Escaping Fate
When I close my eyes I can feel the lights of Machine floating around me like dust, my body alive with movement. I dream about it at night. The need to move is like an itch under my skin.
I think about the ad for the Mason Jar that hung at Machine, when I sit in the living room and paint on my laptop, when I shower, when I lay awake in bed—the rail-thin dancer on the ad, the blocky colors of the poster.
I go to the auditions and sit outside in the car for an hour. Once or twice I try to get out and join the jerky stream of women suctioned into spandex skirts and plunging blouses. Always try new things, right? I should’ve worn something sexier than brown corduroys and a U2 shirt, something that would get their blood pumping. The security guard watches me in the car. I hold onto the steering wheel. I pretend to read a book. I rummage in the glove box to pass the time.
Amma calls. “Where are you?”
“I’m on my way home.”
“I’ve been worried.”
I’ve only been gone an hour. “I’ll be there soon.”
She’s waiting at the kitchen island when I come home. Heated up leftovers lie spread out on the counter.
“Where were you?”
“Picking up some things from the store.”
•••
I start practicing when Amma’s at work and Grandmother is sitting out on the deck. I’m woefully out of shape. I drag the floor-length mirrors from the bathroom and guest bedroom into Amma’s room and set them up side by side against the armoire. My reflection looks unsure. I could stand to lose a few pounds.
I move, thick and unpracticed, my feet already hurting, my knees squeaky every time I put weight on them, my arms trembling when I hold them in position, my thighs tired of the constant tension. I relearn the mudras with my hands. I used to be able to run through the set without thinking, but now my fingers freeze and stumble over gestures. Arm movements are jerkier, sloppier, but my muscles still know how to push through the ache in my shoulders. I can’t move my feet the way I used to, can’t jump and slap the ground to the beat. I wish Nisha were here to dance with me. Next to her, I can be invisible.
Lasyam, the goddess Parvati’s graceful, fluid melody of feminine energy. Tandavam, Shiva’s masculine cosmic dance—strong, staccato, mountainous. Bharatanatyam, a combination of the two styles, is inherently androgynous. In the mirror I watch my head and eyes. In Bharatanatyam even the eyes move to the beat, each part of the body independent from the rest. My body still knows the songs.
I find a box of my old dance costumes in the basement and lay them out on Amma’s bed. The thin silk smells like my sweat, infused from many recitals. I arrange and rearrange the pleats that connect the two legs, the material shot through with so much embroidery that the original color is barely visible. I try on the jewelry, drape the headpiece on my parted hair, straighten out the crooked jewels that hang down over my forehead, tie the black shoestrings behind my head, pin the small sun and moon pieces to either side of my hair part, clip the fake nose ring on, and stack three necklaces on top of my T-shirt. Nisha used to help me dress for performances and draw fake henna on my hands using a red Sharpie.
I look in the mirror and expect to see myself at eighteen, a clone of the picture downstairs on Amma’s photo wall. But all I see is me.
•••
Nisha invites me to a beach in Gloucester with the rugby girls. We stop in town to buy beer and snacks. The air smells like fish and salt.
“This town smells like Sri Lanka,” I say. Back when we used to visit, back when my family was still whole. We flew back tanned and complicated, split between missing the blue warmth and grateful to leave all the soldiers behind.
Nisha scrunches up her nose and picks out a bag of Tostitos. “It does. But no one knows us here.” She steps closer to me and puts the chip bag in the basket I’m holding. When she kisses me, her lips taste like fake strawberries.
“I love you,” she says. She doesn’t look at me.
•••
The beach is bare and long during low tide. Fog rolls over the sand and obscures the ocean from view. People camp out under colorful umbrellas, in between the shaggy brush. We set up camp on an abandoned patch of sand. Nearby, a flock of seagulls attacks food left out by a family gone swimming.
Nisha sits next to me on a beach towel wearing only her swimsuit. Jesse and Tasha dig out beers and snacks. Jesse’s arms look enormous in the tank top she wears. Every time she moves her biceps, the muscles change.
She catches me looking and flexes her arm. “Want to feel?”
I poke the hard bicep. I need to do more push-ups.
Nisha kisses me on the neck. “I like your arms the way they are,” she says into my ear.
The seagulls descend on the camp next to us. Jesse and Tasha run to chase them away.
Nisha turns her back and pulls her hair to one side. “Could you retie this for me?”
I unknot her bikini, tie the strings tighter. She turns around and puts her fingers on my cheek. I look at her eyes through her sunglasses.
“Don’t look so sad,” she says. “He’s as good as any guy I could find myself.”
Tasha flaps her arms at the seagulls while Jesse puts away the family’s food in bags and coolers.
“Have you dated either of them?”
“I dated Jesse in college. But that was ages ago. I was a different person. I thought I could be like them.”
A seagull waddles toward us. Tasha and Jesse chase it away on their way back to our camp.
“Why can’t you be like them?” I ask.
She draws circles in the sand. “We’re not like them. We have to think about our families. If we lived like them, we’d lose everything.”
I feel sick with chips and beer. My skin sticks with humidity.
Nisha pushes her fingers down and buries her hand. “I don’t want to spend my life fighting a war I can’t win.”
I need to feel something more solid than air around me. “Let’s swim.” I stand up and say it again, louder so the others can hear. I walk toward the ocean. The others follow. It’s not a warm day. Thorny seaweed and sharp cracked seashells dot the sand. The first cold steps take effort, but I push forward slowly. The water engulfs my feet and creeps upward with each wave, each step.
Tasha stops with the water up to her knees. “The tide is coming in.”
Nisha walks by my side, her skin raised in goose bumps. “That’s it, Tasha? That’s how tough you are?”
Tasha scowls and marches forward.
I can’t feel my legs from the cold. Nisha smiles at me and lets go of my hand.
I keep walking until the water moves around me like air. Waves pick me up as they pass. I dive into them, let the salt into my mouth. The cold soaks into my scalp. People must drown out here, pulled in by the riptide. I feel light, my thoughts chased away by the waves, my brain washed clean by wind. I want the ocean to carry me away, to pull me from myself and birth me like the tide.
Tamils believe that fate is written on top of our heads, immutable, our future stories scratched into our scalps with permanent ink, birth to death. We can’t run from it, we can’t fight it, we simply accept it—this notion that we’re doomed to pay for the sins we committed in our past lives.
Before I got married, Amma brought Kris’s horoscope and mine to an astrologer who told her we were a seventy-five percent match, and that all the indicators pointed to our having had a connection in a past life. Amma was thrilled. A match made in heaven, or rather, written on top of our heads as our souls traveled through the cosmos from one life to another.
I met Kris in college. He was a lanky boy from India with thick-framed glasses and ruddy skin he hated for its darkness. I met him in a gay and lesbian literature class, and for the longest time I knew him as the other South Asian queer on campus. He was pompous, and drove me crazy with the way he turned up his nose at books that weren’t part of the British canon, how he refused to look waiters in the eye. We would meet at parties, fight about the meaning of the Vedas or the true class issues in the Kama Sutra, but we didn’t become friends until his parents disowned him for being gay. He sought me out at a party, pulled me aside, and said, “I told my mother.”
“And?”
His chin, thin and sprinkled with sparse black hairs, quivered. “It was so stupid.”
His grief bent him toward me. He put his forehead on my shoulder, and just like that we were friends, bonded by our proximity to the cliff, our danger of falling.
•••
Our friendship passed in a blur of booze and parties. Kris and I knew enough people that we never had to get involved in the drama of any one social group. We rode to parties with Juan, the boy Kris dated on and off and the only person we knew with a car. Kris sat in the backseat with me, parting my hair in different ways and fussing with my shirt.
Sometimes I met girls at parties but usually I met men. None of them saw me. I wanted it that way.
At one party, Juan danced with a girl while Kris danced by himself near the edge of the crowd.
“Coldhearted,” said one of the guys next to me. He was blond and tall and spoke to no one in particular.
“Who?”
“My girlfriend.” He raised his bottle toward the dance floor. “I’m Derek.” He had at least a foot on me height-wise, so that when he looked at me he seemed to be bending down.
“Lucky.”
“Who’s lucky?”
“That’s my name. Lucky.”
The girl pressed against Juan, her lips on his.
Derek pointed at the door and followed me out onto the deck. Summer air pressed on my skin. He pulled out a packet of Pall Malls and offered one to me.
“You’re hot,” he said. He lit the cigarette I held between my teeth.
I breathed the smoke in deep, held it there until it burst out in a cough.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“Boston.”
“No,” he laughed. “Like your parents. Where are they from?”
“Sri Lanka.”
“You’re all butch hot. I like that.”
Nisha would’ve liked him, would’ve thought he was cute. He talked about his ex-girlfriend, moving closer so that his arm brushed against my waist. He bent down and kissed me in a cloud of sweat and deodorant.
I was too numb to care, too drunk and a fuck was a fuck.
Derek picked me up and carried me inside the house and up the stairs. I hung onto his neck, the Pall Mall still dangling between my fingers. I wanted to walk but I was too drunk to squirm out of his hold.
He took me to a room on the second floor and sat down on a couch, pulling me down on top of him. I wondered if Kris was looking for me. I wondered if I should leave. I stared at the ceiling and the patterns in the popcorn spackle. Derek was hard.
“I should go,” I said.
“Stay the night. I live here.”
I got up. He grabbed my arm.
“Stay,” he said. He pushed me down and unbuttoned my shirt. He left patches of wet saliva on my skin that cooled with the air.
The ceiling was patterned like the stars, a Big Dipper here, an Orion’s Belt there.
When he tried to take off my pants I held his wrist. He lay down on top of me and ground his hips into mine. I tried to focus on the ceiling but I couldn’t. He started to grunt.
I wiggled out from under him. “I have to go.” I picked up my bra from the floor and put it on.
Derek watched me and lit a cigarette. “My ex, she was butch hot too.”
