Chapter 92 CHAPTER 92
Jamal?
Jamal didn’t move. He stood back by the sill, his face emptied of color. Ethan wanted to shake him, to make him see and act, but the boy’s limbs were weak, his eyes enormous with the shock of being the one left on the inside. Jamal was the oldest in that way that feels like a curse for children forced to measure things for adults. He had always carried a strange gravity; now that gravity was a leaden immobility.
“Jamal,” Ethan said, voice low because the air had gone thin. “Listen. Go now—call for help. Bring a towel. Bring anything.” The words felt hollow even as he said them. Jamal’s lips quivered. At last, as if a plug had been pulled, the boy moved slowly, mechanically and went down the stairs with steps that looked borrowed from someone else’s life.
Ethan leaned over the first child. A small hand lay limp where it had fallen. The child’s breath was shallow, a weak answer that shook. Ethan’s hands were steady because they had to be. He spoke names as if the names would stitch something back together. He willed them to breathe with words as if words could force physiology into compliance. The house around them contracted into a tightness reserved for moments when small bodies become suddenly, impossibly fragile.
Ayisha’s voice sharpened with focus. She barked orders to the empty rooms, to the house, to the sky. She demanded water, blankets, anything to absorb the coldness of the morning. The neighbors were not yet gathered; the world outside moved slow and oblivious, as if the city’s ordinary noise could be kept from knowing what had occurred in a house that until hours ago had been filled with the ordinary chaos of children.
Jamal returned and dropped to his knees beside them, his face gray and set. He reached for his siblings with hands that trembled. He whispered quick, small words that Ethan couldn’t make out, an urgent litany meant for mouths that could not answer.
Ethan watched Jamal’s fingers close over small limbs and felt a tenderness so sharp it was nearly physically painful. The boy’s efforts were clumsy but wholly his; he pressed his palms into small chests and tried to rouse a response. It was a heart-rending sight—an eight-year-old trying to perform the work of adults in a world that had not given him that role willingly.
Ayisha’s eyes flashed as she saw that at least one small chest was moving faintly. The motion was a thread; it promised nothing but it was there. She bent her head low and murmured nonsense, sentences, stories, counting, anything to wake them with voice and memory. Her mouth pressed against hair and skin with the ministrations of a parent who refuses to accept finality.
Ethan called again, louder, into the morning, and then quieter, into the small faces before him. He checked for signs, open eyes, the flutter of breath, the dull heat of skin. The children were too still, too shock-still, but they were there. Their small faces, normally expressive and loud, were flattened into the silence of things that had been interrupted mid motion. The sight lodged in Ethan like a nail.
Neighbors began to appear at the gate, drawn by some louder sound or the tremor in the air. People’s faces showed the slow, guilty curiosity of those who want to help but are frozen by the immensity of the moment. A phone was thrust into someone’s hand, fingers shaking. There was a flurry of voices, quick, practical measures proposed, hands offered, blankets passed. The house’s small world became a locus of other people’s concern.
Ethan felt his limbs work on automatic, move the first child to a flat surface, tilt the head to keep the airway open, find a towel to press to wounds that were visible but not to be described. The sun fell in hard lines across the garden and did not care for the small shapes it touched. Everything ordinary felt obscene against the raw frame of the moment.
He knew, with a cold clarity, that the morning line had been crossed. The simple, neat life they’d carved out for those children—meals, bedtime stories, scoldings over messy rooms had been ruptured by a single, reckless second. He looked up and found Jamal standing a little apart, hands clenched, eyes wet and distant. The boy’s face was hard to look at for long; it contained an adult’s grief in a child’s outline.
Ethan reached for Jamal and for himself and for the three small bodies that had been pulled out of the safe world. For a second he was a man who could not hold everything; he had to choose to hold what he could. He held Jamal’s shoulder and felt the trembling there as if it would transfer itself into him. Ayisha knelt and gathered what warmth she could into her palms, whispering small prayers and frantic instructions.
Everything slowed to small operations and long, terrible silences. The garden, with its clipped hedges and sensible flowerbeds, had become the ground of a sudden private apocalypse, something small and intimate and elemental had been broken, and there were no ready words to shape the damage.
Ethan watched the three children, his hands working on the one nearest him, his eyes taking in the others with the frantic, sparse calculation of someone making triage of a life he had sworn to protect.
He and Ayisha looked at the three children and the enormity of what lay before them filled the world.
"Let's bury them at the backyard quickly..." Ethan said, looking at Ayisha who was shaking her head in tears.