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When I was a little girl, my father and I had a nightly ritual. After I'd said my twenty-one Bismillahs and he had tucked me into bed, he would sit at my side and pluck bad dreams from my head with his thumb and forefinger. His fingers would hop from my forehead to my temples, patiently searching behind my ears, at the back of my head, and he'd make a pop sound -- like a bottle being uncorked -- with each nightmare he purged from my brain. He stashed the dreams, one by one, into an invisible sack in his lap and pulled the drawstring tightly. He would then scour the air, looking for happy dreams to replace the ones he had sequestered away. I watched as he cocked his head slightly and frowned, his eyes roaming side to side, like he was straining to hear distant music. I held my breath, waiting for the moment when my father's face unfurled into a smile, when he sang, Ah, here is one, when he cupped his hands, let the dream land in his palms like a petal slowly twirling down from a tree. Gently, then, so very gently -- my father said all good things in life were fragile and easily lost -- he would raise his hands to my face, rub his palms against my brow and happiness into my head.

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What am I going to dream about tonight, Baba? I asked.

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Ah, tonight. Well, tonight is a special one, he always said before going on to tell me about it. He would make up a story on the spot. In one of the dreams he gave me, I had become the world's most famous painter. In another, I was the queen of an enchanted island, and I had a flying throne. He even gave me one about my favorite dessert, Jell-O. I had the power to, with a wave of my wand, turn anything into Jell-O -- a school bus, the Empire State Building, the entire Pacific Ocean, if I liked. More than once, I saved the planet from destruction by waving my wand at a crashing meteor. My father, who never spoke much about his own father, said it was from him that he had inherited his storytelling ability. He said that when he was a boy, his father would sometimes sit him down -- if he was in the mood, which was not often -- and tell stories populated with jinns and fairies and divs.

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Some nights, I turned the tables on Baba. He shut his eyes and I slid my palms down his face, starting at his brow, over the prickly stubble of his cheeks, the coarse hairs of his mustache.

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And so, what is my dream tonight? he would whisper, taking my hands. And his smile would open. Because he knew already what dream I was giving him. It was always the same. The one of him and his little sister lying beneath a blossoming apple tree, drifting toward an afternoon nap. The sun warm against their cheeks, its light picking out the grass and the leaves and clutter of blossoms above.

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I was an only, and often lonely, child. After they'd had me, my parents, who'd met back in Pakistan when they were both around forty, had decided against tempting fate a second time. I remember how I would eye with envy all the kids in our neighborhood, in my school, who had a little brother or sister. How bewildered I was by the way some of them treated each other, oblivious to their own good luck. They acted like wild dogs. Pinching, hitting, pushing, betraying one another any way they could think of. Laughing about it too. They wouldn't speak to one another. I didn't understand. Me, I spent most of my early years craving a sibling. What I really wished I had was a twin, someone who'd cried next to me in the crib, slept beside me, fed from Mother's breast with me. Someone to love helplessly and totally, and in whose face I could always find myself.

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And so Baba's little sister, Pari, was my secret companion, invisible to everyone but me. She was my sister, the one I'd always wished my parents had given me. I saw her in the bathroom mirror when we brushed our teeth side by side in the morning. We dressed together. She followed me to school and sat close to me in class -- looking straight ahead at the board, I could always spot the black of her hair and the white of her profile out of the corner of my eye. I took her with me to the playground at recess, feeling her presence behind me when I whooshed down a slide, when I swung from one monkey bar to the next. After school, when I sat at the kitchen table sketching, she doodled patiently nearby or stood looking out the window until I finished and we ran outside to jump rope, our twin shadows bopping up and down on the concrete.

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No one knew about my games with Pari. Not even my father. She was my secret.

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Sometimes, when no one was around, we ate grapes and talked and talked -- about toys, which cereals were tastiest, cartoons we liked, schoolkids we didn't, which teachers were mean. We shared the same favorite color (yellow), favorite ice cream (dark cherry), TV show (Alf), and we both wanted to be artists when we grew up. Naturally, I imagined we looked exactly the same because, after all, we were twins. Sometimes I could almost see her -- really see her, I mean -- just at the periphery of my eyesight. I tried drawing her, and, each time, I gave her the same slightly uneven light green eyes as mine, the same dark curly hair, the same long, slashing eyebrows that almost touched. If anyone asked, I told them I had drawn myself.

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Some people hide their sadness very well, Pari. He was like that. You couldn't tell looking at him. He was a hard man. But I think, yes, I think he was sad inside.

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Do you think your father was sad? That he sold her?

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I felt certain that if I listened closely enough to her story, I would discover something revealed about myself.

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The tale of how my father had lost his sister was as familiar to me as the stories my mother had told me of the Prophet, tales I would learn again later when my parents would enroll me in Sunday school at a mosque in Hayward. Still, despite the familiarity, each night I asked to hear Pari's story again, caught in the pull of its gravity. Maybe it was simply because we shared a name. Maybe that was why I sensed a connection between us, dim, enfolded in mystery, real nonetheless. But it was more than that. I felt touched by her, like I too had been marked by what had happened to her. We were interlocked, I sensed, through some unseen order in ways I couldn't wholly understand, linked beyond our names, beyond familial ties, as if, together, we completed a puzzle.

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She was perfect, he would say. Like you are.

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The whole time we talked like this, a fantasy played out in my head. In it, I would save all my money, not spend a dollar on candy or stickers, and when my piggy bank was full -- though it wasn't a pig at all but a mermaid sitting on a rock -- I would break it open and pocket all the money and set out to find my father's little sister, wherever she was, and, when I did, I would buy her back and bring her home to Baba. I would make my father happy. There was nothing in the world I desired more than to be the one to take away his sadness.

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Baba?

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He would kiss my cheek and tuck the blanket around my neck. At the door, just after he'd turned off the light, he would pause.

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You know already.

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Mmm?

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My father would smile and say, Why should I be when I have you? but, even at that age, I could tell. It was like a birthmark on his face.

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Are you?

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Was she a good sister?

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Another smile. Yes, I know.

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She was perfect.

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I always waited until he'd shut the door before I slid out of bed, fetched an extra pillow, and placed it next to my own. I went to sleep each night feeling twin hearts beating in my chest.

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So what's my dream tonight? Baba would ask.

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I remember a minor miracle of a conversation I had had with Baba, about a month back. The exchange was a fleeting bubble of normalcy, like a tiny pocket of air down in the deep, dark, cold bottom of the ocean. I was late bringing him lunch, and he turned his head to me from his recliner and remarked, with the gentlest critical tone, that I was genetically programmed to not be punctual. Like your mother, God rest her soul.

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But then, he went on, smiling, as if to reassure me, a person has to have a flaw somewhere.

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I check my watch as I veer onto the freeway from the Old Oakland Road entrance. It's already half past noon. It will take me forty minutes at least to reach SFO, barring any accidents or roadwork on the 101. On the plus side, it is an international flight, so she will still have to clear customs, and perhaps that will buy me a little time. I slide over to the left lane and push the Lexus up close to eighty.

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So this is the one token flaw God tossed my way, then? I said, lowering the plate of rice and beans on his lap. Habitual tardiness?

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And He did so with great reluctance, I might add. Baba reached for my hands. So close, so very close He had you to perfection.

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"Pari?"

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Well, if you like, I'll happily let you in on a few more.

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I am old and helpless.

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"Okay. I'll ask your mother to make us lunch," he says. "She could bring something from the restaurant."

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"Yes. He's a wonderful young man. He made us eggs. We had them with toast. Where are you?"

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"Yes, Baba. Is everything okay at the house with you and Hector?"

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I play with the radio, flipping from talk to country to jazz to more talk. I turn it off. I'm restless and nervous. I reach for my cell phone on the passenger seat. I call the house and leave the phone flipped open on my lap.

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Now you want me to feel sorry for you.

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"I'm driving," I say.

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Oh, heaps. Ready to be unleashed. For when you're old and helpless.

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"Hello?"

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You have them hidden away, do you?

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"To the restaurant? You don't have a shift today, do you?"

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"Salaam, Baba. It's me."

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"No, I'm on my way to the airport, Baba. I'm picking someone up."

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To my relief, he doesn't mention her again. But, some days, he won't stop. Why won't you tell me where she is, Pari? Is she having an operation? Don't lie to me! Why is everyone lying to me? Has she gone away? Is she in Afghanistan? Then I'm going too! I'm going to Kabul, and you can't stop me. We go back and forth like this, Baba pacing, distraught; me feeding him lies, then trying to distract him with his collection of home-improvement catalogs or something on television. Sometimes it works, but other times he is impervious to my tricks. He worries until he is in tears, in hysterics. He slaps at his head and rocks back and forth in the chair, sobbing, his legs quivering, and then I have to feed him an Ativan. I wait for his eyes to cloud over, and, when they do, I drop on the couch, exhausted, out of breath, near tears myself. Longingly, I look at the front door and the openness beyond and I want to walk through it and just keep walking. And then Baba moans in his sleep, and I snap back, simmering with guilt.

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"All right, Baba."

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"Can I talk to Hector, Baba?"

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"Hey, girl."

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Hector Juarez lives across the street. We've been neighbors for many years and have become friends in the last few. He comes over a couple of times a week and he and I eat junk food and watch trash TV late into the night, mostly reality shows. We chew on cold pizza and shake our heads with morbid fascination at the antics and tantrums on the screen. Hector was a marine, stationed in the south of Afghanistan. A couple of years back, he got himself badly hurt in an IED attack. Everyone from the block showed up when he finally came home from the VA. His parents had hung a Welcome Home, Hector sign out in their front yard, with balloons and a lot of flowers. Everyone clapped when his parents pulled up to the house. Several of the neighbors had baked pies. People thanked him for his service. They said, Be strong, now. God bless. Hector's father, Cesar, came over to our house a few days later and he and I installed the same wheelchair ramp Cesar had built outside his own house leading up to the front door, the American flag draped above it. I remember, as the two of us worked on the ramp, I felt a need to apologize to Cesar for what had happened to Hector in my father's homeland.

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I hear the receiver transferring hands. In the background, the sound of a game-show crowd groaning, then applause.

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"Hey, I really like the new painting, girl. The one with the kid in the funny hat? Abe here showed it to me. He was all proud too. I was, like, damn! You should be proud, man."

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I smile as I shift lanes to let a tailgater pass. "Maybe I know what to give you for Christmas now."

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"I really owe you."

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"Thanks for making him eggs," I say.

