Thirteen: Bells

Myra crossed the long side of the room while the noise was still putting itself back together after the speeches, and did not stop at any of the tables she passed.

The Dance Hall had been almost too much to stand in for most of an hour. Over one hundred people under one dome put out more color than there were words for it. All of it lit. All of it overlapping. The crowd made the room sharper instead of worse: every person’s feeling picked out the edges of whatever they stood near, so the chairs and the folded coats and the long tables took their light off whoever was nearest. A full room showed her more than an empty one ever had. More than her eyes had ever shown her. It was beautiful, but she wasn’t used to it and needed time to adjust. It was the far end that thinned. Down where the tables ran out toward the windows the settings had gone mostly empty, and two shapes sat there steady and unhurried, throwing just enough between them to light the cloth.

Emi got up from the chair at the end of that table as Myra came within a few feet of it. Six hands gathered a glass, a folded napkin, and a half-eaten pastry in one movement. She went past toward the far side of the room and laid her palm flat between Myra’s shoulder blades on the way.

Myra stopped at the end of the table with her hands at her sides. Both tails were still against the backs of her legs. She made herself start.

“I’m Myra,” she said. “Myra Calder. I don’t think we’ve ever actually—”

“Oh, honey, I know exactly who you are.” Carol was up out of her chair before the sentence was finished. “Sit. Sit down. Jim, move the—there, that one, it’s out already. Have you eaten anything? Don’t tell me you haven’t eaten anything, I’ve been watching this room all afternoon and I have not seen one of you seven sit down to eat once.”

“Still warm,” Jim said, and pushed the chair the rest of the way out with his foot.

Myra sat. There was a plate in front of her before she had finished doing it, assembled out of two other plates and pushed across with the flat of Carol’s hand. A glass arrived beside it that she hadn’t asked for either.

“Carol,” Carol said. “That’s Jim. And that’s the whole of the introductions, so you can stop.”

Up close the two of them separated out properly. Carol’s colors came off her even and wide and a little fast at the edges, running ahead of themselves. They didn’t change when Myra’s name landed in the middle of it. It simply went on. Jim’s was narrower and much harder to get the measure of, banked down low and holding at exactly the level it had been holding at since before she reached the table. Folded into Carol’s, close to the middle and much smaller than the rest of it, was something with a harder grain. The kind of caution a person keeps out of tidiness rather than fear, filed where it can be found and never once opened.

It came up when she said her name. It went flat again almost at once.

“So how are you doing?” Carol said. “You’ve been in that line since one, you had that whole business on the water this morning, have you had five minutes to yourself? Has anybody given you five minutes?”

“I’ve had about four,” Myra said. “Somebody’s mother keeps finding me.”

“They’ll do that,” Carol said.

“They’ve had that band going since two,” Jim said. “I’ve been told it’s a good band.” His attention went off toward the stage, where the Mildreds were playing.

It got the first real laugh out of her that anybody had got all afternoon. Short, and surprised, and over almost before it started. She felt her own ears come up off her hair, as if somebody had taken a hand off the back of her neck.

“It’s a very good band,” Carol said. “Drink your water.”

After that it was easy for a while, which she hadn’t been expecting from this afternoon.

“That suit isn’t his,” Carol said.

“It’s new,” Jim said.

“It is. Otherwise I would know.” Carol set two fingers against her own collarbone. “I have dressed that boy for every wedding he has ever gone to and I know every jacket he owns. Look at the shoulder. Somebody made that for him.”

Myra turned her water glass a quarter turn on the cloth and left it there. “There’s a shop on the Annex,” she said. “The Gushing Bride. Melisande runs it. She fought me for twenty minutes over my own sleeves and won, so I’d say she’s up to a suit.”

“And he stood through the fitting like a gentleman, I suppose,” Carol said.

“He never went in. She had his measurements already.” Myra found she was enjoying herself. “I don’t think the two of them have ever been in a room together.”

Carol turned toward her husband. Whatever Jim did with his face, it wasn’t much, and it was gone before Myra could find the edges of it.

