And the Mountains Echoed

sister, for the hem of her shirt, before Masooma was calling her name in panic and Parwana hers. Parwana grabbed the shirt, and it looked for just a moment as though she might have saved Masooma. But then the cloth ripped as it slipped from her grip.
    Masooma fell from the tree. It seemed to take forever, the fall. Her torso slamming into branches on the way down, startling birds and shaking leaves free, her body spinning, bouncing, snapping smaller branches, until a low, thick branch, the one from which the swing was suspended, caught her lower back with a sick, audible crunch. She folded backward, nearly in half.
    A few minutes later, a circle had formed around her. Nabi andthe girls’ father crying over Masooma, trying to shake her awake. Faces peering down. Someone took her hand. It was still closed into a tight fist. When they uncurled the fingers, they found exactly ten crumbled little leaves in her palm.
    Masooma says, her voice shaking a bit, “You have to do it now. If you wait until morning, you’ll lose heart.”
    All around them, beyond the dim glow of the fire Parwana has stoked from shrubs and brittle-looking weeds, is the desolate, endless expanse of sand and mountains swallowed up by the dark. For nearly two days they have traveled through the scrubby terrain, heading toward Kabul, Parwana walking alongside the mule, Masooma strapped to the saddle, Parwana holding her hand. They have trudged along steep paths that curved and dipped and wound back and forth across rocky ridges, the ground at their feet dotted with ocher- and rust-colored weeds, etched with long spidery cracks creeping every which way.
    Parwana stands near the fire now, looking at Masooma, who is a horizontal blanketed mound on the other side of the flames.
    â€œWhat about Kabul?” Parwana says.
    â€œOh, you’re supposed to be the smart one.”
    Parwana says, “You can’t ask me to do this.”
    â€œI’m tired, Parwana. It’s not a life, what I have. My existence is a punishment to us both.”
    â€œLet’s just go back,” Parwana says, her throat beginning to close. “I can’t do this. I can’t let you go.”
    â€œYou’re not.” Masooma is crying now. “I’m letting
you
go. I am releasing you.”
    Parwana thinks of a long-ago night, Masooma up on the swing,she pushing her. She had watched as Masooma had straightened her legs and tipped her head all the way back at the peak of each upward swing, the long trails of her hair flapping like sheets on a clothesline. She remembers all the little dolls they had coaxed out of corn husks together, dressing them in wedding gowns made of shreds of old cloth.
    â€œTell me something, sister.”
    Parwana blinks back the tears that are blurring her vision now and wipes her nose with the back of her hand.
    â€œHis boy, Abdullah. And the baby girl. Pari. You think you could love them as your own?”
    â€œMasooma.”
    â€œCould you?”
    â€œI could try,” Parwana says.
    â€œGood. Then marry Saboor. Look after his children. Have your own.”
    â€œHe loved you. He doesn’t love me.”
    â€œHe will, given time.”
    â€œThis is all my doing,” Parwana says. “My fault. All of it.”
    â€œI don’t know what that means and I don’t want to. At this point, this is the only thing I want. People will understand, Parwana. Mullah Shekib will have told them. He’ll tell them that he gave me his blessing for this.”
    Parwana raises her face to the darkened sky.
    â€œBe happy, Parwana, please be happy. Do it for me.”
    Parwana feels herself standing on the brink of telling her everything, telling Masooma how wrong she is, how little she knows the sister with whom she shared the womb, how for years now Parwana’s life has been one long unspoken apology. But to what end? Her own relief once again at Masooma’s expense? She bites down the words. She has inflicted enough pain on her sister.
    â€œI want to smoke now,” Masooma says.
    Parwana begins to protest, but Masooma cuts her off. “It’s time,” she says, harder now, with finality.
    From the bag slung around the saddle’s tip, Parwana fetches the hookah. With trembling hands, she begins to prepare the usual mixture in the hookah’s bowl.
    â€œMore,” Masooma says. “Put in a lot more.”
    Sniffling, her cheeks wet, Parwana adds another pinch,