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"It's all good here," Hector says. "We ate. We did Price Is Right. We're chillin' now with Wheel. Next up is Feud."

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It's like seeing the photo of a radio personality, how they never turn out to look the way you had pictured them in your mind, listening to their voice in your car. She is old, for one thing. Or oldish. Of course I knew this. I had done the math and estimated she had to be around her early sixties. Except it is hard to reconcile this slim gray-haired woman with the little girl I've always envisioned, a three-year-old with dark curly hair and long eyebrows that almost meet, like mine. And she is taller than I imagined. I can tell, even though she is sitting, on a bench near a sandwich kiosk, looking around timidly like she's lost. She has narrow shoulders and a delicate build, a pleasant face, her hair pulled back taut and held with a crocheted headband. She wears jade earrings, faded jeans, a long salmon tunic sweater, and a yellow scarf wrapped around her neck with casual European elegance. She had told me in her last e-mail that she would wear the scarf so I could spot her quickly.

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Hector lowers his voice a notch. "Pancakes, actually. And guess what? He loved them. Ate up a four-stack."

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"What for, mija? We're having a good time. Aren't we, Abe?"

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"Ouch. Sorry."

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I remind him to give Baba his late-morning pills and hang up.

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"Hi," I say. "I thought I'd check in."

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"Remind me again why we can't get married?" Hector says. I hear Baba protesting in the background and Hector's laugh, away from the receiver. "I'm joking, Abe. Go easy on me. I'm a cripple." Then, to me, "I think your father just flashed me his inner Pashtun."

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We hug, and she kisses me on the cheeks. Her skin is soft like felt. When we pull back, she holds me at a distance, hands cupping my shoulders, and looks into my face as if she were appraising a painting. There is a film of moisture over her eyes. They're alive with happiness.

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We meet at the bench. She grins and my knees wobble. She has Baba's grin exactly -- except for a rice grain's gap between her upper front teeth -- crooked on the left, the way it scrunches up her face and nearly squeezes shut her eyes, how she tilts her head just a tad. She stands up, and I notice the hands, the knobby joints, the fingers bent away from the thumb at the first knuckle, the chickpea-sized lumps at the wrist. I feel a twist in my stomach, it looks so painful.

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She has not seen me yet, and I linger for a moment among the travelers pushing luggage carts through the terminal, the town-car chauffeurs holding signs with clients' names. My heart clamoring inside my rib cage, I think to myself, This is her. This is her. This is really her. Then our eyes connect, and recognition ripples across her face. She waves.

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"I apologize for being late."

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"It's nothing," she says. "At last, to be with you! I am just so glad"-- Is nussing. At lass, too be weez yoo! The French accent sounds even thicker in person than it did on the phone.

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"I took a pill, otherwise I know I cannot sleep. I will stay awake the whole time. Because I am too happy and too excited." She holds me with her gaze, beaming at me -- as if she is afraid the spell will break if she looks away -- until the PA overhead advises passengers to report any unsupervised luggage, and then her face slackens a bit.

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Later, as we settle into the car, I steal quick looks at her. It's the strangest thing. There is something oddly illusory about Pari Wahdati, sitting in my car, mere inches from me. One moment, I see her with perfect clarity -- the yellow scarf around her neck, the short, flimsy hairs at the hairline, the coffee-colored mole beneath the left ear -- and, the next, her features are enfolded in a kind of haze, as if I am peering at her through bleary glasses. I feel, in passing, a kind of vertigo.

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"Does Abdullah know yet that I am coming here?"

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"I told him I was bringing home a guest," I say.

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"I'm glad too," I say. "How was your flight?"

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"You are okay?" she says, eyeing me as she snaps the seat-belt buckle.

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She nods, smiling. "Ah, for me too. For me too it is strange. You know, my whole life I never meet anyone with the same name as me."

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"I keep thinking you'll disappear."

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"Neither have I." I turn the ignition key. "So tell me about your children."

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"It's just… a little unbelievable," I say, laughing nervously. "That you really exist. That you're actually here."

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I do wish we had.

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She tells me her son Alain --"and your cousin," she adds -- and his wife, Ana, have had a fifth baby, a little girl, and they have moved to Valencia, where they have bought a house. "Finalement, they leave that detestable apartment in Madrid!" Her firstborn, Isabelle, who writes musical scores for television, has been commissioned to compose her first major film score. And Isabelle's husband, Albert, is now head chef at a well-regarded restaurant in Paris.

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"I'm sorry?"

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As I pull out of the parking lot, she tells me all about them, using their names as though I had known them all my life, as though her children and I had grown up together, gone on family picnics and to camp and taken summer vacations to seaside resorts where we had made seashell necklaces and buried one another under sand.

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"You owned a restaurant, no?" she asks. "I think you told me this in your e-mail."

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"Well, my parents did. It was always my father's dream to own a restaurant. I helped them run it. But I had to sell it a few years back. After my mother died and Baba became… incapable."

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I had told her, in passing the first time we spoke and she asked me what I did, that I had dreams of going to art school one day.

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"Ah, I am sorry."

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She listens intently as I explain to her that I work for a firm that processes data for big Fortune 500 companies. "I write up forms for them. Brochures, receipts, customer lists, e-mail lists, that sort of thing. The main thing you need to know is how to type. And the pay is decent."

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"I should think not. You are an artist."

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"Oh, don't be. I wasn't cut out for restaurant work."

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"Actually, I am what you call a transcriptionist."

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"I see," she says. She considers, then says, "Is it interesting for you, doing this work?"

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We are passing by Redwood City on our way south. I reach across her lap and point out the passenger window. "Do you see that building? The tall one with the blue sign?"

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"Yes?"

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"I was born there."

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"Ah, bon?" She turns her neck to keep looking as I drive us past. "You are lucky."

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"How so?"

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"To know where you came from."

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"Bah, of course not. But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand."

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"I guess I never gave it much thought."

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I imagine this is how Baba feels these days. His life, riddled with gaps. Every day a mystifying story, a puzzle to struggle through.

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We drive in silence for a couple of miles.

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"Do I find my work interesting?" I say. "I came home one day and found the water running in the kitchen sink. There was broken glass on the floor, and the gas burner had been left on. That was when I knew that I couldn't leave him alone anymore. And because I couldn't afford a live-in caretaker, I looked for work I could do from home. 'Interesting' didn't figure much into the equation."

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I worry she will say next how lucky Baba is to have me for a daughter, but, to my relief and gratitude, she only nods, her eyes swimming past the freeway signs. Other people, though -- especially Afghans -- are always pointing out how fortunate Baba is, what a blessing I am. They speak of me admiringly. They make me out to be a saint, the daughter who has heroically forgone some glittering life of ease and privilege to stay home and look after her father. But, first, the mother, they say, their voices ringing, I imagine, with a glistening kind of sympathy. All those years of nursing her. What a mess that was. Now the father. She was never a looker, sure, but she had a suitor. An American, he was, the solar fellow. She could have married him. But she didn't. Because of them. The things she sacrificed. Ah, every parent should have a daughter like this. They compliment me on my good humor. They marvel at my courage and nobility the way people do those who have overcome a physical deformity or maybe a crippling speech impediment.

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"And art school can wait."

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"It has to."

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But I don't recognize myself in this version of the story. For instance, some mornings I spot Baba sitting on the edge of his bed, eyeing me with his rheumy gaze, impatient for me to slip socks onto his dry, mottled feet, and he growls my name and makes an infantile face. He wrinkles his nose in a way that makes him look like a wet, fearful rodent, and I resent him when he makes this face. I resent him for being the way he is. I resent him for the narrowed borders of my existence, for being the reason my best years are draining away from me. There are days when all I want is to be free of him and his petulance and neediness. I am nothing like a saint.

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I take the exit at Thirteenth Street. A handful of miles later, I pull into our driveway, on Beaver Creek Court, and turn off the engine.

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Pari looks out the window at our one-story house, the garage door with the peeling paint job, the olive window trim, the tacky pair of stone lions on guard on either side of the front door -- I haven't had the heart to get rid of them because Baba loves them, though I doubt he would notice. We have lived in this house since 1989, when I was seven, renting it first, before Baba bought it from the owner back in '93. Mother died in this house, on a sunny Christmas Eve morning, in a hospital bed I set up for her in the guest bedroom and where she spent the last three months of her life. She asked me to move her to that room because of the view. She said it raised up her spirits. She lay in the bed, her legs swollen and gray, and spent her days looking out the window at the cul-de-sac, the front yard with its rim of Japanese maples she had planted years before, the star-shaped flower bed, the swath of lawn split by a narrow path of pebbles, the foothills in the distance and the deep, rich gold they turned midday when sunlight shone full tilt on them.

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She toys with the frayed ends of her scarf. "Do you think it is possible that he will remember me?"

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"I am very nervous," Pari says quietly.

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I nod. I think better of telling her just how well I understand. I come close to asking whether she had ever had any intimations of my existence.

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"It's understandable," I say. "It's been fifty-eight years."

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She looks down at her hands folded in her lap. "I remember almost nothing about him. What I remember, it is not his face or his voice. Only that in my life something has been missing always. Something good. Something… Ah, I don't know what to say. That is all."

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"Do you want the truth?"

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She searches my face. "Of course, yes."

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"It's probably best he doesn't." I think of what Dr. Bashiri had said, my parents' longtime physician. He said Baba needed regimen, order. A minimum of surprise. A sense of predictability.

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I open my door. "Would you mind staying in the car a minute? I'll send my friend home, and then you can meet Baba."

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She puts a hand over her eyes, and I don't wait to see if she is going to cry.

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When I was eleven, all the sixth-grade classes in my elementary school went for an overnight field trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The whole week leading up to that Friday, it was all my classmates talked about, in the library or playing four square at recess, how much fun they would have, once the aquarium closed for the day, free to run around the exhibits, in their pajamas, among the hammerheads, the bat rays, the sea dragons, and the squid. Our teacher, Mrs. Gillespie, told us dinner stations would be set up around the aquarium, and students would have their choice of PB& J or mac and cheese. You can have brownies for dessert or vanilla ice cream, she said. Students would crawl into their sleeping bags that night and listen to teachers read them bedtime stories, and they would drift off to sleep among the sea horses and sardines and the leopard sharks gliding through tall fronds of swaying kelp. By Thursday, the anticipation in the classroom was electric. Even the usual troublemakers made sure to be on their best for fear that mischief would cost them the trip to the aquarium.

