A Change of Heart (4 page)

5

 

—Dr. Jen Joshi

 

 

N
ikhil clicked “save” on yet another report chronicling his Pepto-Bismol-helmed war on dyspepsia, more commonly known as indigestion, and glanced at the waiting room window. He had first noticed Jess sitting outside the clinic before his first patient came in that morning. Now, almost half a day's worth of patients later, she was still perched on the bench outside the clinic in her Goddess of Darkness costume: black pants, black zip-up hoodie. It's what she had worn every single time he'd seen her. He wanted to storm out there and ask her to leave him alone. Or yank the hood off her head to get another look at the hair.

He turned back to the empty waiting room. His last patient had left half an hour ago, leaving him to fill the unforgiving minutes with absolutely no distance run, to borrow inanely from his mother's favorite Kipling poem. Apparently, everyone on
The Oasis
was out carpe-ing the heck out of every one of their diems, just like the brochures said. But what exactly they were squeezing out of life he couldn't bring himself to see.

And yet, here he was unable to leave after close to two years, overstaying Omar's welcome. Sheik Omar, owner of Golden Gulf Cruises, had gone to the University of Michigan with Nikhil in a different lifetime. They had never been friends, per se. Their interests had been too disparate. But every now and again, Omar had lured Nikhil into his frat parties and Nikhil had returned the favor by luring Omar and his mind-boggling sums of money into supporting whichever campus charity he thought could save the world at that moment.

Almost a decade later, Nikhil had fixed the hole in Omar's son's two-year-old heart. It had been routine surgery, but Omar—who had miraculously transformed into the kind of father Nikhil had so badly wanted to be—had trusted no one but Nikhil to perform it. He had flown Nikhil into Doha from India. At the time, Nikhil still worked at a Hindu Ashram–funded clinic in the Himalayas, before he'd joined the MSF and met Jen. Omar had tried everything to get Nikhil and Jen to move to Qatar and work as his personal physicians. As head of one of the world's largest oil suppliers, Omar had moved as far away as it was possible to move from the partying frat boy Nikhil had gone to college with.

After Jen's death, Omar had come to Mumbai and offered Nikhil the chance to hide out. Nikhil's family had been hounding him to go home to Chicago, but he couldn't. He definitely couldn't go back on mission either, and continuing to live in Jen's flat in Mumbai would have killed him. Omar had given him a choice between being his personal physician and heading up the medical facilities for his cruise line.

For some reason a cruise ship had sounded like the only bearable option. A floating mass of strangers who needed no real fixing. Because really, no matter how fucked up the world was, only the most presumptuous dumbfuck thought he could actually fix any part of it.

Being a waiter at one of the restaurants had sounded like just the thing, but that involved learning a skill and meeting far too many people and Omar had refused to let him clean decks.

For two years Nikhil had done the worst possible job at being a physician on
The Oasis
. With the exception of showing up drunk at the clinic, he had given Omar every reason to fire him. “You are my brother, and you can't fire family,” had been Omar's only response.

“What if I kill someone?” Nikhil had asked him.

“You won't.”

Thankfully for Omar and his unwarranted faith, ailments resulting from indulging in an excess of food, drink, and sunshine were generally fixable even by a doctor whose hands shook because he was destroying his liver. So here he was, cocooned in the safety of a job he could never be fired from, floating on an ocean so beautiful it underscored every ugliness he had ever witnessed, on an overdecorated, overcrowded monstrosity that highlighted his aloneness with all its familial bonhomie, and he couldn't bring himself to care about any of it.

He poked around at the screen looking for more paperwork, but his eyes drifted back to Jess. Her arms were wrapped around herself and her hood was pulled over that ridiculous red hair Jen and he had fought so hard over. He had loved Jen's hair, her real hair. He could have spent a lifetime watching the jet-black strands catch the light, a black so rich and deep, even the sunlight couldn't insert any gold into it. It shone blacker in the light, as immutable and stubborn as his wife herself.

He had spent every night he got with her with his face buried in it. It was that sleeping by her side, wrapped up in her scent, buried in the comfort of their marriage, that he had missed most when they had been apart.

It was that entangling of spaces with no borders, no separation, skin to skin, existence to existence, that had summarized his too-short marriage. It had been the miraculously healing end to even the hardest day, all-consuming, all-forgiving, like the deep shade of the magnificent oak in his parents' backyard. He had counted on it so completely that the uprooting of it had taken away his entire forest. His everything.

When he'd seen Jen at the airport that last time he visited her in Mumbai, he had walked right past her. She had followed him and tapped his shoulder. He had almost had an aneurysm when he realized that it was her under the punk-rocker-red hair. She had let the local beauty salon in the slum color it, her version of a trust-building exercise to get the girls to come in and get checkups, and it had turned that disastrous red. He had gone completely nuts and refused to let it go.

She'd been right. His completely disproportionate hissy fit had gone on for days.

Then they'd gone to that fair. Their last day together.

The screen in front of him blurred. He squeezed his eyelids together. But, unlike tears, he couldn't squeeze away the blast of pain cramping in his heart.

Of all the things he remembered from that day, his starkest memory was of that ball of panic unfurling in his belly when he couldn't find her in the ocean of people. She was the strongest, most competent person he knew and perfectly capable of taking care of herself. But those minutes of not knowing where she was amid the crush of bodies stretching for miles had been like a flash forward. One of those moments when the universe spins around you and you have no clue what just happened. Just a sense that something did and you missed it and it was important.

