The customs officer is gruff: “What is the purpose of your visit, business or pleasure?”

This is not intended as a loaded question. 

“Coming to take my mother to rehab,” I say. “She lives here.” I hand over my American passport, which I was awarded when I turned eighteen. It clearly states I was born in Iran, which is not a joking matter. Everyone hates Iranians; people who otherwise hate each other put aside their differences when it comes to Iranians. I blame the clerics. My cousin loves to email me examples of the regime’s buffoonery. Like when they shot at a passenger plane by accident. As with most things that terrify and embarrass me about them, there is a sad, bodies-hanging-from–cranes undercurrent.

“I’m so sorry,” the white male customs officer says. 

“Thank you,” I say, as politely as I know how.

I arrive at Cadogan Square at breakfast time, a foreigner in a neighborhood the British complain is overrun with us. Upstairs, Bettania, my mother’s Brazilian housekeeper, opens the door furtively like our flat is a club and I should be grateful to be admitted.

“Get in here,” Bettania says, opening her arms to me. “It’s so awful.” We embrace for a long moment, and I try my hardest to suppress the wave of sadness coming for me. The last time we saw each other we buried my father.

As always, the flat smells like a Scandinavian pine forest. A scented candle to blame. In the corner of the dining room, I see a collection of banker’s boxes. These must be the files sent from the federal public defender in New York where I work as an appellate lawyer. I don’t have a return ticket, but I plan to leave as soon as possible. I look down the hall toward my mother’s room. “Can I see her?” 

“Just one moment, darling. Let me see if she’s receiving.”

In the stainless-steel kitchen, I make a cup of tea and find the flat unchanged. But the shelf where my father stored his vitamin collection is empty. His brown leather slippers are nowhere to be seen. Only his evil-eye key chain, having spectacularly failed to do its job, remains on a tray by the telephone. I look around, dizzy and unsteady, his absence heavy in the room. 

When Bettania returns, I follow her down the hall, hear my name filtering through the door. Inside the bedroom, the paisley curtains are drawn and it smells like my mother’s sweet Guerlain perfume. All the surfaces in the bedroom are cluttered with memories: my mother, a twenty-year-old bride, posing like a swan; my father surveying a factory floor; my grandfather walking in a military parade. Iran before the revolution. We had it good. Unlike some other families we know, mine has never gone back, never will, our exile permanent because of just how good we had it.

My mother’s lazy eye droops. “Finally,” she says. Her tone is not exactly unloving. I squeeze her frail frame, inhaling her warm, soft skin. She sits up like it is the first time in days. The buttons of her silk pajama top are open, and she pulls the sheet over her shoulders. 

“Sit,” she says. I occupy my father’s side and hold her hand. There is an assortment of prescriptions on her bedside table. One box of pills is from Iran. An empty wine bottle rests on the floor. The scene, like Tracey Emin’s bed, sends a flash of familiar alarm through my body.

“I’m all alone,” she is saying. “Forever. This is forever.”

“I’m so sorry. What can I do for you? I want to help.”

“Come under the covers with me,” she says, like a child. 

Anything but that, I think. 

“I’m fine here,” I say. 

“It’s so comfortable. Bettania can bring you tea.”

“No, thank you,” I say, already failing her. 

“I want you to move to London,” she says, reaching for a jar of face cream. I freeze. I stare back at her silently. Why does she always want what I can’t deliver? I can’t even work in England. Does she imagine me as her dependent? Honestly, I would rather die.

“I don’t think I can move here.”

“It’s because of your job.”

“My job is very important to me,” I say. 

She pauses to think for a moment. “I don’t know how you can stand it,” she says. 

“I love criminals,” I say.

“I hate your sarcasm.”

“I’m being serious.” I think of the files in the foyer. They should be on my desk at work.

“You can’t leave me. Your father left me.”

“I’m not leaving you, okay? I’m here. In the meantime, you need help. I’m taking you to The Country so you can get healthy.” 

“I don’t need rehab,” she says. “I need you.”

“You need to detox.”

