A Change of Heart

by Sonali Dev

  Could two people be from more different worlds?

  “Why is that funny?” he asked.

  “Not funny.” No, funny wasn’t the only reason you had to laugh at life. “Which of these are your boxes?”

  His gaze swept the room. His eyes hitched on two yellow suitcases pushed against the far wall and finally he let her hand go.

  “So how old were you when Ria Parkar came to stay?” she asked, knowing she had to keep him talking.

  “Eight. She didn’t speak for weeks when she first got here.” He walked to the suitcases and went down on his knees next to one. “My parents spent every waking moment with her. I tried to be friendly, but all she did was cry. I remember being so annoyed with her.”

  Jess squatted down next to him.

  “I didn’t recognize it then, but it was the worst case of jealousy ever.” He laid the suitcase down flat.

  She followed his gaze. JEN + NIC. The words were emblazoned in shimmering metallic red across the bright yellow plastic.

  “It’s nail polish.” His fingers skated the air over the letters, a horribly sad half smile on his lips. “Then Vic came to stay. Vic was my best friend. My way-cooler best friend. I was this fat, uncoordinated kid. Vic was athletic and funny, and he was just so blasé about it. Always acted as if I was exactly like him, not the ungainly nerd everyone else saw.” He pulled his hand away from the letters he’d been trying to touch. “If Ria had taken my parents’ attention, she completely mesmerized Vic.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that, our little team of Vic and Nic was gone. Of course I reacted like a total brat.”

  He turned back to the red nail polish and this time his hands touched the sparkly names and stroked them.

  “What did you do?” she prodded, her need to keep his mind away from that bag and on less painful memories overwhelming her.

  He looked at her gratefully and went on. “We were riding our bikes in the park behind the house one day. I knew of this low-hanging branch that shot across the bike path. I stopped my bike and walked it around the branch, but before I could warn Ria she came up behind me. I knew she was behind me. I could’ve shouted out to her, but I didn’t.”

  “What happened?”

  “I can still hear the crack when the branch hit her head.” He pressed two fingers into the top of his head. “It was so loud I was sure she had cracked her skull and died.” The memory shone so clearly on his face it was like seeing the horror on his eight-year-old face.

  “I still remember praying as I raced home on my bike while Vic sat with her as she bled onto his lap. The ambulance, my parents, I remember everyone arriving in a haze. I never stopped praying. I felt sure she was going to die. It was like this cold, tight fist around my throat. I couldn’t leave her. Vic and I sat outside her hospital room as the adults took care of things. I swore I’d never, ever hurt anyone again. I swore. I promised if she came out of that okay, I would never be jealous again, never get angry again.

  “When she finally got out of bed two days later, that’s when I cried.”

  His hands shook on the number lock. He rolled the numbers. “Baba found me crying on the deck steps.” He snapped the lock open. “You know what he said to me?”

  She shook her head, although he wasn’t looking at her.

  “He said, ‘Nothing will ever change how much your aie and I love you. You know that, right?’ I remember knowing with absolute certainty that I was a fraud. That as soon as he found out the truth about what I had done, he’d know it.”

  “And you told him, didn’t you?” she said as he clutched the suitcase.

  “I told him I knew . . . I knew about the branch and that I could have stopped Ria from getting hurt and I didn’t.” Nikhil lifted the lid off the suitcase, but he didn’t open it up all the way. “Baba asked me if I had taken her on that path on purpose.”

  “Of course you hadn’t.” Her heart was beating hard. She wished he hadn’t let her hand go.

  He shook his head. “I didn’t know we were going to take that path, and I didn’t remember about the branch until I was almost under it. That’s when Baba told me about why Ria had come to stay with us. He told me that she’d been hurt, that she didn’t have anywhere else to go when her boarding school closed for the summer.

  “I remember the horror of thinking about Ria with no home. I remember asking him, ‘Can’t this be her home? Can’t we be her family?’ ‘We are.’ That’s what he said.” And with that Nikhil threw the suitcase open.

  24

  I identified another two bodies today. Two sisters I’d talked into getting on the registry. I remember every word they said to me, how they bickered with each other. Why do dead people live on forever? Dying should erase life, not leak into it as memories.

  —Dr. Jen Joshi

  Shimmering silk and intricately embroidered gold spilled from the bag as Nikhil threw it open. Just his luck that the first thing staring at him when he opened it was Jen’s wedding sari. Jade. That’s what she had called the color. It was Ria’s word, of course. The only way Jen would ever use jade for a color was if it identified a radiology dye. And yet on their wedding day she had looked as elegant, as beautiful, as impeccably put together as the most fastidious fashionista.

  He squeezed his eyes shut. Jen walking up the aisle to him as he waited for her under an altar of lilies, running those last few steps—it was a vision he was going to carry to his dying day. It would always be as fresh, as real, as the moment it happened.

  The silk slid between his fingers, every one of his senses searching for her beneath it. He’d peeled it off her body fast, too fast, mindless in his hurry to get to her. Her skin. Her smell. She had smelled like a drug. She had been a drug. Familiar, irresistible, sparking unfathomable hunger, bringing incomparable numbing peace. His tough, take-on-the-world wife had been his drug. She was charas to his charsi. Weed to his pothead.

