A Change of Heart (5 page)

He stared down at his hand where he could still feel that tightness, then looked at the stairs he should've taken when he still could and sank down onto the hammered metal step. “Did the cop tell you all that?”

She sank down next to him.

“No. Actually, the police, they might be involved. This thing goes really high up. Jen didn't trust anyone. We can't either.”

“Why? If you know all this, you must know why she got involved.”

“It was an accident. One of her patients disappeared and she couldn't let it go. She kept searching and they found the body with organs cut out. And then another one of her patients disappeared and then another and she realized that the patients who were disappearing had signed up to be on the organ donor registry she was compiling. After that first one the police couldn't find bodies, but she couldn't let it go. She kept digging and pushing the police to investigate. It started making the people who were behind it uncomfortable and they stopped her,” she said, as though killing anyone who stood in your way was just what people did.

He pressed his eyes into his hands, but the visions crashing around in his head only got clearer. Jen had talked so excitedly about how fast the donor database had grown. She had been so proud of what the clinic could achieve with it. But she hadn't said a word about the deaths or the investigation.

“Not only did she document every disappearance, she was trying to track down transplant surgeries across the country without family donors to see where the organs were going. But most importantly she had information on the gang who threatened her.” Crimson stained her high cheeks. It was either the sun and the wind or some sort of emotion he couldn't identify.

“Okay, so where did she hide this evidence?”

The color in her cheeks took on the angry redness of bruises, as though someone had slapped her and her skin was gathering up the proof of their violence.

She didn't answer him.

“You don't know?” How stupid did she think he was? She knew all this, but the one thing that only Jen would know, that was the one thing she didn't know. “Do I have ‘I'm an ass' tattooed across my forehead? Who sent you? Who do you work for?”

“I told you, I don't work for anyone. This is about Jen. She can't move on until you do this, and she won't leave me alone until you do.” For someone who was admitting to being haunted she was so damn calm.

He pushed off the cold metal and stood. “So, you're what, Mother Teresa?” He started down the stairs like he should have done before she started spewing her lies.

“If I could make her go away, don't you think I would? Don't you think I've tried? But I can't. The only one who can end this is you, Nikhil. I need my life back. Please.”

He spun around and faced her, still sitting on that top step, the red hair swirling around her face. “I don't care. I don't care what you need. I don't give a rat's ass about your life.”

The rage that flashed in her eyes was so hot it matched his. He was about to turn away again, but she blinked and blanketed it so fast behind such dead calm he was mesmerized by it.

“I'm not asking you to care about me,” she said. There was no more bleeding sympathy, just that unearthly calm. “But this is about your wife. You care about her, don't you? Because she happened to believe you would pull out your limbs for her.” She waited for him to react, to answer. But if he had any damn answers he wouldn't be here floating on an ocean, wanting nothing more than to be left alone.

Actually, that wasn't all he wanted. But what he did want fell under the category of Fucking Miracle.

And she knew it. She had used it to shovel bullshit down his throat for long enough. He ran down the stairs. But there was no escape. The stairs creaked behind him. “How? How don't you care? How can you listen to what I'm telling you and not want to do anything? How can you stand there and pretend to be broken about her, when—”

He was on her in an instant, his hands on her shoulders. “Pretend? This look like pretense to you? Or can you feel only dead people, but live ones, they're just here for you to mess with. Why don't you go ask Jen how I pretended to love her? Do it now. Conjure her up. Do it,” he hissed into her face.

She grabbed the railing with both hands and stuck out her jaw as if she was determined not to be scared. As if
she
was the victim here.

The fragile bones in her shoulders poked into his palms and he let her go. But he didn't step back. “What's she doing right now? What's she wearing? Let me guess. White robes? Is she transparent? Does she walk through walls and disappear into thin air?”

“I told you it's not like—”

“What about her face? What about her eyes? What does she look like? Like her innards don't fit anymore? Like there's no space inside, because she's a skeleton who can't get any food down her gullet? No, don't look at me like you understand. You don't get to give me that look.”

“Nikhil . . .”

“Oh, I'm sorry, you said she floats into you. Becomes one with you. So, will I feel her if I touch you?” He grabbed her again, pulled her into him, her mouth so close he tasted the wetness of it. “If I put my tongue in your mouth will I forget my name? Will I fucking know what—Shit.”

She was shaking, her eyes wild with terror. He let her go and she fell back, landing on her butt, and buried her face in her hands. But only for a second. When she looked up the terror she'd let slip was gone, blanketed with that calm again.

