Gardens of Water (59 page)

IF HER FATHER HAD
hit her for defying him, she might have stayed. If he had left the tent in anger to attack Dylan or scream at Marcus Bey, she might have known that he loved her as much as Dylan did.

But when she stumbled in to the tent, well after dark, he didn’t even look up from his tea. Her mother glared at her and waited for her father to do something.
rem waited, too, suspended in hope that he would take some decisive action that spared her decision.

“Your daughter is back,” Nilüfer said.

“I see that.”

He finished his tea and set it aside on a saucer next to his sleeping bag. He took off his shirt, his undershirt barely covering his strong shoulders, the muscles in his arms flexing as he laid himself down inside the sleeping bag.

“Your daughter is back.”

“Nilüfer, I have a double shift tomorrow.” He turned his back. “I can’t do this tonight.”

rem walked over to her father and picked up his tea glass. He didn’t even open his eyes, and she briefly thought about dropping the glass simply to get him to startle.

Her mother stood in the corner of the tent, the harsh white of the propane lamp casting a desolate glow over her skin.

When
rem dropped the glass in the sink, her mother grabbed her by the arm. “Get in bed,” she said, her nails digging through her blouse. “I don’t know what’s wrong with your father, but get in bed and stay there.”

rem took off her head scarf and folded it next to her sleeping bag. Her mother watched her as she unpinned her hair and combed out the tangles.

“A man would love that hair,” she whispered across the tent as she turned out the light. “But not now. Not anymore.”

In the darkness and inside the sleeping bag,
rem slipped out of her clothes and into her pajamas—the scratchy material of the bag briefly touching her bare skin before being covered again.

Her brother lay asleep next to her—one bare arm slipped outside the sleeping bag. In the half-light of fire and floodlight cast through the skin of the tent, she watched
smail’s sides expand with each breath; she listened to the tiny whistling sound he made when he was deep in sleep, the same sound she had fallen asleep to thousands of nights before. She slid next to him, wrapped her left arm around his chest, and lay awake for hours. She hoped he wasn’t having bad dreams.

Chapter 45

T
HE NEXT DAY
REM WAS GONE.

That morning, before his shift, before his wife arrived at work in a panic to tell him that
rem had left, Sinan stood on the edge of the school tent, partly hidden behind one of the poles, and watched the teacher. She was one of the American relief workers who he had been told was an elementary school teacher at an expensive private school in
zmir. She sat on a chair, a group of children crowded at her feet, and read a picture book in Turkish. Her accents were wrong, but she had the words right and the children watched her with wide eyes and upturned faces. One little girl, a poor child who had lost both her parents, held on to the woman’s leg and occasionally thrust a finger into her own dirty nose. She rolled the snot between her fingers while staring at illustrations directly in front of her face.

He finally found
smail in the back of the crowd, crouched over a piece of paper, furiously drawing with colored wax pencils. He occasionally looked up from his drawing to listen to the story before returning to his artwork. Sinan noticed no crosses in the tent and saw no signs of Bibles. The teacher, while her head was uncovered, was dressed modestly and did not show any unnecessary skin. After watching for twenty minutes—long enough to see a game in which one child ran around a circle of kids and slapped the tops of their heads—he heard no mention of the prophet Jesus. The children seemed content, and to be content here was no small thing.

He watched a pickup soccer game, and while some of the Americans played with the boys, there were Turkish men also, and no one was standing around talking. They were too busy passing the ball, tripping over their own feet, and falling down to let the boys beat them to the goal.

For breakfast, he stood in the line that led to the Armenian. The man leaned over the table to serve the woman in front of Sinan, and the gold cross he wore around his neck fell over his shirt collar and dangled there just above the yellowish fluff.

“Peace be with you,” Sinan said when he took the eggs.

“May the Lord bless you, my brother.”

Sinan threw the eggs in the nearest trash bin before walking to work.

In the middle of his first shift, Nilüfer, dragging
smail in tow, found Sinan bent over boxes of goods he couldn’t buy to earn money he couldn’t get.

“She’s left with that boy,” Nilüfer said. Her eyes were so dark and angry they looked solid, as though two rocks had been dropped inside her head.

“What do you mean she’s left?”

“She left, she’s gone,” Nilüfer said, her body shuddering with anger. “I go to the W.C. and when I come out she’s gone. I need to relieve myself, what do you expect me to do? The boy,” she motioned to
smail. “The boy can’t stop her.”

smail, who a moment before was marveling at the wall of televisions broadcasting two dozen images of a Manchester United match, hung his head.

“You can’t even stop her,” Nilüfer said, waving a hand at Sinan.

“No, because I’m here lifting boxes all day!”

A handsome couple dressed in black and wafting with perfume and cologne turned to look at Sinan when he raised his voice. The man looked away as soon as he saw him, a disregard that was infuriating, but the woman stared Nilüfer up and down, taking in her dirty pantaloons, the cheap scarf wrapped around her head, the scuffed leather shoes with the soles tearing off. Sinan saw what she saw and he was disgusted with his wife and with himself, disgusted with his children, disgusted with everything.

“This is because you let her watch those American shows,” he said to Nilüfer. “You let ideas into her head.”

Trying to calm himself, he thrust the packing knife into the seam of a box and sliced it open.

“Who hid the earphones from me?”

He stabbed the next box open and shredded the seam apart.

“Don’t accuse me, Sinan.”

He slit open yet another box. Now three boxes full of goods lay open, and he began to recognize the stupidity of his actions.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said again, tears of betrayal threatening her eyes. “What else have you hidden from me?”

“Leave me alone,” he said. “I have work to do.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Leave me,” he said, raising his voice again.

smail started crying and Nilüfer ignored him. He stood there holding his mother’s hand, tears running down his face, and it was as though Nilüfer couldn’t hear him at all.

“No. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to work! I’m going to finish my shift.”

Nilüfer blinked with shock. She finally seemed to notice
smail and pressed his head up against her hip, patting his head in a gesture that was more like hitting than stroking.

“I wouldn’t have taken your name, Sinan Ba
io
lu, if I knew it meant so little to you.”