Five

One Month Earlier

Paul had planned to stay at the Plaza, so we’d arranged to meet nearby at a trendy midtown vegan restaurant known for their homemade kombucha and assortment of locavore fare, where the servers wore pin-striped overalls and white newsboy caps, and the tables and bar were made from recycled wood and brass.

I was expecting Paul alone, as he hadn’t mentioned Kali in any of our correspondence, but when I gave the tattooed and pierced hostess my name, she led me to a table for two in front of the window, where I was surprised to find Kali looking over the menu. It took me a moment to place who she was—I’d met her only that one time eight years before—but she hadn’t aged a day. She was dressed for the chilly December weather in a fitted scoop-neck cream cashmere sweater with jeans that accentuated her figure and tall tan boots, her long onyx locks loose about her shoulders.

As she stood to embrace me, I caught a whiff of a sweet and musky perfume. “Svetlana,” she said, her gray eyes locking on mine. “It’s so good to see you.” She had a regal bearing and the slight, unplaceable accent of a global citizen who speaks multiple languages.

“Call me Sveta,” I replied.

“Sveta.” She squeezed my hand, then settled into her chair with her back to the window.

“Where’s Paul?” I asked, sitting tentatively across from her.

“He’s so sorry he couldn’t make it,” she said, holding my gaze. “He very much wanted to see you, but wasn’t feeling well and decided last minute he wasn’t up to the journey. So you have me instead.” A cloud passed over her placid face. “He hated that he couldn’t come along.”

“I hope he’s okay,” I said expectantly, but she only gave a slight nod, apparently disinclined to comment further. “What are you in town for?”

“Taking care of a few business things. And truthfully, I just love to visit the city at Christmas.” She smiled. “It never really feels like Christmas in the jungle. I’ve got my fingers crossed for snow.”

“You may get it,” I said, looking out the window at the leaden skies.

As she fingered one of many gold pendants that dangled from her neck, it was impossible not to notice she wasn’t wearing a bra. “Your eyes are striking,” she said, evaluating me from behind a thick fringe of lashes. “Glacier blue with that royal iris, just like Shiva’s. No wonder you’ve had such a successful career as a model.”

“Thank you,” I said, self-conscious, “but I don’t know how successful it was.”

“Oh, please,” she said good-naturedly. “When I was younger I knew lots of girls who called themselves models, and none of them were half as successful as you. Your face was on a billboard in Times Square!”

“That was a long time ago. And trust me, it was not as lucrative as you’d think.”

“Regardless, it’s pretty awesome,” she said. “And the designers you’ve worked with . . . I bet you’ve gotten to wear some incredible clothes. That feather dress for Jared Cott?”

I smiled, remembering the cockatoo dress I’d worn in Jared’s show the night I met Chase, which I’d also worn in an ad that ran in all the big magazines at the time.

“Shiva’s always followed your career,” she continued. “And I’m right there looking over his shoulder, explaining who all the designers are.”

We both laughed. “Yeah, he’s never struck me as the type to be into fashion,” I said. “But then, I wouldn’t have guessed you were, either.”

“Just because fashion isn’t a part of my life anymore doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the artistry of it,” she said. “We’re both very proud of you.”

“Thank you,” I said again.

Her steady, open gaze settled on me, leaving me flustered and acutely aware of how infrequently I locked eyes with anyone for longer than a brief moment. Even in bed, Chase and I didn’t look at each other that openly. But no one did—did they? Besides children, of course. Not in New York, anyway.

The server, a pale man with a handlebar mustache, came over to take our order, and Kali shifted her stare to him. His face turned red as an apple as he wrote down her order. So I wasn’t the only one hot under the intensity of her gaze.

“So, how did you and my uncle meet?” I asked once he’d departed.

“In an ashram in India.” She smiled, remembering. “He was already famous, but I didn’t know who he was. All I saw was this beautiful spirit—and those eyes, the same ones you have. We had an immediate connection. But it was a silent retreat, so we meditated together for a full ten days before we ever spoke.” She shook her head with a laugh. “I have to admit, though, I was pretty distracted by him. I don’t know how much inner peace I cultivated on that retreat.”

“Is India where you grew up?” I asked, still trying to place her accent.

“My mom’s people are Indian, so I spent a lot of time there, but we lived all over the place. My parents were missionaries—Africa, Central and South America, Southeast Asia—you name it, we lived there.”

“That’s so cool,” I said.

“It was and it wasn’t,” she confided. “I mean, I did love the travel and seeing all the different places, meeting all different types of people. You must have gotten to do that, too, with modeling?”

“That was my favorite thing about it,” I confirmed.

