Текст книги "And the Mountains Echoed"

Автор книги: Khaled Hosseini

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

“She’s talking about Andreas,” Thalia said evenly. “I bet she is. They had a big fight. Pass me the tape and those scissors.”

“What is he like? Besides being rich, I mean?”

“Who, Andreas? He’s all right. He travels a lot. When he’s home, he always has people over. Important people—ministers, generals, that kind. They have drinks by the fireplace and they talk all night, mostly business and politics. I can hear them from my room. I’m supposed to stay upstairs when Andreas has company. I’m not supposed to come down. But he buys me things. He pays for a tutor to come to the house. And he speaks to me nicely enough.”

She taped a rectangular piece of cardboard, which we’d also colored black, over the pinhole.

Things were quiet downstairs. I choreographed the scene in my head. Madaline weeping without a sound, absently fiddling with a handkerchief like it was a clump of Play-Doh, Mamá not much help, looking on stiffly with a pinch-faced little smile like she’s got something sour melting under her tongue. Mamá can’t stand it when people cry in her presence. She can barely look at their puffy eyes, their open, pleading faces. She sees crying as a sign of weakness, a garish appeal for attention, and she won’t indulge it. She can’t bring herself to console. Growing up, I learned that it was not one of her strong suits. Sorrow ought to be private, she thinks, not flaunted. Once, when I was little, I asked her if she’d cried when my father had fallen to his death.

At the funeral? I mean, the burial?

No, I did not.

Because you weren’t sad?

Because it was nobody’s business if I was.

Would you cry if I died, Mamá?

Let’s hope we never have to find out, she said.

Thalia picked up the box of photographic paper and said, “Get the flashlight.”

We moved into Mamá’s closet, taking care to shut the door and snuff out daylight with towels we stuffed under it. Once we were in pitch-darkness, Thalia asked me to turn on the flashlight, which we had covered with several layers of red cellophane. All I could see of Thalia in the dim glow was her slender fingers as she cut a sheet of photographic paper and taped it to the inside of the shoe box opposite the pinhole. We had bought the paper from Mr. Roussos’s shop the day before. When we walked up to the counter, Mr. Roussos peered at Thalia over his spectacles and said, Is this a robbery?Thalia pointed an index finger at him and cocked her thumb like pulling back the hammer.

Thalia closed the lid on the shoe box, covered the pinhole with the shutter. In the dark she said, “Tomorrow, you shoot the first photo of your career.” I couldn’t tell if she was making fun or not.

We chose the beach. We set the shoe box on a flat rock and secured it firmly with rope—Thalia said we couldn’t have any movement at all when we opened the shutter. She moved in next to me and took a peek over the box as if through a viewfinder.

“It’s a perfect shot,” she said.

“Almost. We need a subject.”

She looked at me, saw what I meant, and said, “No. I won’t do it.”

We argued back and forth and she finally agreed, but on the condition that her face didn’t show. She took off her shoes, walked atop a row of rocks a few feet in front of the camera, using her arms like a tightrope walker on a cable. She lowered herself on one of the rocks facing west in the direction of Syros and Kythnos. She flipped her hair so it covered the bands at the back of her head that held the mask in place. She looked at me over her shoulder.

“Remember,” she shouted, “count to one twenty.”

She turned back to face the sea.

I stooped and peered over the box, looking at Thalia’s back, the constellation of rocks around her, the whips of seaweed entangled between them like dead snakes, a little tugboat bobbing in the distance, the tide rising, mashing the craggy shore and withdrawing. I lifted the shutter from the pinhole and began to count.

One … two … three … four … five…

We’re lying in bed. On the TV screen a pair of accordion players are dueling, but Gianna has turned off the sound. Midday sunlight scissors through the blinds, falling in stripes on the remains of the Margherita pizza we’d ordered for lunch from room service. It was delivered to us by a tall, slim man with impeccable slicked-back hair and a white coat with black tie. On the table he rolled into the room was a flute vase with a red rose in it. He lifted the domed plate cover off the pizza with great flourish, making a sweeping motion with his hand like a magician to his audience after the rabbit has materialized from the top hat.

Scattered around us, among the mussed sheets, are the pictures I have shown Gianna, photos of my trips over the past year and a half. Belfast, Montevideo, Tangier, Marseille, Lima, Tehran. I show her photos of the commune I had joined briefly in Copenhagen, living alongside ripped-T-shirt-and-beanie-hat-wearing Danish beatniks who had built a self-governing community on a former military base.