“Somebody made my son a suit and never met him,” Carol said. “All right. It is a beautiful suit, so I’ll assume she knew what she was doing.” She picked her glass back up. “I’ll tell you who I did meet. This morning, at the doors. The one with the wings.” Her hand came up and made a shape in the air, high and wide. “Two hands holding the door for me, a third one putting a program into my hand, and a fourth doing something else entirely that I never did get a look at.”

“Sumiku,” Myra said.

“Sumiku. Lovely manners.” Carol put the hand back down. “Now, the woman on the cello. Have you seen her? Hunched right over the thing. And nobody has fed her.”

“Somebody’ll feed her,” Jim said.

“Nobody has fed her.”

The plate went down by about a quarter while the two of them worked through it. Nothing at that table wanted anything from Myra except that she keep sitting in the chair. It took her a while to notice she had stopped bracing.

Then Carol put her glass down and turned in her chair until she was facing Myra squarely, and her color came forward with her, and the small filed thing came up with it.

“I’ll tell you something,” Carol said, “and then I’ll leave it alone. I knew your name before I knew your face. Laura said it two or three times, the year before—the year before everything. Not kindly. She’d come in from school with her jaw set and she’d get your name out and then she wouldn’t say another word about it all evening, and I’d let her be, because you do.”

Jim had gone very slightly still beside her, as if he had been waiting to find out whether she was going to say it. Not much. Enough.

“That’s all I had this morning. Then your sister came and found me.” Carol put it down the way somebody lays a card face up. “Riley. I knew that girl when she was eleven, and now she’s a mom, can you believe it? Anyway, she sat me down by the gift table and told me the three of you have the same father, which I am still wrapping my head around. Not that it surprises me that Greg had children with other women.” Carol turned her ring once on her finger, as if she were making sure it had stayed where she left it. “And then she told me it was her that sent Laura out to that bridge in the rain. That she pushed her to meet Andy there. Sixteen years she’s been waiting to say that to my face and she picked today.”

Myra’s glass had stopped a quarter turn from where she had left it.

“I told her what I’ll tell you now, which is that I have never once in my life blamed a thirteen-year-old for weather.” Carol’s color had come forward and stayed there. “I forgave that girl at the gift table in about nine seconds and haven’t thought twice about it since. And then she got started on you and would not stop. The hospitals. All those years. She said you worked at it until it took your eyes.”

“It wasn’t—”

“One more thing and then I’m done.” The glass came back up, because her hands had run out of things to do. “Middle school was a long time ago. I’ve had all afternoon to look at you and you’re not it, and I’m not certain you ever were. You’re at this table. You’ll be at our table at Christmas. There isn’t one thing you have to do about that.” She drank. “That’s all.”

Myra’s ears went still. Then they went rigid, both of them, pinned flat back against her hair. She had taken a breath. She did not let it go.

It was all there, and it was short. The story she had made at thirteen and put into Laura’s head. The footbridge, and the rain, and the water going over. It would take under a minute to say. And she could feel exactly why she wanted not to, which was the part that decided it. It was not about sparing the two of them, but about the woman Carol had just finished describing—somebody all right, somebody done being looked into, handed a chair at this table and a place at Christmas with nothing owing on either. Carol had closed the subject herself. Nobody alive was ever going to open it again.

“Cello player’s eating now,” Jim said. “Second plate. They put her by the kitchen door, which was either very thoughtful or an accident.” Something in him narrowed. “Why is her food squirming?”

Nobody had asked him anything. He said it into the middle of the quiet the way a man puts a coaster under a glass, without looking up at anybody, and it was the sound of an afternoon closing over the top of something.

Myra let the breath out and went the other way with it. “Riley didn’t come up with the bridge on her own,” she said.

Carol’s color stopped where it was.

“She sent Laura out there because of what I’d already put in her head. When I was thirteen, I made up a story about Andy and I told it to Laura. That he liked kissing another girl. That he called her a charity case behind her back, and a freak, and that the whole school had been laughing at her for a year and he knew about it and let them.” Myra kept her hands flat on the cloth, closing her eyes. “None of it happened. I made it to fit her. I built it so there’d be nobody left in the world for her to go to.” Both tails had gone completely still against the legs of the chair. “And it worked. Then Riley told her to go and have it out with him, and she went.”

Nobody stopped her, so she finished it, because stopping in the middle would only have been a slower way of not saying it.

