Another day, another week, and another two more, all passing in restless sleeping at night, tired waking at dawn, and restless tiredness all through the day.
There were the crushing business-of-death appointments to confront—the reading of Sunil’s will at Mr. Desjardins’s office, “liquidating assets” at the bank, transferring car ownership, meeting with the accountant to file the last taxes, returning government-issued documents, applying for the callously named “death benefit” at City Hall, and on and on. Part of her felt relieved as she completed the tasks, and yet, their completion also left her feeling slightly paralyzed, as if Sunil were vanishing a little more every time she drew a line through another item on her list, the way an antacid tablet fizzed in a glass of water until it was gone, and she, like the water that overwhelms the tablet, was the one responsible for Sunil’s dissolution. It was hard to reconcile the two: her duty, and this act of erasure.
After her parents’ fight, silence resumed its noxious reign of the house. Each of them more or less kept to themselves. Kavita thought of them and herself as trapped in a kind of prison, each in solitary confinement, always using different rooms at different times, their paths almost never intersecting. When their paths did cross, they never crossed for long. If they talked, they never talked about what needed to be said.
The thinking side of her asserted that she should engage them, draw them out of their caves of sorrow, get them to eat more and talk more and move more. But the feeling side of her could not bear to be in the same room with them for longer than a few minutes at a time. They were bounded by grief but also torn apart by it. Every time she looked into their wounded eyes, she knew their pain, and it was more than she could stand.
Her mother kept to her routine of napping on the floor of Sunil’s bedroom with his ashes tucked safely on his bed. Her father had finished his album project and moved on to checking out books on Buddhism from the library. Days earlier he even came home with a guide book about monastery tours in Dharamsala. Kavita didn’t ask about it. If he was planning his Great Escape, she didn’t want to know.
She cooked dal and rice or kitchari every few days or so in case her parents craved something other than toast and bananas and ginger tea. (Although she stocked those items too.) She herself never ate more than a few mouthfuls at a time. Got a strange sense of ecstasy from her hunger pangs, like a self-flagellating monk, because, just like the monk, she knew she deserved to suffer, that her suffering was an expression of love. With every hollow groan of her stomach it was as though she were paying off the debts that Anchor hissed in her ear, crumb by crumb, pound by pound. That week, she started cinching up her jeans with a belt.
To pass the time, she limped through long walks, smoked, texted Chi, brooded, denied her hunger pangs, emailed Chi, lost time in flashbacks, took scalding showers, ruminated, shopped for things she didn’t need online, left voicemails for Chi, thought of every big and small fight she’d ever had with Sunil, lost time in weeping, read obsessively about suicide and bereavement and trauma, lost more time in weeping, occasionally hit herself to decompress, slept (except at night), watched more Buffy than was healthy (especially at night).
All the while, she kept an open line of one-way communication with Sunil.
The one advantage of Nirav’s sparse visits was that she didn’t have to pretend to be cheerful or functional for long intervals. Most of the time, she was free to be haunted.
She became numb to Nirav’s excuses for not visiting more often. “I have an early meeting” was as popular as “I have to work late.” Although because they involved work, she empathized with him, if only a speck. After all, she hadn’t rejoined the world as a productive member of society, yet. The thought of going back to work was more insurmountable now that it had been weeks ago. Sometimes it felt as though she might never hold down a job again. All the steps involved in getting through a full day felt as long as a marathon to her. How had she ever done it before?
Other excuses, she had little sympathy for, like, “I have a footy match” or “I’m going to play Snooker with some mates” or “I’m too tired.” Whenever he mumbled these excuses, she dismissed them, telling herself she didn’t care, it didn’t matter if he showed up or not, she was handling things well on her own, everything was fine, and, usually after a quick strike to the head, she more or less believed herself.
One day, the police inspector rang their doorbell. He was holding a white plastic bag. Her thoughts shot to the white plastic bag Sunil had given her, the one full of sleeping pills, the one she had gotten rid of. While rationally she knew that the white plastic bag in the inspector’s hand was a different white plastic bag, knowing this didn’t stop her insides from reacting with panic. “The rest of your brother’s belongings,” he told her. What he said after that, she couldn’t remember.
