by Katy Yocom
She thought about it. “When I was little, my father ran a medical clinic in Delhi. When I got older, I looked down on his work because his vision seemed so narrow. I mean, the problems are just so huge. One little clinic. A drop in the bucket.”
“The trenches are a muddy place,” he acknowledged. “It’s hard to accept that everything one can do will always be too little. But eventually one must engage in life regardless. It ends, you know.”
“So I’ve heard,” she said. “And here I am. And here you are, too.”
“Different path. But the same outcome, yes.”
“Do you miss filmmaking?” she asked.
“Not the technical bits. But I do rather miss storytelling, I suppose.”
After dinner they moved to the front room, where a plastic mask of a staring, stylized human face hung on the wall. She stopped to examine it, and William took it from its hook and handed it to her as they settled onto the couch. “Do you know about these masks?”
“I’ve heard of them,” she said. “But tell me the story. Please. It would be such a treat for me.”
He reddened a bit, looking pleased. “Well, then.” He settled back into his seat, crossed his legs at the ankle, and rested his hands comfortably in his lap, just as he’d done in the studio shots in his documentaries. “The man-eating tiger is generally a sorry specimen,” he began in that William Amesbury tone. Sarah pulled her knees up and clasped them to her chest. Daddy used to call them into the living room when one of William’s documentaries came on—“Kids! Come watch!”—and they would pile into the room and plop down on the floor.
“The rare tiger that turns to human prey does so when injury or age leaves him too decrepit to hunt, or when the population of natural prey disappears. Generally speaking, man-eating is the last resort of a tiger who has run out of options. But that generality does not hold true in the Sundarbans, the vast river delta that stretches between India and Bangladesh. There, the tiger is rather more casual about the matter. As far as anyone can tell, he simply prefers the taste of human flesh.”
Sarah smiled. “You’ve told this story before.”
William twinkled his eyes at her and continued his recitation. “The five hundred tigers that live in the delta kill dozens of people every year, according to official counts, but those counts are known to be grossly underreported. Most of the men fishing the channels and gathering honey in the mangrove forests don’t bother to buy permits to do so, and when a man dies while making a living illegally, his survivors rarely want that fact brought to the government’s attention. Sundarbans tigers kill the unlicensed by the hundreds every year, a fact that presumably speaks not to a preference for lawbreakers but simply to their vastly higher numbers.” He paused. “Some say it’s the salinity of the water that drives the tigers’ aggression. Some say their tastes develop around the steady supply of human corpses that float down the rivers that empty into the delta. Others say the reason is simply that man-eating always goes unpunished in the Sundarbans. You might spot a tiger as he swims from island to island; you might watch him heave himself onto the muddy shore. But three steps into the mangrove forest, and the tiger vanishes.”
Sarah shivered, making William smile.
“From within the forest, he waits for the honey gatherers to come. The tiger watches from his hiding place as a group of men enters the forest, single file on narrow trails. When the time is right, the tiger attacks, always from behind. The last man in line falls victim.
“After many years of attacks, someone puzzled out that the tiger attacks only when no one in the group is looking his way. What the men needed was a set of eyes on the backs of their heads. This was in the 1980s, and it was a simple matter of manufacturing.” He gestured to the mask. “Ivory faces with staring eyes, a red mouth, viperous fangs—all topped off by a silent movie–villain mustache. The honey gatherers began wearing the masks on the backs of their heads when they went into the forest. The tigers still stalked the men, but the masks stymied them. The humans had learned to face in both directions at once.”
She clapped. “Well told! Oh, well told, William.”
He inclined his head in a modest bow. “You’re kind to indulge an old man,” he said. “You know, the masks were hugely successful at first, but they never stopped the tigers altogether. A Sundarbans tiger will stalk someone wearing one of these faces for up to eight hours. And should the man remove the mask, even for a second—”
“The tiger strikes.”
“Precisely.”