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For me, it was a bit like watching an exciting movie with the sound turned off. I felt removed from all the cheerfulness, cut off from the celebratory mood -- the way I did every December when my classmates went home to Douglas firs and stockings dangling over fireplaces and pyramids of presents. I told Mrs. Gillespie I wouldn't be going along. When she asked why, I said the field trip fell on a Muslim holiday. I wasn't sure she believed me.

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The night of the trip, I stayed home with my parents, and we watched Murder, She Wrote. I tried to focus on the show and not think about the field trip, but my mind insisted on wandering off. I imagined my classmates, at that same moment, in their pajamas, flashlights in hand, their foreheads pressed against the glass of a giant tank of eel. I felt something clenching in my chest, and I shifted my weight on the couch. Baba, slung back on the other couch, tossed a roasted peanut into his mouth and chuckled at something Angela Lansbury said. Next to him, I caught Mother watching me pensively, her face clouded over, but when our eyes met her features cleared quickly and she smiled -- a stealthy, private smile -- and I dug inward and willed myself to smile back. That night, I dreamt I was at a beach, standing waist-deep in the ocean, water that was myriad shades of green and blue, jade, sapphire, emerald, turquoise, gently rocking at my hips. At my feet glided legions of fish, as if the ocean were my own private aquarium. They brushed against my toes and tickled my calves, a thousand darting, glistening flashes of color against the white sand.

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At the aquarium, I wandered gamely through the exhibits and did my best to answer Baba's questions about different types of fish I recognized. But the place was too bright and noisy, the good exhibits too crowded. It was nothing like the way I imagined it had been the night of the field trip. It was a struggle. It wore me out, trying to make like I was having a good time. I felt a stomachache coming on, and we left after an hour or so of shuffling about. On the drive home, Baba kept glancing my way with a bruised look like he was on the verge of saying something. I felt his eyes pressing in on me. I pretended to sleep.

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That Sunday, Baba had a surprise for me. He shut down the restaurant for the day -- something he almost never did -- and drove the two of us to the aquarium in Monterey. Baba talked excitedly the whole way. How much fun we were going to have. How he looked forward to seeing all the sharks especially. What should we eat for lunch? As he spoke, I remembered when I was little and he would take me to the petting zoo at Kelley Park and the Japanese gardens next door to see the koi, and how we would give names to all the fish and how I would cling to his hand and think to myself that I would never need anyone else as long as I lived.

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The next year, in junior high, girls my age were wearing eye shadow and lip gloss. They went to Boyz II Men concerts, school dances, and on group dates to Great America, where they screeched through the dips and corkscrews of the Demon. Classmates tried out for basketball and cheerleading. The girl who sat behind me in Spanish, pale-skinned with freckles, was going out for the swim team, and she casually suggested one day, as we were clearing our desks just after the bell, that I give it a shot too. She didn't understand. My parents would have been mortified if I wore a bathing suit in public. Not that I wanted to. I was terribly self-conscious about my body. I was slim above the waist but disproportionately and strikingly thick below, as if gravity had pulled all the weight down to my lower half. I looked like I had been put together by a child playing one of those board games where you mix and match body parts or, better yet, mismatch them so everyone has a good laugh. Mother said what I had was "strong bones." She said her own mother had had the same build. Eventually, she stopped, having figured, I guess, that big-boned was not something a girl wanted to be called.

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Despite the need to make a living, Baba found the time to drive me to Farsi lessons down in Campbell. Every Tuesday afternoon, after regular school, I sat in Farsi class and, like a fish made to swim upstream, tried to guide the pen, against my hand's own nature, from right to left. I begged Baba to end the Farsi classes, but he refused. He said I would appreciate later the gift he was giving me. He said that if culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.

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I did lobby Baba to let me try out for the volleyball team, but he took me in his arms and gently cupped his hands around my head. Who would take me to practice? he reasoned. Who would drive me to games? Oh, I wish we had the luxury, Pari, like your friends' parents, but we have a living to make, your mother and I. I won't have us back on welfare. You understand, my love. I know you do.

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Then there was Sundays, when I put on a white cotton scarf, and he dropped me off at the mosque in Hayward for Koran lessons. The room where we studied -- a dozen other Afghan girls and I -- was tiny, had no air-conditioning, and smelled of unwashed linen. The windows were narrow and set high, the way prison-cell windows always are in the movies. The lady who taught us was the wife of a grocer in Fremont. I liked her best when she told us stories about the Prophet's life, which I found interesting -- how he had lived his childhood in the desert, how the angel Gabriel had appeared to him in a cave and commanded him to recite verses, how everyone who met him was struck by his kind and luminous face. But she spent the bulk of the time running down a long list, warning us against all the things we had to avoid at all cost as virtuous young Muslim girls lest we be corrupted by Western culture: boys -- first and foremost, naturally -- but also rap music, Madonna, Melrose Place, shorts, dancing, swimming in public, cheerleading, alcohol, bacon, pepperoni, non-halal burgers, and a slew of other things. I sat on the floor, sweating in the heat, my feet falling asleep, wishing I could lift the scarf from my hair, but, of course, you couldn't do that in a mosque. I looked up at the windows, but they allowed only narrow slits of sky. I longed for the moment when I exited the mosque, when fresh air first struck my face and I always felt a loosening inside my chest, the relief of an uncomfortable knot coming undone.

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But until then, the only escape was to slacken the reins on my mind. From time to time, I would find myself thinking of Jeremy Warwick, from math. Jeremy had laconic blue eyes and a white-boy Afro. He was secretive and brooding. He played guitar in a garage band -- at the school's annual talent show, they played a raucous take on "House of the Rising Sun." In class, I sat four seats behind and to the left of Jeremy. Sometimes I pictured us kissing, his hand cupped around the back of my neck, his face so close to mine it eclipsed the whole world. A sensation would spread through me like a warm feather gently shivering across my belly, my limbs. Of course it could never happen. We could never happen, Jeremy and I. If he had even the dimmest inkling of my existence, he had never given a clue. Which was just as well, really. This way, I could pretend the only reason we couldn't be together was that he didn't like me.

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I worked summers at my parents' restaurant. When I was younger, I had loved to wipe the tables, help arrange plates and silverware, fold paper napkins, drop a red gerbera into the little round vase at the center of each table. I pretended I was indispensable to the family business, that the restaurant would fall apart without me to make sure all the salt and pepper shakers were full.

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By the time I was in high school, days at Abe's Kabob House dragged long and hot. Much of the luster that the things inside the restaurant had held for me in childhood had faded. The old humming soda merchandiser in the corner, the vinyl table covers, the stained plastic cups, the tacky item names on the laminated menus -- Caravan Kabob, Khyber Pass Pilaf, Silk Route Chicken -- the badly framed poster of the Afghan girl from National Geographic, the one with the eyes -- like they had passed an ordinance that every single Afghan restaurant had to have her eyes staring back from the wall. Next to it, Baba had hung an oil painting I had done in seventh grade of the big minarets in Herat. I remember the charge of pride and glamour I had felt when he had first put it up, when I watched customers eating their lamb kabobs beneath my artwork.

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At lunch hour, while Mother and I ping-ponged back and forth from the spicy smoke in the kitchen to the tables where we served office workers and city employees and cops, Baba worked the register -- Baba and his grease-stained white shirt, the bushel of gray chest hair spilling over the open top button, his thick, hairy forearms. Baba beaming, waving cheerfully to each entering customer. Hello, sir! Hello, madam! Welcome to Abe's Kabob House. I'm Abe. Can I take your order please? It made me cringe how he didn't realize that he sounded like the goofy Middle Eastern sidekick in a bad sitcom. Then, with each meal I served, there was the sideshow of Baba ringing the old copper bell. It had started as a kind of joke, I suppose, the bell, which Baba had hooked to the wall behind the register counter. Now each table served was greeted by a hearty clang of the copper bell. The regulars were used to it -- they barely heard it anymore -- and new customers mostly chalked it up to the eccentric charm of the place, though there were complaints from time to time.

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You don't want to ring the bell anymore, Baba said one night. It was in the spring quarter of my senior year in high school. We were in the car outside the restaurant, after we had closed, waiting for Mother, who had forgotten her antacid pills inside and had run back in to fetch them. Baba wore a leaden expression. He had been in a dark mood all day. A light drizzle fell on the strip mall. It was late, and the lot was empty, save for a couple of cars at the KFC drive-thru and a pickup parked outside the dry-cleaning shop, two guys inside the truck, smoke corkscrewing up from the windows.

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It was more fun when I wasn't supposed to, I said.

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Everything is, I guess. He sighed heavily.

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Long way to Baltimore.

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I remembered how it used to thrill me, when I was little, when Baba lifted me up by the underarms and let me ring the bell. When he put me down again, my face would shine happy and proud.

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I said brightly, You can fly out to visit anytime.

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Baba turned on the car heater, crossed his arms.

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Fly out anytime, he repeated with a touch of derision. I cook kabob for a living, Pari.

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Every day for a month I had been checking our mailbox, my heart riding a swell of hope each time the delivery truck pulled up to the curb. I would bring the mail inside, close my eyes, think, This could be it. I would open my eyes and sift through the bills and the coupons and the sweepstakes. Then, on Tuesday of the week before, I had ripped open an envelope and found the words I had been waiting for: We are pleased to inform you…

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Baba rolled his eyes toward me and gave me a drawn look. His melancholy was like the darkness outside pushing against the car windows.

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Then I'll come visit.

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I leapt to my feet. I screamed -- an actual throat-ripping yowl that made my eyes water. Almost instantaneously, an image streaked through my head: opening night at a gallery, me dressed in something simple, black, and elegant, encircled by patrons and crinkle-browed critics, smiling and answering their questions, as clusters of admirers linger before my canvases and servers in white gloves float around the gallery pouring wine, offering little square bites of salmon with dill or asparagus spears wrapped in puff pastry. I experienced one of those sudden bursts of euphoria, the kind where you want to wrap strangers in a hug and dance with them in great big swoops.

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Have you thought some more, he said, about what we discussed?

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I'll call every night. I promise. You know I will.

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You mean, junior college?

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It's your mother I worry for, Baba said.

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Baba nodded. The leaves of the maples near the entrance to the parking lot tossed about in a sudden gust of wind.

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I shuddered with a sudden jolt of anger. Baba, these people reviewed my test scores and transcripts, and they went through my portfolio, and they thought enough of my artwork not only to accept me but to offer me a scholarship. This is one of the best institutes of art in the country. It's not a school you say no to. You don't get a second chance like this.

