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  However, Sadeed had made a promise to his teacher, and a man must keep his word.

  “All right,” he said, “the pencil is sharp, and now I want you to use your best writing. In English. First think, then tell me the word you are going to write, and how it is spelled. In English. And then write the word on the paper. Do you understand?”

  Amira nodded. “Of course I understand. And stop talking to me like I’m a baby.”

  So the work began.

  CHAPTER 7

  WORD FOR WORD

  Slowly, patiently, Sadeed tried to coax a sensible letter out of his sister, one word, one sentence at a time. After three minutes she had written the date. It took another five minutes for her to write the words “Dear Abby in America.”

  And ten minutes later, when she was struggling to write the word “village,” Sadeed could not stand it one second longer.

  “Your head is full of rocks—I give up!” he shouted. And he grabbed the paper from his sister and tore it to shreds.

  Amira burst into tears.

  From the kitchen at the end of the room, their mother stopped kneading a large lump of dough. She looked at Sadeed. She didn’t scold, but he saw her frown.

  He took a deep breath. Then another.

  And then he said, “Look, don’t cry, Amira. I shouldn’t have yelled at you.” And thinking fast, he added, “Really, it’s not your fault. You just don’t know English well enough to do this. You barely know how to shape the letters correctly, much less spell all the words and get the grammar right. It’s a hard language.”

  Sadeed had meant that to comfort her, but Amira wailed even louder. Between sobs, she said, “The teacher . . . is going to think . . . I’m stupid . . . just like you do!”

  “I don’t think that,” he said, “and neither does the teacher.” He gave her an awkward pat on the shoulder. “Just stop crying, okay? Because I have an idea, and you’re really going to like it. Ready?”

  She looked up at him, and the tears on her cheeks made him feel terrible.

  “Here,” he said, gently taking the pencil from her. He opened to a fresh page in his school notebook. “You just tell me what you want to say to this girl. Talk to me in Dari, and I’ll write it in my notebook first, and then later I’ll copy it onto the good paper. In English. And then you can sign your name to it. I’ll be like a letter writer sitting on his stool at the bazaar, and you’ll be the customer, telling me what to write.”

  Amira dried her eyes with the edge of the dark blue scarf that covered her head and shoulders. She sniffed, and blinked, and looked up at him. “And you’ll write exactly what I say?”

  “I will.” Sadeed nodded, beginning to feel impatient again. “So begin telling me. Right now. We can’t take the whole day with this, all right? Tell me what to write.” Sadeed wanted to get this over with and then go put in a few hours at his afternoon job.

  So Amira began to dictate her letter.

  “Dear Abby in America,

  I am Amira. I am ten and a half years old.

  I live in a village called Bahar-Lan. It is about a hundred and twenty kilometers north of Kabul. We still have some snow on the ground here, but the days are sometimes warmer now. The snow will not be all gone until at least another two months. At night it is still cold.

  I am in the fourth grade at our school. I study very hard. A lot of the other girls in our village go to school also, and I am glad that my father permits it. I love to read, and I am getting better at writing. I am studying English also.

  I have a mother and a father and a brother. My uncle and his wife also live with us in our house. But soon he will have his own home.

  I will be sad when they move, but there will be more room. So that will be good.

  Thank you for the photograph. All I can see is that your hair is pale and that you are wearing a yellow shirt and red pants. Why is there a wall of rock with a roof above it? I do not understand that.

  I haven’t got a picture I can send back to you, as we do not have a camera. But a man who lives near us owns one, and maybe I can ask for his help.”

  Amira kept talking for several more minutes, non-stop. Sadeed was actually quite impressed that his sister was able to speak a letter out loud this way and have most of it make perfect sense. When she finally ran out of things to say, she finished with,

  “Abby, I thank you very much for writing to me. And I hope my letter finds you and your family in fine health, God-be-willing.

