Take What You Can Carry

day given to them to gather themselves, to hide and huddle and swim in a mood that won’t let Olivia go. Though Delan, she sees, seems remarkably improved, smiling and joking and helping his mother with a stew. An acceptance, she realizes, that’s been learned over the years. A tolerance or a numbness, though perhaps the two are the same. While she feels this as a deep cut, he’s barely felt the scrape and this, somehow, is a difference she never considered. The fine print she’d not known to look for.
Lailan shows up on the front steps with a tarp over her head. Water drips from the edges, darkening her light-pink shirt to fuchsia. In her hand is a plastic bag with crayons—nubs mostly, pieces Olivia would’ve tossed when she was a child—and a stack of yellowing lined paper that she holds to her chest. Her lashes are wet from the rain, as is one side of her cheek, and Olivia knows she must’ve struggled to hold the tarp and her supplies and in the process, half her face was bared to the downpour.
Within seconds, Miriam is behind her, chaotic with bags, an umbrella, and a towel, speaking rapid Kurdish. She said to wait five minutes, Soran translates, but Lailan was gone before she even finished. The girl beams, proud of her speed.
There is a quality to Miriam that confuses Olivia. Even, smooth skin but hair that’s graying. Eyebrows that slope downward, making her appear apprehensive or perplexed by the world but at the same time open to surprise and oddly hopeful. Though she could be much older than Olivia, she might also be the same age, and when she speaks, she nods as if firm in her belief or far too used to doubt. And though it’s clear she’s in a hurry for work, she doesn’t leave—instead she sits, draws the girl toward her, then tilts Lailan’s chin back. Looking her in the eye, she deliberately, slowly, and gently wipes the water from the girl’s forehead before tossing the towel over the girl’s head, grabbing her, and drying her off. Both mother and daughter erupt with laughter. A routine, Olivia recognizes. Most likely done every night after baths, something dreaded turned on its edge.
When at last Miriam leaves, Soran blows on the pages of paper, separating them. Olivia sits with Lailan on the floor. “What should we draw?”
In the chair beside them, Soran doesn’t look up from his book. “Yes, thank you. English. Your being here is a lesson.”
From the doorframe, Delan watches them. “Why does the nurse carry a red crayon?”
“Why?” Olivia asks and in his pause hears the joke he’d told on the plane. That moment, the timing, much like now. Combined with the events of yesterday, his instinct to distract angles into an instinct to avoid. But how could it be wrong to lighten a mood?
He grins, already proud of his punch line, before saying, “In case she needs to draw blood.”
Despite herself, Olivia smiles. Then she turns back to Lailan. “So what do we draw?”
“Dog,” Lailan answers. But her hand hovers above the page. Frozen, as if she’s unsure of how to begin.
“You just do it,” Olivia tells her. “Dive right in.” She touches Lailan’s hand, and the girl abandons her drawing to run a finger over Olivia’s orange nails.
“Dive right in,” Lailan repeats and then picks a bright-red crayon and leans into the page. Wild squiggles appear below her small fist. Then an oval for a head. Dots for eyes. Olivia touches her head, realizing it’s now a portrait of her and fearing the girl isn’t far off. But suddenly Lailan stops, alarmed, and sits back.
“What?” Olivia asks.
Soran sets down his book. “Lailan. What’s wrong? Chi buwa?”
The girl’s eyes are wide as she looks between the two of them, and her tongue presses on her lower tooth. Slowly, as if afraid of what she’ll find, she puts her finger on the incisor.
“It’s loose,” Olivia says, trying to mime the meaning of the word as she speaks. “Wiggly. Lailan, it’s a baby tooth.”
“I made wiggly?” Her voice is small.
“No. No, they’re supposed to fall out.”
Seeing her fear, Soran resorts to Kurdish as he explains, and Lailan goes from terrified she’d done something wrong to proud, standing as tall as she can, as if suspecting she might have also grown. When Delan walks into the room, she’s before him in a flash, making him feel the tooth—“wiggly,” she says, latched on to the word. He feels it with much exaggeration as Soran watches, entertained, until Lailan crawls into his lap and makes him test every tooth. Solemnly he touches each one, shaking his head no till he gets to the one that’s loose and his eyes go wide. “Wiggly!” she announces.
What if one day Olivia and Delan have children? She’s seeing how different they are, even in the way Delan seems okay, in his acceptance of what’s happened. What would their difference do to their children, and to them at the end of the day? Would he pass off an early heartbreak as insignificant? Would he shrug off a fear of thunderstorms? Then the questions make her feel ridiculous. Of course he wouldn’t. She knows him. But even the consideration is something—worry where before there was assurance.
After an hour of the girl being there, Olivia quietly asks Soran about Lailan’s parents. In the distance, the booming has begun, that fight that has far-reaching arms, nothing truly contained.
“There is only Miriam,” he says. He stands in the threshold of the room, tired, and glances in the direction of the mountains. “Miriam’s husband died years ago. But they are not her parents. Her parents—” He stops, watching as the girl begins to trace her hand onto a page. “One day, I will tell you. But Lailan has me. She is here when Miriam works. She is the reason I took the job, for my friend. To be here when she needs me. I am good at math, but