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When he had finally gathered himself, Zafira could tell he didn’t like what he saw on her face. And when she stretched the silence between them, he took her downcast face in his hands and touched his lips to her forehead.
“Zafira. Zafira, look at me.”
But she couldn’t. She couldn’t look at him, and her eyes had fluttered shut. In the darkness, anything was possible. Baba was alive, Umm was herself, magic still existed. But eyes couldn’t stay closed forever, unless one was dead.
And the dead never dreamed.
“This is far beyond us,” he had whispered against her skin.
Was it beyond them? Who decides what’s out of reach, if not we ourselves?
The door to Zafira’s room opened now, framing Lana in soft light.
“Okht? I thought I heard the bed creak. I didn’t see you come in last night.” Her features were lit with relief, and Zafira pulled on a smile. “Ummi asked for you.”
The smile slipped from her face. “As she tends to,” Zafira said carefully, ignoring the yawning chasm of guilt.
Umm’s sanity had been
fickle ever since Baba had crawled from the Arz, but she had her rare spasms of lucidity. Moments when Zafira made herself scarce, for it was easier than facing her mother.
“You should go,” Lana said quietly, hands clasped. The dying fire angled her face in shadows. Guilt tugged at her mouth. “I … I told her about the letter. And Sharr.”
With a sigh, Zafira threw the blankets off and stood, the cold going straight through the thin fabric of her old dress and into her bones. Lana padded away, and Zafira heard the shuffle of the majlis pillows by the front door, leaving her to her decision.
Through the threshold, she could see the rust-studded doorknob leading to Umm’s room. The same doorknob she brushed past every daama day, guilt searing the fibers of her being.
No more. She was going to Sharr. She could possibly die. She clenched her jaw and crossed over to Umm’s door. With every step forward, she felt like the condemned trudging to her beheading.
Approaching the Arz scared her less.
With bated breath, Zafira reached for the door. The wood scraped her bare palms. Push it open, coward.
She pushed. The door moaned. Five years, it seemed to cry. Five years. The woman inside lifted her head immediately, eyes locking on her, fingers twisting with the same disquiet rushing through Zafira’s veins.
Umm.
Zafira hadn’t exchanged a word with Umm in five years. Five years of having a mother in the same house as her, five years of silence. Some days, before the screaming began, it was easier to think Umm was dead, too.
She looked the same. Head held regally atop a slender neck like a gazelle’s. A slim nose that Baba loved. Lips a shade darker than red and eyes bright and cold as Zafira’s, feathered by lashes that softened their iciness. Her dark locks were feathered in white.
Those aged strands were a fist to her stomach.
“Zafira,” Umm said. Her voice was not the same. It was torn now, wearied by sorrow.
Zafira couldn’t move from the doorway. She couldn’t breathe.
“You never come to see me.”
Umm never ventured through the house, either. These scant walls housed three souls and an abundance of memories. Zafira threw a quick glance behind her, to where Lana was curled on the majlis, dutifully not paying attention.
“I can’t,” she breathed.
Umm’s voice was soft. “It was him or you.”
A conversation they should have had five years ago, had the pain not been so suffocating.
“You should have saved him,” Zafira whispered. Umm’s blankets were strewn about her, even the pale pink one Yasmine had made herself.
