It was spring now. Frigid temperatures were giving way to milder days. The palette of the world outside shifted, a spin of the color wheel. Yellow turned to green and gray turned to blue. The snowcaps of the mountain receded. The river waters ran cold and fresh, a new generation of fish filling its beds. It was time for her family to reenter the world, Zeba decided. Should the villagers gawk and stare, so be it. Should they point fingers and whisper or shout, it would not matter. She had not left Chil Mahtab only to make her children prisoners of their own home.
Rima’s small fingers, the soft pad of her palm, fit snugly into Zeba’s right hand. Basir carried a black plastic bag they would use to bring back fish from the river. Zeba followed her children, her chest bursting to see them in the warm sunlight. Basir, Shabnam, and Kareema were a few meters ahead of her, close enough that she could see their profiles when one turned to laugh at something another had said.
Kareema stopped abruptly, turned, and called back to her mother.
“Do you promise we will see Bibi-jan tomorrow?”
“Yes,” Zeba nodded. “We’ll leave in the morning to go to your uncle’s home. We’ll have to bathe well, though, so we don’t stink of fish when they hug us.”
Kareema burst into laughter and hopped a few steps to catch up with her siblings.
These are my children, Zeba thought to herself. Look at those brilliant faces, the way their arms swing as they walk, the way they nudge one another with a playful shoulder. There’s no part of the devil in them. They are mine.
Gulnaz would be waiting for them, as would Rafi and his wife. Without Kamal to spoil things between them, Zeba felt like she’d been returned to her childhood. Knowing the truth about their father had freed Rafi and Zeba to love their mother more completely, for they could finally understand her as a whole person. They didn’t need their father’s explanations nor did they have much desire to be part of his life. It was enough to know he was there, not a martyr, but not the devil, either.
Many of the villagers had come to the river, enough that the sight of them made Zeba hesitate for a second. She considered calling the children back and turning around, promising them to come another day. But then she thought of the women she’d left behind at Chil Mahtab. She thought of Latifa and Nafisa, Bibi Shireen and the young woman with the twin boys. She remembered that they’d called her Malika Zeba and burned her name onto their bodies.
We are so happy for you, they’d cried the day she was freed. Pray for us, Malika Zeba. You know no one else will.
They’d rejoiced in her release because that, too, gave them strength. If a murderess could be set free, there was some hope for the rest of them.
Bolstered by their voices that echoed still in her head, Zeba lifted her chin and pushed forward, nearing the villagers she’d avoided for two seasons. Boys laughed, carrying sticks strung with trout, their silvery-green skins dotted with red. A family was flash-frying the fish by the side of the river, just feet away from the stones where small children sat perched, dipping their fingers into the icy waters and shivering.
Zeba settled on a flat area, not far from where the river took a gentle bend. They were close enough to others that she could make out their faces but far enough away that she could not make out their words. She spread out the bedsheet she’d brought and they sat, cross-legged, while Basir went off to try the fishing net he’d borrowed from a neighbor. Shabnam and Kareema brought jacks and began their quiet game, bouncing the ball and deftly grabbing the silver spiders from the ground. Rima giggled each time they softly batted her meddling hands away.
The river water shimmered in the afternoon sun, and Zeba put a hand to her forehead to shield her eyes from the glare. She looked for Basir’s silhouette and found him amid a group of boys his age. While some stood on a cluster of rocks, Basir and a few others had sloshed into the waters with knees high, dragging their nets.
Zeba heard a rustling behind her, and her head swiveled instinctively. Seeing a mother and father making their way back home with a young girl walking between them, she turned her attention back to her daughters.
She had leaned over to brush Shabnam’s hair from her eyes when she suddenly felt her breath catch in her chest. She turned once more, slowly, half hoping the family would not notice her and half hoping they would. There were people around them, but no one paid them much mind, as if Zeba and her children were the most ordinary people.
The wife was speaking to her husband who nodded. The little girl’s hand was clasped in her mother’s. They were coming closer and would soon pass Zeba and her three daughters. Zeba lowered her gaze and felt her eyes mist. She blinked but could not look away. What a beautiful girl she was — just as lovely as the three who sat before her.
The girl’s slender frame came in and out of view, half hidden by her father’s form. He looked to be a good man, Zeba thought, a wave of peace washing over her. He looked to be the kind of man who knew right from wrong, the way he walked with his wife and daughter and not ahead of them.
Something the mother said made the little girl look up and laugh, a bashful expression of cheer on her precious face. Zeba let out a soft cry, quiet enough that her own girls were not distracted from their play. But as if her breath crossed the open ground between them and tapped on the little girl’s shoulder, her head turned.
She looked in Zeba’s direction, and her mouth opened slightly. Zeba still could not bear to turn away, meeting the girl’s eyes and feeling her heart pound in her chest. Would she say something to her parents?
But she did not. She only blinked her eyes and smiled, a soft curve of her lips that felt to Zeba like tiny arms thrown around her neck. The many words left unsaid between them, the many questions each had about the other dissipated into the spring air, replaced by the sound of the babbling river, renewed with mountain water.
From this distance, Laylee looked distinctly unbroken. Her father’s hand absently touched the top of her head, as if to confirm her presence even as she walked beside him. She had lived over four thousand days but spent the recent months reliving the one day that had been infinitely worse than all the rest. While Fareed’s angry hands tried to wring the life from Zeba’s neck, Laylee’s mother had been bent over her daughter, her tears mixing with the ghastly crimson she was dabbing away from between Laylee’s tensed and bruised thighs. At the moment when Zeba had thrown her head back and screamed in the judge’s office, Laylee had begged her mother to end her misery. Kill me, she’d pleaded. In the next room, her father, Timur, had fallen to his knees to hear his daughter make such a quietly catastrophic plea. They had no other children. Laylee was everything.
You are a good, good girl, he’d whispered to her over and over again. Laylee’s mother had to turn away, broken a second time to see the way her husband cradled his daughter. His spirit was shattered but his honor intact.
Only because her father’s hand touched her head with pride and only because her mother had nursed her day and night back to health had Laylee survived to live these spring days. She would never be the little girl she’d once been, but her wounds would continue to heal.
Zeba lifted a hand and pressed it to her chest. Her eyes could have followed the girl forever, until she became nothing more than a purple dot against the sparse trees, but Zeba closed her eyes, burning the image of that timid smile into her memory.
“Madar, are you all right?” Shabnam asked, looking at her mother nervously. She and Kareema had paused their game, giving Rima a chance to scatter the jacks with one mischievous sweep of her hand.