Take What You Can Carry

it, I know. But it was a mistake to come.”
“She was mad at you.”
“Not at me. But it’s not as safe as I thought. Better than before, yes. That’s true. But areas near my hometown, it’s not great.”
Below is a teahouse, the metal tables left outside black in the night. Olivia watches the street, trying to process. Of course she’d known it wasn’t completely safe. That was where her reticence came in, but in some ways, it was a draw. To challenge herself. To find adventures rather than another day at a desk. To push through what easily could be a hemmed-in life. Live big and bold and brave, her father likes to say. When she’d told him about her plans, about the coded call to Delan’s mother who said it was safe—coded because the government tapped their phones, since his family is political, just as they censor the letters—she’d felt bad, picturing him at a rainy window, sitting in his green chair after a long shift as manager of Zayle’s Deli, listening to someone else’s adventure.
“The concept of peaceful is relative,” her father finally said. “What’s been done to the Kurds, if someone only lightly beat them with a hammer, they might call that peaceful.” A deep breath, which always signaled a verdict. “Liv. You use excuses to leave people. But him? If you’re worried you don’t know him—that’s not a reason to leave; it’s why you lean a little closer.” At the time she’d just laughed and countered with, “Why should I bother to listen closer if he doesn’t talk about what’s important?”
“Is Soraya your mother’s sister?” she now asks Delan.
Calm. No anger. He nods. “That’s who she’s mad at. She thinks she didn’t tell me the truth because she wanted me to come home. Could be true, I don’t know. I also might’ve gotten the codes wrong.”
A bird swoops overhead, alone in the sky. Olivia starts to laugh, a small laugh that erupts from her like a spill. “Your uncle is well; I’ll pass along your greeting—that could’ve meant whatever you do, don’t come?”
“Maybe. The calls, they’re minutes long. I heard clicking; that means the lines are tapped. I couldn’t ask.”
“Delan.”
But he’s not smiling. He’s not laughing. “Would you blame her? If she did mean I should come. If she let us come when it wasn’t safe?”
He wants an answer. And in this, she understands that it’s not his view of his mother that concerns him—it’s hers. “She wouldn’t have put you in danger. Us. You, you’re her son.”
“Danger,” he says. “It’s their home. Why should I be so much better than my own parents that I shouldn’t walk the streets they walk?”
“I didn’t say that. And it’s not about being better. It’s about a mother protecting her child, wanting what’s best for her child. She’d want you to stay away if it kept you safe.”
Now he turns to her, and what had touched on anger seems more like grief. “And what kind of son accepts that?”
Car horns, music that’s faint from open windows. His question hangs, and all his past reasons for having gone home only twice—time, money, a job that kept him in town—are now revealed as half-truths. The convenient, shinier side of the coin. “So why, then?”
For a second, he looks surprised that she would ask him. And she sees it, a gathering of sorts, like a breath before a motion. He’s going to reach under that bravado of his, that need he has to rarely admit hurt, and finally show her a part of him he’d thought better hidden. He’s going to let her in. She waits, but instead he looks to the sky. To a plane that glows distant and slow. And in his focus, she understands that his resolution is gone.
“Danger is relative,” he says at last. “What your father said is true.”
“Peace. He said peace.”
“I think you should go home.”
“Just me? No. If you can stay, I can stay.”
There is, for a moment, the start of a smile on his face. Just for a second, though, before he turns away.
The mosque smolders gold in the dark. Otherworldly and alluring. She watches it, the way the light seems to pulse, to emanate, and though the thought of leaving him here, of never meeting his family or seeing his life, is itself a devastation, at this moment the deeper ache is from turning away from a chance to take photographs that could help her career—and the second she realizes this, she feels shame that at a moment when she should be thinking of him, she is instead thinking of herself. And then this shame infuriates her. Why should she feel bad for taking herself seriously? Why, when she allows herself the opportunity and risk for love, should she not do the same for her career?
When she turns back to him, he’s watching her, waiting. “I won’t go home.”
A deep breath. “Liv. There’s no official war—but war never needs to be declared. The resistance, the nationalists, they’re being targeted. The Peshmerga. Anyone the government thinks is associated with them. And the secret police, the Iraqi military—they’re everywhere. And ruthless. What they do to people, to get information. And there are rumors,” he adds, “that someone in my family is an informant.”
“You think it’s true?”
“Of course not. The military starts the rumors. It’s a tactic. To break up families.”
“So what do the rumors matter?”
“It means my family is being looked at.”
“Because of Aras? Because your family is close with him? Or because of your other aunt, the political one?”
“Because we’re Kurds. It doesn’t matter. You’ll go home. I’ll pay you back for your ticket. You, of all people, I shouldn’t have dragged here.”
You, of all people. One night, a couple of months ago, she’d walked in to find him, Mason, and their friend Alan in the kitchen, no one talking. The bamboo light shade cast blocks of shadows, and the faucet’s drip was steady. Through an open window were the insistent piano notes of