by Sonali Dev
She turned to him. Whatever she was struggling with made it hard for her to twist in her seat. She did it nonetheless.
“I’m fine. You?”
Just for that, he wanted to keep driving. “I’m ready for a break.”
The relief in her body was tangible. There was no physical manifestation of it. Her shoulders didn’t sag, her face didn’t relax. It was in her breathing—it eased. It had been his best skill as a physician. To know what his patients bore when they lacked the tools to articulate it. Jen had worshiped him for it. Her medical skills had been more tangible. She could make surgical magic with the most archaic supplies. Together they had been unstoppable.
He pulled the car into a parking spot so fast he hit the curb. Before he could apologize, Jess slipped out of the car. No surprise. He, on the other hand, wanted nothing more than to stay within the confines of the car, within the comfort of something.
She squeezed her eyes shut and fished her bag out of the backseat as though she were grabbing something from the jaws of a mad dog, slung it over her shoulder, and waited.
What the hell was in that bag? “Leave it in the car. I’ll lock it,” he said. She was going to break her shoulder, for shit’s sake.
Without a word and with only the barest hesitation, she threw the bag in the backseat again, and he felt like such a jerk he wanted to pull it out and carry it for her. He turned away and started for the glum redbrick rest area, her footsteps crunching gravel behind him.
* * *
When Nikhil came out of the men’s room, Jess was waiting for him. From the look she gave him, he knew she had hurried because she was still mortified about having him drag her out of the restroom the last time. Without a word she headed back to the parking lot and without a word he followed her. But she stopped so abruptly, he almost ran into her and knocked her over. Her body froze in that way he’d seen it do so many times in the short while he’d known her. It reminded him of a dam of ice, seemingly fragile yet strong enough to hold anything in.
He walked past her, resisting the urge to touch her elbow. What the hell had happened to her in a car? He clicked the Jeep open. She started at the sound. It was the barest movement, but he noticed it. Just the way he noticed her eyes sparkling with helplessness when he held the door open. She didn’t move.
“Are you hungry?” he asked to distract her, but her stomach groaned so loudly in answer that her embarrassment escaped in a smile. That sudden self-conscious quirking of her lips threw her wide-open for the beat of second.
He slammed the door shut, not ready to let that smile disappear again behind that awful combination of terror and courage.
The glass-and-metal enclosure behind them was lined with vending machines. Before he knew it, he was dislodging every kind of sodium- and sugar-loaded treat from its metal perch. Her eyes followed his plunder of the machines with so much enthusiasm—which for her meant the slightest brightening of the brown in her eyes and the pink in her cheeks—that he kicked himself for having forgotten about food. He filled her hands, then his own, and they dropped down on the grass side by side.
“I’m so sorry we didn’t stop to eat. You must be starving.”
She was already halfway through a packet of tiny donuts. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to answer until it’s all gone.” She pointed to the stack of packets, her mouth full of donut, and proceeded to rip open and annihilate one after another.
Every once in a while she pushed something into his hand, and he in turn pushed it into his mouth and forced himself to chew and swallow. But only because he didn’t want to talk about how he couldn’t eat.
She folded each packet neatly into a square and tucked it under her crossed legs as she ate without pause.
“Where do you put it all?” he said without thinking when every crumb was gone.
She tilted her head, a confused frown folding between her brows. “My stomach, usually. You sure you’re a doctor?”
“It’s a manner of speaking when someone skinny eats a lot.”
Her lips quirked. “Really?”
“Oh.” She was teasing him? Maybe it was all that sugar. Or maybe it was the fact that he was being a patronizing jerk.
“And I’m not skinny,” she said. “At least not for my line of work.” As soon as she’d said it she stiffened, because of course she had let that slip without meaning to.
“What’s your line of work?”
She waited a beat too long to answer him. “I’m a dancer.”
A dancer? That would definitely have been his very last guess. She was far too serious to be a dancer. With all those thorns sticking out of her and her discomfort with attracting attention, how did she ever get on a stage? Not to mention being a heart patient. That had to make it hard.
“You look like I just told you I’m a ghost whisperer or a psychic.” Wow, and there it was again, another tiny smile. Sugar and salt were magic on this girl.
“What kind of dance?” Maybe she was a ballet dancer. That whole Goddess of Darkness thing went with ballet, didn’t it? He couldn’t imagine it being any kind of happy dance.
The smile vanished in another one of those ninja flash moves of which she was master. Instead of answering, her eyes landed on the car and she started collecting the folded-up packets and stuffed them in a garbage can.
“Junk food and generating garbage. Welcome to America!” he said.
“Don’t call it junk. It was delicious.” She surveyed the grass where they’d been sitting and picked up a chip she had missed. “And yes, I know ‘junk’ is just a manner of speaking.”
Yup. Total patronizing jerk.
She poked the grass to make sure nothing had been left behind, but he had a feeling it was also because she couldn’t make herself go back to the car.
“Is it all cars?” he asked.
She looked up at the car and gave the slightest headshake. “No.”
That’s all the answer he would get.
