The Last Lie

By the time I step off the T in JP, I’m shaky. I want to giggle, roll on the floor and pound my fists on the linoleum of the station until my knuckles bleed. I walk through the park where we played rugby. A breeze carries smells of Chinese fish fry. I sit on the bench to think. I didn’t tell Tasha or Jesse that I was coming, didn’t ask if they minded. I swung myself from Nisha’s house and this is where I landed.

A father tries to teach his daughter to walk on the grass. The kid stumbles after a couple of steps and freezes on her hands and knees until the father stands her up again. Appa taught me how to walk by putting my feet on his and stepping with me. Bikers pedal by, their hippie cotton skirts lifted up by the wind of their own movement. I taught myself how to ride a bike.

Sitting still makes me cold. I walk to the rugby house. I don’t know if I can tell them. I don’t want their pity, don’t want to be told it gets better. My parents are the kind of people who talk politics but never mention gay marriage, who watch the news but change the channel at the mention of gayness. Shame, dishonor, embarrassment. Five hundred Sri Lankan Tamil families in the greater Boston area, and not one of them has a gay kid.

Tasha and Jesse are smoking on the deck when I get to the rugby house.

“Hey handsome.” Jesse waves. “You okay?”

I twist away, watch the sparse trees that line the sidewalk. Tasha holds out a cigarette and I take it, lighting it from the one in Tasha’s mouth.

By the third cigarette, I’m restless. My legs are asleep. I can’t get the sinking feeling out of my stomach, a physical pain every time I look at my phone and see that no one has called.

I suggest rugby, and Jesse calls up some people they know in the neighborhood. A half hour later we’re in the park, lining up for a scrum. I want to run and fight and fuck, anything to quiet the static in my head. We line up five on five. Jesse plays a hooker as always, built dense and strong to power through the scrum. I line up next to her as the loosehead prop, snake my hands into her shirt and ball them up in her sports bra for leverage. We push push push and the ball peeks from under our line.

As we play I gasp cold air. The stinging wakes me up. My legs hurt. My mouthguard tastes like toothpaste. When we ruck or fall down in tackles the other girls smell like dirt and grass. Their sweat coats my skin.

I get tackled to the ground three times, landing harder and harder on my back and tailbone. I still can’t tackle well. Legal tackle means cheek to cheek, the side of your face on her butt. It means knowing how to fall forward, how to lose balance on purpose, how to drive something home.

We play until it’s too dark, and for a moment, with the sun dipping under the trees and the leaves crunching under our steps, Tasha’s arm over my shoulder, and the clink of twelve-packs from the liquor store, just for a moment I can forget.

•••

Amma doesn’t call. I keep waiting for the phone to ring, check it every five minutes like a tick, turn up the ringer when I go to bed, but still nothing.

I lie next to Tasha in the living room. My stomach twists and spirals, keeps me awake. My heart beats too fast to settle down for sleep. I feel Tasha next to me. We don’t touch but the air between us presses warm against me. A subtle shift when she turns under the sheets. The mattress dips in the middle. I want to let myself roll into her. My muscles tense up trying not to.

I wake up on my side, arms spilling over the edge of the bed. I’m sore. The backs of my knees ache and my tailbone is tender. Tasha is inches away.

Through the doorway to the kitchen, Jesse makes something on the stove. A girl I haven’t seen before, a petite brunette drowning in one of Jesse’s jerseys, rummages in the fridge. I get out of bed and join them.

“Want some eggs, you?” Jesse asks. “You need to bulk up. It’ll help your game.” She sprays some oil onto a skillet. Gray, thick smoke shoots out from the pan. She breaks five eggs into it. Crackling fills the kitchen.

The brunette watches me, frowning at the tips of her mouth. When I look at her, she looks away. She kisses Jesse. Nisha’s absence is lodged in between my lungs. There isn’t enough air. The exposed wood beams are siphoning oxygen into the October winds outside. I hold onto the doorframe.

“I’m going to take a walk,” I say.

Jesse flips over the mass of eggs. She calls after me as I leave. “Feel free to grab something in the fridge.”

I step out into the clear morning air. I should’ve worn a coat. I put my hands in my pockets and walk down the creaky steps to the sidewalk. The sky spreads a clear blue, the air crisp and unmoving. I walk toward the park. A young woman my age pushes a stroller. An old man in a motorized wheelchair holds a small poodle on his lap. Garden blooms, the last of the fall, bend toward me from the retaining walls that hold in people’s yards. I check my phone. No calls. What if Amma never calls me back? What if Nisha never talks to me again? I call Kris, but the phone rings and rings and goes to voice mail.

I jog the rest of the way to the T station and climb down the stone steps. People lumber around the station, holding whimpering babies to their chests and adjusting diaper bags. Too many people. Amma’s never going to call back. Bile rises at the back of my throat. I have to be the one to do it. I have to go back to Amma’s house.

The tiled walls grumble as the train arrives, but I’ve left my Charlie Card at the rugby house.

•••

Tasha’s up and out of bed, sitting on the crumpled sheets playing Xbox when I walk in. She pats the space next to her.

I want to crawl back into bed and sleep until my lungs can expand without pain. I sit down.

“Did you guys have a fight?” Tasha asks. “You and Nisha?”

“Yeah, yeah we had a fight.”

She sucks in air through her teeth. In the morning light, her broken-and-glued-back-together tooth shines. The jagged edge of it glows dark and clear.

I spin my wedding ring around and around on my finger.

She offers me a game controller. “Plenty of fish in the sea.”

The longer I wait to go back to Amma’s house, the harder it’ll be. I should walk back down to the station, step onto a train, go back home. My legs refuse to move. I fall back onto the couch.

“Stay for a while.” Tasha pats my knee and places the controller on my lap.

“I don’t want to overstay my welcome.”

“Nonsense.”

We play for a while in silence. She pauses the game, goes to the kitchen and comes back with two IPAs. “Stay the week, then go. It’ll be fun.”

I drink my beer fast. One week in the rugby house.

She punches me in the arm and un-pauses the game, smiling with her broken tooth.

•••

We go to a string of parties with drunk people I don’t know. The first is a block party in the rugby house neighborhood. Young professionals and parents, small kids and large dogs. A table struggles under food—everything from curry to steak to sushi. There are other South Asians there—young, hip couples who ignore me and a couple of new immigrant men who stare.

One of the Indian men keeps his eyes on me from across the party. He is light skinned and doughy, the kind of man Amma finds attractive. I talk to an older man about his work certifying organic farms for the government. I coo over a woman’s German shepherd that she’s taught to stand on its hind legs and hug people. I keep up a string of conversations because every time I get done talking, the man looks like he’s going to come over. After a while I look for Tasha and Jesse. The Indian man heads my way. His face would be kind if he wasn’t leering, his sharp eyes focused on me like there’s no one else in the world.

“Do I know you?” he asks.

I try for the most uninviting look I can manage. “I don’t think so.”

“I think our parents were friends.”

“I don’t think so.”

He tries to laugh and ends up scowling. His forehead gets extra shiny with sweat. “But you’re from India?”

“Sri Lanka.”

“Yes, yes, Sri Lanka.” He looks down at his paper plate and takes a bite of fufu. He chews it for a long time, and swallows with difficulty. “These Americans with their bland food. I miss my mother’s cooking. Do you cook?”

“Fufu is African food. You’re supposed to eat it with soup.”

“I came here for my studies. I just got a job at a good company. Do you go to school?”

I catch sight of Jesse near the food table, holding hands with her girlfriend. The Indian man looks at them. Jesse pulls her girlfriend in for a kiss.

“They are so shameless.” He turns back to me and gives me an embarrassed smile, as if we share some secret.

I think of Nisha, of her mother’s hand whipping across her face.

“Hey you,” Tasha says into my ear. She looks at the Indian man and takes a step closer to me.

He chokes on his rice. He opens his mouth, but when no sound comes out, he closes it.

She pulls on my shoulder, nods at the man, and leads me away.

•••

Tasha takes me canvassing door to door for the Obama campaign. Two weeks until the election. We walk up and down the steep hills of JP until my calves ache. I carry a clipboard and wear a campaign shirt, but I don’t know the spiel so I stand back near the curb and let Tasha talk to disgruntled voters. Their eyes pass over her shirt. They nod and shut the door.

“Is anyone in JP not voting for Obama?” I ask.

“You have a point. But I agreed to do this neighborhood.” She scratches the side of her leg and squints against the sun. She looks down at her clipboard of names.

We keep walking. Dried leaves litter the street.

She stops halfway up a hill and looks around. “Did we do this street already?”

It doesn’t look familiar, but we’ve walked through so many I can’t keep track. “Ring a doorbell and see if you recognize someone.”

“All these white people look the same to me. I can’t tell.”

We start to climb again. She looks down at her clipboard and rings a doorbell. I stand on the sidewalk while she talks to an older lady holding a tabby cat.

She crosses a name off her clipboard. “Two more streets.” She’s quiet for a while. “I know it’s not my business, but I’m sorry about Nisha.”

The air fills with fall chill.

“I know it can’t be easy with your family,” she says.

“Are you close with yours?” I don’t know anything about Tasha’s family. She never talks about them.

