“Go find her yourself.”
Eventually Sonja found the girl on the fourth floor, cross-legged within the doorway that framed the charred canvas of the city. Sonja sat beside her. “I’m sorry.”
“Will he come back?”
“I don’t know,” Sonja said, and immediately regretted it, knowing how much false hope one can cultivate in the soil of those three words. “Probably not.”
The girl nodded to the city.
“It’s hard, Havaa, I know. The same thing happened to my sister.” But that was a lie, wasn’t it? She spoke of Natasha as if her sister was one of the disappeared. She wanted a share of the national suffering, to blame the Feds for the fact that her sister didn’t love her enough to say good-bye. There was, at the center, an unnamable darkness around which she circled but couldn’t touch. “I don’t know where she is. I don’t know if she’s alive or dead. I know nothing.”
“How do you find them?” the girl asked. She lifted her gaze to Sonja as if teetering on the precipice.
“I don’t know, Havaa. I’m sorry. I don’t. Maybe we try to find them in other people. In kindness and generosity; those things don’t disappear.”
The girl gave a deep, mucus-rattled snort. The answer wasn’t the one she wanted, but Sonja had learned to be realistic when discussing death. Even if the answer put no distance between the girl and the hole the war opened within her, it was, Sonja hoped, enough to keep her holding on.
Havaa reached for her hand, and without thinking, Sonja felt for her pulse. Her radial artery rose and fell against Sonja’s finger as a gentle reminder. She pressed her palm to Havaa’s forehead.
“Am I sick?” the girl asked.
“No, you are in perfect health.” And as she said the words, they seemed like a small miracle. She held Havaa’s wrist, bending the joint back and forth. Through faded blue sweatpants, she felt the shape of Havaa’s calves and knees. These legs would stand and walk and run. These arms would lift and embrace and let go. This person would grow and adapt and live; Sonja would make sure of it. “Your family isn’t your choice,” her father had said, to quell a tantrum, many years earlier, and without wanting to, she kept discovering what he had meant.
“What are you doing?” Havaa asked.
Spools of raw gratitude unraveled in Sonja. She was an idiot to be so impressed by legs that walked, wrists that bent, hands that held. Instead of explaining, she focused on the sensation of good fortune, of undeniable blessing, so she could later return to this memory to marvel at the girl’s body, how remarkable it is, this human matter.
“I have no idea what I’m doing,” she said, and helped the girl to her feet. “You kept your suitcase packed just in case you had to leave again, right?”
Havaa nodded.
A half hour later they left the hospital. Block after block passed unchanged but for the location of craters, the dispersion of brick. A one-way sign pointed to the sky. Three emaciated black dogs watched them from across the canyon of a grocery store basement, but thankfully didn’t follow. All through it Sonja’s head hummed. She held the girl’s suitcase in one hand, and her hand in the other. She tried to remember the name of the street she had lived on.
This is what there is. Scorch marks fanning like massive seashells across the ground. Clouds gathering at the horizon. The unevenness of earth. The small heat she holds in her hand. A hand that is her hand holding a hand that is the girl’s hand. This is it.
Somehow her feet recalled what she had forgotten. They led her. Her apartment block hadn’t fallen. Blast tremors had opened the windows, but the building stood. They climbed the stairs.
“A nice woman lives here,” she said as they passed Laina’s flat. “Maybe you could spend time with her while I’m at the hospital.”
The girl nodded. They stood at the front door. “I haven’t been here in many months,” she said. She unlocked the door. Dust covered everything but the ceiling. She would deal with it tomorrow, or the day after that; she had cleaned enough for one day. The entranceway bore no sign of break-in. The looters had long since emigrated. She lit a candle.
For dinner Havaa skinned and cut the sprouts from two potatoes, while Sonja found a car battery with enough juice to put a pot of water and rice to boil on the hot plate. When