  Your friend in Afghanistan,

  Amira Bayat”

  As promised, Sadeed had written down exactly what she said, word for word. He showed his notebook to her, and she smiled and said, “Thank you, Mr. Letter Writer.”

  And then Amira hopped off the charpoy and went to help her mother get ready to carry their flatbread dough to the oven at the village baking co-op.

  Before they were out the door, Sadeed had already begun translating Amira’s letter into English. He made a rough draft on a new page in his notebook, and then used his neatest handwriting and copied the words over onto a fresh piece of white paper. In fifteen minutes he had filled one side of a sheet. After ten minutes more he had covered half the other side, and that was it. The letter was ready for Amira’s signature.

  Sadeed put all the papers away, carefully closed up his notebook, grabbed his hat and coat, and then dashed out the door to go to his father’s shop. Some new shipments of wheat flour, lentils, and rice were supposed to arrive, and he knew he’d be needed to help his father and his uncle stack the heavy sacks.

  He set off at a brisk walk. It was mostly uphill to the bazaar, more than half a kilometer along the main road that ran through the center of town.

  Sadeed heard the roar of a truck as it climbed the steep grade toward the village, but the sound was an echo from the far side of the marketplace, where the roadway got wider. Near his house, the oncoming traffic was mostly women and girls walking home from the bazaar with their parcels and bags of food. Up ahead he saw people headed the same way he was: a herdsman carrying a bundle of wool, a woman with two sacks of charcoal hanging from the yoke across her shoulders, a boy leading a donkey with a bundle of carpets tied to the pack saddle. Sadeed noticed everything, and he nodded and smiled when neighbors greeted him, but his mind was elsewhere, still distracted by this letter-writing business.

  Amira’s sudden outburst of tears had been a surprise. She really wanted to do a good job on the letter, wanted to be proud of her work. I would want to do a good job too, of course, he thought. But I’d never start crying about it. Which made him think about how different he was from his sister, and from girls in general. That thought bounced around his mind for several minutes. Girls were a great mystery.

  As he neared the bazaar, the dirt street widened into the central market area. The permanent stalls on both sides of the street had been built so that the doorways were above the level of the roadway, and running along in front of each row of shops was a knee-high platform of rocks and dirt, something like a porch. The common roof that ran above the stalls extended out over the raised porch area, and this gave the shopkeepers and their goods a little shelter from the weather. Stout wooden doors, two for each shop, were propped open for business, locked and bolted shut each night.

  At this time of year the market always seemed dull and slow to Sadeed. The permanent stalls were the only places doing business. He loved the bazaar best from late spring through the fall, when the whole market area would be packed from morning to night with vendors selling from pushcarts, from small wagons, from baskets, or from cloths spread out over the ground. Potatoes, fruit, spices, shoes, tools, books, charcoal, kerosene, clothing, leather, cloth, cookware, meat, poultry, portable radios, lumber, woodstoves, bicycles, tea—almost anything was available when the bazaar was in full session.

  “Are you hungry, boy?” Sadeed was only five or six stalls away from his father’s, and the man calling to him was a food vendor named Rafi. He was holding out a kebab. “Stupid quest
ion—boys are always hungry. Here, take it.” He winked and said, “I’ll put this on your father’s account.”

  Sadeed grinned and accepted the short wooden skewer of roasted chunks of lamb and red peppers. “Mmm—smells delicious. Thank you.”

  “Just come back and spend money someday,” the man said. “And tell the people you meet where you got that.”

  As he wolfed down his first bite of grilled meat, Sadeed got a clear look at his afternoon’s work. His father’s shop was two stalls wide. One was used mostly for storage, which left the floor area of the other stall uncluttered so customers could step inside and have their purchases weighed on the scale hanging from the ceiling. And there on the porch in front of the storage stall, forty or fifty bags of grain and flour were piled up, some delivered from Kabul by truck, others no doubt brought by donkey or oxcart from local mills and grain growers. Sadeed wished he’d been around to hear the haggling over the prices—his father was a master at striking a good deal.

