by Sonali Dev
He had been rummaging in a drawer while shouting obscenities at Rico when the door flew open. What are you bellowing about now, Bram? A tiny woman in a sari had pushed her way into the room and Rico had pushed his way out, done with this bullshit.
Your daughter is a whore like you. That’s what I’m bellowing about. Those were the last words Rico remembered hearing.
Ashna had found him underneath the bleachers. Angrier than he’d ever been in his life. Your father’s a sick asshole. How can you stand to be around him?
He’s my father, Rico.
And that explains so much. I don’t think I can deal with him for the rest of my life.
What are you saying? Are you leaving me?
Without waiting for an answer, she had run out of there. Had she really believed that’s what he’d been doing? Leaving her because he hated her father?
Rico had waited there all night. She hadn’t come back. No matter how much he’d begged after that, she hadn’t come back.
“What did your father say to you, Ash? What did he say that changed everything?”
She pushed her hair off her face with both hands and gaped at him, so much horror in her face it was like these past hours hadn’t happened.
“I had never fought with my father, Rico. Never. Not until that day when I told him I couldn’t live without you, and I wasn’t going to. But when I came to you, you had already met him and you didn’t want me. Not after you’d seen the ugliness I came from. Just the way my father said you wouldn’t.”
“I sat under those bleachers all night, waiting for you to come back. You didn’t answer my calls. Didn’t respond to my texts. And then you told me you were done with me. You didn’t even ask what he said to me. He called my mother a whore, Ash. He was terrible to your mother, too. A real charmer you’ve got there. How can you believe anything he says?”
She sank down on the bench next to her, breathing hard. Something was very wrong. She looked up at him and he knew her response would change everything. Like the silence in a piece of music before it hits a crescendo.
“He died.”
The muted horror in her eyes said there was more.
“When?”
Her hand pressed into her belly. “Twelve years this month.”
“Twelve years this month,” his whisper echoed hers, knowing exactly where they’d been twelve years ago. Done with high school. Excited about their future together. She on her way to UCLA on a soccer scholarship. Him taking a year off. Maybe coaching for their high school until he had enough money to figure out what he wanted to do. His father’s friend, his old coach from Rio, had taken a managerial position with Sunderland and he’d been trying to get Rico to try out. But at that point playing had still felt impossible.
He sat down next to her, but she was staring straight ahead at the gold wallpaper.
“How did it happen?”
Her hands clasped together and pressed into her lips, memories flashing in her eyes, creasing her forehead.
“He shot himself in the head.” She spoke the words loud and clear, as though practicing diction. “That day.”
“Oh God.” He lifted his hand to reach for hers, but she jerked back.
Silence wrapped around them, a silence so corrosive, it shoved miles and years between them.
“That’s why you didn’t come back.”
She laughed again, or maybe it was a sob. There were no tears in her eyes. “The family kept the suicide out of the papers.”
When he’d tried to reach her he’d imagined every scenario except this one. The only response he’d gotten from her was that she was done with him. Rico hadn’t wanted to believe that her father had convinced her that he wasn’t good enough for her. But he’d seen her horror at his anger at her father and he’d believed it. He had walked away and never let himself turn back. Now he wondered if the horror in her eyes had been about her thinking he was leaving her.
She was in a trance. Her body rocked back and forth, the barest motion. “I heard it. The gunshot. I found him. After I left you and went back to the restaurant to see him.” Her voice was the thinnest, strongest thread. “If I had been there one minute sooner, he’d still be alive.”
Rico slid closer to her. When she didn’t draw away from him, he placed a hand on her back, and when she didn’t shrink from that, he wrapped his arm around her, a horrible coldness engulfing him. “I’m so sorry.”
She said nothing; he wasn’t even sure she had heard him, but she let him hold her.
Losing her had felt like being on fire. His lungs blackened and useless, his skin singed off. Solid stabs of pain separating muscle from bone. Turned out his pain had been nothing. He had abandoned her when she had needed him most.
