A Thousand Splendid Suns

becoming more shrill with each word.
"It was just here," Mariam said, and he cried, "No, it's lost, I know it. I
just know it's lost! Where is it? Where is it?"
"Here," she said, fetching the ball from the closet where it had rolled to.
But Zalmai was bawling now and pounding his fists, crying that it wasn't
the same ball, it couldn't be, because his ball was lost, and this was a
fake one, where had his real ball gone? Where? Where where where?
He screamed until Laila had to come upstairs to hold him, to rock him
and run her fingers through his tight, dark curls, to dry his moist cheeks
and cluck her tongue in his ear.
Mariam waited outside the room. From atop the staircase, all she could
see of Tariq were his long legs, the real one and the artificial one, in
khaki pants, stretched out on the uncarpeted living-room floor. It was
then that she realized why the doorman at the Continental had looked
familiar the day she and Rasheed had gone there to place the call to
Jalil. He'd been wearing a cap and sunglasses, that was why it hadn't
come to her earlier. But Mariam remembered now, from nine years
before, remembered him sitting downstairs, patting his brow with a
handkerchief and asking for water. Now all manner of questions raced
through her mind: Had the sulfa pills too been part of the ruse? Which
one of them had plotted the lie, provided the convincing details? And
how much had Rasheed paid Abdul Sharif-if that was even his name-to
come and crush Laila with the story of Tariq's death?
44.