A Change of Heart (28 page)

He had promised not to hurt her. “Jess, I'm—”

She raised her hand, cutting him off, and finally met his gaze, her eyes begging him not to make her acknowledge the horrible thing he had said, not in front of Vic.

“Please,” she mouthed. Or maybe the plea was just in her eyes. “I'm ready to go. We're done here. Right, Nikhil?”

He nodded, swallowing his apology for when they were alone and letting her collect her beloved bag before following her out the door. She was right. They were done here.

35

 

—Dr. Jen Joshi

 

 

A
ll Nikhil wanted was a few moments alone with her. To go down on his knees and beg forgiveness. But Vic had taken the train into the city—his family took no chances when they were smothering you—and he was driving back with them.

Nikhil knew that acting like she hadn't heard his terrible words was the only way Jess saw to handle the shame he knew she was feeling and hiding beneath all that calm. He had to show her it was him, not her, who deserved to be ashamed. But she didn't want him doing it in front of Vic and so he wouldn't.

Fortunately, Vic kept up a steady stream of conversation, drawing her out with stories about how his company approached children's learning styles. Naturally, as a mother, it was a topic close to her heart and Vic seemed so genuinely interested in her opinion that Nikhil suspected he had jumped down Vic's throat unfairly. Something he'd been doing a lot of with his family lately.

By the time they reached his parents' home, several cars were already parked on the driveway. Of course they would come home right in the middle of Ria's baby shower. Aie's silk flower garland was hanging across the main door as it always did on holidays and ceremonies.

“Breathe, Vic,” he said, thumping his cousin on the shoulder as they entered the house and hung up their coats. “I'm not going to break down. I'm actually glad I'm here for Ria's
dohal jevan
.”

Vic responded by throwing his arms around Nikhil. “Thanks, man,” he said, and this time Nikhil returned his hug as though he meant it. Vic, who never knew how to quit when he was ahead tried again to take the bag from Jess's hands. “Good luck with that,” Nic wanted to say to him. Instead he said, “Is it just the aunties?”

Vic nodded and headed straight to the kitchen and to Ria.

Nikhil stopped outside the archway that led to the kitchen.

Aie and her five closest friends stood around the island threading flowers into long garlands as they oohed and aahed over Vic as he kissed Ria, who was perched on a chair that had been draped in a sari.

The last time Nikhil had seen these women all dressed up like this in his mother's kitchen was at his wedding. He couldn't make himself go in. He stepped back into the foyer.

Jess, who had been avoiding his gaze like it held communicable diseases, studied him with calm eyes. Despite how hurt she was, she was assessing his need for comfort and trying to find the best way to comfort him.

“They're all dressed up,” she said, leaning against the wall next to him, hiding away with him. She was wearing her usual black sweatshirt over yoga pants. Only, the ill-fitted clothes no longer hid anything from him. “Maybe I should go upstairs and wait there?”

He reached out and grabbed her hand, hoping she wouldn't pull away, needing her not to.

She didn't. She squeezed back and stayed right where she was.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “What I said to Vic. I didn't—”

“I know,” she said, understanding softening her eyes. “It was just a manner of speaking.” Her smile was sad but real, and he knew she had forgiven him even though he didn't deserve to be forgiven. She understood, even though he himself didn't understand. “Are those your mother's friends?” She wanted him to leave it alone, and he didn't know how not to right now.

He followed her gaze to the archway. “Yes. The Auntie Brigade.” That's what Vic had nicknamed them.

As was their way, the aunties were all wearing saris that matched—pink and blue—very clever.

“They're wearing matching saris,” she said, indicating the archway he had backed away from like a thief in his own home. “Is that traditional for
dohal jevan?
”

“Actually, it's an American tradition. In America, pink is for a baby girl and blue is for a baby boy.”

“Really? So girls can't wear blue?” she asked.

“God forbid,” he said. “And boys most certainly can't wear pink.”

“Oh. Joy looks adorable in pink.”