She turned the mask, studying it. “I keep thinking about what happened to Sunil.” The fear he must have felt as the tiger’s jaws closed around his throat. Suffocation: not the quickest of deaths, and surely one of the most terrifying.
“Survival is a harsh business,” William said. “Ruthless and impersonal. But it’s astonishing, really, the fact that no organic matter ever goes unused. Perfect, in a sense.”
She cocked her head at him and smiled. He was beginning to remind her of her father.
Later, when she went upstairs, she thought about their conversation. Was she engaging in life more or less, now that she had quit journalism? Day-to-day engagement felt a little anticlimactic. Visiting villages, writing press releases, making phone calls. She wouldn’t see the results of her work with anything like the regularity of journalism. In her previous life, her work appeared in the world with her name attached. Sometimes her stories and photos had an effect, and sometimes they didn’t. And sometimes she learned the end of the story, but mostly she didn’t.
Like the boy soldiers. They were brothers, eleven or twelve years old, who’d been made the heads of a revolutionary force. For reasons Sarah didn’t understand, their followers had revered them, quite literally, as gods. Then the revolution failed. Sarah covered the story up to the point when the boys surrendered. They got starved out of their hideout and came down the mountain crawling with lice, at which point people decided maybe they weren’t divine after all. Sarah wanted to know what happened to them—boys who’d been taught so much violence, who’d been granted godhood and then demoted. Did somebody take them in? Were they sold into slavery? Killed? She thought it would make an important story. But the rest of the world didn’t care, or so her editor said. Nobody had the attention span anymore. Hotel checkout was at noon, he added.
“You don’t have to be an ass about it, Hal,” she’d said.
“Don’t let yourself get soft, DeVaughan,” he told her. “That’s how people get killed.”
She had let herself mourn while she packed, for the boys and for what she saw coming for her career. She didn’t know another way to live. Then she zipped her suitcase shut, splashed water on her face, and told herself to pull it together. At five till noon, she checked out of her room. She took a tuk-tuk to the airport, boarded her plane, and left. Another goodbye to a continent beginning with the letter A. Another departure at 600 miles an hour.
She never did find out what happened to those boys.
Quinn
Mother had always been beautiful. When Quinn was small, Westerners who met Mother said she looked like Princess Grace. There was something regal about her, the way she commanded a houseful of servants. The way she shopped for clothes, furniture, textiles, whatever she wanted to surround herself with: She would sweep through shops, identifying objects of desire with a graceful gesture, and the merchants would box them up beautifully and send them home with her, the spoils of an afternoon’s outing.
She never gave up the shopping habit. Not after the divorce, not after the move back to the States, where her American dollars didn’t have the buying power they’d had in India. Not after the bankruptcy from which Quinn and Pete had helped rescue her. Over the years, the stresses had worn at her. To Quinn’s eyes, Mother looked now as Grace Kelly might have looked if she’d lived into her sixties, if she’d lost a child and blamed the cook, her husband, a teeming s
ubcontinent. Her Serene Highness, minus the serenity.
Her shopping tracked with her anxiety levels. Shortly after Sarah left for India, Mother presented Quinn with two beautiful little coats she’d bought for the twins, navy for Nick and powder blue for Alaina.
They were at lunch at Lilly’s, an upscale bistro on Bardstown Road, seated in a booth at the window. A light snow fell outside. Quinn thanked her mother uneasily. “It’s too generous,” she said. “You bought them all sorts of stuff at Christmas. And they don’t have anywhere to wear clothes like this.”
Mother ignored her protests. When their lunches arrived, she surveyed what Quinn had ordered—soup and salad—and appeared to approve. “Do you remember when you were four and the twins were babies? You told me once that if you ate enough, you could have a twin. You were so jealous of them. You shouldn’t have been. You were the best baby. Smiley and happy and beautiful with those big blue eyes and rosy cheeks.”
“I couldn’t help being jealous,” Quinn said. “You were obsessed with them.” Mother had watched the twins like a scientist, parsing their similarities (she deemed them both highly intelligent) and their differences (Sarah was the busy investigator, Marcus the contemplative observer).
