“Course he knew. He always knew everything I did.”
The night they discovered what Parvaiz had done, Aneeka had allowed Isma to brush out her long dark hair as their mother used to do when she had a daughter in need of comforting, and partway through Aneeka leaned back into her sister and said, “He never explained why he didn’t tell me about the Ibsen tickets.” Months after their mother died, Parvaiz, a boy suddenly arrived into adolescence in a house where bills and grief filled all crevices, had decided he needed a laptop of his own so that his sisters wouldn’t disrupt his work on the sound projects that had recently become an obsession. One night he sneaked out of the house when everyone had gone to sleep, took the bus to Central London, and waited from midnight until mid-morning outside a theater in the West End for return tickets to the opening night of an Ibsen play that an actor recently elevated, via a superhero role, to the Hollywood A-list was using to reestablish his credentials as a serious thespian. Parvaiz bought two tickets with money he’d “borrowed” from the household account using Isma’s debit card, and quickly sold them both for an astronomical sum. He announced all this, sauntering into the house like a conquering hero, only to be confronted with his sisters’ rage. Isma’s anger came from the thought of the overtime she worked to keep the debt collector from the door, and from the thought of every horror that could befall a young boy in a world of racists and pedophiles; but Aneeka’s rage was far greater. “Why didn’t you tell me? I tell you everything—how could you not tell me?” Both Parvaiz and Isma, accustomed to Aneeka’s being the buffer between them, had been completely unprepared for this. Six years later, that story was all Aneeka could grasp to help her understand her brother’s subterfuge. Isma had an easier answer: his father’s son; a fecklessness in the gene pool.
“Boys are different from us,” Isma said. “They see what they want through tunnel vision.”
The screen became a place of confusion, all motion and shapes, for a few seconds, and then she saw her sister lying in bed, face turned toward the phone that had been settled in its dock.
“Maybe if we start looking now for cheap flights I could come to you for my Easter break,” Aneeka said, but Isma shook her head firmly before the sentence was finished.
“Don’t want me telling the security monkeys at Heathrow how much I admire the Queen’s color palette?”
“I do not.” Her muscles tightened at the thought of Aneeka in the interrogation room. “Are we really not going to talk about the fact that Parvaiz has reappeared on Skype?”
“If we talk about him we’ll argue. I don’t want to argue right now.”
“Neither do I. But I want to know if you’ve spoken to him.”
“He sent a chat message just to say he’s okay. You get the same?”
“No, I got nothing.”
“Oh, Isma. I was sure you had. I would have told you otherwise. Yes, just that. He’s okay. He must have assumed I’d tell you as soon as I heard.”
“That would imply he remembers how to think about anyone other than himself.”
“Don’t, please. I know anger is the way you express your concern but, just don’t.”
Anger is the way I express my anger, she would have said on another night, but tonight she said “I miss you.”
“Stay with me until I fall asleep,” Aneeka said, her hand reaching toward Isma, swerving to switch off the light.
“Once upon a time, there lived a girl and a boy called Aneeka and Parvaiz, who had the power to talk to animals.”
Aneeka laughed. “Tell the one with the ostrich,” she said, voice muffled by her pillow.
She was asleep before Isma was done telling the childhood story their mother had invented for her firstborn and Isma had modified for the twins, but Isma stayed on the line, listening to their breath rise and fall together as in all those times when Aneeka would crawl into Isma’s bed, awakened from or into some night terror, and only the older sister’s steady heartbeat could teach the younger one’s frantic heart how to quiet, until there was no sound except their breath in unison, the universe still around them.
2
ALL MORNING SHE PRETENDED not to notice him sitting across the café basement, working on a crossword. But when she ordered a sandwich for lunch and brought it to her table, he came over and said he was about to have a bite himself, would it be all right if he sat with her.
“Preston Road,” he said, returning a few minutes later with a plate of pasta. “It sounded familiar when you said that’s where you grew up but I didn’t know why until I looked it up on a map. That’s in Wembley. My father’s family lives somewhere around there. I used to visit every Eid.”
“Oh, really?” she said, choosing not to mention that she knew exactly where his father’s family used to live, and that she also knew, as he seemed not to, that they’d moved away, to Canada.
“There was a song my cousins used to sing to my little sister when the adults weren’t around. I’ve had a line of it stuck in my head for years. Drives me crazy that I can’t remember the rest, and my sister has no memory of it. Do you know it?” Unexpectedly he broke into a Pakistani pop song that predated his birth—he was four years her junior, she’d discovered. She recognized the song by the tune more than the words, which came out as gibberish tinged with Urdu. He sang two lines, softly, face turning red—a self-consciousness she wouldn’t have expected, particularly given how pretty his voice was. She pulled up a song for him from the music library on her phone and watched as Eamonn plugged in his headphones—unconscionably expensive; Parvaiz had coveted such a pair. He listened, eyes closed, recognition rather than pleasure in his expression.
“Thank you,” he said, when he was done. “What does it actually mean?”
“It’s in praise of fair-skinned girls, who have nothing to fear in life because everyone will always love their fair skin and their blue eyes.”
“Oh, yes,” he said, laughing. “I knew that once. They sang it to tease my sister, but she just treated it as a compliment and made it one. That’s my sister for you.”
“And you? Are you like that too?”
He frowned a little, sliding the tines of his fork into the little tubes of pasta. “No, I don’t think so,” he said in the unconvinced manner of someone who isn’t accustomed to being asked to account for his own character. He raised the fork to his face and with little sucking sounds drew the pasta into his mouth. “Oh, sorry. My table manners are usually better than this.”
“I don’t mind. Do you know any Urdu?” He shook his head, a response his singing had anticipated, and she said, “So you don’t understand ‘bay-takalufi.’”