Where are you?Gianna asks. You are not in the photographs.

I like being behind the lens better, I say. It’s true. I have taken hundreds of pictures, and you won’t find me in any. I always order two sets of prints when I drop off the film. I keep one set, mail the other to Thalia back home.

Gianna asks how I finance my trips and I explain I pay for them with inheritance money. This is partially true, because the inheritance is Thalia’s, not mine. Unlike Madaline, who for obvious reasons was never mentioned in Andreas’s will, Thalia was. She gave me half her money. I am supposed to be putting myself through university with it.

Eight … nine … ten…

Gianna props herself up on her elbows and leans across the bed, over me, her small breasts brushing my skin. She fetches her pack, lights a cigarette. I’d met her the day before at Piazza di Spagna. I was sitting on the stone steps that connect the square below to the church on the hill. She walked up and said something to me in Italian. She looked like so many of the pretty, seemingly aimless girls I’d seen slinking around Rome’s churches and piazzas. They smoked and talked loudly and laughed a lot. I shook my head and said, Sorry?She smiled, went Ah, and then, in heavily accented English, said, Lighter? Cigarette. I shook my head and told her in my own heavily accented English that I didn’t smoke. She grinned. Her eyes were bright and jumping. The late-morning sun made a nimbus around her diamond-shaped face.

I doze off briefly and wake up to her poking my ribs.

La tua ragazza?she says. She has found the picture of Thalia on the beach, the one I had taken years before with our homemade pinhole camera. Your girlfriend?

No, I say.

Your sister?

No.

La tua cugina? Your cousin, si?

I shake my head.

She studies the photo some more, taking quick drags off her cigarette. No, she says sharply, to my surprise, even angrily. Questa è la tua ragazza! Your girlfriend. I think yes, you are liar!And then, to my disbelief, she flicks her lighter and sets the picture on fire.

Fourteen … fifteen … sixteen … seventeen…

About midway through our trek back to the bus stop, I realize I’ve lost the photo. I tell them I need to go back. There is no choice, I have to go back. Alfonso, a wiry, tight-lipped huasowho is tagging along as our informal Chilean guide, looks questioningly at Gary. Gary is an American. He is the alpha male in our trio. He has dirty-blond hair and acne pits on his cheeks. It’s a face that hints at habitual hard living. Gary is in a foul mood, made worse by hunger, the absence of alcohol, and the nasty rash on his right calf, which he contracted brushing up against a litreshrub the day before. I’d met them both at a crowded bar in Santiago, where, after half a dozen rounds of piscolas, Alfonso had suggested a hike to the waterfall at Salto del Apoquindo, where his father used to take him when he was a boy. We’d made the hike the next day and had camped out at the waterfall for the night. We’d smoked dope, the water roaring in our ears, a wide-open sky crammed with stars above us. We were trudging back now toward San Carlos de Apoquindo to catch the bus.

Gary pushes back the wide rim of his Cordoban hat and wipes his brow with a handkerchief. It’s a three-hour walk back, Markos, he says.

¿Tres horas, hágale comprende?Alfonso echoes.

I know.

And you’re still going?

Yes.

¿Para una foto?Alfonso says.

I nod. I keep quiet because they would not understand. I am not sure I understand it myself.

You know you’re going to get lost, Gary says.

Probably.

Then good luck, amigo, Gary says, offering his hand.

Es un griego loco, Alfonso says.

I laugh. It is not the first time I have been called a crazy Greek. We shake hands. Gary adjusts the straps of his knapsack, and the two of them head back up the trail along the folds of the mountain, Gary waving once without looking as they take a hairpin turn. I walk back the way we had come. It takes me four hours, actually, because I do get lost as Gary had predicted. I am exhausted by the time I reach the campsite. I search all over, kicking bushes, looking between rocks, dread building as I rummage in vain. Then, just as I try to resign myself to the worst, I spot a flash of white in a batch of shrubs up a shallow slope. I find the photo wedged between a tangle of brambles. I pluck it free, beat dust from it, my eyes brimming with tears of relief.

Twenty-three … twenty-four … twenty-five…

In Caracas I sleep under a bridge. A youth hostel in Brussels. Sometimes I splurge and rent a room in a nice hotel, take long hot showers, shave, eat meals in a bathrobe. I watch color TV. The cities, the roads, the countryside, the people I meet—they all begin to blur. I tell myself I am searching for something. But more and more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting for something to happen to me, something that will change everything, something that my whole life has been leading up to.

