A Sister to Honor (27 page)

What to do, what to do? He'd pulled his own Glock out from under the seat. One action could not be tolerated: for Shahid to take their befouled sister home to be married, as if she had committed no crime greater than the brush of one hand against another. Explicitly, Omar had charged him not to let Shahid abandon his glorious career for such nonsense. No good could come of trying to bleach an indelible stain. Yet there they had come, the open door spilling light onto their faces, Afia barefoot, her features knit tight, and Shahid with his hand on her elbow, guiding her down the steps. They were leaving. He could not let them. Not this time. No. He was a man, a Satar, he would take care of this. And so he had turned the headlights on, raised the Glock.

•   •   •

A
llah! How can you account for everything that goes wrong in the world? How could you think a Pashtun brother could lay eyes on such a photo and still send his sister home to be honorably wed? How could you imagine that the recipe for combustion, memorized in the camps above the Khyber Pass, would stutter and delay and fail to kill? How could such a girl disappear, and why would a brother hunt her down for any reason but to seize back his honor? How could a finger on a trigger, once squeezing, fail to stop when a man blocked the target? What, oh what had he been made to do, when all he desired was purity and his rightful place?

He stepped from the car. His left foot throbbed the way it did when his muscles cramped up. The snow had stopped, the sky cleared. Following the constellations, he located the four directions. He knelt, facing east, and in a language that made no sense to him, recited his prayers.

T
he place they took Afia wasn't like a prison, not the way she pictured an American prison anyway. She had seen pictures of the cages, the dogs. Her room had a regular door, no bars. Though she was locked in at night, she had a bed and a sink and flush toilet, not a hole in the floor. The place smelled of disinfectant. They allowed her to have books—the jail's small library had even got hold of the textbooks she needed—and she was allotted both paper and pencil, plus two hours a day in the library where there was an Internet connection. No e-mail.

Only one other inmate, a skinny black woman named Thalia who said she was a Muslim, ever spoke to her. Thalia came in two days after Afia, charged with murdering her boyfriend; she'd done two stints behind bars already, she said, and they weren't granting her bail. The other women, a couple dozen at most, avoided Thalia as much as they did Afia. Then there was Officer Jane, the prison librarian, and Sara Desfani, her court-appointed lawyer. Sara—she told Afia to call her Sara—was Muslim, but she wasn't Pashtun or even Pakistani. She tried to get Afia to talk about Baba and Moray and what they wanted for her, about Shahid and how angry he got when he found out about Gus. Afia didn't see what business Sara had to understand life in Nasirabad. It was all she wanted now. Home. With Moray's cool hands stroking her brow, stroking away the fever that gave her bad dreams in which Shahid was dead and she was locked away forever far from anyone who loved her.

But she wasn't home. She was in the bad dream.

She would not let the name
Khalid
escape her lips. The Americans, if they knew the facts, would want to punish Khalid. But Khalid, for all he'd done to paint the picture of Afia's shame, was not the truly guilty one. She was the guilty one. She was the one who had abandoned her
namus
, who had put Shahid at risk in the first place.
If a tree falls in the woods
, her philosophy teacher had asked,
and no one to hear it, does it make a sound?
If a woman pollutes herself, she could have echoed, and no one to know it, has she brought shame to her family?

The answer, it would seem, was yes.

Shutting her eyes, she saw Shahid's blood on the snow behind the cabin.
Run
, he had cried out, dying.
Run.

Where should she run now?

From her family, silence. The district attorney, she learned, had spoken to them. All Sara knew was that they had protested Shahid's innocence—he could not have set a bomb, he would not have threatened his sister. They had sent no money for bail. They would not speak with Afia. Sara did not mention Khalid, so Baba must not have mentioned him. Maybe he thought Khalid was still in the mountains; maybe he knew the truth; maybe he had lied to Shahid and sent Khalid to America himself. Afia did not ask.

Alone at night, in her cell, which was never fully dark, always the lights in the hall, she heard her brother's voice, smelled his sweat, rested her closed eyes on the face he always brought home from Peshawar, from the squash tour, from America. His too-wide, silly smile, showing the gums above his teeth. His brown eyes gleaming as she unwrapped her present—a necklace from Dubai, a pair of slippers from America. The tiny mole by his mouth, echoing hers by her eye.
Oh Shahid, Shahid
, she whispered into the silence.