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Only for a year, maybe two. Just to give her time to get accustomed to the idea. Then you could reapply.

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That's true, he said, straightening up in his seat. He cupped his hands and blew warm air into them. Of course I understand. Of course I'm happy for you. I could see the struggle in his face. And the fear too. Not just fear for me and what might happen to me three thousand miles from home. But fear of me, of losing me. Of the power I wielded, through my absence, to make him unhappy, to maul his open, vulnerable heart, if I chose to, like a Doberman going to work on a kitten.

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Baba cleared his throat and looked out the window at the dark sky and the clouded-over moon, his eyes liquid with emotion.

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I found myself thinking of his sister. By then, my connection with Pari -- whose presence had once been like a pounding deep within me -- had long waned. I thought of her infrequently. As the years had swept past, I had outgrown her, the way I had outgrown favorite pajamas and stuffed animals I had once clung to. But now I thought of her once more and of the ties that bound us. If what had been done to her was like a wave that had crashed far from shore, then it was the backwash of that wave now pooling around my ankles, then receding from my feet.

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Everything will remind me of you.

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It was in the tender, slightly panicky way he spoke these words that I knew my father was a wounded person, that his love for me was as true, vast, and permanent as the sky, and that it would always bear down upon me. It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself.

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What's taking so long? he murmured.

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I reached over from the darkened backseat and touched his face. He leaned his cheek onto my palm.

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A month later, a couple of weeks before I was due to fly east for a campus visit, Mother went to Dr. Bashiri to tell him the antacid pills had done nothing to help her stomach pain. He sent her for an ultrasound. They found a tumor the size of a walnut in her left ovary.

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"Baba?"

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She's locking up, I said. I felt exhausted. I watched Mother hurry to the car. The drizzle had turned into a downpour.

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He is on the recliner, sitting motionless, slumped forward. He has his sweatpants on, his lower legs covered by a checkered wool shawl. He is wearing the brown cardigan sweater I bought him the year before over a flannel shirt he has buttoned all the way. This is the way he insists on wearing his shirts now, with the collar buttoned, which makes him look both boyish and frail, resigned to old age. He looks a little puffy in the face today, and strands of his white hair spill uncombed over his brow. He is watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? with a somber, perplexed expression. When I call his name, his gaze lingers on the screen like he hasn't heard me before he drags it away and looks up with displeasure. He has a small sty growing on the lower lid of his left eye. He needs a shave.

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"Baba, can I mute the TV for a second?"

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I pluck the remote from the arm of the recliner and turn off the sound, bracing myself for a tantrum. The first time he threw one, I was convinced it was a charade, an act he was putting on. To my relief, Baba doesn't protest beyond a long sigh through the nose.

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"I'm watching," he says.

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I motion to Pari, who is lingering in the hallway at the entrance to the living room. Slowly, she walks over to us, and I pull her up a chair close to Baba's recliner. She is a bundle of nervous excitement, I can tell. She sits erect, pale, leaning forward from the edge of the chair, knees pressed together, her hands clamped, and her smile so tight her lips are turning white. Her eyes are glued on Baba, as if she has only moments with him and is trying to memorize his face.

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"I know. But you have a visitor." I had already told him about Pari Wahdati's visit the day before and again this morning. But I don't ask him if he remembers. It is something that I learned early on, to not put him on the spot, because it embarrasses him and makes him defensive, sometimes abusive.

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"Baba, this is the friend I told you about."

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He eyes the gray-haired woman across from him. He has an unnerving way of looking at people these days, even when he is staring directly at them, that gives nothing away. He looks disengaged, closed off, like he meant to look elsewhere and his eyes happened upon them by accident.

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He nods slowly. I can practically see the uncertainty and confusion rippling across his face like waves of muscle spasm. His eyes shift from my face to Pari's. He opens his mouth in a strained half smile the way he does when he thinks a prank is being played on him.

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"You have an accent," he finally says.

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Baba nods. "So you live in London?" he says to Pari.

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"What?" He turns sharply to me. Then he understands and gives an embarrassed little laugh before switching from Farsi. "Do you live in London?"

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Pari clears her throat. Even so, her voice shakes when she speaks. "Hello, Abdullah. My name is Pari. It's so wonderful to see you."

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"Baba!"

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"She lives in France," I said. "And, Baba, you have to speak English. She doesn't understand Farsi."

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"Paris, actually," Pari says. "I live in a small apartment in Paris." She doesn't lift her eyes from him.

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Actually, Mother didn't much like to travel. She never saw why she would forgo the comfort and familiarity of her own home for the ordeal of flying and suitcase lugging. She had no sense of culinary adventure -- her idea of exotic food was the Orange Chicken at the Chinese take-out place on Taylor Street. It is a bit of a marvel how Baba, at times, summons her with such uncanny precision -- remembering, for instance, that she salted her food by bouncing the salt grains off the palm of her hand or her habit of interrupting people on the phone when she never did it in person -- and how, other times, he can be so wildly inaccurate. I imagine Mother is fading for him, her face receding into shadows, her memory diminishing with each passing day, leaking like sand from a fist. She is becoming a ghostly outline, a hollow shell, that he feels compelled to fill with bogus details and fabricated character traits, as though false memories are better than none at all.

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"I always planned to take my wife to Paris. Sultana -- that was her name, God rest her soul. She was always saying, Abdullah, take me to Paris. When will you take me to Paris?"

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"Maybe I'll take her still. But she has the cancer at the moment. It's the female kind -- what do you call it?-- the…"

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"Ovarian," I say.

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Pari nods, her gaze flicking to me and back to Baba.

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"I have, yes. It is beautiful up there. But I am scared of high places, so it is not always comfortable for me. But at the top, on a good sunny day, you can see for more than sixty kilometers. Of course a lot of days in Paris it is not so good and not so sunny."

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"What she wants most is to climb the Eiffel Tower. Have you seen it?" Baba says.

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"Well, it is a lovely city," Pari says.

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"Have you climbed it? All the way to the top?"

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"The Eiffel Tower?" Pari Wahdati laughs. "Oh yes. Every day. I cannot avoid it, in fact."

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Baba grunts. Pari, encouraged, continues talking about the tower, how many years it took to build it, how it was never meant to stay in Paris past the 1889 World's Fair, but she can't read Baba's eyes like I can. His expression has flattened. She doesn't realize that she has lost him, that his thoughts have already shifted course like windblown leaves. Pari nudges closer on the seat. "Did you know, Abdullah," she says, "that they have to paint the tower every seven years?"

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"That's my daughter's name."

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"Abdullah, can I ask you a question?"

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"You have the same name," Baba says. "The two of you, you have the same name. So there you have it." He coughs, absently picks at a small tear in the leather of the recliner's arm.

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He shakes his head. With a fist, he yanks at his cardigan and clutches it shut at his throat. His lips barely move as he begins to hum under his breath, a rhythmic muttering he always resorts to when he is marauded by anxiety and at a loss for an answer, when everything has blurred to vagueness and he is bowled over by a gush of disconnected thoughts, waiting desperately for the murkiness to clear.

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"Yes, I know."

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Baba shifts his gaze to the window, his fingernail still scraping the tear in the recliner's arm.

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"What did you say your name was?" Baba says.

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Baba shrugs.

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"Pari."

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Pari looks up at me like she is asking for permission. I give her the go-ahead with a nod. She leans forward in the chair. "How did you decide to choose this name for your daughter?"

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"Do you remember, Abdullah? Why this name?"

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Pari Wahdati lets out a sudden laugh that sounds like a deep, guttural cry, and she covers her mouth. "Ah, mon Dieu," she whispers. She lifts her hand. In Farsi, she sings:

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"Can you sing it for me?" Pari says urgently, a catch in her voice. "Please, Abdullah, will you sing it?"

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"Abdullah? What is that?" Pari says.

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Who was blown away by the wind one night.

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"It's like a nursery rhyme," I say. "Remember, Baba? You said you learned it when you were a boy. You said you learned it from your mother."

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He turns to me, helpless. He doesn't know.

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He lowers his head and shakes it slowly.

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"He used to say there was a second verse," I say to Pari, "but that he'd forgotten it."

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"Go ahead, Baba," I say softly. I rest my hand on his bony shoulder. "It's okay."

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"Okay."

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Beneath the shade of a paper tree.

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"Nothing," he mutters.

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Hesitantly, in a high, trembling voice and without looking up, Baba sings the same two lines several times:

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I found a sad little fairy

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"No, that song you are singing -- what is it?"

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I know a sad little fairy

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Smiling, her eyes teared over, Pari reaches for Baba's hands and takes them into her own. She kisses the back of each and presses his palms to her cheeks. Baba grins, moisture now pooling in his eyes as well. Pari looks up at me, blinking back happy tears, and I see she thinks she has broken through, that she has summoned her lost brother with this magic chant like a genie in a fairy tale. She thinks he sees her clearly now. She will understand momentarily that he is merely reacting, responding to her warm touch and show of affection. It's just animal instinct, nothing more. This I know with painful clarity.

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"Oh, Abdullah…" Pari says.

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A few months before Dr. Bashiri passed me the phone number to a hospice, Mother and I took a trip to the Santa Cruz Mountains and stayed in a hotel for the weekend. Mother didn't like long trips, but we did go off on short ones now and then, she and I, back before she was really sick. Baba would man the restaurant, and I would drive Mother and me to Bodega Bay, or Sausalito, or San Francisco, where we would always stay in a hotel near Union Square. We would settle down in our room and order room service, watch on-demand movies. Later, we would go down to the Wharf -- Mother was a sucker for all the tourist traps -- and buy gelato, watch the sea lions bobbing up and down on the water over by the pier. We would drop coins into the open cases of the street guitarists and the backpacks of the mime artists, the spray-painted robot men. We always made a visit to the Museum of Modern Art, and, my arm coiled around hers, I would show her the works of Rivera, Kahlo, Matisse, Pollock. Or else we would go to a matinee, which Mother loved, and we would see two, three films, come out in the dark, our eyes bleary, ears ringing, fingers smelling of popcorn.

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Folds appear on Baba's forehead. For a transitory moment, I think I detect a tiny crack of light in his eyes. But then it winks out, and his face is placid once more. He shakes his head. "No. No, I don't think that's how it goes at all."

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It was easier with Mother -- always had been -- less complicated, less treacherous. I didn't have to be on my guard so much. I didn't have to watch what I said all the time for fear of inflicting a wound. Being alone with her on those weekend getaways was like curling up into a soft cloud, and, for a couple of days, everything that had ever troubled me fell away, inconsequentially, a thousand miles below.