From the look on her face, he had no doubt Joy looked adorable no matter what. A hunger to meet her baby, to know him, washed through him. “I'm sure he does. We just like getting our gender roles assigned bright and early here in America.”

“And everyone wears pink and blue for baby showers in America?”

“No. The aunties always match their clothes. They call one another and discuss ‘the dress code' before each gathering.”

“Really? That's so sweet.” She smiled up at him.

What was sweet was Jess when she smiled like that. Her eyes disappearing as if she were smiling into the sun.

It was gone too fast, possibly because he had stared at it like some psycho and made her conscious of it.

His thumb stroked the soft skin of her hand. “Do you really want to go upstairs?”

“No,” she said as though he didn't know why she was staying. “It's not like I'm family or anything. I'm sure no one will notice that I'm not dressed up. Do you want to go inside?”

He nodded and led her into the kitchen, his hand pressed into the small of her back. All five aunties turned to them in unison. Their eyes darted in awkward little dances between Jess and him, varying degrees of sympathy shooting at him in lieu of words, the silence coming up abrupt and sudden after the animated chatter they had interrupted.

“Hello, Auntie
jis,
I hope we didn't hold everyone up.”

That's all it took. They rushed at him. “Of course you're not holding anything up,
beta!
” “We only just got here.” They patted his face, pulled him into hugs. They were smiling, but each face carried a diluted version of his mother's worry. Suddenly, they went silent again. There were just too many topics to avoid. His weight, his clothes, his two-year absence, a strange woman by his side. Finally, after all these years, he'd struck his mother's friends speechless. Crazy as it was, he smiled.

Aie stepped in. “You're here just in time. We were just about to do a quick blessing for Ria. That's all. Nothing elaborate,” she said, in the voice she used when she wasn't quite sure how to approach a conversation but saw no way out of it.

A silver platter with an oil lamp, some vermillion, turmeric, and rice, and some sweets sat on the island. The silver platter had been in their family for at least three generations, and his mother had used it to say a blessing for him and to ward off the evil eye at every birthday and Diwali. He had explained the ritual to Jen the first time he brought her home, and Aie had totally embarrassed him by lighting the lamp and twirling the platter around his head three times and then doing the same to Jen.

One of the aunties leaned over the oil lamp with a lighter.

“Come, come, Jen, you come too,” someone said to Jess.

The oxygen seemed to disappear from the room, leaving behind so much silence it echoed around the high ceiling.

He didn't know exactly which one of the aunties had made the error, but they all stared at the floor as though it had suddenly turned into the most interesting thing in the room.

Amazingly enough, the mention of Jen didn't tear his heart out. It was funny, in a sick sort of way, that one of them had made the one slip they had all been avoiding with such focus.

“You meant Jess,” his mother said, yet again stepping up and lifting the boulder of awkwardness off their collective shoulders.

He should have stepped up and eased things, but he felt removed from the scene, seeing each expression, each little scuffle being fought inside all the players from a distance. The only calm in the room was Jess, her face a peaceful pond with elephants stampeding at the banks, and it grounded him.

Aie held the prayer platter out to Jess. She looked away from him and at the platter Aie was offering her and stepped away from it. “I can't.”

His mother looked stricken. “Jess,
beta,
we don't believe in such things. Come, it's okay.”

Jess didn't move, her face carefully blank, her jaw set. He recognized the look. For some reason, she believed that she couldn't offer a blessing. Based on the sadness on Aie's face, she seemed to think it had something to do with her being a widow.

Sometimes he hated all the superstition, all the precarious intricacies of his culture. Some days he wished he could throw it all off, un-know everything that Aie had worked so hard to code into him, but that still sometimes felt just as foreign as it felt familiar.

“Aie . . .” he said, “let her be.”

His mother put the platter down. “That's fine. Everything's fine. We already have five women here to offer the blessing, so we're fine. Let's do the gender game first. Ria, you ready to pick out the baby's gender?”