I buttoned up my shirt.
He kept watching. “Now she calls herself a lesbian.”
I didn’t know if I was supposed to apologize. I said nothing and left, closing the door on the smoke.
•••
In the winter of my senior year, Amma stopped talking to me when she found old texts from an ex-girlfriend, texts like I miss you and I want to fuck you deep and lick my fingers clean and Come back to me let’s try to make it work. She had snooped through my phone when I was sleeping. I don’t know what tipped her off, what gave her the feeling that something was wrong, but one night when I was home for Christmas break, I awoke to her crying. She clutched my phone to her chest and sobbed at the end of my bed.
I went to a friend’s house that night, and stayed there until my bus back to college. Amma stopped transferring money to my account. I wasn’t talking to Appa at the time, too angry about the divorce and his remarriage. Vidya was busy with work, Shyama with her husband and grad school, and I wasn’t out to either of them. I had $243 to my name.
I put up a website with my art but I was new on the scene and no one wanted to buy it. I sold off my possessions one by one: small green desk, forty dollars; pleather office chair, fifty dollars; blue couch, best offer. The due date for my rent came and went. I sold my furniture, my band posters, the iPod Appa had given me for my birthday. I packed up extra clothes and took them to a consignment store for forty-seven dollars in cash. No job openings. No skills. A rapidly depleting bank account. Kris was luckier—his parents had paid for an entire year of his room and board in the dorms before he came out to them. He snuck out food from the cafeterias for me to eat. Every day he came by my efficiency apartment and we talked ourselves in circles.
“Maybe the loans will come through,” I said. I knew that wasn’t possible, but I said it anyway. The credit union told us we needed a cosigner.
Kris stacked and unstacked my shot glasses to pass the time. “I wish we could afford to get drunk.”
My landlady knocked on the door. Her ragged outline showed through the blinds, the flowered robe she always wore. When I opened the door she was wringing her hands.
Her watery eyes darted to where Kris sat on the floor, roamed over the emptiness of the apartment. “I need your rent, dear. It was due three weeks ago.”
“I’ll have it soon.”
She took a step toward the apartment like she was going to come in. Rightfully I couldn’t stop her.
“I need that rent.”
“I know. I just don’t have it right now.”
She looked where the couch used to be. “You going somewhere, dear?”
“No, just—just redecorating.”
She frowned and retied the knot around her waist. “Can you make the rent?”
“I just need more time.”
“I don’t have time, dear. I got someone who wants to rent, and all my rooms are full.” She looked at Kris. “He your boyfriend?”
“No.”
“I don’t like men staying the night.”
“He’s just a friend.”
She poked her finger into the knot of her robe and pulled it back out. “I think I’m going to ask you to move out. I’ve gotten complaints from the neighbors. Too much noise, too many people over.”
“I’ll get the rent to you soon, I promise.”
“No, no. I want you out. You got two weeks, dear.”
I slammed the door closed behind her. I didn’t realize I was shaking until Kris pulled me down to the floor between his legs and put his arms around me.
“You can live with me,” he said.
“What about your roommate?”
“I’ll ask him. Don’t worry about it.”
•••
Kris’s roommate was a boy named Tim who always wore a Wildcats ball cap and had a Nickelback poster taped to the wall on his side of the room. I slept on his futon, but I had to wait until he was done studying on it every night. It got harder and harder to wake up for my eight-thirty Matrix Theory class. I started skipping it.
On most days, even though the weather was still cold and there was a March bite to the air, I spent my days under the trees on campus, listening to the squirrels coming out for the spring. The trees budded in silk curtains hanging down into the grass. I avoided the room as much as possible. As the weeks dragged on, Tim became more and more talkative.
“You and Kris dating?” he asked me.
“No.”
He rubbed the back of his neck and shuffled his feet. “Do you want to go to a movie sometime?”
“I can’t.”
“I’m a nice guy.”
“I’m gay.”
He turned back to his Calculus and stayed quiet for a while. I kept writing my English paper.
“You ever slept with a guy?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then how do you know?” He kept reading his math book, following the words with his finger. “I think you just decided too fast.”
•••
One weekend Tim had his friends over to the room to drink. They made Jell-O shots in the small microwave and mini fridge. I couldn’t afford the booze so Kris and I spent the evening on the dirty, pilled couches in the lounge, playing cards and drinking hot chocolate he’d snuck out from the cafeteria.
Kris shuffled cards without looking at them. “Semester’s almost over. What are we going to do?”
“We could go back to Boston after graduation.”
Kris stopped shuffling.
“Maybe we can get jobs.”
“Maybe you can. No visa, no job for me.”
He dealt out the cards into two piles. I picked one up from my pile and turned it over. Jack of Clubs. I ran my finger along the edge of it, letting its sharpness bite into my flesh.
He tapped his fingers on the table. “We could get married.”
I dropped the card.
He wasn’t smiling. “Think about it. You need to convince your parents you’re straight. I need to stay in this country. Your parents would welcome you back.”
The room needed more air. I wanted to feel the cold spring night around me. The idea was too sticky. Too many things to go wrong.
“People do it all the time back home,” he said.
A marriage of convenience. Amma would talk to me again.
I straightened my pile of cards and gave it to Kris. “Let’s go back to the room. I’m tired.”
We walked in silence. The dorm floor was especially loud. Students rode scooters back and forth in the hallway. Music clashed through open doorways.
Kris’s room was dark. Someone had thrown towels over the lamps so that they glowed eerie and muted. At least ten people sat crammed onto the floor and the futon.
Tim got up and stumbled toward us. He put the tips of his fingers together around the red cup he was holding. He bowed. “Namaste.”
I grabbed Kris’s arm and pulled him back toward the door.
“What?” Tim stood up straight. “Isn’t that how you guys do it?”
I opened the door. He crossed the room and closed it. He put his elbow on the door near my head. I could smell his sweat.
“You’re Indian and gay.” He turned toward the room of people. Some laughed. “How does that work out?”
“It works just fine,” I said.
He lurched forward and kissed me. My head slammed against the door. My brain rang.
Kris wrenched him backward but he pushed his way toward me. I pressed against the door.
He was too close. “I think you’re lying.”
No escape. I pushed back, pushed hard, away. He fell. Laughter from the walls. Red cup spilled red fizz into the carpet. He pushed me down into a beanbag. I stood up. Pushed down. Up, pushed down, my knees gave way again and again not strong enough to stand up push back, push hard, away away away again push push run.
•••
I ran to the pond and collapsed into the trunk of a tree. I watched the water. I wanted something to wilt against. Kris found me. He was carrying my jacket. He held it out to me and I put it on. The fabric was freezing. He’d been looking for a while.
He sat next to me and stared across the water. Clumps of ice had started to form on the pond, little veins spreading across the top like spiderwebs, eating up the warmth.
“I love you,” he said. “I hope you know that.”
I watched a duck jump into the water. The ice—too fragile still—cracked and broke. Water rippled from beneath the bird’s feathers and spread out across the pond.
My breath curled white and smoky out of me. “If we do this—if we get married, what happens when we fall in love?”
“Tell you what. If Nisha ever decides she wants to marry you, I’ll give you a divorce.”
“Nisha and I haven’t talked in four years,” I said.
Kris laughed. “Then you don’t have to worry about that particular scenario.”
I watched the bird on the pond, the ice breaking. We could still win.
After we get back from the beach, Nisha stops answering my calls. During the day, she texts me that she needs space away from me to get her head around this marriage. At night, she wants me to say “I love you” and describe in detail how I’d fuck her. When I ask to meet up, she refuses. I turn off my phone and stop answering her texts.
•••
Grandmother sits outside every weekday for hours at a time, bundled in more and more clothing as the temperature drops. She doesn’t risk it when Amma’s at home during the weekends. And even though she never comes out and asks me, I know I’m supposed to keep quiet about what she does all day.
By the end of October, the temperature is too cold to sit outside for more than an hour. I try to coax Grandmother back inside, and some days she surrenders. Some days the smell of betel leaves and the sound of her favorite shows are enough. But other days she cups her hand behind her ear and tells me to listen to the baby.
“It’s your baby, Vidya.”
“I’m Lucky.”
“It’s your baby.”
So I bring her more blankets, start making her wear her winter coat. She comes inside right before Amma gets home. Her skin is icy to the touch, the wrinkles still holding pockets of cold between the tissue.
•••
One day it rains. When I come downstairs to drink my coffee, Grandmother is sitting outside without her winter coat. Everything is soaked. Rain blurs her face.
I run outside.
“Come in the house,” I say.
Thunder grumbles overhead. The rain is cold, little pinpricks to my skin. It rattles on the tin gutters. Rain pelts Grandmother’s skin. She shivers. Her cotton housecoat clings to her legs.
I shake her arm. “Come on, Ammamma.” I squint to see through the rain, and try again in the best Tamil I can muster. “Vaango, vaango.”
She gets up slowly. Each step takes a thousand raindrops. I pull her inside and slam the door shut. The rain has soaked into the carpet inside.
I run and grab towels from the bathroom and when I get back she’s still standing where I left her, soaked and shivering. I throw a towel on her head and mop up as much of the water as I can.
“You need to change,” I say.
Her eyes look through me.
“Neenga uduppa maathonum,” I try again, in Tamil.
She moves toward the bathroom. I get a sweater and thick socks from her room and bring them down. When she takes too long to change, I pound my knuckles on the bathroom door. She comes out dry, her eyes clear. I wrap a blanket around her over the sweater.
“You need to change your clothes, Vidya,” she says. “You’ll get sick.”
I put on dry clothes and clean up most of the water from the carpet. Grandmother sits in the kitchen while I make tea. My hands won’t stay steady. I watch to make sure she drinks it all. My tea tastes like rain on metal and musty carpet. I already know I won’t tell Amma about this.
