#scintillae

Nile smiles when she stumbles across them. Some are small enough to put in a pocket; She carries the cross she finds tucked away in a nook near Zahlé on her necklace. Others she can keep in her backpack: The well-read copy of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet that she found on the table in the Lisboa safehouse, annotated in Booker’s precise hand, and Nicky’s note with the PIN numbers to their most important accounts that she uses as her bookmark. Gestures that keep her warm in the cold nights she spends out in strange landscapes, in stranger cities and in strangers’ houses.

Somewhere close to Erbil on the roof of the house of a woman named Sarya, she watches the stars and rests her hand on the burner phone she bought about a week ago. Her stomach is full – Sarya shared her food and flat readily, and with a wide smile. As if she had been waiting for Nile to come along. Her Kurdish is still halting, despite all the time she has spent studying it, but it is enough to convey her sincere thanks. Sarya laughs and says that al-Tayyib’s friends are always welcome in her home. Nile wonders how this woman first met Joe, but does not feel like it’s her place to ask.

Above her, the sky turns. Nile raises a hand to trace constellations so old that only a handful of people remember them, and she could call all of them by name. Andy showed them to her, her hair greying and the lines around her eyes deepening with every smile. Nile had watched Andy’s hand draw pattern after pattern, had listened to her call them names in a strange, throaty language. Nile’s imitations had been so far off that Andy had laughed and said she had just cursed her own mother.

 She takes a picture of the night sky and sends it to their shared e-mail address. Then she turns on airplane mode. Her heart feels lighter afterwards.

 -

 She finds a letter in the letterbox of their rarely-used Dacha near Nizhny Novgorod, three pages inscribed in Joe’s looped hand. It is dated to eight months prior, some idle chitchat about what him, Nicky, Booker and Quynh have been up to interspersed with earnest descriptions of job offers. She can feel the edge of grief in the pressure of the pen, in his choice of words, in the half-sketch of Andy’s face on the last page, can read his warmth in the reminders of all she has achieved, in the care and the underlying worry that reminds her so much of her parents. He writes, Come home any time, and Booker wrote a phone number next to those words that Nile knows she could call at three a.m. and someone would answer. She picks up a postcard from the Nizhny Novgorod art gallery and sends it to Genoa because they check in there relatively regularly.

Heading for Shanghai she sends a text message. Will be home soon. Don’t worry. Then she tosses the phone.

 Nile has a five hour layover at Pulkovo Airport and buys a coffee for herself and the mother of two who is trying to pay and wrestle her crying kids at the same time. The woman thanks her profusely, and smiles at Nile’s accent that she has never quite managed to shed, and offers her some home-made Pirozhki. Sitting on the plane some time later, Nile thinks that this, too, is love. All of it: A stranger taking her in, another stranger feeding her. Love can be light like this, and like a letter and a little note and a novel that is so well-read that she can fit her fingertips over the marks Booker’s left in the corners.

 -

 Shanghai is nothing as she remembers it, but that is fine. Her mom told her that you never step into the same river twice, and Quynh said that it is the same with cities. Nile checks in on the flat they bought a few decades ago and only use so sparingly that there is nothing edible at all in the kitchen, and the layer of dust on everything is appalling. She inhales, sneezes twice, then puts her backpack down. Even after all this time the space feels familiar. She remembers the weeks spent here, waiting for a sign, any sign, killing time with endless rounds of Uno and eating her weight in whatever Nicky comes up with.

First things first.

She curls her fingers into fists and turns left. Check the rooms, they told her so many times, back when she was young. After fifty years, it has become a reflex. The first one used to be their living-room. Everything, she finds, is as it should be. The small table and the leather sofa and the two armchairs – all covered in dust, untouched. Nile opens the curtains and regrets it immediately as a cloud of dust rises. She leaves the room to settle, wandering into the next.

 The second room is mostly empty, too. The bed is made, too many cushions and three blankets folded neatly across each other. Nile smiles.

Joe left a notebook. He always does – other people scatter receipts or headphones, Joe scatters his sketches and notebooks. Nile walks over to the bed, picking it from the night stand and flipping through it.

Unfamiliar faces and places are laid out across the pages, interspersed with those she would know blind, would know (and has known) even blasted to pieces. Booker, a crooked smile and his eyes averted. Andy, her face lined, laughing. Quynh winning a round of Uno against Nile. And Nicky. Over and over Nicky, Nicky sleeping and half-awake; Nicky’s hands and Nicky’s eyes and Nicky’s smile on every style she can possibly imagine. She can feel Joe’s love and care running her fingers across them. It is like a sunbeam in her heart, like someone switched on the light. Joe’s art always does this for her - translates all the care, all the love he has for them, into warmth spreading through her veins.

Nile puts the book down and steps on.

 The third room…

She stops suddenly as if she has walked into a wall. Bitterness floods her mouth that she can only barely swallow. The third room used to be Andy’s. Nile bites her tongue. The details hurt the most. The little jade dragon on the side table that some emperor or another gifted Andy – Nile has forgotten his name. Quynh might still know. The way the duvet is folded that Nile started copying about four decades ago. The half-open dresser, because Andy was only ever orderly in places she didn’t consider home. And as she has done so many times in her long, long life, Nile sighs exasperated. It is that or crying.

And then it is crying anyways as she opens the door of the dresser fully and a pullover falls right into her hands. She does not mean to bury her face in it, it just happens.

The pullover still smells of Andy. Faintly, she has to look for it, but it’s still there. The perfume-and-shampoo combination. Nile swallows against her constricting throat. It’s no use. The tears start coming, and she cannot fight them. And as she sits in the empty room, clutching a shirt, Nile remembers her mother.

  She remembers her mother sitting with her father’s shirt in her lap, all quiet. She remembers entering the room, all hesitant and unsure what to do. It had been three yeas since her father’s death. Her mother noticed her and beckoned her to come closer.

Nile settled against her mother’s side, hands folded in her lap. Her eyes were glued to the way her mother clutched the cloth. “I still miss him,” her mother said. Nile stayed quiet for a long moment before she exhaled. “Me too.” Her mother’s left arm snuck around her and pulled her close. “Sometimes you have to sit with your grief so it doesn’t swallow you whole.” Her mother’s hand around the shirt tightened, just a bit. “You have to sit and walk yourself through it. One step after the other. And then, once you have done it a while, you realise that the grief may not go away that quickly. But that is fine because you understand that all it is, is love.” She took Nile’s hands and put them against the cool fabric that still, very faintly, smelled like her father. “Love isn’t always light. Love can be heavy as hell. But it’s all we have. And it is worth so much.”

 The pullover in her hand. The cross on her necklace. The feeling of Andy coming through the door any second, young as the day Nile met her, and telling her to get ready for another job.

Nile sits in silence with the pullover for a while, tasting the dust in the air as she breathes. This, she realises with sudden clarity, is what she came for. To find something she can hold onto. To find something that holds the love she had for Andy, Andy had for her. Something to sit with in silence and let the grief turn into love again. A reminder. A whisper: You are loved, you were loved, you will always be loved.

Nile, through all the sadness and tears, smiles.

 -

 The line rings twice before someone picks up. “Hi,” Booker croaks, just barely awake. If the sleepy muttering on the other end of the line is anything to go by, Nicky has to be nearby. “I’m coming home,” Nile says.

 All of them come to pick her up from the airport. Nile did not expect it, was only looking for one of them, so it stops her dead in her tracks. Before she can recover, four pairs of arms are wrapped around her.