Page 58 of What Remains (John Worthy #3)

POYA: THE FREEDOM TO BE

“This is different, I know, but I’m curious. What was it like?” he asked as Poya crossed to a pair of north-facing windows. “Your room in Kabul?”

Poya had to think. It was nearly summer now in the United States.

So much time had passed since fleeing Kabul.

The past was less and less like a movie with a continuous thread of sound and color and narrative, and more like a series of snapshots: brief explosive images that flared white and hot as a burst light bulb and only for a second.

Close your eyes against that light as Poya had done when John Worthy shot those money bags, and all that was left were the after-images imprinted on the backs of your lids, void of detail and gone within moments.

“I remember my mother’s garden,” Poya said, finally, not turning around, worried that memory would hurt and then he would know because emotions did that.

Slid into the eyes, flickered across one’s face.

Maybe a lucky thing that the doctors said Poya should wear dark glasses until sunlight didn’t cut tears.

“My room was on the second floor down the hall from Baba’s study.

My windows looked out onto Mami’s garden.

I loved that garden and the beehive, too, the one under a flowering almond.

My mother called the bees her ‘little girls’ because, well, they all are, except the drones.

” Poya paused. “Maybe I loved it more because of Mami. She spent so much time there, brought her students there for classes. She let me sit in back and listen. I guess you’d call it a kind of secret garden. My room always smelled so nice.”

“That reminds me,” he said. “On one of my visits to your father, he had a very beautiful pink rose in a bud vase. The smell was amazing.”

“Probably autumn damask. They were my favorite. My grandmother planted those bushes, so they were very old. They can live for twenty years if you take good care of them. In spring and before it got too hot in summer, I would leave my windows open so they could perfume my room,” Poya said, and then let go of a small laugh.

“What?” he asked. “Something funny?”

“No, something I’d forgotten I knew until just now.

” His house hugged a high cliff over the water and this room, a converted attic space, was on the third floor.

So Poya had a very good view: all bright blue sky and water, so much water spreading along the northern horizon though dotted here and there with islands.

These were odd, too, not the way an island was described, say, in Robinson Crusoe or Island of the Blue Dolphins.

Those islands had beaches and a lot of sand.

These didn’t. Sculpted from deep red sandstone and basalt, these islands were deeply green with pines and balsam firs and slender ash.

Rising from the big lake…no, Great Lake, Lake Superior, the islands seemed to have existed since the beginning of time. “Something about home.”

“What do you remember?”

“Baba.” Poya concentrated, but not too hard. The harder a person grabbed at a memory, the faster it tore apart. “From a time when I was little.”

“And?”

“And one morning…I think I was five, maybe six…Baba came in very early. I remember waking up when he sat on my bed. I opened my mouth to say something, but he whispered that I should be very quiet.” I want to show you something many people never see, Baba had said, but hush, we mustn’t wake your mother.

“We went outside into the garden and tiptoed into a bed of poppies, so it must’ve been February because that’s when poppies bloom.

Anyway, I remember him crouching by one.

The blossom was…mauve, yes. A very beautiful color.

Because it was so early, there was all this dew, these perfect little drops, like diamonds on the petals. ”

“Was that what he wanted to see?”

“No. He said I should look inside the flower.” Poya put a hand to a cheek. Baba hadn’t shaved yet and his whiskers scratched when he whispered in her ear. “He said I would see something most people never do.”

“And what was that?”

“A honeybee.” Even now, years later, Poya still could conjure the image of that bee— a little girl , her mother would’ve said—speckled with yellow pollen. “It wasn’t moving at all. I thought it was dead and started to cry.”

“But it wasn’t?”

“No.” Baba’s voice: There, there, dry your eyes.

“The bee was only sleeping. I didn’t believe my father, but then he blew on it, very gently.

All of a sudden, the bee moved. It straightened out its legs and its antennae wiggled and then off it buzzed.

” Poya pause. “I guess that was about as close to a real-life fairy tale as I ever got. That garden, my parents.”