At seven, Quinn had begun to grow so quickly it made her knees hurt. Ayah told her that she must be made of dough like a chapatti, and that the cook was coming to her room at night to stretch her taller. The idea scared Quinn rigid. Then she stopped growing taller and started growing thicker. Mother knelt in front of her, slim and elegant, and stuck a worried finger into the waistband of Quinn’s pants. After that it was carrot sticks and cauliflower. The cook made a joyless version of masala chai with watered-down milk. At dinner one evening, Quinn reached for a slice of white bread and stuffed it into her mouth, and Mother looked away, her upper lip recoiling.
“What do you hear from Sarah?” Mother asked as a server refilled her tea.
“She said the Jogi Mahal is closed to visitors now because it’s inside the park. You remember that place? The hotel where we stayed when we went to Ranthambore?”
“Beautiful building.” Mother slid her fork into her quiche. “Do you remember that enormous banyan tree beside it?”
“Second-largest banyan in India. I never did find out where the largest one is.”
“Calcutta, I think.”
It surprised Quinn that Mother had retained these facts; she never spoke about India, and even in America, she’d never been one for nature. Mother set down her fork. “Did I tell you? I picked up an espresso machine.”
Quinn arched her eyebrows.
Mother gave her a glare. “Look, it’s been difficult for me with Sarah moving back to India. I buy myself nice things because that’s what you have to do when you’re alone.”
Down that path lay bankruptcy, and they both knew it. “Why did you ever agree to go there? With Daddy, I mean?”
The question must have caught Mother by surprise. Her expression softened. “He was a doctor. When you’re young, you think that means certain things.” She laughed a little. “It all seemed so romantic. India. I thought I was signing up for something out of Kipling. You can’t imagine the misconceptions I had. I thought I was going to be Mrs. Doctor, the mistress of the manor.”
“You were the mistress of the manor. And you hated it.”
“But I loved the idea. It sounded so sophisticated, being part of an expat community. I didn’t even know what expat meant when I first heard it. I had to look it up.”
They finished lunch over conversation about the kids. When the check came, Mother was powdering her nose. “You don’t mind getting that, do you, darling?”
.
The twins woke Quinn and Pete the next morning, boinging up and down on their bed and demanding to go sledding. Bright snow topped the bare maple limbs outside their window and blindfolded the cars down in the street. Five inches, maybe six, from the look of it. Pete and Quinn exchanged a look.
It wasn’t that they were fighting, exactly—more that there was a conversation waiting that they hadn’t managed to have. Since the asthma attack that had sent Nick to the ER, Quinn felt on high alert all the time. She felt Pete watching her watch Nick, but when she turned to him, he couldn’t quite meet her eye. It was as if only so much gaze were allowed in the family, and she was spending it all on Nick.
The development surprised her. The day she and Pete had learned the sexes of the twins, she had cried in the doctor’s office parking lot. Pete listened closely as she haltingly explained how the news felt like a punishment, a reminder of her grief. The way he comforted her then seemed like a promise that when parenting the twins became too raw, he would understand the source of her hurt, would help her through the hard parts.
But now they couldn’t talk about what was happening.
Pete started on toast and eggs while Quinn helped Nick with his peak flow readings—safely in the green zone—and got him going with his breathing treatment. Sledding: She didn’t know. The exercise and the cold air could trigger him. But snow didn’t last long in Louisville, and she didn’t want to cheat her son out of a rare treat. She started a video of silly animal tricks and left him sitting on the living room floor while she went upstairs to help Alaina put her hair up. Alaina greeted Quinn at the bathroom door, chanting, “Snow day! Snow day!”
“Not exactly. It’s a snowy day, but not a snow day.”
“Why?”
Quinn sat on the edge of the tub and gathered her daughter’s white-blond curls into a thick ponytail. “Because it’s Saturday,” she said. “A snow day is when you get to stay home from school or work because of snow.”