“My family stopped talking to me when they found out I was queer.” She kicks a pile of leaves pressed up against the curb, and they flutter out from her feet and scatter on the road. “So I get it.”

My voice jumps ahead of my thoughts. “My sister ran away from home after college. I haven’t talked to her since.”

“Have you tried to find her?”

“I don’t think she wants to be found.”

Tasha checks the clipboard again and starts walking.

“I was such a dick to my family,” she says.

“It’s never too late.”

She stops mid-stride. “At some point I realized I couldn’t save anyone but myself. So I stopped trying.”

She keeps walking and I follow.

•••

One night after rugby, we buy Captain Morgan and craft beer. Jesse and Tasha call up other friends, and we sing rugby songs and play cards. During our smoke breaks the cold air can’t touch me, and when Tasha puts her fingers on my cheeks and kisses me, I pull her closer by the waist and kiss her back.

Vidya’s letter rests in a pocket of the jeans I’ve worn since Nisha’s house, folded neatly along the already-existing crease in the paper and tucked back in the envelope with the photo. At night I take out the envelope, run my thumb over the serrated edges of the American flag stamp, follow the blocky white text underneath it—Liberty—the return address in Louisville, Kentucky, written in Vidya’s scrawl. I read over the tall loopy writing, the short, square note framed on each side by thick white space. I stare at the photo of Vidya and her daughter, the little girl’s black curls frozen in a bounce, her chubby hands reaching out toward me. Vidya’s skirt blows around her slim hips, her face still the prettiest of us all. She’s smiling at someone. Jamal behind the camera? I want to think so, believe that she ran away for a reason that lasted. Maybe I just want to believe that Amma was wrong.

Before I go to bed I slip the paper and photo back in the envelope and settle it back in my pocket. Louisville, Kentucky. A sixteen-and-a-half hour drive. Fifteen hours if I drive above the speed limit, and I always do.

•••

I finally decide to tell them. Tasha and Jesse gather around me and listen to the story. The whole story, Nisha’s parents catching us, Amma’s phone call, everything. I’m done lying to them.

“I’m going to go back home soon.” Just the thought of that cluttered house with all of Kris’s depression littered around makes me weary.

Tasha puts down her beer and puts her hand on my knee. “We like having you around.”

At night, I lie in Tasha’s bed and think about Grandmother doubled over with the coughs, her eyes blank with bluish haze. Who is getting her water now? Is Amma taking leave from work?

I take out Vidya’s letter and carry it to the porch. A few lights dot the otherwise empty street. A clear fall moon hangs in the sky. I can smell the cold in the air now, the winter moving in too late. When we were younger, Vidya always wanted to be outside. She thrived in nature while Shyama sat inside with the AC and the cleanliness of Amma’s housekeeping. Vidya and I ran around the neighborhood climbing trees and getting dirt under our fingernails that Amma would painfully dig out later with a safety pin.

What would Vidya say? In college, when Amma stopped talking to me, it was Vidya who smoothed things over, Vidya who drove out to bring me home, Vidya who tried to talk me out of marrying Kris, Vidya who kept my secrets safe. Louisville, Kentucky. A fifteen-hour drive.

•••

After the incident with Kris’s roommate in college, I spent the rest of the semester living in the prop room of the theatre building. The attic smelled like history, like memories that didn’t belong to me, sleeping thick among the shelves of liquor bottles and kitchen props. There were large Chippendale chaises and flower chandeliers from the seventies, typewriters and rows of chairs of all shapes. I did my homework curled into the arm of an enormous mustard leather wing chair. When I got bored, I browsed the stacks of weapons or the collection of old books—illustrated kid’s editions of Moby Dick and Robinson Crusoe, 1950s housekeeping manuals, dusty copies of Anaïs Nin’s diaries. There was an old shortwave radio that worked.

The place had a reputation for being haunted. Students and maintenance staff ignored the creaks I made, the unexplained music. When students came up to get props, I hid behind old electronics in the back of the attic. I slept on piles of pillows.

Kris brought me food from the cafeteria, and I hid it with the other pantry items, between Snowdrift vegetable shortening and Tony Chachere’s red beans and rice.

When it got too hot, I found fans to cool me off. Exploring was enough to take my mind off not having a home. I showered in the gym. Sometimes I fucked girls so that I could sleep in a real bed. And sometimes, when things got bad, I would think about Kris’s offer to get married. I was on track to graduate that summer, and then what? The economy was tanking, and what if I couldn’t get a job? The longer I lived in that attic, the saner his idea seemed.

•••

Tasha and I drive out in the midafternoon in her Kia. I take off my shoes and brace my feet above the glove box. With every left turn, her fuzzy rainbow dice and college graduation tassel—both slung on the rearview mirror—tickle my feet. She plays old CDs while we drive, and sings to Disney songs as the car winds around the long blue Adirondacks. I have Vidya’s letter in my shirt pocket.

From the sides of the highway, trees bend toward the road like they’re going to scoop us up in their foliage. We chase the slice of clear blue sky that cuts through the tree line. Here and there, a water tower floats above the forest that blankets the mountains and obscures the villages. We drive blind, our future in the hands of the mountains that reveal the next slice of road around the bend.

In a valley town we take an exit to get fast food burgers and fries. Tasha insists that she doesn’t allow eating in her car, so we sit on a park bench.

“You know,” she says, contemplating a curly fry with a frown, “Nisha’s a good person.”

I slump my shoulders and hope she notices.

She bites into her burger and wipes her mouth on her sleeve. “You and Nisha. How serious was it?”

“I never expected us to grow old together.”

She watches the empty park—about the size of a soccer field, littered with trees. A swing set and a single rusty slide. “You want to work on your tackles?”

“Now?”

She crunches up the burger wrappings and drops them into a trashcan. “Why not?”

I don’t have an answer, so we walk to the middle of the grassy area, clear the ground of sticks and glass, and face each other.

She pulls up her plaid cargo pants. “You know the basics. Cheek to cheek. Below the waist.”

She runs at me before I can prepare myself. Her arms make contact with my pelvis and the world tips. I land with a thud that knocks the air out of me. She lands on top of me, scrambles up, and helps me to my feet.

In slow motion, she squats and tips herself forward, clasping her arms behind my butt. Her head rests on the side of my hip. “This is the ideal position you want. You try.”

I bend down to her pelvis and wrap my arms around her. Musty laundry and cologne. I should be used to her smell by now. It gets inside my nose and stays there. I can taste her when I breathe out.

“Now push with your legs,” she says. “Not with your back. Keep your back straight and drive your legs forward, up and forward.”

Back straight. Know how to fall. Hold onto something, and drive it to the ground. I push with all my strength and her knees buckle. We fall into a heap. I land on my hands.

She knocks my arms out with her elbows. I fall heavily onto her.

“Always land on your opponent. It knocks the air out of them.” Her arms wind around my waist and hold me there.

I nod and she lets me up. We knock each other down a few more times until I work up to doing a running tackle. I get used to the feeling of her hips, the momentary vertigo, the fall.

“Squeeze me tight to you. Clasp your arms together. Don’t leave an opening.”

I run at her and drive her to the ground.

Her head is cradled in the un-mowed grass. “Always look at the person. Never look at the ground.” She hooks a leg behind my knees and flips us so that I’m pinned underneath her.

“Never look at the ground.”

She’s thinking about kissing me. I can see it in her eyes. She stays like that for a few minutes, raised slightly on her elbows, her curls plastered to her head with sweat, before jumping up and heading toward the car.

•••

The mountains crack open into hills, and again into flatter land. The sky stretches further, wider, shows off a few stars, faint against the well-lit highway. We switch off driving every three hours. By midnight my eyes hurt. My muscles, saturated with coffee, spasm at the stillness. A group of thirty motorcycles passes us, some of the men doing wheelies and shouting into our car. Tasha stirs from her nap. I keep driving.

We stop at a Super 8 off the highway at two in the morning. The Indian attendant at the desk stares at me. It’s late. I’m here with a black girl who clearly looks like a lesbian. And with this hair, I probably look like a lesbian, too.

•••

I wake up bleeding. Blood smears between my thighs. My boxers are soaked. I jump out of bed in a panic. The sheets are clean except for a quarter-sized spot of red. I’ve waited for my period so long that I stopped putting a tampon in. Finally. A month late. Finally.

Tasha’s already up, drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup. She looks at the sheets. “It’s not so bad. They’ll bleach it.”

I wash my boxers in the bathroom sink but the blood won’t come out.

The Indian attendant is still there when we check out. He stares with that same look, like he’s watching a bad car wreck.

“That guy certainly has eyes for you,” Tasha says in the car. She goes through a box of CDs and picks out the soundtrack to Disney’s A Goofy Movie.

I toe off my shoes and prop my feet back up on the dash. Sunlight filters through the gray clouds, taking on their smoky, dusty feel by the time it lands on my skin. Tasha bobs her head up and down to the music and puts Vidya’s address into her phone’s GPS. I force my breath to slow and deepen, and try not to pay attention to the cramps sparking in my abdomen.

She drops the phone into a cup holder. An electronic voice drones on to take the next available U-turn. Tasha sings along with the tape. I clench my teeth through the pain. We drive.