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We were celebrating the end of yet another round of chemo -- which also turned out to be her last. The hotel was a beautiful, secluded place. They had a spa, a fitness center, a game room with a big-screen TV, and a billiards table. Our room was a cabin with a wooden porch, from which we had a view of the swimming pool, the restaurant, and entire groves of redwood that soared straight up into the clouds. Some of the trees were so close, you could tell the subtle shades of color on a squirrel's fur as it dashed up the trunk. Our first morning there, Mother woke me up, said, Quick, Pari, you have to see this. There was a deer nibbling on shrubs outside the window.

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We have to do something about these eyebrows, Mother said. She was wearing a winter coat over a sweater and the maroon wool beanie hat she had knitted herself a year and a half earlier when, as she put it, all the festivities had begun.

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I pushed her wheelchair around the gardens. I'm such a spectacle, Mother said. I parked her by the fountain and I would sit on a bench close to her, the sun warming our faces, and we would watch the hummingbirds darting between flowers until she fell asleep, and then I wheeled her back to our cabin.

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Make them dramatic, then.

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On Sunday afternoon, we had tea and croissants on the balcony outside the restaurant, which was a big cathedral-ceilinged room with bookshelves, a dreamcatcher on one wall, and an honest-to-God stone hearth. On a lower deck, a man with the face of a dervish and a girl with limp blond hair were playing a lethargic game of Ping-Pong.

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She grinned weakly. Why not? She took a shallow sip of tea. Grinning accentuated all the new lines in her face. When I met Abdullah, I was selling clothes on the side of the street in Peshawar. He said I had beautiful eyebrows.

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I'll paint them back on for you, I said.

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Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra dramatic?

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Yeah.

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Pari?

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I put down my cup, began to speak, but she cut me off.

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She told me how, for years now, Baba had been sending this Iqbal -- my half uncle, I thought with an inner lurch -- a thousand dollars every three months, going down to Western Union, wiring the money to a bank in Peshawar.

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His name is Iqbal. He has sons. He lives in a refugee camp near Peshawar.

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I turned to her sharply.

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The Ping-Pong pair ditched the paddles. They were leaning now against the wooden railing, sharing a cigarette, looking up at the sky, which was luminous and clear but for a few frayed clouds. The girl had long, bony arms.

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I read in the paper there's an arts-and-crafts fair up in Capitola today, I said. If you're up to it, maybe I'll drive us, we'll have a look. We could even have dinner there, if you like.

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Abdullah has a brother in Pakistan, Mother said. A half brother.

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Okay.

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I want to tell you something.

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I'm telling you now, aren't I? That's all that matters. Your father has his reasons. I'm sure you can figure them out, you give it some time. Important thing is, he has a half brother and he's been sending him money to help out.

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Because I think you should know even if he doesn't. Also, you will have to take over the finances soon and then you would find out anyway.

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You'll be doing the books for a long time yet, Mother, I said. I did my best to disguise the wobble in my voice.

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Why are you telling me now? I asked.

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I won't, she said. And don't you go thinking I will. The time has come, you have to be ready for it.

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There was a dense pause. When she spoke again, it was in a lower tone, slower, like when I was little and we would go to the mosque for a funeral and she would hunker down next to me beforehand and patiently explain how I had to remove my shoes at the entrance, how I had to keep quiet during prayers and not fidget, not complain, and how I should use the bathroom now so I wouldn't have to later.

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I turned away, watched a cat, its tail erect, sidle up to the Ping-Pong couple. The girl reached to pet it and the cat tensed up at first. But then it curled up on the railing, let the girl run her hands over its ears, down its back. My mind was reeling. I had family outside of the U. S.

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I made myself look at the trees, the wash of sunlight falling on the feathery leaves, the rough bark of the trunks. I slid my tongue between the incisors and bit down hard. My eyes watered, and the coppery taste of blood flooded my mouth.

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Your father is like a child. Terrified of being abandoned. He would lose his way without you, Pari, and never find his way back.

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A brother, I said.

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Ask me tonight. When I'm not as tired. I'll tell you everything I know.

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I have a lot of questions.

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I blew out a gush of air; a hardness lodged in my throat. Somewhere, a chain saw buzzed to life, the crescendo of its whine at violent odds with the stillness of the woods.

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Yes.

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I nodded. I gulped the rest of my tea, which had gone cold. At a nearby table, a middle-aged couple traded pages of the newspaper. The woman, red-haired and open-faced, was quietly watching us over the top of her broadsheet, her eyes switching from me to my gray-faced mother, her beanie hat, her hands mapped with bruises, her sunken eyes and skeletal grin. When I met her gaze, the woman smiled just a tad like there was a secret knowledge between us, and I knew that she had done this too.

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I tossed the napkin on the table and pushed back my chair, walked around to the other side. I released the brake on the wheelchair and pulled the chair away from the table.

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I could use a new hat, she said.

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Yes?

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Mother's gaze lingered on me. Her eyes looked too big for her head and her head too big for her shoulders.

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So what do you think, Mother? The fair, are you up for it?

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Pari? Mother said.

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Do you even know how strong God has made you? she said. How strong and good He has made you?

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She rolled her head all the way back to look up at me. Sunlight pushed through the leaves of the trees and pinpricked her face.

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There is no accounting for how the mind works. This moment, for instance. Of the thousands and thousands of moments my mother and I shared together through all the years, this is the one that shines the brightest, the one that vibrates with the loudest hum at the back of my mind: my mother looking up at me over her shoulder, her face upside down, all those dazzling points of light shimmering on her skin, her asking did I know how good and strong God had made me.

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We move from the living room to the kitchen. I fetch a pot from the cabinet and fill it at the sink.

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After Baba falls asleep on the recliner, Pari gently zips up his cardigan and pulls up the shawl to cover his torso. She tucks a loose strand of hair behind his ear and stands over him, watching him sleep for a while. I like watching him sleep too because then you can't tell something is wrong. With his eyes closed, the blankness is lifted, and the lackluster, absent gaze too, and Baba looks more familiar. Asleep, he looks more alert and present, as if something of his old self has seeped back into him. I wonder if Pari can picture it, looking at his face resting on the pillow, how he used to be, how he used to laugh.

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"I want to show you some of these," Pari says, a charge of excitement in her voice. She's sitting at the table, busily flipping through a photo album that she fished from her suitcase earlier.

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"I'm afraid the coffee won't be up to Parisian standards," I say over my shoulder, pouring water from the pot into the coffeemaker.

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When the coffeemaker begins to gurgle, I take my seat at the kitchen table beside Pari. "Ah oui. Voilà. Here it is," she says. She flips the album around and pushes it over to me. She taps on a picture. "This is the place. Where your father and I were born. And our brother Iqbal too."

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When she first called me from Paris, she mentioned Iqbal's name -- as proof, perhaps, to convince me she was not lying about who she said she was. But I already knew she was telling the truth. I knew it the moment I picked up the receiver and she spoke my father's name into my ear and asked whether it was his residence she had reached. And I said, Yes, who is this? and she said, I am his sister. My heart kicked violently. I fumbled for a chair to drop into, everything around me suddenly pin-drop quiet. It was a shock, yes, the sort of third-act theatrical thing that rarely happens to people in real life. But on another plane -- a plane that defies rationalizing, a more fragile plane, one whose essence would fracture and splinter if I even vocalized it -- I wasn't surprised that she was calling. As if I had expected it, even, my whole life, that through some dizzying fit of design, or circumstance, or chance, or fate, or whatever name you want to slap on it, we would find each other, she and I.

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"I promise you I am not a coffee snob." She has taken off the yellow scarf and put on reading glasses, through which she is peering at pictures.

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I carried the receiver with me to the backyard then and sat on a chair by the vegetable patch, where I have kept growing the bell peppers and giant squash my mother had planted. The sun warmed my neck as I lit a cigarette with quivering hands.

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There was silence at the other end, but I had the impression she was weeping soundlessly, that she had rolled her head away from the phone to do it.

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I know who you are, I said. I've known all my life.

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We spoke for almost an hour. I told her I knew what had happened to her, how I used to make my father recount the story for me at bedtime. Pari said she had been unaware of her own history herself and would have probably died without knowing it if not for a letter left behind by her stepuncle, Nabi, before his own death in Kabul, in which he had detailed the events of her childhood among other things. The letter had been left in the care of someone named Markos Varvaris, a surgeon working in Kabul, who had then searched for and found Pari in France. Over the summer, Pari had flown to Kabul, met with Markos Varvaris, who had arranged for her to visit Shadbagh.

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"My God!" I breathe.

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I slide the photo album closer now and inspect the picture that Pari is pointing to. I see a mansion nestled behind high shiny-white walls topped with barbed wire. Or, rather, someone's tragically misguided idea of a mansion, three stories high, pink, green, yellow, white, with parapets and turrets and pointed eaves and mosaics and mirrored skyscraper glass. A monument to kitsch gone woefully awry.

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That was when I had to tell her.

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Near the end of the conversation, I sensed her gathering herself before she finally said, Well, I think I am ready. Can I speak with him now?

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"Orchards."

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"C'est affreux, non?" Pari says. "It is horrible. The Afghans, they call these Narco Palaces. This one is the house of a well-known criminal of war."

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"Yes." She runs her fingers over the photo of the mansion. "I wish I know where our old house was exactly, I mean in relation to this Narco Palace. I would be happy to know the precise spot."

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"So this is all that's left of Shadbagh?"

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"Of the old village, yes. This, and many acres of fruit trees of -- what do you call it?-- des vergers."

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She tells me about the new Shadbagh -- an actual town, with schools, a clinic, a shopping district, even a small hotel -- which has been built about two miles away from the site of the old village. The town was where she and her translator had looked for her half brother. I had learned all of this over the course of that first, long phone conversation with Pari, how no one in town seemed to know Iqbal until Pari had run into an old man who did, an old childhood friend of Iqbal's, who had spotted him and his family staying on a barren field near the old windmill. Iqbal had told this old friend that when he was in Pakistan, he had been receiving money from his older brother who lived in northern California. I asked, Pari said on the phone, I asked, Did Iqbal tell you the name of this brother? and the old man said, Yes, Abdullah. And then, alors, after that the rest was not so difficult. Finding you and your father, I mean.

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I asked Iqbal's friend where Iqbal was now, Pari said. I asked what happened to him, and the old man said he did not know. But he seemed very nervous, and he did not look at me when he said this. And I think, Pari, I worry that something bad happened to Iqbal.