“My parents’ rules were pretty strict, though. I guess all teenagers have issues with their parents, but I didn’t speak to mine for a long time after I left home. Our relationship was something I really had to work on healing.”

I nodded, sympathetic. “But you ended up living a very spiritual life.”

She shrugged. “I always felt the calling, but I fought it. I think that’s why I was so resistant to my parents. I wanted to be normal, to live in the material world—and I did, I mean I spent my early twenties doing all the things I hadn’t been allowed to do as a girl.”

“Like what?” I asked, intrigued. Kali was turning out to be much more down to earth than I’d assumed she’d be.

“Oh, you know. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.” She winked.

I laughed. “So what brought you back to spirituality?”

“All that was fun at first, but after a while I felt this gnawing emptiness inside. I’d take drugs just to feel something. One night I was in a friend’s car, coming home from a party in the rain. There was a car stopped on the road with no lights on, and we didn’t see it. My friend swerved at the last minute and our car flipped. He didn’t make it.”

My hand flew to my mouth. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry.”

“I came full circle after that, though my beliefs are different from what I was raised with. It’s been a journey for sure, but I am happier and more fulfilled now than I ever imagined possible.” She reached across the table and took my hand in hers. “But enough about me, I want to hear about you.”

While we waited for our food, she asked about my life with such genuine warmth that I found myself compelled to open up to her, telling her not only about Chase, but about his mother and all our problems. She listened intently, her changeable eyes absorbing my pain without judgment, as if she could see straight to my soul. Her attentiveness made me realize how long it had been since anyone had really listened to me. But maybe that was my fault, for not speaking up more often.

When I was finished, she thought for a moment, and then said slowly, “You doubt yourself because that’s what you’ve been conditioned to do. But your inner strength is there inside, waiting for you. Everything you need”—she tapped the tangle of necklaces on her chest with her clean, bare nails—“is right here within you.”

I wasn’t totally sure what that meant in the context of the dirty laundry I’d dumped on the table, but she was certainly right that a career in fashion had conditioned me to doubt myself. I had the sense she truly believed that my future could be anything I wanted it to be—something I hadn’t felt for a long time.

“You need to come see us,” Kali said, shaking her head. “Shiva hasn’t done enough for you. We have our family at Xanadu, but you’re his blood. He—”

My ears pricked up. “Xanadu?” He’d invited me to visit the place in the jungle a handful of times, but this was the first time I’d heard the name.

“Our piece of paradise.” Her eyes danced. “Sveta, you’ve never seen anything like it.”

“A stately pleasure dome?” I quoted. “Where the sacred river runs?”

Her smile lit up the room. “Down to a sunless sea.” She grasped my hand. “You have to come. Promise you’ll come.”

“Yes.” I nodded wildly, suddenly overcome with the desire to visit my uncle and his enchanting—wife? Girlfriend? A simple gold band encircled her ring finger. So they must have married at some point. How lucky, I felt, to stumble upon this winsome branch of my family tree.

The loss of my career combined with the chasm that had opened between Chase and me since we’d become engaged had left me feeling adrift lately, and Kali certainly seemed more grounded than anyone I knew. Maybe some time at a spiritual retreat in the jungle was just what I needed.

“How many of you live at Xanadu?” I asked.

“There are about seventy-five of us,” she said. “Though we have rooms for visitors as well.”

“And what do you do out there in the jungle?” I asked, intrigued.

She laughed. “So much. We share all the household activities like cooking, cleaning, gardening. We meditate, of course, and do a lot of physical activity—swimming, yoga, dance. Some of us are painters or musicians. We practice both group and individual therapy. We’re focused on finding personal freedom and living our best lives, while helping others to do the same.”

“That sounds wonderful,” I breathed.

“It is.” She glowed from within as she spoke. “It’s a more natural, healthy way to live. I see so much loneliness here.” She gestured to the restaurant. “Everyone on their phones, no one meeting eyes or holding space for one another. We may be deep in the jungle at Xanadu, but we are never lonely.”

“What do you do if you get sick?” I asked.

“The forest is full of herbal remedies. Though we’re rarely ill. When your vibration hits a certain level, you’re no longer susceptible to the diseases that plague humanity.”

“But I thought Uncle Pa—Shiva was sick,” I said. “I mean, that’s why he couldn’t come today, right?”

