He sighs and turns on his side. ‘Maman,’ he says, half opening his eyes.
‘It’s Nuri,’ I whisper. ‘Your door was open and the covers were off. I thought you might be cold.’
I pull the covers over him, tuck him in as if he is a child. He mumbles something and falls back asleep.
I head downstairs and I unlock the glass door and stand outside in the moonlit courtyard. The sensor catches me and the light comes on. The bee is sleeping on one of the dandelions. I stroke her fur, very gently so that I will not disturb her. I am amazed that she has survived in this little garden she has made into a home. I watch her resting among the flowers with her saucer of sugar water by her side; she has learnt to live without her wings.
I now know that Mohammed will not be coming – I understand that I created him, but the wind picks up and the leaves rustle and there is a chill in the air that gets beneath my skin, and I imagine his tiny figure in the shadows of the garden. The memory of him lives on, as if somehow, in some dark corner of my heart, he had had a life of his own. When I come to this realisation it is Sami who fills my mind. I remember tucking him into bed, in the room with the blue tiles, and sitting beside him to read the children’s book I had found at the market. His eyes lit up, full of anticipation. I translated as I read, from English to Arabic.
‘Who would ever build a house made of straw?’ he had said, laughing. ‘I would have used metal, the hardest metal in the world, like the type they use for spaceships!’
How he loved to look up at the stars and make up stories. The sensor light goes off and I sit for a while in the darkness and look into the dark sky. I have only memories now. The wind blows and I can smell the sea. The leaves on the trees move and I can see him again, in my mind, Sami, playing beneath the tree in the garden in Aleppo, in our house on the hill, putting worms into the back of a toy truck so that he could take them for a drive.
‘What are you doing?’ I’d said to him. ‘Where are you taking them?’
‘They have no legs so I’m helping them. I’m going to drive them to the moon!’
There was a full moon in a blue sky that night.
I go to our room. Afra is asleep with her hands tucked beneath her cheek. On the bedside table there is another picture. I pick it up and for a moment I cannot breathe. She has drawn the cherry tree in the concrete garden, with its crooked branches and soft pink petals. This time the colours are correct, the lines and shading less distorted. The sky is bright and blue with wisps of clouds and white birds. But beneath the tree, a grey sketch, almost invisible: the gentle outline of a boy, the pencil marks soft and swift, making him appear as though he has been captured in movement. He is part of this world and yet not quite in it. There is a slight shimmer of red on his T-shirt where Afra has started to colour him in and stopped. Although he is a half-ghost, he is clear enough for me to see that his face is tilted toward the sky.
I climb in next to her and look at the gentle curve of her body and remember the shimmering outline of the buildings.
I reach out and touch her for the first time, run my hand along the length of her arm, then down over her hips. I touch her as if she is made of the finest film of glass, as if she might easily break under my fingertips, but she sighs and edges closer to me, though she is asleep. I realise how afraid I have been of touching her.
The sun is rising and her face in the dawn light is beautiful, those fine lines around her eyes, the curve of her chin, the dark hairs on the sides of her face, the slope of her neck, soft skin down to her breasts. But then I imagine him on her, forcing her, the look in her eyes, the fear, the scream locked inside her, the hand over her mouth. I remember the key that I forgot on the coffee table of the smuggler’s apartment, I remember driving through the streets of Athens and not turning back. I am shaking now. I fight it, push the thought out. I realise I have forgotten to love her. Here is her body, here are the lines on her face, here is the feel of her skin, here is the wound across her cheek that leads into her, like a road, all the way to her heart. These are the roads we take.
‘Afra,’ I say.
She sighs and opens her eyes ever so slightly.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What for?’
‘I’m sorry I forgot the key.’
She doesn’t say anything but she wraps her arms around me so that I can smell the roses, and then I can feel her crying on my chest.
I move back so that I can look at her – sadness and memories, love and loss, blooming from her eyes. I kiss her tears, I taste them, I swallow them. I take in everything that she can see.