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"That was the night that we met," Pari says. "It was a setup."

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Pari nods. "Yes. When we get married, I thought, Oh, we will have a long time together. I thought to myself, Thirty years at least, maybe forty. Fifty, if we are lucky. Why not?" She stares at the picture, lost for a moment, then smiles lightly. "But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think." She pushes the album away and sips her coffee. "And you? You never get married?"

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I keep turning the pages of the album as she provides captions to the snapshots -- her old friend Collette, Isabelle's husband Albert, Pari's own husband Eric, who had been a playwright and had died of a heart attack back in 1997. I pause at a photo of the two of them, impossibly young, sitting side by side on orange-colored cushions in some kind of restaurant, her in a white blouse, him in a T-shirt, his hair, long and limp, tied in a ponytail.

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"He had a kind face."

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She flips through more pages now and shows me photographs of her children -- Alain, Isabelle, and Thierry -- and snapshots of her grandchildren -- at birthday parties, posing in swimming trunks at the edge of a pool. Her apartment in Paris, the pastel blue walls and white blinds pulled down to the sills, the shelves of books. Her cluttered office at the university, where she had taught mathematics before the rheumatoid had forced her into retirement.

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"Non, non. It's all right." She brushes the picture absently with the side of her thumb.

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I point to a striking-looking woman with long dark hair and big eyes. In the picture, she is holding a cigarette like she is bored -- elbow tucked into her side, head tilted up insouciantly -- but her gaze is penetrating, defiant.

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This is not true. It was painful and messy. Even now, the memory of it is like a soft ache behind my breastbone.

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"This is Maman. My mother, Nila Wahdati. Or, I thought she was my mother. You understand."

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"No. It's fine. He found someone both more beautiful and less… encumbered, I guess. Speaking of beautiful, who is this?"

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"She's gorgeous," I say.

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I shrug and flip another page. "There was one close call."

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"Maman was elegant and talented. She read books and had many strong opinions and always she was telling them to people. But she had also very deep sadness. All my life, she gave to me a shovel and said, Fill these holes inside of me, Pari."

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She ducks her head. "I am sorry. I am very rude."

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"She was. She committed suicide. Nineteen seventy-four."

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"I'm sorry."

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"I am sorry, 'close call'?"

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"It means I almost did. But we never made it to the ring stage."

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She lets out a heavy breath and folds the photo album shut. After a pause, she says brightly, "Ah, bon. Now I wish to ask something of you."

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"Of course."

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"But I could not. And later, I did not want to. I did careless things. Reckless things." She sits back in the chair, her shoulders slumping, puts her thin white hands in her lap. She considers for a minute before saying, "J'aurais dû être plus gentille -- I should have been more kind. That is something a person will never regret. You will never say to yourself when you are old, Ah, I wish I was not good to that person. You will never think that." For a moment, her face looks stricken. She is like a helpless schoolgirl. "It would not have been so difficult," she says tiredly. "I should have been more kind. I should have been more like you."

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I nod. I think I understand something of that.

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"Will you show me some of your paintings?"

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We smile at each other.

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Pari stays a month with Baba and me. In the mornings, we take breakfast together in the kitchen. Black coffee and toast for Pari, yogurt for me, and fried eggs with bread for Baba, something he has found a taste for in the last year. I worried it was going to raise his cholesterol, eating all those eggs, and I asked Dr. Bashiri during one of Baba's appointments. Dr. Bashiri gave me one of his tight-lipped smiles and said, Oh, I wouldn't worry about it. And that reassured me -- at least until a bit later when I was helping Baba buckle his seat belt and it occurred to me that maybe what Dr. Bashiri had really meant was, We're past all that now.

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You could just pop in and ask, I said.

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After lunch, the three of us go out for a stroll. We keep it short for both their sakes -- what with Baba tiring quickly and Pari's arthritis. Baba has a wariness in his eyes, tottering anxiously along the sidewalk between Pari and me, wearing an old newsboy cap, his cardigan sweater, and wool-lined moccasins. There is a middle school around the block with an ill-manicured soccer field and, across that, a small playground where I often take Baba. We always find a young mother or two, strollers parked near them, a toddler stumbling around in the sandbox, now and then a teenage couple cutting school, swinging lazily and smoking. They rarely look at Baba -- the teenagers -- and then only with cold indifference, or even subtle disdain, as if my father should have known better than to allow old age and decay to happen to him.

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After breakfast, I retreat into my office -- otherwise known as my bedroom -- and Pari keeps Baba company while I work. At her request, I have written down for her the schedule of the TV shows he likes to watch, what time to give him his midmorning pills, which snacks he likes and when he's apt to ask for them. It was her idea I write it all down.

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If you want him to nap, flip on the Weather Channel or anything to do with golf. And never let him watch cooking shows.

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I don't want to disturb you, she said. And I want to know. I want to know him.

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I don't tell her that she will never know him the way she longs to. Still, I share with her a few tricks of the trade. For instance, how if Baba starts to get agitated I can usually, though not always, calm him down -- for reasons that baffle me still -- by quickly handing him a free home-shopping catalog or a furniture-sale flyer. I keep a steady supply of both.

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They agitate him for some reason.

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Why not?

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"Yes, but a lot of years have passed," Pari says. "She is older now, you see."

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One day, I pause during dictation and go to the kitchen to refresh my coffee and I find the two of them watching a movie together. Baba on the recliner, his moccasins sticking out from under the shawl, his head bent forward, mouth gaping slightly, eyebrows drawn together in either concentration or confusion. And Pari sitting beside him, hands folded in her lap, feet crossed at the ankles.

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"That is Latika."

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"Latika, the little girl from the slums. The one who could not jump on the train."

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"Who's this one?" Baba says.

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"Who?"

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One day the week before, at the playground, we were sitting on a park bench, the three of us, and Pari said, Abdullah, do you remember that when you were a boy you had a little sister?

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She'd barely finished her sentence when Baba began to weep. Pari pressed his head into her chest, saying, I am sorry, I am so sorry, over and over in a panicky way, wiping his cheeks with her hands, but Baba kept seizing with sobs, so violently he started to choke.

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"She doesn't look little."

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Baba grins.

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But it's only minutes later, when I am back in my room wearing earphones and typing, that I hear a loud shattering sound and Baba screaming something in Farsi. I rip the earphones off and rush to the kitchen. I see Pari backed up against the wall where the microwave is, hands bunched protectively under her chin, and Baba, wild-eyed, jabbing her in the shoulder with his cane. Broken shards of a drinking glass glitter at their feet.

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"You don't think?"

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"He's serving tea!"

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"He is not," Baba says roughly.

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Baba looks at her blankly.

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Flashback, I mouth into my coffee cup.

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"I know what I would do," Pari says.

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Baba grunts.

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"The game show is now, Abdullah. And when he was serving tea, that was before."

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"Yes, but that was -- what do you call it?-- it was from the past. From before. It was a…"

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Pari watches him as though waiting for a moment when something will open in his eyes. "Let me ask you something, Abdullah," she says. "If one day you win a million dollars, what would you do?"

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Baba blinks vacantly. On the screen, Jamal and Salim are sitting atop a Mumbai high-rise, their feet dangling over the side.

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"If I win a million dollars, I buy a house on this street. That way, we can be neighbors, you and me, and every day I come here and we watch TV together."

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Baba grimaces, shifting his weight, then stretches out farther in the recliner.

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"And do you know who this is, Abdullah?"

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"He is Jamal. The boy from the game show."

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"Get her out of here!" Baba cries when he sees me. "I want this woman out of my house!"

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"Baba!"

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"She stole my pills!"

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Pari's cheeks have gone pale. Tears spring from her eyes.

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I wrestle the cane from his hand but not before he gives me a good fight for it.

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"Put down the cane, Baba, for God's sake! And don't take a step. You'll cut your feet."

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"I want this woman gone! She's a thief!"

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"Those are hers, Baba," I say. I put a hand on his shoulder and guide him out of the kitchen. He shivers under my palm. As we pass by Pari, he almost lunges at her again, and I have to restrain him. "All right, that's enough of that, Baba. And those are her pills, not yours. She takes them for her hands." I grab a shopping catalog from the coffee table on the way to the recliner.

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"What is he saying?" Pari says miserably.

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"I don't trust that woman," Baba says, flopping into the recliner. "You don't know. But I know. I know a thief when I see one!" He pants as he grabs the catalog from my hand and starts violently flipping the pages. Then he slams it in his lap and looks up at me, his eyebrows shot high. "And a damn liar too. You know what she said to me, this woman? You know what she said? That she was my sister! My sister! Wait 'til Sultana hears about this one."

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"All right, Baba. We'll tell her together."

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"Crazy woman."

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"We'll tell Mother, and then us three will laugh the crazy woman right out the door. Now, you go on and relax, Baba. Everything is all right. There."

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"I am very sorry," she says. "That was not prudent of me."

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I flip on the Weather Channel and sit beside him, stroking his shoulder, until his shaking ceases and his breathing slows. Less than five minutes pass before he dozes off.

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Back in the kitchen, Pari sits slumped on the floor, back against the dishwasher. She looks shaken. She dabs at her eyes with a paper napkin.

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"Je suis une imbécile. I wanted to tell him so much. I thought maybe if I tell him the truth… I don't know what I was thinking."

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"It's all right," I say, reaching under the sink for the dustpan and brush. I find little pink-and-orange pills scattered on the floor among the broken glass. I pick them up one by one and sweep the glass off the linoleum.

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I empty the broken glass into the trash bin. I kneel down, pull back the collar of Pari's shirt, and check her shoulder where Baba had jabbed her. "That's going to bruise. And I speak with authority on the matter." I sit on the floor beside her.

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She opens her palm, and I pour the pills into it. "He is like this often?"

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"He has his spit-and-vinegar days."

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"Maybe you think about finding professional help, no?"

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"I know," I say, "but not yet. I want to take care of him as long as I can."

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I sigh, nodding. I have thought a lot lately of the inevitable morning when I will wake up to an empty house while Baba lies curled up on an unfamiliar bed, eyeing a breakfast tray brought to him by a stranger. Baba slumped behind a table in some activity room, nodding off.

