Chapter 18
That school in which you studied, I'm the one who built it.
—Ghita Bensultana
The route to Ghita's apartment draws them away from the crowds, down alleys where moonlight turns blue walls to glacial ice. The din of the revelry follows them, carried between buildings, testifying to a festival at its height with no sign of slowing.
Shay tries to internally prepare herself.
She rehearses what she will say to the midwife, how she will explain herself, but as they near their destination, another, deeper, apprehension tugs at her.
It hangs like a heavy cape around her shoulders, dragging behind her every step.
She doesn't see or hear or smell anything she can point to as being out of the ordinary, but a foreboding disrupts her thoughts, insisting that something is deeply wrong.
Finally, Shay stands before the same door she walked through countless times, bearing fresh cuts on her fingers and a bundle of foraged herbs in her arms, or sporting the puffy eyes of a sleepless night and the smiling lips of a successful birth.
Black paint confirms that tragedy has struck. Illuminated by watery moonbeams, two crisscrossed slashes mar the door's wooden surface. A symbol that declares a building unsafe to enter, either due to structural collapse or because someone has been quarantined with infection.
Shay glances at Shadi and Khawla to find them glancing back and forth at each other, their wide eyes pearled by silver shadows. She knocks softly on the door and pauses, listening. Then she calls out, “Khalti, are you there?”
She knocks louder, calls out more urgently, “Ghita, it's me, Shay. Are you well?”
Their neighbor Zaytuna pokes her head out from the upstairs window. “It's late! What's this commotion about?”
“Khalti,” Shay says with some relief. “I'm very sorry to disturb you, but I'm looking for the midwife.”
“Are you with child?”
“No.” Shay looks down, ridiculously, at the flat span of her stomach. “It's me … The apprentice.”
“Bnti, is it really you?” Zaytuna disappears for a moment and returns with a pair of wire-framed spectacles perched on her nose. “Hold on, I'll be right down.”
Shortly, the woman clatters down the stairwell on the side of the building.
At the bottom, she draws a threadbare robe over her sleeping gown as she marches up to Shay.
Zaytuna grabs both her hands and peers into her face like someone confronted by a ghost. “Where did you go, bnti? The midwife was quite distraught by your disappearance.”
“I …” Guilt slithers between Shay's ribs. “I was lost, khalti.” It's the only explanation Shay thinks of, and she reasons it to be accurate in more ways than one.
Zaytuna huffs, jamming a hand on the crest of one hip. “I told her not to let you keep foraging so close to that awful forest.”
Shay's eyes drift back to the black smears across the door, shocked afresh by the sight. “Do you know where she is?”
“I'm so sorry.” Zaytuna runs a nervous hand over the brightly colored scarf that covers her hair. “The midwife … she fell sick.”
Shay sets her teeth. It can't be true. Ghita never got sick.
And if she ever did feel the slightest symptom of approaching illness, she always knew what herbal tincture to take to nip it in the bud.
Of all the times for her to succumb to illness, how could it happen when Shay wasn't there to help?
She's reaching toward the door handle when Zaytuna stays her hand with her own.
“What are you doing?” Shay wails. A pang of panic fills her throat. “She needs me.”
Zaytuna lowers her voice to a somber wisp. “She's not here, bnti.”
Shay steps back from the door, and her hands are shaking. Her whole arms are shaking. She sniffles. Was the illness so dire, Ghita had to be admitted to a clinic for treatment? “Did she go to the maristan?”
Zaytuna shakes her head sadly as Shadi and Khawla take hold of Shay from either side as if she might fall. “I'm so sorry,” the neighbor repeats, her mouth twisting like the words are bent into peculiar shapes that cause friction on her tongue. “It is a great loss to the community.”
“What?” Shay manages to stutter. “Where is Sami?”
Zaytuna looks confused. “Who?”
“The baby …” Shay wipes her wet eyes, new tears rising more quickly than she can dry them.
“Why don't you come upstairs,” Zaytuna offers, pushing the question aside before Shay can decide how much is prudent to say. “I can make some tea.”
The shaking moves to Shay's legs, her body under the grip of denial, every bone joining her mind in its fight to reject the neighbor's words.
Zaytuna has no reason to lie, yet it can't be true.
Ghita can't be … gone. The midwife was a force of nature.
Shay would sooner believe the moon itself had fallen, leaving behind a gaping hole in the fabric of the sky.
Wiggling free of her companions, Shay lunges for the door.
“I wouldn't go in there if I were you.” Zaytuna's voice turns sharp with warning.
“Is it contaminated?” Khawla asks worriedly.
The woman's face clouds over. Her chin trembles. “It isn't safe.”
Something is off about all this. Shay pivots back to the woman and speaks gently. “What really happened here?”
The neighbor straightens her face like a new bedsheet, but she can't smooth the edges of fear from her eyes. “Just come upstairs. You don't need to see what's in there.”
Desperation mounts in Shay's chest. Whatever has happened, it's surely her fault for leaving. Why couldn't she have been content with what she had? Why was she so needy, so greedy, so hungry for a kind of love that was never meant to be hers?
Turning from Zaytuna, Shay pounds on the door, a scream ripping from her throat. “GHITA!”
Khawla's caring hands are on her upper arms, but Shay can't stop pounding.