Thirty-four … thirty-five … thirty-six…

My fourth day in India. I totter down a dirt road among stray cattle, the world tilting under my feet. I have been vomiting all day. My skin is the yellow of a sari, and it feels like invisible hands are peeling it raw. When I can’t walk anymore, I lie down on the side of the road. An old man across the road stirs something in a big steel pot. Beside him is a cage, inside the cage a blue-and-red parrot. A dark-skinned vendor pushing a cartful of empty green bottles passes me by. That’s the last thing I remember.

Forty-one … forty-two…

I wake up in a big room. The air is thick with heat and something like rotting cantaloupe. I am lying on a twin-sized steel-frame bed, cushioned from the hard, springless platform by a mattress no thicker than a paperback book. The room is filled with beds like mine. I see emaciated arms dangling over the sides, dark matchstick legs protruding from stained sheets, scant-toothed mouths open. Idle ceiling fans. Walls marked by patches of mold. The window beside me lets in hot, sticky air and sunlight that stabs the eyeballs. The nurse—a burly, glowering Muslim man named Gul—tells me I may die of hepatitis.

Fifty-five … fifty-six … fifty-seven…

I ask for my backpack. What backpack? Gul says with indifference. All my things are gone—my clothes, my cash, my books, my camera. That’s all the thief left you, Gul says in his rolling English, pointing to the windowsill beside me. It’s the picture. I pick it up. Thalia, her hair flapping in the breeze, the water bubbling with froth around her, her bare feet on the rocks, the leaping Aegean flung out before her. A lump rises to my throat. I don’t want to die here, among these strangers, so far away from her. I tuck the photo in the wedge between the glass and the window frame.

Sixty-six … sixty-seven … sixty-eight…

The boy in the bed next to mine has an old man’s face, haggard, sunken, carved. His lower belly is swollen with a tumor the size of a bowling ball. Whenever a nurse touches him there, his eyes squeeze shut and his mouth springs open in a silent, agonized wail. This morning, one of the nurses, not Gul, is trying to feed him pills, but the boy turns his head side to side, his throat making a sound like a scraping against wood. Finally, the nurse pries his mouth open, forces the pills inside. When he leaves, the boy rolls his head slowly toward me. We eye each other across the space between our beds. A small tear squeezes out and rolls down his cheek.

Seventy-five … seventy-six … seventy-seven…

The suffering, the despair in this place, is like a wave. It rolls out from every bed, smashes against the moldy walls, and swoops back toward you. You can drown in it. I sleep a lot. When I don’t, I itch. I take the pills they give me and the pills make me sleep again. Otherwise, I look down at the bustling street outside the dormitory, at the sunlight skidding over tent bazaars and back-alley tea shops. I watch the kids shooting marbles on sidewalks that melt into muddy gutters, the old women sitting in doorways, the street vendors in dhotis squatting on their mats, scraping coconuts, hawking marigold garlands. Someone lets out an earsplitting shriek from across the room. I doze off.

Eighty-three … eighty-four … eighty-five…

I learn that the boy’s name is Manaar. It means “guiding light.” His mother was a prostitute, his father a thief. He lived with his aunt and uncle, who beat him. No one knows exactly what is killing him, only that it is. No one visits him, and when he dies, a week from now—a month, two at the outside—no one will come to claim him. No one will grieve. No one will remember. He will die where he lived, in the cracks. When he sleeps, I find myself looking at him, at his cratered temples, the head that’s too big for his shoulders, the pigmented scar on his lower lip where, Gul informed me, his mother’s pimp had the habit of putting out his cigarette. I try speaking to him in English, then in the few Urdu words I know, but he only blinks tiredly. Sometimes I put my hands together and make shadow animals on the wall to win a smile from him.

Eighty-seven … eighty-eight … eighty-nine…

One day Manaar points to something outside my window. I follow his finger, raise my head, but I see nothing but the blue wisp of sky through the clouds, children below playing with water gushing from a street pump, a bus spewing exhaust. Then I realize he is pointing at the photo of Thalia. I pluck it from the window and hand it to him. He holds it close to his face, by the burnt corner, and stares at it for a long time. I wonder if it is the ocean that draws him. I wonder if he’s ever tasted salt water or got dizzy watching the tide pull away from his feet. Or perhaps, though he can’t see her face, he senses a kin in Thalia, someone who knows what pain feels like. He goes to hand the photo back to me. I shake my head. Hold on to it, I say. A shadow of mistrust crosses his face. I smile. And, I cannot be sure, but I think he smiles back.

