Page 258 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

She searches my face. “Of course, yes.”

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

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.
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.
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,