•••
After Nisha’s engagement, Amma cries often about wanting me to have a baby, to fit in for once in my life and be a good brown daughter. She cries when I’m helping her cook, when we drink tea, before she goes to sleep. I hear her wheezing, see the way she trembles with the effort.
One day she stays home from work and claims her heart is hurting.
“I think it’s a heart attack,” she says. She’s burrowed in her blankets, only her head visible in the enormous folds of her comforter.
“Your heart is fine,” I say.
“It feels like stabbing. My daughter is giving me a heart attack.” She rubs at her chest and cries.
I sit there, trying to feel my own pulse, my blood, some primordial pull to comfort my mother, a tear, something, anything to reassure me that I’m still alive. Instead all I feel is numbness reaching to the tips of my fingers, something cold and hard in me pushing back against her tears.
“I miss Kris,” I tell her. “I think I should go and visit him.”
What I really miss is the way Nisha’s skin smells and how she smiles when I kiss her. She still won’t answer my calls. She still refuses to meet up.
I summon up every last dreg of compassion I have left. I rub Amma’s chest for her and get her some aspirin. Maybe that softness does it, because she smiles for the first time in days. “Go home and spend some time with your husband,” she says.
•••
Kris isn’t home when my Camry finally pulls into our driveway. I’m exhausted and dizzy at the sight of our lavender front door and black shutters. I drag my duffel bag into the house, get myself a beer, and sink into our couch to look out the window at the street. The living room is just as I left it—messy, Kris’s computer thrown onto a couch seat, weeks-old bowls of ramen in muddy water, fat fruit flies meandering through the air, the sharp, sweet smell of rotting garbage. After the immaculate cleanliness of Amma’s house, our living room makes me queasy. I drink my beer and watch the cars that march by our house. The numbness sits inside me, makes time slip by while I stand still.
When Kris comes home I’m still sitting there, looking out the window and watching the sunset. Not even the colors can get inside my skin.
He flips on the light switch. “How many beers have you had?” He toes off his black leather loafers and loosens his tie.
I point at the couch armrest where I’ve stacked my beer caps into a tower. Who’s counting? The slush in my brain feels good after Amma’s house, the sluggishness against that stonehearted feeling, the engagement, Nisha, Tasha, Amma, all of them pulling me in different directions.
“Jesus.” Kris counts out the beer caps one by one. “Nine.” He takes them into the kitchen, and comes back with a glass of gin and tonic. He unbuttons his collar and takes off his belt. “So are we getting drunk or what?”
“I suppose. Everything’s fucked up.” I can feel the steam leaving me, my legs itching to get up and move.
He sits across from me and drinks.
“Amma wants us to have a baby. Can you believe that? Us, with a baby. God.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
I put my beer bottle on the coffee table. The mud in my mind wobbles. “Are you serious? You know what’s wrong with that.” The walls look squishy. I could pinch them with my fingers.
He stares at his glass, collecting the condensation on its side with a finger. “I think a baby sounds nice.” He flicks droplets of water at me.
“As long as you carry it.”
“Come on, Lucky. A baby would be good for us. Think about it. We’d be a real family.” He reaches over and pushes a piece of hair off my forehead.
“Don’t touch me.”
He wants to take back the moment he came out to his mother, take back her locking him in his room, take back his imprisonment in his parents’ house for days before he snuck out and took a cab to the airport so he could fly back to the States.
“We’re fucked up.” The words warp around my tongue. “We’ve fucked this up. We can’t fuck up someone else.”
“We could make really good parents. Think about it.” He drains the last of his gin and tonic and vanishes up the stairs, glass in hand.
I want him to come back, to smile and laugh like we used to in college, in the first months of our marriage, that delight at having pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes.
•••
Kris shakes me awake. I’m still on the couch, still in my clothes, my duffel bag still sitting on the floor of the living room.
I sit up. Sunshine clangs behind my eyes. “Don’t let me do that again. I’m too damn old.”
He gives me a glass of water and I drain it.
“So.” He sits across from me in the same armchair as the night before. “About this baby.”
“The baby we’re not going to have? Yes, what about it?”
He rubs his forehead and stands up. He goes to the kitchen with my empty glass.
I shut my eyes, hoping my head will stop throbbing.
He comes back with a full glass and an envelope. Dirt encrusts its corners. “This came for you. I think it’s from Vidya.”
He lays the envelope down on the coffee table. A part of me doesn’t want to look at it. A ghost. An empty chair. I pick it up and there it is, her writing, the spikey t’s and long p’s that dig into the depths of the next line, addressed to an apartment we haven’t lived in for two years. Postmarked a week ago. I take it in my hand. I carefully run my finger underneath the flap, which comes away easily, the glue weakened with travel. Inside, a short letter written on thick white paper that’s embedded with what looks like seeds. The letter is wrapped around a glossy photo. Vidya stands next to a palm tree, squinting at the sun, dressed in a skirt and a T-shirt. On her hip, a little girl of maybe three, her hair curling in and out, wrestled into pigtails. The girl is darker than Vidya, her mouth thicker, her nose wider. She holds onto Vidya with one chubby hand, and reaches out to the camera with the other.
Lucky, I’m sorry I missed your wedding all those years ago. You know I had my reservations, but I’m happy for you. I hope he’s everything you wanted in a husband. I miss you. I’m doing great. Radha, my daughter, makes my life so happy. You, Grandmother and Amma are in my thoughts. Give my love. Vidya. P.S. You can plant the letter. It’ll grow wildflowers.
I flip the letter. Nothing on the other side.
Kris holds out the envelope. “There’s a return address. Kentucky.”
•••
For the next few days I’m on the Internet, trying to track down the address, match it with a phone number or email. I try Vidya’s old email address. She hasn’t answered any email I’ve sent in the last five years. No luck on a phone number. I check everything I can find, including preschools and kindergartens in the area to see if a little girl named Radha goes there. They turn me away. Confidentiality issues. I call Shyama but she hasn’t heard from Vidya, either. Even Vidya’s art site, the online portfolio where she used to post pictures of her sculptures, is gone, just as it had been right after she ran away.
I find nothing. She has made sure to leave emptiness behind.
•••
My sister Vidya left at night. She didn’t tell anyone she was going, but I remember her coming into my room right as I was falling asleep. I had just graduated college, and we were all busy planning my wedding to Kris.
The corner of my bed sagged. She put her fingers through my then-long hair, again and again, until I melted back into sleep, lulled by the rhythm of her nails on my scalp.
The day before she left, she and Amma got into a fight. They fought often, about everything from what Vidya wore—Amma said it was too revealing—to what she did in her free time—Amma had wanted her to volunteer at the hospital to help her get into med school, but Vidya wanted to teach an art class at the county jail. This fight was different. Amma had found a Valentine’s Day card addressed to Vidya from someone named Jamal.
Vidya and Amma faced each other in the kitchen. I hid myself behind the curve of the staircase and watched.
Amma waved the pink, glittery card above her head. “You’re not American. You’re not like these American girls. You can’t run around with boys at your age.” She crumpled the card in her fist and shook it. “What will people think?”
Vidya clenched her fingers at her sides. “I love Jamal.” She was wearing the cutoff shorts that Amma hated.
I sat down on the stairs and pushed my toes into the thick carpet.
“It won’t last, Vidya.” Amma’s voice softened and she sank into a chair. “Love covers up all the bad things, but then when it’s gone, the bad things will still be there.”
Vidya put her hands on Amma’s head. “Nothing bad will happen.”
“People like him don’t know the meaning of a good marriage.”
Vidya snatched her hands away like Amma had burned her. “People like him?”
“An Indian man will love you forever.”
“Like Appa did?”
Appa and Amma had told us they were splitting up on the day of Vidya’s graduation from college. The news was slipped in between congratulations and anxiety about medical school. Appa moved out of our house at the same time that Vidya moved back in to start a new job as a pharmaceutical lab tech for the summer. By fall, Appa had married Laila Aunty and bought a house in the rich part of Lexington.
The day after the fight, Vidya disappeared, no note. We woke up in the morning and she was gone. She had taken most of her clothes—billowy chiffon blouses and designer jeans with studded back pockets. The only things left in her suddenly empty closet were the churidars and sarees that Amma had bought for her, now lonely on their plastic hangers.
Amma sat in Vidya’s room for hours, spreading them out on the bed, running her fingers over and over them, tracing the patterns of flowers and peacocks embroidered on silk.
•••
“Maybe I should just go down to Kentucky.” I stand at the door to Kris’s bedroom. He lies on the bed in graying boxer briefs, partly covered by a fuzzy quilt. Thick curtains block out the morning sun. I walk the rest of the way into the room and lay down next to him.
“A baby boy is a joy to have. I should write that one down.” He taps his chin with a long finger. “How about, ‘The stork is on his way’?”
I try to punch him but he rolls away.
“Or ‘I hope you’ve caught up on sleep. Congrats.’”
“You’re an ass.” His room is filthy—clothes everywhere, shoes kicked off near the bed, two towels draped over the tufted leather headboard. “Was Justin staying over while I was gone?”
“I think you should go to Kentucky. I think you should find her, and bring her back.”
“Really?”
“No. If she wanted to be found, she would’ve said so. She would’ve given you a phone number, email address, something.”
“There was a return address.”
“Who knows if it’s real?”
I remember the empty whiteness of the letter. The note, really, the jagged letters contained in a rectangle in the middle of the page, surrounded by nothing. I could go pull it out from under my pillow where I stuffed it the night before, run my skin over the paper, see if I missed something.
“‘Life isn’t fair,’” Kris says. “‘Get well soon.’ No, that’s shitty. And yes, Justin was staying over.”
“Where is he?”
“He left for California a week ago.”
“Are you okay with that?” I ask.
He flips over onto his back so we’re lying side by side. He stares up at the ceiling, and says with that high, fake voice he uses when he lies, “Of course I’m okay. I’m always okay.”
