by Sonali Dev
Joy wasn’t a boisterous child by any means, but he still managed to get a scraped knee or elbow every time they went to the park. The clothes in her bag were a sea of black. Pants, jeans, T-shirts, and sweatshirts, neatly ironed and crisply folded, like the layers in a slab of black slate. She dug into the bottom of the bag and found her dance bandanna. She’d worn it to every rehearsal for the past five years. It had been worn and washed so much that it was muslin soft. She folded it diagonally and then rolled it a few times to form a bandage, then bound it around his elbow. Still not a sound, not a movement.
The wet towel sat on the nightstand. Without thinking about it, she reached for it. His face was streaked with dirt. How had he fallen? How had he become such a mess? It was an absurd question. She knew exactly what had happened. And it hadn’t been today.
She wiped the wet towel across his cheeks. The grime wiped away easily. Under all that dirt she unearthed surprisingly lovely skin, bronze and gold tones and not a single spot or pore. Even his stubble followed a neat line across his jaw. There were deep creases in his cheeks, where both a smile and a frown brought on dimples. Suddenly, she had an overwhelming urge to know what his smile looked like. Not just the hints he’d thrown her way, but his real smile.
She wiped across his jaw. She hadn’t realized how fine boned he was. That sharply angled jaw, the high, wide forehead, those long-lashed eyes of chocolate, every feature was perfectly etched. But somehow she was sure that even if all that wretched grief and anger lifted, it would still be hard to comprehend the beauty of his face, because he wouldn’t let you. He would draw you instead with that sharp intelligence and that gentle kindness that had fallen on her unexpectedly and in fleeting bursts like passing showers at the start of a monsoon, but that continued to drench her like raindrops that had soaked too deep.
Having cleaned one side of his face, she pushed at his shoulder to turn him. He went over easily, a shuddering breath his only complaint.
For another long moment his half-clean face captivated her, two faces spliced together. One dirty, one clean. One dark, one bright. Both tinged with pain, but one brought to some semblance of life. She started wiping at the dirty half of his face. This half was grimier, harder to get clean, but in the end she managed to make it halfway decent.
Next came his shoes. The second she slipped them off his feet, he groaned as if he’d been eased out from under a great burden and pulled his knees up, folding himself into a fetal position.
This was how her Joy slept. Elbows to knees, everything pulled in tight.
She’d done enough, more than enough. As a favor to Jen she had taken care of her husband. But to face the task ahead she needed sleep. She tried to push off the bed, but something tugged at her sleeve. Nikhil’s hand clutched her sweatshirt. She tried to pry it out of his grip, but he pulled it closer to his chest with such need she could not bring herself to put any kind of force into it.
She slid off the bed, her knees landing on the carpet, and sank back to the floor, her torso leaning against the bed, her head resting on her outstretched arm held in place by her sleeve fisted in his fingers. He took a deep breath, and for a moment the frown between his brows eased. That was the last thing she remembered before she fell into the abyss of exhaustion that had been calling her name.
* * *
Nikhil woke to find his wife’s hair splayed against his pillow, his face pressed into the heavy silk. He inhaled, breathing her in. She had changed her shampoo. He liked it. A little softer, more floral than her usual, but nice. He stroked his cheek against it and lifted his hand to pull her closer. He clutched air and then cold sheets. There was no body next to him.
He lifted his face and found only her head on the bed. He sprang upright, his heart beating like a drum. He was about to scream, but he saw an arm stretched out next to her head. He followed it and found the rest of her. Life rushed back into his limbs.
She was on the floor, her arm reaching for him. Her face was pressed into the mattress. The familiar aching tenderness rose in his heart but stuttered. Something didn’t feel right. It felt like a dream that had lingered into wakefulness.
His hand went to her hair, meaning to lift it off her face, but something held him back. Let her sleep, he told himself. She never gets enough sleep.
She raised her head. A glassy brown gaze met his. An alien gaze.
Jess. Anger surged through him. How dare she be here? Where Jen should have been.
In an instant, the sleep in her eyes cleared. Her brows drew together with concern. “How are you feeling?”
The question was too intimate. Why the hell should he feel anything at all? “I’m just fine. What are you doing in my bed?”
She pulled her arm off the bed and scooted back a little on the carpet. Technically, she wasn’t in his bed, but she didn’t correct him. She just wrapped her arms around her knees and drew herself in.
He got off the bed. Springing to his feet like that made the room spin. His head felt like someone had placed a bomb inside it and lit the fuse. She was next to him when he opened his eyes, steadying him with one hand and holding out a glass of water with the other.
He wanted to swipe the water from her hand and push her away, but the queasiness cut off any chance of movement. All those mornings on the ship when he had started his day bent over the pot rose up to meet him. He flew to the bathroom and emptied his stomach almost solely through his nose.
She stood behind him but she didn’t touch him. Which was just as well, because being touched right now would lead to more gut emptying.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said when he was sure speaking wouldn’t cause more pressurized vomit to project from him. “Seriously, I don’t know what you’re trying. But it’s not going to happen.”