“That’s why she was on that bridge in the rain. All of it ran off something I invented because I was thirteen and jealous and hurt and good with words.” Her voice grew small. “I’ve said it out loud before, to people who loved her, and it got easier every time, and it has never once been this hard. I’m not asking you for anything. You put a chair out for somebody, and I couldn’t let you do it without knowing what I did.”

Carol made a sound that was not a word, and got a hand up over her own mouth, and what came off her was nothing whatsoever like what Myra had braced for.

She had spent the walk across the room, and the last ten minutes, and some part of every year since she was thirteen, building against one particular kind of heat. It never came. What came instead was grief, wide open and undefended, with nothing in it aimed at her at all, and there was no wall anywhere that was any use against that.

Jim had not said a word since the cello player. He put his glass down and came around the end of the table, and Myra had no idea what was coming until his hand closed on her shoulder, warm and heavy and perfectly steady, the way a man takes hold of something that belongs to him.

“You could have avoided this all night,” Jim said, softly. He let go, and went back around, and sat down, and picked his drink up again.

“All right,” Carol said, to nobody in particular. “All right. Do Andy and Laura know?” She took the hand off her mouth and put it flat on the cloth and left it there until it had stopped doing anything.

Myra nodded, wordless.

“Okay. I want to be careful here, because I’ve watched people hand out forgiveness that was never theirs, and it is an ugly thing to be on the end of,” she said. “This was never mine. It was Laura’s. She gave it to you, and I watched the pair of you this morning before I knew a word of any of this and I could have told you so from across a garden. My son married you knowing every bit of it.” Her voice had gone thick and she was doing nothing about it. “And I have never blamed Laura. Not one day. My son fell in that river at thirteen years old and I have never held five minutes of it against her.”

“I...”

“I know exactly what I’d just finished telling you.” Carol’s hand came halfway across the cloth and stopped, as if the last few inches were something she had to be given. “An hour ago what Riley said about your eyes was a sad thing about a doctor who worked too hard. It isn’t that anymore and it is never going to be that again.” The hand finished the distance and came down flat over Myra’s, the whole of it, and patted twice. “You were paying something off in the dark with the arithmetic wrong the whole way through, and you kept paying, and you didn’t even know yet what that girl was to you. And then you sat at my table and let me be kind to you for ten minutes and you told me anyway.” She stopped. “You could have let me go on the way I was. I’d have been perfectly happy.”

“I know,” Myra said. “But I wouldn’t have been.”

“I fed that child for years because nobody at her house was going to.” Carol’s hand stayed where it was. “You don’t get to sit at my table and be the only person at it who isn’t forgiven. That is not how I keep a table.”

Myra’s ears came up off her hair before she had any say in the matter.

Carol reached over and took the plate she had built out of two other plates, and moved it back in front of her, and squared it up against the edge of the cloth. Her hand wasn’t steady and she made no attempt to make it be.

“Eat,” she said. “I am going to be no use to anybody for a minute and you are going to eat.”

Myra picked up the fork.

---

It was Harper who saw her coming, and got a hand up over the table before anyone else at it had noticed that the noise in the room had changed direction.

The bachelor table had been set at the far end of the hall, well away from the families, which Art took to be deliberate and did not mind in the least. There were eleven of them at it, and most of them had watched the crossing from the rows rather than standing anywhere near the water. Harper sat at the head with her coat open and her sword belted and peace-knotted out of the way of the chairs, aquamarine hands folded, running the table the way she ran everything, which was by appearing not to.

Kevin Burgmeyer had put himself at the corner nearest the wall, where a man can see the room without the room seeing much of him, and had been quietly working his way through the bread for twenty minutes. The other Kevin sat opposite him. Nick Reynolds had his suit jacket on the chair back and his sleeves pushed up and was laughing at something that had finished being funny two minutes ago.

Herman, who had come to a wedding in sneakers and had not once been asked about it, was watching the doors rather than the table, as if the doors were the more interesting half of the party.

Robert West had not said anything for a while and was perfectly content talking about the band. Van sat with both hands on the table where they could be seen, which Art had noticed the previous evening and had never mentioned to him.