•••

After the spring college semester ended, I didn’t go home. Kris and I both stayed in the prop room, preparing for graduation and applying for jobs. Vidya called me every day. I only answered when I thought I could lie effectively. One day she called four times in a row. When I finally picked up, she said, “Where are you?”

“I’m at home.”

“I’m at your apartment. Where are you?”

“You’re here? Who’s with you?”

“It’s just me. Where are you?”

“I just got out of class.”

“I’ll come and get you.”

Back then I needed time to prepare my lies. I gave her directions to the building where some summer classes were held. I stood out on the curb with my backpack. A riot of petals lay crushed on the sidewalk, the air sweet with their smell. Vidya pulled up and I climbed quietly into the passenger seat. She sat with the car in park, silent.

“Why are you here?” I asked. My teeth chattered but not with cold.

“I’m here to take you home.”

“I can’t.”

She turned around in her seat. “Amma needs to see you, talk to you.”

“She doesn’t want to see me.”

A class had just gotten out. The sidewalk filled with students.

She stroked my hair. “Amma wants to see you. I talked to her.”

She turned my face to her.

“I love you the same, Lucky.”

I tried to keep it in but I cried anyway.

“Amma will too, eventually,” she said. She put both hands back on the steering wheel. “Back to your apartment?”

“I—just the theatre building.” I gave her directions.

“I didn’t know there were dorms in the theatre building.”

I dried my face with my sleeves and didn’t correct her.

•••

I wake up in Louisville. Tasha shakes my arm. I stretch my legs by walking them up the sun-warmed windshield.

Louisville is too bright. The air conditioning blows tepid and dusty against my arms. Sunlight rushes around the car. I squint against it, using my hand for shade. We pass a baseball stadium near an overpass. Great cracks run through the highway, patched over with tar.

We drive into a small cluster of city-like buildings, all gray steel and blue-green glass. Buildings flash by in a whirl of brick. A large poster of Muhammad Ali watches us from a concrete museum. A scooped-out façade of a building rises on a road by the shore. The Ohio River blinks at us through the empty windows.

“Destination on your right,” the GPS says. The blue of the river unfolds on Tasha’s side of the car. Metal sculptures dot the wide sidewalks of Main Street. People in business suits swarm on the sidewalks, women in too-small skirts, men in pinstripe and Windsor knots. I can’t imagine Vidya among these too-clean people, her ruffled skirts and her wild hair.

The building the GPS leads us to is dark brick with white Grecian trim, an Italian restaurant and a couple of boutique stores on the first floor.

I wipe my sweaty palms on my jeans.

“Where the hell are we supposed to park?” Tasha swings the car right, up a hill, past fancy hotels.

Vidya’s building is shrinking, sliced by the defroster grid of the car’s back window. Tasha pats my knee. The concrete runs seamless down the buildings, across the streets and up the other side.

We find a parking garage with water-stained cement floors. Our sneakers squeak on it, even after we get onto dry concrete. I crack my knuckles one by one. The tips of my fingers have lost all warmth. Upright, I can feel the blood falling inside me. It magnifies in my head.

Tasha bumps my shoulder with hers, winds her arm around mine and weaves our fingers together. My palms sweat but she doesn’t flinch away.

We walk to Vidya’s building faster than I expect. Our palms are plastered together with sweat. I shake mine out of her grasp to let the air in.

Outside the building, two intertwining bodies make a bright orange metal sculpture. I squint at it, trying to make out where one form ends and the other begins. It’s familiar, the shape of the sculpture, but I can’t think of why.

The glass doors of the building open into a circular lobby. Grass-textured walls wind close on all sides. We get in the gilded elevator and watch the floor fall away. Fourth floor. A blank wall and a hallway carpeted with crimson filigree like a twenties hotel. Vidya’s door is glossy black like all the others, six paneled with a peephole and a tarnished gold knocker with the face of a lion. Apartment 429. I lift the knocker’s circular handle and let it fall down onto the door. We wait.

I knock again. We wait.

Eventually Tasha knocks at number 428. Nothing. I knock at number 427. The door opens. A little kid with a round, broad face pops his head around the door, hiding.

“Do you know who lives in this apartment?” Tasha points to Vidya’s door.

The little kid looks at the carpet and nods.

“Do you know where they are?”

He looks at Vidya’s door, then at us, and shuts the door. Tasha knocks again. A woman opens the door and hangs her head out into the hallway.

“Do you know where the people in apartment four twenty-nine are?”

“Why do you want to know?”

I step forward. “I’m her sister.”

The woman looks me up and down. “You don’t look like her sister.”

“We look a lot alike. She has longer hair, curly.” I show her the picture that came with the letter.

The woman takes the photo. I want to snatch it back.

“This woman hasn’t lived here in years. She moved out with her little girl.”

“Where did she go?”

“She said something about Pennsylvania.” The woman taps her finger on her chin. “I may not be remembering right.”

The blood has fallen away from my fingers, leaving me empty. Tasha grabs my hand and puts her fingers through mine. She thanks the woman and pulls me toward the elevator. I follow, grinding my shoes into the carpet so that they squeak.

Outside, I blink into the sun and trace the lines of the orange sculpture again, trying to find the point of separation between the two forms. Tasha pulls out a cigarette and lights it. She walks around and around the sculpture, taking puffs of smoke and blowing it around the metal.

“What now?” she asks.

“I guess we go back.”

She stands near the sculpture’s plaque for a long time. She takes a drag from the cigarette and throws it down. “Come here and look at this.”

The town of Louisville proudly sponsors The Living Art Walk. Title: “The Lovers.” Artist: Vidya Jeyakumar.

I reach up and press my hand to the metal. It’s warm, the orange paint starting to pucker and bubble.

Vidya Jeyakumar. She never changed her name.

“Why would she put this address on a letter if she doesn’t live here anymore?” I ask.

“The city hall will have records of the artists who contributed,” Tasha says. “They may have a current address on file.”

But they don’t. All they have is the address in Louisville. I can’t feel the blood inside me. Vidya is good at disappearing, but I don’t know what she’s running from anymore.

•••

When Vidya came to get me from college and brought me home to Amma, she asked me why I didn’t tell her.

“Tell you what?” I fiddled with the zipper on my backpack.

“Tell me what happened with Amma.”

“I didn’t know how you felt about—you know.”

She stared straight ahead at the lines of the curving highway and blinked rapidly. “I’m your sister.”

“Still.”

“It doesn’t change anything,” she said.

“Does Shyama know?”

“No.”

“Don’t tell her.” I pressed my forehead against the cold window. I couldn’t talk around the fear in my throat.

“It’s not a terrible thing, Lucky.”

I swallowed down the lump. “Amma will never accept this.”

“She has to change.”

“She won’t.” I turned my face so she couldn’t see me cry. “She stopped transferring me money. I’ve been living in the prop room.”

Vidya slowed and stopped the car on the side of the road. She pulled me to her and held me. Her hands shook. I felt her crying on my scalp.

I hoped that Amma would’ve gone to bed by the time we made it to Winchester, but the lights were on and through the kitchen window I saw her making sambol. She pounded dried peppers, onions, and coconut shavings in a stone mortar.

Vidya took my duffel bag and unlocked the front door. I stayed in the car.

She dropped my bag off inside and came back out. “You can’t stay in there forever.”

“Watch me.”

“I promise you I won’t leave your side.” I remember Vidya said that then, though neither of us could’ve known that she’d be gone by the end of the year.

I couldn’t make myself move. She grabbed a handful of my T-shirt and pulled me out. I couldn’t make myself resist.

I walked in the door and into the kitchen. Amma froze for a moment, her back tense. For a second no one moved. Then Amma hunched her shoulders and scraped the sambol out of the mortar.

I stepped forward. I couldn’t breathe. “Amma.” I had prepared a speech during the ride, everything I wanted to say. But no words came to me in the too bright kitchen, cold vinyl floor under my feet. “Amma.”

“This isn’t something she can control,” Vidya said. “You have to accept this.”

Amma put the sambol aside and cut into a fresh onion.

“Amma, talk to her. Please.”

Amma’s grip on the knife loosened. Her cutting stilled. “I can’t accept a daughter like this.”

Something was rising in my throat. I swallowed it down.

“This is no kind of life,” Amma said.

“This is a perfectly fine kind of life,” Vidya said. Her voice rose. She was going to fight for me. But I didn’t want to fight anymore. I didn’t want to live in the prop room and I didn’t want to walk away.

“Amma,” I said. “I want to marry Kris. I love him.”

•••

On the way back to Boston from Louisville, I get a short and clipped phone call from Amma, her voice scratchy under bad reception in the mountains.

“Come home.” Her voice sounds hollow, like she isn’t really there.

I lose reception as we drive, chased by a knife-thin moon. I could go back to her house. Or I could walk away, cover my tracks, disappear. I hold my face in my hands and breathe in the wet blackness around me, my body too heavy, a balloon filled with water, dragging me down, crushing me into the seat of the car.

•••

Nisha finally calls that night, after we get back to the rugby house and just as I’m getting ready to pass out. She doesn’t answer right away when I say hello. Silence stretches and stretches on the line.

