Free Gardens of Water by Alan Drew Page B

in her hands now. “He’d be here now.”
    “I know, Anne,” Dilek said, stroking her shoulder again. “I know.”
    They sat for a while, Dilek trying to calm her mother, andrem staring at the Ferris wheel cars still hanging above the water. The submerged cars, mirror images of the ones above, floated beneath the surface like huge, brightly colored beetles.
    “rem and I are going for a walk.”
    “Yes,” Dilek’s mother said. “Leave me here alone.”
    “I’ll be back.”
    “Yes, yes.”
    Dilek tookrem’s hand and held it to her cheek as they walked along the broken waterfront. The sun was up now and the morning breeze stirred the smell of rot and gasoline.
    “She’s driving me crazy,” Dilek said. “She won’t even let me cry for him. She just says, ‘You wouldn’t be crying if he had been home.’”
    Then Dilek cried andrem held her and pulled her head to her shoulder and watched buckets of ice cream float out from a half-submerged ice-cream shop. Some of the buckets had burst open and green swirls of pistachio glistened on the surface of the water. A moment later a bloated body floated through the swirls, its clothes bursting at the seams, its skin as white and pasty as bread dough.
    Dilek tried to pull away fromrem, butrem held her a few moments longer until the body bobbed past. “No one can protect us,” Dilek said, as they continued down the sea walk, the cement striated with cracks. “No one.”
    rem blinked, and across the black screen of her closed eyelids the white skin of the floating body appeared. She tried to ignore it, but she was suddenly scared it was Dylan and she tried to remember, tried to see the body clearly to be sure it wasn’t him.
    “I realize that now,” Dilek continued. “I used to think my father could keep me safe.”
    They stopped at a four-foot fissure in the walkway. Three chickens clucked past and flapped themselves into the air just long enough to reach the other side.
    “How’s Aye?”rem asked. She had seen her friend alive just after the quake, but she hadn’t seen her since.
    “She’s fine; her family is fine. Her parrot died.”
    “Well, at least we won’t have to listen to that horrible squawking anymore.”
    Aye used to hang the caged bird from a hook outside her bedroom window. From that perch two stories above the street, the bird let out the most horrible noise that was like listening to a child’s colicky tantrum. The water boys hated it because the parrot had a habit of aiming its droppings at the part in their slicked-back hair.
    Dilek laughed out loud. “Allah, Allah,” she said. “That was a terrible bird.”
    They sat down together on a slab of concrete that overlooked the water. From here, ifrem looked directly away from shore, it was almost possible to forget the chaos that was behind them. The water lulledrem, calmed her, and she wanted to dive in and stay underwater where nothing could be broken, where nothing could crush her.
    “Have you seen Dylan?” she finally asked.
    “No,rem. I heard he went back to America.”
    “He’s alive?”
    “Yes.”
    Relief and disappointment, both, rose inside her simultaneously.
    “Back to America?”
    “That’s what I heard,” Dilek said. “He and his father.”
    rem picked at her fingernails and watched two jellyfish push up against each other in the murky water.
    “Wouldn’t you leave, too, if you could?” Dilek said.
    “Of course. It’s not that. The night of the quake he tried to touch me, but I pulled away.”
    “Where were you?” Dilek said, and suddenly it was just like it was before the quake. Where were you? What happened? How did it feel?”
    “The kitchen.”
    “The kitchen?!”
    “Yes, and my parents in the next room with the guests.”
    Dilek put her hand to her face, her eyebrows narrowing into a devilish grin.
    “Oh, I would have let him,rem,” Dilek said. “He’s so handsome.”
    “Yes, well, your parents are different.” Dilek’s father had been a school