Her face freezes. Her expression doesn’t change, but somehow manages to become different from mere seconds ago. It’s the eyes, of course. The lips and cheeks and eyebrows stay the same, but the eyes themselves go dark, closed while still open.
With great difficulty, she swallows. “That is not funny.” Her voice, a whisper that grows without warning into a near-shout. “That is not funny! What kind of person jokes about that?”
“It’s not a joke, Aneesa. I swear.”
“Stop lying. That’s disgusting,” she says, and turns away, wrapping her arms around herself.
“Get out your phone,” I tell her, “and Google Brookdale, Maryland, toddler, sister, and shoots.”
Her back to me, I can perceive only the tightening and hunching of her shoulders, the pause of her breath. She fumbles for her phone. I watch as her fingers dance across the glass, conjuring letters, words, my past, my sins.
A pause. She holds the phone at reading distance in a hand that begins to tremble.
“Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un,” she whispers, and when she turns to face me, tears have cut trails down her cheeks. They glimmer there like the paths of falling stars.
“This was you?” Holding out the phone. I flinch at the headline: Boy, 4, Shoots, Kills Infant Sister.
It’s kryptonite. It’s garlic and a crucifix. Wolfsbane. I rise from the chair, fall back a step, then another, its glow toxic and cold and burning me.
“Don’t make me. Don’t make me read—”
“I’m sorry.”
From her for once. The satisfaction is hot gravel down my throat, settling in my stomach.
My name isn’t in the article, of course. Nor is my mother’s, my father’s, Lola’s. The victim was a minor; the shooter was a minor. The media protects us. Too late, the media protects us.
“This is really you?” she whispers, the phone turned back to her now, her face alight in cold blue, like reflections off a pool at night.
“Yes. It’s really me.”
“Fox Tail Drive,” she mutters, then looks up sharply, staring open-mouthed over the top of her phone. “That’s here. That’s where we live. It happened in the house you’re in now? You didn’t move?”
You try selling a house where a baby was killed, I want to say. But I can’t bring myself to.
“Oh, Sebastian.” The words strangle her. I worry she can’t breathe, but she keeps talking. “Sebastian. I don’t even… I can’t even… Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you say something?”
“So you could hate me sooner?” I snap.
“No, you asshole!” The words explode out of her, and she actually throws her phone down on the table in outrage, finally looking up at me. Tears stream down her face. “So that I could be here for you!”
“You are here.”
“I think…” She trails off, and then, without warning, without a word, she hugs me, her arms around. It’s the last thing I expect and the first thing I want, and somehow it feels all wrong. I stand there, stiff and unyielding, mute, and we’re both silent and then—after millennia—I melt against her, neither of us speaking, neither of us moving, both of us barely breathing.
The temptation is to cry. To let my tears join hers. To commit the final sin of weakness and allow myself a relief and a release I simultaneously crave and have forfeit. But I haven’t cried to my mother and I haven’t cried to my therapist. I won’t cry to her, to Aneesa. I won’t. I bite the inside of my cheek; I focus on the familiar, delicious pain.
And this is the moment to kiss her, but this is the moment never, ever to kiss her. Because to kiss her now is to seal it with pain and shame, and nothing grows well or true or right in that blend of fertilizer. So I need to, but I can’t, and I stand steady and I hope that I did the right thing, that whatever my motivations, it was the right thing to do, that I’m not just trying to spread out the burden or entice her with pity.
She pulls back. Her gaze flickers between cold and hot, whirlwinds of flaming hail in her eyes.
“What happened?” she whispers, and I say nothing because, what is there to say?
“The story says it was an accident,” she goes on. “What happened?”
“I don’t know. I was four. I don’t remember.”
“Do you remember anything?”
“No.”
The quiet surrounds us; we are suffused by it and by the past.
With a shake of her head, she comes to the present. “So, wait. You don’t remember. So, how…? How did… One day someone just… mentioned that you’d done this?”
“No. No, not like that. I was just four. But I’ve always… I’ve always been aware that I did it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Like, do you remember learning to walk?” I don’t let her answer. “Of course not. But you know you learned at some point because you can walk and you’ve always been able to walk.”
She mulls this over for a moment. “It’s like that?”
“It’s a little like that.”
This seems to satisfy her, if satisfaction has any place here, at this time.
“What did you say before? ‘In a lily way…?’”
“Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un,” she says. I’ll never get it right. “It just means… It’s something we say when something bad happens.”
“Something bad happened a long time ago. Not now.”
“I don’t even know what to say. I don’t. ‘I’m sorry’ feels useless.”
“You can’t treat me any differently. You can’t do that.” I mean to sound insistent and confident, but pleading has crept into my voice. I’m begging, not demanding. “It’s not fair to treat me differently. You were the only person in this town who didn’t know. I didn’t have to tell you.”
“But—”
“No. And don’t tell your parents. They like me.”
“You think this would make them not like you?”
I think of Evan’s parents. “Well.”
“My parents think you’re great, Sebastian. My dad practically quotes you, like you’re Shakespeare or something. You think he tells every random kid he meets to call him by his first name? That’s not typical. He really likes you.”
I try not to not let my shock and my pleasure show, but I know my face betrays me. It almost always does. “Let’s keep it that way. Right now they see me, not… not what I did.”
She nods. For the first time, her hijab slips the slightest bit, and I catch sight of hair so deep brown it’s black. Then she tucks it away smoothly, so quickly that it’s gone in the instant I realize I’ve seen it.
The next time I go to Aneesa’s house, Mr. Fahim makes a joke about Saint Sebastian. Nothing has changed. She hasn’t told them.
Good.
We’re in Aneesa’s living room two days later, watching the pilot episode of Max Headroom on my laptop. She has taken my words seriously and not treated me any differently. A part of me imagined that learning about my past would either repel her or bring her closer to me, but she’s acting as though she hasn’t learned something horrific.
Which is what I wanted.