  What kind of idiot smiled now? Here. Where his dead wife was all around him. In boxes and bags and lifeless saris. But he’d just called her “weed” and it was hilarious. And she would have thought so too.

  He let the sari go. How could you want something so badly and be so very tired of it all at once?

  “Nikhil?” The soft hand on his shoulder wasn’t her, he knew it wasn’t. And yet it kept him from folding over and throwing up the grief that consumed him.

  “Sometimes I feel like this isn’t happening. That I’ll wake up and she’ll be here and all of this will have been a nightmare.”

  “I know.”

  “How? How could you possibly know what this feels like?” Even as he said it he was certain she knew what it was to be altered by loss. “Was it Joy’s dad? Was he someone you loved?”

  That trademark blast of pain, which he’d grown to recognize, flickered across her face and was gone. “Will it be easier if I went through the bags?” she said with a gentleness that turned her into someone entirely different from that yogic Goddess of Darkness she wore so well.

  He let go of the sari he was gripping. “No.” He had to do this himself.

  He started filing through the saris. Shoving away the images of Jen in each one of them. The midnight-blue, in which Ria had first taught her how to wear a sari. The shimmering burgundy she had carried with the confidence of a princess at their reception. The black-and-gold, in which he had twirled and twirled her as they danced at Ria and Vic’s wedding. When she’d told him she was pregnant.

  When she’d told him she didn’t want to be.

  But she had learned to want it, for him. Because she’s yours, Spikey.

  “She’s ours,” he’d told her, and she’d repeated it in wonder. Because she’s ours.

  Their little girl.

  Under all the saris was the jewelry. Coordinated sets of necklaces and earrings and bracelets Aie had bought for her daughter-in-law even before Nikhil had met Jen. Nothing made Jen cry, but having his mother slip his grandmother’s gold bracelets onto her wrists at the engagement ceremony had made t
ears stream down her cheeks.

  She would have slipped those bracelets on their little girl’s wrists at her wedding.

  “I wouldn’t get rid of any of this stuff,” he said, turning to Jess’s hopeful eyes. “But there’s nothing in here that looks like any kind of storage device would fit in it.”

  He opened a red velvet–lined box, removed the bracelets, and pulled at the lining, tearing it off, trying not to let the ripping sound bring satisfaction. There was nothing there. He put it aside and started on the rest of the jewelry boxes. Ripping and ripping.

  But he found nothing. Jess put each box back together when he was done tearing it up. Folding the velvet lining and pushing it in place until it looked like it had never come apart.

  Nothing. The bag held nothing but the remnants of his life with Jen.

  Opening it had been hard enough. Putting it away—the lingering smells, the fresh-as-a-flesh-wound feel of the memories—was impossible.

  Jess pulled the bag away from him and put everything back in place, her movements quick and efficient and soundless. She snapped it shut, her jaw so tight her lips all but disappeared. Her hands hesitated a second before she moved the other bright yellow bag toward him.

  The same bright red nail-polish letters emblazoned this one too.

  Given how much they traveled, Jen had believed the best way to spot their bags on baggage claim belts was to buy the brightest color. But on their first flight into Heathrow it had been clear that all travelers basically had the same idea.

  Jen had bought red nail polish at the airport and painted their names on. Actually, she had done one and he had done the other. The closest he had ever come to carving his name into a tree for a girl.

  She had laughed at him about that. What kind of man marries the only girl he’s ever fallen for? You have to have someone break your heart before you find your soul mate. You’re so unromantic, Spikey.

  Or too darned romantic. Depending on how you looked at it.

  He threw the second bag open.

  This one was chockfull of what looked like crushed-up newspaper balls. He picked one up. Wrapped in the newspaper was a cup. They never moved with this stuff. They always gave it away to their local friends or people they had worked with. Then they bought all of it again at their next posting. But Vic or Ria, whoever had packed up the stuff, had wrapped each piece. Baggage gathered on Jen’s behalf when she had fought so hard not to collect any on her own.

  “It’s not in this one,” he said and turned to the boxes.

  He ripped one open before his brain kicked in. Books, clothes, bedding. More smells and sights. More them.

  Coffins. These weren’t boxes. They were cardboard coffins. Body parts of their marriage, chopped up by a killer and disposed of in garbage bags. Mangled and maimed and entirely unrecognizable. Not a trace of the beautiful body that was gone.

  “How do you deal with it?” he asked when they had spent God knows how many hours, lifetimes, trudging through the Dumpster of severed limbs and he found in his hands a picture of himself with his head on Jen’s lap. A selfie she had taken and then printed to take with her when she left for Mumbai.

  “Deal with what?” Jess had been silent for so long the sound of her voice was like breaking through the surface of water and filling his lungs with air.

  “With whatever it was that happened to you.” His own voice came from miles away. They were solidified distance. Each particle vibrating between them its full-blown self.

  “That depends,” she said, her hands working methodically on wrapping up and putting away everything he had pulled apart.

  “On what?”

  “On what you mean by dealing with it.”

  “How do you fucking go on?”

