by Sonali Dev
She pushed him away, her hands shaking with the effort to move his bulky frame off her. But it only made him smile. “I like it when they struggle. Or haven’t the girls been talking about me?”
She would not cry. Would not cry. “I’ll scream.” Please, please God. Why won’t anyone come into the bathroom?
“I want you to scream. I want to make you scream. I want to make you scream over and over again until you can’t scream anymore. I want you to lose your mind like you’ve made me lose mine.” He ground his hips into her again. “See that. See how much I want you. All day, all week, he’s been waiting to get inside you.”
She started struggling. Pushing him away. Twisting. She raised her knee and kicked him between the legs. He screamed in pain. But she didn’t wait to see if he had gone down. She yanked the door open and ran into the corridor. It was deserted. Oh God, where was everyone?
She kept running. The Junior Artists’ changing room was empty. She locked the door behind her and pulled her costume off as fast as she could. She tugged her salwar kurta on and slung the costume on the hanger. She couldn’t afford to pay for it if anything happened to it. Then she grabbed her school bag and ran out. It was the middle of the night. If the Junior Artist’s bus was gone, she would not be able to get back to the hostel.
The bus was gone.
She looked around, the frantic beating of her heart making it hard to breathe. All the girls from the group were gone; everyone was gone. At the end of the night shift, it was usual for everyone to hurry home, but today something was very wrong. Raj hadn’t followed her. Neither him nor that secretary of his, Rao, nor that hulking bodyguard of his were anywhere in sight.
She ran back to the set. The techs were putting away the last of the equipment. They were all men, one more dangerous looking than the other. She ran to the studio lobby. The parking lot was almost isolated. How was she going to get out of here?
“Did you miss your bus?” Rao, Raj’s secretary, was standing too close behind her. She scampered back and found herself outside the building with him blocking the entrance.
He tsked. “I can give you a ride home.” He took a step down and looked over her shoulder and off into the dark night. “An unprotected girl all by herself at midnight. It’s almost as if you’re looking for trouble. Then again, you’ve been flashing those boulders at everyone all week, so you might just get your wish.”
She spun around and looked into the face of Raj’s bodyguard.
“We can take care of you,” the bodyguard said, inches from her face, and she heard herself sob. Before she could start running, the two men grabbed her arms and pushed her into the Jeep that pulled up next to her. She saw Raj in the driver’s seat and she knew that all hope was gone. That her life was over.
Rao slammed the door shut and the bodyguard switched places with Raj and took the wheel.
Raj slid in next to her.
“Please. Please don’t do this,” she said, his face blurring because her tears were flowing and her throat was closing up. Even before the car sped off, Raj’s arms were around her.
He straddled her, his fish breath shoving into her mouth along with his wet tongue, his hands shoving into her breasts. “You want this, whore. You know you do.” He pushed her down into the seat. Her head slammed into the door with a crack and her back sagged into the leather. He grabbed her hands and slammed them against the glass over her head.
She struggled, with everything she was worth she struggled. But the weight of his body pinned her in place. Her horror and shame stole her voice. “No.” It was the only word she could manage. “No.”
But he kept shoving it back into her mouth, with his hand, with his fish-breath mouth.
He tore through her clothes, tore the skin of her breasts with his teeth, tore hair from her scalp as she struggled. Finally, as she struggled for breath through the hand that cut off her breath, he ripped through the flesh between her legs. And the pain was so stunning, for a moment the horror, the shame, all of it was consumed by the intensity of it. A burning ripped through her body as if he had snapped her spine in half, he slammed into the pain, pushing her head into the car door. She heard a crack. Another bolt of pain slashed down her spine. He had to have broken her neck. Her head went numb, her struggling, clawing arms fell away from him, as if the strength from them had disappeared. She tried to move, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t hear, she couldn’t see. But the pain between her legs went on and on.
When she thought it was over, the car pulled to a stop. She tried to sit up, but she couldn’t move. Her back, her legs, everything was wet and sticky.
“Your turn, Qasim,” his horrible voice said. The door opened. Another door opened. She tried again to sit up but her legs slipped against wet leather. She might have screamed, but huge hands flipped her over and shoved her knees into her belly. She willed herself to die. To not feel the pain that followed. She willed herself to die. But she didn’t.
“Fuck, sir, you really tore her up.”
“Not my fault I’m hung like a horse.”
They kept talking, she kept screaming, the car kept moving. None of it stopped. Nothing stopped. It went on forever.
And then, finally, when she knew it would never, ever end, the door opened and she was shoved out of the car.
She didn’t even feel herself hit the earth. Didn’t feel her face tear against the gravel. Didn’t feel her shoulder pop out of its socket. Didn’t feel it when another car pulled up. But she knew it was Rao who wrapped her in a sheet and put her in his car and drove her to his home.
31
I was so angry when Nic got here. I was just burning up with the crap these bastards have been up to. But his calm is so deep he makes it impossible to remember that there are problems in the world that cannot be fixed.
—Dr. Jen Joshi
She should have screamed, but she didn’t. Somehow she knew where she was. Even emerging from her bone-deep sleep, she knew it was Nikhil wrapped around her. Knew that all that had flashed and scraped inside her all night had been a dream, long gone.