Because of her, Shahid was dead. Shahid had tried to send her home, to save her. But she—she had been in love! With Gus! Even now, in her white room, with her books and her prayer mat—even now with Shahid dead—she felt the secret shame of wanting Gus. He had said all the dear words to her, lying on his bed, their sweat sticking them together. That he loved her. He wanted always to be with her. He would protect her from her family, from her jealous brother. She was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. He would marry her. How could she ever have thought such foulness sweet, such danger safe?

Gus had not tried to see her, and no wonder. To the police she had claimed she was the one tampering with his brakes, setting a bomb to explode in his home. Why? the police asked. Because, she said, he liked another girl. She was jealous, crazy with jealousy. They claimed she was lying. But could she blame Gus if he believed such a story? A knife pierced her gut every time she thought of him, which was many times every day.

She would never be a doctor now. She would help no one. She had brought death and shame; now she had nothing but death and shame to offer. If they would let her, she thought in the wee hours of the night, under the light they never turned off, she would take poison and be rid of herself.

•   •   •

O
nce a day they let the women out in the exercise yard. From the back, the building was faced with blond brick; the outside walls were of stone topped by clay tiles. A female guard stood by while Afia walked with Thalia in the cold yard. Thalia talked about revenge. She'd been set up, she said. This guy Hammer had done her boyfriend, all over a bag of coke. When she got out she had a gun stashed away, and she knew how to shoot it and she'd take care of Hammer in a way that she'd never get caught, no ma'am. Thalia talked and Afia tried to listen. Snow banked the gravel path. Toward the center sat a stone fountain that must have been used once as a birdbath, the ice in it slowly melting.

Afia didn't remember much about coming here. That night, at the cabin, she had run until her breath could carry her no farther. There had been stones beneath the stones, sharp twigs, branches that cut her shins and made her fall and rise, fall and rise again. Then she had walked, stumbled, seen the yellow glow of a house lighting its barn. Below her knees, she had felt nothing. She had slipped through the barn door to the familiar odor of animals—a horse, chickens, a pair of goats. In a rough blanket she had rolled herself and spent the night shivering in the stall of the horse, who poked and nuzzled her. In the morning the old man had found her and cried for his wife. By then she was too stiff to move. After rubbing her feet and legs, the wife had swaddled them in a pair of thick wool socks. They had driven her to a hospital. When or how the police came for her, she couldn't remember. When they had pronounced Shahid's name to her, she broke out weeping and would not stop—not in the hospital when they peppered her with questions, not when they pulled her hands behind her back and cuffed her wrists. In the back of the car that brought her to a prison, a different room, she had wept herself to sleep. At some point after that—days, a week, more?—the blisters on her feet proved infected, and they treated her with antibiotics and a stinking plaster. The little toe on her left foot was far gone with frostbite, the doctor reported, and a few days later he gave her an injection to deaden the pain while he cut it off.

She cared about none of it. For a long while, when they came in to ask her questions, she only looked at them and shrugged. Eventually they coaxed words out of her. Eventually she understood: She had to confess that it was she who had killed Shahid, and Shahid who had tried to kill her. That story was the only way to spare her family more grief, just as this was the only place safe from Khalid.

Two weeks had passed; now it was March, the advent of spring. She was watching a red cardinal on the stone fountain when a guard came to lead the women back inside. She had a visitor, the guard said. All the guards, except Officer Jane, were like this one, chunky white women who stood with their arms folded across their chests and barked announcements—LOCKDOWN! LIGHTS OUT! HEAD COUNT!—even when no one stood more than ten feet from them. The cardinal flew off, and she followed the guard to the room with the tables, where other women whispered to their husbands or their lawyers, and more guards stood by the walls. When Coach Hayes came through the armored door, she rose from her folding chair, her knees shaking.

Coach looked like a different woman. Older, paler, her shoulders curled forward as if they bore weight. “Afia,” she said when she drew close, and her voice had a rasp in it.

They sat. They were not allowed to touch. All the bad things Afia had done seemed to lie on the table between them. That she had left the cabin. That she had called Gus. That she had failed to lock the back door. But these were not the worst thing. The worst, she had to remind herself, was that she had loosed the bullet to kill Shahid. An easy story to tell—for had she not, in the end, brought death to her brother?—until Coach lifted her pale face and fixed her with those blue eyes. “It's my fault,” she said.