And at the far side, propped into each other, were the two the afternoon had already finished with. Laura Black’s wings hung off the back of her chair at an angle that was going to cost her something later. Mark Garret had folded himself down into a seat built for a much smaller man, glasses pushed up his forehead and forgotten there, and had reached the stage of the day where everything anyone said struck him as both true and moving.

“Incoming,” Harper said. “All of her.”

Laura came down the length of the table and spread out around its far end without any fuss about it. One of her took the chair Harper pushed out. One went to the corner. One stayed on her feet, a hand resting on the back of the chair at the corner. The three white dresses arranged themselves inside about ten feet of floor. Not three women who happened to match, but one woman standing at three points of one table. Nobody made room for her, exactly. The room arrived somewhere else instead.

Art stood, because he always did, and put his hand out to the nearest of her.

“Art,” he said. “Art Penn. I must apologize. I’ve watched you cross a river today and I haven’t yet said a word to you.”

“Laura,” Laura said. All three mouths, all at the same moment, one voice coming out of three places at once and not echoing anywhere. “And I’m still trying to wrap my head around some of the late arrivals, so don’t worry about it.”

He kept hold of the hand a second longer than he needed to, which gave him time to work out where to put his eyes and to conclude there was no correct answer to that. He sat back down facing all three and let the question of it go.

Across the table, Laura Black’s chin came up off Mark’s shoulder.

She looked at the end of the table. She looked at the other end of the table. She put her glass down with enormous care, the way you put down something that belongs to somebody else.

“No,” Laura Black said. “No, I’m sorry. I have to say something about this.”

“Here we go,” said Harper.

“There are two of us.” Laura Black pointed, and the gesture covered about a third of the table. “Two of us. Two Lauras. In one building. Do you have any idea what the odds on that are? I’m a statistical anomaly and I have been coping with it extremely well and now there’s a second one and she’s got a better dress.”

“There are three of me,” Laura said, all three of her, perfectly dry. “I’m not sure you’re the anomaly in this conversation.”

“That’s cheating,” Laura Black said.

“It isn’t, though,” said Laura.

“It’s cheating and I want a recount.” Laura Black got one wing up off the chair back and held it out to its full span, which took out a candle and most of Nick's line of sight. “Wings. Visible from space. Nobody has ever had to explain me twice.”

Mark stirred against her shoulder and said, to no one, with feeling, “There’s two of them now,” in the voice of a man reporting a betrayal by an institution he had trusted. “I love everyone at this table,” he added, before collapsing again.

Nobody at the table took it as an actual objection. Nick and the two Kevins and Herman watched the whole exchange with the specific enjoyment of men who have had exactly enough to drink to find two Lauras funny without needing to contribute anything to it, and Kevin Burgmeyer went on working through the bread.

At the other end, Felix and Van and Robert had been trading looks for most of a minute. They were the kind of looks three men trade when a thing they are proud of comes up sideways and none of them will be the one to raise it. Felix had stopped pretending to listen to the wings argument. Van had got very interested in the stem of his glass.

“You can just say it,” Harper told them.

“We won the challenge,” Van said, flatly, to the tablecloth.

Emily reached them before anyone could follow that up. She came down the far aisle with Dawn on one side, both of them carrying glasses and none of them carrying plates. She stopped behind Robert’s chair and put a hand on the back of it.

“Sam told me the whole thing on the mound this morning,” Emily said. “Every round of it. She did the voices.”

Robert, realizing Emily was naked, went a color Art hadn’t previously seen on him. Van studiously tried to keep his eyes away.

“So.” Emily got her glass up. “Felix Walker. Van. Robert West. The Regular Joes, who won the Island Challenge against metaphorical gods, and got a trophy for it and a guide that Sam wrote out by hand, which between the two of them is the best haul anybody’s come out of this place with.” She looked at each of the three in turn, which took a while, because Robert wasn’t going to be looked at without doing something about it. “To the Regular Joes.”

“That… that’s very kind of you,” Robert said, to the tablecloth. “You didn’t have to…”

The table went up. Glasses, palms, the flat of Kevin McAllister’s hand hard enough to move the bread basket. Under all of it Herman banged his own glass on the wood, as if he had been waiting all afternoon for a licensed opportunity, and went on four beats past everybody else. Nick started a chant and got two syllables into it before Harper put a hand on his arm and retired it.

