Take What You Can Carry by Gian Sardar (superbooks4u .TXT) 📕

was the first time they’d walked to the water after her mother passed, and every wave was one she’d never hear.

“My dad said you can look at the sky and feel which star is watching you. And that’s the person you knew. And he was right, because I felt it. She’s up there, helping and protecting us. Keeping us safe. Even now, my mom knows I’m here with you. If we go outside tonight, I could probably find her for you.”

Lailan shakes her head.

“No? You don’t want to?”

Still facing the wall, Lailan shakes her head again. “Here, big clouds. Big. We see stars; stars are big big. But stars not see us.”

“Because of the clouds?”

The girl shrugs. “Where I born, all people stars.”

Olivia’s unsure how to respond, if Lailan means that the stars must not be able to see because there’s been no protection. Cautiously, she says, “Stars are very, very powerful. And I’ve heard that if the clouds are heavy, if they’re having a hard time looking, sometimes they send someone to help. You might not even know who it is, because it’s a secret. The person might not even know.”

Now Lailan turns. Intrigued. She bites her lip, then remembers her loose tooth and touches it with her thumb. “Soran?” she finally asks.

Olivia smiles. “I can’t tell you. How would I know?”

“You?” Said loudly and with a jump and a landing on the bed.

Olivia motions Lailan to lie beside her, and though the girl obliges, she can’t seem to stay straight or still and so props one leg up on the wall. “Tell me another story,” Olivia says, just as the power goes out and the fan slows to a stop.

And so with one leg on the wall and a small hand patting Olivia’s arm, Lailan talks about a mountain and a treasure and lava, and when she says the word, she glances at Olivia, proud. Olivia nods, encouraging, but sees Delan in her mind. Outside the sky appears erased, wiped out by the heat.

Downstairs, Gaziza’s kept vigil by the window, perched in the gold chair with prayer beads, her hair covered in a dark headscarf. She is willing her son to appear, and her love for her child is so concentrated, so intense that it seems at any moment it could break into something tangible, something so powerful, it could reorder the world. The woman’s eyes shine and move with any shadow of clouds, any flicker of change upon the empty street.

Late in the afternoon, the heat has settled. Soran heads to the garden, plunging his hands into the soil at the potting table, while Olivia takes a seat on the bench beside him, listening for any changes within the house. A voice. A telephone ring. It’s hot early this year, he explains, snapping the little leaves and tiny branches off a tomato seedling. When planted, he tells her of the stem, the spots of the injuries will become roots, the plant healthier. “These will go there,” he says, nodding in the direction of the grapes. “That area, that’s where I need to get ready.” Beside it, the chukar birds are out in an enclosed pen, their wah-ooo-ooo, wah-ooo-ooo sounds constant as they stab at the ground with red beaks.

In the United States, there’d be a fist pounding a desk, demanding answers. A lawyer. A group outside the jail with signs. Calls to a news station. Here, they sit in a garden. Or a chair by the window. “There must be people we can call,” she says.

“You do not make phone calls. Our phones are tapped—they have been for a while. We set meetings, go for tea. I have tea later today. Please, will you hand me that water?”

A pail filled with water sits by the faucet, inside a chipped porcelain teacup. Using the cup, he drenches the soil around the plant. Olivia fans her shirt, hot with stagnancy. She needs to pace. To run. To do anything to burn off her frustration. What she’d said to Delan comes back in bursts, how she’d made him feel. A fight at the worst time.

Just then, the chukars scatter within their pen as Lailan bursts outside, racing to greet them. “Bird,” she announces and shoves grass between the holes in the fence, “bird time to eat,” until Soran says something to her in Kurdish that makes her stop. Then he turns to Olivia. “There is work to do, if you want.”

Gardening gloves. Her sneakers. The sting of sweat in her eyes and the burn of sun on her back. Eventually Lailan settles and sits on the path beside them, drawing on lined paper, as Olivia twists and pulls the weeds from their roots, relishing in an absence of thought, the physical motions that blank her mind and place energy into her body rather than her worries.

Hewar lugs compost in a wheelbarrow, and Olivia and Soran mix it into the cleared section. His sons, their love of gardening, it’s clear it stems from him. Her own father, she remembers, discovered his love for gardens a few months after her mother’s sleep—as they called it—began. Bags of soil had slumped at his feet like something defeated. For hours, it seemed, he’d studied an area in the backyard that was all grass gone to seed. She will love this, he’d finally said, his voice solid with belief. Seeds covered and hidden, plants that would bloom later in the year—a garden was not just for the present but for the anticipation of a future day. Such hope, inherent in its essence. And though her father’s ability to keep a garden alive was lacking, it turned out to not matter after all. The moment never came.

“Stop,” Soran says.

Olivia freezes, unsure. He motions her out of the way and pulls on a larger rock near where she’d been about to dig. A trapdoor. Two feet square, a wood plank that’s been glued with gravel, each piece carefully arranged like a small sculpture of rocks. With the