He was quiet a moment. “I’m sorry about your father. Your mother, too.”

“I know you are.”

“He was a good man, a good friend. I didn’t know your mother as well, but I visited your father several times, you know. Many times, just to talk.”

“Yes.” Poya debated a moment then said, “I remember when you once did.”

“You do?”

“Yes.” Poya told him about the night on the landing. “You looked right at me, but I kept very, very still. I remember closing my eyes and thinking, don’t see me, don’t see me. ”

“It must’ve worked. I didn’t. So,” he said, his tone changing ever so slightly, “you knew about your dad. Of course, you had to because…” In the window, Poya saw his reflection touch a finger to an eye. “You were smart to hide the color, that extra pupil.”

“Yes. My parents’ idea and then when we had to leave, I knew I would need more. I’d already been in my father’s secret room. It was actually very easy to find.”

“Oh?” He cocked his head. “Why? And what made you think to look?”

Poya held up two fingers. “One was when he told me to never go in. That didn’t make sense.

It wasn’t like he was a mad scientist or something.

I was curious. Then, the evening you left, you asked my father how some person would recognize him.

That’s when Baba said he would be the one with the black glasses and blonde hair and as if he hadn’t worked out in a while.

Then it was just a question of where he might keep his disguises. ”

“Which made you think of the study? Just because you weren’t allowed in?”

“No, I had to think about it awhile. One afternoon, though, I was in the garden, and I noticed how my father’s study didn’t line up with the house.

The wall at the end was too thick and so I wondered if there was another room there.

” Poya shrugged. “Basic geometry. One afternoon when no one was around, I went into his study and walked around a little bit, knocked on walls. Then I noticed this book on the shelf that I thought might either have a key inside or, you know, hide some mechanism.”

“Oh? What was special about the book?”

“It was the only book whose spine wasn’t broken.”

“Meaning it hadn’t been read.”

“Yes, but it had been moved. I knew because you could see that the dust around it had been disturbed. So, then I pulled the book out a bit. There was this loud click, and then a whole section of the wall slid to one side.” Just like one of Baba’s movies.

“What was the book?”

“ The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. ”

“Two halves of the same person.” He nodded. “Appropriate.”

“Yes.” One look at faces and noses and wigs and, best of all, those small cases of eyes of many colors…Poya knew Baba was a master at hidin g who he truly was. “I recognized you again, you know. When you drove us to the farm.”

“I wondered why you were so comfortable,” he said. “You didn’t clam up. Most kids do, with strangers.”

“Don’t feel bad. Adults are like that. They miss what’s right in front of their nose all the time simply because they don’t expect to see anything.

” Poya paused. “Or are taught not to see. Like girls, women. Why do you think men in Afghanistan don’t want to hear a woman’s voice?

Why do you think some men reduce a woman’s view of the world only to the rectangle that a burqa allows? ”

After a small silence, he said, “You don’t have to do that here. No strings attached either. I promised your father I would look after you and your mother, and I keep my promises.”

Well, Poya thought, better late than never. “I know.”

“But it bears repeating. You are my ward, and this is your home now.” He spread his hands to take in the room.

“This is your space. You will go to school, you will make friends. Someone might break your heart. It will feel like the end of the world, but it won’t be.

When that happens, I hope you’ll tell me. ”

“Afghanistan already broke my heart.” Now, Poya did turn.

“My world already ended once.” Twice, counting Mami.

“If I lived through that, I will live through anything. But you know what I worry about? Other kids my age. I’m only fourteen, but I feel…

old. As if all the things an American teenager worries about are just so trivial.

Even the way I talk and think, I just don’t see how I’m going to fit in.

” Poya paused. “Or I even want to. I feel…separate. Apart.”

“Give it time. For now, let yourself settle in. Give yourself the freedom to simply be.” He paused at the door, his hand on the knob. “Look, you need to know that I won’t force you into anything. I mean, into my line of work, your dad’s. Driver’s, for that matter, or the work his men do.”

