The Lost Girl

  She will be thrilled when I tell her I’m going somewhere with Ray on Saturday. I stare hard at the photograph, as if it can give me answers. Can I love him?

  Love isn’t so simple. It’s not a word I can throw around.

  I think of Sean. I miss him so much it’s an ache, a longing that starts in my belly and chews its way up into my throat. He’s my best friend, my only real friend. But was it ever anything more than that? There were so many half moments, so many almosts. And he made it clear that he was not going to break the laws for it.

  I can’t keep doing this. I have to stop shrinking back. I have to stop clinging to the world by the lakes, the guardians and Mina Ma and Sean. I’m here now. I am somebody else now. I’ve got to be better.

  There’s a sound above me. I glance up. This is an old colonial house, and you can hear every creak and scrape. This sounded like it came from the attic. I haven’t been up there yet.

  I leave the room and head for the steps. The stairs don’t creak beneath my feet. I have always been unusually light footed. I hover outside the attic door. It’s slightly ajar. I can hear movement: the rustle of jeans, the sound of feet against the floorboards. I peep through the gap.

  I see beautiful things. Paintings of mermaids, of rich colors, oils, sunsets and dark pirate ships on bleak seas. A woman standing on a cliff, watching an empty horizon, waiting. A sense of adventure stirs in my chest. I imagine sailing into open seas, seizing my fate in both hands. I imagine swashbuckling battles, swords and cutlasses and battle scars. I imagine desire, the raw passion of falling into bed after a long reckless day and kissing somebody. I think of lips touching the bent crook of my elbow, and I wonder where that memory is from.

  I focus on the woman and the bleak gray horizon. I feel a pang as though I’m that woman and it’s my skirt and my hair blowing in the wind. Then I blink and make myself step back from it, out of it, and I realize the woman looks uncannily like Alisha. Standing there, watching the emptiness. Waiting for something to come. Me? She wanted Amarra to come back so badly.

  There are sculptures, too. A Greek goddess holding grapes. A pair of lovers who are neither mortal nor immortal but somehow both, fused together, crowns of leaves and twigs in their hair. The sculptures are clay, marble, and paper. No candle wax, but that was always my silly quirk. Paper birds, looming and enormous. I wonder if they will carry me on their backs, and if we can possibly soar out into the farthest reaches of the sky, until we’ve been swallowed up by the stars. Or will I need my own wings?

  In the middle of these stories and this beauty is Alisha, and she’s like a work of art herself. She moves around an enormous sketch on an easel. There’s a look of such fierce concentration on her face that she’s lovelier than usual.

  I want to stand in the doorway for days, feasting on the beauty and absorbing every last bit of it. One look hasn’t been enough, but I don’t want her to see me here.

  On my way back to my room, I stop in a pool of light spilling out of Neil’s study. He’s at his desk, examining papers with his glasses pushed up his nose. I think of all the times Amarra wrote about sitting with her father. “We studied the fall of Rome today. I polished a really old knife in the study. Dad told me all about the Crusades.” She loved it, every minute of it.

  I wonder if I ought to go in. Would it comfort Neil to have an echo of his daughter help him? As though he senses my gaze, Neil glances up. He seems surprised.

  “Come in,” he says in a friendly way.

  I nod, going into the room. He gestures to the chair near his, on an adjacent edge of the desk, and shows me the papers.

  “It’s not very exciting, I’m afraid. They’re copies of letters.” He waves a magnifying glass at me. “It’s slow work because my eyes just can’t concentrate on text this small for long.”

  “I could read them out to you if you like,” I offer.

  He considers me for a minute. “I think we both know that wouldn’t interest you for long.”

  “No,” I try, “really, I—”

  “I was her father,” he says, gently interrupting me. “Believe me, I’d know her if I saw her.”

  I try to say something, but no words come out.

  “Your gestures and mannerisms are different,” he says, “and you have a different vocabulary. You do a good impersonation of her smile, but it doesn’t look quite right. Your voice is the same voice, but it sounds different if you listen hard enough. I have no imagination,” he adds ruefully. “When my sisters and I were young, they loved magicians, but I always saw through the tricks. Amarra was like that, too. She had a clear-eyed way of looking at the world. She saw through the smoke and mirrors so many of us construct.”

