“Three years, maybe more.” She did not pause before the reply.
The air between them was changed from what he remembered—there had always been tenderness, but now there was a charge too. He was aware of his body and hers alone. Of course he had felt this before, but something about the tone of her voice, the way she looked at him and then away, made him think it would not be impossible to reach out and touch her. They had been children together and were so young when they began to love each other, he knew that when he looked back. Some days, in the life he had now, it seemed unbelievable that they could have had so ardent a love without ever touching. But that is what it had been. Now her shirt was cut low and a shadow gestured to her breast. He looked down at his hands, holding on to his knees.
By now they both must have become different people. But what he felt for Amira—it was as though she had been tucked in a compartment in his heart that hadn’t changed, and seeing her now he knew it never would: he could return to her at any age and feel for her the way he always had. He knew, with such certainty it shamed him, that it would not matter if he fell in love one day and married—Amira would continue to exist as a love entirely apart. If ever they could resume, even just for an afternoon, if ever she called—a sin was not a sin if it were for her. A risk was not a risk.
“What did you end up studying?” he asked.
Do you like waking up before the rest of the world?
When you were little did you think the moon followed you?
“Psychology—with an emphasis in child development.”
“Done with school?”
She shook her head. She was beginning graduate school in the fall, she said she wanted to do research. She asked him what he studied. When he didn’t answer right away, the peace of her face was disturbed. She was being careful like his mother, not knowing what questions to ask.
“I had to work. But I’ve saved a little money now, and I’m going to try to go back to school.”
All of that was true. What he wanted now was to be honest with her. He had already lost; being dishonest would not win anything back for him now.
“Mumma and Baba once mentioned you were in India.”
She moved the row of her bangles down her arm then up again. Their curves twinkled in the dark.
“I wasn’t.”
“I didn’t think so,” she said, and she smiled as though she was proud she had intuited it. Offering her the truth seemed to relax her. Her eyes were as big as a cat’s in the dark.
“What else did you think?”
She shrugged. “I couldn’t imagine you being convinced to do something you didn’t want to do.”
He was quiet. He had wanted to change for her.
“So,” she said, tenderly now, asking the one question no one else had, “where have you been?”
Leaves circled beside them and then dispersed. The little pearls that dangled from her earrings quivered.
“I was in a bad place after us,” he said. “You know me.”
She winced. He listened to the scrape of leaves and wondered if it could be effortless, confessing it all to Amira.
“I couldn’t go to class and if I did I couldn’t focus. I fought with my father more than I spoke to anyone. I was drinking a lot and I wanted something stronger.”
He paused, not knowing how to continue. For years he had hidden his habits from her but feared she had known. He had always thought that was why she had ended things: not the excuse she gave of her parents, having hardly thought of them throughout their relationship—but that she herself had grown tired of waiting for him.
“It got worse. I got into worse fights with my father. I wasn’t myself. Or if I was, I wasn’t anyone I recognized.”
The beeping of the safe. Mumma’s pale face in the hallway. Hadia asking if anyone had seen her watch. Amira looked at him with fear and care and it was thrilling to see a reaction in her. Even if it was just sympathy, the least personal of investments.
“Before I left, I started taking pills to silence this voice in my head telling me: you’ve sinned, you’ll sin again, home for you is a place you stand outside of, looking in. Eventually it felt like I had no other choice, or I wanted that and nothing else. There was one fight with my father I couldn’t take back. I moved to L.A. I wasn’t sure I’d stay, but I’m still there now. It’s hard to remember that first year. I worked temporary jobs. I helped move furniture. I kept what Mumma would call bad company. But about two years ago I met someone who helped me get clean. I was lucky. That voice had finally quieted, and I started to feel like I could breathe. Not breathe easy, just breathe. And now, if I do find myself walking alone, or by the ocean, looking out, and if I do think of God—I can’t explain it, Amira, but it’s different. It’s not that I am at home where I live now. But at least there, I am not the only one standing outside.”
He was surprised by what he had most wanted to share with her. He didn’t mention who had helped him get clean. Realized he didn’t want to say her name. Even thinking of her next to Amira made what he had felt for her in the past year shrink.
“I don’t understand,” was all she said, her voice small, like a squeak. “Clean?”
Maybe because he needed someone to know, or maybe to watch her face twist to prove her care for him, or to give her an image that would haunt her the way she haunted him, he rolled up his shirtsleeve and offered her his arm, and even in the darkness he could see the splatter of dots following his vein.
A dark, small speck. A permanent stain. So heavy and black it cannot tell good from evil.
“Oh, Amar,” she whispered.
She touched his arm. He felt a current shoot from his arm through his entire body and he jerked back, unrolled his sleeve, and buttoned it again at the wrist. Her eyes shimmered.
“You can’t tell anyone,” he said, and his voice was rougher now, “not where I live and not what I did.”
“We may not speak anymore but I have never, and will never, break your trust.”
He wanted to believe her.
“Do you still?” she whispered.
He shook his head. “Some days it feels like that was another life entirely. Other days I am so certain I will again, it’s almost as if it’s my destiny, as if I am in a holding cell waiting for the sentence to be handed down to me. But I know if I did, I’d never stop.”
She looked at him the way people sometimes looked at him, as though their love for him were useless, a love that pained them more than it gave them anything in return.
“I don’t see the guys I met when I first moved anymore. I got a new job and I work other ones on the side. I cook at a restaurant in town that has a good reputation. I’m good at it. It’s hard work, but I’m valued there.”
He was not sure what she was thinking, if she was happy for him or if she was thinking what he imagined his father would, but she nodded at least.
“Promise me you never will again,” she said.
“I think it’s more important that I promise myself,” he said, and she half smiled at that.
Every day he lived without it felt like an extra day he was lucky for, and he feared using now the way he had once feared his dreams—not at all in the sunlight but then it would be a certain hour, a darkening of the sky, and he was terrified that at night they would come for him again. She reached out her pinky like a child and like a child he took it. Again that current that lit his body.
“Khassam?” she asked, the Urdu word for swear it.
“Khassam.”
She kissed her thumb and then he kissed his. She tugged his pinky tight for a second. Then she let go. He thought she was about to say it was time to go back, but instead she asked, “Do you remember that party, the first time we really spoke?”