by Katy Yocom
For two weeks, the waxing moon backlit the wandering clouds, brighter each night. Thunder rumbled intermittently, far off but growing nearer, and Sarah stood listening in her doorway and thought, Come on already.
On the day of the full moon, the skies opened.
They were in the park when it happened, passing beneath a banyan and thus half-sheltered from the sudden downpour. Sarah held out her hands, palms up, elated to be there when the first fat drops fell through the canopy, rattling the brittle forest like a dry seed pod. The stones released their scent, and the long-dead leaves. The rain began to pelt, and for a few minutes the world seemed strangely biblical to Sarah: heaven hurling itself to earth, kicking up a furious layer of dust that mushroomed to knee height before warm, wet drops knocked it back down. Runnels gathered and coursed in thin streams topped with dust until the soil drank them in.
“Tomorrow the whole forest will be lit up lime green,” Sanjay said. He nodded toward a spindly, leafless tree that Sarah had assumed was dead. “All the dhok trees will send out tiny leaves overnight. If there’s sun tomorrow, they’ll glow like stained glass.”
Sarah studied the tree with new respect, imagining the awakening already at play beneath its dark, wet bark.
.
The rains settled in. Sarah awoke one morning to a day dark as twilight. Water poured over the eaves in sheets. A steady drip tap-tapped through her kitchen ceiling. She put a pan underneath it. In the front room, she picked up her copy of Man-Eaters of Kumaon. The cover felt cool and soft in her hand, the pages fatter than they should. Her books were swelling up.
As a child, she had hated the monsoon. She knew nothing of the way the natural world sprang to life outside the cities; to her, it meant only muddy streets and the smell of mildew advancing inexorably from curtains to carpets to the very sheets of her bed. It marooned them indoors and left them to die of boredom, maddened by near-daily power outages. Paint peeled off the walls, the bathroom ceiling turned pink with mold, and they fought, Quinn and Marcus and Sarah. They tormented one another, trying to shed their own itchy frustration by thrusting it like a dead badger into someone else’s hands.
Something changed in the sound of the drip. She returned to the kitchen to discover the ceiling was bubbling. A blister of water bigger than her hand had already started to spread tentacles in three directions. There was only one thing to do: plunge a knife into the blister. Rob had taught her that trick, maybe the one useful thing to emerge from their brief marriage. The idea shocked her at the time, but he’d been right. A gouge-hole in a water-soaked ceiling is an ugly thing, but if you don’t lance the boil, it spreads, creating far worse damage. She took up a kitchen knife, climbed onto the wicker seat of her least wobbly chair, and thrust. The blade hit something solid just behind the plaster surface. Bricks, she thought. She pulled it out and tried again. No luck. She changed her grip on the knife and drew it, scalpel-like, through the diameter of the blister. A cascade of milky water gushed out, splattering her hand, her face, the pan, the floor.
This was what she remembered about having cholera—the way liquid poured out of her in every imaginable way. It came out in uncontrollable shit so thin she mistook it for pee. It came out in vomit, sweat, tears, in snot dripping from her nose as she cried. Quinn found her in the bathroom and cried out for Ayah. But it was Leela, the housekeeper, who ran panicked into the room, ordered Quinn out, stripped off Sarah’s filthy pants, and sluiced her down in the tub. Sarah was freezing, the water made her colder, and even in the tub she couldn’t control the gush of liquid from her body. She cried and cried, humiliated. Mother appeared, her expression fierce, and Sarah braced for a tongue-lashing. “Wrap her in blankets,” Mother ordered instead, and then Sarah and Marcus and their mother were in the car, Sarah clutching a bucket and vomiting clear liquid into it. There was nothing to do about the diarrhea except let it soak the blankets. The air in the car took on a fishy odor. Ravindra rolled down his window.
On the other side of Mother, Marcus slept. Sarah thought Mother had brought him along to keep her company.