“I’m not an addict, if that’s what you think.” I look at the pills, bottles, and ashtrays that surround her, not to mention the stack of casino chips. “Isn’t it beautiful that he is so close?” she says. “The three of us will be together again.” I follow her train of thought out the window to Cadogan Square gardens.

Despite my father’s wishes that his ashes be spread in the Caspian Sea, my mother has petitioned Cadogan Estate to have them planted under a sapling, a tree he wouldn’t be able to name in a neighborhood that was a temporary home. Across the bed, I see the box of pills from Iran again. I have no idea what they are. But I want them. The prescription is written in Farsi. They must be potent if someone bothered to bring them all the way to England. I need them to function here. I’ve got to have them. On my way out, I pretend to clean up while helping myself to the Iranian pills, like a dirty cop. 

The tree planting ceremony took place three months ago, a few days after the funeral. A black-clad crowd of close friends, all of whom had attended the funeral, gathered. Somehow, I was the only person there who thought it was a terrible idea. I looked for support among friends and relatives—it’s a park, not a cemetery!—but found none. I’d tried convincing myself that I was wrong. Perhaps he would have approved. He was sent from Iran to this neighborhood as an adolescent. He learned English in this neighborhood. His accent had traces of this neighborhood. They walked these streets together. The three of us did. But as soon as I saw the meager shrub that would memorialize his life, a memory came for me. The paramedics lifted him, zipped him into a body bag, and drove away. Subject turned object—a handsome, bearded Irish poet wrote of his own father’s death. 

My mother directed the gardener with aplomb and the internment was surprisingly fast. No speech. No reading. The cedar box was placed in the English dirt. The baby maple went directly on top, the soil was returned and watered lightly. There was no reason to believe the nascent tree would survive. And how long before the box disintegrated? The final touch was a tiny plaque. Green. No different from the others in the garden identifying plants. The crowd lingered. No one knew what to say. Eventually, people dispersed, and only Bettania and my mother remained. I felt sure that soon there would be no evidence that my father was here. That any of us were. 

The next day, everything is ready. Her bags are packed. I’ve secured a bed at The Country, a treatment center in Warwickshire. At her request, her lawyer Rob is downstairs waiting to drive us. Rob looks like a dirty blond Tom Hardy if Tom Hardy was playing a lawyer, which is to say, I find him nice to look at. Thick buttery lips like frosting, blue eyes; not usually my type. He wears pointed brogues, the pointiest I’ve ever seen, in contrast to his conservative pin-striped suit. He’s over six feet tall and relatively slim, though his pants look snug. But when my mother emerges from her bedroom, cloaked in scent, I deflate. I know she’s not going to rehab—she’s too well-dressed. The ensemble, charcoal gray and voluminous and the slightest bit iridescent, has her resembling a Frank Gehry building. 

A bouquet of fantastical flowers sits on the dining table. They arrived earlier in the morning. She pushes them to her right, takes a seat, and opens the card from Aspinalls in Mayfair, a posh casino which claims to support wildlife conservation. 

“You must be very popular,” I say. “With the animals.” I remove a leaf, checking to see if the flowers are real.

She grins with irritation, crumples the note, and throws it in the trash. As she comes back to her seat, she announces: “I can’t go to treatment today. Call and tell them I am coming tomorrow.” 

“I don’t think it works like that,” I say. 

“I am paying them.” 

“It’s not a hotel, Mom.” 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says. “It’s Thanksgiving. Nasrin will be very insulted if we don’t make an appearance. I’m not going to rehab on Thanksgiving.” She didn’t mention Thanksgiving when we spoke over the phone. I arranged everything for today. 

“You are not even American,” I say. “And you’re in London.” 

“Speak for yourself,” my mother says. “In my heart, I am one hundred percent American.” 

My mother’s friend lives on a street in Holland Park where all the houses are painted a different pastel color. Like my family, Nasrin joon and her family fled Iran during the revolution, fearing the religious fundamentalists who toppled our incompetent monarch. Nasrin joon brought up her twin boys in Austin before moving to England. On the way across town, my mother tells me that Nasrin’s youngest brother is a nuclear scientist in Iran. 