  “What about Nikhil?” I ask.

  Neil smiles faintly. “Too smart for his own good, quite frankly. He sees clearer than any of us. But he’s also a dreamer like his mother. He sees, but feels more.”

  I can’t help noticing his repeated comparisons. Amarra was like him. Nik is a dreamer like his mother. He probably doesn’t mean to, but he’s underlining the similarities between them. Highlighting the crisscrossing lines that link their characteristics, personalities, mannerisms. Showing me they’re the family and I am not part of it.

  “I’m doing my best,” I say.

  “I have no doubt that’s true,” he says, quite kindly. “I don’t mean to criticize you. But I’m too practical not to look and listen. I could have convinced myself I saw her. I could have tried. But that’s not who I am.”

  I feel defeated, hurt at being so summarily dismissed. I can’t help respecting him at the same time. He’s not trying to be hurtful, he just loved his daughter.

  “Give me a chance,” I say, trying not to sound fierce. Keeping my voice quiet, level, like hers. “You might be surprised.”

  “Okay,” he says.

  As I turn to go, he adds something unexpected.

  “Do you have a name?”

  “That’s not giving me a chance. . . .” I falter.

  A sad smile elongates his features. “Until I see differently, don’t I owe us both the courtesy of calling you by your own name?”

  I suppose that’s true.

  “Eva,” I tell him.

  He nods. “You are important,” he says. “Even if I can’t quite believe my daughter survived, like my wife does, you’ve still given us reason to hope for something more. For life beyond death. It’s why we wanted you in the first place. For that hope. And the absence of loss.”

  I look closely at him for a moment. For a man who claims to believe his daughter’s dead, he’s certainly not letting her go. She’s still here, in everything he does.

  When I return to Amarra’s room, I stare down at the snake on my wrist. I want to tear it out of my skin, strip away the tattoo and everything else that Amarra did and made me do too. I look into the mirror and wonder if I am looking at her. What is this power the dead have over the ones they leave behind? It’s strange and beautiful and frightening, this deathless love that human beings continue to feel for the ones they’ve lost.

  “Where are you?” I ask her. “You haven’t really gone, have you? I had this idea that I might be free if you were dead. But I’m not free; you’ve managed to trap me anyway. I’ve got to live your life and be you better than you ever were. Are you laughing? You’ve done it; you’ve died but you’ve stayed. You must be laughing. . . .”

  •••

  Jaya’s back in the school the next day. I have no choice but to sit next to her on the bus. “Hey, you,” she says, holding out her arms to hug me. A lump lodges in my throat. She’s so happy to see me, so sincerely and openly concerned. It’s devastating.

  “Hey,” I say. I almost add “Are you better now?” but realize who I’m supposed to be in time. I say instead, “Feeling okay? Or were you trying to skip out on your test yesterday?”

  She laughs. “Oh, please, that’s a Sonya kind of thing to do. Yeah, I’m fine now, what about you?”

  “I . . .” I
find myself telling her the truth. “. . . feel a little shaky.”

  She nods. “Of course you do! It was such a horrible thing to happen. It’s going to be a while before you’re back to normal.”

  She’s so understanding, so quick to excuse my behavior, it makes me feel guiltier. If she only knew.

  Later in the day, at lunch, someone pulls out the chair next to Jaya and sits down across from me. I look up, and my heart jerks in shock: Ray.

  Oh, God. How am I supposed to face all three of them at the same time without slipping up?

  “Hi,” he says, smiling at each of us, his eyes lingering on me. I look away. His hopeful, careful expression is too much for me. I can’t forget how happy he looked when I agreed to go out with him over the weekend. Or how he asked me if I really was Amarra.

  Why would he ask such a question? Why would he imagine I might be anything else?

  “Um,” says Sonya, looking so astonished and irritated it’s rather funny. “What the friggin’ hell are you doing?”

