Free The Blue Between Sky and Water by Susan Abulhawa Page A

convicted on secret evidence, and sentenced to life in prison.
    It was then that Nazmiyeh began trying in earnest to summon Sulayman for help.

NINETEEN
    Nur and I never spoke, except in her dreams, but I brought her home. Then brought her home again. Nur was our missing link, the extra clothespin Teta Nazmiyeh needed when she hung the sky. She saw colors in the ways Mariam had.

    The Sun did not fully shine that morning in Charlotte, North Carolina, as if the day was not yet ready to rise. Rain falling on the roof had pitter-pattered pink and saffron drops in Nur’s heart, and now the morning was a wet gray, as her grandfather seemed to be. But his color brightened when he saw her walk down the stairs.
    “Good morning, habibti.” He smiled at Nur, who stood in her footed pajamas, rubbing her eyes with one hand and holding Mahfouz, her bear, in the other.
    “It’s CCP Saturday!”
    Chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast every Saturday. Her jiddo rose from his chair. Nur liked to watch his wobbly walk without his cane and special tall shoe. He had one good leg. The other was shorter because a bad soldier had shot his growing plate. There was a rhythm in the way he would swoop lower to step with the short leg and then rise to his full height on the good leg. When he walked, his body moved up and down, side to side, front and back, in a fluid cadence that seemed to Nur like a song.
    “What shall we do today, habibti?” He picked her up and headed back to the kitchen, carrying her in the melody of his gait.
    “Jiddo, can we go to the duck park and ride the paddleboats and feed the duckies and will you tell me the story about how your growing plate got broke? And can we please also get ice cream? And then let’s go to the pottery place and paint some more ceramics. And—”
    “Well, that will be a full day for sure, but your old jiddo is going to need a nap sometime in all that. And it’s called a growth plate , not a growing plate.”
    Nur imagined a nicely painted pottery plate growing somewhere inside his leg. Sometimes she worried she might break hers, too.
    He sat her at the table and returned with pancakes. It was just the two of them and her bear, whose right eye was a green button her grandmother, Yasmine, had sewn to match Nur’s eyes, one green and one brown with hazel accents. Teta Yasmine had been in heaven for a while now, Nur couldn’t be sure how long, and she had promised her jiddo, on that day when she had found him crying on the sofa, that she would take care of him like her teta had. But for now, jiddo was the one who took care of most things. She knew how to cook cereal, which they often ate when she insisted on preparing dinner. But the most important things to learn were words, her jiddo said. Already, at five, she could read her picture books.
    “Jiddo, did my daddy used to eat chocolate chip pancakes? And what did Mahfouz do?” she asked, wanting to hear the answer he gave her every CCP Saturday morning.
    “Yes, habibti. He loved them. And we used to have CCP Saturday mornings just like this. Except that Mahfouz would be sitting right by the table, waiting for us to give him scraps, but we couldn’t because chocolate isn’t good for dogs. So, we gave him doggie treats instead,” he said.
    “Why did Mahfouz die, Jiddo?”
    “When dogs get old, they die and go to heaven.”
    “Was my daddy old?”
    “No, habibti. Sometimes accidents happen and … Why don’t we talk about happy things on CCP Saturdays. Okay?”
    She thought about his answer, her legs swinging under the chair. “Okay. Listen. This is happy.” Nur puckered her lips and blew.
    “Wow! I think I heard a little whistle come out!”
    She took a large bite of pancake that made her cheeks bulge as she chewed, still swinging her legs, and asked through a mouthful, “Jiddo, how come my daddy couldn’t see shine colors?”
    “Most people can’t, habibti. You know I can’t, either.”
    “I know. But how come? How can people