Taj shakes his hand and stalks toward me, grasping my arm without stopping. He jerks his chin toward the road. “We are going to the police.”
I am ashamed at my relief. I want to get away from here, even if this man is the only way out. As we pass the girl’s parents, Taj gestures toward the road and they fall in step with us. Baseer is still holding the corpse, but I feel the child’s weight as if she is back in my arms. I know that she will always be in my arms.
The trek back to the car feels shorter than the walk into the desert. Soon, we will be at the police station, where I will again have to confess. They will know who I am. It may save me. But Taj is watching me like the wind watches the leaves, knowing it may toss them as it likes, loosen them from trees at will.
Rebecca’s arms are wrapped around her, her hair whipping in the breeze, face pale and eyes swollen. Today is our anniversary, but it seems small now, too. I had hoped to see her as she used to be, to find even a trace of joy. Instead, I have added to her grief from three months ago.
She has moved the car to the edge of the road. She sees no one but me, her clouded eyes searching my face. I can scarcely glance at her, much less meet her gaze. I am crushed by the weight of Telaya’s death and further by the weight of my wife’s love because at this moment, I do not deserve it.
No words are exchanged, no introductions made. The girl’s parents wedge into the backseat with Taj, Telaya slumped across their laps. I see Taj gently pry the shard of glass from her face and I feel that stabbing pain above my eye again. Taj asks if I know the station north of here. I do.
I dig my hands into the scalding leather of the steering wheel. It comforts me, one pain making another recede. The radio, now warped with indentations, is mercifully silent. On the floor are ordinary tools I usually keep in the trunk.
“I had to make it stop,” Rebecca whispers.
But I’m not staring at the tools. Under her seat is a mop of yellow wool. The tousled locks of the broken doll. The car is spangled with pastel rainbows cast by the mirrors on Telaya’s dress. It must have been the finest one she owned. The mirrors on the doll’s are making rainbows, too, smaller ones that dance across Rebecca’s ankles. I turn the key and the engine comes alive. High above us, a bird of prey soars into view, shuddering against the burning blue dome.
1
On that scalding August day, Sergeant Najib sat behind his desk, polishing the barrel of his gun. He liked being a sergeant, despite the fool of a constable they had given him and the discomfort of his starchy uniform in the heat. Outside, there was nothing but a two-lane highway and the beige, boundless desert dotted with the occasional grungy bush or approaching mass of a nomad migration. Najib was proud to be king of this solitary mud box perched on the Kabul-Kandahar highway. From his station, he proudly served the young republic, proving that it was a serious entity. So serious that there were outposts of law and order even in places where the only real laws were those of nature, and the only real orders those of a warlord. Najib had loyally served the king, too, before the coup that had sent him packing four years ago.
Slipping the gun into his holster as noisily as he could, Najib stroked the cover of his well-thumbed Koran, then cast a glance at his young underling. Najib liked to think that the boy was a dedicated servant. It was an accepted fact that Kochi nomads were up to all sorts of trickery, and soon he would catch one of them in the act of something expressly forbidden, like passing off tin as silver or riding mules loaded with the remains of harvested poppies in the hope of starting their own field.
The grumble of a car interrupted his daydreams about glorious arrests and impending promotions. The constable shuffled out of his seat, turning to him for a cue. Najib might have walked to the station’s only window, a cutout in the wall split by three vertical bars, but he would see no car from there. What imbecile had placed the single lookout point facing the desert instead of the road? He stalked out of the station, the younger man on his heels. A sand-colored Mercedes was slowing down by the station. It dipped onto the shoulder of the road, kicking up dust before coming to a stop. Najib’s eyes fell on the hazy veil of blood on the grille, the red-streaked hood, the spiderwebbed windshield. Inside the car was the strangest mix of folk. A stunning yellow-haired woman caught his eye first, then an urban type at the wheel and a cluster of Kochis in the back. It occurred to him that these might be the outlaws he had been waiting for.
He hooked his thumb into his holster and stood still. He would let them come to him. The driver stepped out. Above the man’s right eye was a swollen, bloody gash. His shirt was stained, too. The blonde woman emerged, moving with a determination that reminded Najib of one of his wives. The last time this many people had turned up at once was when some hoodlums had organized a pack-beast race and a luckless camel had tried to outrun a big rig instead of the other animals, an unanticipated yet exciting twist that ended with the parched beast collapsing in a heap on the highway, making the asphalt look like it had grown a hump, and the terrified driver swerving off the road, his eighteen-wheeler belly-up like a giant bug. Luckily, there had been no deaths. Except a woman who had worn a chaderi, a blue burka, whose name no one knew and whose age no one could guess because they made sure she remained covered as she died.
Daniel had passed the solitary police outpost before, paying it little mind as he drove toward the fields of Fever Valley. As he stepped out of his car, the breeze rising from the desert was like a whisper from the poppies to the north. The policeman studied him with narrowed eyes, his hands behind his back. An airplane glided over them, leaving a feathery wake in the sky. The officer tilted his head and spoke.
“Salaam, saheb. You have some business for the police?”
“There’s been an accident.”
The officer nodded at the Mercedes and called him sir again. “I see, saheb. Why are there Kochis in your car?”
“A girl was run over. I brought her here.”
“Alive?”
Daniel shook his head.
“Are you the one who killed her?”
A psychedelically painted eighteen-wheeler downshifted as it passed, curious heads poking out of paneless windows, a dozen men sitting tailor-style on the tarp-covered cargo. It lumbered up the highway amid puffs of diesel. Daniel closed his eyes. A series of images surfaced in his mind like sepia photos in darkroom chemicals. He was driving. You never think of how it is for me, Rebecca had said. An accusation. She was wrong, he told her. She cried. Sometimes I wish we hadn’t come here. He tightened his grip on the wheel. More accusations. All the while, that wretched sonata played on. He fumbled in the glove compartment, looking for a tape. A stupid Neil Diamond tape, which would lighten the mood because she thought he was corny and it would make her laugh. He looked away from the road, only for an instant. He had wanted to make her laugh, and instead he’d made her scream. A thin scream, not more than a single note, yet so vast it could not be contained by the car, slamming against the windows and breaking right through the glass.