Take What You Can Carry by Gian Sardar (superbooks4u .TXT) đź“•
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- Author: Gian Sardar
Read book online «Take What You Can Carry by Gian Sardar (superbooks4u .TXT) 📕». Author - Gian Sardar
They lumber down the hallway toward Delan, who stands at the front door with her suitcase. There is a pained look on his face as he watches them, as if someone has shown him a postcard of a place he can never go.
“Have you seen Lailan?” Olivia asks, trying to shake the mood with that age-old joke that somehow always works with children. “She was here a second ago. Maybe over here.”
She steps toward the cabinet, and the girl laughs into Olivia’s stomach, a vibration that settles sadness into her core. Then Lailan hurries to the curtain, hiding, and Olivia pretends to not notice when she then darts behind a gold chair. “Where am I now?” Lailan asks, her voice clearly coming from the chair.
Olivia goes to the curtain, and a tumble of laughter erupts with the mistake.
With each laugh, each gleeful reminder that Olivia’s looking in the wrong place, Olivia thinks of the girl’s future. Because Lailan is at the beginning of an entire lifetime, if she’s lucky. So much sprawls before her: crushes and kisses and hopes and heartache. Skinned knees and friends who say mean things and long nights spent reeling in silence. And accomplishments. Burning pride and passion, that thrill when you surprise yourself. And all of it will be lived without Olivia, and though irrational, because of course this is how it will be, how it always was to be, the promise of such a void is a loss unlike anything she’d expected.
Finally, Olivia peeks behind the chair, and when Lailan looks up, there are tears in both their eyes.
“Come here,” Olivia says, sitting in the chair. The girl crawls into her lap. “You and I,” she says, but the words lodge in her throat. She looks up at the ceiling, at a faint stain like a leaf, and tries again. “You know you’re one of my favorite people in the whole world. And do you know how many people I’ve met? A lot. Thousands. And out of everyone, you, you and your big heart, you’re who I’m always going to think of. And wish I was with.”
Lailan nods, as if she already knew this, and looks down at the rug.
In Olivia’s pocket is her copper tree-of-life pendant, strung upon its dark leather cord. When she loops it over Lailan’s head, it takes a bit for the girl to look up, to understand, and when she does, her eyes go wide.
“For me?”
Olivia nods. “This is a bit of me, and my family, for you. The stone will protect you. And the tree connects everything. Which means it connects me to you, always.”
Goodbyes and wet cheeks and hugs that don’t let go. Gaziza has packed them food, and Hewar hands her a square package wrapped in brown paper that she is told to open later. Outside the front door, Lailan buries her face in Miriam’s shoulder and won’t look at Olivia until Olivia is up against her, wrapping her arms around both the woman and the girl. Lailan, stuck in the middle, raises her face up for a gasp of air and twists her body so it’s Olivia she clings to.
Olivia holds her. Sweet oil and seeds and flowers, a last breath of this little girl whose voice she’s learned to listen for. The thin waves of her hair, the small bones of her shoulders. There is no choice, Olivia tells herself. No choice but to meet people and fall in love and live and lose. To work and worry and grow old, if given the chance. And hopefully, hopefully what adheres to it all is a bit of joy. Or maybe just an openness to joy. Because what she’s seen is that sometimes it is a choice. A choice to let your eyes fall upon the sight through a clouded window that makes you smile or to find in plants a miracle despite the chaos and calamity that batters down the soil around them. She hears Soran’s voice talking to the seedlings, encouraging, and realizes that Lailan learned this from him and his family—even in the way she never overlooks the abandoned bits of the world but rather sees in them an untamed potential and promise of transformation. The way she sees the magic. And it’s this, his continued presence in the girl, that allows Olivia to finally let go. Because she knows he is there, his voice quietly breaking the silence.
The trip in reverse. Returning as if being reeled back, wound home. Mountains lowering, becoming hills, then plains. The loss of Soran is so monumental, it’s unreal. Kept off to the side, unrooted and unfixed, a mind’s effort to protect. But Lailan’s loss is easier to process and therefore constantly triggered by a world that seems to flaunt a mutual interest in the girl, everything meant to be shared with her. A tree with branches low and wide and easy to climb. Clouds shaped like grapes. A flock of sheep that from a distance blends into barren land, seemingly invisible until all at once they run. Every view intensifies the girl’s absence.
And anything she can think of to distract revolts, spurred by the ineffectiveness of language. I will miss you. How small those words sit in the shadow of their meaning. I’m worried. Stay safe. Help Lailan. I will think of you.
As such, they made idle conversation.
Do you think Mason will have destroyed the house?
I may plant
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