How would she ever forgive him? How would he ever forgive himself?
“I’m sorry,” he said again, then again. “I should have tried harder to reach you.” But he had believed that she had forsaken him and chosen to believe her father’s lies. “I should not have left.”
She touched his face, generosity that brought him to his knees. “You couldn’t have reached me. No one could. Not for a long time. He wasn’t the only person that bullet destroyed that day.”
They sat there like that. The immensity of what they had just learned hanging in the air between them.
“Rico,” she said suddenly, her voice oddly stronger. “When you went to see him. How did you know he was terrible to my mother? Is it because of what I told you earlier?”
“No. Because she walked in when he started yelling.” Rico remembered her father rummaging in the drawer. Was that where he kept the gun he used to kill himself? The maniacal rage in his eyes was something Rico would carry to his grave. There had been something unhinged about him, something about that moment that had always felt odd, but Rico had tried to bury the memory deep, like the rest of that meeting. Now he wondered if Ashna’s mother had saved his life that day.
“That can’t be right.” There was an odd confusion in her eyes when Ashna focused on him. “My mother wasn’t in America when it happened. She only arrived after his death.”
“I’m one hundred percent sure it was your mother.” Suddenly Rico remembered everything in stark detail. The ponderous gloominess of the room covered from floor to ceiling with books. The sharp scent of alcohol, sweat, and vomit in the overcooled air. The congested, raspy note in her father’s voice.
“I even remember that she was wearing a sari . . . it was blue . . . and she had a huge red bindi on her forehead.”
Ashna stood, her face leached of color. “I have to go.” She opened the door and let herself into the elevator lobby.
He followed her. “What’s going on, Ash?”
She came to him then and grabbed his face. “I’m sorry. For everything.”
What the hell was that supposed to mean? “Tell me what I said. Tell me what to do. I know what I did was unforgivable, but please don’t leave me again.”
“It wasn’t unforgivable.” She bit her lip and looked at him in a way that made his heart burst with love and gratitude. “It wasn’t your fault.” The fierceness he’d missed shone in her eyes. “It wasn’t mine either.” She dropped a kiss on his lips. “I’m not leaving you. I promise. I just need to go right now, okay?”
“Let me take you home.”
“No, I need to do this myself. It’s something I should have done a long time ago.”
He had no idea what she meant, but she had that look again, a look that reinforced her words. She wasn’t leaving him, just leaving. Please let that be the truth. “At least let George take you home.”
That of all things made her smile. “This is the birthplace of rideshares, Rico. You’re not summoning George to drive me home, but will you please give him a raise?” She pressed a finger into the elevator button.
“Actually, you’re wrong,” he said. “Rideshares originated in Africa—Zimbabwe, it was crowdsourcing of carpools . . .” He trailed off, but it made her go up on her toes
and kiss him again, hard and fierce.
He wrapped his arms around her and returned her kiss, gathered up her essence. But when she pulled away he let her go. Whatever helped her believe they’d make it, he would do.
“I love you, Ash,” he whispered into her lips before stepping away.
“I love you too,” she said simply, hands still on his face. “But that’s never been our problem.”
The elevator opened with a ding and she got in.
“I’m not leaving, Ashna. No matter what happens, I’m never leaving you again,” he said before the mirrored doors cut them off, because that much he had to say.
Chapter Thirty-Three
All through the ride home, Ashna felt oddly strong.
The way Rico looked at her filled her heart. All the things they’d said to each other filled her heart. They’d held nothing back, and she was still standing. Hope flooded her like she’d sprung a backward leak.
Something precious lay within her reach, but she couldn’t have it if she stayed the person she’d been. The only way to not be that person was to face the secrets she’d run from for so long. If Mom had been with Baba that day, what did that mean?
If unraveling her relationship with Mom meant unraveling with it, then so be it. She was already undone, and it wasn’t as scary as anticipating it had been. All that mattered now was how she put herself back together.
