A Thousand Splendid Suns

But the feeling didn't last. It was hard to feel, really feel, Mammy's loss.
Hard to summon sorrow, to grieve the deaths of people Laila had never
really thought of as alive in the first place. Ahmad and Noor had always
been like lore to her. Like characters in a fable. Kings in a history book.
It was Tariq who was real, flesh and blood. Tariq, who taught her
cusswords in Pashto, who liked salted clover leaves, who frowned and
made a low, moaning sound when he chewed, who had a light pink
birthmark just beneath his left collarbone shaped like an upside-down
mandolin.
So she sat beside Mammy and dutifully mourned Ahmad and Noor, but,
in Laila's heart, her true brother was alive and well.
20.
The ailments that would hound Mammy for the rest of her days began.
Chest pains and headaches, joint aches and night sweats, paralyzing
pains in her ears, lumps no one else could feel. Babi took her to a
doctor, who took blood and urine, shot X-rays of Mammy's body, but
found no physical illness.
Mammy lay in bed most days. She wore black. She picked at her hair
and gnawed on the mole below her lip. When Mammy was awake, Laila
found her staggering through the house. She always ended up in Laila's
room, as though she would run into the boys sooner or later if she just
kept walking into the room where they had once slept and farted and
fought with pillows. But all she ran into was their absence. And Laila.
Which, Laila believed, had become one and the same to Mammy.