but I heard the panic in it. "Please promise you won't! Oh God, Amir agha! Please promise you won't!"
How could I promise? I held him against me, held him tightly, and rocked badk and forth. He wept into my shirt until his tears dried, until his shaking stopped and his frantic pleas dwindled to indecipherable mumbles. I waited, rocked him until his breathing slowed and his body slackened. I remembered something I had read somewhere a long time ago: That's how children deal with terror. They fall asleep.
I carried him to his bed, set him down. Then I lay in my own bed, looking out the window at the purple sky over Islamabad. THE SKY WAS A DEEP BLACK when the phone jolted me from sleep. I rubbed my eyes and turned on the bedside lamp. It was a little past 10:30 P.M.; I'd been sleeping for almost three hours. I picked up the phone. "Hello?"
"Call from America." Mr. Fayyaz's bored voice.
"Thank you," I said. The bathroom light was on; Sohrab was taking his nightly bath. A couple of clicks and then Soraya:
"Salaam!" She sounded excited.
"How did the meeting go with the lawyer?"
I told her what Omar Faisal had suggested. "Well, you can forget about it," she said. "We won't have to do that."
I sat up. "Rawsti? Why, what's up?"
"I heard back from Kaka Sharif. He said the key was getting Sohrab into the country. Once he's in, there are ways of keeping him here. So he made a few calls to his INS friends. He called me back tonight and said he was almost certain he could get Sohrab a humanitarian visa."
"No kidding?" I said. "Oh thank God! Good ol' Sharifjan!"
"I know. Anyway, we'll serve as the sponsors. It should all happen pretty quickly. He said the visa would be good for a year, plenty of time to apply for an adoption petition."
"It's really going to happen, Soraya, huh?"
"It looks like it," she said. She sounded happy. I told her I loved her and she said she loved me back. I hung up.
"Sohrab!" I called, rising from my bed. "I have great news." I knocked on the bathroom door. "Sohrab! Soraya jan just called from California. We won't have to put you in the orphanage, Sohrab. We're going to America, you and I. Did you hear me? We're going to America!"
I pushed the door open. Stepped into the bathroom.
Suddenly I was on my knees, screaming. Screaming through my clenched teeth. Screaming until I thought my throat would rip and my chest explode.
Later, they said I was still screaming when the ambulance arrived.
Chapter Twenty-Five
They won't let me in.
I see them wheel him through a set of double doors and I follow. I burst through the doors, the smell of iodine and peroxide hits me, but all I have time to see is two men wearing surgical caps and a woman in green huddling over a gurney. A white sheet spills over the side of the gurney and brushes against grimy checkered tiles. A pair of small, bloody feet poke out from under the sheet and I see that the big toenail on the left foot is chipped. Then a tall, thickset man in blue presses his palm against my chest and he's pushing me back out through the doors, his wedding band cold on my skin. I shove forward and I curse him, but he says you cannot be here, he says it in English, his voice polite but firm. "You must wait," he says, leading me back to the waiting area, and now the double doors swing shut behind him with a sigh and all I see is the top of the men's surgical caps through the doors' narrow rectangular windows.
He leaves me in a wide, windowless corridor crammed with people sitting on metallic folding chairs set along the walls, others on the thin frayed carpet. I want to scream again, and I remember the last time I felt this way, riding with Baba in the tank of the fuel truck, buried in the dark with the other refugees. I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills. But I am here, my legs blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning. There will be no floating away. There will be no other reality tonight. I close my eyes and my nostrils fill