  “Eating lunch with you,” he says. “Are you eating your tomato? May I?” He picks it out of her sandwich before she can say a word. Her face turns a worrying shade of purple, and I bite back a smile. It’s quite obvious Ray is deliberately annoying her to amuse himself.

  “Why would you want to eat here?” she demands. “I thought you didn’t like me!”

  “I don’t,” he says, “but I can put up with you for half an hour.”

  “Unsurprisingly, I still don’t like you, either.”

  Ray ignores her and tweaks Jaya’s nose. “Hey, Jay-Jay. Skipped a test yesterday, did we?”

  She rolls her eyes and giggles in spite of herself. “Go away, Ray,” she says, though her voice is friendly.

  “Yeah, please,” says Sonya.

  “Why don’t we ask Amarra what she thinks?”

  “We already know what she thinks,” says Sonya irritably. “Amarra never minds who sits with us, so don’t think you’re special just because you’re her boyfriend. We need our girl time, you know.”

  “Hang out in the bathroom, then,” says Ray. “I won’t bother you there, I swear. I’m too manly to risk it.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Want me to prove it?”

  Jaya and I laugh. I can’t help it. Even with my nerves strung so tight, I have to laugh at Sonya squawking and covering her eyes while Ray pretends to reach for his fly. He abandons the subject and goes back to his lunch, winking at me. I try to stop staring. I must have more of Amarra’s hormones than I thought.

  As the lunch bell rings, I wonder if I made a mistake, agreeing to see Ray on Saturday. Maybe if I’d backed away, said my head was a mess and I needed time, I would be safer. I’d be less likely to expose myself. He asked me if I was really her. I wish I knew what he meant by that. But it’s too late to back out now.

  I’m keenly aware of how dangerous this is. This illusion is fragile as the most finely blown glass, and at any moment it could shatter and cut us all.

  When I get home that evening, all I want to do is go to bed, but I have to keep Amarra’s face on for a while longer. Then I retreat to her room for a few precious hours on my own. When I sleep it’s a deep, dreamless sleep. Peaceful.

  And in the morning, it starts again.

  I get through the rest of the week as best I can. I eat lunch with Amarra’s friends, sometimes with her boyfriend. I sit in her classes and enjoy some of them. I laugh and play with her sister. I feel guilty every minute, but lucky too, because this is my life now and it’s not really as bad as I’d worried it would be. The days congeal together, setting a pattern for the next few weeks, maybe months, and each day I learn a bit more about these people, this world, and the girl whose many roles I’m supposed to play. Sean, the theater boy, would say that rehearsals make you better at your part, and I guess he would be right to say so. Each day, I learn my lines a little better.

  Each day, I lie better.

  6

  Spider

  I stay in the car for a moment longer than I should, watching him through the open window. He’s sitting on the steps of the patio area around Garuda Mall, and he hasn’t yet spotted me. I can’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses, but his head is pointed the other way. He looks like a model from an aftershave ad. No, he looks rawer than that. More interesting.

  Alisha pushes her sunglasses up onto her head and squints past me at Ray. “What’s wrong?” she asks. “Nervous?”

  I nod. “It feels like it’s all starting again.” I can imagine how Amarra used to feel when they first went out, how nervous, how her heart stopped every time he looked at her, how she felt like she was constantly on her toes. It’s a little like how I feel now. And it’s how I felt last year, with Sean.

  “The pieces will fall into place,” Alisha assures me. “These things take time.” She brushes hair out of my eyes. “You don’t have to get out and see him today. You can call him, tell him something came up.”

  It’s so tempting. He’d be disappointed, but at least I wouldn’t have to keep lying. I feel like I’m caught in a web. Each time I lie, I spin the web tighter around myself, until some days it’s hard to breathe.

  But I won’t run away. I’ll get out and I’ll walk up to him. I just need to muster the courage to do it.

  I will have to cling to my excuse: the supposed gaps in my memory, my uncertainty after the accident. There’s no other way to be with him. No one ever trained me to be a girlfriend, a lover, a love—there hadn’t been enough time, after discovering Ray existed, to start lessons and better equip me for it.

  “No, it’s okay,” I say, “I’ll get out now.”

