Upstairs, we wandered silently through three bedrooms where beds were piled high with pillows and blankets. Pretty white drapes covered the windows. On a nightstand in the biggest bedroom there was a black-and-white photograph of a man and a woman on their wedding day. They were standing in front of a church, and the wind had pulled the bride’s veil straight up in the air. They were both laughing. I bent down close to the picture and saw that the sleeves of the woman’s gown were made of lace. She wore a diamond pendant on a chain so thin it was barely visible.
In one bathroom, when Amir flicked a switch, light seemed to glow from every surface, including the mirror that we made faces into. We didn’t quite look like ourselves in that mirror. The whites of our eyes seemed very white, and our brown skin seemed luminous.
In a child’s bedroom, a closet was full of colorful clothes. There was a red velvet dress that I imagined she wore only at Christmas, and a row of cotton dresses with delicately embroidered flowers and ribbon belts. On a shelf above the dresses, sweaters were neatly folded. On the floor of the closet, I saw a pair of silver sandals with small jewels on the straps. I tried to put them on, but my feet were too big; the girl who owned them was much younger than I was. I kept trying, though, pulling on the jeweled strap of the sandal until it broke. Amirhad wandered off somewhere, but now he was returning; I heard his footsteps in the hall. When I looked over my shoulder, he was watching me. I ran my thumb over the jewels on the broken strap in my hand.
Amir crossed the room and sat beside me.
“I’m going to carve a new bird,” said Amir. “For Pal. Will you paint it?”
I nodded. After Rei had discovered that we were sleeping in the shed, we’d moved the nests to a ledge high in the back of a cave in the face of the cliff. It was our best hiding place yet, far better than the tree pockets in the grove where I’d put my treasures as a kid. I liked to imagine that sometime in the future an adventurous child would find the cave and recognize our birds as priceless clues to a mysterious and indelible past.
“I think my mother killed herself,” I said to Amir on the floor of that girl’s room. “I used to think that she just fell, that it was an accident. But my father told me that she had dark moods. I think he was trying to tell me the truth about what she’d done.”
Amir put his arm around me. I rested my head against his shoulder. His slow breath moved my hair. I did not worry about the owners of the house returning. I felt safe. We sat like that for a long time. Energy moved from his warm, lean body to mine, sinking into my skin like a balm.
“Imagine having all these clothes,” I said, looking up at the closet.
Amir shifted. After a beat of time he said, “It’s just a bunch of stuff.”
But it wasn’t just a bunch ofstuff. Having that many beautifulthings signified something. If you had enough beautiful things, they could never all be taken away from you. You might lose one or two, but the loss would never feel like much when you considered how much more you had. You could never be left with nothing.
I folded the broken, jeweled sandal strap and put it in my pocket.
I think I knew even then that a part of me would never be the same again. Something had shifted within me the moment I stepped into that house, grieving the loss of Pal, and saw that blue kitchen floor. A fissure of longing had opened and grew deeper by the day.
