No Dawn without Darkness: No Safety In Numbers: Book 3 (15 page)

“It’s hard,” I say.

“No,” she says, “it really isn’t. You just go down there and open your mouth.”

I gaze down the bleachers to where Thad has slumped onto the bench.

“Okay.”

It takes me a while to get to the bottom of the bleachers, and then I have to hop the fence to get onto the field and around to where the team is sitting. Some of the guys break into smiles and pat me on the shoulder. I say hi, bump fists and slap backs. It’s actually no big deal being down here.

Thad is alone on a bench near the watercooler. I drop next to him.

“You’re really sucking,” I say.

He looks at me like I just fell from the sky, then goes back to staring at his hands. “Thanks.”

“That first day in the mall, before we knew anything, Mike and Drew and me, we got this pick-up game of touch going with some guys from Tarrytown.”

“That was right after the game,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. “You can imagine how Mike and Drew were looking for payback.”

Thad smirks. “Drew knocked out some guy’s teeth in that game. Got a flag on the play for unnecessary roughness.”

“The Tarrytown guys were all scared shitless of you. Wanted to beat the crap out of me for being a blood relation.”

“So did they?”

“They tried.” My jaw still hurts and I have a bruised rib from the episode. “Mike and Drew, though; they looked out for me.”

Thad slaps his gloves against his palm. “I asked them to,” he says. “Before the cell phones were blocked, I texted Mike to cover your ass.”

“I know,” I say. “Mike made it clear that I was not to leave his sight.”

Thad stares out across the field, watching the defensive line continue to screw up. “He didn’t say a word to me when he came out,” he says. “I learned Drew died from the news.”

Now I feel like an ass. “We were there with him, Mike and me,” I say. “Drew didn’t die alone.” I leave out the details. No one needs to know the details.

Thad slaps his gloves again. Somehow the defensive line managed to hold Ossining off to a fourth down. Coach waves for Thad to get the offensive line together.

“You going to Wes’s party?” he says, standing.

“Nah,” I say.

“You should go,” he says, grabbing my shoulder. “Bring that girl you’re sitting with. The guys are always asking me about you and I’m sick of making shit up.”

“Maybe we’ll stop by.”

He hefts his helmet and smiles. “Stop by or I tell Mom you coughed.”

“Okay, jeez,” I say. “We’ll stop by.”

I turn and feel the smile on my face. Glancing up, I catch Shay staring at me. Her face is a question and she holds a thumb up. I nod, and she flashes this
I-told-you-so
look.

On my way back up to her, I stop in front of my parents. My dad looks away from the players gathering at the West Nyack thirty yard line.

“You all right?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “Is it okay if I stop by this party after dinner?” We’re doing Thanksgiving at the church.

My mom smiles like I’ve answered a prayer.

“You need a ride?” my dad asks.

“Thad’s got me covered.” No way I ride with him.

“She looks nice,” my mother says. “Your girlfriend. From the mall, right?”

I catch Shay’s face in the crowd. She’s watching the game. “She is nice,” I say.

“Have fun,” my dad adds.

I think he’s sober, or at least not drunk. It’s the nicest interchange we’ve had in a long time.

I crawl back up the bleachers, really beginning to feel it in my bum ankle.

“The talk was good?” Shay asks as I settle in beside her.

“All good,” I say. “You mind stopping by a party later?”

“Why, Ryan, dear, I thought you’d never ask.”

L
E
X
I

CHAT WITH D-MASTER

S
H
A
Y

F
or the thousandth time, Ryan says, “This is my girlfriend, Shay.” At first, the words excited me. I’ve never been anyone’s girlfriend, let alone been introduced that way to popular—and obviously very jealous— girls. But the excitement wore off fast, and now I feel like a trophy in Ryan’s story—the Triumphant Return of the Hometown Hero.

I hate myself for begrudging him this party. I want him to get his life back. He sent me these emails while I was away detailing his days sitting alone on swings in abandoned playgrounds, roaming the stacks in a dingy library branch. That’s not Ryan.

“Oh. My. God. Shut up, people!” a girl shouts. She’s in front of the TV. Whatever game was playing has been interrupted for this breaking news: They have arrested three men in connection with the terrorist attack on the Shops at Stonecliff. The screen shows a dilapidated farmhouse in some desolate patch of grass upstate.