“He’s very bright,” my mother says, proud. Like when she reports to me that an Iranian woman won the Nobel Prize in mathematics. 

Nasrin joon greets us in a white suffragette-style pantsuit, patent leather pumps, and gold jewelry. She has a short black bob and long false eyelashes. We follow her into the monochromatic, beige living room, where a Polish waiter circulates with champagne and lights guests’ cigarettes. Despite the smoke, you can smell khoresh-e karafs and turkey cooking in the kitchen. The whole time, I think of the meager tree planted in honor of my father. 

In the wallpapered dining room, people serve themselves traditional Thanksgiving dishes—sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, corn bread, ham!—on the same plate as kabob and tadiq. A feast in honor of the English settlers. A family of four shows up in costume. The children are Indians, the parents Pilgrims. 

I hear Farsi mixed with English. “May I die for you?” someone says. My father’s friend Mohsen attacks me with kisses as he did with my father. He smells of tobacco and aftershave. He steers me away from the food to an unoccupied club chair near the window where he can speak to me alone.

“I’m so sorry for what has happened to your family,” he says, gravely. “What a family it was. What a family!”

“Someone gave us the evil eye,” I say. 

“My darling,” he says earnestly. “Your mother. I worry so much.” Mohsen continues, “She needs family.” 

“You’re right,” I say, thinking about the implications.

“She will gamble even more, drink even more. There will be nothing left.” 

“You’re right.” As if I could stop her.

“My daughter lent her money last time they were at Les Ambassadeurs. It was a birthday party,” he says. “She really needs to be paid back.”

“I can’t pay anyone back,” I say, trying to stand. But he blocks my way for a moment. 

“That’s why I only play cards at home,” he says, before giving way. 

On the sofa, my mother is saying: “I have to beg her to visit, can you imagine? She doesn’t respect family. They don’t understand, this generation, where they come from.” 

Everyone agrees. The humiliation stings. I start to fantasize that I could move to London and live among these people. That I was still part of a great family. That I was not me but someone more Iranian. That I fit in, knew the rules, and followed them expertly, better than anyone else. That I was the best Iranian daughter in the world. That I was awarded the gold medal, the trophy. What would it feel like to fulfill their expectations?

She keeps drinking white wine. I’m stressing over what I’ll do if she gets too drunk to walk. What we will do. I don’t want her to embarrass herself in front of these people. She takes a long gulp and announces her intention to play cards. I watch her dart to a table where two Pilgrims are waiting to play pasur. I follow her and interrupt before the hand begins.

“Are you okay?” I say quietly in her ear.

“My husband is dead,” she says, so everyone can hear. “My daughter defends criminals. What do you think?”

Afat, another close friend of my mother’s and joon to me, approaches. She works at the jewelry section of Harvey Nichols. “You can’t abandon her,” she says, “after everything she’s done for you.”

“Of course not, Afat joon,” I say, sincere. “I’m doing my best. I want to help her.” I’ve known Afat my whole life. I am embarrassed to admit that I still crave her approval. But this woman knows nothing of my life. I imagine her sitting erect, mouth pursed on the flea-market couch of my studio on Bedford Street as a mouse scurries across the room. It is not always simple on Bedford Street but it’s mine.

“You are too American, Nargess,” Afat says. “Your generation is lost. Neither here nor there.” Too American or not American enough? I’m not sure who is more confused: my generation or theirs?

I look over at the Thanksgiving feast. “At least we didn’t cause a revolution,” I say. 

We get home hours later—my mother is not well and we carry her into the cab. I lock the front door from the inside, hiding the key so she can’t leave the flat. She falls down in the hall and it takes some effort to get her into bed.

“You have no right to speak to my friends that way,” she says, as I tuck her in. “Blaming us for the revolution is ludicrous. It was the CIA’s fault.” 

“Get some rest. Tomorrow, I’m taking you to The Country.”

“Don’t be so irritating,” she responds.

In the small guestroom with a view of Belgravia’s gray roofs, I don a pair of my father’s old pajamas and wash the London grime off my hands and face. The water turns black as I scrub away the centuries of dirt. I take the Iranian pills out of my toiletry bag and pop one out of its cocoon. In the kitchen, I pour myself a glass of wine and swallow the small yellow tablet.