Laura Black attempted to stand.

She got about halfway, wings coming up with her, one hand out for a toast that had already finished happening. Then Dawn peeled off from behind Emily, took a plate off the nearest table on the way past, and was at her elbow with it before the rest of the table had worked out what was going to go wrong.

“Sit down,” Dawn said. “Sit. There you go.”

“I was cheering,” Laura Black said.

“You were falling. Eat this.” The plate went down in front of her and Dawn put a fork on it with a small click. “You’ve had two hours of whiskey and about nine grapes. That’s not a whiskey problem anymore, that’s a food problem, and I can fix a food problem.”

“I’m a Master,” Laura Black said, with what dignity remained available to her, and picked up the fork.

“Excuse me.” Mark had come round to it a full sentence late and was rising, in the manner of a drawbridge, on her behalf. “Excuse me, I want to say, she was cheering, that was cheering, and I think it’s—”

Dawn handed him a plate too, on principle, and he sat back down holding it in both hands and looking at it as if it had been left to him in a will.

Art waited until the table’s attention had gone off somewhere else, which at that table took about forty seconds, and then turned back to the nearest of her.

“May I ask you something about the three,” he said. “You may tell me to mind my own business. People usually don’t, and I’d rather you did if you want to.”

Laura turned her glass on the cloth, one of her, while the other two stayed exactly where they were.

“Ask it,” Laura said.

“How is it, day to day?” He asked, and then he waited, the way he always did, several seconds past the point where modern conversation expects an answer and starts filling the gap for you.

“I had two until last night,” Laura said, all three of her at once, and the whole table’s end of it went quiet by a notch without anybody deciding to. “Two for over a month. I got the third one yesterday and turned it on in the dark and I’ve had about nineteen hours of it, so ask me again next week, because right now I put a hand out for a glass and three hands go, and I have to pick.” She let that sit. “It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever had done to me. It’s also the first time in my life I feel like I can be fully myself.”

“Liberating,” Art said.

“Surprisingly.” One of her lifted the glass, and all three of her drank. The rest of the table had stopped remarking on that somewhere around the second course.

Art put his own glass down and turned it a quarter turn, and did not ask the second question, which had been sitting behind the first one since he stood up to shake her hand. There would be another afternoon for it, or there would not.

The table came back up around them in pieces. Laura Black worked steadily through Dawn’s plate and stopped arguing with anybody, which nobody drew attention to. Nick got Van talking about the island and Van, to his own evident annoyance, kept talking. Kevin Burgmeyer finished the bread. Herman was still watching the doors. Thunder echoed in the distance.

At the far end, Art and Laura went on talking, and the rest of it closed over the top of them the way a room does.

---

The dome had been showing the same deep blue dusk since one o’clock, and never once matched anything under it. Below it the long windows ran the whole west wall, and the light coming through them was the wrong light for half past five in the afternoon, and the two of them together made the hall feel like a room with the wrong lamp left on in it.

Norah went over to the windows because she wanted the real one. That was all it was. The plates had gone, the toast was twenty minutes behind them, the room had loosened into the part of an afternoon where everybody stands up and goes to find somebody else, the dances were about to start, and she had been on four inches of heel since one o’clock and wanted ninety seconds of glass and no relatives in it.

Behind her the Rahman table had settled into itself, in the arrangement it always reached about forty minutes into any family meal, whichever house it was held in. Nadia was explaining something about the seating arrangement q to Reem, who was eating and not listening and had her chair turned toward the dance floor. Neither of them was looking anywhere near Norah’s back.

The real sky was a low, bruised gray with the sun still running along under the bottom of it—and lightning, in the distance. Norah put two fingers on the window frame and let herself have it.

“There you are,” Hana said, arriving at her shoulder. “I’ve been trying to get across this room for ten minutes. Somebody’s grandmother wanted to tell me about a hip.”

“Whose grandmother?”

“I never found out. It was a very good story about a hip.” Hana came up beside her and looked out at the same nothing, hands folded, everything about her exactly where it had been put that morning, as if the afternoon had not been allowed to touch any of it. “This is a beautiful room. I keep saying that to people. I’ve said it to about nine people. It’s a beautiful room and the food was lovely and your friend who gave the speech is very funny.”

