The Summer We Came to Life

Chapter

44





NO ONE’S NOTICING THE SUNSET THIS TIME. THE silence is broken by a flick of Jesse’s lighter and the crackling of cigarette paper. She takes a deep puff and inhales slowly, almost as if she will speak. But there is nothing to say to a parent who has lost a child.

“Maliheh became somebody else. She buried inside of herself and whispered all her thoughts to gestating Mina. Maybe that’s why Mina was born with all the wisdom of a woman. She absorbed the profundity of a mother’s heartbreak. My family intervened. They arranged our move to the United States through a cousin in Washington. Maliheh said she didn’t care if we went to the bottom of the ocean. America would do.”

Arshan sits forward, rests his elbows on his knees and scratches his beard with both hands. He sighs with utter exhaustion. “So that is how we came to America. My family gave us money until I found a job. When she was eight months’ pregnant, Maliheh was in a highway car accident with my cousin. My cousin lived. Mina was born by emergency cesarean. But Maliheh died in the hospital before I could get there. They told me it was a miracle that my daughter survived. A gift from God.”

Tears spring to Arshan’s eyes. He swallows hard to keep them from falling. He’s waited thirty years to confess this. No turning back now. “I hated her. My infant daughter. I didn’t want her. I wanted Reza, and I wanted my wife. Not a screaming baby who reminded me every day of what I had lost. I got a nanny and a job at the university into which I disappeared. Mina grew and grew. I never told her anything about her mother, and she turned out exactly like her in every way. I thought it was a trick. I thought it was my punishment. It never occurred to me that she really was a gift. Mina was a gift and a chance at redemption. And I missed it. I turned away. All of you knew my daughter better than I did. If Maliheh had lived—Maliheh wanted Mina more than anybody has ever wanted a child. Days before she died, she made me promise to be happy. So that Mina could be happy. And instead I let her be raised by strangers—” Arshan turns his head away quickly so they won’t see the tears slipping past his guard.

He’s not looking for comfort. He wants them to hate him. To condemn him finally for all his wrongs. The man who turned away from God. The man who could not save his son, or protect his wife, or love his daughter.