•••
Kris proposes a night out. He wants to leave at eight, which really means nine, because as per usual we don’t start getting ready until seven forty-five. I hated his chronic lateness for years, but I got used to it because I knew that if I didn’t, I would turn into Appa, pacing anxiously in the living room while Amma got ready and then fighting the whole way in the car. Too many fights.
Kris tries on outfits while I watch. I spread out on his bed in my boxers and feel the air on my skin for the first time in months.
“Are these pants too tight?” He turns around in front of his mirror to scrutinize his butt.
“Criminally.”
He takes a bow. “These are perfect. You should get ready, too.”
“I like being naked.” Amma has rules about clothing. Pajamas can’t be worn during the day. You can’t leave the house in jeans and T-shirts. Hair has to be combed. No cleavage. No shorts or skirts above the knee. Sports bras only when exercising. No men’s clothes.
“Get dressed,” Kris says.
“Pick something out for me.”
“How butch?”
“Futch.”
He disappears down the hallway and into my room. “Can you fit into those red jeans I bought you?”
“Too tight.”
“They’re supposed to be tight.”
“I’m a little fat right now.”
He comes back with jeans draped over his arm, holding a stack of shirts on hangers. He stops in the doorway. “You aren’t fat right now.”
He wrestles me into a short sleeved button-down shirt and tie and fusses with my hair.
The phone rings. Amma, with news that Grandmother is in the hospital again—this time with pneumonia. We leave immediately for Boston.
•••
Cars skid along the highway, their tires fogged by rain-slicked tar, their metal scuttling under rusty green bridges. The robotic voice of the GPS guides me. Even though I know the way, I always turn on the GPS like Amma taught me to. Her voice still lives in my head.
The rain. It was the rain. Grandmother got sick because of the rain.
When I park in the hospital lot, Kris reaches over and takes off my tie. He undoes the top button of my shirt and untucks the back. “Well, this is as feminine as it’s going to get. Just act extra girly.”
•••
The smell of antiseptic and sickness crawls under my skin. Death is everywhere in a hospital, as common and concentrated as the disinfected air. Grandmother floats among the tubes and machines, scratchy white sheets draped around her like a coat, the small room crammed with steady beeping.
I sit on the couch while Grandmother sleeps. Kris escapes to go buy coffee with Appa. Amma cries silently near a small window that faces the night’s darkness.
Grandmother lies motionless except for her raspy breathing and spasming eyelids. Her mouth hangs open.
Amma stares blankly out the window. “I should’ve brought her in earlier. She’s been coughing for a while.” She shudders, her voice almost muffled out by the beeping of machines.
“You couldn’t have seen this coming,” I say.
Amma looks me up and down. “Why are you dressed like a boy?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer, just turns back to the window.
Grandmother doesn’t have her dentures in and her mouth looks sunken like a cave. I sit and watch her while the scent of the hospital works its way into my clothes. Grandmother caught me with Nisha once when we were in middle school. Nisha and I had hidden in my room to play out a scene we’d read in a summer reading book for school. A ronin warrior slowly strips off his mistress’s kimono, revealing her part by part, each second written in detail. Grandmother’s face had hardened when she found us, her voice glass-like when she asked us what the hell we were doing.
I stare at Grandmother’s sleeping form because when I look away all I can see is the rain soaking into her dress, her face and hair dripping with it, her thin body shivering, rain pooling into the carpet, her eyes that day—the clarity as if the rain had washed away her dementia and for a moment she had herself back.
“It’s from sitting out in the cold,” Amma says. “Why did you let her sit out there in the cold?”
“It’s no one’s fault.”
“I told you not to let her.”
I stroke Grandmother’s hand. Her skin moves in many folds.
“She’s had a hard life.” Amma’s voice is softer now, sadder, choked up. “What will I do if she doesn’t—What will I do?”
Something gives. The hardness inside me budges, just for a moment. I walk over to Amma and put my hand on her shoulder.
•••
Grandmother doesn’t wake up until morning. Kris sleeps on one of the chairs with his head drooping to the side. Amma and Appa sit silently on the couch. I sit on Grandmother’s bed, rubbing her hand and nodding off every once in a while with my head in my hand.
Around sunrise, Grandmother’s hand twitches in mine. I snap my head up, but my eyes are heavy.
“Ammamma?”
Her eyes open and scan the ceiling. She looks through me, her eyes cloudy.
“Vidya.” Her lips quiver into a smile.
I nod. Amma comes and puts her hand on Grandmother’s forehead.
“I want to see Vidya’s baby.” Grandmother struggles to shake the words from her mouth. “I want to see Vidya’s baby.”
Amma is going to cry again. Appa comes to her side and rubs his hand up and down her arm.
•••
Kris and I drive home after Grandmother is released from the hospital and settled back home with Amma. Hollowness eats its way through me, my insides scooped out and left on the floor of Grandmother’s hospital room. Kris stays silent in the passenger seat and squints through the windshield without blinking. The sky hangs a uniform gray against the gold dead grass in the median. Rain rises like mist through the spindly trees that flank the highway. The car shifts beneath me, slides along, bouncing back and forth between the white dotted lines.
I’m skin stretched around bones, my chest cavernous, no heart, my head dizzy with its own emptiness. The sun sets and still the road winds, pitch black except for the lone headlights of my car. When we first moved away from the city, I was terrified of driving at night, of plunging through the thick blackness, hoping I would see the next turn in time. But now it’s easy, like walking through our house in the dark, using my fingers and the pressure around me to know the way.
I turn off the car in our driveway, unlock the house with my hollow fingers, walk up to my bedroom, and lie facedown on my bed. I don’t want to move for days. Grandmother wants to see Vidya, and her baby.
Kris sits down on the edge of the bed. “She’s going to be okay.”
I try to breathe out the concrete that’s filling me up.
“I’m sick of you being sick,” Kris says, so quietly that I can barely hear him. “Get well soon.”
I sit up and with all my strength, I push him down onto the bed and pin his arms above his head. I want to punch him, see the trickle of blood from his nose, feel my fist on his cheek. His skin would give way and then his muscles, ripping through, crack and shatter. I wrap one hand around his throat. I push my thumb and index finger into his arteries. He swallows. I push harder. His breathing slows. Grandmother wants to see Vidya. Vidya, the photo of her and her daughter, the little girl’s hands reaching for the camera. Grandmother’s housecoat soaked with rain, her wheezing cough, her hospital blankets and the drip drip drip of saline. Would it be so bad? I like the softness of baby skin, the way their limbs squish and smell like milk. Kris and I would be good enough parents.
“Let’s have a baby,” I say.
Kris stares at me. I loosen the pressure on his neck. He coughs once, twice. “Let’s.”
I’ve pushed the sound out of him. I bend down and kiss him. We’ve kissed before, when we were drunk and it seemed like a funny thing to do. We know how to kiss each other. We fumble off our clothes. We know the moves. We’re skilled enough to make it work. I press my face into the pillow and try to pretend it’s not Kris fucking me. I’m too full too full, dirty with the movement, Kris grabbing my hip to make me stop and it drips down my legs I want it out of me out out bled dry. I run to the bathroom and throw myself into the shower.
I move back to Amma’s house to take care of Grandmother. Constant supervision, doctor’s orders. She sleeps most mornings. Around eleven I help her come down the stairs, holding her by the arm. I make her tea, help her to the folding chair, and watch Tamil game shows with her while I catch up on commission deadlines. I help her use the bathroom, get her water and juice when she asks.
After a few days, boredom settles inside me and makes my limbs twitch with the urge to move—dance, play rugby, anything. I think about calling Nisha, but my stomach knots with nausea when I pick up the phone. I want to visit the rugby house, but I don’t want to explain the rain, explain Grandmother. So instead I call the Mason Jar, and find out they have an open stage night where anyone can dance.
•••
I park outside the Mason Jar and wait. I’m early. The place is still dark inside the windows, though there are a couple of businessmen at the bar. My hands tremble on the steering wheel. I can’t make myself go in. I watch the door. For a long time it stays closed, but then a woman in a long skirt opens it and walks in. I’ve brought a couple of dancing outfits I wore for performances in college—not Bharatanatyam but Bollywood songs. I still remember the choreography from some of them. I can do this. I’m a dancer. I trained for years. I can do this.
I cross the street to the bar and open the door. A bouncer sits on a stool. The place is darkened with thick drapes hung over the windows. Over-varnished wood tables, black leather booths, gothic chandeliers, black-and-white tile floors, a scuffed wooden stage on the far end of the room.
“I’m here for the open stage.” I grip my bag of costumes tight.
The bouncer motions to the bar. “Mr. Alan, got another one for you.”
A man in a green trench coat turns on his wooden barstool. He’s mostly bald but a few wisps of white hair still cling onto the skin above his ears. He has tiny, watery eyes. He takes the toothpick out of his martini and sucks off one brown olive.
“You from India?” He picks off the other olive with his hand and pops it in his mouth, licking his fingers clean.
I walk to the bar so I don’t have to shout.
“You know how to belly dance?” he asks. “We need a belly dancer.”
“I thought it was open stage.”
He picks his teeth with the toothpick. “I like to get a handle on what everyone’s going to perform.”
“A Bollywood song.”
He hops down from the chair, landing a full head shorter than me. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”
“Lucky.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Lucky.”
“That won’t do. Won’t do at all.” He turns toward the back of the bar and gestures for me to follow. “Jasmine? No, too common.”
We walk through a set of curtains behind the stage into a hallway.
“Asha? Yes, Asha. Asha okay with you? I have a cousin who married an Asha.”
“My name’s Lucky.”
He points at me. “Tonight, your name’s Asha.” He opens a door to a room. “This is where the girls get dressed.”
The tiny room has a couch squeezed into one corner and full-length mirrors nailed to the wall. Three women scuttle around in various stages of undress.
Mr. Alan claps his hands and the girls turn around. “Ladies, ladies. I want you to meet Asha. She’s doing Bollywood tonight.”