For one stretched-out, suspended moment, she looked as if he had slapped her. But only for one moment. He had the sense that he was seeing her in flashes. That she was two people, one who stood before him and another who flashed at him from behind her.
She took a step toward him and poured the glass of water she was holding into the toilet he had been hugging. Shame, because suddenly a glass of water was exactly what he needed.
“Why are you in my room anyway?”
“I’m not,” she said, sticking her chin out until, from his vantage point next to the can, the wings of her jaw seemed as sharp as knives. As sharp as the temper she was letting him see in one of those flashes. “This is not your room, it’s mine. You came here last night.”
He opened his mouth to speak. She raised a hand to shut him up. The huge sweatshirt lifted around her like a balloon, not exactly ammunition for seduction. “No. I don’t want to hear it. I’m going out to get some fresh air. Before I’m back please get out of my room.”
With that, she stormed out, slamming the door loud enough to indicate that the temper he’d seen simmering under her frozen-lava façade wasn’t his imagination. He tried to stand up, but his body wasn’t quite ready to let him off the hook yet. His stomach did another kickass backflip, and air and bile and definitely some of his esophageal lining flew hurtling into the inky-blue water. He was done with the Jack. Definitely done with this particular morning ritual, thank you very much.
He could have sworn he was letting himself into his own room last night, but he must’ve grabbed the duplicate key to her room. Not surprising at all, given that standing up straight had been a problem. She hadn’t chastened him for it, or thrown him out on his butt. All she had done was help him and all he’d done was be a prized jerk.
He pushed himself off the pot and got himself a glass of water. Meeting his own eyes in the mirror was out of the question, but the rest of him was near impossible to recognize. There was a huge splatter of blood and dirt on one side of his shirt. He had broken into a run after leaving the bar and fallen.
He squeezed his throbbing temples. Something tugged at his elbow but he ignored it. The absolute anger blanketed over wounded dignity on Jess’s face when she
had asked him to get out made another bout of nausea rise inside him. He grabbed his shoes and let himself out of her room. For the first time in a long time, he had the urge to get cleaned up.
15
Something about Rahul reminds me so much of Nic. Everything about them on the outside is different, and yet that part of me that aligns with Nic, that makes me me, that’s the part that recognizes Rahul.
—Dr. Jen Joshi
If Rahul knew anything, he knew that when evidence was tampered with, it meant something really nefarious was going on and someone really high up was involved.
“You’re right to smell a rat, boss!” Ramesh, his information specialist, said over the phone. He was going to lose his job if anyone found out he was digging through a private hospital’s records without authorization. They both were, but this only proved that they had unearthed something. “When I first searched through the organ donor database last week, the records for Dr. Joshi’s recipients listed two kidneys and eyes but that’s all. Everything but a heart showed up. Which is normal, because heart transplant cases are next to nonexistent. But then I went back to check on something and suddenly there’s a heart recipient and there’s no record of the database being updated. Someone changed it without knowing I had already looked. If I’d been even a few days late, we wouldn’t even know.”
Rahul opened the file and read the name on the recipient form for the hundredth time. “So were you able to locate this Jess Koirala?”
Ramesh’s voice grew even more excited. The young recruit loved his job in that way only the really young can. Rahul wished there was a way to hold on to that. “Amazingly enough, no one by that name exists in Mumbai. It’s almost as though someone came up with that name after making sure it didn’t exist and then used it to falsify the record.”
“And the address?” All Rahul had asked Ramesh to find was a name so he could call Jen’s husband and try again. Not that the good doctorsaab was taking his calls. But this put a whole new angle on the case.
“The building was torn down six months ago to build a mall. It was a leave-and-license rental property and all the renters were paid off. No forwarding addresses.”
“Naturally.”
“Exactly! So, boss, the address doesn’t exist, and you know what else doesn’t exist?”
“Jess Koirala.”
“Exactly!”
He thanked Ramesh and left him to continue digging. But he had a feeling they weren’t going to find anything more from the hospital records. First, Jen’s diary had been stolen from right under his nose, then, the donor registry Jen had worked so hard to build had been erased without a trace, and now someone had tampered with Jen’s health records. He’d investigated everyone from the senior-most officers to the newest hawaldars on his team, offered immunity if the diary showed up. But it remained gone, Jen’s words as lost as the cause and the evidence she had sacrificed her life for, and now every trace of the lease on life she’d given someone was also gone.
Guilt coated his ever-present anger. He had promised to protect her when he’d sent her into the alligator’s jaws. Even though it had often felt like her charging ahead while he tried to hold her back. Jen’s beautiful eyes sparkled in his head as if she had just smacked him down about something and flounced out of his office.
Do your job, DCP Savant. It should be simple enough.
But it wasn’t simple. He was choking on red tape. One of his instructors at the academy had once told him that an IPS officer’s success depended on how well he could navigate bureaucracy. With a mentor like Kirit Patil, Rahul hadn’t realized how true those words were. Why was it that it took losing things before you recognized the full value of them?
