by Ami Rao
But even that, she can cope with.
What she cannot live with, what she finds incomprehensible is something else. On her mind, in her brain, gnawing at her heart is only one person. Not her brother or her mother or her father, but David. Something had changed between them that evening. But it wasn’t, as David would always believe, it wasn’t because Ameena had taken David’s allegiance for granted and had felt betrayed – stranded – when she realised that loving someone does not mean always agreeing with them. That wasn’t it.
No, it was because they had said things that had recast the moulds they had created of each other in their own minds. Identities of goodness and virtue and infallibility, like a child creates of an idol, fossilised over years, sacred and specific. God, we are all so naive, she realises with sudden horror, naive over and over again. And even when we know this, even when we know that this ancient circular loop of naivety only serves to deepen the illusions and ensnare us into believing only what we want to believe, we still foolishly fall into its trap. This, she thinks, this failure of the human mind to break out of these illusory patterns even when we see them – almost as if we crave the suffering we know it will bring – remains, despite its infinite capacity for freedom, one of its most crippling limitations.
For otherwise, how could he have uttered those words, and how could she have not seen them coming?
Because the thing with words, the really tricky thing, is that once they’ve been spoken, they can be forgiven, they can be forgotten, dulled with time and tricks and the foibles of memory, but they cannot, not ever, no matter how much you try, become unspoken. In fact, she reasons, it must go even further than that. To utter words that carried such power, that had the ability to cut so deep, one must, surely, have been thinking them for a very long time before gathering up the courage to actually speak them. Saying those things, in Ameena’s mind, wasn’t the deathblow; the deathblow was thinking those things. Yes, that was it. That, to Ameena, was the truly heartbreaking thing; the fact that someone you loved had thought such thoughts about you all along.
It is a sadness she feels she can drown in.
In the fabric store, once you’d made your selection, the man would take a pair of giant scissors, cut off the length you wanted, fold it into a neat square and put it in a bag for you to take home. Your very own piece of shimmer.
When she looked outside the window of their home on the day she was leaving, she wished she could take a piece of the river with her, the river when it looked like this, restful and still and shimmering like silk.
3.24
While Ameena was on her flight to Manchester, David drove up to Rhode Island.
He arrived late in the afternoon, checked into his hotel, and spent the rest of the evening at a piano bar where he had often played in his summers home from college. It was a place of comfort for him and of belonging, where he recognised the smells and the rhythms, and the faces he knew he would find, old faces, familiar faces, friendly faces, the kinds of faces owned by people with whom David understood implicitly that you could pick up where you left off, no matter how long ago you’d gone or why, who welcomed you back without question or judgement, as if you hadn’t gone away at all.
Earlier that day, on the way to the bar, David had driven past the large chain drugstore where his house once stood. The road still sloped upward gently and then fell downward steeply, the incline disproportionate, cruelly deceptive, surprising first-time drivers into desperately scrambling for their brakes. Years ago, his mother had joined a neighbourhood campaign to get some sort of road sign put up on the brow of the hill. There was no funding, they’d written back politely. Money was scarce, reserved for more pressing causes. There are always more pressing causes, his father had remarked wryly.
There was a sign now, David noticed, a yellow diamond-shaped lollipop with the image of a car tipped precariously on the base of an inverted triangle.
On a whim, he decided to park up and go inside. The parking lot was in front, where the small, thriving fore garden used to be, where rows of petunias once bloomed among the lilies and bushes of dwarf rhododendron lined the fence flowering a bright shocking pink in the springtime. All that was gone now, the area covered in asphalt, marked with neat white and yellow pavement markings. Behind the drugstore was the road that ran parallel to the beach along the coastline, and cutting across it, leading straight onto the stretch of beach, was the path.
David sat inside the car for a few minutes, his hands on the wheel, thinking about his childhood home, how memories attach to a physical structure, like barnacles to a rock – it was easier, he knew from experience, to break the rock than to pry the barnacle off.
A black Honda Civic hatchback pulled up next to him with an elderly couple inside. David smiled at how the man got out first, then went round to hold the door open for his wife. When he got out of his own car, the old lady looked at him curiously and whispered something to her husband, who seemed to have trouble hearing her. David followed the couple into the store wondering if they might have been friends with his parents. Or maybe they were just sizing him up, wondering what business someone in a rented car with New York plates had in their little town.
Inside, the air conditioner was turned up, uncomfortably high. David wandered through the maze of aisles marvelling at how things had changed in this tiny coastal village, at how much more was available now, things that not so long ago people asked friends to bring home from visits to the city; all that was here now, under this single freezing roof. David didn’t need anything from the drugstore, but he was inside now, so he picked up an electric toothbrush and a hairbrush that was ‘guaranteed to add shine’. But when he lined up at the checkout, he saw standing at the till, eyes down, scanning items from somebody’s shopping basket, a woman who used to be a girl he had dated in high school, not looking much older really, in her bubblegum-blue drugstore uniform with the little white collar and white strips on her short sleeves and a white belt tied neatly round her slim waist.