The wine and pill combine, my insides grow calm, and panic begins to yield. Perhaps the situation is not as dire as it feels, and she’s not as helpless as she seems. She won’t need me forever. When she gets sober, she’ll remember that she finds me annoying. She’ll remember I embarrass her with my bad manners and messy clothes. She’ll get back on her feet and I can go back to building a meaningful life. But what is more meaningful than helping your mother?

I take a sip of wine and open the window to a gust of cold air. The red wine leaves a tingling sensation on my tongue. My mind jumps to Tehran in the seventies when we were not yet foreigners. I inhale the chill. Out of the blue, a burst of resolve. I tell myself that I am not abandoning her. I’m here. I can do it. I’ve been straddling cultures my entire life. I’ve got this. I remind myself of the cases I’ve won, the good work I’ve done. I don’t shy away from challenges. I don’t have to move here and be at her bedside. I feel optimism for the first time since his death and I suspect it is drug-induced but I don’t care. 

The day after Thanksgiving, I try again. This time I ask Rob to come upstairs to help. A cold and dark November day, Rob is dressed as a lawyer-slash-superhero. Sharp suit, brogues, red socks. We wait as Bettania helps my mother finish packing. Rob sits straight and does not look at his phone. I fidget, stand, sit down, fetch a glass of water. 

“You know you can’t force her,” Rob says. 

“That’s your job,” I say. “I think you can take her.”

“Seriously, she has to choose to get better,” Rob says.

“The least I can do is try.”

Twenty minutes later, my mother finally emerges, dressed as a normal human, not a sculpture. She’s not sober. But we are able to wrangle her downstairs into the Prius.

The Country is a two-acre property directly off the highway in Warwickshire. A Victorian with gables serves as the main building. In the back are stables with horses and several stand-alone structures—a pottery studio and meditation hut. My mother steps out ahead of us onto the gravel, a slight limp, and rings the doorbell. Inside, a light sculpture dominates the foyer. Modern with pulsing bright colors, it cheers up the late nineteenth-century architecture. The place is eerily empty and excruciatingly quiet. We’re told the patients are in group. 

The three of us are shown to a waiting room and offered herbal tea. The door closes loudly behind us, and I wonder just how long I myself would last here. The blood rushes to my head and I feel dizzy, lightheaded, too warm. 

My mother picks up a pamphlet and opens it. “Sound therapy?” her eyes widening and her voice still shaky with drink. “You can’t leave me here.”

She’s right. I can’t. But Rob interjects in a tone I haven’t heard him use before, the one he probably uses with her when I’m not around. “The Country has an excellent reputation,” he says.

“They just want my money,” she says. “All these places are the same.”

Everyone wants her money. She locks eyes with me and travels to that place where she talks to herself. I was in my early teens when I noticed that she talked to herself all the time. It happened anytime we were alone for long periods, when she drove me home from school, to the dentist, to the pediatrician, her tone argumentative. A running fight with someone. Who? When she returns, she begs. “Please don’t go,” she says, grabbing me by the shoulders. 

I stare at her small face, her delicate hands. “You need some rest and care,” I manage to say. Privately, I have no confidence in this place.

“It’s true,” Rob says. “You need to listen to your daughter. She wants the best for you.”

I look away. I want to give in to her. She should be home in bed. She’s okay as long as she’s in bed. I take her hand. Rob sees.

“Remember, without thirty days, we will not be able to negotiate the casino bills,” he says, reminding her of financial matters.

She registers this statement, thinks. Her expression changes. She stands up straight. She morphs back into an adult. 

“Okay, go,” she says. “Leave. I don’t want you.” She starts talking to the therapist about the accommodations, ignoring our departure, and the sudden transformation is jarring. Before we leave, my mother’s therapist tells me that I’m expected back in exactly one week for the first of several family therapy sessions.