“Humph,” Alaina said. “It’s snowy outside, and as far as I’m concerned, that makes it a snow day.”
Quinn smiled at the joy that radiated from this pink-cheeked girl. Happy morning sounds floated up from downstairs: Pete clanging the skillet on the stove, Nick laughing at his video. “Must be pretty funny,” Alaina said.
Quinn stopped brushing and listened to Nick giggle. “Stay here a minute.” She hustled downstairs. Nick sat cross-legged, snorting in glee.
“Hey.” She kept a smile in her voice. “Careful, Nickypants. You’re messing up your treatment.”
“Play it back.” He giggled. White vapor escaped around the edges of the nebulizer mask.
She turned off the video. “Nick. Honey. You can’t talk during a treatment. And I’m really sorry, but you can’t laugh, either, not so hard that the medicine escapes. You want to play outside today, don’t you?”
His shoulders slumped inside his orange T-shirt, and he gave her a wounded look over the mask. She hadn’t meant it as a threat, but she could hear how it sounded. “It’s okay, kiddo.” She ruffled his hair. “We just need to get that medicine into you, that’s all.” She checked the mask’s green elastic strap, gave his shoulder a squeeze, and started for the stairs.
Pete called to her from the kitchen. She backtracked and joined him at the stove.
He nodded toward Nick. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know what to think,” she said. “I don’t know how much medicine escaped.”
They stared at each other, doubtful. Nick had averaged an attack every five days since the night of the ER. “Cold weather’s never triggered him,” Pete ventured. “Snow’ll be gone by tomorrow.”
She hesitated.
“If we keep him inside, he’ll think we’re punishing him for the asthma,” Pete said.
“Or for messing up his treatment,” she said. “God, I hate this.”
“By the way, I saw those boxes. What happened? I thought you weren’t going to let your mother spend money on the kids like that.”
“Listen, I tried,” she said. “I told her she shouldn’t have bought that stuff. She said it was too late to return it.”
“It’s always too late for her not to sp
end money. She paints you into a corner every time.”
“Yeah,” Quinn said. “And then she stuck me with lunch.”
“Don’t let her walk all over you, Quinn.”
They’d had this discussion half a dozen times before; they both knew its contours. A familiar argument to delay, at least momentarily, a decision about Nick.
In the end, they decided to chance it. On the sledding hill at Cherokee Park, Quinn watched the skin around her son’s mouth for signs of the white ring. She didn’t want to think about the color he’d turned on the way to the hospital. Asthma blue.
A shock of cold slid down the back of her neck, and Alaina leapt away, giggling. “Come play, Mommy!”
Quinn chased her, careful not to get too far from Nick. She rode three times with each of the twins on the red plastic sled, handing off the inhaler to Pete to keep it close to their son. Pete was doing pretty well with this level of protectiveness, though it chafed at him, she could tell. He’d come from hearty stock, outdoorsy types who saw good health as the inevitable reward for their natural gusto.
“Warming up out here,” he said as she rolled off the sled with Alaina. In the cold sunshine, his cheeks glowed red, and a drop of moisture glinted under his nose. They held eye contact for a few seconds.
“This is working, right?” she said. “I think this is good.”
“It is good. He’s doing great. Aren’t you, Nick?” He called out that last part.
“What?” Nick called back from a few yards away, where he knelt, packing snowballs.
“You’re a sport,” Pete said.
“What’s a sport?”
“It’s what you are. You’re up for what’s happening. C’mon, let’s get in one more run.”
Quinn reached into her pocket. “Here.” She pressed the inhaler into Pete’s gloved hand.
Sarah
She felt herself growing restless. No bylines, no publications was one thing, but what was she even doing? Writing grants and press releases. Observing. Pitching in here and there in ways that didn’t add up to much. A couple of times, she’d caught herself thinking that maybe she should call Hal. She was here, after all; why not do some stories? Make a little extra money, do something with a definable endpoint and an outcome she could hold in her hands?