The journey seemed never-ending. Flooded-out roads and broken concrete sent them doubling back. When at last they reached Daddy’s clinic, the Irish nurse with the pixie cut stuck a needle in the back of Sarah’s hand to drip fluids into her through a clear plastic line. “Don’t you even,” Mother said to the nurse, and Sarah wanted to ask, Don’t you even what? but she was too busy examining the needle with horror. Mother had to stop her from tearing the bandage from her hand. Daddy stood over Sarah, stern-faced, asking question after question.
“Did you eat any fruit without washing it? Did you drink unboiled milk? Did you go outside? Sarah! Were you and Marcus playing in the gully?”
“We were in the house,” she said. Her words slurred and puddled. Mother sat on the bed next to her, frantically petting Sarah’s hair and muttering: “The cook. The cook. The cook didn’t wash the vegetables.”
“What about before? Anytime in the last few days?”
Sarah looked up into her father’s face, etched like a cartoon version of an angry man: forehead nothing but furrows, mouth a thin line. His eyes looked capable of shooting flames. “No,” she lied. She leaned forward to vomit. A bucket appeared from somewhere, but nothing came out other than a stream of saliva.
“Did anyone give you anything to eat that you aren’t sure was properly cleaned?”
She couldn’t even follow that question.
He listened to her heart and took her pulse, and Sarah vaguely knew Marcus lay in the next bed. But she never heard a sound out of him, never heard him vomit, nothing, until the commotion started. Marcus’s headboard began banging the wall, soft jerky sounds as if he were fighting an enemy in his sleep. Daddy dropped Sarah’s wrist and leapt to Marcus’s side, shouting for a tongue blade. For a moment Sarah saw Marcus’s thin body jerking as the nurse pulled his head back and slid the wooden blade into his mouth. And then people began pouring into the room, and Mother flew from Sarah’s side, and even though Marcus was the one in trouble, suddenly Sarah found herself surrounded by strangers wearing masks, all talking loud and fast, and her bed was moving and someone was running behind holding up the bag of fluid and they were taking her away.
She cried out for Mother and Daddy, but the strangers rolled her out of the room and parked her bed on the other side of the wall, where she could see nothing but hear everything. The smell of fish settled over her again. Daddy gave order after order to the nurses, and Mother begged, “Marcus! Marcus!” And then her begging turned to wails, filled with his name. Sarah sat up, gripping the bed rails, crying, “Daddy? Daddy?” but for a long time no one came.
At last he stepped out of the room, pulling his stethoscope from around his neck. His body sagged. He rested his forehead against the wall.
“Daddy?” Sarah asked through tears.
He turned to her. She’d never seen his face so bleak. And then a nurse on the other side of the ward called out, “Doctor!” sharp and urgent. He stood up straight and took two long strides down the hall, and then he was running.
Quinn
Nick had weathered the trip to the sledding hill unharmed. The day’s casualty, instead, had been Pete’s tolerance for caution. The success of the outing had been enough to convince him that everything was fine, and his gestures toward vigilance lost their sincerity as winter gave way to spring and then full summer. He thought he was humoring Quinn; she could see that, and the new dynamic eroded her confidence. He’d begun saying things she wouldn’t want to admit to her friends. He knew women, he said, who let their kids play outside and didn’t stand watch over them. He admired women like that, spontaneous and capable and carefree. He never said these things in an ugly way; instead he sounded wistful, as if something precious had drifted just out of reach.
The water park posed a conundrum. Given the choice, Nick and Alaina would have opted to go there every week
. The best Quinn could do was space the visits out to once a month or so. On their second visit that summer, Nick survived two hours of ordinary fun only to be caught in the face with an errant blast of sunscreen from somebody else’s mother.
Quinn grabbed her son by his cold, wet shoulders and pulled him out of range, shouting for Pete to bring the inhaler. She crouched on her haunches and stared up into Nick’s face as he spluttered and choked. The sun caught her full in the eyes, inverting all the colors: Suddenly Nick’s hair was purple, his face aqua; where the sun had been, a red-black spot. Pete ran up and slapped the inhaler into her hand. She held Nick’s shoulders as he used it. The moment held a terrible intimacy: her eyes searching his face from a distance of a few inches.
“I’m fine, Mom.” His voice jittered with the medicine.