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I am not sure she does. I don't tell her the other reason. I can barely admit it to myself. Namely, how afraid I am to be free despite my frequent desire for it. Afraid of what will happen to me, what I will do with myself, when Baba is gone. All my life, I have lived like an aquarium fish in the safety of a glass tank, behind a barrier as impenetrable as it has been transparent. I have been free to observe the glimmering world on the other side, to picture myself in it, if I like. But I have always been contained, hemmed in, by the hard, unyielding confines of the existence that Baba has constructed for me, at first knowingly, when I was young, and now guilelessly, now that he is fading day by day. I think I have grown accustomed to the glass and am terrified that when it breaks, when I am alone, I will spill out into the wide open unknown and flop around, helpless, lost, gasping for breath.

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Pari smiles and blows her nose. "I understand that."

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Next to me, Pari begins to get up. I watch her flatten the wrinkles of her dress, and I am struck anew by what a miracle it is that she is here, standing inches from me.

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The truth I rarely admit to is, I have always needed the weight of Baba on my back.

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Why else had I so readily surrendered my dreams of art school, hardly mounting a resistance when Baba asked me not to go to Baltimore? Why else had I left Neal, the man I was engaged to a few years ago? He owned a small solar-panel-installation company. He had a square-shaped, creased face I liked the moment I met him at Abe's Kabob House, when I asked for his order and he looked up from the menu and grinned. He was patient and friendly and even-tempered. It isn't true what I told Pari about him. Neal didn't leave me for someone more beautiful. I sabotaged things with him. Even when he promised to convert to Islam, to take Farsi classes, I found other faults, other excuses. I panicked, in the end, and ran back to all the familiar nooks and crannies, and crevasses, of my life at home.

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I get up and go to my room. One of the quirks of never leaving home is that no one cleans out your old room and sells your toys at a garage sale, no one gives away the clothes you have outgrown. I know that for a woman who is nearly thirty, I have too many relics of my childhood sitting around, most of them stuffed in a large chest at the foot of my bed whose lid I now lift. Inside are old dolls, the pink pony that came with a mane I could brush, the picture books, all the Happy Birthday and Valentine's cards I had made my parents in elementary school with kidney beans and glitter and little sparkling stars. The last time we spoke, Neal and I, when I broke things off, he said, I can't wait for you, Pari. I won't wait around for you to grow up.

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She reaches for her reading glasses sitting on the side table and yanks off the rubber band holding the postcards together. Looking at the first one, she frowns. It is a picture of Las Vegas, of Caesars Palace at night, all glitter and lights. She flips it over and reads the note aloud.

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I shut the lid and go back to the living room, where Pari has settled into the couch across from Baba. I take a seat next to her.

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"I want to show you something," I say.

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"Here," I say, handing her the stack of postcards.

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July 21, 1992

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Pari

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Dear Pari,

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P. S. I'm having the most awesome ice cream sundae as I write this.

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You wouldn't believe how hot this place gets. Today Baba got a blister when he put his palm down on the hood of our rental car! Mother had to put toothpaste on it. In Caesars Palace, they have Roman soldiers with swords and helmets and red capes. Baba kept trying to get Mother to take a picture with them but she wouldn't. But I did! I'll show you when I get home. That's it for now. I miss you. Wish you were here.

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She flips to the next postcard. Hearst Castle. She reads the note under her breath now. Had his own zoo! How cool is that? Kangaroos, zebras, antelopes, Bactrian camels -- they're the ones with two humps! One of Disneyland, Mickey in the wizard's hat, waving a wand. Mother screamed when the hanged guy fell from the ceiling! You should have heard her! La Jolla Cove. Big Sur. 17 Mile Drive. Muir Woods. Lake Tahoe. Miss you. You would have loved it for sure. Wish you were here.

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I wish you were here.

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Pari puts the postcards down on the coffee table and nudges closer to me. "Tell me."

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I look down at my hands and rotate my watch around on my wrist. "I used to pretend we were twin sisters, you and I. No one could see you but me. I told you everything. All my secrets. You were real to me, always so near. I felt less alone because of you. Like we were Doppelgängers. Do you know that word?"

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I shake my head. "To you." I laugh. "This is embarrassing."

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I wish you were here.

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A smile comes to her eyes. "Yes."

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I used to picture us as two leaves, blowing miles apart in the wind yet bound by the deep tangled roots of the tree from which we had both fallen.

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Pari takes off her glasses. "You wrote postcards to yourself?"

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"For me, it was the contrary," Pari says. "You say you felt a presence, but I sensed only an absence. A vague pain without a source. I was like the patient who cannot explain to the doctor where it hurts, only that it does." She puts her hand on mine, and neither of us says anything for a minute.

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"I'm really sorry," I say.

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From the recliner, Baba groans and shifts.

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"Why are you sorry?"

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"But we have found each other, no?" she says, her voice cracking with emotion. "And this is who he is now. It's all right. I feel happy. I have found a part of myself that was lost." She squeezes my hand. "And I found you, Pari."

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"That you found each other too late."

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Her words tug at my childhood longings. I remember how when I felt lonely, I would whisper her name -- our name -- and hold my breath, waiting for an echo, certain that it would come someday. Hearing her speak my name now, in this living room, it is as though all the years that divided us are rapidly folding over one another again and again, time accordioning itself down to nothing but the width of a photograph, a postcard, ferrying the most shining relic of my childhood to sit beside me, to hold my hand, and say my name. Our name. I feel a tilting, something clicking into place. Something ripped apart long ago being sealed again. And I feel a soft lurch in my chest, the muffled thump of another heart kick-starting anew next to my own.

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In the recliner, Baba props himself up on his elbows. He rubs his eyes, looks over to us. "What are you girls plotting?"

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Another nursery rhyme. This one about the bridge in Avignon.

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He grins.

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Pari hums the tune for me, then recites the lyrics:

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Sur le pont d'Avignon

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L'on y danse, l'on y danse

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Sur le pont d'Avignon

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"Maman taught it to me when I was little," she says, tightening the knot of her scarf against a sweeping gust of cold wind. The day is chilly but the sky blue and the sun strong. It strikes the gray-metal-colored Rhône broadside and breaks on its surface into little shards of brightness. "Every French child knows this song."

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L'on y danse tous en rond.

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We are sitting on a wooden park bench facing the water. As she translates the words, I marvel at the city across the river. Having recently discovered my own history, I am awestruck to find myself in a place so chockful of it, all of it documented, preserved. It's miraculous. Everything about this city is. I feel wonder at the clarity of the air, at the wind swooping down on the river, making the water slap against the stony banks, at how full and rich the light is and how it seems to shine from every direction. From the park bench, I can see the old ramparts ringing the ancient town center and its tangle of narrow, crooked streets; the west tower of the Avignon Cathedral, the gilded statue of the Virgin Mary gleaming atop it.

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Outside the Papal Palace, she spoke nearly without pause, the names of all the saints and popes and cardinals spilling from her as we strolled through the cathedral square amid the flocks of doves, the tourists, the African merchants in bright tunics selling bracelets and imitation watches, the young, bespectacled musician, sitting on an apple crate, playing "Bohemian Rhapsody" on his acoustic guitar. I don't recall this loquaciousness from her visit in the U. S., and it feels to me like a delaying tactic, like we are circling around the thing she really wants to do -- what we will do -- and all these words are like a bridge.

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Pari tells me the history of the bridge -- the young shepherd who, in the twelfth century, claimed that angels told him to build a bridge across the river and who demonstrated the validity of his claim by lifting up a massive rock and hurling it in the water. She tells me about the boatmen on the Rhône who climbed the bridge to honor their patron, Saint Nicholas. And about all the floods over the centuries that ate away at the bridge's arches and caused them to collapse. She says these words with the same rapid, nervous energy she had earlier in the day when she led me through the Gothic Palais des Papes. Lifting the audio-guide headphones to point to a fresco, tapping my elbow to draw my attention to an interesting carving, stained glass, the intersecting ribs overhead.

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Baba lives in a nursing home now. When I first went to scout the facility, when the director, Penny -- a tall, frail woman with curly strawberry hair -- showed me around, I thought, This isn't so bad.

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Further along the path, I said.

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"But you will see a real bridge soon," she says. "When everybody arrives. We will go together to the Pont du Gard. Do you know it? No? Oh là là. C'est vraiment merveilleux. The Romans built it in the first century for transporting water from Eure to Nîmes. Fifty kilometers! It is a masterpiece of engineering, Pari."

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I have been in France for four days, in Avignon for two. Pari and I took the TGV here from an overcast, chilly Paris, stepped off it to clear skies, a warm wind, and a chorus of cicadas chirping from every tree. At the station, a mad rush to haul my luggage out ensued, and I nearly didn't make it, hopping off the train just as the doors whooshed shut behind me. I make a mental note now to tell Baba how three seconds more and I would have ended up in Marseille.

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How is he? Pari asked in Paris during the taxi ride from Charles de Gaulle to her apartment.

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I guess I expected worse, I said.

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The place was clean, with windows that looked out on a garden, where, Penny said, they held a tea party every Wednesday at four-thirty. The lobby smelled faintly of cinnamon and pine. The staff, most of whom I have now come to know by first name, seemed courteous, patient, competent. I had pictured old women, with ruined faces and whiskers on their chins, dribbling, chattering to themselves, glued to television screens. But most of the residents I saw were not that old. A lot of them were not even in wheelchairs.

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Did you? Penny said, emitting a pleasant, professional laugh.

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And then I said it. This isn't so bad.

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Not at all. We're fully conscious of the image most people have of places like this. Of course, she added over her shoulder with a sober note of caution, this is the facility's assisted-living area. Judging by what you've told me of your father, I'm not sure he would function well here. I suspect the Memory Care Unit would be more suitable for him. Here we are.

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That was offensive. I'm sorry.

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I let myself into the locked unit. They don't have tea parties on this side of the door, no bingo. No one here starts their morning with tai chi. I went to Baba's room, but he wasn't there. His bed had been made, his TV was dark, and there was a half-full glass of water on the bedside table. I was a little relieved. I hate finding Baba in the hospital bed, lying on his side, hand tucked under the pillow, his recessed eyes looking out at me blankly.

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She used a card key to let us in. The locked unit didn't smell like cinnamon or pine. My insides shriveled up, and my first instinct was to turn around and walk back out. Penny put her hand around my arm and squeezed. She looked at me with great tenderness. I fought through the rest of the tour, bowled over by a massive wave of guilt.

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The morning before I left for Europe, I went to see Baba. I passed through the lobby in the assisted-living area and waved at Carmen, who is from Guatemala and answers the phones. I walked past the community hall, where a roomful of seniors were listening to a string quartet of high school students in formal attire; past the multipurpose room with its computers and bookshelves and domino sets, past the bulletin board and its array of tips and announcements -- Did you know that soy can reduce your bad cholesterol? Don't forget Puzzles and Reflection Hour this Tuesday at 11 A. M.!