“Hello?” I cup the phone to block out the sound of Tasha and Jesse playing Guitar Hero. I walk outside onto the porch and shut the door. The night chill wraps around me. “Hello?”

A sniff. More silence.

“If you don’t answer, I’ll hang up,” I say.

Another sniff.

“Nisha.”

“Take me away from here.” Her voice tight like a violin string. “Please.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“You said we’d go somewhere.”

Through the window, the rugby girls are still playing. My absence is unnoticed.

“You said we’d go,” Nisha says.

“Now?”

She makes angry sounds, none of them actual words. “You said. You promised.”

Jesse hollers her victory dance.

“You promised.”

“Okay, okay. Okay. We’ll go.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow. Meet me at Alewife at ten.”

Her voice breaks, halting. “Thank you.”

I stay out on the deck after I put away my phone. The cold from the creaky floorboards soaks into my feet. The moon lights the deck in blue.

I can’t take Nisha to Toronto like she wants. But I can take her to Bridgeport, to my house. Kris will understand. Her parents won’t find her there.

The wind feels new, but then again Boston wind always feels new, solid and pregnant with the sea. Windows glow stark yellow against the painted blue of the buildings. Alewife at ten. Tomorrow everything will change, or maybe it’s already changed, and I’m just waiting for it to sprout like spring growth. Tomorrow I’ll bring Nisha home, and she’ll belong to no one.

Eight o’clock. My alarm bounces off the walls of the rugby house and echoes inside my head. No one is up this early. Tasha moans a complaint and pulls the rainbow quilt over her face. I dive for my phone and shut off the alarm. I want to sink into the mattress. I massage the sleep out of my eyes and swing my feet over the edge of the bed.

“Where are you going?” Tasha’s voice is muffled by the quilt.

“Back home.”

“This early?”

I roll my shoulders to get some feeling into them, but even that takes an enormous amount of effort. “I’m getting old.”

She rolls over and pokes me in the side, where love handles are starting to form. “Don’t forget to come back.”

I want to tell her about Nisha but I can’t find the words.

Eight twenty-three. When I get changed and out of the bathroom, Tasha’s in the kitchen.

“Coffee.” She gives me the boob cup. “I put milk and sugar in it.”

I let the coffee slide down my throat. Beer might be a better start to the day. Whiskey. It would still my fingers.

She flips pancakes on the stove, adds one to a short stack and brings the plate over.

I sit down and pour maple syrup over them. “You didn’t have to do all this.”

“I always cook for girls who stay the night. I figured you’d need your strength to face your family.” She cuts a piece of my pancake stack and puts it in her mouth.

My fingers clamp on the fork and cut large, messy pieces.

Nine forty-seven. I take the T from JP to Alewife, walk up out of the concrete building, and sit on the bench where smokers mill about. The sun slants under the roof of the parking garage and warms the tops of my shoulders, working the tension out. I smell cold in the air, but the nip isn’t strong enough for a winter jacket.

A curvy woman in a business suit smokes in her stilettos, flicking the cigarette repeatedly and squinting up at the sky. “Hope this heatwave lasts,” she says to me.

I want to feel the cold air around me. This chill is too mild for the end of October. I want the trees to crust over with frost, to see Boston dusted with white before Thanksgiving like when I was a kid.

The woman stamps the cigarette with a pointy-toed shoe. She squints at the sky again, her hand shielding her face, and walks down the steps to the trains.

Ten o’clock. I watch the time on my phone. It gets hard to swallow or breathe.

Ten fifteen. Nisha is late. I send her texts, try to call. Her phone is out of service. She’s supposed to be bringing my car.

Ten thirty-two. I walk around to get the feeling back into my legs, and sit down again next to a homeless man in a dirty, torn military jacket who keeps wiping at his nose with his sleeve. He ignores me.

Eleven forty-four. Nisha isn’t coming. She’s not coming. Traffic wouldn’t be this bad on a Sunday. Her phone is still out of service.

I kick at a trashcan. The homeless man stares at me, wiping at his nose. I sit back down on the bench and put my head in my hands. She might still come. Anger clenches my insides. I have to get my car from her place. I get up and move toward the buses.

Eleven forty-six. I walk back to the bench and sit back down. Could her parents have found out and stopped her? This may not be her fault.

Twelve thirty-six. The homeless man gets half of a burger from a hurried passenger. He holds it out to me in silent offer, wiping his nose.

“Thank you, but you can have it.”

He bites into the burger. Ketchup drips down his chin.

I stand up and head inside the station to the buses.

Three minutes past one. Curtains are pulled tight against the windows of Nisha’s house. My car sits in the driveway where I left it, its white coat gleaming under the high sun.

Trying to ignore the feeling that I’m stealing my own car, I get in. The leather scalds the backs of my thighs. I turn the AC on to full blast, and drive away. I’m too tired to care. I want to sleep for weeks.

•••

Amma’s car is in the driveway. My car crunches into its spot. My stomach churns.

When I was little, Amma used to say that I brought the most happiness into her life. After losing a daughter, my birth was a miracle. They named me Lakshmi. Beauty. Wealth. A few months later my father got tenure, and somehow I got all the credit.

I walk up the steps to our front door. The blue door is bumpy where the paint dripped from the edges. I slide my key into the lock, and let myself in.

I’m named after a goddess whose husband sleeps in a cosmic ocean of milk. One legend says that gods and demons churned the milk together, hoping for immortality, but instead they turned the milk to poison.

Amma sits at the dining table, almost hidden behind a stack of dentistry journals, her laptop open in front of her, reading glasses on. She looks up at me when I come in and goes back to reading something in one of the journals she has propped open with a coffee cup.

I try to summon up that numbness, to spread it through me and help me walk up the stairs to my room where I can sleep. I want to fall to the floor, fall through the floorboards and be swallowed up. I can’t make the numbness come. I drag my legs to the dining table and sit down.

Amma ignores me and keeps reading. The skin under her bloodshot eyes hangs dark.

I sit and trace a deep groove in the pine table. Amma and Appa bought it when they first moved in and it amassed a collection of nicks and scratches over the years. Amma covers it when people come over.

I run the edge of my fingernail in the groove, around the crescent shape of it. I don’t remember who made it, but it looks like the mark of a knife. I scratch at it, up and down and around, the wood digging under my nail.

When Lakshmi’s husband incarnated as the human prince Rama, she became the avatar Sita, the most beautiful woman in the world. A good wife follows her husband. Sita was captured by a demon, imprisoned for years, and finally rescued after a great war. But now her chastity was in question. Rama ordered her to walk through fire to prove her purity. She didn’t burn.

Amma shuts the laptop with a thud. She takes off her reading glasses and stretches her hands in front of her. She leans her elbow on her laptop and pinches the bridge of her nose. “It’s not easy, Lucky,” she says. “After your father left, I worked hard to be part of this community. I paid a lot for my mistakes. I don’t want you to suffer like I did.”

I make my voice as soothing as I can. “I won’t suffer, Amma.”

“Of course you will.” She spits out the words. “You don’t know how hard it’ll be until you don’t have it. Our world isn’t kind to women without husbands.”

I’m not part of this world she’s afraid of, this community she clings to, these uncles and aunties who compare each other’s kids like pieces of fine jewelry. These people don’t belong to me. The words sound harsh even in my head. They get caught on my tongue. I dig my nail into the knife mark, up and down and around.

“Don’t play with your life, Lucky. You can’t be happy living like these Americans.”

She acknowledges the possibility, and rejects it. Can’t. I get up from the table.

“You’re going to destroy the reputation of this family,” she says.

I walk upstairs to my bedroom, and close the door on Amma’s voice.

Even after Sita proved her fidelity, questions remained in the minds of the people. Rama, now king, sent his pregnant wife into exile because he couldn’t stand the shame. She raised her kids alone in the woods, and when they were grown, she called upon the earth to swallow her up, and it did.

•••

Grandmother’s coughs scrape themselves out of her throat and fall around her. I bring her glasses and glasses of water during the day, place another by her bed at night, and wake up to go help her drink it. She stays in the folding chair all day, and when she gets tired of that, she stares out the sliding glass doors. Sometimes I take her to sit on the deck to work out the pain in her knees. She leans heavily on me when I help her walk, favors her left leg, and throws her coughs behind her.

The heat outside refuses to let up, even with November creeping over us. The sunlight taps against our skins when we go outside. Even the floorboards of the deck soak up the warmth and radiate it back into our feet like asphalt.

Grandmother cups her hand behind her ear and listens. I catch a small wail in the air, but as soon as I hear it, it’s gone, leaving only the sound of the air around us.

“The babies are dying.” She stretches out her neck like a turtle into the breeze. “I can’t hear them now.” Her eyes are clear, the blue eating more and more of the brown from the outside in. Tears drip out and down her cheeks. “The babies are dying, Vidya. They want to be born.”

I wipe away her tears with a kerchief. “There are no babies.”

“I hear them, Vidya. They’re dying.”

I try to tell Amma. “She’s getting worse,” I say.

Amma pulls on her thick suede gardening gloves over blue latex ones that she took from work.

“She’s getting worse,” I say again.

She tightens the Velcro straps on her gloves. “I’ll worry about Grandmother. You just worry about you. It’s what you’re good at.” She opens the sliding glass doors and walks out onto the porch.