Ashna opened her front door and let herself into her house, ready for whatever awaited her.
The living room was tidy. The mustard and green pillows arranged in an exact diamond pattern. The kitchen cleaned up. No dishes in the sink. No glasses or cups strewn about the place. No scarves or stoles draped around chairs.
Had Mom left without telling her? Again? Now, when Ashna needed her, needed the truth? Now, when she realized just how much she didn’t know?
I’m not leaving. No matter what happens, I’m never leaving you again.
Words Shobi and Rico had both said to her. Her life had turned into a sonorous chamber with the same sounds coming at her from all directions. It couldn’t be a lie.
An urge to scream swelled in her chest. On the way here, she had practiced what she would say to her mother. The questions she would ask. How patient she would be. She’d finally listen.
Now she wouldn’t have the chance.
She stormed into the living room and disheveled the cushions. Her hands shook. Her skin felt too tight around her. The kitchen was empty too, and sparkling clean.
“Mom?” the word broke her voice as she called out.
She ran up the stairs and into her room and yanked open the dresser drawer. The mother-of-pearl inlay box winked up at her, concealing within it her mother’s ring. The one Ashna had pulled out of the garbage at thirteen, another symbol of her parents’ ugly marriage, which she’d believed made her ugly too. Pushing open her window, she pulled her arm back and tossed the box, ring and all, into the enchanted forest of her childhood, letting out the ungodly scream that was choking her.
“Ashna, sweetheart, what’s wrong?” Shobi’s voice hit her like something in a dream, piercing through her back like an arrow.
She spun around. “Mom?”
Worry creased Shobi’s forehead. “What the matter, beta?”
“I thought you left.”
“Mina and I were having tea on the patio. We didn’t hear you come in until you . . . why did you scream?”
“If you screamed because you thought Shobi was gone, then that’s good news, right?” Mina Kaki walked into the room behind Mom.
Then the funniest thing happened: both Ashna and Shobi rolled their eyes and smiled at the same time.
“Did you stay the night?” Ashna asked her aunt.
“I could hardly leave Shobi by herself when . . . well, you look better than you did last night.” Mina Kaki raised a brow.
“I’m fine. I need to talk to Mom.”
“I want to talk to you too,” Shobi said, eyes exhausted and edged with bags that hadn’t been there last night.
“The house . . . thanks for cleaning up.” It felt like a stupid thing to say, but her mother smiled.
“Mina helped.”
“In other words, I tidied up while Shoban Gaikwad Raje lectured me about being complacent in being judged for domesticity,” Mina Kaki said.
“It’s true. Who says our homes have to look like magazines? It’s just another arena they use to make us compete and feel insufficient in,” Mom said, and of all things, it made Ashna smile.
“That’s all very good and dandy,” Mina Kaki said. “But what if we don’t all like to exist in chaos? Choice is a two-sided concept, Shobi-ji.”
“Hello?” Ashna cleared her throat. Both women turned to her. This was not how Ashna had expected this day to go. Or yesterday. That thought was followed by the memory of her climbing Rico like a tree.
“Sorry,” Mina Kaki said. “Why is your window open?”
Oh no, the ring! Ashna slapped a hand to her mouth.
“Umm . . . I just threw a three-carat diamond out the window.”
The two women stared at her openmouthed. Possibly the only time in her life Ashna would get to see that.
Pushing her way past them, she ran down the stairs. “We have a lot to talk about, but I have to find the ring first. I think I know what I want to do with it.” Suddenly she didn’t want that ring lost.
The three of them went out into the yard below Ashna’s window and started searching through the grass.
“That’s the trajectory.” Shobi used her finger to trace an arc from the second-floor window into the hedges.
“Behold someone who’s turned analysis into an art form.” Mina went to a giant rosebush where Shobi’s arc had ended. “I think it’s in there.” She pointed without letting her finger touch the bush.