“Oh, honeybun.” She wiped his face. “We shouldn’t have brought you here. It’s too dangerous.”
“I’m okay. Really. Look.” He demonstrated by taking three deep breaths with a minimum of coughing. Quinn pressed her ear to his skinny chest, listening for wheezing, but could hear nothing above the warbling canned theme-park music and the rush of his heart.
They made their way to a row of turquoise plastic deck chairs and sat down, stunned and limp.
“Jesus,” Pete said when she told him what had happened. “People ought to be more careful.”
“They ought to be, but they aren’t.”
Pete’s face closed when she said that.
“Not you,” she said. “I’m talking about the whole world.”
“You worry too much, Mommy,” Alaina said, cheerfully critical.
“No, pumpkin.” She pushed her daughter’s wild hair off her cheek. “I worry just enough to keep the inhaler handy.”
.
In the months after Marcus died, Quinn tried to guess what Daddy might want when he came home from the clinic, which wasn’t often. Occasionally she guessed right, and he rewarded her with a tired smile, a hand on her shoulder.
Mother spent whole days in her bedroom when she wasn’t wandering the house in her pink nightgown, which slowly faded to the color of putty. She stopped going to church. She rarely left the house at all. When she crossed paths with her daughters, she barely acknowledged them.
Sarah remained weak for a long time. Born Free no longer interested her. Nothing did. One day, Quinn went into the twins’ room (she couldn’t think of it as just Sarah’s room), crawled under the covers with her sister, and began chatting about the things they would do once Sarah got her health back. But Sarah said nothing and wouldn’t look at her. On the other side of the nightstand, Marcus’s bed stood tidy and forlorn.
Quinn tried cuddling her, but Sarah held herself stiff. “You know what?” Quinn said, clinging tighter. “I’ll be your twin now.”
Sarah slapped her across the face.
On the anniversary of Marcus’s death, they drove through Delhi to the cemetery where he was buried. Beneath a gloomy sky, Mother bent down to the low granite marker and pressed her finger to the dash between his birth and death dates. “That’s his life, right there,” she said. “That’s all there was.”
Sarah let out one blurting sob and began to cry. She clung to Mother’s waist, sagging toward the ground. Mother grabbed her under the armpits. “Stop it, Sarah, you’ll rip my dress.” Then she softened and hefted Sarah into her arms. “Let’s take you home. You too, Quinn. That’s my good girl.”
My good girl. At those words, a dirty gray memory sprang out of hiding. Quinn sat down in horror and felt it banging around inside her chest like a rat in a waterpot.
She’d seen them sneak out that day. And somehow, till just now, she’d forgotten.
She’d been deep into the book she was reading. The twins had begun making a racket, then fallen abruptly quiet. The sudden silence brought Quinn out of the world of her book, and she realized she needed to use the bathroom. She was passing by the empty kitchen as Sarah and Marcus tiptoed out of the pantry and crept to the kitchen door.
Their bodies were slim as fishes, and the door never opened more than a crack. The slightest gust of warm, wet air slid into the room as the two of them slipped outside. By the time the door clicked shut again, it was as if they had never been there at all.
“Get up, Quinn. We’re leaving,” Mother said, and Quinn found herself back in the cemetery, sitting on Marcus’s grave. Somewhere below her, his body lay in a casket. The thought horrified her. She scrambled to her feet.
Back at the house on Cornwallis Road, they found Ayah sitting at the dining room table, her eyes streaming.
“Why is Ayah crying?” Quinn asked Mother.
That was how the girls learned they were moving to America. Ayah would not be coming with them. Neither would Daddy.
That night, Quinn went to Mother’s darkened bedroom. “Please,” she begged. “Don’t make me leave Ayah.”
Mother stroked Quinn’s hair and wiped her tears. But when her sobs grew louder, Mother took Quinn’s chin in her hand. “Who do you love better? Ayah or me?”
Quinn couldn’t cover up the truth fast enough. Mother saw it in her face and snatched her hand away. She threw back the covers and got out of bed, lifted her white chenille robe from its hook, and wrapped it around herself. It was too late, then. Or almost too late.