Grandmother snores on her folding chair in the living room.

I follow Amma. The air swirls with a slight chill but the sun prickles on my shoulders. Amma walks down the steps to her garden, still going strong in the unseasonal late-fall heat. The grass slides wet and cold under my bare feet.

She crouches down and starts to pull out the weeds that have crept in. “Now you’re trying to convince me you care. How selfish.”

My shadow swallows her.

“All you care about is going out and drinking with your friends,” she says.

The sun is starting to singe through my pores. I think of numbness. I need to hold onto that feeling.

“What did I do to deserve daughters like this?” She stops weeding and sits back into the grass.

Imagine me without my weight. I’d just float off the earth, my bones growing hollow like a bird’s.

“I’ve tried to tell you, Lucky, but you don’t listen to anyone. You’re going to end up alone.”

She presses her face into her dirty gloves. I crouch down and try to pry her fingers away. She resists. She cries and pulls at her hair, heaving sobs down into her soiled gloves.

“Amma.” I try again to wrestle her hands away.

The gloves leave dirty streaks down her face. “You think it’s my fault that Vidya ran away?”

I open my mouth but the answer won’t come. It’s not your fault. Grandmother isn’t my fault. Blame solves nothing. But I can’t wrap my tongue around the lies.

She pushes me away and kneels down next to her garden. “It’s my fault, right? My fault. Everything’s my fault.” She pulls at a healthy pepper plant, rips it out, and tosses it into a pile of weeds. “I’m a terrible mother.” She pulls another plant hanging low with eggplants, and tosses it into the weeds. “I’m a terrible wife.” Pulls and pulls out one plant after another.

I grab her shoulders and try to push her back but she’s heavier and shakes me off. I fall backward into the grass.

She grabs the last onion plant and shakes it at me. “Go,” she says. Loose dirt falls from the exposed roots. “Get away from your terrible mother. It’s what you want, isn’t it?”

I scramble to my feet.

“Just go.” She hits her chest with her fists again and again. “Go.”

I should stay. I should stay. I turn and run, away from her, away from the bald garden and the pile of healthy dead plants.

I go to the rugby house and tell Tasha what happened. We sit and smoke on the deck. The wind is back to normal—cool but not yet cold—carrying with it red and yellow leaves, slowly stripping the trees in the neighborhood. Tasha nudges me and points toward a car that is parallel parking. A small blue Honda. Nisha’s car.

“Do you want me to go inside?” Tasha asks.

“No.” I put my hand on her knee. “Stay.”

We watch Nisha pull in behind a Smart Car and get out. She looks at us, but I can’t see her expression.

She walks up to the house. I take my hand from Tasha’s knee.

Nisha climbs up the creaky steps and stands in front of us. I stare at the peeling strips of paint on the wood floor.

She digs around in her purse and pushes something at me. A gold envelope that glitters in the sun. I take it slowly and open it. She holds out another one for Tasha.

The wedding invitation is cut in the shape of a woman’s facial profile. Milky skin and a long, aquiline nose, head draped in a red saree that opens to reveal text printed in gold. Tamil on one side, English on the other.

Tasha holds the card close to her face and looks at the Tamil script she can’t read.

“I want you to come,” Nisha says.

“I’ll come.”

She pulls out another invitation from her purse and drops it through the mail slot in the front door.

Tasha holds out the one Nisha gave her. “You can take this back.”

“You’re not coming?”

“I’m coming with Lucky. I’m her date.” Tasha shakes the invitation at Nisha.

Nisha’s face twitches and for a minute I think she’s going to cry. But then she takes the gold envelope and puts it carefully back into her purse, turns around and walks to her car. The wind blows her long hair into her face. I want to call her back, stop her, shake the sense into her.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Tasha says as Nisha drives away. “That I said I was your date, I mean.”

“You can’t make it any worse.”

She puts her hand on my knee and traces circles into my jeans. “The tournament’s getting close. We need a place to practice properly.”

I turn Nisha’s wedding invitation around and around in my hand. The glitter sheds onto my skin. I can’t scratch it off. I think of Nisha’s dark hair, splayed out on her bed, in the backseat of her car, on the mats of our old high school.

“I know of a place,” I say.

•••

That night I take Tasha, Jesse and two other girls to Winchester, through the side door of the high school that I know they keep unlocked for the theatre kids who practice late. We sneak through the long E wing, up to the gym, up again to the darkened wrestling room, navigating with the light from our phone screens.

The smell of sweat cooks in the heat of the room. We pull off our shoes and crawl on the mats to find each other in the dark. Jesse sets up a flashlight in the corner. She and another girl pull on their gloves and helmets and face off first while Tasha and I find seats against the wall.

“Are you all right?” Tasha asks.

I press my back against the mat and slide down onto the floor. “Fine.”

Jesse and the girl circle each other.

Tasha’s fists beat a soft rhythm against the floor mat. “That was really fucked up what Nisha did. The wedding invite and everything. You can’t tell me you’re okay with all that.”

The smell from the mats is overpowering.

“I know it’s not my business. But she’s hurting you. I wish I could help.”

“I’m fine.” I scrape the mat with my knuckles.

Jesse blocks a kick and dodges a punch.

“She shouldn’t be stringing you along.”

“Shouldn’t you practice what you preach?”

“I don’t string people along.”

“You don’t commit to them, either.”

Jesse grabs the girl’s forearms and powers her to the ground. She knocks out Jesse’s knee with a kick. Jesse falls down heavily. She grabs the girl’s shoulders and pushes her flat to the floor.

“You’re a beast,” the girl says.

Jesse helps her stand and they both strip off their gloves. They shake hands.

Jesse comes over and offers me her gloves. I push my fingers into them and she straps me in. She takes her helmet off and secures it on my head. My short, prickly hair sticks out through the holes of the padded helmet.

Tasha gives me a fresh mouth guard and I put it in. She’s already padded and ready. We face each other. Tasha bounces back and forth. I keep my distance.

She feigns a punch. I step back. The mouth guard slides around. I bite down on the soft plastic.

She lunges at me again. I take another step back.

“Don’t let her corner you,” Jesse shouts from the side.

I’d have to take my eyes off of Tasha to check how much space I have behind me. Step to the side, circle around. But Tasha’s in the way. She comes closer. I keep my hands up to shield my face.

She comes close enough to make contact. I step back, feel the wall against my back foot. Nowhere to run.

“You have to go for it,” Jesse says. “Punch her.”

I try to visualize the energy flowing from my shoulders, try to twist with my waist but Tasha’s eyes glow in the dim light and I can’t do it.

“Punch me,” she says through her mouth guard. She steps in closer and aims a jab to the side of my face. The glove makes contact with my forearm.

I instinctively punch back. My glove lands on her shoulder.

A phone vibrates in the room. I feel it through the mats.

“It’s for you, Lucky. It’s your mom.”

Tasha aims a punch to my shoulder. I can’t dodge in time. My skin stings with the impact.

“How’s it feel?” she says.

The panic rises, that jitteriness in my fingers, my knees. Cornered.

“Just push through,” Jesse says. “Don’t close your eyes.”

Tasha lightly touches my glove with hers. “Push me back.”

I keep my eyes open. Step forward. Feign jabs. She steps into the middle of the room. We circle each other. The mats vibrate with a phone call.

“It’s your mom again.”

“Shouldn’t you get that?”

“No.” I can’t talk well around the mouth guard.

Tasha’s hands fall slightly from her face. “Maybe she wants to make up.”

I feign a punch. She puts her fists up. How much would a punch to the gut hurt? Don’t think too much. Act with the body. Trust the body. It knows how to survive.

I punch, twisting from the gut. For a split second I forget I’m punching another human being and it feels too easy until Tasha folds at the point of contact and sways toward me. I catch her, lift her upright. “I’m sorry.”

She coughs a laugh. The mats vibrate with Amma’s call.

“I can keep going.” She pulls herself up and punches me in the stomach.

Air rushes out of my lungs. Vertigo.

I punch back, blindly. My gloves make contact again and again.

Her hits twist me. My insides hum. My brain rings. I feel lighter with each hit.

Another punch and she sways toward me. I hold her. She puts her gloved hands on the sides of my head and presses her forehead to mine. Her hair is cold. Our noses slip against each other.

“Forget about Nisha,” she says.

The floor vibrates with Amma’s call. Four calls.

I close my eyes and think about the space between my face and Tasha’s.

Amma calls again. Five.

I step away from her. Jesse takes off my glove so I can call Amma.

Appa picks up the phone. “It’s Grandmother. You need to come home.”

•••

I don’t speak to Tasha as she drives me to the hospital. It’s an effort to even say goodbye, to thank her for driving.

I don’t speak to Appa or Laila Aunty when I find them in the waiting room. They don’t speak to me. Laila Aunty looks like she’s going to come hug me, but Appa holds her back by the hand.

I walk into a room decorated like a hotel, nothing like the sterile rooms she’s been in before. Grandmother lies under a mound of blankets and tubes. The light’s been turned down. There’s a window that shows the stars rising outside.

Amma sits in an armchair by the bed. I stand by her shoulder.

