Free Gardens of Water by Alan Drew Page A

smiled as they passed, as though on vacation—tourists come down to see the damage. He had heard about this. Some entrepreneurial travel agents fromstanbul had arranged tours to see the towns destroyed by the earthquake, for which “adventure” tourists were said to be paying incredible prices.
    He was about to curse them, when through the windshield of the last bus he saw the American director in the passenger seat waving an arm at the driver. The truck downshifted—the sound like metal shearing metal—but did not stop. The American smiled and held his hand out the window in a prolonged wave. As they passed, Sinan caught a glimpse of the man’s son, his earphones stuck in his ears, his face grave and drawn-looking.
    Sinan was ashamed. He had never thanked the American. As soon as he hadsmail in his arms, nothing else had mattered and he had left the director alone with his dead wife—the woman who had savedsmail’s life. Shameful.
    Because his hands were full, he nodded and hoped it would be interpreted as thanks, but the bus had already passed.

Chapter 13
    REM COULDN’T STAND IT ANYMORE. FOR FOUR DAYS NOW SHE had sat inside this tent wondering if Dylan was alive. Every hour, it seemed, of each of those four days her mother checked for strange marks onsmail’s skin, watched for enlarged pupils, pressed her palm against his forehead, which was always too hot, too cold, or too sweaty. She tugged on his tongue. “That bump wasn’t there this morning.rem, was that bump there this morning?”smail was fine, at least as fine as anyone could be after the quake, but he willingly endured his ears being folded back, his eyelids tugged open, his lips yanked apart, and a prodding finger sliding around his gums.
    So when she woke this morning, after yet another dream of her teeth falling out—each one
plunk, plunk, plunk
ing onto the tiled floor of their now-nonexistent bathroom—and found her father gone for the first time since they left the hospital, and her mother andsmail still asleep, she sneaked out of the tent and ran down the hill into town.
    rem found her best friend, Dilek, and her mother, Yasemin Hanm, camped on the retaining wall that ran from the port along the sea to the destroyed amusement park. They were huddled together beneath a sagging blanket tied to two sticks wedged in cracks in the pavement.
    “Both your mother and father are alive?” Dilek’s mother askedrem.
    “Yes,”rem said.
    “Good,” Yasemin Hanm said. She had been a well-kept woman who favored Vakko blouses and tailored pants, her hair always pinned back with a gold broach, but now she wore a shirt ripped at the shoulder and her curly hair was wild and hung in her face. “Good,” she said again. “Your mother is lucky.”
    Dilek stroked her mother’s shoulder, and toldrem with amazing calm that her father had been killed in the quake, one of thirty men crushed in the
k
raathane
down Atatürk Street. Behind them, the cars hovering above the water of the half-submerged Ferris wheel rocked in the morning wind, the metal joints creaking.
    “I’m sorry for your loss, Yasemin Hanm,”rem said. “May your pain pass quickly.”
    “Always spending his time at the
k
raathane
playing cards with the men,” she said. “What’s wrong with me?”
    Dilek removed her hand from her mother’s shoulder, and placed her arms across her chest as though hugging herself.
    “Your father’s a good man,” Yasemin said torem. “He’s always home with his family.”
    “Anne,” Dilek said to her mother. “Please don’t speak poorly of father.”
    “Do you know what it’s like?” she said, snapping her head toward Dilek. “Always gone to play cards, always gone on business, always gone into town.” She pushed her palms against her eye sockets. “He had a woman, I tell you.”
    “He didn’t,” Dilek said. “Now stop it.”
    “He did,” she said. “I know it. Always gone playing cards. Humph! If he’d been home,” she said, her face