Back in her room, she knelt by her bed and laid out his things with the care of an archivist handling lost treasures.
His wallet—curved, worn brown leather, a graduation present. Car and house keys held together on the plastic Taurus keychain she got him from a Hallmark store years ago. And his cell phone.
His cell phone. The repository of their pleas. She picked it up. It was off. Had it been off the whole time? Was the battery dead? Before turning it on, she hesitated. It doesn’t matter, she thought. It doesn’t change anything. Stop torturing yourself. But reasonable thoughts were easily overruled by her beastly need to know. She pressed the power button. It flickered to life. Which probably meant it had been off the whole time.
25 missed calls, she read, heart sinking.
5 new messages.
The glare of knowing began to sting her eyes.
This meant that while they were reaching out to him, Sunil had remained fixed on his plan. She had an answer now, and it proved her earlier assertion to be correct. The answer didn’t matter, it didn’t change anything, and it certainly didn’t make her feel any closer to closure. All Kavita felt was torture at the hands of a past she couldn’t alter.
She deleted the messages. They served no purpose anymore. She didn’t need to hear their pleas, veiled with false cheer and calm, as they gently tried to ease Sunil home. She relived the futility of that helpless time enough as it is. She would never forget it.
Once the voicemail was empty, she dialled his number. The voicemail message was the only place the sound of his voice existed anymore. They weren’t like other families who videotaped every event, momentous and mundane. The idea of spending money on a camcorder seemed like a frivolous waste to her frugal immigrant parents, who sacrificed everything—including trips back to India for births, wedding, and even funerals—to save for Sunil and Kavita’s educations. Pushing down a violent surf of grief, she dilated her eardrums and listened, her heartbeat a slow throb in her throat. “This is Sunil,” he said. “Leave me a message and have a good one.”
His voice—easygoing, healthy, alive—vacuumed to her hollow centre, where spun against her insides, like a cold wind twisting against the walls of a cave, with nothing to break it, nowhere for it to escape.
Next came the beep and she hung up.
On Thanksgiving she drove up to Gatineau Park to see the hawks, one of their Thanksgiving traditions, a favourite of Sunil’s. She followed the road that sliced through the hills surrounded by mixed forest on either side, so dense and lush it was almost possible to forget the fetters of urban life in the deep green of pine needles and the rose tone of cliffs. Every now and then, the trees would clear, revealing a small dark pond or cattail-hemmed marshland. At one point, she thought she spotted a beaver, but then again it might have been a deadhead bobbing in the water.
She parked in the grass alongside the road a few minutes away from Champlain Lookout. The trails were always frenzied during the holiday. Everywhere she looked there were families; small ones, big ones, some with dogs, others with strollers, others still with coolers and cameras, although considerably more with camera phones.
She wanted to hate them. Their togetherness and full bellies and smiles and laughter and posing for group photos and the fact that they had things to be thankful for. Since Anchor and Blaze and Black Gloom had colonized her insides, she could remember only distantly what gratitude felt like. Something like a long breath of relief exhaled skyward, the gentle sag into a loved one’s arms, the happy idiot feeling of luck. She wanted to hate the other families for showing off.
But she couldn’t. She knew they weren’t to blame.
“You should be here watching the hawks,” she said to Sunil.
But you were too slow, said Anchor as it pulled. You let him down. The sinking feeling spread.
Black Gloom slowly crushed her from crown to toe and she wondered how it was possible that she could be simultaneously sitting and flattened on the car mats.
Then she felt them all mixing together. Anchor and Blaze and Black Gloom, all at once, like a maelstrom—heavy, feverish, thick—churning under her skin. She couldn’t hold them. She wanted them out.
