Gardens of Water (45 page)

rem burst into tears and ran out of the tent.

Nilüfer watched after her. “She’s running around like a wild animal.” She put her hands to her mouth and began chewing her fingernails. “They’re saying terrible things, Sinan. People have seen them. And where was she today? Where did they take that ferry? Marcus Bey didn’t even know where his son was. You tell me if these rumors are true, since you seem to know all about this.” She took a step toward him and poked her finger into his chest. “I’ve spent too many years sweating at hard work, too many years stuck in a hot kitchen. I’ve kept my mouth shut too many times so I could be called a good woman, and for this girl—for you—to ruin my name!”

“Nilüfer,” Sinan said. “Calm down, Nilüfer. Like you said, she’s just a child.” He tried to put his arms around her.

“Don’t tell me to calm down,” she said. “A child, yes. Your child! You don’t care about her. If you loved her, you wouldn’t let this happen.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Sinan said.

“Talk to her I’ve already talked to her and she’s lied to me. You should hear the things people are saying.”

“People spread rumors about others to keep eyes off themselves.”

“You should lock her up in this tent until she learns her place. Thinks she knows what it is to be a woman!” She ripped a piece of nail from her thumb and spat it on the floor. “If you loved her that’s what you’d do, lock her up in here until that boy is back in America.”

“Nilüfer, do you want to go to work sixteen hours a day?” Sinan said, raising his voice.
smail cowered on the bag, hiding as best he could from all of them. “Do you want to worry about taking care of all of us? Do you want the burden of trying to make you all happy? Do you know what that’s like? Don’t tell me what to do, unless you want all that.”

“Yes, you’re the only one who works,” she said under her breath. “Of course.” She sat down and pulled
smail into her lap.

“Nilüfer,” Sinan said, coming to sit down next to her. “A hundred and forty million will get us to Diyarbak
r. I’ll have the money in three weeks. Just three weeks. We have a house there, family. The American boy won’t matter then.”

She didn’t look up. Her palms remained pressed against her eyes and her wrists glistened with water.

“I never thought you were a weak man,” she said quietly.

He stood up and looked down at her. “We’re in a tent, Nilüfer,” he said, spitting the words at her as though she had no sense at all, as though she were the stupidest woman in the world. He heard the tone in his voice, but he didn’t care. “How do you lock a girl up in a tent?!”

She said something he couldn’t hear and he let it go.

“In three weeks I’ll have the money. Just twenty-one days more, Nilüfer.”

“But everything can change in one day, my husband.”

IT TOOK A WHILE,
but he found his daughter on the bare hillside between the city and the camp where the sea spread below like a hole in the earth, just a dark pool of emptiness that was darker than the moonless sky. He had trouble seeing her at first, but soon he caught her shape hunched in the darkness.

“You scare me when you run away,” he said.

She was silent, but he heard a sniffle and he sat down next to her. It was pitch-black on the hill between the fires of the tent city and the bulldozer floodlights in town, and he couldn’t make out her face, only the outline of her head and shoulders.

“You don’t know what it’s like to be a parent,” he said. “I’m always afraid something will happen to you. Every day I worry life will be mean to you.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a dark shape prowl the ridge of the hill. He turned to see what it was, but what he thought he saw was gone, replaced by the luminous rising moon.

“There are things in the world,
rem, that will try to hurt you.

They don’t care about you. They just want something. Everyone wants something. Your mother and I love you and we’re trying to protect you.”

“Yeah, I felt so protected after the quake, Baba. You disappeared.”

Only his guilt kept him from slapping her. He suddenly felt the steepness of the hill. The land in front of him fell toward the sea, and when he moved his foot little landslides of rock tumbled silently into the dark.

“I kissed him, Baba. That’s the ‘terrible’ thing people saw.”

An image of his daughter kissing the American boy turned his stomach.

“What they’re saying, though, I don’t know,”
rem continued. “What people say is always worse than what you’ve done. That’s what Dylan says.”

He tried to control his anger, but it boiled to the surface and he remained quiet for a minute, trying to get the burn to subside. “This is not how I raised you,” he said finally. “It’s a sin.”

rem blew air out of her mouth. “Baba, you raised me to be like mother.” She scraped her heel into the dirt and loosened some rocks. “You told me you wanted me to be happy.”

“And that I want you to live a good life, a moral one.”

“Baba, I can’t be unhappy and be moral, too. I cannot be like mother—unhappy, stuck cooking food all day long, cleaning floors that are dirty again by the end of the day. I can’t keep my mouth shut like I have no thoughts, like I have no brain.”

“Your mother is a good woman, she’s happy with her life. And I don’t treat her like she has no brain.”

rem said nothing in response to that. Sinan tried to see the expression on her face through the darkness, but he only saw the indefinite oval shape and the slope of her nose catching the light of the moon.

“I don’t want to be like mother. Dylan told me women do whatever they want in America, they can be anything, they don’t even have to act like women.”

“You don’t understand what you’re doing,
rem. It’s dangerous.”