Ninety-two … ninety-three … ninety-four…

I beat the hepatitis. Strange how I can’t tell if Gul is pleased or disappointed at my having proved him wrong. But I know I’ve caught him by surprise when I ask if I can stay on as a volunteer. He cocks his head, frowns. I end up having to talk to one of the head nurses.

Ninety-seven … ninety-eight … ninety-nine…

The shower room smells like urine and sulfur. Every morning I carry Manaar into it, holding his naked body in my arms, careful not to bounce him—I’d watched one of the volunteers carry him before over the shoulder as if he were a bag of rice. I gently lower him onto the bench and wait for him to catch his breath. I rinse his small, frail body with warm water. Manaar always sits quietly, patiently, palms on his knees, head hung low. He is like a fearful, bony old man. I run the soapy sponge over his rib cage, the knobs of his spine, over shoulder blades that jut out like shark fins. I carry him back to his bed, feed him his pills. It soothes him to have his feet and calves massaged, so I do that for him, taking my time. When he sleeps, it is always with the picture of Thalia half tucked under his pillow.

One hundred one … one hundred two…

I go for long, aimless walks around the city, if only to get away from the hospital, the collective breaths of the sick and dying. I walk in dusty sunsets through streets lined with graffiti-stained walls, past tin-shed stalls packed tightly against one another, crossing paths with little girls carrying basketfuls of raw dung on their head, women covered in black soot boiling rags in huge aluminum vats. I think a lot about Manaar as I meander down a cat’s cradle of narrow alleyways, Manaar waiting to die in that room full of broken figures like him. I think a lot about Thalia, sitting on the rock, looking out at the sea. I sense something deep inside me drawing me in, tugging at me like an undertow. I want to give in to it, be seized by it. I want to give up my bearings, slip out of who I am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.

I am not saying Manaar changed everything. He didn’t. I stumble around the world for still another year before I finally find myself at a corner desk in an Athens library, looking down at a medical school application. In between Manaar and the application are the two weeks I spent in Damascus, of which I have virtually no memory other than the grinning faces of two women with heavily lined eyes and a gold tooth each. Or the three months in Cairo in the basement of a ramshackle tenement run by a hashish-addicted landlord. I spend Thalia’s money riding buses in Iceland, tagging along with a punk band in Munich. In 1977, I break an elbow at an antinuclear protest in Bilbao.

But in my quiet moments, in those long rides in the back of a bus or the bed of a truck, my mind always circles back to Manaar. Thinking of him, of the anguish of his final days, and my own helplessness in the face of it, makes everything I have done, everything I want to do, seem as unsubstantial as the little vows you make yourself as you’re going to sleep, the ones you’ve already forgotten by the time you wake up.

One hundred nineteen … one hundred twenty.

I drop the shutter.

One night at the end of that summer, I learned that Madaline was leaving for Athens and leaving Thalia with us, at least for a short while.

“Just for a few weeks,” she said.

We were having dinner, the four of us, a dish of white bean soup that Mamá and Madaline had prepared together. I glanced across the table at Thalia to see if I was the only one on whom Madaline had sprung the news. It appeared I was. Thalia was calmly feeding spoonfuls into her mouth, lifting her mask just a bit with each trip of the spoon. By then, her speech and eating didn’t bother me anymore, or at least no more than watching an old person eat through ill-fitting dentures, like Mamá would years later.

Madaline said she would send for Thalia after she had shot her film, which she said should wrap well before Christmas.

“Actually, I will bring you all to Athens,” she said, her face rinsed with the customary cheer. “And we will go to the opening together! Wouldn’t that be marvelous, Markos? The four of us, dressed up, waltzing into the theater in style?”

I said it would be, though I had trouble picturing Mamá in a fancy gown or waltzing into anything.

Madaline explained how it would work out just fine, how Thalia could resume her studies when school opened in a couple of weeks—at home, of course—with Mamá. She said she would send us postcards and letters, and pictures of the film set. She said more, but I didn’t hear much of it. What I was feeling was enormous relief and outright giddiness. My dread of the coming end of summer was like a knot in my belly, winding tighter with each passing day as I steeled myself against the approaching farewell. I woke every morning now eager to see Thalia at the breakfast table, to hear the bizarre sound of her voice. We barely ate before we were out climbing trees, chasing each other through the barley fields, plowing through the stalks and letting out war cries, lizards scattering away from our feet. We stashed make-believe treasures in caves, found spots on the island with the best and loudest echoes. We shot photos of windmills and dovecotes with our pinhole camera and took them to Mr. Roussos, who developed them for us. He even let us into his darkroom and taught us about different developers, fixers, and stop baths.

