I hate myself for begrudging him this party. I want him to get his life back. He sent me these emails while I was away detailing his days sitting alone on swings in abandoned playgrounds, roaming the stacks in a dingy library branch. That’s not Ryan.
“Oh. My. God. Shut up, people!” a girl shouts. She’s in front of the TV. Whatever game was playing has been interrupted for this breaking news: They have arrested three men in connection with the terrorist attack on the Shops at Stonecliff. The screen shows a dilapidated farmhouse in some desolate patch of grass upstate.
The entire party stops to stare at Ryan and me.
Ryan claps his hands, raises his arms like his team’s run one in. “Yes!”
Chatter erupts, a pitter-patter of words in my ears, and Ryan ushers me out of the room, out of the house. We sit on a low rock wall lining a flagstone patio. There is nothing but the wind rattling the branches.
“Why don’t I feel anything?” he asks.
And I realize, we’ve both been faking.
We interrupt this program for breaking news.
“So they caught the people,” I say. “It doesn’t change what happened.”
“But shouldn’t this feel good?”
“I’m not sure this news is for us.” I gesture toward the window, where inside, someone chants U—S—A—, and fists pump the air.
Ryan takes my hand. “It’s still good news. It means it’s really over.”
“It doesn’t feel really over.”
We sit there, hand in hand, and watch the party until we get too cold and have to go back inside.
• • •
Ryan slips into things like he’s donning a second skin, smiling and slapping palms. I put on a good face, make nice for the nice people. Around ten o’clock, I get a text from my mother: I’m outside. She agreed to let me out of the house on the condition that I agreed to a strict curfew.
“I have to go,” I say, tugging on Ryan’s hand.
He’s all mine again. “Do you need a ride? I can get Thad—”
“My mom’s outside,” I say.
He pulls me to him. “I don’t want to let you go.”
I wrap my arms around him, lay my head against his chest, and listen to his lungs, his heart.
He walks me to the door, steps out with me into the night. “Text me later?” he asks.
“I might even call you.”
He lowers his lips to mine, and before I can worry too much about my mother’s van at the curb, he’s kissing me, gently, oh so gently, a wisp of a breath passing between us.
His eyes are full of mischief. “Later, then.”
“Yes.”
• • •
My mother is waiting with the engine running, knuckles white on the steering wheel. Her hands are bonier than before. Bapuji said that she was not able to eat while we were away.
“I’m guessing that is the boy?” she says.
“Ryan.”
“He’s handsome.”
“He is.”
She’s listening to NPR. FBI agents used shipping information obtained from a medical supply company to locate the self-proclaimed “Purifiers,” who set the bomb in the mall. The company sent a device used for aerosolizing liquids to the address. An FBI spokesperson said earlier that minute fragments of the device were discovered within the original bomb casing. By altering the device to create an ultrafine mist, the terrorists were able to spread the flu virus throughout the mall, infecting the entire population.
“Can we listen to something else?” I ask.
My mother nods, and I turn the radio off.
We drive in silence, out of West Nyack and toward home. The leaves are gone, nothing but bare branches crane over the car. I found this poem “One Art,” by Elizabeth Bishop: The art of losing isn’t hard to master, that’s the first line. I’ve decided this is the Fall of Lost Things.
My mother and I have lost the ability to talk. It’s as if the vacuum of Nani’s absence sucks up every word we might speak. Sometimes, I catch her staring at me. She always smiles and turns away, goes back to whatever she’s doing. My brain forms “I tried to save her,” but it gets lost on the way to my lips, so I say nothing at all.
It’s not just my mother. It was the same with my relatives in India. Aunts, uncles, cousins, everyone wanted to know about Nani. I vaguely recounted her last days, how she had gotten sick early. I told my relatives that she died without pain, without fear. I’m sure that’s not true, but why tell the truth about death?
• • •
We get home, and Bapuji is awake with Preeti on the couch. Preeti has made it her goal in life to catch up on all the television she missed. She had programmed the DVR to record everything before we got locked down. While we were trapped, my parents kept every episode, recorded everything to DVD once the DVR was full, just in case, so that when Preeti got out, she’d have them all, wouldn’t miss a minute.
Preeti’s still very weak. She almost didn’t come with us to India, but Ba didn’t want to split us up, and she is a doctor, after all, so we made the trip as a family. Preeti spent the whole time lying on cushions, watching everyone run around in the garden. She pouted and whined. The mall seems to have changed very little about her.
“Good party?” my father asks.
“I saw Ryan,” my mother says, smirking.
“Ah,” my father says. “As much trouble as we thought he’d be?”
“He’s very handsome,” my mother says.
My father places his hands over his ears. “It’s better that I don’t know.”
I smile because my father is trying to be funny. I wish I could tell them about Ryan. What he means to me. But it’s more of a feeling than words. Instead, I say, “I’m going to take a shower,” and begin mounting the stairs to the second floor.
“Again?” Preeti asks.
