The Book of M. Peng Shepherd

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СКАЧАТЬ know,” Marion replied. “But it sure seems like it, doesn’t it?”

      I didn’t know what to say, but it didn’t matter. I knew what she wanted me to know: that if she’d known somehow that it really was going to end now—not in some far future time, but now, right now—she never would have left him. She would have cherished all the moments. We waited in silence for what felt like hours.

      “I’m going back now,” I finally said. I couldn’t think of anything to comfort her. There was nothing to say, without looking at the truth of it head on—no way to offer hope without also reminding her that she might never see them again.

      “I’m going to stay,” Marion answered.

      When I reemerged from the woods and sat down beside you again at the fire, Rhino was standing, stating to the group that he was going to drag his blankets out onto the grass after we put the fire out, because now that there was no electricity and therefore no air conditioning, it was going to be disgustingly hot in the ballroom where we were all camped out.

      He wasn’t really announcing it, I knew as I watched him. It was more that he was trying to ask the rest of us to join him without begging outright. For comfort in numbers. I realized that none of us had even tried sleeping in our individual guest rooms once. After the wedding reception had been interrupted by the news about Boston, we’d all banded together in the ballroom and never left, save to retrieve our suitcases and bring them back down. The courtyard where Rhino wanted to sleep was a couple hundred feet from where the rest of us were still set up inside. Nine days ago, that wouldn’t have been enough distance for me to be from a random stranger. Now it felt terrifyingly far.

      “That’s a good idea,” you said. “Let’s all move out here.”

      Over the top of the flames, Rhino looked at you so gratefully it made my eyes tear again.

       MAHNAZ AHMADI

      THE NIGHT NAZ CONSIDERED KILLING HERSELF, SHE SAW HER sister again.

      It was a few weeks after she finally took the Bluetooth headset off. She wasn’t sure of the exact date, but it was snowing outside, which meant she’d been in the studio for four or five months by then. Hiding, talking to herself, and beginning to starve. She’d rationed well, but there was no food left in the entire building anymore, or in the duffel bag. She’d gone out a few times to the roof, but all she could see beyond the vast, empty parking lot was darkness and the glow of flashing police lights, and all she could hear were the echoing sounds of people crying or being killed. She had her bow, but it was no good in situations like that. In the open or one-on-one, she might win. But against a crowd, in a city, a bow was almost useless. In close quarters, she’d never stop every single one of a gang before one of them reached her and took her down.

      She planned to jump. Or at least think about jumping, soon. Before the hunger made her too weak to find a quicker, more dignified death than starvation. Her mother had almost starved once, she’d told her. When the times were very bad. It was a way of leaving life that Naz never wanted to experience.

      But that night, there was a small, solitary shape standing uncertainly in the center of the parking lot. A woman.

      The sight didn’t frighten Naz. She assumed the woman was just a ghost. Naz had seen the apparitions of her sister so many times after the phone cut off—in the hall, across the room, sleeping beside her. Why not also lurking among the empty car spaces, looking up at her? She was about to ask it to point out some constellations, for old times’ sake.

      But then she saw that the ghost had a shadow.

      “Mahnaz?” it called softly.

      Naz was down every flight of stairs and out the front door before she even realized it. “Rojan?” she was screaming.

      Rojan had run for the entrance too, and had been pulling on the front door before Naz had made it to the ground floor and flipped the lock. They tumbled backward into the dark warehouse in a tangle of limbs, and then clambered to slam the door shut behind them and do up the locks again.

      “You promised. You promised,” Naz kept wailing, over and over. “You promised you wouldn’t do this. You promised you wouldn’t come.”

      Rojan was clinging to her so hard she could feel her skin going numb and bloodless on the parts of her arms where Rojan held them. They kissed each other’s cheeks until they had smeared the tears all over their faces, until all she could taste or see or breathe was stinging salt. “Thank God you’re here.” Rojan sniffed, and kissed her again. “I was so scared—I thought I’d finally make it here and you already would have left or something.”

      “You—you—” Naz could barely speak between the heaving sobs. The miraculousness of it was finally starting to pierce the anger. “You’re really here.”

      “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I said I—” She reached down and pulled a wad of paper out of her pockets—handfuls of notes she’d made, neighborhood maps she’d tried to draw, descriptions of the building she was looking for—everything she’d written down from their phone conversations. “I just couldn’t let you be alone.”

      “But how did you get all the way here from Tehran?” Naz interrupted. “How did you even get out of the house without Maman freaking out?”

      “What do you mean, ‘Maman freaking out’?” Rojan shook her head. “She’s the only reason I did make it here. You think I just had thousands and thousands of U.S. dollars lying around in my student dormitory room for a plane ticket?”

      Naz stared at her. “But—” She couldn’t finish.

      “The day after your phone died, she gave me everything she had. Emptied out her accounts. She told me to find you.”

      Naz was shaking. “She … she … she helped you come here?” She ran her hands up and down Rojan’s arms over and over, as if each time she did it she might discover Rojan wasn’t real. But she was. And she was in Boston. And now she was going to die, too. “Here? Here?!” Naz was screaming again, unable to control herself. “Didn’t she hear me? What this place is like? Why would she help you come here? Why would you do it?!”

      “There was a case in Tehran,” Rojan said softly. Naz fell into a stunned, paralyzed silence as the words sunk in. There was a case in Tehran. There was a case in Tehran. The words echoed in her mind, over and over. There was a case in Tehran. It was everywhere now. Rojan looked down at her hands as Naz swayed. “Naz, she made me come.”

      Naz heard what more her little sister meant to say. Because she wanted us to be together at the end.

      They both sat in silence in the darkness. Naz reached out and took Rojan’s hand and held it, and they stayed that way for a long time.

      “It had only just happened—the shadowlessness. Tehran Airport wasn’t a madhouse yet. I got to London fairly easily. But Heathrow was not what I expected. I got stuck there in ‘departures’ for almost two months. I couldn’t find a flight out that was going to the United States. All the airlines had just stopped going there. I ate out of the vending machines—they were having to refill them twice a day, there were so many of us. Finally I overheard someone saying Switzerland might be making U.S. flights, or was making flights to somewhere that was making СКАЧАТЬ