The night of Madaline’s announcement, she and Mamá shared a bottle of wine in the kitchen, Madaline doing most of the drinking, while Thalia and I were upstairs, playing a game of tavli. Thalia had the manaposition and had already moved half her checkers onto her home board.

“She has a lover,” Thalia said, rolling the dice.

I jumped. “Who?”

“ ‘Who?’ he says. Who do you think?”

I had learned, over the course of the summer, to read Thalia’s expressions through her eyes, and she was looking at me now like I was standing on the beach asking where the water was. I tried to recover quickly. “I know who,” I said, my cheeks burning. “I mean, who’s the … you know …” I was a twelve-year-old boy. My vocabulary didn’t include words like lover.

“Can’t you guess? The director.”

“I was going to say that.”

“Elias. He’s something. He plasters his hair down like it’s the 1920s. He has a thin little mustache too. I guess he thinks it makes him look rakish. He’s ridiculous. He thinks he’s a great artist, of course. Mother does too. You should see her with him, all timid and submissive, like she needs to bow to him and pamper him because of his genius. I can’t understand how she doesn’t see it.”

“Is Aunt Madaline going to marry him?”

Thalia shrugged. “She has the worst taste in men. The worst.” She shook the dice in her hands, seemed to reconsider. “Except for Andreas, I suppose. He’s nice. Nice enough. But, of course, she’s leaving him. It’s always the bastards she falls for.”

“You mean, like your father?”

She frowned a little. “My father was a stranger she met on her way to Amsterdam. At a train station during a rainstorm. They spent one afternoon together. I have no idea who he is. And neither does she.”

“Oh. I remember she said something about her first husband. She said he drank. I just assumed …”

“Well, that would be Dorian,” Thalia said. “He was something too.” She moved another checker onto her home board. “He used to beat her. He could go from nice and pleasant to furious in a blink. Like the weather, how it can change suddenly? He was like that. He drank most of the day, didn’t do much but lie around the house. He got real forgetful when he drank. He’d leave the water running, for instance, and flood the house. I remember he forgot to turn off the stove once and almost burned everything down.”

She made a little tower with a stack of chips. Worked quietly for a while straightening it.

“The only thing Dorian really loved was Apollo. All the neighborhood kids were scared of him—of Apollo, I mean. And hardly any of them had even seen him; they’d only heard his bark. That was enough for them. Dorian kept him chained in the back of the yard. Fed him big slabs of lamb.”

Thalia didn’t tell me any more. I pictured it easily enough, though. Dorian passed out, the dog forgotten, roaming the yard unchained. An open screen door.

“How old were you?” I asked in a low voice.

“Five.”

Then I asked the question that had been on my mind since the beginning of summer. “Isn’t there something that … I mean, can’t they do—”

Thalia snagged her gaze away. “Please don’t ask,” she said heavily with what I sensed to be a deep ache. “It tires me out.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’ll tell you someday.”

And she did tell me, later. The botched surgery, the catastrophic post-op wound infection that turned septic, shut down her kidneys, threw her into liver failure, ate through the new surgical flap and forced the surgeons to slice off not only the flap but yet more of what remained of her left cheek and part of her jawbone as well. The complications had kept her in the hospital for nearly three months. She’d almost died, should have died. After that, she wouldn’t let them touch her again.

“Thalia,” I said, “I’m sorry too for what happened when we met.”

She tipped her eyes up at me. The old playful shine was back. “You should be sorry. But I knew even before you hurled all over the floor.”

“Knew what?”

“That you were an ass.”

Madaline left two days before school started. She wore a tight butter yellow sleeveless dress that clung to her slim frame, horn-rimmed sunglasses, and a firmly knotted white silk scarf to hold down her hair. She was dressed as though she worried parts of her might come loose—like she was, literally, holding herself together. At the ferry port in Tinos town, she embraced us all. She held Thalia the tightest, and the longest, her lips on the crown of Thalia’s head in an extended, unbroken kiss. She didn’t take off her sunglasses.

“Hug me back,” I heard her whisper.

Rigidly, Thalia obliged.

When the ferry groaned and lurched away, leaving behind a trail of churned-up water, I thought Madaline would stand at the stern and wave and blow us kisses. But she quickly moved toward the bow and took a seat. She didn’t look our way.