She started toward the Jeep, shoulders squared for battle, and he had all the answers he needed.
“Will removing the top help?”
She started. “You can do that?”
He was crap at cars and machines, but how hard could it be? He got in the car, pushed around the edges of the soft top, and found a few levers. Fortunately, things popped and unsnapped and he was able to flip back the entire fabric roof covering the front seat. It wasn’t the entire top but it was something, and he thanked the engineers at Jeep for not making him look like a fool.
She stood there, frozen, watching the late-afternoon sun flood through the cab. He got out and secured the flap in place and opened the car door for her, mostly to get her to move.
She looked up at him, her incredibly delicate jaw clenched, her eyes filled with something he hadn’t seen there before. Something he did not care to define.
He hadn’t realized how large her eyes were, their upward sweep unusual. She must be from one of the Northeast Indian states. Her irises were huge. Except you hardly got a look at them when she was holding herself in her meditative stance with her eyes heavily lidded.
They weren’t heavily lidded now.
The long column of her throat worked, struggling with what she was trying to say.
“Nikhil?”
His stomach clenched in response to that tentative tone.
“Thank you.”
“For what? For starving you?”
He had heard of smiles being sad, but this one bled. And was so damn brave, he couldn’t bear it.
“For everything.” She touched his shoulder, a whisper of a caress that lasted no more than a second, then she braced herself and sank into the car.
He slammed her door shut and took far too long to make the trip around to the driver’s side. His arms and legs felt like water. Like melting ice. He touched his shoulder. “I don’t want you to touch me,” he wanted to tell her, but they slid back inside the silence that had engulfed them on their drive out of Miami.
> It wasn’t the same silence as before. The open top meant far too much wind noise for conversation. She closed her eyes against it as they merged onto the freeway, but this time her body didn’t go stiff enough to splinter.
Having some food in her system probably helped. The windswept silence stretched on, broken only by the flapping of the soft top he’d apparently not secured as well as he’d thought. Just when he was sure sleep had claimed her, her low voice floated through the wind and the flapping. “Jen was right. You are different from any man I’ve ever met.”
Jen.
For the first time in two years, Nikhil had forgotten about his wife. The heavy, painful weight slammed back into his heart—which was hers and hers alone.
His body recognized the pain and restlessness and eased back into it. It wasn’t relief exactly, not comfort either, but a feeling of being covered up again after someone had stripped him naked.
Cars whizzed past, flashing at him like the memories he would never be able to let go of. Hour after hour, they slashed through him, punishing him with their clarity.
Next to him, Jess’s arms stayed wrapped around herself, her face peaceful in sleep. No, peace was too benign a word for her. She was placid, like the upper cool crust of lava. Under it she hid more than he wanted to know. Under it she hid the only thing about her that mattered. Jen’s heart.
Jen, whose heart had hungered for life and justice and change. His wife had fixed things. Defeated them. But this impostor she’d chosen to bring into their lives was stone. Lava hardened and frozen so cold it could burn off your limbs.
How can you talk to her? Why her? When I’m still here. He wanted to speak the words into the falling darkness, needed the grief to scrape his throat.
For as long as he had known her, his wife had always known what she wanted. She’d always had a plan. Why had she brought this stranger into his life?
Why, Jen?
She didn’t answer.
But that didn’t stop him from repeating the question over and over as they flew toward home.
12
I don’t think I believe in justice quite as much as Nic does. He believes in it like someone who’s only ever known justice. He glimpses evil through windows. He’s never in the room with it. Sometimes I hate him for it.
—Dr. Jen Joshi
The one thing Asif hated more than anything else was being threatened.
He was disappointed in the politician chutiya for treating him like some common criminal and trying to scare him. A common criminal wouldn’t know how to recruit a computer genius away from India’s most prestigious engineering college and get him to set up a system that matched up rich people who needed organs with poor people who happened to be lugging them around in their worthless bodies.
Even if the idiot was passed out half the time from not knowing when to stop with the smack. Youngsters these days didn’t understand balance. He sank into the spaceship-style chair he had paid for, in front of the desk that was crammed with the millions of rupees’ worth of toys he had bought the druggie bastard, and snapped his fingers at the bed where the lump of genius lay unmoving.
It was all the command Laloo needed. His most faithful dog grabbed the boy’s skinny, passed-out arse and dragged him to the bathroom.
The sound of water turning on and the boy being shoved under the shower made Asif want to go in there and shove his head into the commode. Look at the house he had given the idiot. If he had stayed in his fancy engineering college, he wouldn’t have been able to afford a place like this even after forty years of working his balls off.
Some people had no gratitude.
“Hi, Bhai!” the wet idiot grinned worshipfully at Asif, dragging water across the pure-white marble Asif was paying a minor fortune for.
“You trying to kill yourself on my time?” Asif asked.
“More like killing myself on your dime, Bhai.” He chuckled at his own fancy English humor. “You won’t let me die, Bhai,” he said. “Especially not after you hear what I have for you.”