He walks back through the set of curtains to the bar. I push the door open a little more and go into the dressing room. One girl with milky skin and a thin face smiles at me. Her lips are painted dark brown and her light blue eyes lined heavily with black. She wears a long quilted skirt and a fringed scarf.
She holds out her hand. “I’m Mala. You’re going to love it.”
I shake her hand. The others introduce themselves. They all have these brown-sounding stage names, but none of them are brown. I dress in a mirrored lehenga choli and drape the dupatta around me like a saree. The girls ooh and aah over the embroidery and the bangles.
Mala picks up a sheet of bindis. “Can I borrow one of these?” She plucks one off and sticks it in the middle of her forehead. She plucks another and sticks it on my forehead.
I take it off and move it down to between my eyebrows.
“You got any perfume?” Mala asks.
“No.”
She digs in one of her bags and pulls out a vial. “We always wear perfume. The men like it.” She spritzes some on me.
My eyes water. I smell like a baby hooker.
Mr. Alan brings back shots of tequila. A couple more girls join us. Most of them are doing some type of belly dance, going by the outfits. We wait in the room while the murmur of the bar gets louder. By nine thirty, there’s a steady hum of conversation. Mr. Alan comes back to decide the order of performance.
“I need to leave early,” I say.
He mimes shooting a gun at me. “Then you’re first, Asha.”
I take two more shots of tequila and follow him out to the bar area. He climbs up onstage. “This here’s our newest girl, Asha.”
I walk up onstage. Some of the men in the front hoot and shout. The place is packed and dim. I make eye contact with the back wall. That’s how Nisha taught me to overcome my stage fright when we were young. “Watch the back wall, and never look away. Everyone will think you’re looking at them.”
The music starts, and it’s easier to tune out the shouts from the men. First muted drumbeats, thaam thaam theem, thaam thaam theem, then flute arching over, low sitar plucks, a rumbling cello. I breathe steady and clear my head. It’s just another performance. I’ve done this hundreds of times. Arm waves, hip circles, spin. Nothing else exists but me and the wood under my feet. I remember the music. Thaam thaam theem. Thaam thaam theem. Step out, back, out, back, hands left and right, wrists flowing like waves.
•••
It isn’t until I’m back in the dressing room that I hear the clapping and shouting in the bar. Mr. Alan comes in. “Hear that? They like you.” He holds out another tequila shot. “A couple of guys requested private dances with you. Your choice, of course.”
I stand up too fast and the room lurches. I hold the edge of the couch.
He comes toward me like he’s going to help. My stomach spasms. If he touches me I’ll puke. I grab hold of my costume bag, and push my way past him. A couple of men call out to me as I push my way through the bar.
Tasha invites me to the rugby house. I miss its exposed beams, the cracks running along the plaster walls, Jesse with her tough posturing. I pick Tasha up after work at a bank downtown.
She throws herself into the front seat. “What are you so happy about?” But she’s grinning, too.
“Where to?”
Her smile slips off. She takes a long time with her seat belt. “I know I invited you to the rugby house. But Jesse—well, we didn’t know how to say no so—well, Nisha’s over there. Right now.”
I don’t know how much they know. I put the car in drive and head toward JP.
“I don’t care if Nisha’s there. We’re all adults, I’m sure we can be civilized.”
When we pull up the hill, Jesse and Nisha are outside on the deck with a few others, sitting on the mismatched chairs and on the railing. Nisha laughs with her hand on Jesse’s arm. I push my hands into my jean pockets and try not to scowl.
Tasha starts to climb the steep hill toward the house. “You sure you’re going to be okay?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“I should warn you. Nisha thinks that we’re—you and I—you know, that we’re together.”
I stop walking. “Where did she get that idea?”
Tasha kicks at a dark stain on the sidewalk. “Something I said, I think. I could’ve corrected her. But I didn’t. I let her believe it.”
“I don’t care what Nisha thinks.”
We walk up to the house in step. We’re close enough that the hairs on our arms mingle. Nisha doesn’t look at us, engrossed in a conversation with a girl I don’t know. Is everyone quieter now that we’re here? Our steps creak too loud on the porch. Tasha stands closer than she should.
Jesse crosses the deck, wraps her enormous arms around me, and claps me on the back. She raises her cigarette as if in toast and puts it in between her thin lips. The tip glows as she sucks in. She slings an arm over my shoulder.
I try not to look at Nisha, who stands directly opposite me, still with her head turned away. She talks to a girl I don’t know, every once in a while touching her dangling earrings like she’s afraid they’ve fallen off. The girl she’s talking to is feminine and Asian, pretty with long dark hair that falls around her face. I try not to stare at Nisha, try to focus on my conversation with Jesse. My eyes wander back and forth.
“You should’ve seen this talent show,” Jesse says. “We wrote the lyrics on our stomachs and spelled out the song.”
Tasha talks to another girl I don’t know—a mohawked redhead with snakebite lip piercings. She hangs on Tasha’s arm and looks at her with a dimpled smile.
“Harder, faster, stronger,” Jesse says. “You know the song, right?”
Nisha has her blue contacts in. I like her eyes brown, but I could never talk her out of wearing them.
When the already dark sky starts to spit down rain, the other girls leave. The mohawked girl kisses Tasha goodbye. Nisha stays behind and talks to Jesse.
Tasha comes over. Our arms brush but she doesn’t flinch away. She leans close to my ear and whispers, “I guess that wasn’t very convincing.” She smells like old cologne.
If I turn, we’d be too close. “Whatever she wants to believe.”
Nisha’s cold, glassy eyes look at me. It takes forever for her to cross the deck. I see her mouth make the words before I hear them.
“I need to talk to you.” She turns around and heads into the house.
Tasha puts a hand on my shoulder. “You don’t have to go.”
I follow Nisha into the house. She sits down on the bed in the living room—Tasha’s bed. She pats the space next to her and crosses her legs, arranging her crocheted skirt so that it reveals just one tanned kneecap. I stand near the door. She pats the bed again.
The TV plays on mute, an old movie about a Jewish lesbian in Berlin during the Holocaust, trying to fly under the radar. Unseen, hunted, dangerous.
I sit on the low couch that faces the bed. From this seat I have to look up at Nisha, framed by Tasha’s paintings on the wall.
The Jewish woman in the movie is vacationing with her lover and her lover’s children, taking pictures in wooded areas.
“I’ve been thinking.” Nisha frowns and rubs down her skirt. “I know we don’t have bridal parties, but if my wedding was a white wedding, you’d be my maid of honor.”
The woman on TV is found out—Nazi officers drag her down the stairs of her German lover’s apartment building. Dirt stains her white pantsuit.
“It’s stupid to be fighting with my maid of honor.”
I can’t feel my skin, only the heaviness and my stomach turning. I wish I’d never left Amma’s house. Behind Nisha’s head hang three square canvases. I first thought they were close-ups of tree trunks but now I see eyes staring back from the weaving colors.
“Are you listening, Lucky? I said I don’t want to fight anymore.”
I can’t find words. I nod. The Jewish woman’s German lover, now old, walks in a garden. She survived the war. Married with children. Hidden. Safe.
“Are we okay then?” Nisha says. “We can go back to normal?”
I stare at the canvases behind her head. The eyes in the wood grain stare back. I can’t feel my skin. Normal, where Nisha is engaged and we pretend like she’s not, like she’s not walking into a new life that has no space for me, where we are both in love and married, just not to each other, normal where us is an impossibility. Hidden, safe. “Yeah, sure. We can go back to normal.”
•••
“You stayed out all day.” Amma puts her hands on her hips. Several pots and pans hiss behind her on the stove. Her laptop sits open on the dining table next to a stack of dentistry journals. “What use is you staying with me to help if you go out with your friends all day?”
I take my time hanging up my coat in the front closet. “Where’s Grandmother?”
“Sleeping.” Amma turns her back to me and walks over to the stove. She stirs the contents of each pot. “I must have done something terrible in my past life.”
She did something terrible in her past life, and is cursed with daughters who don’t listen to her. One who runs away, another who never acts like a brown lady should act. Be a proper woman. Have a child. Where is your natural urge to nurture? Where did it go? Stop being a deviant. Do you have no shame?
I tune her out and rifle through the dentistry journals on the table. Dysesthesia of the mandible. The effects of beverages on plaque acidogenicity after a sugary challenge. Is it ethical to raffle off prizes in exchange for referrals?
•••
Nisha calls me crying. She won’t tell me why. “I need more outfits,” she says instead. “For the wedding.” All those pieces of ritual require outfit changes for the bride. “Will you take me?” Nisha’s voice is quiet, like she’s afraid I might refuse.
I don’t want to upset Amma, but she’s only too happy to let me go for this. Spending time with family is only important if the alternative is spending it with friends she doesn’t approve of.
I drive Nisha to Chandra’s Bridal Boutique in Cambridge. In the window of the tiny, cottage-like shop, three headless mannequins model three types of bridal wear from three different Indian states. Nisha’s eyes are still red, her face swollen from crying in the car, but she makes a brave attempt at nonchalance. A bell tinkles when we open the door. The store is small, cramped, and brightly lit, every wall filled with shelves that glitter in rainbow.
“Do you have a new saree for the wedding?” Nisha asks me.
I nod. Amma probably bought one as soon as she heard.
“It better be nice,” she says. “Not too simple, okay?”
If Amma picked it out, it definitely won’t be simple.
Nisha goes up to the woman behind the counter. “I’m looking for a churidar for the mehendi ceremony before my wedding.” If she was white, she would’ve flashed the diamond on her ring. Sri Lankan weddings don’t even have mehendi ceremonies, but Nisha insisted. When we were kids, she was the one who got new dresses and jewelry for no particular reason. My parents’ money was split among three kids.
The woman behind the counter pulls out churidars in crinkly plastic bags. Blue and white with beads, yellow and orange with stones, red and green with embroidery. “These are the newest styles. Just came in this week. Very affordable.”