She lit a cigarette, sucked in a long drag, and butted it out on her palm, pressing its molten tip into the place along her lifeline where everything had gone wrong. A yowl spurted up her throat like bile, sharp and scathing as her wound, but she stoppered it in her throat, where it shook. Guilty people didn’t deserve to scream. They hadn’t earned the right.
With a pulsing stare, she focused on the pain—hot, deep, sharp. That pain she could manage. That pain she knew she deserved.
Then she gagged the yowling welt with tissues and climbed out of the car. Hiked up to the crowded lookout point. Slipped into an opening along the curved stone wall and let the panoramic view calm her breath. To the right were the rolling hills of the Eardley Escarpment, which from a distance, resembled sleeping Vishnu covered in mosses. She admired the pines and cedars, as verdant as coriander chutney, and leafy trees, vibrant with shades of turmeric and saffron and paprika. Below, a steep drop gave way to farmland that marked the landscape like earth-toned Hippie patchwork cloth. Straight ahead in the distance, the Ottawa River trenched through the land, gleaming.
And above, the soaring hawks, like kites, only freer because they had no cords to bind them to the ground.
“That’s why you loved them,” she said to Sunil. He envied them. Maybe he even wanted to be one of them.
A dark-haired woman with a green Tilley hat beside her said, “Pardonnez-moi?”
Kavita glanced at her and left.
On Halloween, she kept the lights off, and paused her hunger strike for the evening, telling herself that she was eating the candies for Sunil. He always loved Halloween candies, especially mini chocolate bars. She sat outside his bedroom in the dark with a bag of them and ate her way through it until all that was left was a mess of wrappers littered around her like decaying leaves. While she gorged, they reminisced.
“Bear, do you remember the year you dressed up like a woman? I don’t know if kids do that anymore. Mom gave you one of her old dresses and a bra. You stuffed it with cantaloupes, I think. Or was it grapefruits? And you let me put makeup on you! Every little sister’s dream. What was I that year? The Karate Kid? I wore an old gi of yours, and you drew a beard on my face with Mom’s eyeliner. She wasn’t too pleased about that. We’ve got the pictures somewhere.” Maybe one day she would have to will to look at them again.
She unwrapped a Coffee Crisp and ate the top wafer first, the way Sunil had taught her to do. As she nibbled, she felt the lightness she had momentarily enjoyed start to drain away as another memory surfaced. “Then there was the year I told you I wanted to go trick-or-treating with my friends. I must’ve been about eleven, I think. I can still see the wounded look in your eyes, like I’d rejected you.” Why did the memory come back to her now? To punish her? To show her that she had always been careless with him?
A short while later, her stomach rejected the treats, heave by heave.
Are you surprised? Anchor said, as she rinsed the sweet and bitter tastes from her mouth. She held the counter against its drag. You didn’t deserve the chocolates in the first place. Sunil doesn’t get to enjoy any. Why should you get a night off from remembering why?
As she stood there, staring into the whiteness of the sink, it seemed to Kavita that Anchor was making more and more sense. She had let herself off too easily. Was she ever going to learn? Was she ever going to become a better person? The kind of person that did what needed to be done and said what needed to be said, at the right time, and the right place, when it mattered.
She pressed her thumb into her scar, breathing into its sting and screams.
One day, she finally forced herself to call Dr. Jones. Patty had been leaving polite yet insistent reminders on the answering machine about the life insurance paperwork and the report that needed to be filled our by Sunil’s physician. Underneath some papers on her desk, she found one of Sunil’s old appointment cards with the doctor’s information. As she stared at the date and time written on the card, she remembered waiting for Sunil in the clinic parking lot with starved eyes, the fraying hope as the minutes ticked by without his arrival, the wordless shock of the long drive home without him.
Clenching the scar on her palm, which was healing but still ached, she dialled the doctor’s number. After a few of minutes of being put on hold, he answered.
“This is Dr. Jones,” he said, in the same clip voiced she remembered.
“Dr. Jones, my name is Kavita Gupta. My brother, Sunil, was one of your patients. Sunil Gupta.”