He needed bodies. Without bodies, he couldn’t prove that the disappearances in the slum were deaths, let alone murders to carve out organs. And without murders he had no case, and without a case, no funding or authority to investigate. He needed both to go searching for undocumented bodies. But those who didn’t exist couldn’t disappear.
I have zero patience for anyone who uses “couldn’t” as a crutch.
That was how Jen had responded when he’d told her about Kimi and how they couldn’t find her a match for years.
Jen had reminded him so much of Kimi. Jen had Kimi’s fiery spirit. She had been what he had always known Kimi could be, once they fixed her heart. He had spent all those childhood years watching that spirit triumph every time she struggled for her next breath, every time she struggled to fight off her next fever. For Kimi and Jen, he had no choice but to keep going until he had put away the bastards who were carving up innocents for the cost of their organs.
Maybe he was looking in the wrong place. Maybe the thread to follow was Jess Koirala. All he needed to do was find Jess Koirala or at least find out who had fabricated her and why.
16
Sometimes marriage terrifies me. If I don’t keep a piece of me for myself, won’t I be just one half of a whole? And if I let that go, what will I have left when there is no us?
—Dr. Jen Joshi
“Where the hell have you been?” Nikhil jumped up from the open stairway he was sitting on. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
Were she a different person she might have believed that he looked worried, but she was nothing if not realistic. He was angry because she had disappeared without telling him. She didn’t really care, because he had essentially accused her of trying to seduce him and asked her to get out.
But he had been in hell at the time, so she was going to let it go. Then there was the other little fact, that she had no choice but to let it go. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize how far the pharmacy was.”
Now he just looked confused. “What’s wrong? Are you not feeling well?” He studied her in that way he had, as though everything but what was wrong with her was immaterial. He was such a doctor, and he wasn’t even trying. She refused to let that stupid concern of his make her stupid belly clench again. Refused to let it dig up the memory of his hands on her skin, the back of his fingers pressed into her scar. “I’m fine.”
She handed him the bottle of water she was holding and tore open the packet of Alka-Seltzer she had picked up at the pharmacy. Sweetie got the worst headaches when he drank, and this always helped him. She took the bottle back, broke each large pill in half so it would fit and dropped the pieces into the bottle, and pushed it back at him.
He watched the water fizz and bubble with eyes so tortured she might as well have offered to suck his soul from him.
“I’m not a doctor, but I do know you have to drink it before the fizz is gone. Otherwise it won’t work.”
He touched the bottle, but he didn’t take it from her. “Actually, the fizz makes no difference to the efficacy. The fizz just helps it dissolve without a spoon.”
She tried not to roll her eyes, and failed. His eyebrows lifted the slightest bit and the hint of something like amusement dented his cheek.
She pushed the bottle into his hand. “Drink.”
He did, his throat working as he drank. His stubble dithered off and disappeared down his jaw and down his neck. The tendons on his neck were long and lean, just like the rest of him.
“You didn’t have to do this,” he said when he was done.
Without responding, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a bag of lemon drops. “These are supposed to help with hangovers too.”
“Why are you doing this?” He looked at the candy, that same tortured look on his face again, as if what she was offering was so much more than just the candy.
“We have to get on the road. We need to get to her things.”
“Jen, her name is Jen.”
“I know what her name is, Nikhil. And her name was Jen, since we are getting technical. And before you go making all sorts of assumptions again, the only thing I want out of this. The. Only. Thing.” She gave him her hardest look. She wanted no doubt in his mind about this. “Is to find that evidence, and then I need to get back
home.” To her baby.
He brought his hand to his hair, once more finding nothing to grip. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” He met her eyes. “In fact, I shouldn’t have said any of that stuff I said before.”
Yes, he shouldn’t have. “And just so you know, when I told you I was a dancer, I don’t know what you understood it to mean, but I’m a chorus dancer. A backup dancer in films. I . . . I dance only for the camera . . . as part of a dance troupe . . . not . . .”
He tilted his head to one side, a curious frown folding between his brows. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I’m not a bar dancer, not, not that kind of . . .”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
You’re a whore. With a whore’s body. This is what whores get.
She pushed away the leering faces in her head and raised her hand to stop his words. “I was not trying to get in your, in your . . . I have no interest in . . . Are you smiling?”
Sad as his eyes were, he was definitely smiling. Heaven help her, those dents in his cheeks, they were by no means little. They stripped away everything harsh in his face and transformed it. She stepped away from him, trying to get away from what that smile did to him.
“You can’t even say the words. How could I, how could anyone ever think of you that way?” He looked incredulous. More than anything he could have said, even more than that smile, his incredulity pooled in her chest, wet and hot.
“Hey.” He lifted his hand but stopped it inches from her cheek and then dug it back into his pocket. “The way I behaved last night. It had nothing to do with you. That was just . . . I was just . . .”