Nisha looks down her nose at the churidars on the counter. She looks like Kris. He gets this way in brown stores, as if the salespeople should be bowing to him inside. I want to hold her by the waist, draw her to me.
“Do you have any unique styles?”
“These are the newest styles.” The woman pulls out some more churidars from their plastic cases and spreads them out on top of the others. “This style is in all the Indian movies now.”
Nisha touches a gold and white churidar. She takes it to the back room to try it on.
The woman turns to me. “Would you like to buy one?” Her black-lined eyes blink behind round glasses.
Nisha opens the door to the fitting room. The woman turns to the shelves and starts putting some of the churidars back. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to what goes where, but there has to be some code.
“How does it look?” Nisha asks too loudly. She has that scrunched-up face that can either lead to yelling or to tears.
I put on the best awed-by-your-beauty face I can manage. “Looks great. Turn around.”
She does a little twirl. The woman behind the counter glances at me over her shoulder.
“Looks great.”
“You already said that.”
“Just means it’s twice as true.”
Nisha goes back to the fitting room. The small store’s getting hot. I pull at the neck of my shirt to let some air in.
“If she likes that, she may like these.” The woman pulls out more churidars. “These are her size.”
“I don’t think—”
“We have matching jewelry.”
Nisha comes out of the dressing room and looks through the churidars that the woman has just pulled out. She’s walking with a sway to her hips again, which is a good sign.
“I’ll get this.” She points to the one she tried on. “And—” She sniffs loudly.
I put a hand on her shoulder but she shrugs it off. She has her back to me. I can’t tell if she’s going to cry or not.
“Nisha?”
She hides her face and shoves her purse at me. “Pay for this. I’ll be in the car.” She runs toward the door.
I feel the numbness start to spread. No. It’s Nisha. I’m not numb to her.
I turn to the woman behind the counter. “The gold and white churidar. And some matching bangles.”
“We have these mirrored ones. Just got them in.” She opens the back of the counter and pulls out a set of shimmering bangles. She dangles them on her finger, filling the store with their clinking.
I touch the bangles lightly. They feel like sand from all the glitter, with mirrors embedded deep in the metal. Nisha is crying outside.
I pay with Nisha’s money and hurry to my car. She’s crying against the passenger door. I unlock it and she gets inside. I get in the driver’s side, stare at the steering wheel, and wait.
She’s shrunken in on herself, all curled up toward her knees. “You were flirting with her,” she says.
“Who? I wasn’t.”
“You like her.” She cries harder.
I punch the side of the steering wheel, making her jump. “You’re getting married in a month. What the fuck does anything matter.”
She doesn’t have her contacts in, her eyes dark brown now like oil. “You’re married.”
“Kris and I, we have an arrangement.”
Tears cling to her eyelashes. She doesn’t say anything.
“Nisha, our marriage isn’t real. Kris likes men.”
She puts her head in her hands. “I can’t do this. This isn’t me.” Her hair swings around her face. “I only agreed to get married because you were married. Why didn’t you tell me before?”
She reaches out and grabs my arm. I draw her to me and hold her while she sobs.
“It’ll be okay. You’ll be fine.”
She grabs hold of my wrist and squeezes hard. She looks up at me and her face is wild—her eyes large and her chin set like she’s clenching her teeth together. “Let’s go. Run away with me.”
“What?”
“We could go somewhere. We could be happy somewhere. You and me.”
I push her gently away from me. “You can’t be serious.”
She pulls my wrist. Her fingers grip like a vice. “We could go anywhere. You and me.”
I close my eyes and hold her close. The bride belongs to the man who brings her home. “Okay,” I say. “You and me.”
The days march toward the wedding. Grandmother starts to feel better. She still can’t move around much, but she sits and watches her shows. Sometimes she sits in the kitchen and croaks instructions to Amma while she cooks. When it comes to food, Grandmother is lucid. The onions have to be cut smaller, fried longer, with more oil and spices. “Smaller,” Grandmother cries. “Don’t take that out yet. Put in more curry powder.” Amma grinds her teeth and puts up with it. At Grandmother’s instructions, Amma stays in the kitchen most nights and during the weekends.
“You need to spend time with her,” Amma tells me. “She needs something to occupy her time.”
I dig out two pairs of knitting needles and yarn from the recesses of my old closet, along with a how-to-knit book from the eighties. A blond woman with gigantic teeth and a workout headband smiles on the cover. The pages are crisp with too many spilled beverages.
I give Grandmother the thickest needles I can find. I try to start stitches in bulky, fuzzy blue yarn while she squints at the directions.
She puts a betel leaf packet in her mouth and reads while chewing. “Knitting soothes the troubled spirit. To make a purl stitch, the needle is inserted through the front of the stitch, then must be brought forward and over the yarn.”
When I get the stitch down, I show her. I stand behind her and guide her arms and hands like she’s a human puppet. When I was little, Grandmother knitted blankets, scarves, sweaters, even dresses and gloves. She bought the warmest wool she could find in Sri Lanka, and sent the finished pieces to us through relatives and friends traveling to the US. I hated wearing the brightly-colored sweaters and dresses. My American classmates made fun of me for looking like a FOB.
Grandmother catches on to the stitch slowly, but her fingers still remember how to hold the yarn with tension. We knit to the beat of her chewing and spitting. Her hands tremble as she knits. Without me behind her, guiding her movements, she quickly forgets the stitch and tangles up the yarn. When I look up, she’s trying to pick apart a knot with her shaking fingers. I take the yarn from her as gently as I can and put it aside. She coughs. I stand behind her and give her a fresh ball of yarn, guiding her hands as they cast on stitches.
When Amma comes home and finds us knitting, she says, “This is how it should be. You should be learning to have responsibility, not running around with friends like a little kid.”
I stare at the fuzzy blue yarn we’re working with and hold the tension with my fingers.
“You’re not going out again,” she says.
“I’m twenty-seven. You can’t really stop me.”
She fiddles with the zipper of her purse. “As long as you act like a kid, I’ll treat you like one.”
“She’s twenty-seven,” Grandmother says. The yarn slacks around her fingers.
Amma hitches up her purse and storms up the stairs.
•••
Laila Aunty comes by that night. No Appa in sight. Amma is washing dishes and sees Laila Aunty’s Lexus pull up in the gravel driveway.
“She’s alone,” Amma says. She hurriedly wipes her hands on a dishrag and runs up the stairs.
I’m painting on my laptop, coloring over my sketch of the flamenco dancer from El Jaleo. Grandmother is knitting a bright red scarf, wavy at the edges where she’s dropped and added stitches.
I open the door before Laila Aunty has a chance to knock. She clasps her purse in front of herself. She’s wearing a kurta that sparkles when she moves.
“I came to see Grandmother, dear. Is your mother home?”
Amma comes down the stairs. She’s changed out of her home clothes and into something she normally wears for work. She and Laila Aunty step around each other on their way to the living room.
Laila Aunty bends down and kisses Grandmother on both cheeks. Grandmother doesn’t seem to know who Laila Aunty is, but she smiles and makes small talk anyway.
Amma sits silently on the sofa. She stares through the sliding glass doors at the vegetable garden that needs weeding.
“How are you, dear?” Laila Aunty asks me. “You must miss Krishna.”
I close my laptop. “He’ll visit soon.”
“Let me make some tea,” Amma says.
I start to get up to follow her but she waves me down. She goes to the kitchen.
“Have you drawn anything new?” Laila Aunty asks. “Any pictures of Sri Lanka?”
I’ve drawn a woman with no arm. I shake my head.
“I wish you’d paint a canvas for us. We need something to hang in the den.”
Vidya used to paint for Appa. They still have some of her paintings hanging in their house.
“I’m not that good,” I say.
Amma brings tea for each of us.
Laila Aunty takes a sip and closes her eyes. “I miss your tea.”
Amma drinks hers in silence.
“At university your mother used to make tea just like this,” Laila Aunty says. “Our whole floor would visit our room in the evening instead of going to the cafeteria.”
“The cafeteria was very far,” Amma says.
“And they only gave plain tea. One of the girls in the hostel had an uncle who had a farm nearby. He brought us milk so we could make tea.”
“It’s sad what happened to him.”
“What happened?” I ask.
Amma wraps her hands around her mug. “He was killed in the riots.”
I know about this. The riots that started the Sri Lankan war. I’d read about it in college.
“It was what?” Laila Aunty says. “Third year of university?”
“Third year. We were about to go home for vacation. I had a train ticket for the next morning, but the security guards came to the hostel that night and told us to get to the inner rooms. They had some rooms that were in the middle of the floor that were hard to get to. They said there was a mob heading toward the university.”
“News wasn’t as easily spread, no. We didn’t know that the riots had already started in Colombo.”
“They put some Sinhalese boys in charge of protecting us. But some of them wanted revenge, too.”
“Some of them threatened us.”
“So we took our things and ran.”
“We took our tea.”
“We did take our tea.”
“We went and stayed at this farmer’s house, the one that used to give us milk. But the riots spread fast, so we had to move on.”
“We couldn’t bathe for a week. Remember? It was just a bunch of us girls, no.”
“You wouldn’t believe the smell.”
Amma tucks her legs underneath her and leans forward. Their voices are high-pitched and loud, almost argumentative if you weren’t listening to the words.
“We finally found a barn near someone’s house that we hid in, but the family found us. It was a nice Muslim family, and they hid us in their daughters’ rooms.”
“Remember Meena?”
“Meena was a girl on our floor.” Laila Aunty lowers her voice. “She had her period during the riots.”
“She smelled like you wouldn’t believe.”
“We snuck her out to the river to wash herself. But when we were bathing—”
“We heard men’s voices. We were so scared.”
They giggled and wiped at their eyes.
“We snuck off in our wet clothes, hair still wet—”
“Shampoo still on—”
“Eventually the farmer who first took us all in, he arranged for a tractor to take us to Kandy so we could take a bus home.”
