A Change of Heart (17 page)

“I'm sorry—I didn't realize that's what I was doing.” Vic dug his hands into his pockets, the blasted sympathy still dripping from his face. Dripping from all their faces and bouncing off the tile, the walls, the granite, the fucking recessed lights cramming the ceiling with myriad sources of fake brightness.

“We are your family, Nic.” Well, wasn't Ria the master of stating the obvious today.

“Is that why I was the last to find out about the baby?”

“I told you I tried to call you. You wouldn't take my calls.”

“You left me messages. You could have let me know I was going to be an uncle.”

“It was complicated. You know we never expected to have children. I still have no idea how it happened. You know it wasn't something I was prepared for. We weren't even sure we were going to go through with the pregnancy, Nikhil.”

There was a gasp from the doorway.

Nikhil spun around to catch Jess with her hand pressed to her mouth, horror widening her eyes. It was a real pain how silently she moved.

“Jess, hi,” he said, but she didn't seem to hear him.

Her eyes, her entire being, in fact, was focused on Ria with such loathing, Ria actually pressed back into her chair.

Okay. What the hell?

He tried again. “Come on in. You want some breakfast?”

Her hands were tight fists. She turned around and looked at the arched kitchen entrance she'd just come through, then back again at him, as lost as a doe on a freeway.

“Breakfast?” he repeated.

“Sorry. I'm . . . I'll be right back.” She backed out of the room, not stumbling but looking as though she had.

He followed her.

Instead of going back up the stairs, she opened the front door and stepped out. He grabbed the heavy wooden door before it slammed in his face and followed her into the blast of sunshine. His hometown had just done one of its spectacular weather backflips and flown from a blizzard and landed on a bright spring day. Everything was melting fast and furious, turning the driveway, the sidewalk, the road into impossible-to-navigate, gushing rivulets. A perfect reflection of the Joshi household.

He found his hand holding her arm. It was so tiny under the thick fabric. She yanked it from him and stepped away, pressing a hand into one of the high pillars that held up the porch, her entire body sagging into the support. Her feet were bare on the wet concrete. He had the urge to scoop her up in his arms, to take those feet off the ice-cold water.

He had never wanted to scoop anyone but his wife up in his arms. He half twisted away from her, needing to go back inside, but the door clicked shut behind him. Jess spun around and met his gaze, her eyes tortured beyond anything he had ever seen.

“What's wrong with you?” he said, trying to snap her out of wherever she was lost. But maybe he didn't want to know the answer. His hand reached for the doorknob behind him.

“Was she talking about dropping that baby? How could she do that so calmly? What kind of person is that?”

Anger popped inside his head. Hot. So hot. So large. It was like all his previous anger was tiny paper boats in the face of its wave. “You don't know anything about Ria, Jess.” He could not believe the look in her eyes, her anger matching his own. “It's complicated.”

“Complicated? What's complicated? There's a mother and a father and they have everything in the world. What more does a child need?”

“Ria has health concerns. There's severe genetic mental illness in her family. She could get very sick over her pregnancy.” They could lose Ria. Suddenly, he wanted to go back in and make sure she was okay.

“Yes, Ria Parkar's life does seem so very hard. What is it with you people acting like a child is some sort of inconvenience?”

“We people?” Blood pounded in his ears. “Jen didn't not want a baby because it was inconvenient.”

Jess drew back. Guilt nudged out the anger on her face. “I'm sorry. That's not what I meant.”

It's exactly what she had meant. “Who died and gave you the right to judge people?” He was sick of her righteous self-pity, her know-it-all indignation. “You're here chasing a problem that's not even your business. Shaking things up. Abandoning your own child. Leaving him with a man who's not even his father, and you want to throw judgment around?”

If her eyes had looked tortured before, now her entire body seemed to fold over with pain, and because he was a vulture he fed on it. As long as the pain was outside of himself, that's all that mattered. “Where's his father anyway? How is it you never talk about him?”

She wrapped her arms around herself. The pain hardened and peaked in her eyes before she blacked it out. He wanted to yank her arms apart, wanted to bring the pain back, so he could be the one to take it away. “I'm sorry,” he said, disturbing the silence that sprang up between them like unbridgeable distance.

“No. You're right,” she said, fully back in her yogic mode, measured and distant, making sure everything was about him again. Eager to give him whatever he wanted. Eager to get this over with. “I had no right to judge her. I'm sorry.” She had withdrawing into herself down to an art, and she wielded her skill without mercy. It was as though she were a snail and all the air between them crisp, hard shell.

