The Book of M. Peng Shepherd
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lurking among the empty car spaces, looking up at her? She was about to ask it to point out some constellations, for old times’ sake.
But then she saw that the ghost had a shadow.
“Mahnaz?” it called softly.
Naz was down every flight of stairs and out the front door before she even realized it. “Rojan?” she was screaming.
Rojan had run for the entrance too, and had been pulling on the front door before Naz had made it to the ground floor and flipped the lock. They tumbled backward into the dark warehouse in a tangle of limbs, and then clambered to slam the door shut behind them and do up the locks again.
“You promised. You promised,” Naz kept wailing, over and over. “You promised you wouldn’t do this. You promised you wouldn’t come.”
Rojan was clinging to her so hard she could feel her skin going numb and bloodless on the parts of her arms where Rojan held them. They kissed each other’s cheeks until they had smeared the tears all over their faces, until all she could taste or see or breathe was stinging salt. “Thank God you’re here.” Rojan sniffed, and kissed her again. “I was so scared—I thought I’d finally make it here and you already would have left or something.”
“You—you—” Naz could barely speak between the heaving sobs. The miraculousness of it was finally starting to pierce the anger. “You’re really here.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I said I—” She reached down and pulled a wad of paper out of her pockets—handfuls of notes she’d made, neighborhood maps she’d tried to draw, descriptions of the building she was looking for—everything she’d written down from their phone conversations. “I just couldn’t let you be alone.”
“But how did you get all the way here from Tehran?” Naz interrupted. “How did you even get out of the house without Maman freaking out?”
“What do you mean, ‘Maman freaking out’?” Rojan shook her head. “She’s the only reason I did make it here. You think I just had thousands and thousands of U.S. dollars lying around in my student dormitory room for a plane ticket?”
Naz stared at her. “But—” She couldn’t finish.
“The day after your phone died, she gave me everything she had. Emptied out her accounts. She told me to find you.”
Naz was shaking. “She … she … she helped you come here?” She ran her hands up and down Rojan’s arms over and over, as if each time she did it she might discover Rojan wasn’t real. But she was. And she was in Boston. And now she was going to die, too. “Here? Here?!” Naz was screaming again, unable to control herself. “Didn’t she hear me? What this place is like? Why would she help you come here? Why would you do it?!”
“There was a case in Tehran,” Rojan said softly. Naz fell into a stunned, paralyzed silence as the words sunk in. There was a case in Tehran. There was a case in Tehran. The words echoed in her mind, over and over. There was a case in Tehran. It was everywhere now. Rojan looked down at her hands as Naz swayed. “Naz, she made me come.”
Naz heard what more her little sister meant to say. Because she wanted us to be together at the end.
They both sat in silence in the darkness. Naz reached out and took Rojan’s hand and held it, and they stayed that way for a long time.
“It had only just happened—the shadowlessness. Tehran Airport wasn’t a madhouse yet. I got to London fairly easily. But Heathrow was not what I expected. I got stuck there in ‘departures’ for almost two months. I couldn’t find a flight out that was going to the United States. All the airlines had just stopped going there. I ate out of the vending machines—they were having to refill them twice a day, there were so many of us. Finally I overheard someone saying Switzerland might be making U.S. flights, or was making flights to somewhere that was making U.S. flights. I managed to get to Zurich a week or two after that, through Geneva. In Zurich, I found out the closest to Boston anyone was flying was Providence, in Rhode Island,” Rojan finally continued. “I mean, the sign said Boston, but they told us they were really flying to Providence—because it was safer, because for some reason that city is almost empty of people now—and we’d have to make our own way from there. They were charging—I don’t even know. I just kept throwing money at the counterperson out of Maman’s savings until the lady gave me a ticket. Someone tried to rob me after that, but the airport staff beat him off. I went in the bathroom and put everything I had left in my bra and underwear then. Not like it was much.”
“What happened in Providence?”
Rojan shrugged. “The guy sitting next to me on the flight said he has a daughter here in Boston somewhere. I gave him the rest of what I had in exchange for a seat in his rental car. Well, the car he found in the rental car parking lot and hot-wired. We split up at the roadblock on the freeway just outside city limits.”
“Fuck,” Naz said. “He could have killed you or something.”
“I—yeah,” Rojan admitted. “I kind of—I kind of can’t believe I did it now. I just didn’t know how else to get here.”
They sat close, shoulders touching, as they ate the last of the bags of airplane peanuts the stewardess had generously gifted Rojan on the flight. Naz’s stomach ached ravenously. It was more food than she’d had in a long time. “So … what now?” she asked.
THEY DECIDED TO HEAD FOR NEW YORK, BECAUSE THAT WAS the only place nearby that Rojan thought she hadn’t seen come up on the news by the time she left Tehran. It struck them as a little funny—that of course it would be New York that would survive when the shit hit the fan. “Things weirder than this probably happen in New York every day,” Rojan joked as she held open the duffel bag while Naz packed it with what little they could take from the studio.
“That’s just movie New York,” Naz said, but still, a part of her had hope. If anywhere in the United States was still functional, she couldn’t help but believe it would be New York, too. Although even if it wasn’t, nothing was going to be worse than Boston. “Take off your necklaces,” she added. “They draw too much attention.”
“They’re Maman’s,” Rojan protested. “I’m not just going to leave them here.”
“Wrap them up and put them in the bag, then. You can’t wear them.”
Rojan obeyed, reaching for a pillowcase. “How long do you think it’ll take on foot?” she asked.
“If we really rush, ten days, maybe?”
Rojan nodded. “Good thing I packed soap.”
Naz smiled. She didn’t have the heart to tell her sister that they weren’t going to stop long enough at any point to allow washed fabric to dry, so there’d be no washing anyway. But they could survive each with a few pairs of underwear and the same bra. The bow was what she really needed to make sure they were safe, once they got out into the open country.
They had to get out first, though. The roadblocks were still in place all over the city, held by police and emergency military personnel, the main streets all locked down. There was only one place left the government couldn’t monitor very well.
“The water.” Rojan grinned.
It was how she’d avoided the roadblocks and reached Naz in the first place, it turned out. After watching the man she’d shared a ride with turned away by police in riot gear carrying huge machine guns, Rojan had decided she didn’t want to press her luck and started hunting for an unguarded street—but she couldn’t find one. Sooner or later, she always ran into another roadblock or a roving patrol, blue and red lights dazzling the night. By accident she found herself crouching behind a small overturned boat in a trash heap to hide from a passing cluster of police, and that’s when she got the idea.
“I dragged it up onto the bank where I came out and tried to hide it in the bushes,” she said. “I can show you where