“They came for him after we left,” Laila Aunty says. “They took him out to his field, and burned him.”
“Burned all his cattle, too.”
“We didn’t find out until after we made it back to Jaffna.”
Silence rang in the space between their voices.
“So sad,” Amma said.
“Our parents were so worried when we got back.”
“Your father, too,” Amma starts to say. She cuts herself off.
Laila Aunty puts her teacup on the coffee table. It’s dainty and ceramic. The tea set for guests.
“Well,” she says, standing.
“Thanks for coming.”
Laila Aunty starts to move toward Amma but then stops. Instead she kisses Grandmother on the cheeks again and leaves.
When she’s gone, Amma washes out her teacup by hand in the sink. She doesn’t say anything.
“Why did she come?” I ask.
Amma stops scrubbing the cup. “She has regrets.”
That night I dream that I’m on a bus in Sri Lanka, trying to get home to my family. We get stopped at a security checkpoint. While we’re all getting searched by army officers, our bus explodes. A woman with no arm falls on me. She shields me from the flames and shrapnel. She’s so heavy I can’t breathe. I crawl and crawl but she lies on top of me, holding me down.
When I wake up in the middle of the night, I draw the scene. I can’t capture the way the woman crushed me, but I can feel it, all over.
It’s one of the best sketches I’ve ever drawn, but it’s not what Laila Aunty meant when she said she wanted a painting to hang on her wall.
•••
I go to the rugby house that weekend. I pretend not to hear Amma mutter to herself as she pulls on her gardening gloves and steps outside. Grandmother stands on the deck and holds the railing. I pull on my sneakers and leave before either of them has a chance to say anything.
Tasha and Jesse aren’t up when I get there. Tasha’s black curls poke out of the rainbow quilt when I knock on the door, and through the open window I see her drag herself to the door.
“Hey you.” She leans heavily against the door and wipes her eyes with little squishy sounds.
I follow her inside and throw my duffel bag on the floor next to a pile of Xbox controllers. Someone shifts in her bed. All I can see is a pale forehead.
“I’ll make you some coffee.” Tasha pushes me into the olive kitchen.
I sit down at the rickety table with mismatched chairs. She putters around the kitchen, pulling coffee and filters from cabinets. The coffee grinder screams a high-pitched wail and the smell of ground coffee fills the room. She makes coffee in a French press, carefully pouring it into two mugs shaped like boobs. She sits down at the table with me.
Black coffee. The mug is yellow with red swirls and a great big red nipple. I’m not a fan of black coffee. I always add sugar and creamer and Amma drinks hers with condensed milk. I blow on it. The air steams up my glasses.
Tasha’s already halfway through hers. “I just got these beans.” She closes her eyes and breathes in the smell.
“What time are you guys going to practice?”
“Rugby season’s over for Boston Women’s. Last night was our alumnae game at Wellesley.”
I sink further into the chair.
She rubs at her temple, then scratches a tattoo on her neck. “Good thing, too. I think I have a concussion.”
“So no rugby.”
“Nope. But,”—she holds up a finger—“the MMA tournament is starting.”
“MMA?”
“A friend of mine runs it. A bunch of dykes and trans boys fighting in basements for cash. It’s terrific.”
“Like Fight Club?”
“We don’t talk about Fight Club. Want to join?” She reaches out and touches my hair, which is finally long enough to put into a ponytail. “Do you ever think about short hair?”
“I do have short hair.”
“I meant shorter. Like mine.” She pulls at her curls, stretching one two-inch piece out from her head.
“My mom would kill me.”
“You’re twenty-something years old. Why the hell are you afraid of your mother?”
She lifts up her hand. I feel the air move around my head before she touches me.
“I’ve always wanted to cut my hair short,” I say.
“Then what are you waiting for?”
Jesse appears around the bend of the hallway. She blinks the sleep out of her eyes and pours herself a cup of coffee. “Are you joining the tournament, Lucky?”
A blond man with high cheekbones stumbles in, his shirt crumpled and his boxers twisted. He looks odd in the house, against the corner of the rainbow flag just above his head.
The man walks to Tasha and puts a hand on her neck. He was the one in her bed earlier. I stare at my coffee and wish it had sugar and cream. I hear him say, “Hey, baby,” and something that sounds like a kiss.
Tasha coughs, and when I look up, the man has moved away. He’s standing by the fridge, his face crumpling the way that Nisha’s does when she’s angry.
“I’ll call you later,” Tasha says to him. “You should probably go.”
He wraps his arms around himself and walks into the living room.
“Straight men can be so needy,” she says.
When he leaves, Tasha teaches me the basics for the tournament while Jesse watches and plays on her phone.
Tasha rolls up one arm of her T-shirt. “Punch me.”
“What?”
“Punch me. Go on.” She spreads her legs and tilts toward me. “Go on.”
I make a fist and throw my weight at her, unfocused and wobbly.
“Harder. Come on.”
I punch again, less wobbly this time.
“Again. Go a little harder each time. Rotate with the motion.”
I visualize punching. I picture the muscles in my shoulders, my back twisting back and snapping forward, the power flowing through my arm. I punch again. Again, again, stronger and stronger until Tasha has to widen her stance.
She feels her arm where I just punched. “Not bad, twinkle toes. You may even give me a bruise.” She moves behind me and puts her palm flat on my right shoulder blade. “The power comes from here. Rotate with it.”
“I was rotating.”
She doesn’t move her hand from my back. “You can punch a lot harder than this.”
“I’m trying.”
“Maybe we need to get you angry.”
“I’m already angry.”
She turns and gives me her other arm to punch. “Not angry enough.”
I picture Nisha, her wedding, the way she gets excited about her bridal clothes and how she cried in the car and asked me to run away with her. I haven’t heard from her since. I punch, harder and harder, rotating out from my shoulder, again again again.
After a while we have to escape to the deck to let the sweat freeze on our faces. We’re all down to our boxer briefs and sports bras.
Tasha makes me chug a bottle of water before handing me a PBR. She tries to convince me to cut my hair.
“Stop pestering her,” Jesse says.
“Look at her. She wants to.”
I text Kris: Should I cut my hair?
He responds: You hate your hair.
We gather in the kitchen. Tasha spreads out her buzzer and guards on the table. “Ready?”
I screw my eyes shut. The cold buzzer tickles my head as it runs back and forth, the vibration running through me, slipping down under the pit of my stomach. Hair falls around me. My head feels oddly light. Tasha pulls out scissors and works on the top, biting the tip of her tongue in concentration. Pieces of hair cling to the sweat on my forehead and work their way inside the collar of my T-shirt. Finally, she steps back, throws up her hands and says, “Done.” Jesse swats at my back and neck.
My head spins when I stand. I stumble into the bathroom and stop at the mirror. My ears stick out like naked baby birds stretching out their new necks.
Tasha is behind me, arms crossed over her chest. “So? How do you feel, Mulan?”
I rub what’s not there on the back of my head. I look like a woman I might stare at from across the room.
My reflection grins.
Tasha’s fingernails dance on my neck. “You look good.”
•••
By the time I pull up to Amma’s doorway, a migraine beats a soft pulse behind my left eyeball. Amma’s car is missing, but Nisha’s is in our driveway. Nisha opens the door before I have a chance to put my key in the lock. She stands there motionless, her eyes widening slowly.
“Hey.” I try a smile. “Can I come in?”
“Your mom’s going to kill you.” But she’s starting to smile. “You’re going to be dead for my wedding.” She puts a hand on my shoulder and bends down with the force of her laughter. I wonder if she’s forgotten about crying, about asking me to run away with her.
Grandmother’s in her chair in the living room, watching the TV, blankness stitched on her face. A bit of drool hangs from the side of her mouth. I wipe it off with the hem of my shirt. She turns and looks at me, her eyes blank.
“It’s me, Lucky.” I take her hand and rub the back of it. “Lucky.”
She plucks her hand out of mine and touches the tip of my hair like it’s made of glass. “Lucky, you’re a boy.”
Nisha sits on the edge of the couch armrest and smirks. “You don’t look half bad.”
“You need to marry her,” Grandmother says to me, nodding her head.
“Marry who?”
She doesn’t answer. She looks out the sliding doors to the deck. I open the doors so that the musty indoor air can circulate. Grandmother breathes in the wind that rushes in, lets it fill her up. She sits straighter. She’s probably been in the chair all afternoon. I should’ve come home earlier. I’m the only one who helps her walk around when she wants to. I’m the only one who wants her to be strong.
I offer her my arm, and help her stand and hobble to the deck. The weather’s unseasonable warmth swirls around us.
Grandmother slowly turns back toward the living room. “I can’t hear the baby.”
•••
When Amma’s car pulls into the driveway, I hide upstairs. Nisha’s already left. Grandmother still sits in the living room.
There’s the wind chime on the front door. Amma’s footsteps. The thunk of her putting her bag down. She says hello to Grandmother.
“Lucky?”
I walk down the stairs, pausing just before I come into view. The next stair feels like stepping off a cliff.
Amma stands at the bottom of the stairs, some mail in her hand. She looks up at me, and freezes. Her mouth hangs open. Her face gets hard, her eyes and lips press together, closer and closer until they’re just slits in her face.
“Amma?” My voice is dry and cracked.
She’s sinking, her knees giving out under her reaction. She slumps down on the first stair and claws at her chest. The mail drifts to the floor.
I leap down the staircase and kneel next to her. “Amma?” I try to turn her around by the shoulder so I can see her face but she resists.
She sucks in the air around us. Her fingers clutch at her chest. She stares at the carpet.
My fingers tingle with the numbness that threatens to spread. I’m too big for my skin. I did this for a reason. I want this.
I rub circles on her back, hoping to rub out that feeling in my fingers. Around and around, circles, both of us pitching with her crying, trembles and shakes until I can’t tell how long we’ve sat there. Then she sniffs, shrugs my hand off her shoulder, and goes up the stairs without saying a word.
