Page 279 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

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.
“I know,” I say, “but not yet. I want to take care of him as long as I can.”
Pari smiles and blows her nose. “I understand that.”
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.
The truth I rarely admit to is, I have always needed the weight of Baba on my
back.

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.

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.
“I want to show you something,” I say.
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