“Don't,” he wanted to say. “Not you too.” He was sick of everyone tiptoeing around him. The fact that she had never done it had kept him sane the past week, and the idea of losing it kicked him off-center. He spun away from her, his face inches from the closed door, and breathed until his heartbeat slowed. Despite the sunshine, the cold from the wet concrete was seeping through to his slippered feet. Her bare feet had to be freezing.

“Let's go inside,” he said without turning around.

For a long time she didn't answer, but he knew she had moved closer behind him. “Can we look for it, Nikhil? Please,” she said, her voice even, safe and sound in that shell he wanted so badly to grow around himself too. “Please. I need to get back home.” Her tone was raw and he knew she was thinking about her baby. It was the only time desperation leaked past her armor. He would have done anything to take the words he'd said before back.

He turned around. “Is Joy okay?” he asked as though it was apology enough.

As if she weren't already buried inside that sweatshirt, her head fell forward, her chin dug into her chest, her fingers squeezed her arms. “He's fine.” For all her rolling up into a ball, her voice was as fierce as a tigress. “But I'm here. He doesn't know why his mother has to leave him alone for so long.”

His hand itched to slip the hair flopping onto her face behind her ear, to smooth away those thorns that prickled from her skin. He dug his fists into his pockets.

“Most of her things are here. In the basement. We can go down and start looking.” They had to get this over with. It was about time for her to get back to her child. It was about damn time.

22

 

—Dr. Jen Joshi

 

 

W
ith the Jess Koirala trail leading to nothing but dead ends and Nikhil Joshi not taking his calls, Rahul's only hope was to be able to convince the home minister to sanction a trip to visit the good doctor
saab
in America.

“You want a foreign trip? I'll put you on the Interpol exchange list. Why America? Europe is so much more beautiful. How about Switzerland—it's where all our movies used to be shot in my day.” The minister hardly ever spoke of his days as one of Bollywood's first superstars.

He had once told Rahul that it made people take him less seriously as a leader and that his Entertainment phase was behind him. This was his Service phase. But they were in the minister's home and he was always a different person in his home, especially around his daughter. No matter what his phase, Kirit put his family above everything else.

“Or maybe South America. These days those Brazilian beaches are all the rage. You can go there. I'll take care of it,” the minister said, dipping his fingers into the finger bowl the bearer had just placed in front of him. He rinsed his fingers and wiped them on the towel the servant held out.

“Papa, I don't think Rahul is asking for the charitable donation of a vacation for himself. Are you even listening to what he's saying?” Kimi glared at her father with those huge eyes, and Rahul didn't bother to glare at Kimi because he knew how useless it was. He didn't need her help. Not that that had ever stopped her.

All Rahul had wanted to do today was take a few moments to talk to Kirit privately and leave. But she had found them talking and insisted he stay for dinner, undoubtedly to prove to him that they could still be friends after he'd pushed her away. Naturally, her mother had excused herself from dinner, as she always did when Kimi forced Rahul to eat with them.

Her father frowned at her, the way he always frowned at her, with the fondness of one scolding a precious and infallible pet. “Kimaya,
beta,
I would never assume Rahul was asking for a donation. You know I don't consider anything I've done for him charity. But you're the one who keeps reprimanding me for working him too hard, and now here I am trying to make sure he gets some time off and you're making me look bad.”

She colored. Not in an admonished sort of way, but the way she always reddened when her family called attention to the difference in their social class and it made her fume. Not that her denying it changed the fact that he had been a servant in their home. Just one of the many reasons why what she wanted was impossible. They didn't stand a chance in hell.

He cut her off before she jumped on her soapbox and went to war over him once again.

“We found parts of a dismembered body at a construction site, sir. The eyes were carved out. It's time to open up an investigation. I have no doubt this is related to the Jennifer Joshi case.”

“Rahul! Can we please maintain the sanctity of this dinner table? You know Kimaya's mother hates business talk at dinner, and you know she's the home minister within these walls, so even though she's not here right now her ears are everywhere.” He looked at one of the servants and smiled, but Rahul knew his smiles and he knew he had pushed too hard. “At least wait for the ladies to retire.”

Kimaya was the only lady at the table. And she was the least retiring person Rahul knew in all the world.

“I'm not
retiring,
Papa. I have a movie premiere after-party to cover.” She typed furiously into her phone before glaring at her father again. “And I've had my heart replaced. I'm hardly queasy about organs.”

“You're going out at this hour again? Rahul will go with you.”

She stood. “No, he won't. He's not my bodyguard. He's the Divisional Head of the Crime Branch, who needs you to help him do his job.”