The barely noticeable limp is new, a symptom of post-polio. My mother was five years old when she contracted the disease. It was rampant in Tehran in 1953. She woke up on a December morning with a fever and body aches. A week later, she couldn’t move her legs. The doctor was called and within minutes it was confirmed that she was highly contagious. She was quarantined in a small windowless room at the west end of her childhood home on the Air Force base. Her older brothers were spared. They grew to their full height, didn’t limp, didn’t experience permanent muscle weakness, did not take a year off from school. It was a terrifying time. All over the city, children walked with crutches or leg braces or deformed limbs. A neighbor boy named Amir, just a few years older, died the year before. My mother’s father, the general, visited her regularly during the long year of solitude. Otherwise, almost no one came. Her own mother couldn’t bear to see her daughter suffer. Not for a minute. But it was a miracle that she survived.

Seven days without contact. Bettania takes the week off to babysit her granddaughter and I have the place to myself. In my parents’ home without parents, I feel like an intruder. The question of moving to London hangs over me. Though I want to start catching up on work, I’m wildly unfocused and take too much Adderall, which accounts for the penny-sized zit on my chin I attack with a sewing needle, my fingernails, and a razor. Every time I see my reflection in the window, I am shocked and fascinated. Above the monster pimple, I see my Turkic eyes and long high eyebrows, dramatically arched, one missing some hairs where I’ve rubbed them off while thinking or reading.

On day three, I start to snoop incessantly, open every drawer, look in every cupboard. I find Vodka bottles hidden all over the flat. Under the bathroom sink. Behind the washer/dryer. Under beds. Most are empty. He kept this from me. The extent of her relationship with booze. I continue snooping, looking for answers. Did my father leave me a note? I look in his desk. Where is the note? Live your life. You can’t solve her problems. I find bills, stacks and stacks of bills. Casinos. They are in the top drawer of the filing cabinet in a folder labeled with my mother’s name. I close the folder and feel sick to my stomach. 

My father’s things are still impeccably neat. I look at his socks, his undershirts, his ties. His shoes are extremely large. I put my feet in a pair of Ferragamo lace-ups and walk around the flat. He has condoms? Now I’ve gone too far. I should stop but I don’t. Her things are equally orderly. A drawer for sunglasses. Another for watches. Her clothes are ironed and folded. She has a drawer full of casino chips. And more Iranian pills. A lifetime supply, it seems. 

The snooping becomes embarrassing and tiresome. I force myself out the door with a pile of work reading in hand for coffee and scrambled eggs on Elizabeth Street. Occasionally, I look at real estate listings online as instructed by Rob. He’s asked me to meet realtors about selling her flat, but I have no head for markets—real estate, stock, super. Never have. And the idea of involving myself in my mother’s finances alarms me. I cannot imagine her listening to a word I say. I cannot imagine arriving at The Country with real estate listings and advice, as I know Rob would like me to. 

Day five, I call the office in New York to check on my clients. Who has called from prison? Who has been told that I had to take an extension on their filings? How many clients are complaining? Even though appeals move slowly, my absence has not gone unnoticed. I can tell from my assistant Raoul’s voice. 

The next day it rains. Stressed by conversation with Raoul, I spend the day working at the dining room table next to the casino flowers, which seem to be immortal. Later that night, I take an Iranian pill again. What if these pills could literally make me more Iranian? What if they put me in touch with the Persian sages? Ferdowsi. Hafez. Rumi. Even Mohammad comes to mind with his handsome, dark, shoulder-length locks, sinewy frame, turquoise eyes, and abundance of eyelashes. I wait, an optimist. I will know what to do, I think. I will know how to live a meaningful life. But the pills make me groggy, and a pleasant numbness coats my body. I forget where I am. I drink more wine. And I’m out.

The next night, I resolve to skip the pills, worried that I’ve built up a tolerance. But after dinner, I give in and take three. I drink red wine and listen to Nina Simone. I feel a tingling sensation in my mind. On the balcony, I stare out at the square where the ashes are buried. My mind bounces between cultures. I’m hopeful that the clarity of a few nights ago will return. There’s a choice to be made between expectations, ideals, rules, moral codes. What is forbidden in one culture, abandoning your mother no matter what her state, is required for survival in the other. How else am I to succeed as a lawyer, a worker, an American? But the problem feels even more intractable. In the distance, the trees in the garden are skeletal and bare. My mind shifts to my father and his ashes below ground, steps away from the street. I worry about him under there, bearing the weight of English history on his chest, deep beneath the soil: the Plantagenets, the Tudors, the Victorians, trapped with no possibility of escape. 

