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

herself to keep going. The next image blurs, just slightly. This is when her arms began to shake, her muscles trembling. The next one. From here on out, she realizes, she looked down. And just like then, she can’t bear it now, to see this, but there he is. Soran folded over, dying. She looks away from him, to the side of the photo, to those unmoving trees. And that’s when she sees it, something she’d not noticed before. Or not realized she’d noticed but must have, somewhere within her subconscious.

Quickly she flips through the rest of the photos, but all blur or worse. Then she flips back to the ones she already saw. And there it is again: a man who would ultimately be unable to escape his own burned image on film. In a few shots, he’s beside a tree; in others he must be behind the tree. She grabs the sharpest photo and goes to her desk, shaking with the edge of understanding, then twists the shaft of her desk lamp to aim the beam at the image.

With her loupe, she leans down. Then sits back hard. After all this time, the answer was right here.

The man. Most likely he is why Soran had a hood on, so this man would not have to face the magnitude of his betrayal. Would not have to see it in Soran’s eyes. At times, the man holds on to the tree, though in most other shots, he must have backed behind it. Not because he was hiding, Olivia realizes, but because he, too, could not stand the moment. Could not bear to witness what he’d done. But in one shot, there he is, turned in such a way that she can see his whole body. A man whose arm is in a sling. Their cousin.

CHAPTER 17

The phone bill.

Rebecca was the one who thought of it, who’d filed all their past statements in a cabinet in the kitchen, and so Olivia hunted for the one around when Delan called his parents, and there it was. A +964 number, connected through the operator.

Now she looks at the clock. Eight thirty p.m. here. Six thirty a.m. there. She picks up the phone.

Mason watches her with wide eyes. “What are you gonna say?”

But Olivia’s not thinking. She’s dialing the operator. Reading off the number. Oceans away, another operator answers and the call is put through. Ringing. And then a voice. Gaziza. The fact that it’s this easy shames her. Why has she not thought of this before?

“Choni,” Olivia says. “Eme Olivia ye.” Nothing else comes to her, so she ends by saying, “Gaziza. Delan?”

“Olivia,” Gaziza says and then follows with a flurry of Kurdish. Olivia’s panic rises. Is he not there? At this hour, his absence would never be good.

Suddenly the line goes silent. Olivia shuts her eyes, trying to hear anything on the other end, but there’s nothing. It occurs to her that the line could be disconnected, but she won’t put down the receiver. Still, she holds it, placing a picture of him in her mind. He’s sleepy. Going down the stairs. Going to the phone. Please be there. Pick up the phone.

“Is he there?” Mason asks.

“I don’t know. Gaziza put the phone down, I think.”

And then she hears a door close. A relief just that the line hasn’t been disconnected. She takes a deep breath and then, for the first time in more than a month, hears Delan’s voice.

“Is this you?” he asks.

Until this moment, she realizes, everything within her had been held with an unforgiving, unrelenting tension, one that finally, only now, subsides. A split-second change she feels in every inch of her body. And then she says his name, and simply saying it to him makes her eyes well. She stares at the bamboo kitchen light fixture, trying to settle herself.

“I had to call,” she says, now wanting to get it all out, feeling the words jumble and scatter in her throat. “The photos. There’s—”

“Did you win?”

“What?”

“The contest. At work.”

“No. That’s Friday, but that’s not it.” She stops. Because she hears a clicking on the line. I heard clicking, he told her. That means the lines are tapped. But did she imagine it? Could it be just a bad connection? “Did you hear that?” she asks. Which maybe she should not have.

In turn he’s silent, as if listening, trying to hear what she’s talking about. Or, she realizes, trying to figure out how to phrase his words. To warn her. “The knocking on the door?” he says at last. “Yes. Someone’s here—I’ll have to go soon. But my uncle, I’m sure you were going to ask, is the same. Not great. Nothing to worry about, though, I promise. But nothing to say.”

Things are not okay. They’re being listened to. He wants her to watch what she says. Beside her, Rebecca and Mason stare, questioning. Through the phone, she hears him yawn.

“Sorry,” he says. “It’s early. But I’m glad you called.”

“You’re all right?”

“In mourning. Let’s not talk about that. But Lailan—wait till you hear this. A weed. She’s grown like a weed. She kept saying she couldn’t sleep, that her knees hurt, and sure enough, an inch this past month. Though I might have measured wrong. I don’t know. But it was a lot, I’m telling you. And she talks about you all the time. Last week she colored her toenails orange, with a marker, to be like you. And she calls you Liv, like I do, but it sounds like love when she says it. And that necklace. She’s not taken it off. But she gets sad because she didn’t give you anything.”

Olivia can’t help it—now she’s crying, arms on the table, face in the crook of her elbow. Beside her, Rebecca rubs her back in big circles. It’s one thing to hear of this world in which she is a talked-about ghost, a world that, despite everything, she misses, but the