He'd seen her hair first. In the unbroken mass of black hair and un-deodorized sweat, the red had flashed at him. He'd been shaking when he pulled her to his chest. She had done what she always did—been overwhelmed by his display of affection and covered it up with amusement.

Holy.

Shit.

“I'll be right back,” he shouted to the nurses and rushed out the door.

Jess's only reaction when she saw him jog out of the clinic was the slightest softening of her eyes.

“Come on,” he said and headed for the stairs without waiting for her.

She followed him. No protests, no questions. He led her up the stairs, flight after flight. She kept up with him, her steps tracing his as they broke into the sunlight on the main pool deck. The pungent burn of chlorine filled his nostrils. He kept going. They had to dodge people, flashes of bright bikinis and sunglasses and multicolored wraps. Up to the next deck level. Then the next. The number of people thinned as they went higher. Until the sunshine and the wind grew angrier, fighting each other for power over that topmost deck. Until the only ones there to witness it were the two of them.

He grabbed her arm and pressed her against the little cabin room—the only patch of shade on the wide-open deck—and reached for her hood.

She pulled it off before he could touch it.

“Is the hair real?”

She took a breath but her eyes didn't waver. “No.” The wind whipped the short strands around her face.

He continued to hold her gaze, but he couldn't get himself to ask the question.

She answered it nonetheless. “Jen knew you'd believe me if I had the hair. That's why I had it done.”

He took a step back, needing to pull breath into his lungs.

It made him a fool of gargantuan proportions, but if there was any chance, any chance at all, he had to take it. He had to know. “Can I talk to her?”

Sympathy flared in her eyes, a hot, harsh flash making him sick to his stomach.

“No,” she said, shaking her head and spinning that hair around her face. “You can't. I'm sorry.”

He lifted his hand and stopped it inches from the flaming strands. The wind teased them to within a breadth of his fingers, but they didn't reach him. “It's amazingly like hers.”

Relief swept across her always-calm features, making her look as weary as he felt. “I got it colored at the same place Jen did.”

“And where was that?”

She gave a small nod, acknowledging the endless swirl of doubt churning inside him. “Beauty's Beauty Parlor in Dharavi.”

He pulled his hand away and rubbed the stubble on his head. He'd forgotten to shave it today. “I hated it.” He had been such a jerk about it too.

“I know,” she said. “Jen didn't like it much either.”

And yet Jen had done no more than be amused by it. He walked to the railing and leaned back into it. She had always been so damn patient with him.

Silence stretched between them, unruffled by the wind so violent everything in its path had to be bolted down.

But silence didn't have the answers he needed. “How does this work? This”—he twirled his finger between them—“her talking to you.”

She sagged against the wall behind her. It was the slightest move, but there it was again, the relief she was trying to hide. He hungered for some of his own.

“It's really hard to explain.” Her voice was a whisper above the wind. “I feel her inside me. It's not hearing words so much as knowing them. Like a mist of thought sinking into my brain and becoming my own thoughts.”

He tried to tamp it down, but the hope that unfurled inside him sped up his breath. He knew he was going to regret this, knew what a pathetic asshole this made him, but there was no backing out now.

“Okay, hit me. What does she want?”

“Jen was working on something,” she said quickly, as if sensing how badly he wanted to change his mind. “She was collecting evidence against someone who was stealing organs from undocumented slum dwellers.”

His heart started slamming. “Shit. The cop sent you!” He wasn't just a pathetic asshole, he was a pathetic, gullible asshole. Of course Rahul Savant would pull something like this. He was desperate.

He backed away from her, heading for the stairs. Rahul wasn't the only one who was desperate. Nikhil's own desperation had made him crazy. This conversation had gone on too long.

“No one sent me,” she called after him. “Certainly not the police. You have to believe me. Her death, they—”

He stopped but couldn't turn around. “I was there. If you know all this you must know that I . . . I watched my wife die. I watched what they did to her.”

Her hand rested on his shoulder. But there was no comfort in it.

There was no comfort.

“Then how can you let them get away with it?”

He spun around, throwing off her hand. All the scattered scraps of feelings from these past two years balled into rage in his heart. Pure hundred-proof rage. “They already got away with it. Even the bastards who are rotting in jail got away with it. They're alive and she's gone and she's not coming back.” He squeezed his eyes shut and tried not to feel another horrible surge of hope. The fucking thing kept leaping up inside him like giant waves, throwing him up then down like an ocean gone mad. Now it slammed him down. “Is she?”

“I'm sorry.”

He couldn't believe he had asked the question. What was worse, if Jess had told him that Jen was coming back to talk to him, through her, through the fucking door behind her, he'd have believed that too. Talk about pathetic, gullible asshole.

“The men you put in jail don't matter. They were just low-level hired guns paid to take the blame. Hired by the real criminals she was collecting evidence against.”

He lost his center of gravity. The white deck spun under his feet. It's what Rahul had tried to tell him two years ago, what Rahul was probably trying to tell him this morning. And just like those two times it shut his brain down. The burning ball of rage that kept growing inside him wiped out everything except the fact that Jen had lied to him. She had knowingly put herself in danger, knowingly put their baby in danger, and kept him out of a decision that affected her safety, their baby's safety.

They had promised never to lie to each other. It was the basis of their marriage.

“That's not possible.” His voice sounded every bit as destroyed as he felt. “It was random. They came out of nowhere.” There was no way Jen could have gone walking down that alley if she knew. There was no way this was why she had tried to talk him out of visiting her. But he had needed to see her, needed to touch that tightness in her belly that had changed everything.