hard chair as I usually did, I might lie alongside him, as his mother would if she were there. I hesitated only a moment before laying myself down, the length of his narrow bed, my arm up under my head so I could better watch him; and he rested his beautiful hand upon my other arm, just to be sure of me, so like his mother, and he closed his fine eyes and went almost immediately to sleep.
So I remember that night, that Tuesday, because it was when I took new steps in my closeness to both son and father: the same night, although they didn’t know it, one and the other.
And on my long walk with Skandar, after he and Sirena came home from their supper, it was new, because I also talked. We were passing the cemetery and I asked if he’d ever walked there, because it was so beautiful, but he hadn’t, and I told him about going to see my mother’s grave, and then I told him about her, Bella Eldridge, and her years of illness, and her admirable, grown-up combination of competence and resignation, and how furious it made me, how looking at her life I felt like a ravenous wolf, I wanted her to have had the chance to devour the world, to be greedy, to be sated. He laughed and said, “Why don’t you want these things for yourself, instead, who are here on earth to enjoy them? Don’t you think she’d want you to want them for yourself?”
“But I do,” I said, so emphatically that I almost reached to touch him. “I do want for myself. Enormously.”
“I would never have known that,” he said. “If you hadn’t told me. You seem wonderfully calm in your life, as though it’s in enviable order. As though there’s nothing extra that you would require. You don’t have messes, or make them. You’re so generous to everyone—to your school, to Reza, to Sirena—even to me. You don’t look like a ravenous wolf.”
“Well I am,” I said. “I’m starving.”
We were passing an ice-cream shop at that point, and he made a joke about how, if it were open, I could be satisfied.
“I could eat every last spoonful in that place and it wouldn’t fill a corner of my hunger,” I said.
“Then you must find a way to feed yourself.” He was quite earnest now. “You must ask for what you need.”
“Need?” I laughed. “That’s a complicated word, isn’t it? Who needs anything, really, besides some food and water? I’ve already got much more than I need.”
“But if you’re a ravenous wolf …” He looked off into the distance, smiling as ever. “I can’t think of you this way, you see. It doesn’t make sense to me. What is it that you want?”
“Life,” I said. “All of it. Everything. I don’t want to miss it. I don’t want the prison doors to close.”
“Prison doors? But really—”
“I know. It doesn’t make sense to you, who grew up with war and misery all around you, and I know terrible things have happened in your family—your brother—I know. But trust me.”
And I told him—which is odd to think, even now, because of course I hadn’t ever properly told Sirena; bits and pieces, maybe, but not the whole story—about how I’d grown up with my mother’s longing and had never found a way to fulfill it, how I’d always thought there were rules about what was possible and allowable, even though I hadn’t known, really, who’d made those rules. How in high school, art had seemed the way to break the rules, to get around them; but how it hadn’t, then, seemed properly grown up, afterward.
“Who says you have to be grown up?” he asked.
“Tell that to an elementary school teacher! I don’t know. It seemed like, who did I think I was, to think I could be an artist, you know? And it didn’t seem like I could make a living—”
“Did you try?”
“I couldn’t bear to be a failure. It seemed worse to try and fail than not to try. And then my mother, you see—”
“Yes,” he said, “I do see.”
And we walked along in silence for a while.
“Service,” he said, “is one of life’s great joys. It’s a privilege to be in service.”
“You’re joking, right? What does that even mean?” I’d always thought of my service as my enslavement.
“It’s a great relief, a gift, to be faced with a job that you know absolutely you must do for the benefit