“Behold someone who’s turned delegation into an art form,” Shobi said.
“Really, you two pick today to turn into a comedy duo?” Ashna grabbed a fallen branch and pushed the thorny branches apart with it. Long-ago memories of her aunt and her mother laughing together sparkled at the edge of her consciousness. How many memories had she buried?
“There it is,” all three of them said, and Ashna squatted down and used her leg to nudge it out like a ball.
It earned her impressed raised eyebrows. She slid the box into her pocket.
“I’ll leave you two alone now,” Mina said. “You have a lot to talk about. And yesterday was Monday and I didn’t go home. So Shree’s going to be extra grumpy today because Mondays are . . . you know . . . our day.”
Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. Could she unhear this?
Shobi let out a full-throated laugh. Where had she been hiding that thing?
The same place you’ve been hiding yours, a voice inside Ashna said.
“The child looks horrified,” Shobi said, making Mina shrug.
“They think we’re celibate, don’t they?”
“Mina Kaki!” Ashna said. “Thank you so much for . . . for . . . being here.” That sounded terrible. “I mean . . .”
“I know what you mean.” She patted Ashna’s cheek. “You kids have to stop thinking of your moms as single-function devices. We have lives apart from you. We are people. We have orgasms.” Before Ashna could die of mortification, Mina took her hand. “Can you walk me out?”
That was code for I’m not done talking to you.
“I’ll see you inside,” Shobi said, shaking her head at Mina.
Mina Kaki got in her car, rolled down her window, and turned to Ashna. “When Shobi and I were younger, we used to talk a lot about our girls growing up. We swore they would not face what we faced. We wanted to make sure you girls didn’t have to fight our fights and the fights of our mothers. It’s time to put that behind us, don’t you think?”
Ashna nodded. She knew her aunt wasn’t done.
“I like to believe we changed things at least a little, your mother more than me. But in this changed world, you girls can’t see
m to see how it was for us. You can’t see our obstacles because we removed them for you. And now you get to judge us from a perspective that we weren’t lucky enough to enjoy.”
“I’m sorry,” Ashna said around the lump in her throat.
Mina smiled the smile that had made Ashna’s childhood bearable. “It’s the last thing we want you to be, beta.” With that she blew Ashna a kiss and was gone.
“You all right?” Shobi was just done putting the kettle on as Ashna walked into the kitchen.
Ashna flew into her arms.
Shobhi’s arms went around her, tight, so tight they almost suffocated her. A memory burst through Ashna. Ages ago her mother had always held her like this, too tight for breath.
I’ll die, Mamma.
I’ll bring you back to life so I can squeeze the life out of you again.
Then those hugs had turned into goodbyes and Ashna hadn’t been able to bear them anymore.
She couldn’t breathe, but in that breathlessness the tears washed through her, taking with them so many things she’d let fester for years and years.
“I’m sorry.” Those were the first words that came.
Shobi slowly let her go. “What are you sorry for?”
“I always blamed you for everything, but it was always my fault. And I thought you had left again.”
Her mother wiped Ashna’s tears with the end of her sari, a gesture so absurdly campy and Bollywoodish and so at odds with who Shobi was that a watery laugh burst from Ashna. She pulled away, some awkwardness returning.
“None of this was your fault.” For the first time in her life those words didn’t feel like thorns on her skin. “And I’m glad,” Shobi added quickly, holding Ashna’s hands, “that the thought of me having left didn’t make you happy.”
“I felt many things when you left, Mom. But happiness was never one of them.” Of all the things Ashna had ever said to her mother, this was probably the most honest.
She pushed Shobi onto a stool. “Why don’t you sit, I’ll make us some tea. I know the exact brew that might make this easier.” She brought ginger and lemongrass to a boil, then added a mix of Cunoor long leaf and Darjeeling as her mother watched. Then she wrote the words Overdue Conversations on the jar.