He looked at her small frame, her narrow shoulders, her long neck, the glint of the small gold cross she still wore round it, the shock of dark curls on her head. She glanced up suddenly at the customer she was serving; she was done scanning, the customer reached into his back pocket for his wallet, said something David couldn’t hear; he saw the girl smile, say something back.
She looked tired, David thought, but still beautiful, there had always been a fragility about her, a person always on the verge of breaking. He felt something looking at her, a kind of stirring inside of him. He stepped out of the line and leaving the two items he had picked up on a shelf where they didn’t belong, he slipped out of the store.
The following morning, David went for a walk on the beach. He rose early, before the sun, and drove straight down, arriving, as he had hoped, at a time when the sand and the sea and the rocks were his alone, before the rest of the world woke to claim its share.
He had thought about her again, the girl in the drugstore, briefly in his hotel room, just before he had fallen asleep, but then when he woke in the morning, it was gone. I believe in the idea that we all have two stories and that one of them is personal, Ameena once told him, and the personal is what’s true, and what’s real. More real than anything public. For some reason thinking of the girl made him think of that, though he wasn’t sure why.
He walked the long stretch of sandy beach, his feet making soft, impermanent prints on the sand, his presence forcing the resting gulls out of their reverie and into the sun-spangled sky with loud protesting squawks. The beach ended at a cliff and David climbed the rocks, wet with moss and spray, with the easy expertise of a man who has climbed that treacherous terrain more times than he cares to remember. Some while later, at the point where the bay came in, he stopped, and watched the gentle ebb and flow of the water below him, forming a sort of inlet, a rock pool. They used to play here as kids, Abe and him and the other li
ttle kids from school, in this exact spot, the shallow pool teeming with creatures that would appear like a miracle, and then vanish with the tide – he and the other children would wade in with their swimming shorts, the water up to their knees, and play at being fishermen, catching crabs and bristle worms and whelks with their little hand nets. David marvelled at the memory, at how vivid it still was.
He found a flattened bit of rock and sat down, his legs dangling off the cliff edge, the rock pool below him. Funny, he thought, how the memories of happiness, forgotten in the blur of life, could sharpen again, so quickly, so crisply, when you returned to the place where those memories were born. Same for sadness, those memories of sadness. That was true too.
Classical Sufi scholars, Ameena had said in that same conversation about the two stories, believe that there are two intersecting notions of transcendence. One is to gaze out at the universe and to consider that whatever you see reflects what you are. The other one is to look inside yourself and recognise that the universe is present in you.
‘Hello David,’ a soft voice called next to him, startling him. He hadn’t heard anyone approach.
‘Oh hey,’ he said, surprised by her, by how the essential loveliness of her face remained unchanged even after all these years.
‘I saw you,’ she said, ‘at the store yesterday, you didn’t see me. I asked around later, after my shift was done, they said you were staying at the hotel. This morning I thought, if you hadn’t left town yet, that you might be here.’
‘How would you know that?’
‘When you know someone, David, you know someone.’
She looked away. The wind had picked up and she pulled her yellow cardigan closer around her thin body. David noted again how tired she looked.
‘Can I sit down?’ she asked.
‘Yes, yes, of course, sorry,’ David said, shifting slightly to one side to make room for her.
She sat down next to him on the rock, her hands on either side of her, palms facing down. He noticed how small her hands were, how pale.
‘I’m sorry about your mom,’ she said after a while.
‘Thank you,’ David replied.
She chuckled suddenly, and her face lit up, a sudden ping of memory. ‘She never liked me, you know, your mom. But whether it was me or my religion she felt such distaste for, I don’t know.’
David laughed. ‘Don’t be silly,’ he lied, ‘she liked you fine.’ It struck him how familiar he felt with her, how safe. The sensation of walking back into one’s home after a long trip away, of sleeping on one’s own bed. He had not expected that feeling so many years later.
‘Oh please, I may have been young, but I’m not stupid. You always know when someone doesn’t like you! Anyway, it doesn’t matter. She was a good person and she had real magic in her fingers – the best piano teacher the school could have had.’
David smiled. ‘Do you still sing?’
He remembered even now how sweet her voice used to be, how they would often sing together, David and the girl – how his mother would begrudgingly admit how perfectly suited they sounded, at least vocally, if not in any other way.
She laughed, a sad little laugh. ‘Not in years,’ she said softly. ‘One needs a reason to sing. Anyway, how have you been? Are you still in New York?’
He nodded. ‘I’ve been okay, thanks. Pretty good actually. I work in an ad agency. Branding stuff, you know, consumer goods and things. I get to play music. Jazz. Nothing big, just little gigs, here and there. Not as much as I’d like, but still, it’s something. I get to play with some really great guys. I’m working on writing my own stuff. I’m seeing someone… she’s incredible.’
‘Wow, that’s great!’ she said. ‘I’m really happy for you.’
There was something about the way she said it, the way she nodded and her smile and how her body shifted away ever so slightly, that he knew she meant it, she wasn’t just saying it, as people do. ‘And you?’ he said. ‘How have you been?’
