Six Seconds

23

Cold Butte, Montana

In Montana, Samara brushed tears from the corners of her eyes and cupped her hands around her tea. A chill had penetrated her.

Images from the night her world ended still burned.

In the morning, dust and smoke had arisen from the ashes of Samara’s house. A gentle wind carried wisps of cloud across the smoldering neighborhood.

The soldiers had vanished.

Samara was in shock, uncertain she was alive.

Her ability to feel, to form a thought, to speak, had shut down as scenes unfolded around her in a staccato slide show of horror.

Ahmed! Muhammad!

Someone called their names over and over.

Medical relief workers helped Samara into the rear of an ambulance. They treated her until she shook them off to watch rescuers extract two bodies-one large, one small-from the ruins of her home.

Ahmed! Muhammad!

Samara could not, did not, accept that they were dead. It was an evil dream.

Wake! Wake!

When would she awake?

Old women in black robes came to her with solace and prayers, supporting her as she knelt before the corpses set side by side on the ground. The sheets that covered them glowed white against the scorched earth. A hood had been tied around Muhammad’s head.

His face was gone.

She took his hand and held it to her cheek, her tears webbed along the dust that encased his skin.

She felt the warmth of his smile on the day they’d met at the university in London.

Muhammad.

She felt his goodness, his spirit, leave this earth.

Muhammad.

Then the women pried Samara from him and she watched the workers, faces covered with surgical masks, load him into the truck to take him to the morgue.

Muhammad!

She fell upon the smaller corpse.

Ahmed.

She pulled back the sheet.

To see his face in death.

Her son.

Her child.

Her life.

All who were near were jolted by Samara’s banshee wail that reached a degree of sorrow beyond this earth. Then, like an exaltation of angels, the robed women gathered over her to share the burden of her pain. Samara raised her hands to heaven to ask why.

A black combat helicopter patrolling the aftermath thudded above slowly. She saw the dark visors of the crew.

Watching the scene.

In that instant, her answer had been delivered, although it would not be revealed to her until later.

Samara looked upon Ahmed.

Tenderly she slid her hands under the sheet.

Lovingly she collected her son.

The old women admonished the relief workers who tried to take him from her and pushed them back.

Ahmed was weightless in her arms as Samara began walking through her devastated city to the morgue.

The old women followed, beating their chests with clenched fists, shouting prayers as others joined them to form a death procession.

As they passed from neighborhood to neighborhood, weary soldiers, fingers on triggers, eyed them, scanning them for signs of an insurgent ruse.

They glimpsed Ahmed’s small hand that had escaped his death shroud, as if to reach for reason in a time and place where it did not exist.

Helicopter gunships continued to hover directly above Samara as her tears fell upon her dead son.

In the time after, people from the hospital, neighbors and kind strangers from relief agencies helped her.

Samara had a vague and mixed memory of what followed.

She’d been taken to a room in the local mosque.

Muhammad and Ahmed were naked, side by side on tables where the old women guided her in washing them for their journey to paradise.

The women prayed as the bodies were cleansed.

Then they were wrapped in cloths and placed in coffins.

The next day the coffins were secured to the roofs of cars, draped with flowers and driven slowly in a pro cession to a cemetery on the bank of the Tigris River, one of four rivers said to flow from Eden.

The coffins were lowered into a single plot to rest together, father by son. Samara’s friends struggled to keep her from throwing herself into the grave.

Depleted of life, Samara refused to leave the cem etery.

Hours passed, day turned to twilight, which turned to night and prayers. The old women understood and watched over her. Covering her with blankets and shawls.

When a new day approached, they made her tea and brought her bread. They sat with her in silence, contem plating the Tigris, a river as old as time.

A river that knew great sorrows and great joys.

A river that held the answers.

And as the sun broke, the old women answered the call to prayer, leaving Samara to gaze upon the Tigris.

Statue-still, she was a portrait of pain.

Numb, alone, disconnected from the world, Samara was being transformed.

Every passing second, every tear, every beat of her broken heart, brought her closer to an awful knowledge.

The chant of the old women completing the morning prayers ended. Without invitation, one of the oldest among the mourners took her place next to Samara and took her hand.

Gnarled fingers wrapped in leathery, sunbaked smooth skin traced the lines of Samara’s palm. The old woman studied it in silence for a long moment.

Then she spoke to Samara in an ancient dialect.

She had known Samara’s mother and her grand mother, she said, knew her people, that Samara’s tribe was descended from Bedouins, near the disputed region.

Samara will soon go there.

She will return to her people and the desert because the next stage of her life is there.

It is already foretold, here. The old woman gave Samara’s hand a gentle squeeze.

In the weeks that followed, Samara journeyed to the cemetery every day to contemplate her loss, the river and the old woman’s prophecy.

A few months later, she made inquiries to interna tional relief agencies.

Samara asked favors of influential doctors who knew diplomats, who could expedite matters as she prepared to go to the desert, to find whatever awaited her there.