I wished I knew more about Oklahoma, but they never spoke much about their time there. I only knew that the land was so flat that they thought the sun could take a seat on the horizon. Roads seemed to stretch into forever, and the city looked like it could swallow Kabul whole. Though few people they met in town could have found Afghanistan on a map, they were friendly. One neighbor welcomed them with a pie and a jar of pork sausages that my father passed along to an American classmate. He immersed himself in his studies, determined to become valuable to Afghanistan’s future. Though my mother wasn’t there for her studies, she learned to drive and became fluent in English by taking classes at a library and watching television shows and repeating the lines aloud.

She also gave birth to my sister, who lived and died before I took my first breath. Everything I knew of my sister fit in the palm of my hand: one photograph of my mother holding her swaddled in a blanket and one of her propped on my father’s knee, an American birth certificate, and a beaded silver bracelet with an evil eye charm.

The charm had failed to protect her, though. Shortly after my parents returned to Afghanistan and introduced my sister to cooing aunts and uncles, she was struck by an unrelenting fever. She was gone in a matter of days, leaving my parents’ arms empty and their hearts broken.

I wish I could have seen my two daughters side by side, Boba sometimes said. But she will never be far from our thoughts. I have picked a star in the night sky and imagine that is her in the heavens, forever our light.

With a kind of magic I didn’t fully appreciate as a child, my parents spun grief into gratitude. I knew my mother was thinking of my long-gone sister as she watched Faheem nestle close to me. We were, she never tired of telling us, the greatest comforts God could have given her. Being a child, I took this to mean we had suffered our allotted tragedy.

By the time I was ten years old, I did not curl in my father’s arms or seek kisses from my mother for every scrape as often as I had the year before. I did not chase their affections, believing that they, like sands in the desert, existed in infinite supply.

Chapter 2