She strokes Grandmother’s hand with one finger and doesn’t look up. “She asked for you.”

Grandmother lies still, the blankets around her unmoving.

“She asked for you,” Amma says again. Her voice cracks.

Something drops in the very middle of my insides. Grandmother lies still and cold. The last bits of sunlight hang frozen in the air.

Silence eats through the house. Five ugly bruises form on my face and arms. Amma doesn’t notice. My face aches every time I move it, but inside I’m hollow. Inside, I can’t feel a thing.

Appa comes to see us almost every day, usually with a container or two of Laila Aunty’s curries. We sit around with tea, watching the news on TV. Democrats take the Senate. A divided nation reelects Obama.

Grandmother’s folded chair leans against the glass sliding doors that lead to the deck.

When I can’t take the silence, I go upstairs to Grandmother’s room and lie on her bed, finding patterns in the popcorn ceiling. Some of Vidya’s drawings are still taped to the walls of my old bedroom, each one carefully preserved in a plastic sheet protector and stuck on with tape. She drew me whatever I asked for, and I spent hours trying to copy her loose-wristed sketches. I send her one last email, telling her what happened.

The sheets smell like Grandmother’s skin, like the soap she liked to use. I hate the smell, too strong and flowery, but in the mornings I wash my face with it anyway. I can’t let it sit there, unused and softening in a plastic dish in the bathroom, its mint green blending in with the walls.

I could’ve gone home to Kris, could’ve never come to this house again. I could’ve walked away.

Vidya’s drawings watch me. She drew portraits of Amma, Shyama, me, Nisha. Appa’s portraits are missing, just empty spaces, holes in the crowded wall. Interspaced among us are pictures of Matt Damon at various ages and Wonder Woman in reimagined costumes that made sense. The small metal sculpture, her senior year art project, stands where it always did, a miniature of the orange metal outside of her apartment in Louisville.

•••

Amma and Appa plan the funeral. I want to help, to do something besides lie on Grandmother’s bed in the new November heat, but I can’t. I lie crushed into the blanket. I’m useless. Have I always been so useless?

Tasha wants to come and see me, but I tell her not to. I can’t upset Amma more. I step around her like a shadow. She sits in the living room and watches the election coverage for hours on end. She goes to work even though she’s eligible for bereavement leave. I wish I had work to go to, something to structure my life. At night when she isn’t watching the news, Amma sits with her laptop and dentistry journals, her reading glasses on the tip of her nose. I sit with my laptop, trying to work on commissions I’ve neglected. I finish the pixie drawing, and the man who ordered it threatens not to pay unless I lighten the pixie’s skin. I lighten her skin. He pays me enough for a month’s mortgage on our Bridgeport house. I draw two portraits of couples for wedding invites, a battle scene of a young mage against a blurry medieval army, and a painting of John Watson kissing Sherlock on a bridge in the rain.

Amma and I don’t talk. What would we say? We sit with the lights off, our faces lit by blue screens, private and alone in our grief.

•••

People come by our house to pay their condolences. Laila Aunty has cooked everything. Rice and curries line up in aluminum trays on the dining table. People swirl around the house. I stay close to Kris and no one tries to talk to me. Amma sits on the couch and cries. Shyama and Laila Aunty sit beside her. I want to console her, to hold her as she cries, but I can’t make myself push into the grief circling around them.

•••

Grandmother looks more lifelike than before she died. Her face drips over whatever they’ve pumped through her to keep the flesh firm. Only around the edges of her fingernails can I see the gray striations of a decaying corpse.

Perfume wafts from the coffin, flowers and chemicals and something sweet. What sort of death smell is it trying to cover?

They dressed her in her favorite saree—dark green with embroidered white squares, a flower garland and a gold chain around her neck. There’s a sharpness to her white hair that I don’t understand. It’s so crisp now, like each strand reflects the light differently.

Amma sinks at the knees, grips the edges of the coffin for support. I hold her around the waist and prop her up. Shyama stands watching Grandmother’s feet. Amma’s sister-in-law couldn’t get a visa in time to come from Sri Lanka. It’s just the three of us—our small family even smaller in the viewing room.

I wonder if Grandmother’s eyes are completely blue now, if the clear ring around them has taken over the burgundy. I wonder if her gums are still stained with betel leaf.

Grandmother once told me about Hindu funerals. Loved ones shrieking, women rocking backward and forward, their unclipped hair keeping time with their movement. But this is New England, a white funeral home, and my mother swallows our traditions for theirs. She cries quietly, doesn’t let the grief swell out of her and settle over the room.

They give us a half hour with Grandmother in the small room that seems to close in on us, then take the coffin to the main viewing room for the wake.

An obscene blue sky shines through the windows. I sit at the front with Amma on one side and Shyama on the other. Kris and Rajesh sit behind us and pass little Varun back and forth between them.

A man I don’t know sings nasal Hindu prayers into a microphone without taking a breath. His raspy crooning soaks into the walls. Thick carpet muffles footsteps and people seem to appear out of the sunlight, kissing me on the cheek and holding Amma while she heaves quietly. There are people I haven’t seen since my own wedding, or even since I was little. Amma’s friends, family friends who took Appa’s side in the divorce, Amma’s co-workers. Maybe I should have invited Tasha and Jesse to the wake. Maybe it would’ve been the polite thing to do.

Death has washed us of color—everyone wears white and black and brown. No adornments, no jewelry.

“She lived a full life,” they say. “It was a peaceful death.” No one comments on my buzzed hair, or the bruises on my face showing through my concealer.

Flower wreaths line the wall, propped up on metal stands, each with a banner declaring who sent them. There’s one that says, “From Lakshmi, beloved granddaughter.” I’ve never seen it before.

Nisha and her parents, all dressed in dull, worn gray, stand at the end of the line. Nisha has her hair up. She walks close to her parents like they’re all encased by the same invisible cage. They make their way to the coffin.

Kris taps me on the shoulder. “Are you okay?”

My head is too full to nod.

Nisha’s parents walk toward Amma. Nisha’s eyes slide over me, refusing to look, landing instead on Grandmother in her coffin.

Her parents murmur to Amma, who clasps their hands. Nisha walks to the coffin. She looks down into it, her ponytail fanning across her back.

Kris taps my shoulder again. “Go talk to her.”

I dry my palms on my thighs and stand up.

Amma sniffs and wipes at her eyes. Nisha’s parents are distracted.

I walk quietly to Nisha and stand behind her. “I fought with Tasha.”

She turns around. “Why?” She doesn’t have her contacts in, and I love the darkness of her eyes.

I run my hands over my hair, feeling the bristles slide under the pressure of my palm. “It was just for fun.” I show her the bruise on my arm that I haven’t covered with makeup.

She presses a finger into the darkened skin.

Grandmother lies still in her coffin. Amma said she asked for me. Not the me she thought was Vidya, or the me she thought was a boy. She asked for Lucky, the me she remembered.

Nisha steps closer and tucks her chin down. Little bits of water hang on her eyelashes. With a look toward her parents, she whispers, “They won’t let me leave the house. They won’t let me leave.”

My head is too light. Blood floats in me, up and up like it’s going to float away. “Do you want me to come get you?” That’s what happens in Tamil movies. The heroine is forced into a marriage but her lover arrives at the last minute and carries her off. The bride belongs to the man who brings her home.

Nisha looks at her feet. “I don’t want to get married.”

“You can back out.”

“It’s too late.” She shuffles her feet closer to mine. The tips of her ballet flats touch the toes of my oxfords. “I’m sorry about Grandmother.”

I nod at our feet. We slouch toward each other. She takes my hand and rubs my palm with her thumb. My blood wants to float away, to twist out of my skin and fuse with the air.

Nisha pushes my bangs to the side. I sink and she catches me. For the first time she feels solid against me, like she can hold me up. She rubs her wet cheek against mine. Grandmother asked for me. All she wanted was to see Vidya, hold a baby.

Someone pulls me away from Nisha. I stumble.

Nisha’s mother’s face squeezes into the space between us. She leans toward me and whispers in Tamil, “Don’t you touch my daughter.”

I put my hands up and step back.

She jabs her finger into my sternum.

“Don’t,” Nisha says weakly.

Her mother whirls around. “You need to be a good girl.”

Shyama walks up next to me. “Please, this is a funeral.”

Appa and Laila Aunty appear on either side of me.

Nisha’s mother looks around at us. “You should all be ashamed.” Sunlight pinches her face in shadow.

Amma pushes her way into the circle. “You need to go.”

“Do you know what your daughter did?”

“You need to go.”

Nisha’s hair swipes back and forth across her back as her mother grabs her by the arm and drags her away.

Amma clutches her chest. Laila Aunty catches her before she falls. Shyama goes to them and puts her hands around Amma. The three of them stand there, holding each other up. A wail rises in chorus, wrung out of the air. The sound pulls at my skin. I walk toward them. Amma’s arms press against my face. Their wail surrounds me, crests over me. I hold onto Amma’s shoulders.

•••

The funeral ceremony is moderated by a priest who looks like the one from my wedding. A distant male cousin comes from Toronto to do the last rites for Grandmother because Hindus believe that women, givers of life, shouldn’t be the ones to send life passage from this world. His bare shoulders slope forward as he follows the priest’s instructions, repeating chants and prayers in a low rumble I can’t make out.