“Sam.”

“Sam. She’s very funny.” Hana smiled. “And Andy’s mother found me twice and fed me both times.”

“I think she does that to everyone.”

“She did it very well.” A beat. “Baba’s sitting down, by the way. I made him. He got up four times to move chairs nobody asked him to move.”

“He’ll get up again.”

“He will,” Hana agreed, warmly, agreeing with everything and disagreeing with nothing, the way she always had.

Norah let it run. It was easy and it cost nothing and she had four minutes in her before somebody came to find her, and she was in the middle of working out how to hand her sister back to the room when Hana’s smile came off her face.

It did not slip. Norah had seen it slip once, at one corner, in a garden this morning, and had not known what to do with it then either. This was different. It came off all at once, the way a coat comes off, and what was underneath it was not a sadder version of her sister but a woman Norah had never been introduced to.

“I have to say something to you,” Hana said, “and I’ve been carrying it around for about four years, and I’ve never once got it out of my mouth.”

Norah went still. Everything in her that would ordinarily have answered—the joke, the deflection, the fast and easy thing that keeps a conversation from turning over—deserted her.

“Okay,” she said. “Keep going.”

“You know all of it already.” Hana’s hands had come unfolded. “That’s the stupid part. There’s nothing in it you don’t know. Yousef. The girls. The house that’s ten minutes from Mama’s house. I’m not telling you anything.”

“Tell me anyway.”

Hana took a breath and let about half of it out.

“I did everything right,” she said. “I want you to understand that I’m not complaining. I did it right and I meant it and I still mean it and I’d do most of it again. And somewhere in the middle of doing it right, about four years ago, I went hollow. Not sad. I’d know what to do with sad.” Her voice did not rise anywhere in it. “Hollow. Like the inside got taken out and the outside kept going, and the outside is very good, everybody says so, everybody has always said so, Hana’s so good.”

The window was cold under Norah’s fingers. She left them where they were.

“And I have been so jealous of you,” Hana said, “for four years, that some days I couldn’t be in a room with you.”

Norah heard herself make a sound. It was not a word.

“You,” Hana said. “Specifically. Not Nadia, Nadia works like a mule and always has, I don’t envy that. You. Because you went and made a whole life out of nothing anybody handed you, and nobody told you to, and nobody would have caught you if it hadn’t worked.” She stopped. Started again, quieter. “I’m not angry with you. I know how this sounds. I’m not angry and I don’t want you to feel sorry for me and I’m not asking you to fix anything. I’m proud of you. I love you. But I wanted to say it to your face. Once. Instead of swallowing it at another dinner and passing you the bread.”

Norah’s face did something before she could get to it. She felt it happen, the whole of it, disbelief going across her plainly and without permission, and there was no taking that back.

“Me?” she said. “Hana. Me?”

“Yes.”

“Why? Why would you—you’re the one who got it right. You are the one they don’t worry about. Baba says your name like it’s a finished sentence.”

“I know.”

“Then why—”

“Because they gave me Los Angeles when I was nine years old,” Hana said. “In the front room. With the shot glass. You remember that? Mama put it in my hand and everybody clapped and I have never been. I’m thirty and I’ve never been, and I still talk about it, and every single person in that family knows I’m never going to go.” She turned to face Norah properly. “They gave Nadia New York. They gave Reem Chicago and she went and it broke and she came home. And you… Norah, nobody ever gave you one.”

“No,” Norah said. “They didn’t.”

“And you went anyway.” Hana’s chin was up and it stayed up. “Nobody had a plan for you, so nobody could hold you to one. You weren’t anybody’s project. And I have thought about that on and off for four years, in my kitchen, at ten o’clock at night, and it is not a nice thought. I’m sorry. But I could not put it down.”

Norah turned back to the glass because she needed somewhere to put her eyes. There was a version of this where she made it small. It was right there. She could hear the exact line, the flat funny one about how Los Angeles was overrated and the traffic would have finished her, and she could hear Hana laughing at it, relieved, and the two of them walking back to the table with the whole thing folded up and put away where it had been for four years. She did not use it.