His limbs were undecipherable from her own except in patches of weight and pressure against her skin. She knew it was him because fear didn’t jolt through her body, her heart didn’t race, panic didn’t lodge in her throat. The need to scream didn’t have her gulping for breath.
I’m being touched.
Still nothing. She was a freshly formed scab on an ancient wound, too numb for feeling.
Behind her he was awake. She felt his wakefulness in his breath. In his touch.
The swollen skin around her eyes smarted and turned her view of the room into a slit-shaped window. Her nose and mouth felt raw and salty, at once wet and parched from the tears that had leaked from her all night and even in sleep drained her. She drew into herself, trying to regain possession of the armor she had let slip off her shoulders.
He gave her a moment, and she knew he’d been waiting for her to wake up. He hadn’t wanted her to be alone when she awoke.
She would never know how he knew just how to do it, but he let her go and got off the bed without gouging her skin off and dousing her in shame.
“I’ll go get coffee,” he said into the long, translucent silence.
Something was lodged in her heart. Something like that spiked rubber ball Sweetie used to massage his legs when they ached. Sharp and soft at once. The prongs harsh yet comforting. She nodded without turning. Although she wanted nothing more than to look at him. To see what he saw. To know if he could see what an aftermath she was. An aftermath eight years too late.
She waited to hear the door click shut behind her before she dragged herself to the bathroom, splashed her face, and tried to put herself back together. But the rawness was wrapped too tightly around her, the kind of rawness that followed you when you emerged from a prolonged illness that somehow permanently altered you. Her limbs felt heavy, her chest and belly liquid, her forehead fevered.
When she left the bathroom, he
was waiting for her, the offering of a steaming cup in hand. Milky tea, sweet, with no hint of ginger or spice. Exactly the way she liked it. She’d only told him that once.
She tried to thank him, but all she managed was to raise guarded eyes to him, so afraid of what she would find in his gaze. He tucked a loose lock of hair behind her ear, pausing a moment before he actually did it. Giving her a chance to pull back.
Can I touch you?
Those words had undone her yesterday. Today, they made her want to press into his hand again. To relive the unspeakable peace of being held in sleep.
He held out two pills. “The headache pretty bad?”
It was terrible, pressing against her eyelids and scraping her eyeballs with jagged nails. The worst kind of retribution for her tears. Eight years in the making.
“It’s not bad,” she said and got an eye roll in return.
“Medicine is magic. That’s what my grandfather said. He was a medical genius. Take these.”
She did.
They watched the sun rise over the lake for a few moments before taking their cups to the box of CDs sitting by the open laptop he had borrowed from his mother, leaving nothing more than a sticky note telling her he’d taken it.
She sank into the chair in front of the laptop. He pulled a dining chair next to her and settled into it. They started with the first CD, opening each folder and scrolling through memory after memory after memory.
Each sip of tea settled her insides a little more until she felt fortified enough to slide him a sideways glance. He studied the pictures, his brows drawn together over intense eyes as he sorted through everything Jen had collected. Pictures, patient records, movies, music. All the little things that had made up the woman he had loved.
Suddenly he turned to her with those intense eyes. “I shouldn’t have said what I said yesterday. I was wrong. It wasn’t Jen’s fault. It wasn’t your fault. Not even a little bit. I’m sorry.”
He didn’t say anything more. Didn’t dilute his apology with excuses and explanations of what he had meant. It left his apology absolute and it was everything.
All she could do was nod, and just like that her tears started again. She hadn’t realized how badly she had wanted him to say that. She had needed it. He wiped her cheeks, and for a long time they sat like that, their hands touching but not holding. Then he turned back to the files and started clicking through them again.
Jen liked to catalog illness. Pink gashes on swollen, sunbaked skin. Distended bellies. Eyes so sore and infected they looked like the inner flesh peeping through ripped, festered skin. Nikhil seemed to feel none of the punching nausea that sickened Jess’s stomach. Every once in a while he explained things, named them: gastroenteritic distention, erythema, edema. Talked about how they had slapped together supplies and components of drugs to create treatments on the fly. They had been warriors, disease the enemy.
On the one hand, his foreign terms stripped off the layers that separated them, gave her glimpses of the profession that was such a part of who he was. On the other hand, it shone a spotlight on the world that separated them. But it didn’t matter; right in this moment, nothing could separate them. They were each other’s only support. Solace all the more precious because they had found it nowhere else.
Jess listened, not really registering anything but the fact that he was talking about the fight, not about who he had lost to it. He was touching the good things Jen and he had done together.
One of the folders contained not patients or diseases but things. Art, actually. Masks and pottery. Sculpture and paintings. Explosions of color and dancing people painted into walls. Stacks of rocks balanced into precarious towers.
She didn’t need to ask why the folder had been labeled Nic’s Knacks. Jen wasn’t the one for art.
“It’s amazing how we found art even in the most wretchedly poor hamlets. Carvings, paintings, weavings. People had no food or water, but they took the time to beautify their surroundings, their homes.”