“Leave your sister alone,” my mother says.
• • •
I’ve taken to showering several times a day. There’s something delicious in being clean. I have a near constant desire to feel water running over my skin. When I’m not in the shower, I’m outside. My mother keeps yelling at me to put on a hat, that it’s November and I’m going to freeze, but I love the way the breeze tickles my scalp, how the cold sends shivers through my body, the way the crisp air burns my lungs.
Once in the bathroom, I turn the water to hot and step into the stream. Mist envelops me. When I can’t take any more heat, I turn the water to cool, then sit on the floor of the shower and let the rain fall down. As the steam dissipates, I see my story.
It came to me one night in Ahmedabad. I was lying awake in my sleeping bag on the floor of my cousin’s bedroom, watching patterns of headlights from the street below trace across her ceiling, and smelled a familiar smell. Following the scent, I found henna. There’d recently been a wedding of some other distant relation, and all the girls had been decorated with mehndi.
Bored, I took a bag from the pile. It was still moist. I began to draw on the top of my foot—just a mindless doodle, I thought. But it grew. The drawing circled my ankle. The waving lines curved into wings. They were my flight from the men who’d tried to hurt me. The wings became hands, the man’s as he grabbed at me. Fingers forked up my calves.
It became my secret ritual. Every night, more of the story poured out of my fingers all over my skin. Bruises were encircled and inscribed with symbols: where they came from, when. My left hand was a lotus blossom, the palm, Nani’s eyes.
Family members began to look at me funny. I ignored them. I hunched in front of a floor-length mirror on the bedroom wall and sketched curling smoke cut by beams of light across my lower back. Silhouettes of bodies crawled over the peaks of my hips.
My cousin Idaya, in whose room I was staying, interrupted me one night. “Are you okay?” she asked, yawning.
I was mid-drawing, working slowly around my belly button—a swirling pattern to capture that fluttery feeling I felt climbing with Ryan that first time. ?
??I’m sorry,” I said, dropping the bag.
“It’s fine,” she said, warily. “I have lots of henna. You’re just kind of putting on a lot.”
“I do it all the time at home,” I said, trying to come up with some explanation that didn’t involve my being insane.
“Oh.”
“Nani let me use hers.”
Idaya’s eyes widened. “I’m so sorry,” she said. She was my father’s brother’s daughter, not related to Nani.
I decided to use the excuse she gave me. “Thanks,” I said. If she wanted to believe this was for Nani, that was fine. In a way, it was.
• • •
In the shower, water courses over my skin, adding patterns to patterns, glittering over parts of the story, bleeding them together. The earliest designs are fading. What’s weird is that as the pictures go, so do the memories. I’m losing the feeling of that panicked run through the dark. I no longer taste the sour spit of that bastard who attacked me every time I close my mouth.
Everyone please move on, let fade the bruise.
The last design I traced was a repeat of the one I’d made that night before everything. The one Nani had feared revealing to my father, the one that drove us to the mall so early that Saturday. I finished it the night before the celebration of her life—the traditional calendar of mourning had been abandoned, seeing as Nani had been dead for so long, and there was no body to burn anyway.
I wore a loose white salwar kameez. The fabric was so fine that the red-brown of my henna story was visible to any who wished to look. When it was my turn to say something, I read a favorite Tagore poem of Nani’s, one she’d read often after Nana’s death.
Peace, my heart, let the time for the parting be sweet.
Let it not be a death but completeness.
Let love melt into memory and pain into songs.
Let the flight through the sky end in the folding of the wings over the nest.
Let the last touch of your hands be gentle like the flower of the night.
Stand still, O Beautiful End, for a moment, and say your last words in silence.
I bow to you and hold up my lamp to light you on your way.
• • •
I step out of the shower and am confronted with myself. I had wanted to show this skin to Ryan, had wanted to take him to a room and just throw off my clothes as a test: Would he know the secret meaning? But I don’t need to test Ryan. And more, I see now that no one could understand this story. That this is just for my eyes. That I told this story to myself.
We interrupt this program for breaking news.
My hand stretches out, finger points, and on the steam-shrouded glass of the mirror I scrawl: We interrupt this program for breaking news.
A knock on the door. “Shaila? That’s long enough,” my mother says. “The steam’s fogging up the windows out here.”
I turn off the water, open the door.
My mother is in the hall, placing towels in the linen closet.
“I wasn’t there when she died,” I say.
“What?” My mother jams another towel onto the shelf.
“Nani,” I say. “I saw her after. There had been a riot, and I got trampled by the crowds, and when I woke up, she was gone.”
My mother gives the pile a hard shove with both hands. “Your nani, she could get all these towels in the closet. Even pushing with all my strength, I can’t get them in.”
I rest my fingers on my mother’s arm. We haven’t really touched that much since I got home, so we both look up, surprised at the contact.