“They called me the leftover,” Norah said, softly. Hana did not move. “Reem made a patch. She was sixteen, I was thirteen, it was a joke about hand-me-downs—she sat up one night and embroidered it badly and sewed it onto a coat that had already been Nadia’s and then yours, and it said leftover, and everybody laughed, including me.” Norah kept her eyes on the cloud bank. “And then it just stayed. It’s been my name in my own head for fifteen years. It’s the first thing I hear when something goes wrong. I still have it. The patch. It’s in a box in my apartment.”

“Norah—”

“I’m not finished.” She said it steadily. “I have spent my whole life certain that the three of you looked at me and saw the one who got what was left. And you most of all. You, married right, settled easy, ten minutes from Mama, the one who did it properly—I have been sure since I was about fifteen that when you looked at me you were… that you were looking down.”

Hana’s face opened all the way. There was nothing pleasant left on it, and nothing agreeable, and none of the warm restating thing she had done to every sentence anyone had handed her all day. “No,” Hana said. “Not one day. Not one day of your life. I have never once looked down at you, Norah, not for a minute of it, and I don’t know what to do with the fact that you thought so.”

The room went on behind them. Somebody at the far end laughed at something. A chair went back. The band came up out of whatever it had been doing, and a few people went out onto the floor to find out whether this one was danceable, and decided it was not.

“Can I ask you something,” Norah said. “Not to fix it. I haven’t got anything to fix it with.”

“Ask,” Hana said.

“If you went. If you actually went to LA. What would you do there?”

Hana did not have to go looking for it, as if the answer had been sitting somewhere near the front the whole time, and that told Norah more than the last ten minutes had.

“There’s a road that goes up out of the city into the hills,” Hana said, “and somewhere near the top you can pull over and see the whole of it lit up underneath you. I don’t know what it’s called.” She was talking to the glass rather than to Norah. “I’d want to be the one driving. Me. At night. On a road I’ve never been on.”

“Okay,” Norah said.

“And then I’d want to come home.” Hana’s hands had gone back to being folded. “Four days. That’s the whole of it. Four days and then home to Yousef and the girls and that house, and I would be so glad to walk in the door I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. I’ve never said that out loud to a single person, because of how small it sounds next to how badly I want it.”

Norah did not tell her it wasn’t small. She reached out and took her sister’s hand. “If you want to, I’ll come with you. We’ll make a long weekend out of it. Just us. And then you can come back home to Yousef and the girls, and you can look at that shot glass and know it’s really yours.” She smiled. “I promise, Hana.”

Hana’s eyes were bright, and she opened her mouth, but couldn’t find the words to reply. Instead, she reached over and straightened the neckline of Norah’s blouse. She did it without being asked and without saying anything about it, and then put her hands back where they had been.

“We should go back,” Hana said, blinking furiously. “Nadia’s going to send someone.”

“She’ll send Reem,” Norah said. “Reem won’t come.”

“Reem will come,” Hana said, “and pretend she was already walking this way.”

They went back along the windows together, not touching, Norah’s heels loud on the blackwood and Hana’s not loud at all.

Reem was already halfway across the floor.

She had come round the long way, past the cake table, at a pace built to suggest she had business at the cake table. She reached them carrying nothing whatsoever to show for it. She fell in on Norah’s other side without a word about any of it. Then, six or seven steps out from the table, she got a hand through Norah’s arm and left it there, which Reem had not done since the two of them were girls, and she looked straight ahead the entire time she was doing it.

Nadia had a seating chart flat under her hand and a question already loaded. Norah watched her get one proper look at the pair of them and put it away, the chart and the question both, face down under her palm—Nadia, who had an opinion about everything that had ever happened to any of them, asking nothing at all.

“Sit,” Nadia said. “Both of you. Reem has been arguing with me about this chart since the soup and I need somebody at this table who can read.”

They sat. Reem let go of Norah’s arm on the way down and immediately turned her chair back toward the dance floor, as if the last ninety seconds had been an administrative matter now concluded.

Norah was well into her plate before she worked out what was wrong with the light. It lay across the blackwood thinner and further along than it had any business being at half past five, a shade belonging to an hour that had not happened yet, the kind of light that turns up late for its own hour. Nobody else at the table appeared to have noticed it. Norah looked at it for a while, jaw tight.