Teenagers hold incense by the coffin. I stand with Amma and Shyama and watch Grandmother. The smoke washes over my face, into my chest.

Grief is an impossible meal, so we cut it up into little pieces, dress it in ritual, and take it like a pill.

When the funeral-home workers come to close the coffin, Amma drapes herself over Grandmother. Shyama and I pull her off. We walk with the coffin and the mourners to the crematorium, a procession of black and white under the clear autumn sky. Someone throws flowers that crush under my feet.

Normally women don’t go to the cremation, but when the funeral-home workers say they’ll allow six people into the room, Amma puts a hand on the back of my neck and guides me in.

Grandmother’s coffin sits on a conveyor belt. The priest says the last chant, then tells us to push a button.

Amma ushers me forward, and I press the button that sends Grandmother through a set of black curtains. She should’ve burned on a funeral pyre of wood and cow chips, the flames and wild night dancing around her, but instead she melts quietly inside a box.

Two days after the funeral, after Shyama and Kris go home, I get an email from Vidya. Meet me at the Winchester library at 2. By the pond. Today. No mention of Grandmother, or the funeral. At Vidya’s words, I seize up and sit there at the computer, unmoving for a hundred long days. I make up an excuse for Amma, say that I’m going to go get a book to read, that I need it to fill the time and the awful silence in my head. She tells me to get one for her, too. Something happy, she says. A happy story.

I arrive at the library early, and spend my time looking for a book for Amma. My hands shake between the shelves. My mind runs through my fingers. I can’t hold a thought. I walk out empty-handed. Still early. I walk around the pond. A thin film of ice rests on the water. I play the scene over and over in my head. I would say, “Why didn’t you come for the funeral? Grandmother asked for you. Amma misses you. Come home. Come see her.” What I imagine is a turnabout of the memory in which Vidya and Amma fight. A reversal. This time, Vidya would apologize. Amma would melt.

Vidya sees me before I see her. I finally catch sight of her as I’m rounding the corner. She’s waving from the back door of the library. Her daughter is holding her hand. The girl chews on her fingernail and stares up at me. She’s older than in the photo I have, but not by much. There’s a pinprick in my sternum. I don’t realize the changes in Vidya until I get closer. She’s darker, her skin leathery like too much sun and not enough sunscreen. Her hair as short as mine used to be. The wrap of her coat shows a waist thinner than I remember. A crazy thought passes through me, and I wonder if she’s sick.

“Look at your hair,” Vidya says.

She hugs me. She smells unfamiliar, like peonies and something else I can’t place. She rubs a hand over my head.

“You look great,” she says, and sounds like she means it. “This is Radha.” She kneels next to her daughter, points up at me. “Radha, this is your Lucky Chithy.”

The girl smiles shyly at her own feet. I can tell she’ll look like Vidya someday, like Grandmother in the picture where I thought she was a princess.

“She’s brought something for you,” Vidya says. “Go on.”

Radha digs in a mirrored purple purse and draws out a bag full of clacking shells. She holds it out to me.

“These are shells from all the beaches we’ve been to,” Radha says. I want to believe she even sounds like Vidya, but I can’t remember what Vidya’s voice used to be at four years old.

“She’s been collecting them for years,” Vidya says.

I take the bag from Radha. The shells are multicolored, some minuscule, some as big as my palm.

“Are you sure?” I ask. “I don’t want to take away your collection.”

“They’re just things,” the girl says. “I don’t need things.”

Vidya kisses the girl on the forehead. Radha follows us while we walk around the pond. I think of all my questions. There are too many, cluttering up my mouth.

“I’ve been following your artwork online,” she says before I can speak. “You’ve gotten quite good.”

“It pays the bills. Why did you put that address on your letter?”

“I don’t remember which address I put.” Her voice is light, almost uncaring. “I like your art.”

“Kentucky. Louisville. I went looking for you.”

She puts a hand on my shoulder. “I didn’t think you’d do that. I haven’t lived there in years.”

“Where do you live then?”

“Everywhere.”

She tells me that she’s been traveling around the country with her daughter for two years in a minivan, driving coast-to-coast, teaching classes on papermaking.

“It’s not so bad, Lucky. I’m free.”

“Free from what?”

“Expectations.” She stops to watch a young boy eating alone on a bench, ripping off bits of his sandwich and feeding it to the ducks. “I don’t like being told what to do.”

I gently touch the shells in the bag. Their stripes, their curves.

“Grandmother always talked about you,” I say. I watch to see if she’ll cry, but she seems smoothed out and serene like the iced-over pond.

“I’m sorry about Grandmother,” she says. “I know you must miss her.”

“Don’t you miss her?”

Her smile is free of pain. “I miss all of you.”

I form the question in my head but she answers before I can ask.

“I can’t come home, Lucky.”

“Amma misses you.”

“I can’t come home. Maybe someday.”

“But—”

“Amma’s love comes with strings, Lucky. You know that better than anyone. I can’t deal with strings. I like my life. I have Radha. I’m happy.” She looks at me with pity. The longer I look at her, the less she resembles the sister I remember. “You deserve to be happy, too. I hope you know that.”

“I’m happy.” I say it without thinking, an automatic response.

She turns away. “I don’t want to pry. I don’t presume to know your relationship with Kris, or your sexuality.”

“Then don’t. I could be bisexual.”

“Are you?”

I briefly consider lying.

“Are you?” she says again.

“No.” Nisha’s face looms behind my eyelids. Her wedding in less than a week. “Come home. Amma would be so happy if you came home.”

She doesn’t consider it for even a second. “I made my choice, Lucky. I like my choice. I’m not going to muddy it up now.”

“But you’re all alone.” I imagine leaving, getting in my car and driving until I can’t drive any more. Picking a place on a map, making a new home. Could I leave Amma all alone? She has no one else now. Or maybe she’ll bend. She has no one else now. Could she learn to live with the real me?

“And anyway,” Vidya says, “I love traveling. We get to go all over the country. Wake up in a new place every week.”

“What about Radha?”

“Radha loves it. She’s learning papermaking, and she gets to make friends at every place we go.”

“But shouldn’t she meet her family? Her grandmother?”

Radha pulls on my coat. She’s wearing a flowered skirt over blue pants. I’d been too distracted to notice earlier. She shows me a book she pulls out from her purple bag. It’s an Atlas, and she flips to a map of the US. She tells me where she got each shell. Haulover Beach. Block Island. Saint George Island. San Luis Obispo.

“They’re mementos,” she says, stumbling over the word.

Vidya starts walking again, and Radha trots behind us, still looking at the map. “I wanted her to meet you,” Vidya says. “I wanted to make sure you’re okay. You were Grandmother’s favorite.”

I don’t know why this is the thing that makes me cry, but it does. Vidya hugs me to her.

“I was young, Lucky,” she says into my shoulder. “I made my choices and I didn’t think enough of you. I’m sorry.”

“Come back, then. Come back and see Amma.”

She wipes my face with her scarf and puts her hands on the sides of my face like she used to do when we were younger.

“I only came to see you, Lucky. I left Amma behind a long time ago.”

In less than an hour they’re gone, Vidya claiming she has to be in Vermont before nightfall to speak at an artist’s studio about letterpress. I walk around and around and around the pond alone, learning the shape of each shell.

Nisha’s wedding day.

Nisha’s wedding day and it snows, white shedding from the sky and floating in the air. The house turns cold. I can see my breath when I wake up.

Nisha’s wedding day and I haven’t decided what to do. Indecision sits in my chest, something sharp when I breathe.

According to Hindu rites of mourning, I’m not allowed to go to a wedding until a month after the funeral. I wake up, brew coffee and mix oatmeal for Amma. When I go back to my room, my bed’s already made and Amma has laid out a saree for me. The blue of it cuts through my eyes. I’ve gotten used to the colors of death: the pale creams, charcoal grays, inky blacks.

“I can’t go,” I say.

Amma holds herself up by the wrought iron headboard, thick rings under her eyes, her face sunken in and dusty. “Nisha is your best friend.” Even her voice is dusty. I’ve forgotten what it sounds like. “You should go.”

“But the rules—”

“—can be bent just this once. She wants you there. Go.”

I dress myself while Amma waits outside the door. Once around and tuck. Pleat and tuck. Twice around, pin.

I paint my face, watching the layers go on one over the other in the mirror. Battle armor of powder and sequins. Amma has no idea what she’s dressing me for. Silence is the rule. Words are complications, sharp edges that cut up our tongues. We keep them in with walls of teeth, preserve the peace. Om shanti shanti shanti, as the prayer goes. Peace at any cost, as the prayer goes.

•••

The Sheraton hotel wedding hall is dusted with snow. I shiver in my thin saree and join the trickle of people going inside. A cave of plush filigree carpet and fake candle lighting. A Ganesh statue welcomes me. Sweet almonds, here have some more, take a lassi.

I could throw open the wooden doors of the wedding hall, stride up to the altar, offer my hand to Nisha. I could lead her out to my car in front of five hundred guests, take her home, run away to Toronto.

I wish I’d thought to tuck my flask into my saree.

