And the Mountains Echoed

that he’d forgotten it.”
    Pari Wahdati lets out a sudden laugh that sounds like a deep, guttural cry, and she covers her mouth.
“Ah, mon Dieu,”
she whispers. She lifts her hand. In Farsi, she sings:
    I know a sad little fairy
Who was blown away by the wind one night
.
    Folds appear on Baba’s forehead. For a transitory moment, I think I detect a tiny crack of light in his eyes. But then it winks out, and his face is placid once more. He shakes his head. “No. No, I don’t think that’s how it goes at all.”
    â€œOh, Abdullah …” Pari says.
    Smiling, her eyes teared over, Pari reaches for Baba’s hands and takes them into her own. She kisses the back of each and presses his palms to her cheeks. Baba grins, moisture now pooling in his eyes as well. Pari looks up at me, blinking back happy tears, and I see she thinks she has broken through, that she has summonedher lost brother with this magic chant like a genie in a fairy tale. She thinks he sees her clearly now. She will understand momentarily that he is merely reacting, responding to her warm touch and show of affection. It’s just animal instinct, nothing more. This I know with painful clarity.
    A few months before Dr. Bashiri passed me the phone number to a hospice, Mother and I took a trip to the Santa Cruz Mountains and stayed in a hotel for the weekend. Mother didn’t like long trips, but we did go off on short ones now and then, she and I, back before she was really sick. Baba would man the restaurant, and I would drive Mother and me to Bodega Bay, or Sausalito, or San Francisco, where we would always stay in a hotel near Union Square. We would settle down in our room and order room service, watch on-demand movies. Later, we would go down to the Wharf—Mother was a sucker for all the tourist traps—and buy gelato, watch the sea lions bobbing up and down on the water over by the pier. We would drop coins into the open cases of the street guitarists and the backpacks of the mime artists, the spray-painted robot men. We always made a visit to the Museum of Modern Art, and, my arm coiled around hers, I would show her the works of Rivera, Kahlo, Matisse, Pollock. Or else we would go to a matinee, which Mother loved, and we would see two, three films, come out in the dark, our eyes bleary, ears ringing, fingers smelling of popcorn.
    It was easier with Mother—always had been—less complicated, less treacherous. I didn’t have to be on my guard so much. I didn’t have to watch what I said all the time for fear of inflicting a wound. Being alone with her on those weekend getaways was like curlingup into a soft cloud, and, for a couple of days, everything that had ever troubled me fell away, inconsequentially, a thousand miles below.
    We were celebrating the end of yet another round of chemo—which also turned out to be her last. The hotel was a beautiful, secluded place. They had a spa, a fitness center, a game room with a big-screen TV, and a billiards table. Our room was a cabin with a wooden porch, from which we had a view of the swimming pool, the restaurant, and entire groves of redwood that soared straight up into the clouds. Some of the trees were so close, you could tell the subtle shades of color on a squirrel’s fur as it dashed up the trunk. Our first morning there, Mother woke me up, said,
Quick, Pari, you have to see this
. There was a deer nibbling on shrubs outside the window.
    I pushed her wheelchair around the gardens.
I’m such a spectacle
, Mother said. I parked her by the fountain and I would sit on a bench close to her, the sun warming our faces, and we would watch the hummingbirds darting between flowers until she fell asleep, and then I wheeled her back to our cabin.
    On Sunday afternoon, we had tea and croissants on the balcony outside the restaurant, which was a big cathedral-ceilinged room with bookshelves, a dreamcatcher on one wall, and an honest-to-God stone hearth. On a lower deck, a man with the face of a dervish and a girl with limp blond hair were playing a lethargic game of Ping-Pong.
    We have to do something about these eyebrows
, Mother said. She was wearing a winter coat over a sweater and the maroon wool beanie hat she had knitted herself a year and a half earlier when, as she put it, all the festivities had begun.
    I’ll paint them back on for you
, I said.
    Make them dramatic, then
.
    Elizabeth Taylor in
Cleopatra
dramatic?
    She