Rhys had wanted to live somewhere in the hills, but Shirhazi, at best, rolled. It did not have proper hills, not until it came to the base of the mountains, to the north. And by then the city had turned to scrubland and clover fields. So he settled for living in a three-storied house made of mud-brick and bug secretions sandwiched at the far end of a long row of similar houses. There was a roof garden, and a wide, open balcony on the second floor. There were no windows on the first floor, of course, but windows on the upper floors opened out onto the rear garden, and during the hottest part of the day, they could push them all open and catch a breeze off the inland sea.
They. Rhys had expected to remain alone in Tirhan, his narrow days interspersed with occasional visits to Khos and Inaya, his fellow exiles, to ease some of the loneliness. But it hadn’t turned out that way. Nothing about his life in Tirhan had turned out the way he expected.
Rhys walked across the street, through the front gate, and onto his tiled front patio. He heard laughter from behind the house. He passed through the cobbled alley to the treed yard surrounded in an eight-foot-high privacy wall. His family’s refuge.
His daughters played in the yard, attaching strings to giant ladybugs and hanging them from the wisteria bushes that bordered the backyard. Ladybugs were supposed to be lucky, and were a popular symbol of the Tirhani Martyr. It was said that after she was burned, her body was consumed by ladybugs. It was nearing the time of the Martyr’s festival, when the whole of Shirhazi would fast for nine days and feast for nine nights down at the beachfront. It would be the first year he and Elahyiah felt the girls were old enough to join in the nighttime festivities. There would be fireworks and magicians. Elahyiah had friends running the food kiosks and performing in the theater groups. The girls had been talking about it for weeks.
He stood at the edge of the yard and watched them. The girls were two and four now, not old enough, in his opinion, to be left out in the yard with bugs in the sun, but he did not see Elahyiah or the housekeeper. The girls had shed their coats and played uncovered in the dirt.
“Laleh, Souri,” he said. The girls lifted their heads. Souri, the younger, squealed and ran across the dirt in her bare feet. Souri had once eaten a spider and nearly died from it. Laleh was far more cautious, willing to follow but never lead.
Laleh hung back with the bugs under the scant shade of one of the thorny acacias.
“Where’s your mother?” Rhys asked Souri.
Souri clung to his robe.
Rhys scooped her up and asked Laleh, “How long have you been out? Come inside. You’re going to get cancer.”
“Da,” Souri said, and threw her little arms around his neck.
“Come,” Rhys said to Laleh again, and held out his hand.
Laleh took a few tentative steps forward, head lowered. He often wondered where Laleh got her docility from. Certainly not from her mother.
They passed through the filter spanning the arched entryway of the porch and stepped across the cool tiles and into the house. A dozen succulents with broad green leaves crowded the porch, situated around a low, bubbling fountain lined in blue and green tiles. The main floor was one big room, loosely divided by hand-carved screens that Elahyiah’s father had brought over from Chenja. The screens were her dowry; her family had little else to offer besides Elahyiah herself.
Elahyiah sat bent over her desk near the ceramic stove they sometimes lit during the cool winter evenings, consulting her Tirhani dictionary. She spent several nights a week improving her Tirhani with a group of women downtown. The women were all Chenjan refugees, or the children of refugees. She had emigrated to Tirhan when she was nine, and he thought she spoke the language well, but she was constantly worried about it. “When we met I believed you would think I was some uneducated Nasheenian, it was so poor,” she once confided.
He had thought nothing of the kind. Elahyiah was nothing like a Nasheenian woman, though he had not felt the need to tell her why he knew that for a certainty.
Elahyiah turned when he entered. He saw that she had the long stare of deep immersion. It took her a moment to focus, to come back from wherever she had been in her head, and then she was looking at him, at the children—and she smiled.
“You left them outside uncovered,” he said.
She blinked, and the smile faded. “It’s only been a few minutes.” She turned to look at the water clock next to the call box.
“Where’s the housekeeper?”
“I sent her home. It was such a beautiful day.”
That was Elahyiah—compassionate when she remembered to be, but not always practical. God, he loved her for the compassion, but….
Rhys left the girls with her and walked into the kitchen. Dirty dishes littered the counter; half-eaten mangoes and a loaf of uncovered rye bread, plates smeared in peanut butter and toast and grasshopper heads.
“Elahyiah, you can’t send her home before she’s even finished the tea dishes.”
When she did not reply, Rhys turned to look back into the study, and saw Elahyiah giggling over some bug with Souri.
“Elahyiah?” he said. “The tea dishes.”
“Hm?” She raised her head, distracted. “That’s just tea.”
Rhys felt slow irritation building in his chest, disrupting his hard-fought calm. He closed his eyes. These are not important things, he reminded himself. It was a blessing that his days no longer consisted of cutting off heads and blowing up buildings. A blessing.
“Let’s get the children slathered down and put to bed,” Rhys said. “I’m not paying to have their skins replaced before they’re twenty.”
He went upstairs to the tidy bedroom and changed his clothes. The housekeeper had the unenviable job of trying to keep up with his distractible wife. She did her best to keep the children fed and the common rooms clean, but it often fell to him to keep the bedroom neat. He had become terribly fastidious about it. When he came back down, Elahyiah had managed to move the children halfway to the bathing room. They stood in the hallway talking idly about how fast bees could fly.