Rahul took a breath, and stood. “I'll follow her, sir.”

His phone beeped. Naturally, it was a text from Kimi. Actually, it was three texts:

She threw him a look so fiery it was almost as though things were normal between them again, and walked out the front door before the doorman rushed to open it.

He followed her out and responded to her text.
I know. But please stop trying to be mine.
Great, now he was being just as juvenile as her and texting instead of talking like they used to.

His phone beeped again, because even lying on her deathbed for years, the girl had never let anyone else have the last word.

She drove off. He straddled his Enfield Bullet.

Another text from her.

He shouldn't have read it. But of course he did.

23

 

—Dr. Jen Joshi

 

 

N
ikhil didn't actually drag her down the stairs to the basement, but it definitely felt like that. He stormed down as though he was too afraid to stop, too afraid to look at the framed artwork covering the walls. Not paintings by artists, but the kind of drawings young children made. Flowers and footballs, and kittens drawn with two circles and a spiraling tail. Crayons and finger paints lined with felt-tipped pens. The thick, matted frames made them look like art gallery prints. But what they framed was undoubtedly innocence.

She raced to keep up. Suddenly, he stopped as if he had run into a glass wall. Maybe she shouldn't have been so good at stopping in the middle of motion. Maybe she should have run into him and pushed him through the wall he'd hit. Because he looked like he couldn't get through it for anything.

Next to them was a picture of a purple dinosaur with spikes on his head. “This one is yours,” she said, unable to make it a question.

He didn't respond. She walked around him and took a step down.

“That's Spikey,” he said in a voice that made her regret calling his attention to the picture. “I think it's from second or third grade. It was the first year Ria and Vic spent the summer here,” he said from behind her, not following her down as she'd hoped.

But he was talking. She turned around to face him. “How was that?” she asked and took a backward step down.

“What? Having them stay with us for the summer? It was great. Why wouldn't it be?” He looked at her as if she had accused him of something horrible, but he still didn't follow her down. Her heart twisted under the roped scar. She wanted to touch it. But now was not the time to call his attention to it.

What she needed to do was keep his mind far away from what they were about to do. “Sometimes children don't like having people take over their space.” She reached for his hand, meaning to tug him along.

But as soon as she touched him, he grabbed her hand and clutched it hard, as if it could keep him from drowning. “Is Joy possessive about you?”

“No. I wasn't talking about Joy. I grew up in my uncle's house too. My mother and I moved there after my father died and we had nowhere else to stay.” Bringing up her pathetic childhood here, in this altar to everything a childhood should be, made shame well up inside her.

But his eyes softened, and his focus shifted outward to her. “They weren't nice to you, your cousins?” His eyes skimmed the pictures then met hers, gathering all that was different about their childhoods into that one intuitive glance.

She took a step down and tugged his hand, forcing him down the last remaining steps. When they reached the bottom, she tried to withdraw her hand, but he resisted and she couldn't force it.

“It's not like they weren't nice. There just wasn't enough space in the house.” And never enough food. They had been like a bunch of mongrels fighting for the same scrap.

She had hated fighting for food, hated it so much she had stopped fighting after a while and her appetite had slowly disappeared. At least while Aama was alive, she had insisted on hiding some food away for her and making sure she ate. But once Aama was gone, her aunt had praised her lack of appetite as if it were her greatest virtue.

This time he tugged her hand to get her to move, pulling her away from the memories, and he led her past a large living room. He didn't seem to notice anything, not the white leather couches, not the TV that covered an entire wall.

“How old were you?” he said, stopping outside a door as if a flesh-eating python lived inside. No marks for guessing they had finally reached their destination. “When your father died.”

“Six, and fourteen when my mother died.”

“I'm sorry,” he said turning to her. “That's terribly young.”

His eyes were so kind, she wanted to tell him it was all right. But having someone squeeze her hand and acknowledge what no one had ever acknowledged stole her words and all she could do was soak it up.

He twisted the knob with his free hand and pushed the door open. It was a storage room of some sort, with boxes and bins lined up from floor to ceiling on wooden shelves. They stepped into the room together.

“What about your aunt and uncle? Didn't they correct your cousins when they treated you badly?”

She laughed and he looked at her with such sadness, her bitter-as-bile laughter died in her throat. If the idea of her aunt and uncle not correcting their girls made him this sad, what would he say if he knew her uncle had sold her to the first man who offered to take her off his hands? And her aunt had actually sat her down and explained how it was her duty to help her younger cousins by “marrying” the man her uncle had found for her.

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. J
EN
+ N
IC
. 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.