She stared at the pictures because staring at him hurt. Her eyes stopped on the picture of Nic holding a red glazed ceramic bowl. Veins of gold etched a cracked web pattern on one side. As if the bowl had broken and been pieced together with gold glue.
She couldn’t seem to move on from it. She felt his eyes on her as she tried and failed to pull her gaze away from the golden webbing etched into the vibrant red.
“It’s beautiful.”
“One of our colleagues, Magali, brought it back for us from Japan. It’s called kintsukuroi. The art of repairing broken pottery with gold.”
Her pulse slowed and sped up all at once. “To emphasize the brokenness.”
He reached out and brushed her cheek, his fingers lingering. She met his eyes. She couldn’t believe she had told him. Now she would forever be a broken pot in his eyes. And yet, speaking those words last night had been like digging shrapnel out of her flesh. She was sore, but the piercing weight of the deeply lodged shards was gone. The relief was indescribable.
His fingers stroked her skin. “I don’t think the point is to emphasize the brokenness.” He was silent for a few minutes. “The point is that things can be repaired. That they are even more beautiful for having been repaired.”
He watched her in that way he had, where he was looking inside her and inside himself all at once.
“What happened to it? We didn’t find it in your things,” she asked, drugged by his fingers on her skin.
“I sent it to Ria after our wedding. She left Vic, and she was pretty broken up about it.”
“And you believed that the kintsa . . .”
“Kintsukuroi.”
“You believed the kintsukuroi would help her understand that broken things can be fixed and made even more beautiful.”
He smiled. “Pretty ironic, huh?”
She wanted so badly to tell him that it wasn’t ironic. If she touched his skin, traced those stubble-covered crevices down his cheeks that had forgotten how to dig dimples into his face, she would touch veins of gold. She had watched them form more and more every day. He thought he was broken. She had thought it too, but she couldn’t imagine how she’d been so mistaken. He was more whole than anyone she knew. Whole on the inside. His were surface cracks.
The smile slipped off his face when she didn’t respond, at least not in words. He clicked over to the next image. Then the next.
It took another four hours to go through all the CDs. But it felt much longer. Like trudging over miles and miles of sand dunes without reaching anywhere. They found nothing that could be construed as evidence. But they had found something else. Something you found when you traveled impossibly difficult paths with someone.
Between the terrible truth she had gouged out of herself and the beautiful realities that had been taken from him, their need to heal threaded together and wrapped around them and held them in place.
Somewhere along the way, their bodies had drawn closer and closer until they touched. Arm against arm, thigh against thigh, comforted and grounded. Every now and again, Nikhil reached for her, his hands over hers on the mouse. His fingers touching her hair, brushing her fingers when he brought her water.
For hours and hours, their only conversation was touch. An entirely new language for her. A vocabulary she hungrily soaked up with every inch of her being.
His fingers, warm and gentle, played a harmony across her skin, a tremble in her heart, a sob of longing she barely held in, terror that she might get used to this, hunger to believe this promise of respite.
Finally, when he spoke, it was to ask her if she wanted to eat. She was ravenous. But she could do little more than nod.
* * *
They stood under the backlit menu at the Corner Bakery that really did wrap around a street corner with a black-and-white awning. Something about the tidy tables and dim lighting felt like being outside of her life and inside a movie or a book that had sucked her in. She was living someone else’s life, but it felt like her own.
Nikhil had taken her hand when they crossed the street, touching it first with the slightest nudge, as though he couldn’t help but touch her, but he wouldn’t without giving her a chance to pull away. She didn’t pull away. Instead, her fingers chased his, their hands doing a little dance of touching and withdrawing, before their fingers interlaced and he finally wrapped her nervous, tingling hand in his.
Now he stood too close behind her as she studied the menu, his hands on her shoulders. He started to drag his hands down her arms, then seemed to realize what he was doing and stopped. Her body held on to the touch, unaware that he had backed away from it. Heat kissed along her arms where his hands had meant to go.
The warm haze that his nearness had engulfed her in all day and all night grew warmer still. She barely heard herself give the cashier her order. She barely heard herself thank her when she handed Nikhil the black-and-white-striped bag.
As she followed Nikhil out of the darkened restaurant and into the sunshine, the brightness blinded her. It felt like her eyes would never adjust. But a few blinks was all it took.
The city was luminous around them. Great sheets of glass and steel and wet streets trapping light and throwing it back into the sky. Melting ice coated each twig and branch on winter-bare trees where fledgling spring sunshine turned it to crystal. A huge steel sculpture that looked like a kidney bean reflected the entire city on its undulating surface. Just beneath it, a noisy ice rink was jam-packed with skaters of every age, spinning and twirling and sliding by in flashes of color, bright coats and scarfs flying in the wind thick with the sounds of happiness.
Suddenly, she wanted to dance. Wanted to fly down the ice until the wind set her face on fire.
“Do you skate?” Nikhil asked, studying her face, drinking in all she didn’t say. She looked up at him, everything inside her ablaze, no longer able to hide all the things she wanted from him.
He took her hand and circled the rink. Before she knew it, he had put their bags of food and their shoes in lockers and rented skates, and they were strapping them on.