Exactly one week after we dropped her off, Rob drives me to The Country for family therapy. To prepare myself adequately, I smoke cigarettes outside on the gravel driveway, next to a structure built to house the garbage, and ask Rob to stay with me. Today, he feels like a brother more than a lawyer—maybe he’s better at his job than I give him credit for. He’s wearing his sharp brogues with jeans and a blazer. I like his formality, his respect for the rules, his not billing me for the ride. 

Bettania, who drove separately with her husband, is seated next to my mother when I arrive. Several family members are on a conference call. There are many kind words spoken, words of love. But then the lead therapist—female, British, white—asks me how I feel about my mother’s drinking and gambling. And I’m wondering if they have a solution to exile at this rehab. A meditation or something. A bit of sound therapy, perhaps. My mother stares at me flatly, betraying nothing. I decide that I’m not going to talk about feelings or say that I miss my mom. Hearing my feelings—what are they exactly?—would probably only annoy her. So, I bring up selling the flat, a topic she would otherwise refuse to discuss. I might be able to help with the practical reality facing her.

“I refuse,” she says. 

“I don’t think you have a choice.”

“It’s my money. I can do whatever I want with it.” 

“And when it’s gone?” I say. “What will you do?”

“I’m not going to move into your hovel, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

I pause, hurt, waiting for one of the two therapists to step in and help. They don’t.

“Anyway, your father knew all about it,” she says, triumphantly. “It was very convenient for him. He could go out without me.” I remember the first time my mother told me about his many affairs. A family dinner at a Persian restaurant, how my cousins were aghast, how I cried, how my father grinned and said, You are all so square.

I don’t know what to say. I’m grinding my jaw. Still no word from the professionals.

“You always loved your father more than you love me,” she says. 

“That’s not true.” 

“You never, not once, stood up for me. You never said anything to him about his infidelities.” This part is true. What was I supposed to do? “And you call yourself a feminist!” 

“Everyone has goals,” I say.

“You’re a fake,” she says. 

My mother looks happy for the first time today. I turn to the therapists again, pleading for help, my palms to the sky. 

The woman joins the conversation. “You mustn’t attack your daughter,” she says. “Isn’t it normal in your culture for men to have more than one wife?”

I gasp. I’m looking at my mother’s incredulous eyes. “That’s not part of our culture,” I say.

“What country did you say you were from again?”

I allow others to answer this one.

In the parking lot, I am sweating and panting like a rabid dog. My blue collared shirt has giant rings under the armpits. I think I might have a sweating disorder. It is not normal. I ask myself if the therapist’s comment was as racist as it felt. And was my mother as offended? But soon my mind has moved on to my failure to stand up to my father. Why didn’t I confront him? Did I fail her? The thing about feminism bothers me most. When I light a cigarette, I notice that my hand is shaking. Cars speed by on the nearby highway, so close it feels like they might crash into the building. The taste of cigarettes is combining with snot in my mouth and my skin smells of panic. I think I’ve lost both parents, not just one. 

Rob drives me back home through Knightsbridge to Belgravia. The route home triggers a sense of deceptive nostalgia. For what, I don’t know. For the colonizer? This is the power of imperialism, I think, to make the colonized nostalgic for the colony. 

My life in New York is real, I tell myself. It’s this side of things that seems fake. I live alone on a picturesque block in the West Village. I work on Duane Street, seven blocks away from the site of the September 11 attacks. I eat Persian food at Nader Persian Restaurant on Twenty-Ninth Street and Park. And when I really miss home—wherever that may be—I go to my cousin Maryam’s place on the Upper East Side to meet with Persians who are more Persian than I am.