When we got home, Mamá told us to sit down. She stood before us and said, “Thalia, I want you to know that you don’t have to wear that thing in this house anymore. Not on my account. Nor his. Do it only if it suits you. I have no more to say about this business.”

It was then that, with sudden clarity, I understood what Mamá already had seen. That the mask had been for Madaline’s benefit. To save herembarrassment and shame.

For a long time Thalia didn’t make a move or say a word. Then, slowly, her hands rose, and she untied the bands at the back of her head. She lowered the mask. I looked at her directly in the face. I felt an involuntary urge to recoil, the way you would at a sudden loud noise. But I didn’t. I held my gaze. And I made it a point to not blink.

Mamá said she would homeschool me until Madaline came back so Thalia wouldn’t have to stay home by herself. She gave us our lessons in the evening, after dinner, and assigned us homework to do in the morning while she went off to school. It sounded workable, at least in theory.

But doing our studies, especially with Mamá away, proved nearly impossible. News of Thalia’s disfigurement had spread all over the island, and people kept knocking on the door, fueled by curiosity. You would have thought the island was suddenly running out of flour, garlic, even salt, and our house was the only place you could find it. They barely made an effort to disguise their intent. At the door, their eyes always flew over my shoulder. They craned their necks, stood on tiptoes. Most of them weren’t even neighbors. They’d walked miles for a cup of sugar. Of course I never let them in. It gave me some satisfaction to close the door on their faces. But I also felt gloomy, dispirited, aware that if I stayed my life would be too deeply touched by these people. I would, in the end, become one of them.

The kids were worse and far bolder. Every day I caught one prowling outside, climbing our wall. We would be working, and Thalia would tap my shoulder with her pencil, tip her chin, and I would turn to find a face, sometimes more than one, pressed to the window. It got so bad, we had to go upstairs and pull all the curtains. One day I opened the door to a boy I knew from school, Petros, and three of his friends. He offered me a handful of coins for a peek. I said no, where did he think he was, a circus?

In the end, I had to tell Mamá. A deep red flush marched up her face when she heard. She clenched her teeth.

The next morning she had our books and two sandwiches ready on the table. Thalia understood before I did and she curled up like a leaf. Her protests started when it came time to leave.

“Aunt Odie, no.”

“Give me your hand.”

“No. Please.”

“Go on. Give it to me.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“We’re going to be late.”

“Don’t make me, Aunt Odie.”

Mamá pulled Thalia up from the seat by the hands, leaned in, and fixed her with a gaze I knew well. Not a thing on this earth could deter her now. “Thalia,” she said, managing to sound both soft and firm, “I am not ashamed of you.”

We set out, the three of us—Mamá, with her lips pursed, pushing forth like she was plowing against a fierce wind, her feet working quick, mincing little steps. I imagined Mamá walking in this same determined manner to Madaline’s father’s house all those years ago, rifle in hand.

People gawked and gasped as we blew past them along the winding footpaths. They stopped to stare. Some of them pointed. I tried not to look. They were a blur of pale faces and open mouths in the corners of my vision.

In the school yard, children parted to let us pass. I heard some girl scream. Mamá rolled through them like a bowling ball through pins, all but dragging Thalia behind her. She shoved and pushed her way to the corner of the yard, where there was a bench. She climbed the bench, helped Thalia up, and then blew her whistle three times. A hush fell over the yard.

“This is Thalia Gianakos,” Mamá cried. “As of today …” She paused. “Whoever is crying, shut your mouth before I give you reason to. Now, as of today, Thalia is a student at this school. I expect all of you to treat her with decency and good manners. If I hear rumors of taunting, I will find you and I will make you sorry. You know I will. I have no more to say about this business.”

She climbed down from the bench and, holding Thalia’s hand, headed toward the classroom.

From that day forth, Thalia never again wore the mask, either in public or at home.

A couple of weeks before Christmas that year, we received a letter from Madaline. The shoot had run into unexpected delays. First, the director of photography—Madaline wrote DOPand Thalia had to explain it to me and Mamá—had fallen off a scaffold on the set and broken his arm in three places. Then the weather had complicated all the location shoots.

So we are in a bit of a “holding pattern,” as they say. It would not be an entirely bad thing, since it gives us time to work out some wrinkles in the script, if it did not also mean that we won’t be reunited as I had hoped. I am crushed, my darlings. I miss you all so dearly, especially you, Thalia, my love. I can only count the days until later this spring when this shoot has wrapped and we can be together again. I carry all three of you in my heart every minute of every day.