But he'd recognized it. Seen it in another set of eyes that would never stop haunting him. He stumbled down the remaining steps. The smell of the sewer in his nose, the grunting of those bastards as they thrust into her ringing in his ears over Jen's screams.

He was back at the blasted railing, back in that alley, his face pressed into mud pooled with his own blood.

He leaned into the ocean, shoving his face into the salty wind. What kind of idiot surrounded himself with this kind of temptation when all he wanted was for this shit to be over?

* * *

She squeezed her eyes shut, squeezed every muscle until she stopped shaking. She reminded herself to breathe. It was just a reflex. Just a damn reflex. Nikhil hadn't been trying to hurt her.

This wasn't about her. She tamped down the nausea that clawed up her belly and went to him. She had to finish this. She couldn't back down now.

He stood at the railing, his head bent, his entire body weeping like one of those giant conifers that drooped by the Gandaki River. He had that same desolation as the mountain town she'd grown up in. As if he had been born for beauty, as if he'd been showered with blessings, and then the tide had turned and no one knew what to do with the devastation, with the ugliness that the storm left behind.

He leaned so far into the railing, she half expected him to let go. “Are you happy now?” he whispered into the ocean. “Is this what you wanted to see?”

No. His pain was unbearable to witness, so sharp it scraped at all the thick skin she'd grown around herself. She shook her head, knowing full well he couldn't see her. His eyes were fixed on the turquoise waves, but she doubted he saw those either.

The vibrant blue swirled around them like an abomination, the harsh brightness highlighting the darkness trapped in their two bodies like a spotlight. Anger and pain, old and new, his and hers, pulling and pushing, multiplying against each other.

Except his pain was pure. It had dignity to it. Her own pain had been ugly, filthier than the deepest gutter.

Despite his defeated stance, he crumbled further. “She used to . . . God . . . She could make me forget my name. She could make me forget everything. I could come home after sawing off a child's limbs and she could make me forget. Do you know what that feels like? To have someone like that?”

No, she didn't. But she knew what never being able to forget felt like. “If I could change things, I would.” That much she meant. It was much more than she should have shared, but that much she did mean.

Of course he didn't believe her. He laughed the ugliest laugh and turned around to face her. “Right.”

“Yes. I would.” She met his eyes and held his stare, angry and suspicious as it was.

“And what about that heart beating inside you?”

She shrugged. “That could have come from someone else.”

“So not from my loss but someone else's loss.”

“I didn't choose this. It's not like I wanted it to happen. Don't believe me if you don't want to, but I can tell you one thing for sure. What happened to Jen, if I could stop that from happening to anyone, I would do whatever it took to stop it.”

6

 

—Dr. Jen Joshi

 

 

I
t could be the odd, slashed-open feeling of finally being able to talk about Jen, or then maybe it was the expression on Jess's face—like a child determined to have her way despite having no power at all. But Nikhil saw the woman for the first time, past Jen's hair, past his own wretched hope, and he knew she wasn't lying.

In this moment, he would bet his life she actually meant what she said. Her eyes glittered with conviction, the kind of conviction that reminded him of patients after the worst kind of trauma, a vulnerable, bleeding sort of determination that was a silence so powerful, no stringing together of words could match it.

He turned back to the blinding blue of the ocean. The railing reached his waist. Not for the first time, the urge to let go grabbed him. All it would take was releasing his grip, and gravity would take care of the rest.

“Seems like the easiest way out, doesn't it?” Her voice flew around his neck like a noose and yanked him back.

She leaned into the railing beside him, her body adding to the push against the metal keeping his body from escape. The wind picked up whatever perfume she was wearing and swirled it around him. There was something melancholy about the scent, like soporific hemp and meditative incense that made your limbs heavy even as it lightened the weight of the world.

Maybe it was her melancholic air, maybe it was that terror he'd witnessed in her eyes earlier, or maybe it was the fact that every heart transplant patient had glimpsed their own mortality, but he recognized surmounted suffering when he saw it. She had the look of someone who had hiked to the top of the mountain and back, but had lost a limb in the process and wasn't quite sure it had been worth it.

He turned to her. “You sound like you've considered it too.” This coward's madness balanced on the edge of a metal railing.

Her breathing stayed steady, but the effort of keeping it steady increased the slightest bit, the way one breathed for a stethoscope. “No. I've never contemplated killing myself. It's a luxury I couldn't afford.”

He heard himself laughing again and hated the sound. Luxury? Wasn't it just great that he understood exactly what she meant?

