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

with a grin for Lailan’s sake. Immediately his hand goes to his heart, as if she’s just the girl he’s been waiting for, and Lailan beams up at him before he scoops her into his arms.

“My girls,” he says.

The sound of Gaziza crying is constant, and Kurdish is all that’s spoken. For once, Olivia is grateful to understand nothing. Holding Lailan’s hand, she registers people on the couch, the last place Soran slept. His shoes left by the front door. A book he was reading splayed upon the end table. Remnants of his life are spread around them, and his absence is so abrupt, so jarring, it’s as if he’s been lifted by a hook and removed. At times she feels as though she’ll turn her head and there he’ll be, finishing what he was saying. She tries to remember his last words, but all she remembers is him talking about plants.

Plants. How many had he been about to get? Enough for the back row in the garden—enough that he should not have thought walking was best when his car was parked right here on the street. She stares at the front door, feeling he was either picked up by the military the moment he walked outside or that someone gave him a ride that went horribly wrong.

She pulls Delan to the hall to ask about the plants and the car.

“It could’ve been a tray. The okra, they were babies, he said. No bigger than a few inches. Easy to carry,” he adds, though she sees that he’s wondering. “He liked to walk.”

She thinks back to that day in the bakery. And to the times he was gone, returning with some brink of confusion, things not adding up. “Could he have been in the resistance? He told me no, but—”

“No, no. He steers clear. I love him, but he avoids trouble.” A pause as he hears the tense. “I was in a fight once, and he jumped in to help and then yelled at me for putting him in that position. Like a little old man,” he says fondly. “He was in the wrong place. You look the wrong man in the eyes and that can be enough. And Aras, he would’ve said something. They would’ve talked more.”

She needs to tell him about Soran’s disappearances, but suddenly Gaziza is sobbing in the kitchen, her fingers burned on a pot of rice. Delan rushes to her side, wrapping her hand in a cloth and holding her to him.

There is food. The kitchen filled with well-meaning mourners making a feast. Ferhad unwraps the kebab he brought, a tray so large that Olivia knows it must be from his wedding. His wedding. Mere days ago. She danced with Soran and Delan. You need to dance, he said to her, breathless and smiling as he pulled her from her seat. His eyes, that sun-touched dark green, now closed beneath a shroud of white. Never to be seen again.

And then Delan’s voice shoots through the room. She finds him in the corner with a man she recognizes, the man from the picnic with the almost-black eyes. Delan’s anger is present and full, and in a second, Ferhad has stepped in, trying to calm both men. The moment Olivia is by Delan’s side, Ferhad shakes his head apologetically. “Wassim talk what hear.”

He’s spoken in English. Either imploring her for assistance or not wanting others to understand. Ignoring him, she takes Delan’s arm, and at first he turns to her, angry, his fury landing upon anyone he sees.

“Please,” she says.

He studies her, needing the time, she understands, to pick an emotional path. At last he nods and follows Olivia to the garden.

“Tell me.”

“In my own house. On the day of my brother’s death. I should kill Wassim for that. I tell anyone what he said, he would not walk out alive.”

“Tell me what he said.”

“Rumors. Talk that Soran was the informer. That that was why we were spared during the raid.”

“But you told them—”

“Of course I told them! But this is what’s being said. That he’d turned and then did something the government didn’t like and so they got rid of him. My own brother, and this is what they’re saying.”

“He would never do that.” But even as she says this, she hears Delan telling her they threaten anything, anyone someone loves to get them to spy. To turn.

And he sees it on her face. This memory, this consideration. “How could you—”

“Delan, I didn’t—”

“I saw it. You, thinking that my brother—”

“I don’t think he would ever do that. I don’t. He was good. He was sweet and wonderful, but there were mornings when he’d be gone and—it didn’t sound right, where he said he’d been. His answers didn’t add up. That’s why I asked about the resistance. But I know there are other reasons—”

“Of course there are. A million,” he says. But his words have a filed edge to them, worn from this new information. As he speaks, there is a distraction in his voice. “That’s what Ferhad said. At the picnic. That he’d seen Soran leaving town in the mornings. But it means nothing. There was a reason, I know.”

And then, perhaps in self-destruction or distraction, she brings up what she’s been worrying over for days, something that was answered the moment of Soran’s death but needs to be said aloud. “You’re not coming home, are you?”

And he looks at her sadly, because of course he knows she’s been worried about this and of course the answer is no.

“Not right away,” he says. “But I will come back. I promise.”

But how can you be sure? she wanted to ask. After what’s happened, how could he know he wouldn’t be next? But she said nothing, because he, too, must feel those dark possibilities and his own mortality, and yet still he was choosing to stay.

My family needs me. And I want the truth.

The accusation, though spoken by only that one man to Delan, must have made its