I am entitled to freedom, I tell myself. I don’t have to pick between parents, I think. I don’t have to pick between cultures. I am fine where I am, floating, reaching, contributing to the American justice system, making a life. But I remember that in America I am a Persian princess, a terrorist, exotic. As I get out of the car at Cadogan Square, smelling wet concrete, I’m starting to worry that the force of history is stronger than I am.

The night after family therapy Rob and I sit in a pile of fallen leaves in the garden belonging to Cadogan Square, drinking from a bottle of Japanese whisky and smoking cigarettes. His long legs stretch out before him, showing off his slim ankles and red socks. We have a small shovel with us, which rests in his motorcycle helmet. It’s late, well into tomorrow already. 

Rob is fidgeting with a Swiss Army knife. His presence is keeping me calm, his temperament, the opposite of mine, quiet, reflective, slightly reserved. His expression is gentle, almost startled. He looks like someone who reflexively tells the truth. And I feel like I won’t get in trouble as long as he is here.

Unfortunately, though, Rob is still not on board with my plan and needs convincing. When I mentioned it to him earlier, as though I was joking, he didn’t approve. This time, I’m more direct.

“Human beings’ wishes for their remains are sacred,” I say. “As the family attorney, it’s your job to make sure he’s laid to rest correctly—think of me like Antigone.”

“Antigone didn’t end well, Nargess.”

“Different times.”

“You are going to be the end of my career,” Rob says. 

“Restoring honor to the family.”

“Are you really, though?” he says. 

In the distance, the maple and sycamore trees have shed their leaves, and their bare branches make charcoal drawings in the cloudy sky: an evening dress, a deer, a kettle. But it’s the leafless sapling on the other side of the square that calls to me. I stand and stretch my legs, grab the shovel, and slap it against my palm a few times. 

“I know for a fact there is a statute criminalizing digging up the dead,” he says, in an accent so stiff I want to dismantle it. 

“That’s why I brought my lawyer with me.”

“I really think you should reconsider,” Rob says, feebly.

I squint, trying to make out my father’s plaque. It’s hard to see in the dark but I know where it is by heart, having studied its location every day since the day he was interred. Conscious that my heart is beating like crazy, I start moving. I can’t leave him under there.

“Stand guard,” I say, walking across the square, aware that my steps are heavy and loud. The shovel feels like contraband in my hand. The journey is slow but with each step I’m more certain than ever this is the right thing to do. Every cell in my body agrees. Rob is now at least fifty feet behind me. I look back but I can no longer make out his expression. 

When I get to the spot, I make myself small, crawl past the first row of foliage, and kneel in the mud before my father’s makeshift grave. I think of the sages and Mohammad of my dreams—his brown locks perfectly blown dry at the salon, his teeth white like a movie star’s, his expression solemn but open, eyelashes coated with mascara—and I ask for their blessing and forgiveness. 

Then I dig. 

The first layer of soil is difficult to penetrate. Rocks and dry earth. I consider asking Rob for help. I saw his strong pale biceps underneath his T-shirt. This would be easy for him. But this is a task only I can complete. I rest for a few moments in the dirt and picture Mohammad again.

Once I have more strength, I push the steel shovel deep into the ground. My arm shakes and my forearm hurts. I dig through the English dirt for what feels like an interminably long time and make a neat pile of dirt to the left of the tree trunk. Behind me, the moon glows through a thick layer of clouds. When I hit the cedar box containing my father’s ashes, I begin to cry. I reach for it, pry it out of the soil with the shovel. It’s about a foot long and six inches wide. I fill up the hole and replace the plaque as it was.

I walk back to Rob in the moonlight, the muddy wooden urn in my arms. I plop down next to Rob and place the urn between us, put my palm on the box. 

“Rob, meet my father, freed from the yoke of imperialism,” I say.

“Lovely to meet you, sir. Congratulations on your escape.”

“He is grateful for all you have done, Rob. Take a bow.”

Rob rises and does as requested. I stand to leave the communal garden and give him an American-style hug, which he graciously accepts. We exit the park together through the black wrought iron gate. On the sidewalk, I watch him put his helmet back on and get on his motorbike. Walking back to the flat with the box in my hands, I feel the weight of indecision lift. I can now do as she wishes. ■

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