And the Mountains Echoed

cripple.” Then, to me, “I think your father just flashed me his inner Pashtun.”
    I remind him to give Baba his late-morning pills and hang up.
    â€¦
    It’s like seeing the photo of a radio personality, how they never turn out to look the way you had pictured them in your mind, listening to their voice in your car. She is old, for one thing. Or oldish. Of course I knew this. I had done the math and estimated she had to be around her early sixties. Except it is hard to reconcile this slim gray-haired woman with the little girl I’ve always envisioned, a three-year-old with dark curly hair and long eyebrows that almost meet, like mine. And she is taller than I imagined. I can tell, even though she is sitting, on a bench near a sandwich kiosk, looking around timidly like she’s lost. She has narrow shoulders and a delicate build, a pleasant face, her hair pulled back taut and held with a crocheted headband. She wears jade earrings, faded jeans, a long salmon tunic sweater, and a yellow scarf wrapped around her neck with casual European elegance. She had told me in her last e-mail that she would wear the scarf so I could spot her quickly.
    She has not seen me yet, and I linger for a moment among the travelers pushing luggage carts through the terminal, the town-car chauffeurs holding signs with clients’ names. My heart clamoring inside my rib cage, I think to myself,
This is her. This is her. This is really her
. Then our eyes connect, and recognition ripples across her face. She waves.
    We meet at the bench. She grins and my knees wobble. She has Baba’s grin exactly—except for a rice grain’s gap between her upper front teeth—crooked on the left, the way it scrunches up her face and nearly squeezes shut her eyes, how she tilts her head just a tad. She stands up, and I notice the hands, the knobby joints, the fingers bent away from the thumb at the first knuckle, the chickpea-sized lumps at the wrist. I feel a twist in my stomach, it looks so painful.
    We hug, and she kisses me on the cheeks. Her skin is soft like felt. When we pull back, she holds me at a distance, hands cupping my shoulders, and looks into my face as if she were appraising a painting. There is a film of moisture over her eyes. They’re alive with happiness.
    â€œI apologize for being late.”
    â€œIt’s nothing,” she says. “At last, to be with you! I am just so glad”—
Is nussing
.
At lass, too be weez yoo!
The French accent sounds even thicker in person than it did on the phone.
    â€œI’m glad too,” I say. “How was your flight?”
    â€œI took a pill, otherwise I know I cannot sleep. I will stay awake the whole time. Because I am too happy and too excited.” She holds me with her gaze, beaming at me—as if she is afraid the spell will break if she looks away—until the PA overhead advises passengers to report any unsupervised luggage, and then her face slackens a bit.
    â€œDoes Abdullah know yet that I am coming here?”
    â€œI told him I was bringing home a guest,” I say.
    Later, as we settle into the car, I steal quick looks at her. It’s the strangest thing. There is something oddly illusory about Pari Wahdati, sitting in my car, mere inches from me. One moment, I see her with perfect clarity—the yellow scarf around her neck, the short, flimsy hairs at the hairline, the coffee-colored mole beneath the left ear—and, the next, her features are enfolded in a kind of haze, as if I am peering at her through bleary glasses. I feel, in passing, a kind of vertigo.
    â€œYou are okay?” she says, eyeing me as she snaps the seat-belt buckle.
    â€œI keep thinking you’ll disappear.”
    â€œI’m sorry?”
    â€œIt’s just … a little unbelievable,” I say, laughing nervously. “That you really exist. That you’re actually here.”
    She nods, smiling. “Ah, for me too. For me too it is strange. You know, my whole life I never meet anyone with the same name as me.”
    â€œNeither have I.” I turn the ignition key. “So tell me about your children.”
    As I pull out of the parking lot, she tells me all about them, using their names as though I had known them all my life, as though her children and I had grown up together, gone on family picnics and to camp and taken summer vacations to seaside resorts where we had made seashell necklaces and buried one