She stuck out her chin again, her stance that of a pugilist bracing herself for impact. “You should try anger instead.”

She sounded so much like Jen when he'd first met her. Jen had been so angry at everyone and everything. “I'm going to make this world a better place if it kills me,” was her unspoken mantra.

Well, didn't irony suck balls.

But Jen's anger had always been on behalf of other people, against the injustices she loved to go hurtling after. This woman's anger, when she let it out, was an armor. She was protecting only herself. That knowledge only intensified his ache for his wife.

“Anger can help you deal with just about everything.” The bitter edge in her voice was a serrated knife against the wound he had let her rip open.

“Oh, I'm plenty angry.” It hadn't gotten him through shit. “Jen used to hate that I didn't get angry enough.” He'd always told her there was too much anger in the world as it is, and he had never felt the need to add to it.

She should see him now.

“Actually, she was really proud of you for it,” Jess said, and paused to gauge if she should go on. “Maybe she was even a little jealous.”

He was going to regret this, but he leapt onto that, panting for a scrap like a starving dog. “What else did she . . .” He leaned his head back and let the salty air slap his face. “What else did she say?”

She turned to him, leaning a hip against the railing. He had expected to hear triumph in her voice, but there was only more of that relief and the ubiquitous sympathy. “Where do I start? Your wife thought you were . . . Let me just say, I was shocked to find that you didn't have wings. Or a halo.” There was the faintest smile in her voice and he turned to look at it. It was a tight, restrained thing. But he was pretty sure it was a smile. Then it fell away and she looked surprised at what she'd just said.

“Yeah, the bracing ocean breeze took off with the wings and the Caribbean fun-shine has a way of burning through halos. Then there's the alcohol fumes. Those aren't great for halos and wings either.”

She looked sad. If she said anything about letting Jen down, he was throwing her overboard.

“She could talk about you forever,” she said instead. “She was completely and utterly awestruck by everything about you.”

Jen's beautiful, bottomless eyes caressed him. The way she had looked at him, always with disbelief at her own dumb luck at having found him. He'd known exactly how she felt. He had felt it tenfold.

“That wasn't always the case,” he said softly, mostly to push past the pain clamping around his throat and because now that he'd talked about her, he couldn't stop. “When Jen first met me, she was just annoyed at everything about me. It was hard work bringing her around.”

“And you always knew you had to bring her around?” she said just as softly.

“I knew instantly. I'd always thought I was abnormal because I had never been in love. Then I met her and there could never be anyone else.” Jen had thought it was really weird that he was so sure of his feelings after meeting her just once.
It's because it's your first time. It's just the novelty of the thing,
she'd said.

She had slept with him because, well, because she slept with all the new recruits. She'd told him that without the least hesitation, and then she'd been so angry with him because she hadn't wanted to move on. His relief had been extreme.

This couldn't possibly be happening. I mean, this is like Hollywood crap. I don't want to sleep with anyone else, and I can't seem to keep out of your pants,
she'd said.

It is a bit demeaning to be wanted just for my body,
he'd told her.
But I'm okay with you trying to get it out of your system. Take as long as you need. Maybe it will fix itself.

It hadn't fixed itself and here he was. “She would be so disappointed in the way I've handled it.”

Jess's eyes, which had been studying him with guarded calm, softened again. “Actually, you've handled it exactly the way she was afraid you would. Except for the fact that you haven't gone after the bastards she was trying to catch.” She tried to be smooth about it, but her desperation was naked in the determined set of her jaw.

“You can stop working me now. I'm here.” And, God help him, he was. Even though he wasn't sure what exactly was going on, and he couldn't decipher what he believed from what he didn't, he knew that he was going to follow this all the way to its end. How could he not?

Instead of looking embarrassed, she shrugged defiantly.

“But I still have questions.”

“Sure.”

“Why didn't she tell me about the investigation?”

* * *

It was a question she had asked herself over and over again. How had Jen not told Nikhil what she was doing? Even if Jen knew Nikhil would try to talk her out of it, she should have told him. He had a right to know.

“Maybe she didn't want to worry you.”

“Maybe? Can't you ask her?”

“I can't ask her things. All I have is what she chooses to share.”

“You said she knew how dangerous these people were. Did they threaten her?”

She nodded. They had pressed a gun into her belly, into her unborn child, but it hadn't stopped Jen. Unlike Jess, who had learned to sell her soul for far less far too long ago.

Nikhil paled under the blazing sun. The wind whipped the moments of calm he'd mastered from his eyes.

