Stranger No MoreSample

Eventually,  we moved to a new safe house and tried to start over. The children began recovering from all that had happened. I tried to shield them as best I could, and for much of the time, I felt as though they were able to enjoy life. As we approached our first Christmas since leaving Asghar, they filled the air with excited chatter about presents, food, and all the things they were going to do during the school vacation.

 

All those plans changed when two police officers visited one afternoon. They told me that Asghar was planning on kidnapping the girls within the next twenty-four hours and that we should get as far away as possible as soon as we could.

 

I didn’t know what to say. They insisted that they were taking the threat seriously and told me to phone my friends to see if I could stay with some of them for the Christmas vacation.

 

“You’ve got three hours.” I knew most of the police from the station by now, and one of them was the same female officer who had accompanied me on the first visit back to the apartment when Ziynab had hurled Farsi obscenities while the officer collected my things for me. “Don’t worry,” she added as she stood in the doorway, about to leave. “It’s going to be okay.   You’ve got an angel on your shoulder.”

 

Her words caught me. Ever since I had been given the Farsi Bible I had picked it up and prayed from time to time. The worse Asghar’s attacks had gotten, the more I had prayed. I found that it helped, much like drinking a glass of cool water took away the dryness in my mouth on a hot night. To my mind, prayer was like medicine, only to be taken in the most extreme of times.

 

But an angel on my shoulder? That sounded different, and unlike anything I had ever learned in a mosque. There, it was all about fear and rules and the difficulty of earning a route to paradise. I had never thought of God being interested in helping me before, let alone being with me all the time. I liked the idea. It gave me courage.