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

Think about it, Mason said. My credit card works the same tomorrow.

“A sign,” she now says to the ceiling, picturing Soran. “Can you help me with that?”

If anyone would want to keep her safe, it’s him. But the room, of course, remains silent.

Then she realizes that, depending on where the soldiers are standing, she could cut the photograph and isolate the man with the sling. Delan certainly doesn’t need to see the rest. And with this thought, the trip becomes possible once more, the idea of going, of returning. And again she feels that flutter of nerves, that beating of anxiety.

Just to see what the photo looks like cropped, how clear it is and if she could get him cleanly away from the soldiers, she decides to get her paper cutter. This doesn’t mean she’s going, she tells herself. This is only cropping a photo. In her closet, the box with the paper cutter is wedged under a shelf with shoes, and she’s reaching down, fingertips skimming the corner, when she sees the present from Hewar. Square and padded. Still wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine.

She sets it on the bed. Unties the twine, then unwraps the paper. There are creases, the places where Hewar’s hands had made the folds. Lightly, she touches one, wondering what was happening in the house when he’d pressed down, whose voices he was hearing. Then she keeps going. Inside is cheesecloth that covers something hard, and once everything is unwrapped, she sits back, shocked. On her bed is the center cabinet door. The door with the painting of the woman that’s covered in glass. Part of a piece that’s been in their family for generations. Olivia stares at the image: the woman’s head with dark, flowing hair on the body of the white horse. Crown topped with red and turquoise ribbons that flow like the plumes of her wings as she sails over flowers in a sky of royal blue. The woman who somehow senses everything.

This whole time, the painting’s been there. Mere feet away, hidden beneath its wrapping. People came and went below and music pulsed and beat into the night as Hollywood stretched around it, this ancient bit of a faraway family—and yet she’d not known. It’s beautiful. The paintings, she said. Careful, Delan warned from the stove. If you tell a Kurd you like something, even a small comment, it’s custom for them to give it to you.

Hewar had taken it off its hinges. On their cabinet now, what’s in its place? An open wound or a makeshift door? Anything would be a constant reminder of her, something they’d face every day. Something Delan has faced every day. To have given this to her was a huge gesture, generosity like nothing she’s known, and yet she’d cowered from her memories to the point that it went unnoticed. She takes it to her dresser, where she moves aside all her perfumes, all the reminders of other days. There she sets it. In the center. And from there, the woman appears to stand by, knowingly.

She dreams new dreams. There is no fire at her back, no film that sends its chords of need. When she wakes Sunday morning, she writes a letter to her father that begins with I’m sorry but then scratches it out and crumples the page. She’s not sorry. She wants to do this. A flight tomorrow. A chance to help.

The night before, when she found the best image, she startled because she realized she’d been observing it technically. That somehow she’d turned everything off, like a stranger to a strange situation who could simply evaluate. That fierceness, that ruthlessness as an artist that Peter Darrow had talked about—perhaps it was true. And perhaps it’s been within her. Because she’d gone back to photograph the boys playing soccer. She’d taken pictures that day in the mountains and did not stop. And the night of the raid, she’d thought of her camera when the world below her window seared with tragedy. But though it was fierceness, it sat alongside who she was. Because she adored those boys. And in the mountains, she both got the shot and looked away. And truth be told, never does she want to be the person who stares down tragedy, unblinking. Never does she want to be the one who remembers her camera but forgets her love.

And then it’s early Monday, and her flight leaves in a matter of hours. Last night she called the number again and Gaziza answered, but Hewar quickly jumped on the line and managed to tell her Delan had just left to meet friends for tea. Knowing Hewar understands more English than he speaks, she listened for clicking and told him what she could, the details of her “layover” in Baghdad, her plan to go to Soraya’s, and her hope that Delan could meet her there. Please, can you let Soraya know that I will go to her? And tell Delan to meet me there? And though Hewar agreed, it still hadn’t felt real. Until now.

All she’s taking is one carry-on suitcase, inside of which are clothes for Delan and gifts, including a collection of tea for Gaziza, a book on birds for Hewar, and for Lailan an Etch A Sketch and a set of watercolors and brushes and paper. Mason has determined—from an old medical dictionary he found on a shelf—that she has pneumonia and is on bed rest. I’ll call each morning and even tell them your symptoms. What are they gonna do, stop by and bust us? Of course, there was only one person from the paper who’d have reason to stop by upon learning she was out sick—right after giving her the photos—but she knows that Peter Darrow will most likely just give her space, and that if for some reason he dropped by, he would find her absent and yet return to the office with reports of her cough and tales of her fever.

A