  “As opposed to what?”

  He pushed himself off the floor and stood, her eyes following him like floodlit probes, demanding to be answered.

  He flipped the mirror on her. “Didn’t you ever consider it? The alternative?”

  She looked away, going back to folding and wrapping, the precise care in her actions falling on his frayed senses, soothing one moment, gouging the next, an unperturbed glance her only reaction to the hideous question that had just come out of his mouth.

  “I had Joy. How could I?”

  And he had nothing. But it sounded too weak, too selfish to say it.

  Her hands stilled. “There’s a difference between considering it and doing it.” Her words were empty, but her eyes, they filled them in. “It’s okay to consider it, Nikhil. If that gets you through. It’s okay to do whatever you have to do to make it through the hours.”

  That was the problem. Making it through the hours.

  “Look at you,” she said. “You just went through all these boxes and you’re still here. You’re going on.”

  “I’m really not. This isn’t going on. I can’t even get out of bed in the morning.”

  “But you do get out of bed every morning.”

  “But I don’t want to. All of this—it doesn’t feel like my life. It doesn’t even feel like life. I don’t feel alive.”

  * * *

  The pain in his eyes was so raw she wanted to run from it. Instead she made herself stand and face him. People with healed injuries claimed forgotten pain returned when they heard someone else talk about their pain. Muscles and nerves had memory and the reminder resurrected those memories. Jen had already brought all her suppressed memories back to life. Now here was the pain in Nikhil’s eyes to give those memories bulk and blow them up like an inflatable raft.

  “You’re right. You don’t feel alive. You feel trapped in what happened. Like you’re still in the middle of it. Like it’s still happening. Like it will never stop. But the feeling passes, in flashes at first, then for longer and longer stretches of time. You live in those stretches of time. That’s all I can tell you.”

  He reached for her then and the shock of it jolted through her. She had been wrong; his pain wasn’t like hers. His tragedy was completely different from her own. He needed to touch someone, needed to feel something real in his hands. Something alive. His arms circled her waist, his head found its way to her shoulder. “Tell me something she told you. Tell me what she wanted. How she sounded. Tell me where she is.”

  “I told you I don’t . . .” Her hand went to his shoulder. She patted it tentatively, trying not to think about it. Trying not to think about the fact that he was a man, and that his hands were around her. Somehow it was different this time. He wasn’t half unconscious with alcohol. “Jen wanted you to be happy. She worried that if something happened to her, that you would not be okay. She wanted more than anything for you to continue to be who you are. To never lose your faith. She knew you would find it again. Find your way. Even if you got lost for a while, she knew you would find your way in the end.”

  He started to shake in her arms, a subtle, unwilling trembling. A kite fluttering to break free as you tried to hold it in place against the wind.

  For long moments the shaking went on, him struggling to hold it in and failing. The need to soothe him was a wave and it took her down. She stroked his shoulders, his hair. She couldn’t not hold him, couldn’t not speak words she knew he needed to hear, as, body and soul, he fell into his pain.

  When he finally pulled away, his eyes were bloodshot, but unlike the last time he’d cried in her arms, there was courage there.

  He cupped her cheek. “Do you mind going up by yourself? I need a moment.”

  “Of course.” She should have run up, run away from him and his brave, hurt-soaked eyes. But she stood there a moment watching him before turning around and slipping out the door.

  “Jess,” he said when she was halfway to the stairs. He was leaning on the door frame.

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you.”

  25

  More than anything, it’s what you’re afraid of that defines who you are. Most people are afraid of losing something—their life, people they love, things they own.
Nikhil and I? We’re terrified of amounting to nothing. Of being powerless against the things we want to change.

  —Dr. Jen Joshi

  She heard voices coming from the kitchen and couldn’t bring herself to go in. But she couldn’t go back down either. He wasn’t the only one who needed a moment. The feel of his hair was imprinted on her palms. A strange bundle of knots was lodged in her chest, and she tried to untangle it and find the triumph she should’ve been feeling.

  This was a huge step after all. It was why she was here. She pulled out her phone and typed out the words Search begun.

  Almost immediately he responded with his Naag strike. About time. And?

  And we’ll find it.

  Tell your roommate he doesn’t have to pick up and drop Joy off at school. My men will take care of it.

  She pressed back into the wall. She was going to throw up.

  If you go anywhere near him, I’ll go tell Nikhil what you’re up to right now. Her thumb hovered over the send button. Why would Nikhil care? She deleted the juvenile words.

  I am in his house. He trusts me. If you pressure me like this I can’t work. One more week. Then she typed the hardest word. Please.

  OK, but after that I’ll have to do more than just drive him back and forth from school. One of my men enjoys slapping children around.

  Nausea squeezed up her throat. But he wasn’t done.

  Oh, and I was talking to some old friends from Calcutta and trying to find out about Joy’s father. Her knees buckled.

  He’s dead.

  That’s what you say. I’m sure Joy will appreciate someone filling him in on his “dead” father.

  I know where the evidence is. I’m taking Nikhil there tomorrow.

  Much better.

  Her hand was shaking when she erased the messages. Please, Jen, give me a clue. Give me something.