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.
‘You forgot about us,’ she says.
‘I know.’
And then I kiss her face and her body and I feel with my lips every inch of her, every line, every scar, everything that she has seen and carried and felt. Then I rest my head on her stomach and she puts her hand on my head and strokes my hair.
‘Maybe we can have another child,’ I say, ‘one day. They won’t be Sami, but we will tell them everything about him.’
‘You won’t forget him?’ she says.
She is silent for a while and I can feel her heartbeat in her belly.
‘Do you remember how he loved to play in the garden?’ I say.
‘Of course I do.’
‘And how he pushed that worm around in his toy truck like he was actually taking him somewhere?’
She laughs and I do