Page 257 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

nobility the way people do those who have overcome a physical deformity or

maybe a crippling speech impediment.
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.
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.
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.
“I am very nervous,” Pari says quietly.
“It’s understandable,” I say. “It’s been fifty-eight years.”
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.”
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.
She toys with the frayed ends of her scarf. “Do you think it is possible that he
will remember me?”

“Do you want the truth?”