A flurry of scratches from the other side of the door. The brass knob twists from inside. Whoever she expects to see when the door shudders open, it certainly isn't the bouncing ball of gray fur that quickly twines itself around her leg. “Qamar! How on earth did you get inside the house?”
“You should have listened to me,” Zaytuna rasps, backing away. “Go turning over rocks, you're asking to uncover snakes.” She scurries back upstairs, leaving Shay to stare inside the apartment, the familiar walls and furniture buried beneath a darkness that swims with shadows.
“Maybe we should go.” Khawla releases Shay and wraps her arms around her own body.
Shay bends to shower Qamar with overdue affection in the form of pets and scritches. She glances up at Khawla. “I understand if you'd rather wait for me outside.”
“If you go in, I'm coming with you,” Shadi says.
“We may need this, then.” Khawla pulls a jinn stick from her sash. “Found it on the ground on the way over.”
They step inside as Khawla breaks the stick.
She holds it out like a magician's wand to light the way ahead.
Wind gusts through a shattered window, which explains how Qamar got in.
As Khawla waves the glowing stick, its sweeping light reveals overturned chairs and broken decorations.
They move to the kitchen, where cabinet doors hang from their hinges like broken wings and shards of plates and mugs crunch like packed snow beneath their slippers.
The horror is incomprehensible, but Shay can't look away from it. In a wordless daze, she stumbles to their sleeping room. The midwife's books are torn, reservoirs of wisdom and knowledge now piles of shredded pages, tossed like leaves and debris after a storm.
Shay kneels before the empty bassinet Ghita made for Sami. She splays her fingers over the plain wool blankets, half expecting to find them warm. Their utter coldness confirms that whatever took place here happened days ago at least.
She doesn't register the tears streaming down her face until Khawla and Shadi kneel quietly to either side of her. “Who could have done this?”
Their silence is answer enough. Shay thinks they know as well as she does. The soldiers came for Shay, just as they had come for Shadi's brother. But none of them, least of all the midwife, had done anything wrong. Things look so much clearer now that she's spent time away from her medina.
The people don't follow Al-Mukhtar for their good providence.
They follow them because they're afraid.
Like the neighbor upstairs, who'd rather invent a story about the midwife being sick than talk about what really happened here.
Maybe she even made herself believe it. How could Shay have ever believed Mekchaouen's leaders’ so-called miracles came from God?
She prefers to believe in the God who led Shadi to that cave, a God of mercy and beauty and hope, not one who condones control through brutality and violence.
And if it wasn't a raid, if it was robbers or the type of deviants who prey on women living alone, what is the sense in this destruction?
Whoever did this wanted someone to find the aftermath, to be reminded how thin the illusion of safety is and has always been.
And what of Sami? Would he be raised to train as a Moulay?
Or returned to a mother unfit to care for him?
Through her tears, Shay makes out the blurry shapes of parchment strips strewn among the rubble.
Suspecting they are not made from the same thin paper that filled Ghita's books, she lifts one between her fingers.
Yes, these are thicker, the kind of parchment reserved for official decrees.
Each torn strip holds another fragment of an image. Is that … an eye?
A quick sweep of the room produces two mostly intact halves. She holds them flush, and her heart twists at the sum of her own face—depicted not on a wanted poster, but a sign for a missing person.
Ghita was trying to find her.
“Wow.” Khawla stands next to her, appraising the handmade flyer.
“The midwife could draw quite well. Her line variation and blending techniques really capture your nature,” she says with the authority of someone speaking as an artist herself.
“Do you think this could be the sign the bone-eaters saw in the medina? Is it possible they were in a hurry and mistook it for a wanted poster?”
Shay can't speak, busy adding and subtracting facts and lies.
She distinctly remembers Kabeer's assertion that he could read, so a lack of literacy is not a viable excuse.
Her mind quickly crafts another scenario, one where the bone-eaters knew the posters were one thing but told her they were another.
But why? And how had Aidi known the ring was a magical talisman when Ghita's posters made no mention of it?
Did he trick her into thinking he was helping her so he could keep the hjabat for himself?
Shay feels the effervescence of laughter bubbling deep inside her, jagged and bitter when it hits the back of her throat. It's a joke at this point, the way everyone keeps lying to her. She's a joke. Ghita didn't raise her to be this gullible. She feels so stupid. And angry, at herself mostly.
But then, if Shay's not a fugitive, why was Ghita's apartment raided?
“We should go,” Khawla says, regarding Shay worriedly. “In case the building is under any kind of surveillance.”
The words raise an alarm inside her, breaking through her shock.
As desperately as Shay wants to know exactly what happened here, she won't learn anything more tonight.
Besides, she still can't be certain she's not a wanted criminal.
The neighbor saw her; would Zaytuna turn her in?
That's what Al-Mukhtar brought the people of her realm to.
They turned them against one another, making enemies of neighbors.
“You're right.” Shay turns to the door as Khawla's jinn stick illuminates an oblong stain set beside it. A dark, shapeless splotch, blemishing the burnished wall. Blood—dry now, but cast in long ribbons where it once dripped toward the floor.
Her body collapses into Khawla's ready arms, and Shay sobs into her warm chest as loss renders her senseless. She thought she knew what grief was before, but this—this is true grief. It's cruel, and it's relentless, and it feels like being pummeled by a thousand hurled stones.