Again the dark cloud passed over her face. “His dis-ease is something else,” she said, turmoil swirling behind her luminous eyes. “Metaphysical, I’m afraid. He—” She broke off, looking, for the first time since we’d sat down, unsure of herself. “It’s why I wanted to meet you. I’m worried about him, to be honest. He’s withdrawn more and more the past few months.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I had no idea what else to say to this. I hardly knew the man as an adult, and I certainly wasn’t the right person to counsel her on matters of the heart. Also, I wasn’t entirely sure what she meant by his illness being metaphysical. Was that even possible? It sounded medieval, like something that would be cured by bloodletting or an alchemist. “I’m not sure how I can help, though.”

“He has visions,” she went on, “terrible visions. And he’s started to say things about people plotting against him.”

“What people?” I asked, disturbed.

“Members of the Mandala, our council. Even me.”

“The Mandala?”

“Our group. It means circle.” Her gray eyes were so vulnerable, I felt the urge to wrap her in a hug. “He hasn’t reached out to you?”

“No.”

“Has your mother spoken to him lately?”

“My mom?” I drew back, confused. “No, not that I’m aware. I mean, they haven’t talked in years. They’re not friendly.”

“Oh.” She tucked a strand of silky hair behind her ear. “I just wondered, with your family history . . .” Her voice trailed off.

I stared at her, at a loss. “What history?”

“I know it must be hard for you to talk about,” she said gently. “I’m just worried he’s depressed. I’ve never seen him like this. With your father’s suicide, I . . .”

A bomb went off in my head, taking with it all the noise of the restaurant. All I could hear was a high-pitched whining as I gaped at her, shaken to my core.

“Oh, Sveta,” she cried, taking both my hands in hers. “Did you not know?”

But I had no words.

“How stupid of me. Though you were so young, it makes sense—” Her face crumpled into a mask of sympathy mixed with something else—disbelief? Scorn? “But you’re a grown woman, have they kept it from you this long?”

Her shock wasn’t unwarranted. I fumbled for my orange cardamom kombucha, drinking until half the glass was gone. “I was told he died fighting in Afghanistan,” I said finally. “Soldiers carried his casket. It was draped with a flag.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

How could my mom have kept this from me?

But I was only eleven. Surely she’d only lied to me to protect me. She must have been in so much pain. After years of my struggling to understand why she’d cut Paul out of our lives, suddenly her reason became clear. One of the things I remembered from Surrender was that he believed in radical honesty. No little white lies, no untruths to protect someone from the fact that you thought that dress was unflattering or their father had killed himself. Paul must have wanted to tell me the truth, and my mother wanted to protect me.

As devastated as I was by Kali’s revelation, at least this explanation made sense. Though it left me with only more questions.

After lunch, I wandered through the park, impervious to the cold. Leaves crunched underfoot as I trod the asphalt paths beneath the bare red oak trees, replaying scenes from my childhood through the lens of what I’d just learned about my father’s death. I was both infuriated and more mystified than ever by my forever stoic mother, who took the punches life doled out without complaint, always with her head held high.

I’d learned over the years that small but mighty Irina Bentzen was not the person to call when I was feeling sorry for myself. When the kids in junior high made fun of me because, due to our meager income, I had no choice but to wear the same clothes in close rotation, she pointed out that I was lucky to have clothes to rotate. She had not been so lucky back in Russia, she assured me. Complaint was weakness to her, and weakness was not acceptable. “Do you have two eyes?” she’d scoff. “All your fingers and toes? Food in your belly and a roof to keep you warm at night? You have no problem.”

Her father had left when she was two, and after her mom died in an accident when she was nine, she’d been raised by relatives who, unhappy about having another child to feed, neglected her. So when a school friend of hers who’d gone to America as a mail-order bride called to ask if she’d be open to marrying her new husband’s army friend sight unseen, she saw the opportunity as a blessing from God. The friend accurately described my father as kind and shy, and I’m certain that even if eighteen-year-old Irina had known what trials lay ahead for her in America, she would still have taken that transatlantic flight without looking back.

So, as much as I wanted to demand answers from her, ultimately I thought better of it. Not only because I would have to admit to having had lunch with Paul’s wife, but because she’d chosen not to tell me and I’d learned to respect her decisions, whether or not I thought they were the right ones.

I was no stranger to withholding details. Like how I’d told Chase that my parents met at a dance when my father was stationed in Russia. It wasn’t that I was worried he’d be put off by my parents’ origin story or say something to his family that would make them think even less of me than they already did—he didn’t want that, either. No, the real reason was that with Chase I was allowed to be someone else. Someone who grew up poor, yes, but romantically, not tragically so. With Chase, I spoke about my past with pluck and charm, told the kind of tales he could see himself relaying to his grandchildren one day about my rags-to-riches story. After repeating it enough, I began to think that the rosier version I told Chase was true.

But Kali had reminded me in no uncertain terms that it wasn’t.