“Yes, of course. I was sorry to hear about him.”
For a few seconds, his words didn’t make sense. “You know about what happened to him?”
“Yes, the police notified us.”
The police. She forgot that they had requested the phone numbers of Sunil’s dentist and doctor.
“Is there something I can do for you?”
Why had she called?
“Miss Gupta?”
The reason flooded back to her, and she detached, floating above the current of the things that didn’t make sense—like Sunil’s death, and insurance forms, and his doctor knowing about his suicide but never calling to make sure they were okay. She spoke numbly about the forms.
“You can mail them or drop them off at my office, if you prefer. I’ll let my receptionist know to keep an eye out for them.”
“Oh, okay,” she said. The task she had agonized over for weeks was a matter of daily business for Dr. Jones.
“Is there anything else I can do for you?”
An entire unspoken conversation lay in the cradle of her partially-opened mouth, but she couldn’t find her courage, nor the dexterity to unloop the stubborn knot in her tongue. “Uh-uh,” she managed to grunt in reply.
“Well then, I apologize, but I have another patient waiting.”
The electric drone of the dial tone resonated in her eardrum, packing it with sound. She hung up the phone and lowered it to the desk.
It was possible that this was simply how things were done. She wouldn’t know. Even if that was the case, however, Kavita found herself asking whether it should be.
He didn’t ask if we were okay. He didn’t offer counselling. He didn’t ask us to come in to discuss where the failure in your treatment occurred. Your family doctor. Yet here we are, your family, in pieces, and he’s on to the next patient.
Blaze would have stirred then, but the chill of her shock was greater than even its fire. She crossed her arms over the cold balling in her stomach.
She had things to say to Dr. Jones. Things she had been working out over the past several weeks. Things she wanted to say on Sunil’s behalf. Like: “You wrote the note.” And, “You put it in his hands.” And, “You wrote completely debilitated on a piece of paper and put that paper in a suicidal man’s hand. He read your words, completely debilitated, and believed it. Yes, it’s true, Sunil took his life. But you should know that you may have taken the last of his hope.”
She wanted to say all of that. Yell it. Stand up for Sunil. But she didn’t. When was she going to learn? When was she going to become a better person? The kind of person that did what needed to be done and said what needed to be said, at the right time, and the right place, when it mattered.
Anchor pulled, pulled, pulled.
Yes, she agreed with it. She was failing him, again.
Shortly after that, the weather grew damp and autumn quickly sloped from vibrant rhapsody to grim decay. As if synchronizing with the season, Kavita went into hibernation like the skeletal trees outside her bedroom window.
She stopped going for walks, or changing out of her pyjamas, she even stopped smoking. She lost interest in chasing Chi, and Nirav, and the world in general. Nothing seemed to matter outside the cave of sorrow that had domed around her, rock by rock.
She cooked but only because it was for someone else. Ate mouthfuls here and there but nothing substantial. Tried to read but couldn’t focus. Attempted to ease the ache in her back with heating pads and Advil but found no relief. Napped to make up for her insomnia but grew too afraid of her nightmares.
She relived losing Sunil many times each day.
Beneath her mute exterior lurked tremors. Danger was imminent. She knew it in her quivering cells. With every car-alarm blare in her gut. Something bad was going to happen. She didn’t know what or when. All she knew was that something else was about to blown up and scatter around them. Danger, danger, danger.
She needed to be ready. She would be ready this time, she told herself. Not like last time. Last time she was caught off guard and did all the wrong things and Sunil paid the price. But she wasn’t going to fail again. She had made a promise to Sunil and this time she wouldn’t break her promise. She would keep their parents safe. She would keep them alive. Sunil could trust her. Really, he could. She wasn’t going to fail him. This time, she would be ready.
She kept all of this to herself, because like Anchor, Black Gloom was making more and more sense lately too. It told her that she was enough of a burden already, so she should keep quiet, and besides, she deserved whatever was happening to her, didn’t she know that? Yes, she agreed, increasingly, she did.