Everyone smiled, or pretended to, and surrounded Ria. They offered her a platter of sweet treats and asked her to choose what she had a hankering for. Apparently, the treat that she picked would predict whether the baby was a boy or a girl. There was always a fifty-percent chance that they were right.

The first thing he had wanted to know when he found out Jen was pregnant was the gender. He'd hated not knowing whether to think of their baby as a she or a he. It had made him feel too distanced from his child, and he'd wanted no distance.

Yet again the stab of pain made his eyes seek out Jess, but she was gone. She must've slipped out while Ria chose between a
lad-doo
and a
karanji
. The urge to seek her out was strong, but leaving here felt like leaving something precious behind. It felt like cheating. This absence of grief felt like cheating.

He dragged himself to the stairs and sat down on the bottom step, wanting to go up but unable to. He listened to the laughter and the teasing in the kitchen. All that normalcy sat like a weight on his chest, even as it made him feel lighter than he had in ages.

“Where did Jess go?” Ria said, waddling up to him and lowering herself down next to him, an act that took considerable effort, given the size of her belly combined with the fact that she was wrapped up in a sari and had flower garlands draped around her wrists and neck.

“I was just going to go find out.”

She threw him one of those looks that tried to gauge what she could or could not say around him, and he wanted to shake her.

“Did you, you know, find what you were looking for?”

He shook his head. No, he hadn't, he hadn't found what he should have been looking for two years ago.

“Nikhil, is everything okay?”

Nothing was okay, except Ria was pregnant and healthy and worried about him. And maybe he needed to stop the tiptoeing first.

“I'm sorry, Ria, but I had to do this by myself.” He put a hand up when she was about to interrupt. “And I know I wasn't by myself. But Jess—she's really helped me, okay? And it was the only way I could do it. Can you understand that? Please?”

Ria raised an eyebrow at him, all indignant. Classic Ria. “I can see that.”

Then she really looked at him. Not her deer-in-the-headlights look, but a look from before everything had gone to hell. “I'm glad. I really am. And Jess was right that day, we shouldn't have left you alone on that ship for so long.”

“You tried. I know how hard you tried. I'm sorry I shut you out. And I'm sorry you felt like you couldn't tell me about the baby. I'm sorry I wasn't here for you.”

She wrapped her arms around him. She had to do it sideways, navigating her belly and the fact that they were sitting down. It was a weird, contorted hug, but it wrapped him up exactly right. He tightened his arms around her shoulders, and all that was skewed between them seemed to slide closer to its right place.

“You're here now, baby,” she said. “I'm so glad you're here now. I should have told you. You were the first person I wanted to tell. I was terrified.”

“I know. I know”

“Viky was terrified . . . is terrified. I thought he'd be all jubilant, but he's been freaking out the entire time. Not that he'll admit it.” She took a breath, and met his eyes more squarely than she had in a very long time. “Nikhil, if it happens, if I lose my mind, you have to take care of him, okay?”

He pulled her close again and spoke into her hair. “Lose your mind even more, you mean?”

She smiled against his shoulder. He pulled away a little and made sure she could see his face. “We're going to watch you like a hawk, Ria. We'll medicate you to death if we have to. You're going to be fine.”

She squeezed him harder, and they sat there like that forever.

“I think I know why Jess didn't want to do the blessing,” she said finally, letting him go. Twisting with that belly couldn't be easy. “Do you mind if I go get her?”

He knew how Jess felt about Ria. He'd seen the way she watched her. He really should be the one to go up there and set things right.

“Please, Nikhil. Trust me.” She stood, or tried to. He gave her a push to help her along and they both laughed. Then she turned and waddled up the stairs before he could stop her.

Maybe Ria was the right person to go get Jess and not him. What could he say to her anyway, when he was feeling the way he was feeling? Nothing was clear anymore. Why hadn't he leaned on his family instead of leaning on some stranger? But she didn't feel like a stranger. What did she even feel like? What did you call what he was feeling?