  “Finally come to work, have you, boy? And I see you’ve brought me a snack.” His father didn’t smile, but Sadeed knew he was joking. Nodding at the stack of bags, his father said, “Well, you’d better eat all that yourself. You’ll need your strength.”

  For the next hour and a half, Sadeed and his uncle Asif worked side by side, first clearing out the storeroom, and then stacking the newest sacks farthest away from the door. It was important to sell the older flour and grain first, so that nothing would spoil.

  As he worked, Sadeed kept thinking about Amira’s letter. And about that girl hanging on the wall like a spider. And he realized that Amira hadn’t answered the girl’s question about the mountains. And Amira hadn’t really told the American girl much about her family, either. I could have written a much more interesting letter, he thought. He heaved a twenty-kilo bag of flour onto the top of a stack. But it’s got nothing to do with me. And he resolved not to think about that letter again.

  A few minutes before seven the next morning, Sadeed met his teacher at the door of the school building and handed him Amira’s letter.

  The envelope had not been sealed, and Mahmood said, “May I read this?”

  Sadeed said, “Certainly.”

  Mahmood took the letter out and turned so that the morning sunlight poured onto the paper. He read it quickly, smiled, and said, “It’s good. Thank you, Sadeed.”

  “You’re welcome.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  The teacher said, “Is there something else?”

  Sadeed pulled some papers from his notebook. “I . . . I rewrote Amira’s letter last night. Because it seemed like there were questions Amira forgot to answer. So this is what I wrote.”

  Mahmood took the sheets of paper and began to read. Again, he smiled. “This is excellent. Very good indeed. And did Amira like the changes you made?”

  “She liked the ones I showed her. But she hasn’t seen all the changes . . . not yet.”

  “But why did she sign her name at the end of your letter?”

  Sadeed shrugged. “I asked her to, and she did. She signed both letters.” He paused, then said, “So . . . which letter should go to America?”

  Sadeed already knew the answer to this question. He had heard Mahmood speaking to the village council. He had said, “Should we accept less than the very best writing, the best spelling and grammar?”

  But Mahmood said, “It should be the first one, I think, Amira’s letter. But leave both of them with me, all right? Either way, a fine letter from our village will be on its way to America by dinnertime. Now let’s go to class, shall we?”

  And on a Thursday morning in the hills above Kabul, the school day began.

  CHAPTER 8

  HOUSE, BARN, FIELDS, WOODS

  Eleven days later and more than seven thousand miles to the west, Abby Carson got off the school bus, walked the long driveway, and let herself in the back door of the old farmhouse where she had lived her entire life.

  “Hi,” she called. “I’m home.”

  No answer, which is what she had been hoping for.

  Because that meant neither her mom nor her dad was home from work yet. And since it was a sunny Monday afternoon in late March, and since she had less than an hour of homework, Abby dumped her book bag just inside the door of the mudroom, kicked off her school sneakers, pulled on her hiking boots, grabbed her green backpack, and headed for the woods.

  The green backpack contained a flashlight, a butane lighter, a compass, a pocket knife, a folding pull saw, a small hatchet, some good climbing rope, a couple hundred feet of nylon cord, a liter of water, a space blanket, a nylon poncho, a pencil, a notebook, and about a dozen energy bars. Abby headed straight north, crossed the winter-brown lawn, and as she stepped onto a path leading through the tangled undergrowth of the woods, she dug around in the pack, found what she wanted, and started munching on an oatmeal raisin bar.

  After walking less than three minutes, all traces of civilization vanished, and she was alone in the woods. But actually, she was still in her own backyard, because her home sat on sixty-seven acres. The house, yard, barn, and pasture took up eight acres or so; forty acres was farmland; and the rest was woods.

  Abby’s mom was in charge of the house, and that made sense because it was the home where she had grown up. When Abby’s grandparents had retired and moved to Arizona, her parents had decided to stay on at the family farm.

