the clothes you have outgrown. I know that for a woman who is nearly thirty, I have too many relics of my childhood sitting around, most of them stuffed in a large chest at the foot of my bed whose lid I now lift. Inside are old dolls, the pink pony that came with a mane I could brush, the picture books, all the Happy Birthday and Valentine’s cards I had made my parents in elementary school with kidney beans and glitter and little sparkling stars. The last time we spoke, Neal and I, when I broke things off, he said, I can’t wait for you, Pari. I won’t wait around for you to grow up.
I shut the lid and go back to the living room, where Pari has settled into the couch across from Baba. I take a seat next to her.
“Here,” I say, handing her the stack of postcards.
She reaches for her reading glasses sitting on the side table and yanks off the rubber band holding the postcards together. Looking at the first one, she frowns. It is a picture of Las Vegas, of Caesars Palace at night, all glitter and lights. She flips it over and reads the note aloud.
July 21, 1992
Dear Pari,
You wouldn’t believe how hot this place gets. Today Baba got a blister when he put his palm down on the hood of our rental car! Mother had to put toothpaste on it. In Caesars Palace, they have Roman soldiers with swords and helmets and red capes. Baba kept trying to get Mother to take a picture with them but she wouldn’t. But I did! I’ll show you when I get home. That’s it for now. I miss you. Wish you were here.
Pari
P.S. I’m having the most awesome ice cream sundae as I write this.
She flips to the next postcard. Hearst Castle. She reads the note under her breath now. Had his own zoo! How cool is that? Kangaroos, zebras, antelopes, Bactrian camels—they’re the ones with two humps! One of Disneyland, Mickey in the wizard’s hat, waving a wand. Mother screamed when the hanged guy fell from the ceiling! You should have heard her! La Jolla Cove. Big Sur. 17 Mile Drive. Muir Woods. Lake Tahoe. Miss you. You would have loved it for sure. Wish you were here.
I wish you were here.
I wish you were here.
Pari takes off her glasses. “You wrote postcards to yourself?”
I shake my head. “To you.” I laugh. “This is embarrassing.”
Pari puts the postcards down on the coffee table and nudges closer to me. “Tell me.”
I look down at my hands and rotate my watch around on my wrist. “I used to pretend we were twin sisters, you and I. No one could see you but me. I told you everything. All my secrets. You were real to me, always so near. I felt less alone because of you. Like we were Doppelgängers. Do you know that word?”