  Ray suggested meeting here. Apparently it was one of their favorite places. They liked the air-conditioning inside, going up and down the escalators, eating at the food court, watching a movie, getting ice cream on their way out, just wandering.

  “Have fun,” says Alisha. “I’m going to drop some things off for next week’s exhibition at the gallery, but I shouldn’t be long. I’ll call you on my way home. If you’re ready to go back too, I’ll come and get you.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  She drives off, almost hitting a car parked nearby on her way. As soon as I’m out of the air-conditioning, the heat hits me and sweat prickles on the back of my neck. I wish I could have put my hair up into a knot or ponytail, but I don’t want to draw anyone’s attention to the shiny white bandage I’ve taped over my Mark. Especially not Ray’s. It’s bad enough having to do it during PE.

  I walk toward Ray, twisting my hands. He stands when he sees me, but he doesn’t come any closer, just waits for me. His face lights up.

  “What?” I ask, when I’m right in front of him and he’s still staring silently at me. “Have I got something on my face?”

  “No,” he says sheepishly. “Sorry. I just always forget how beautiful you are.”

  My face burns hot.

  “A blush!” he teases. “Hey! Point for me.” I give him a bewildered look, and he explains, “Oh, maybe you don’t remember that. You always gave yourself a point when you made me blush. We both did, but you had way more points.”

  It would be lame if I were to pretend I remembered this. Instead I smile and say, “Maybe we could start counting points from zero again?”

  He strokes his thumb down my cheek, a quick touch before pulling his hand away so as not to alarm me.

  “Sorry.”

  “If you’re apologizing about the accident again, I’m not listening,” I say, maybe a tad more firmly than Amarra would have. “I’m okay.”

  “You look okay,” he says, and there’s something in his voice that makes me tense. “Jesus, it’s amazing, actually. I saw you, lying there in all the broken glass. I even tried to crawl to you, but I must have blacked out in seconds. There was so much blood. It drove me crazy when I woke up, not being allowed to see you until you came back to school. Not even being able to talk to you. I was so scared something was seriously wrong.”
He stops abruptly, as though aware of how much pain there suddenly is in his voice, in his eyes. He smiles to lighten his expression. “I expected you to have cuts, bruises, scars all over. But you don’t seem to have a scratch on you.”

  My heart thumps very fast, and I have to swallow once or twice to moisten my dry throat. “I have scratches,” I say, forcing myself to meet his eyes, trying to lift that glimmer of suspicion out of them. “But most of them aren’t places you can see.”

  His face softens. That confusion isn’t completely gone, but I think he believes me. “I know.” He gestures at the sliding doors. “Let’s go inside, I’m about to fry out here.”

  The air-conditioning is a blessing. The heat on my skin cools and I feel less sweaty, less edgy. I feel in control of myself again. I watch a last bead of sweat trickle down Ray’s forehead, by his dark, dark eyes. I can’t help looking at him; my eyes keep pulling that way. I don’t know if it’s the residue of Amarra’s feelings or if it’s the constant refrain in my head, reminding me that I am supposed to love him.

  “Love him, then,” a painfully familiar voice says in my ear. “Go on.”

  I jerk my head around. Sean always sounds so real.

  “Amarra?”

  I swallow back the silly, sudden tears in my throat. “Nothing, sorry,” I say. “I just thought I saw someone I knew.”

  Ray frowns down at me, concerned. “You okay?”

  “Yes. Really.”

  This is ridiculous. I can’t keep doing this. I can’t look at Ray and wish he was Sean. I can’t keep thinking about Sean. They belong to two different worlds; they shouldn’t collide. I am Amarra. I must be Amarra. I have to stop thinking about Sean and everything else that belonged to that other life.

  As if he could hear my thoughts, Ray reaches out and carefully takes my hand, linking his long fingers loosely with mine. The touch startles me.

  “That okay?”

  I nod and keep my fingers entwined with his.

  He grins slightly. “I’d kiss you, but I might shock the old ladies.” Irritatingly, I blush again. He quickly adds, “I mean, I wouldn’t just pounce and kiss you. I know you’re still shaky.”