The bastard had never disappointed Asif and he didn’t this time. Asif had been right. He was a fucking genius. Seven matches. He had found Asif seven matches.
That doctor bitch had already made Asif rich beyond his dreams with her registry database. With all those details about blood type and plasma and this and that enzyme that she had collected, she had practically handed him a menu card of organs from useless living bodies no one would miss, address and age and all. All he had to do was chop them up and serve them to the clients his druggie pet dog found him using all those computer skills, then put the leftover bodies through a shredder and dump the mess in construction sand. God knows there were more foundations being dug around Mumbai than even he would ever need.
Maybe he was wrong about these foreign bastards who thought they could come feed off India’s sewers to assuage their own guilt for being born in mansions. Dr. Joshi had sure as shit changed his life. Like hell was he ever giving up any of it. There were still tens of thousands of names on there. It was his golden goose and he wasn’t chopping off its head just because some politician chutiya thought he had something on him.
He already knew from the beauty parlor bitch that the politician had some chinky-looking woman dye her hair like Dr. Joshi.
Now, if it were him, he would only make someone dye their hair like someone else if he wanted that person to impersonate the other person. But why impersonate a dead woman? Unless you were trying to convince someone she wasn’t dead.
Aha!
But whom would the politician need to convince of that in order to screw Asif Khan over? Only one person would know that for sure. The bitch who’d dyed her hair at Beauty’s. She was his key. And there wasn’t a lock in the city Asif Khan couldn’t open if he wanted to. Finding keys was his favorite pastime.
The wet, grinning fool who was eyeing him for his reward like a hungry dog wasn’t the only genius around. Asif threw the bag of goodies on the bed. “There’s new syringes in there too. Don’t reuse and don’t share. Taking care of your family if you die isn’t part of the deal.”
But the bastard wouldn’t die, because Asif never left anything to chance. He never gave him enough to kill him, and if anyone else in the city sold to him they knew that Asif Khan would make sure they didn’t live to sell to anyone else.
13
I’m surrounded by medicos—physicians, nurses, techs, all these practitioners of medicine. But we’re different from the medicos who don’t seek out the mission life. It might seem like this life calls to us because we want to be healers, but maybe we’re here because we have the greatest need to find healing.
—Dr. Jen Joshi
Nikhil took the two keys the lady at the motel registration desk was holding out and shoved them into his pocket with a “thank you.” When he turned around, Jess was standing just inside the sliding glass doors, the floodlights from the porch behind her illuminating her no-longer-red hair. The brown strands that matched her eyes exactly fell in short wisps around her face and kissed her cheeks. Instead of walking toward her, he walked toward a table arranged with coffee and tea.
She had slept through most of the journey, stirring to wakefulness only as they pulled into the motel parking lot. He had spent the entire drive wondering what he was doing here. On solid ground with a stranger. Headed home after two years.
“Coffee? Tea?” he said over his shoulder, knowing she had joined him in staring at the table. The thick smell of dark-brewed coffee that had been sitting too long assaulted his senses.
“Tea,” she said, filing through the tea box. She picked out an orange packet that said Chai and held it up. “Do you know if this is any good?”
Such a mundane question. Yet the intimacy of it made his insides burn.
He filled a Styrofoam cup with hot water. “I don’t drink tea. My mom always drinks either English Breakfast or Darjeeling. Those are the most like chai. Without spice or ginger.”
“Oh, I ha
te ginger in my chai.” She fished out a packet of English Breakfast.
He took it from her, unwrapped it, and dunked the tea bag into hot water and followed it with creamer.
When he looked up she was holding out a cup of coffee. Didn’t even have to ask him how he took it or anything.
They exchanged cups and wary looks.
And it was too much.
That simple act was too much.
She took a sip of her tea, studying him over the rim. He couldn’t bring his cup to his lips. He tossed it in the trash and extracted a room key from his pocket. “Room two-one-four. Can you find it?”
She gulped down the sip she had just taken. “If I focus really hard.” She tried her almost-smile but didn’t make it.
Which was just as well because he couldn’t do that weird, friendly tête-à-tête thing again.
“I’ll see you in the morning then.” With nothing more than that he turned around and walked into the night.
He had left his bag in the car. She, of course, had hers strapped across her chest. The motel was located in the middle of the kind of neighborhood motels are often located in. Lots of flashing street signs. Many of the ones here bore the word adult.
Just the kind of neighborhood his mother would have freaked out about. Just the kind of neighborhood Jen would have wanted to go exploring in. His hand went to his hair. The weeklong growth scraped his palm.
I love your hair, Spikey.
He pulled his hand away and pushed it into his pocket. His jeans rode low on his hips. All of his clothes were too big. His mother was going to have a fit about it. For a moment he felt the sweet bite of anticipation at seeing his parents, at having Aie chew his head off about something. About anything.
But he knew she wouldn’t say a word about it. Not the weight, not the hair, not Jen. She would treat him as if he were made of glass. Of shattered glass held together by sheer chance of pressure and weight. The way she’d done every time she and Baba came down to Miami to see him. Such a nice ship, beta. Such a nice clinic.