“The work they do for you?”

He shook his head. “No, with me. We’re a team.

I’m not saying you wouldn’t be a valuable asset.

You have unique talents. Being a polyglot is only one.

You’re smart, you’re brave. If you do decide that you want to follow in your father’s footsteps or mine, well, I won’t stop you.

” He paused. “ But I won’t encourage that either.

You are fourteen and you deserve a chance to grow into yourself.

You are my ward, not a weapon and not a tool. ”

“You mean, I can’t be Dick Grayson?”

“That’s my cue to say I’m not Bruce Wayne, but not only am I not independently wealthy, I’m simply not made that way. I’m serious,” he said. “The only thing I want for you is to grow into whomever and whatever you choose. Here, you have the freedom to be.”

Poya’s eyes suddenly stung. Don’t cry. What kind of tears would they be, though? Sadness? Relief? Maybe a bit of both. “I know that.”

“But you don’t believe it yet, which is understandable.

Years of thinking a certain way are tough to break.

So, it bears repeating. You are free. You never have to hide what and who you are ever again.

Remember that.” Turning, Mac said, “Dinner at seven. It’s a nice day.

What do you say, we grill some burgers and eat on the porch and watch the sunset? ”

For a few moments after the door snicked shut, Poya didn’t move but held very still and waited, ears pricked, barely breathing. Habit, really. Another doctor, one who only listened as Poya talked, said that some habits die hard and others never.

Maybe that doctor was right: not every day was a minefield.

But that time hadn’t yet come and now all Poya made out was the stair’s creaks and complaints as Mac walked down from this third-floor attic space to the ground and then, faintly, the housekeeper’s voice raised in a question followed the softer burr of Mac’s response.

Poya stood in the middle of the room for a long moment, eyes roaming from the windows to the bed to the bookshelves, all of them empty save for the seventeen books Poya had managed to salvage from Kabul.

Plucking Anne’s diary from the shelf made the collection looked even more pathetic.

Then, again, a collection, like a person, had to begin with something and start somewhere.

Crossing the room, Poya pulled open a closet door. There was a mirror there, full-length, and Poya studied the image captured in the glass: the dark glasses over the eyes, the hair captured under a cap, the oval face.

Slipping off the glasses, Poya studied the eyes. The colors would never change. The right eye would always be brown. The left would always be a ghost eye, so pale as to be almost white.

The one difference: the ghost eye had only one pupil now instead of three.

Polycoria. A fancy name that meant many pupils. One could have many true pupils, meaning that they could open or close the way a single pupil could, or many false pupils, which were simply holes in the iris.

Poya’s were true. Baba once said it was a lucky thing Poya’s eyesight was unaffected. The condition could be fixed with surgery…just not in Afghanistan.

Having a ghost eye with now only a single pupil was a relief. The doctor said losing the glasses was up to Poya: no medical reason to keep them, but it’s your call.

So much was Poya’s choice now and that was…thrilling. Scary, too.

Folding the earpieces, Poya slid the dark glasses into a pocket. Without the protection of those glasses, that mirror-image was eerie. A little scary, too, because there was more to see than met the eye, even one fit for a ghost.

Like Dorothy . When Baba showed the movie, he said they made Garland, who was sixteen at the time, wear ace wraps around her chest to flatten her out and hide her bulges, her curves. Baba said Garland cried because it hurt so much to hide what she was becoming.

Poya knew just how that felt.

But this is for the best , Baba had said as Mami cut a shock of Poya’s red hair, which was no less startling than that strange ghost eye. This way, you will be a bacha posh. No one need ever know. But one day we will escape to America before long and when we do…

“You can be yourself,” Poya whispered, “because you will be free.”

Then Poya pulled off the cap and shook out coils of rich red hair as ruddy as a maple leaf in autumn—and became herself.

This is the story of your life. So, begin yourself. Start somewhere.

And then Mina opened Anne’s diary and began to read.