The day I should get my period passes and the safety tampon I put in comes out clean. Every night that white cotton, revealing my panic slice by slice.
Still nothing, I text Kris.
Exciting! he texts back.
I want to tell Tasha, Nisha, someone. I don’t even want a baby. I keep my mouth shut.
Nisha talks and talks of running away, but only on the phone. I get text after text of plans: Toronto. That’s where we should go.
I’m so sick of this wedding. Let’s go soon?
I can’t wait to wake up next to you every day.
She never gives a date or time, just rising panic. When I see her, she’s full of the fake smiles she wore at her engagement. I drag around the cloak of her plans with me wherever I go. Amma asks me why I’m slouching more than normal. Tasha has to remind me constantly to keep form when I practice for the tournament. I turn corners with these heavy shoulders. Numbness spreads through me again, fills me like cement.
•••
Kris visits on the excuse that he misses me and wants to be with his wife. Amma’s delighted. She fawns over him, makes his favorite foods, and tries to prod him along on the path to fatherhood.
He arrives with a bouquet of yellow roses. Unorthodox for a brown man, but he loves to stand out. Amma smiles wide and puts them in water. She hasn’t smiled since I cut my hair.
Kris kneels down next to Grandmother in her folding chair. Grandmother turns her head from the afternoon news headlines. Kerala High Court says buildings of religious groups are taxable. Rogue cop dreams up unique rental business. Richie Ramsay leads at Indian Open.
Her bluing eyes twitch. “Lucky.” She reaches up and touches Kris’s hair.
“See?” Amma says. “She doesn’t even know the difference between you two anymore.” She turns to Kris. “I can’t believe you allowed her to cut her hair like this.”
Anger folds over inside me.
Kris has a fake smile of his own. “If it makes her happy.”
•••
Later, when Amma is busy cooking his favorite shrimp stir-fry, Kris drags me upstairs. “How goes it?” He gives me a look but I don’t know what that’s supposed to refer to. Nisha? Tasha? Grandmother?
I sit down on the bed and let him tower over me. My eyelids sag. I droop with the effort of it all. “Fuck if I know.”
“That bad?”
I let myself fall backward onto the bed. I hit the mattress with a thump, arms spread wide. My breath leaves me. I watch the slope of the ceiling.
“Your mother’s mad at you,” he says.
“I know.”
“Did you get your period?”
“Nope.”
“Can I help?”
“Please don’t.”
He sits down next to me on the bed. “We fucked this up, didn’t we?”
Little canyons run across the sloped ceiling and down the walls, cutting into the plaster.
“We should be happy,” he says. “We did this to be happy.”
“Maybe it just wasn’t in the stars for us.” I’m starting to sound like Amma. Rewriting your fate is tricky. We get to keep our families, but we lose something in return. The law of equivalent exchange.
•••
Amma takes me aside that evening while Kris works in the backyard, harvesting the last of the cabbage from Amma’s garden. The only time he gets his hands dirty is when he’s playing the good brown husband.
I watch him from the living room, his thin back bent over the patch of dirt, his spine visible through his striped polo, his long shadow mixing in with the others as the sun goes down.
“He’s a good man,” Amma says. She clears her throat. She does that every time she talks to Laila Aunty. She’s going to say something she doesn’t want to say. “How are you with money?” she asks.
I count the stripes on Kris’s polo. Seven. “Fine.”
“Grandmother’s hospital bills are getting out of hand. I—I need help with them.” She stares out the sliding glass doors, not meeting my eyes.
“Of course I’ll help.” For the first time there’s something I can give her. Money is power. A chance to turn the tables. I don’t think she even knows what she’s given me. I may have lost in my battle with fate, but I haven’t lost to Amma quite yet.
•••
Kris isn’t so sure. “We just don’t have that much lying around.” He keeps his voice low so that Amma, sleeping in the guest bedroom, won’t hear.
“We’ve been saving.” I lie down next to him in the bed and bump his shoulder with mine. “Amma needs this.”
“I’m not actually an engineer, you know. I don’t make nearly as much as your mother thinks I do. And you can barely contribute with your commissions.”
“I contribute.”
“This is our nest egg, Lucky. If we give it to her, we have nothing.”
“We have equity on the house. I’ll get a job. A real job.”
“You’ve tried. There are no jobs in this damn recession.”
I bend his index finger back until it cracks. “I’ll apply again.” Then his middle finger. Then his ring finger. “I’ll keep applying.” I crack his pinky.
He yanks his hand away.
“I’ll fucking work at McDonald’s if I have to,” I say.
“I’m not giving her the money.” He turns his head away from me and draws the blankets tighter around himself.
“You don’t make these decisions. I could apply for a divorce.”
“And be the divorced gay daughter? Your mom wouldn’t even want your money then.”
“And you’ll have to go back to India. How does that sound?”
“You wouldn’t.”
“She needs this money.” I tug on his arm until he turns around. “It’s my fault that Grandmother was in the hospital. We have to pay.”
His eyes follow me even when I look away. I get up and change into my boxers for bed. Amma’s decided to give us privacy, so I can at least sleep how I want to.
“Fine.” Kris stabs a finger at me. “But you get a job.”
•••
I visit Nisha on the weekends, and her parents take us to temple. I follow her around the shrines. Sometimes she stops so suddenly I run into her. She turns back coyly. She drags me to the bathroom. She tries to feed me lemon rice from her plate. I watch her parents carefully, just in case they notice. I’m wary of smiling too big or sitting too close.
One time when I go to her house, she’s alone. She giggles when she opens the door. “They’re gone.” She looks around behind me and pulls me inside. She has no makeup on and she’s still in her pajamas. “I told them I had my period.”
Women during their periods are considered unclean. In the past they weren’t allowed to cook or even enter the kitchen. Now we’re just not allowed to go to temple or pray. Progress, according to Amma.
Nisha pulls me by the hand up the curved staircase. The picture of her at her puberty ceremony looms over me as I climb, her face still full—baby-fat cheeks, too-big teeth and no lines. Menstruating women are unclean, but when a girl reaches menarche, we throw a party.
Inside Nisha’s bedroom, the menagerie of stuffed animals watches me. One side of her mouth curls up. She looks at the bed, then back at me. I like the depth of her face without makeup, the shadows and bumps that haven’t been hidden away. She pulls her shirt off, unbuckles her bra and walks toward me.
She takes my hands and puts them on her chest. I run my thumbs over her puckered nipples. She makes me sit on the bed and straddles my lap.
“It’s not really cheating if you’re not really married,” she says.
Her thighs press against my jeans. She puts her nipple in my mouth and rubs herself off on my leg. I have a tampon in, just in case. My period is three weeks late, but I’ve always been erratic when stressed. She won’t try to touch me. I stay clothed. I suck on her nipple and scratch down her back. She bites my neck. I reach down and finger her and let her ride me. I’m the one not really married, so I’m the one not really cheating. Her marriage will be real. I wonder if she’ll hold onto his biceps and arch against him and muffle her moans against his neck. He’ll have to learn how to pull her hair the way she likes. When she comes she bites so hard she draws blood.
Afterward, we lie on her bed—the same bed we bounced on as kids, the one where she painted my nails during sleepovers, where we pulled the covers up to our chins to tell each other ghost stories. I hold her and feel my eyes close with the weight that follows me. I’m not the one cheating, but I’m the one who feels the burden.
•••
A scream wakes us. Nisha’s mother. My arm’s numb from hours of Nisha’s sleeping form.
Nisha scrambles to cover herself with the blanket. She yanks it out from under me and I fall to the floor. My tailbone lands hard on the wood.
Nisha’s mother runs across the room, shrieking too loud for her petite, withering body. I only catch a few words. Tamil falls too fast and shrill. Nisha stands mummified in her blankets. She’s taller than her mother but seems tiny.
Nisha’s mother pulls back her arm, twists, and swings the slap from her shoulder. She doesn’t stop, her hand slamming across Nisha’s face, sharp crisp thuds that hang in the air.
I jump up and lunge forward, catch the hand that swings a wild pendulum. Her eyes bulge, her mouth edged with spittle.
She shoves me hard. I stagger. She shrieks, calls me something I don’t understand, waits with wide eyes and when I don’t move—
“Get out.”
I stumble into Nisha’s father at the top of the stairs. He pushes his thick glasses up and looks away, stares hard at the wall. I stomp fast down the stairs and out the door, running run run until I can’t see the house. My heart won’t slow. My hands shake with cold. I have no coat. I left my car.
I can’t go to Amma’s house. Nisha’s mother may have already called her. I walk to a bus stop and wait, shivering. In the gray sidewalk I see Nisha’s face, caught in the back and forth momentum of her mother’s hand. The bus pulls up and I ride it to the end of its route.
As the bus pulls into the T station, my phone rings. Amma.
“Hello?”
Silence on the line.
I get off the bus and walk down to the platform. “Hello? Amma?”
“What did you do, Lucky?”
“I didn’t—”
“Be quiet.”
That tone, like in college. Last time led to me being homeless, to Tim, to Kris, to my wedding. A hand swinging wildly across Nisha’s face.
“Nisha’s father called,” Amma says.
I’ve swallowed sand. I wait.
I’m not alone on the platform. An older man, no more than a mass of dirty clothes, slumps on the wall under an ad for Maui, his sleepy head nodding off near the bikini breast cups of the model. A punk kid sits on the bench next to me, his eyes scrunched up underneath thick glasses, his blue head bent over a Harry Potter book.
Amma’s waiting for my explanation. Cold air rushes from the tunnel.
“Amma. I didn’t do—”
“I told you to be quiet.” Her voice is strangled, a cold whisper that makes me want to drop the phone.
The whooshing rumble of the Orange Line fills the station.
“Amma, please.”
“Come home. Now.”
“But—”
“It’s your choice,” she says.
Amma has hung up, or I’ve lost the signal. The train doors open. I enter the empty car.