She didn’t answer straight away, looked out at the waves. The tide was coming in now. In the distance they could see the moored sailboats bob up and down in the wind, their tall masts glinting in the morning light.
‘Jazz…’ she said softly after a while, ‘that passion never died, huh?’
‘Nope,’ David replied, shaking his head, ‘that passion never died.’
She put her small hands together on her lap and looked down at them.
They sat like that for a long time listening to the sound of the sea-foam wearing down the rock edge bit by bit, stripping layer after layer, reducing it over years and years, patiently, persistently, to grains of sand, to insignificance.
‘Ya well,’ she said finally, ‘what can I tell you? You went to college, I went to Boston. I waited some tables, worked some bars, fell into the wrong company. It spiralled down fast, David, much faster than you can imagine. I went to rehab…’
She hesitated. ‘Abe came to visit me there.’
‘Abe did?’
‘David, it wasn’t like that… well, not exactly…’
David shook his head, his face half scornful, half pitying. ‘That little shit. Everything I had, he wanted.’
She touched his hand. ‘David no, it’s not what you think. He was there, that’s all, he was there for me.’ She swallowed as though there was something lodged in her throat, something hard and unforgiving. ‘Then, I met someone. In rehab. He used to call me his guardian angel, said I saved his soul. Said other things too. Swept me off my feet.’
She clasped her fingers together on her lap, so hard, David noticed, that her nails made little red streaks on the backs of her hands.
‘God, I was so stupid. We got out the same time. We made promises. He stayed clean for three months, maybe less. He was stealing money from me and I didn’t even know it. Then one day, he took everything I had, wiped me clean and left. I was eight months pregnant.’
‘Shit,’ David said, ‘I don’t know what to say… that’s just terrible.’
She shrugged slightly, as if to admit that there was nothing really that one could say.
‘I have a child who is autistic,’ she said, ‘he’s six. Look.’ She fished a battered phone out of the pocket of her dress and held it in front of him. ‘That’s my Adam,’ she said, smiling at the picture of a little boy with a dark storm of unruly curls and deep blue eyes.
‘He looks just like you,’ David said.
‘Everyone says that,’ she said proudly.
Then she added softly, ‘He doesn’t sleep very well, doesn’t like the dark. So, I stay up with him most nights. We talk.’
‘I’m sorry, Abby.’
‘Don’t be. I love him so, so much, sometimes I feel I can hardly breathe.’
‘No, I mean. I’m sorry about… I’m just sorry. That’s all.’
She dismissed that with a quick shake of her dark curls.
‘You do what you have to in life, you make provisions.’
The wind was gusty now, the masts of the sailboats dancing gaily in their moored posts. Stomp, jump, boogie-woogie. Far away in the marina, the screen door of the diner slammed shut.
‘He plays the piano,’ she continued, ‘he’s got a real gift. Your mother would have been happy to hear him.’
You little girl, David thought, you poor little girl.
‘That’s great that he does that, that you spotted that gift in him,’ he said.
She straightened up suddenly and clapped her hands together, a look of unbidden joy on her face.
‘Will you listen to him play?’
‘I really need to get back to New York, Abby.’
‘David, please?’
3.25
‘I just wanted to hurt him because he hurt us.’
She nodded. Perched like that on the edge of his bed, with his thick, glossy black hai
r falling over his eyes, she noticed how guileless he looked, still a boy.
‘I understand that,’ she said, ‘we all feel like that sometimes. I have a list of people I want to hurt because they hurt me. But you can’t go around doing things just because you want to. What happened was bad.’
He looked down. ‘I wanted to kill him. I just didn’t know how to do it. If I’d have known how to do it, I’d have done it.’
She didn’t say anything.
‘Does having bad thoughts make you a bad person?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she answered truthfully.
Kareem rubbed his index finger over a pattern on the bedspread as if he was trying to scrub it off.
Then he looked up at his sister. ‘Well, I’m glad you’re here,’ he said.
‘Ameena Hamid! How could you not think of telling us you were coming?’ her mother asked indignantly when Ameena showed up at the door earlier that day, dragging her suitcase behind her.
‘I didn’t want you to cook five hundred different things on my account,’ Ameena replied laughing, hugging her. ‘Hi Mum, it’s so, so, so good to see you.’
‘Your father will be happy you are here,’ Zoya said, wiping her eyes.
‘Where is David?’ her father asked, appearing at the doorway, his eyes searching the area behind Ameena as if David was hiding there, ready to jump out and surprise them all.
Ameena realised with some shock that he looked old, much older than she remembered, much older than she would have imagined he could look. How did he get so old so fast? He had lost weight, his hair seemed to have thinned and his shoulders drooped in a way she didn’t remember. And his eyes, in his eyes she saw that the light had gone out. Where was the energetic, idealistic man of her childhood? Where was the man driven by some insatiable need to always do good, to keep everyone happy all the time? Where was her father? And who was this, in his place?