I could push up Nisha’s wedding saree, remind her what she’s chosen to give up, and leave her to her fate. I could go home to Kris and file for divorce.

I sneak past the guests to the elevator. Nisha said she’d be in room 407. I haven’t told her that I’m coming. Will she be surprised? Will she have a bag packed?

Room 407. Nisha’s wedding day. Silence behind the door. I knock.

Nisha opens the door. Makeup frames her bloodshot eyes. Her red mouth hangs open.

“I’m scared,” she says. She doesn’t move to let me inside.

I push past her into the room.

The door shuts with a metallic click. Snowlight floods through the window and over the room, lighting every edge a cold, clear white. Like Grandmother’s hospital room.

“It’s my fault,” I say into the air.

“What?”

The rain. The soaked housecoat. The wheezing cough. The tubes. Pneumonia.

“Grandmother. It was my fault.”

Nisha’s arms wind around me. I want to melt at the knees.

Instead I say, “You look beautiful.”

She presses her nose against my neck and cries. Her arms pull me closer, flush against herself, tighter, tighter until I want to push them away. Through the window, birds fly away in droves, finally leaving for winter.

Nisha quiets, sniffs away her tears. Her arms slide off me.

“They’ll be back soon.” She grabs tissues from a dressing table and presses them to the bottoms of her eyes. “Did you bring your car? Whose do we take?”

“You have your car here?”

She holds up her keys. “I drove.”

“I thought they wouldn’t let you leave?”

“They didn’t.”

“And yet you drove here.”

She puts the keys back on the dressing table.

“Do you just need someone to do this with you?” I say. “Do you even care if it’s me?”

She fiddles with the edge of her saree.

“Jesus, Nisha. No one has a gun to your head.”

She holds out her hands and takes a step toward me. “What will I have if I leave this behind?”

The bride belongs to the man who—

“Do you want to go or not?” I widen my stance.

She looks at the floor and bites her teeth together. Walls of teeth. Keep in the things you want to say.

The bride belongs—

The room wavers. I walk toward the door.

The wedding has probably started. Both sets of parents will give their children away. Nisha’s male cousin, stepping in for a brother, will guide Deepak to the flower-entombed altar. The priest will make a ring out of reeds and start the ceremony, his nasal chanting filling the room. When Deepak’s sister comes to guide her to the altar, Nisha will stand up, grab the chair for support. Maybe she’ll get used to the weight of the thali on her chest.

I stand in front of the door. “Are you coming?” I ask.

There’s a saying in Tamil that a thousand lies can make a marriage. Here’s the truth: I’m tired of lying.

Nisha is quiet, wrapping the loose end of her saree around and around her arm. I go back to her, draw her to me. I go to kiss her but she pulls away.

“We can have a life together,” I say. “A real one.”

She shakes her head. “I can’t.”

I try to catch her by the waist but she’s walking away, toward the back of the room.

“I can’t,” she says. “I can’t. You should go.”

I make sure to leave the door open behind me. I half expect her to follow, but she doesn’t.

In the wedding hall, she’ll see Tasha sitting in the crowd as Deepak’s sister guides her by the arm to the altar, drums beating a tune to her walk. Deepak will turn to her with the thali in his hand. The drums will beat louder and louder toward frenzy as he ties the thali around her neck like a noose.

I get back in the car. The windshield wipers push snow off the glass. I can’t fight anymore. I can’t save her. I said I would. It’s the last lie I want to tell.

Amma is standing at the kitchen sink when I get home, watching the running faucet. Sound of pressurized water on steel. She startles when I touch her shoulder. I turn off the faucet and guide her to a chair.

“I’m getting a divorce,” I say.

She looks up at me, her eyes struggling with understanding. Her face is puffy and ugly from crying. Her mouth mimes the word “no.” No no no no no. She shakes her head.

I feel drunk, light-headed. I need air.

I open the sliding glass doors and walk out onto the deck. Grandmother’s folding chair is still there, baking in the sunshine. I can’t make myself sit on it, so I sit on the steps instead. Milky clouds stir over the sun, throwing shadows over fresh snow. Wind blows through my saree. Goosebumps, my feet curled with cold.

A high wail rides on the air, pierces through the light, the fog in my head. Like a baby crying.

I go back inside to where Amma sits. I touch her hand.

“Amma, come outside.”

She looks up at me like she doesn’t know who I am.

“Amma.” I pull at her hand.

I lead her out of the house and into the sunshine.

“Listen.” I close the sliding glass doors behind us. The hushed static of the house dies. “There’s something crying.”

Amma shivers, wraps her arms around herself. “I don’t hear anything.”

I pull her closer to the edge of the deck where I was sitting. “Listen.”

She closes her eyes. Waits.

I hear it again, the high wail stretched thin.

Her lips open. She looks at me, then at our crumbling fence. “It’s coming from somewhere.” She walks down the steps to the backyard, barefoot in the snow.

I follow. We spread out, trying to follow the sound. Amma walks to the fence, drags her hand down one of the planks. I squat near her vegetable garden. She’s replanted it, and the lettuce needs to be harvested before the snow melts. We’ll be eating lettuce for weeks. The wail grows softer as I lean toward the garden. I head back toward the deck.

Amma trails her hand across the floorboards. I get down onto my knees in the cold snow and crawl forward. The deck floats about two feet from the ground, the underside of it dark and edged with rocks. I inch closer. Amma stops me with a hand on my back. Her hand clenches in my blouse, then slowly eases open, finger by finger.

I crawl under the deck toward the sound, using my phone to light the way. The smell of rot washes over me. My stomach turns. I pinch my nose and shine the phone screen in a wide arc.

Pressed up against the very back of the deck, a clumpy mass. Something moves.

I react without thinking. The phone slips out of my hand. I crawl back out and into the light.

Amma’s face is still wet with tears, but she looks like she’s forgotten to cry. “What’s under there?”

“Something moved.” My arms twitch. My legs want to run. “I dropped my phone.”

She comes closer, reaches out and touches the bruise on my jaw, a mottled black starting to fade. “What happened to you?” Her eyebrows turn sad, and for a moment I think she’s going to cry again. But all she does is turn my face this way and that and study the skin.

“Was it my fault?” she asks. “Did I make you like this?”

“It’s not your fault.”

She bends toward me, crumples at the waist and cries into the snow. “The community will hate you,” she says. “They’ll blame you for driving away a good man like Kris.”

The snow is melting through my saree.

“Amma, Kris likes men. And I don’t.”

She shakes her head. “This isn’t supposed to be your story. Not my daughter.” She sounds more sad than angry.

I rub her arms, hold her to keep her warm. She keeps crying, coughing her sobs into the snow.

“This is what I want,” I say. “I still have you.”

The wail floats over our heads again. I wipe her face with the end of my saree. We crawl together, over the rocks and dirt until blackness surrounds us like film and the smell pours into our throats. I grab my phone and shine the light toward the back. What I thought was a clumpy mass is a pile of kittens, their fur matted and falling off their skin, their faces starting to peel back and reveal the bone underneath. Dead.

“Grandmother’s babies,” Amma says.

That movement again. That wail. One kitten still alive, small and dark and starved but alive. I reach out, cup it in the palm of my hand.

•••

Amma and I wash the kitten in the sink, wrap it up in a blanket, and give it some milk in a saucer.

“I’ll have to go to the store to buy cat food,” she says. “Cow’s milk is bad for them.” She dips her finger in the milk and lets the kitten lick it off.

The kitten is already half-grown. Grandmother must have heard them when they were first born.

“You loved her,” Amma says after a pause. “Nisha.”

“I do.”

There’s pity in her eyes. “Maybe we should name this one Nisha,” she says, petting the kitten.

“I wasn’t kidding,” I say. “I’m getting a divorce.”

“But Nisha is married now.”

“It’s not about Nisha.” I feel like Vidya, giving Amma one last chance before I become an empty chair. “I want to be me.”

She stops stroking the kitten’s fur. “Can you be happy like this? What would your life look like?”

Like an apartment in Cambridge, a job and a kitten and midnight walks with a girlfriend. Like dancing at Machine with the rugby girls. Like short hair. Like looking in the mirror and never worrying about a stranger looking back.

Amma touches my bruise again, turns me toward the light. “We should put something on this.” She rummages in the cabinets and takes out the sesame oil, a traditional remedy for scrapes and bumps. She dips a piece of paper towel in the oil and dabs it on my jaw. “Don’t do this, Lucky,” she says.

The kitten laps noisily at the milk. Amma covers my jaw in sesame oil, then cries. When I touch her arm, she says, “Leave me be. I’ve lost everyone.” She backs away and up the stairs.

In every story there’s what is written for you, and then there’s what you write. I think of how to tell Kris. I think of Nisha in her wedding saree, walking up to her honeymoon suite in the hotel. I think of Grandmother sitting out on the deck, Vidya and her daughter collecting shells on the beach, Amma crying upstairs, mourning a story I never wanted to write. Can we escape fate? Can we change it?

My wedding photo laughs at me from the wall. I take the frame off its nail, slip out the print, and take it outside to the garden. Cold wind blows from the north. More snow coming, but after, the trees will bud and Amma will plant the garden anew. I dig with my hands and bury the picture deep in the earth.