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So tomorrow is the big day, I said. I'm flying out to visit Pari in France. You remember I told you I would?

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I kissed his cheek and pulled up a seat. Someone had given him a shave, and wetted and combed his hair too. His face smelled like soap.

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I found Baba in the rec room, sunk into a wheelchair, by the window that opens into the garden. He was wearing flannel pajamas and his newsboy cap. His lap was covered with what Penny called a fidget apron. It has strings he can braid and buttons he likes to open and close. Penny says it keeps his fingers nimble.

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Baba blinked. Even before the stroke, he had already started withdrawing, falling into long, silent lapses, looking disconsolate. Since the stroke, his face has become a mask, his mouth frozen perpetually in a lopsided, polite little smile that never climbs to his eyes. He hasn't said a word since the stroke. Sometimes, his lips part, and he makes a husky, exhaling sound -- Aaaah!-- with enough of an upturn at the tail end to make it sound like surprise, or like what I said has triggered a minor epiphany in him.

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Baba smiled on, the way he did when Hector came by the week before to see him, the way he did when I showed him my application to the College of Arts and Humanities at San Francisco State.

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Nearby, an old woman in a bathrobe complacently slid around the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. At the next table, another woman with fluffy white hair was trying to arrange forks and spoons and butter knives in a silverware drawer. On the big-screen TV over in the corner, Ricky and Lucy were arguing, their wrists locked together by a pair of handcuffs.

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We're meeting up in Paris, and then we'll take the train down to Avignon. That's a town near the South of France. It's where the popes lived in the fourteenth century. So we'll do some sightseeing there. But the great part is, Pari has told all her children about my visit and they're going to join us.

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Your niece, Isabelle, and her husband, Albert, have a vacation home in Provence, near a town called Les Baux. I looked it up online, Baba. It's an amazing-looking town. It's built on these limestone peaks up in the Alpilles Mountains. You can visit the ruins of an old medieval castle up there and look out on the plains and the orchards. I'll take lots of pictures and show you when I get back.

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Ah. I almost forgot.

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Baba said, Aaaah!

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I kissed his cheek again later when I rose to leave. I lingered with my face against his, remembering how he used to pick me up from kindergarten and drive us to Denny's to pick up Mother from work. We would sit at a booth, waiting for Mother to sign out, and I would eat the scoop of ice cream the manager always gave me and I would show Baba the drawings I had made that day. How patiently he gazed at each of them, glowering in careful study, nodding.

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Alain, that's your nephew, and his wife, Ana, are coming over from Spain with all five of their kids. I don't know all their names, but I'm sure I'll learn them. And then -- and this is the part that makes Pari really happy -- your other nephew -- her youngest, Thierry -- is coming too. She hasn't seen him in years. They haven't spoken. But he's taking his R & R from his job in Africa and he's flying over. So it's going to be a big family reunion.

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I stooped down and performed our customary farewell ritual, running my fingertips from his cheeks up to his creased forehead and his temples, over his gray, thinning hair and the scabs of his roughened scalp to behind the ears, plucking along the way all the bad dreams from his head. I opened the invisible sack for him, dropped the nightmares into it, and pulled the drawstrings tight.

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Baba smiled his smile.

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"Ah voilà. C'est ça."

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"Pari?"

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Happy dreams, Baba. I'll see you in two weeks. It occurred to me that we had never been apart for this long before.

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"Plus on est de fous, plus on rit," she says. "What is the English? The more the happier?"

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As I was walking away, I had the distinct feeling that Baba was watching me. But when I turned to see, his head was down and he was toying with a button on his fidget apron.

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"You could not see in the picture that I showed to you, but it has fantastic view of the Vaucluse Mountains."

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She empties her chest of a long breath. "You can give it to me now."

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"Are we all going to fit? It's a lot of people for a farmhouse."

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Baba made a guttural sound.

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"Merrier."

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"How about the children? Where are they --"

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I look over to her. "Yes?"

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Pari is talking about Isabelle and Albert's house now. She has shown me pictures of it. It is a beautiful, restored Provençal farmhouse made of stone, set up on the Luberon hills, fruit trees and an arbor at the front door outside, terra-cotta tiles and exposed beams inside.

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There.

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I suppose I should have found it months ago when I moved Baba to the nursing home. But when I was packing for Baba, I reached in the hallway closet for the top suitcase, from the stack of three, and was able to fit all of Baba's clothes in it. Then I finally worked up the nerve to clear my parents' bedroom. I ripped off the old wallpaper, repainted the walls. I moved out their queen-size bed, my mother's dresser with the oval vanity mirror, cleared the closets of my father's suits, my mother's blouses and dresses sheathed in plastic. I made a pile in the garage for a trip or two to Goodwill. I moved my desk to their bedroom, which I use now as my office and as my study when classes begin in the fall. I emptied the chest at the foot of my bed too. In a trash bag, I tossed all my old toys, my childhood dresses, all the sandals and tennis shoes I had outworn. I couldn't bear to look any longer at the Happy Birthday and Father's Day and Mother's Day cards I had made my parents. I couldn't sleep at night knowing they were there at my feet. It was too painful.

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I nod. I reach into the handbag sitting between my feet.

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It was when I was clearing the hallway closet, when I pulled out the two remaining suitcases to store them in the garage, that I felt a thump inside one of them. I unzipped the suitcase and found a package inside wrapped with thick brown paper. An envelope had been taped to the package. On it were written, in English, the words For my sister, Pari. Immediately, I recognized Baba's handwriting from my days working at Abe's Kabob House when I picked up the food orders he would jot down at the cash register.

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I hand the package now to Pari, unopened.

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She looks down at it in her lap, running her hands over the words scribbled on the envelope. From across the river, church bells begin to ring. On a rock jutting from the edge of the water, a bird tears at the entrails of a dead fish.

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"Do you want me to read it for you?"

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Pari rummages in her purse, digging through its contents. "J'ai oublié mes lunettes," she says. "I forgot my reading glasses."

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She tries to tear the envelope from the package, but today is not a good day for her hands, and, after some struggle, she ends up handing me the package. I free the envelope and open it. I unfold the note tucked inside.

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"But you can read it, no?" Pari says, her eyebrows knotted with worry. "You can translate."

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"Yes," I say, feeling a tiny smile inside, grateful -- if belatedly -- for all the Tuesday afternoons Baba had driven me to Campbell for Farsi classes. I think of him now, ragged and lost, staggering across a desert, the path behind him littered with all the shiny little pieces that life has ripped from him.

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"He wrote it in Farsi."

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There is a date too. August 2007. "August of 2007," I say. "That's when he was first diagnosed." Three years before I had even heard from Pari.

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I hold the note tightly against the blustering wind. I read for Pari the three scribbled sentences.

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They tell me I must wade into waters, where I will soon drown. Before I march in, I leave this on the shore for you. I pray you find it, sister, so you will know what was in my heart as I went under.

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Pari nods, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand. A young couple rolls by on a tandem bicycle, the girl in the lead -- blond, pink-faced, and slim -- the boy behind, with dreadlocks and coffee-colored skin. On the grass a few feet away, a teenage girl in a short black leather skirt sits, talking into a cell phone, holding the leash to a tiny charcoal-colored terrier.

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Pari hands me the package. I tear it open for her. Inside is an old tin tea box, on its lid a faded picture of a bearded Indian man wearing a long red tunic. He is holding up a steaming cup of tea like an offering. The steam from the teacup has all but faded and the red of the tunic has mostly bleached to pink. I undo the latch and lift the lid. I find the interior stuffed with feathers of all colors, all shapes. Short, dense green feathers; long black-stemmed ones the color of ginger; a peach-colored feather, possibly from a mallard, with a light purple cast; brown feathers with dark blotches along the inner vanes; a green peacock feather with a large eye at the tip of it.

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Chin quivering, Pari slowly shakes her head. She takes the box from me and peers inside it. "No," she says. "Only that when we lost each other, Abdullah and I, it hurt him much more than me. I was the lucky one because I was protected by my youth. Je pouvais oublier. I still had the luxury of forgetting. He did not." She lifts a feather, brushes it against her wrist, eyeing it as though hoping it might spring to life and take flight. "I don't know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me."

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I turn to Pari. "Do you know what this means?"

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I put an arm around her shoulder as she weeps quietly. I watch the sun-washed trees, the river flowing past us and beneath the bridge -- the Pont Saint-Bénezet -- the bridge the children's song is about. It's a half bridge, really, as only four of its original arches remain. It ends midway across the river. Like it reached, tried to reunite with, the other side and fell short.

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That night at the hotel, I lie awake in bed and watch the clouds nudging against the big swollen moon hanging in our window. Down below, heels click on the cobblestones. Laughter and chatter. Mopeds rattling past. From the restaurant across the street, the clinking of glasses on trays. The tinkling of a piano meanders up through the window and to my ears.

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I turn over and watch Pari sleeping soundlessly beside me. Her face is pale in the light. I see Baba in her face -- youthful, hopeful Baba, happy, how he used to be -- and I know I will always find him whenever I look at Pari. She is my flesh and blood. And soon I will meet her children, and her children's children, and my blood courses through them too. I am not alone. A sudden happiness catches me unawares. I feel it trickling into me, and my eyes go liquid with gratitude and hope.

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As I watch Pari sleep, I think of the bedtime game Baba and I used to play. The purging of bad dreams, the gift of happy ones. I remember the dream I used to give him. Careful not to wake Pari, I reach across now and gently rest my palm on her brow. I close my own eyes.

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It is a sunlit afternoon. They are children once more, brother and sister, young and clear-eyed and sturdy. They are lying in a patch of tall grass in the shade of an apple tree ablaze with flowers. The grass is warm against their backs and the sun on their faces, flickering through the riot of blossoms above. They rest sleepily, contentedly, side by side, his head resting on the ridge of a thick root, hers cushioned by the coat he has folded for her. Through half-lidded eyes, she watches a blackbird perched on a branch. Streams of cool air blow through the leaves and downward.

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She turns her face to look at him, her big brother, her ally in all things, but his face is too close and she can't see the whole of it. Only the dip of his brow, the rise of his nose, the curve of his eyelashes. But she doesn't mind. She is happy enough to be near him, with him -- her brother -- and as a nap slowly steals her away, she feels herself engulfed in a wave of absolute calm. She shuts her eyes. Drifts off, untroubled, everything clear, and radiant, and all at once.

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