  Abby’s dad looked after the farmland, but not really. Brent Collins from a mile up the road did the real farming, and her father just checked up on him now and then when the price of corn or soybeans got interesting.

  Abby’s brother, Tom, had chosen the barn and the small pasture as his territory. He had built himself a clubhouse in the hayloft, and also raised sheep to show at the 4-H Tri-county Fair. Or at least, he used to. Since getting to high school, he had become more interested in computers than livestock.

  And about the time she had turned eight years old, Abby had decided that the woods belonged to her. And she was sure that she’d gotten the best deal. She had explored every inch of the nineteen wooded acres, from the small stream at the northern boundary, to the road on the east, to the fence line on the west. She knew every briar patch, every vine strong enough to climb, every clump of poison oak. She knew where to find sassafras saplings, where to look for wild blackberries, and where to hunt for red-bellied mud snakes. She knew where the rabbits had their warren, knew the hollow trees where raccoons hibernated, knew the pines where the horned owl slept on spring afternoons.

  Today she was headed toward her newest tree house. It wasn’t a regular tree house, because this particular oak lay on the forest floor. The tree had originally stood about eighty feet tall, with a trunk almost three feet in diameter. During a gusty thunderstorm last July, the tree had toppled, and its roots had pulled up a circle of earth fifteen feet across. That root clump held the base of the tree seven or eight feet off the ground, and the upper branches had kept the crown of the tree from falling flat against the earth. This left the main trunk slanted upward at an angle of about twenty degrees—sort of like the deck of a ship that had run up onto a reef. Abby used one of the largest branches like a ladder to climb from the ground up to the trunk, and then she could walk up the trunk like a gangplank into the mass of tangled branches.

  It really wasn’t much of a fort, not yet. Abby had chopped off a couple dozen branches, each about ten or twelve feet long, and had lashed them together to make a rough platform laid across the trunk in the tree’s upper canopy. Another bunch of shorter branches angled up from one edge of the platform to a crossbeam she had tied in place. This made a simple lean-to, open to the east and closed to the west, which was the direction most of the wind came from. Smaller leafy branches layered into the lean-to roof kept out most of the snow and rain. A heap of evergreen branches from a nearby hemlock tree made a soft and springy place to sit.

  It looked more like a gorilla’s nest than a tree house, but it was mor
e than twenty feet up and it was invisible from the ground. The leaves of the dying tree had turned brown by late September, but most of them had stayed in place all fall and winter, which provided good natural camouflage. Abby intended to make some serious improvements to the hideout during the coming summer.

  Back in October, Abby had done some Internet research about how to make a bow and arrows, and that had led her to the U.S. Army Survival Manual, which she had downloaded onto the family-room computer. And following the step-by-step directions, she’d found a dead oak sapling, cut and shaped it carefully with her hatchet, and made herself a sturdy bow with a string made of nylon parachute cord. All fall she added to her stock of handmade arrows whenever she found a long, straight stick.

  Since bow hunting involved walking around on the ground, she kept her bow and arrows wrapped in plastic and hidden in the leaves at the base of the fallen oak, instead of up in the lean-to. And today she was going to have some target practice. She imagined herself getting good enough with the bow to shoot a rabbit—except she knew she’d have to be starving before she could make herself do that.

  Just as the toppled tree came into view, Abby’s cell phone vibrated in her pocket. She didn’t need to look at the display to know who it was.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Hi, sweetheart—I meant to be home by now, but it got busy all of a sudden, and your mom works until five thirty today. Everything okay with you?”

  “Sure, I’m fine.”

  “Well, I just wanted to—”

  High above Abby, a solitary crow gave one sharp warning caw.

  Her dad said, “You’re not in the house.”

  “No, but I—”

  “Abby, I don’t want to hear it. Turn yourself around and go right back inside and get on your homework.”