“She rolled them,” I say, taking out a towel. “That’s how she got everything to fit.” I unfold the towel, snap it straight, and roll it into a tube. It slides into a small crevice on top of my mother’s pile, which threatens to avalanche onto the rug.
“Right,” my mother says. “Yes. She rolled them. I remember.”
“I want to tell you what happened,” I say, “if you want to know.”
My mother touches the hem of the rolled towel. “I’ve been trying to find the right way to ask, to talk to you. I was afraid if I said anything, it would be the wrong thing. How can I ask you to talk about such horrors?”
I take out the whole pile of towels and sit on the rug. “I want to tell you,” I say, taking one from the top and beginning to roll. “It all started because of the henna tattoo, the one on my face.”
By the time I’m finished talking, we’ve rolled all the towels, folded all the sheets, and fit everything neatly in the closet, just the way Nani always did.
My mother then touches my ankle. “And this?” she asks.
My eyes bloat. My throat contracts.
“You don’t have to hide from me,” she says.
And I’m back there, in the dark, eyes flashing in scraps of light, hands raking my skin. I can’t tell her this.
“It’s all I thought about,” she says. “My two beautiful girls, trapped in that huge place, alone among thousands of strangers.”
From the lines on her face, the shadows on thin skin, it’s clear she was there with us every night in her mind.
The truth might be a kindness. So I tell her about the men. About Preeti, unearthed on the floor of a toilet stall. Even Ryan—there was some good in that place. I lay myself before her.
And when I have spewed the last horror, she holds me, the whole tangled mess of me, and whispers she loves me into the wet cords of my hair.
• • •
My mother and I are both somewhere between laughing and crying—snot running, mouths smiling—when Preeti comes up the stairs. Ba is telling the story of how Bapuji nearly got himself arrested after the FBI cut off our one CB conversation.
“He had his fists up like some cartoon boxer, ready to take on the entire army to get you girls back on the phone!”
Preeti is all snark. “Why are you sitting in the hallway?”
My mother reels her laughter back in, wipes her face with a washcloth retrieved from our neat honeycomb of terrycloth in the closet. “You should be in bed,” she says.
“That’s where I’m going,” Preeti says.
“Then I’ll come with you to tuck you in.”
“Oh, god, Mom,” she whines. “I’m not, like, five anymore.”
But Preeti can’t get enough of the attention. She even waits by the door to make sure Mom follows.
Ba squeezes my shoulder, and I rest my head against her arm. Then she meets Preeti at the door and hugs her thin shoulders. “You want me to read to you, or is that only for five-year-olds too?”
Preeti closes the door behind them.
I get up, suddenly aware that I am in the hallway naked save for a damp bath towel. It’s still weird, going into my room. I’m not used to all the personal space, to sleeping alone in a real bed.
I throw on pajamas, then flip open my laptop. There’s a new email from Kris, telling me the details for where he’s going to pick me up on Monday. He offered me a job helping with his afterschool theater program. Of course I said yes.
I think about sending Ryan a message, but the words breaking news intrude. I try typing the line: We interrupt this program for breaking news. It doesn’t feel right.
Digging through my desk, I find some loose-leaf and a pen. I write it over again. We interrupt this program for breaking news. The rhythm of the words pulses: Da-dum-da-dum da-dum-dum da-dum da-dum.
I think of “One Art,” I think of the Fall of Lost Things. I think of Nani, of my painted body. And the words come.
We interrupt this program for breaking news:
The bad guys have been caught! It’s finally over.
Everyone can move on, let fade the bruise.
How many died as part of their ruse?
Why count? This is the time for closure.
Don’t interrupt our program to scavenge old news.
But I see remnants in the rubble: a hairband, shoes.
Why look? It’s done. Spring will dress it in clover.
E
veryone please move on, let fade our bruise.
I keep covering the wound, keep tightening the screws.
Push through each day. Maintain composure.
But what’s breaking now is not the news.
Inside, the bomb ticks—all my effort, confused.
The inmates escape the wall of the enclosure:
Every one, please move on. Let fade my bruise.
I watch them spill out, spread, their power defused;
the lie was in the hiding, not the disclosure.
The world did not crumble after hearing my news.
Everyone can move on. Let fade the bruise.
My cell buzzes. It’s one in the morning. My head throbs and my hand aches. It’s a text from Ryan.
You didn’t call.
I love that he’s such a girl.
I text him back: I was writing a poem.
The phone vibrates and the screen changes to show he’s calling me. I pick up.
“Will you read it to me?” he asks.
And I do.
L
E
X
I
CHAT WITH D-MASTER
I’m going to be late today. Parental Unit has hair appointment.
Don’t bother. Released early.
???!!!!
Don’t blow a fuse. It’s for my dad’s memorial service.
Oh.
You want me to come?
It’s going to be awful.
Obviously. You want me to come?
I’m going to be a mess.
You’re always a mess.
Thx.
I don’t want to go.
If I go, then he’s really gone.
If you don’t go, he’s still gone. You just don’t get to say good-bye.