Chapter 317: Almost there
Amira was coming back because her daughter was sick, and she was running out of time, and there was no other door.
I will beg, she had told herself on the train, watching Porto give way to the border and the border give way to the long open country in between. I will get on my knees. I will say every true thing I have never said. I will crawl if I have to.
I will crawl for her. Hope’s fist uncurled against her neck and then curled again, tighter, in sleep.
Amira pressed her lips to the top of her daughter’s head. "Almost there," she whispered. "Almost."
The cab turned onto the long, tree-lined road that led to the Pedro estate.
Amira looked at the gates when they came into view, tall, iron, unchanged, and felt something move through her that was not quite fear, not quite grief, and not quite hope. Something that had no clean name. Something appropriate to the size of what she was about to do.
The driver glanced in the mirror. "This is the one?"
"Yes," she said.
She paid. She got out. She lifted Hope from the carrier with practised care, holding her against her shoulder, and the child murmured and pressed closer in sleep and did not wake.
Amira stood on the pavement outside the Pedro gates with her suitcase at her feet and her daughter in her arms.
She pressed the intercom.
Waited.
Somewhere inside the house, a phone would be ringing. Someone would be looking at a screen. Someone would see her face on a camera and recognize it or mistake it for another face that looked just like it, and for a moment, the world would hold its breath around that confusion.
She stood straight.
She had not come this far in the wrong direction.
The gate clicked.
And began, slowly, to open.
—---
Saturday afternoons were supposed to be for nothing.
That was the agreement Amara had made with herself not written down, not spoken aloud, but kept with the same quiet discipline she brought to everything else.
Saturday afternoons were the one window in the week she did not fill. No calls, no files brought home in her bag, no mental rehearsal of Monday’s schedule. The twins were Julian’s responsibility for three hours, and she was responsible for nothing except the particular luxury of existing without being needed.
She had been looking forward to it all week.
She was sitting on the living room sofa with a cup of tea going cold beside her and a book open on her lap when she heard the gate intercom buzz from the front hallway.
She considered not answering.
Then she considered that it might be the delivery she was expecting, and she put her book down, went to the hallway, and pressed the screen.
The image was small and slightly grainy, the way the intercom camera always was in afternoon light. She had been meaning to ask someone to fix it for weeks, but the face was perfectly, unmistakably clear.
Amara’s hand went still on the intercom panel.
She looked at the screen for a long moment.
Amira.
The name did not arrive as a sound. It arrived as a sensation, something physical, low in the chest, like a hand pressing flat against a door that had been closed for a very long time. All of it came with the name.
The years of it. The specific, layered weight of what her sister was to her was what she had been, what she had done, what she had cost her. It came back not in sequence but all at once, the way trauma tends to, every instance simultaneous and present and equally real.
She stood in the hallway and breathed.
She could send her away. It was within her rights. It was, by any reasonable accounting of what she was owed, the appropriate response. She did not have to open this gate. She did not have to open any gate she had earned the right to close.
Her finger hovered over the panel.
Then she looked again at the screen.
Amira was holding something.
A child. A small child pressed against her chest, round-cheeked, wearing a yellow jacket with something embroidered on the collar. Asleep, or close to it, one fist tucked under her own chin.
Amara looked at that child for a moment. She pressed the gate release and walked outside.
The afternoon was mild. The garden between the house and the gate was doing what the garden always did in this season, the bougainvillea along the east wall going extravagantly pink, the lawn recently cut, the whole thing carrying the particular manicured peace of a space that has been well tended for a long time. It was a good garden. Amara had learned to love it.
She walked to the middle of the path and stopped.
Amira had already come through the gate. She was standing just inside it with her suitcase beside her and the child against her chest and the afternoon light on her face.
She looked like Amara.
She always had, obviously, they were always assumed to be identical, built from the same blueprint but it struck Amara every time she had not seen her sister for a long period, the way it apparently struck people who met them together for the first time. The architecture was the same. But the woman inside the architecture had changed.
Her hair, for one thing. Amara remembered the crimson. Hard to forget, it had been Amira’s flag, her signature, the thing she wore like a declaration. It was gone now. Dark again. Their natural colour. She wore it simply, pulled back, no performance in it.
She looked tired.
Not the performative tiredness of someone who wanted you to notice, the real kind. The kind that lived in the set of the shoulders and the slight hollowing beneath the eyes and the way she was standing, as if standing itself was something she was doing deliberately rather than automatically.
They looked at each other across twenty feet of garden path.
Amara tilted her head.
The gesture was not welcome. It was a question. It said: speak, then.
Amira looked at her for one more moment. Then she shifted the child to her left arm, bent down slowly, and lowered herself to her knees on the garden path.
Amara went very still.