Together, he and Elahyiah got Souri and Laleh bathed and slathered in burn ointment and put to bed. It was a long, drawn-out process. Laleh, ever the dour, sensitive one, cried and protested. Elahyiah kept up a constant stream of chatter, spoke of Heidian philosophy and Tirhani verb structure, and Souri spun stories of dervishes and sand demons who lived in the garden and became imprisoned in the belly of a sand cat.
By the time they put the girls into their room, the suns had died and the blue dusk had long since fallen.
As Rhys stood at the door of the girls’ bedroom, he realized all of them had gone without dinner.
Elahyiah remained inside the bedroom, telling the girls stories about Chenja and the war in her soft voice.
“I need to speak to you when you’re done,” he said.
“I’ll be down in a bit, love,” Elahyiah said.
A night without dinner would not kill them. If Elahyiah didn’t remember to feed them in the morning, the housekeeper would.
Rhys walked back down to the disastrous kitchen. There were no clean knives. He rolled up his sleeves and threw out the rapidly rotting food—nothing left uncovered for long kept well—and opened the bug bin. He stacked the dishes in the bin and opened the access panel for the refuse beetles. They would lick the dishes clean in a quarter hour.
Rhys left the rest for the housekeeper and made himself a quick meal of stale rye bread, curried protein cakes, and a lone mango he found at the back of the ice box behind a very curdled jar of cats’ milk. He opened the jar and threw it and its contents into the bug bin. The beetles hissed.
As he ate, standing next to the counter, he wrote some notes for Elahyiah on the live countertop.
Make sure the children eat breakfast. Don’t send the housekeeper home early. Don’t leave the girls outside uncovered.
He nearly wrote,
And remember to eat something, yourself
, but that was too much, like reminding her to wash her hair. Which she also often forgot. I’m not raising three children, he amended. How did such a brilliant woman lose so many details? Why did he have to play father to all three of them?
He finally went upstairs to find her.
The window was open. A cool breeze stirred gauzy curtains. Elahyiah stood at the door that led out onto their private balcony. Her hair was unbound; black curls tumbled down her shoulders. She wore only a loose shift.
She turned when he entered, smiled.
“I missed you,” she said.
He moved toward her in the dark. “Elahyiah, the children—”
She brushed a hand across his mouth, delicate as a moth’s touch. “Hush now, they’re in bed. I missed you.”
She kissed him.
They didn’t make it to the bed. She straddled him in the dark, almost frantic, passionate, as if they would be caught and stoned like two unwed lovers.
The whole world, for a moment, was just this: Elahyiah, his wife. The spill of her hair. The warmth, the urgent desire. He didn’t know where her sudden passion came from on these nights, when he was nearly exhausted and the house was in disarray. But her passion never ceased to move him.
Later, he got up to use the privy, and paused again as he entered the archway leading into their shared room. He watched her through the stir of the white curtain that separated their room from the hall. Elahyiah was already asleep. She looked small and dark; she had the fine features of a lizard; delicate as a dragonfly. Their girls had been born small—too small for him not to worry. Both were growing up as fine-boned as their mother. She was peaceful and perfect in sleep, disarmed, completely vulnerable.
He loved her. He felt that in his bones, but some days, even when he lay next to her, when he looked at her as he did now, he could not help but feel, somewhere just under the surface of his love, of their sometimes strained contentment, that something that should have sustained him was missing. He supposed all marriages must be like this; great chunks of contentment, frustrated daily living, shot through with moments of absolute terror and doubt and disappointment. The world was large. It was no fault of his or hers, he supposed, to sometimes wonder if a mistake had been made.
And then as the wind fell and the curtain stilled he felt his restlessness still as well, and his wife was no longer a frail stranger across the hall who could not remember to eat her own dinner or keep an appointment, but the mother of his children, his gift from God, the passionate love of his life, because the love of one’s life was never that which you wished for or hoped for or forgot or lost or mistook; it was the partner you spent your long days with, the woman God made for the partnering of all of your days.
The love of your life was never the woman you left behind.
He moved to step into the room, to lie next to her, but as he did he heard a faint sound from below, felt the stirring of some bug in a wire—old, familiar.
Rhys turned away from the bedroom and descended to the kitchen at the bottom of the house. From here, the sound of the call box was louder, though the stirring in his blood remained the same.
The box was soldered to the wall next to the desk. He picked up the receiver.
“Peace be with you,” he said.
“And with you,” the woman on the other end said. He knew the voice. The connection was good; nothing hissed or chittered over the line. It meant the bugs that originated the call were expensive. Government.
It was the Tirhani Minister.
“I need you to take a train tonight to Beh Ayin,” she said.
“This is… unexpected.” He was thinking it would cost her two hundred notes.
“It’s of great importance.”
If she was being blunt, he would follow suit. “It will cost you,” he said. He thought of the housekeeper, wondered how much it would cost to hire a second.
“I expected nothing less,” the Minister said, but her tone was the same. No amusement, all business.
“Who am I meeting with?” he asked.
“I will have one of my people meet you in Beh Ayin. She’ll give you more information. She lost our original translator. How’s your Nasheenian?”
When was the last time he had spoken Nasheenian? Six years? Inaya and Khos preferred to speak to him in Tirhani. When the three of them lapsed into Nasheenian, it was generally brief, to explain a term, or triggered by some memory.
“You’ll need to translate a negotiation,” the Minister said, “and you need to be on your best behavior.”