Whatever Jen's reasons for not telling him had been, she'd been wrong. How could she shut him out when she knew he felt this way about her?

Restlessness flapped around him like the T-shirt fluttering around his too-lean body. “Tell me what she said about the baby. How did she feel about becoming a mother?” If she had thought he looked like he was in pain before, this question sucked the life out of him.

It was the one thing about Jen she would never understand. How could anyone not want to be a mother? Her Joy had put her back together. Without Joy she would've been dead years ago. Before him, it was almost as if she hadn't existed. His smile, the devotion in his gray eyes, it gave her existence substance. He filled her in, the way he filled in the black-and-white characters in his coloring books with color, his little tongue pinched between his lips, his soft brow furrowed in concentration.

“She knew how happy you were about the baby.”

“I know how
I
felt,” he snapped. “I asked how she felt.”

Despite how well he thought he knew his wife, despite the fact that Jen had been perfectly honest with him about not being ready for motherhood, he looked desperate for someone to rewrite that part of the story for him. “She's gone,” she should've said. “The baby's gone.” She needed him to snap out of this, to get him working on what she needed from him. But she couldn't.

“Did she move away because she needed to distance herself from me? From how I was being about the baby?”

“Nikhil, you know why she moved. You know she had always wanted to work in Dharavi because of your family's connection to India.”

“I begged her to wait until my rotation was done.”

“She would have lost the position. She didn't have the time to wait.”

“Because of the baby. She was going to have to take a break and stop doing what she wanted to do because of the baby.”

“She just wanted to fit it in before it was time.” That wasn't entirely untrue, and Nikhil didn't need to know how terrified Jen had been of losing everything she loved to motherhood.

“The baby wouldn't have changed anything. We could have gone on doing what we wanted to do. A lot of couples manage to do what they love and raise their children just fine.”

“Actually, a baby changes everything. But they would have been changes you wanted to make,” she said, and instantly regretted it when his sad eyes turned alert.

“You're a mother.”

It was the last thing she had expected him to say. The very last thing she needed for him to know.

But he spoke before she could deny it. “How old is she? He?” His entire attention was on her now and she didn't know how to back away from it.

“He's seven. Joy's seven.” Shit. She'd told him Joy's real name. Panic unfurled inside her.

“Joy?” he said. “That's beautiful.” Of all the things that could have made his voice crack, it was her baby's name that did it.

She couldn't give herself time to process that, to think about Joy. “They knew she was pregnant, Nikhil. They still did this.” She attacked his vulnerability instead.

The sound that escaped him ripped through her skin.

“You have to help me find them,” she said.

“Yes.” He nodded. “Just tell me what she needs me to do.”

It took all her strength to not collapse to the deck floor, her relief was so strong.

Then she saw his face and there was no more relief.

It was time to pull out the knife, or to at least stop twisting it. Jen's Nikhil needed respite, and for Jen she'd let him have some.

“Thanks,” she said quietly. “It can wait until tomorrow. I think this is enough for one day.”

Is this how torturers felt? Weary from their victim's pain. Unable to go on without a break. He wasn't the only one who needed the respite. She needed to regroup. Needed to remind herself why cruelty like this was necessary. Jen would have torn her limb from limb for doing this to him. But she would have understood too. For some reason, Jess knew that no matter how much Jen would have hated her for doing this, she would have done the same thing in her place.

Despite the alarm bells gonging in her head, warning her not to, she couldn't stop herself from reaching out and touching his arm. “It will get better, you know. After a while your body adjusts to the pain and learns how to put it away.”

It was true. Pain by its very nature couldn't stay acute. Your threshold for pain grew as pain grew, like a body that kept expanding as you fed it and fed it. How could it not? Whoever decided it was okay to inflict the unthinkable on you had to make sure you lived to experience it. What better way to do that than to keep it right there on the edge of a blade, just bearable enough so you could go on around it?

He pulled his arm away, but didn't argue with her, although it was clear from the way he squeezed his eyes shut that in this moment he couldn't perceive the pain ever lessening, let alone going away. Who knew, maybe he was the one man on earth who really could love one and only one woman until the end of time. People who believed in love did believe in that sort of thing.

Watching him under the Caribbean sun, his body gaunt with pain, his hair shorn off, and eyes that switched from desolation to desperate hope and back again without his permission, all the things Jen had said about him rang true. Watching him like this it was impossible not to believe that he was the miracle Jen believed he was.

Too bad she didn't believe in miracles.