“It wasn’t their fault, what happened to Marcus,” Quinn said. “Daddy’s or Ayah’s.”
Mother cinched the robe at her waist. “I never said it was.”
“You said if Daddy hadn’t made us live in India, this never would have happened.”
Mother’s expression acknowledged the truth of that.
“It was my fault,” Quinn said. “I could have kept them from getting sick.”
The words skittered into the blackness under the bed and hid there, peering out. Mother’s eyes locked on Quinn’s. “What are you talking about?”
Quinn had counted on that question. She felt dangerous and powerful. But as she drew breath to say the words, the suspicion went out of Mother’s face. “You’re a child.” As if that meant: You’re nothing.
Mother shifted her weight, searching with a foot for her slippers in the darkness beneath the bed. Quinn didn’t know what had just happened, but she knew she had lost.
Sarah
At five months old, Machli’s cubs had grown to the size of cocker spaniels. They were still toddlers, romping around in compact bodies that made perfect little loaves when they tucked their legs beneath them. More often, they played and pounced, chased each other, swam, leapt, gnawed on hunks of meat from their mother’s kills, and ineffectually stalked peafowl, which tolerated the cubs’ attentions like long-suffering nursemaids. Occasionally the cubs would parade around single file, looking highly serious, one cub holding the other’s tail between her teeth.
“They’re cute before they learn how to kill,” Hari said.
The comment surprised Sarah. “Everybody has to eat,” she said lightly. Her Hindi was getting better.
“The world would have been better if we were all vegetarians. So much suffering, as it is.”
No wonder he preferred birds, Sarah thought. But maybe not the raptors.
Just now the film crew was setting up to capture footage of Machli’s family, a particularly valuable bit of filming since the park was about to shut down for the season. By the time they saw the cubs again, in three or four months, they’d be twice this size.
She had to admit, to herself if not out loud: Tiger cubs made an excellent reason to stay in India. She could put up with this amorphous work, with its frustrating lack of deadlines and bylines, a lot more happily now that tiger babies were in the picture.
Beneath an overcast sky, the cubs clambered in a tree alongside a river in flood. The forest guards had named them. The one with heart-shaped marks over her eyes was Dil, the Hindi word for heart. The other cub
was called Lalit, for her mischief. Some distance away lay beautiful Machli, flat out on her side, fully engaged in an epic feat of digestion. Her belly looked as big as the rest of her body, as if she’d swallowed a sambar whole.
“It’s the heat,” Sanjay said. “She ate everything she could before it had a chance to spoil.”
“Hang in there, dearest,” William advised. “You’ll feel better tomorrow.”
Sarah turned her binoculars from the beached tigress and back to the cubs. One had abandoned the tree to stalk a peacock. The other balanced on a branch. Those paws! Like catcher’s mitts. Those stubby, chunky forelegs. Sarah adjusted her focus to the cub’s face to look for identifying markings, but suddenly it vanished. A blur, then gone. She lowered her field glasses. No tiger cub anywhere.
No. There she was: a bundle of striped fur being swept downriver.
In a second, the water carried the cub past the jeep and into the branches of a fallen tree, where she lodged against the trunk and disappeared beneath frothing brown water. For one split second, Sarah saw the cub’s face just below the surface, and then the roil obscured it, and they were all shouting and clutching at each other. Sarah yelled, “Do something! Do something!” and when the cub did not resurface, she leapt from the jeep without thinking and crawled out onto the tree trunk.
The men shouted at her, but she could see the little face a few inches below the surface, eyes squeezed shut, paws scrambling. “Hang on, girl!” She plunged her arm into the powerful current and hauled the cub up by the scruff of the neck. The cub emerged screeching and writhing. For an instant the two found themselves face-to-face, and in that moment, Sarah knew: If she survived this, she was staying. Then the cub thrashed against her, all white-rimmed eyes, wet fur, hot breath, a slash of claws against her body. A glancing wallop caught her in the face. She heaved the cub to land, where she staggered, coughed, sprinted for her mother, and disappeared from view with the flash of a striped tail.