Afia's heart squeezed against the wall of her chest. “No,” she managed to say.

“Yes. I should have gone to the police. Right away. They would have arrested him. We would have lost the Harvard match.” Coach's mouth trembled. She looked down, picked at something on her hand. “And Shahid would be alive.”

And I would be dead
, Afia thought. But she said only, “You could not know, Coach.” And then, because a mountain of lies rose between her and the woman who had tried to rescue her, she said, “How is your family?”

“My family?” Coach snorted. “That was my husband's cabin, where you were hiding. I told him to trust me, that I knew what I was doing.”

“He is angry with you.”

“You blame him?” She lifted her eyes again. She studied Afia's clothes, the hijab and the black chador. “I never kept anything from Ethan before,” she said. Bitterness edged her voice. “It's a . . . a point of honor with us. You people don't have a monopoly on honor.”

“I know that, Coach.”

“Do you? Then tell me.” Coach lifted her forearms to the table, as if she would take Afia's hands. Her tone softened. “What really happened, Afia? Who tried to kill you? How did Shahid die?”

“I—I can't explain.” Afia began to weep. Coach Hayes had given her kindness, and she had repaid her with horror and grief. “I never thought to put him in danger.”

“But you did. And I did. And he died. Afia, listen to me.” Coach Hayes dug in her pocket and pulled out a crumpled tissue, which she passed across the table. “I tried to keep you a secret, and it didn't work out. Now you're keeping a secret. I know you are. My husband tells me I'm imagining things. I go on about a man in a blue car that kept following me, but nobody else saw this man. I'm supposed to believe that Shahid Satar, who I knew like my own son, who I loved—” She broke off. As if a string had been pulled, she sank back in her chair, her large hand over her face. Then she grimaced and sat upright. “I loved him,” she repeated, “and I am supposed to believe he was capable of attempted murder. That's what your lawyer wants me to suggest.”

“Miss Desfani? She speaks to you?”

“She's preparing a case, Afia. She has to. And the worse Shahid looks, the better the case she wants to build. Well, I'm not buying it, Afia. Not from my husband. Or the police. Or you.”

Afia felt as if spiders crawled over her skin. A blue car. Khalid. “Please, Coach,” she begged. “No good comes of this. You have your work. You must forget me and—”

Coach's face twisted; a laugh erupted and died. “What work, Afia?”

“The team. The friends of Shahid, they need you—”

“Apparently not that badly. Afia, think about it. I withheld evidence in a criminal investigation. No one thinks I'll go to jail, but it's a scandal. I'm on leave, honey. Administrative leave.”

“Leave? That means?”

“Means I don't work, so I won't embarrass the university. Six months from now, we see if this has blown over. Until then . . .” She snorted. She looked away. “I wallow in grief and get eaten up with curiosity. My daughter wets the bed, and my husband . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“I am so sorry, Coach.”

“Now do you see? Why it's so important for me to know?”

But Afia felt a wall go up inside her, implacable. She had betrayed everything and everyone else. She would not betray Baba's only son. “I cannot tell you anything,” she said, “that would help.”

•   •   •

S
he felt awful about Coach Hayes. When she saw Sara Desfani, two days later, she asked her not to bother the coach; to make the case without her. “Don't be silly,” Sara replied. She had cut and colored her hair since their last meeting. It lifted gently off her forehead and swirled in dark chestnut past her ears. Afia tightened her hijab. “Coach Hayes,” Sara went on, “was there when that bomb exploded. Her testimony's essential. She'll come around. Are they giving you time for prayers, here?”

“Yes. But if Coach doesn't want to—”

“Afia, you worry about your own story. Let me worry about the big picture. By the time Ramadan comes—”

“I don't care about Ramadan.”

“Neither do I, except to get you out of here by then.” Sara glanced at her notes. She tapped a pencil against the side of the table. Her face reminded Afia of Tayyab's wife: full lips and low-slung cheekbones, pouches below the eyes. A stubborn face. No point arguing with her about Coach Hayes. “Your friends at Smith don't consider you especially religious,” Sara said.