The entire party stops to stare at Ryan and me.

Ryan claps his hands, raises his arms like his team’s run one in. “Yes!”

Chatter erupts, a pitter-patter of words in my ears, and Ryan ushers me out of the room, out of the house. We sit on a low rock wall lining a flagstone patio. There is nothing but the wind rattling the branches.

“Why don’t I feel anything?” he asks.

And I realize, we’ve both been faking.

We interrupt this program for breaking news.

“So they caught the people,” I say. “It doesn’t change what happened.”

“But shouldn’t this feel good?”

“I’m not sure this news is for us.” I gesture toward the window, where inside, someone chants
U—S—A—
, and fists pump the air.

Ryan takes my hand. “It’s still good news. It means it’s really over.”

“It doesn’t feel really over.”

We sit there, hand in hand, and watch the party until we get too cold and have to go back inside.

• • •

Ryan slips into things like he’s donning a second skin, smiling and slapping palms. I put on a good face, make nice for the nice people. Around ten o’clock, I get a text from my mother:
I’m outside
. She agreed to let me out of the house on the condition that I agreed to a strict curfew.

“I have to go,” I say, tugging on Ryan’s hand.

He’s all mine again. “Do you need a ride? I can get Thad—”

“My mom’s outside,” I say.

He pulls me to him. “I don’t want to let you go.”

I wrap my arms around him, lay my head against his chest, and listen to his lungs, his heart.

He walks me to the door, steps out with me into the night. “Text me later?” he asks.

“I might even call you.”

He lowers his lips to mine, and before I can worry too much about my mother’s van at the curb, he’s kissing me, gently, oh so gently, a wisp of a breath passing between us.

His eyes are full of mischief. “Later, then.”

“Yes.”

• • •

My mother is waiting with the engine running, knuckles white on the steering wheel. Her hands are bonier than before. Bapuji said that she was not able to eat while we were away.

“I’m guessing that is the boy?” she says.

“Ryan.”

“He’s handsome.”

“He is.”

She’s listening to NPR.
FBI agents used shipping information obtained from a medical supply company to locate the self-proclaimed “Purifiers,” who set the bomb in the mall. The company sent a device used for aerosolizing liquids to the address. An FBI spokesperson said earlier that minute fragments of the device were discovered within the original bomb casing. By altering the device to create an ultrafine mist, the terrorists were able to spread the flu virus throughout the mall, infecting the entire population.

“Can we listen to something else?” I ask.

My mother nods, and I turn the radio off.

We drive in silence, out of West Nyack and toward home. The leaves are gone, nothing but bare branches crane over the car. I found this poem “One Art,” by Elizabeth Bishop:
The art of losing isn’t hard to master,
that’s the first line. I’ve decided this is the Fall of Lost Things.

My mother and I have lost the ability to talk. It’s as if the vacuum of Nani’s absence sucks up every word we might speak. Sometimes, I catch her staring at me. She always smiles and turns away, goes back to whatever she’s doing. My brain forms “I tried to save her,” but it gets lost on the way to my lips, so I say nothing at all.

It’s not just my mother. It was the same with my relatives in India. Aunts, uncles, cousins, everyone wanted to know about Nani. I vaguely recounted her last days, how she had gotten sick early. I told my relatives that she died without pain, without fear. I’m sure that’s not true, but why tell the truth about death?

• • •

We get home, and Bapuji is awake with Preeti on the couch. Preeti has made it her goal in life to catch up on all the television she missed. She had programmed the DVR to record everything before we got locked down. While we were trapped, my parents kept every episode, recorded everything to DVD once the DVR was full, just in case, so that when Preeti got out, she’d have them all, wouldn’t miss a minute.

Preeti’s still very weak. She almost didn’t come with us to India, but Ba didn’t want to split us up, and she is a doctor, after all, so we made the trip as a family. Preeti spent the whole time lying on cushions, watching everyone run around in the garden. She pouted and whined. The mall seems to have changed very little about her.

“Good party?” my father asks.

“I saw Ryan,” my mother says, smirking.

“Ah,” my father says. “As much trouble as we thought he’d be?”

“He’s very handsome,” my mother says.

My father places his hands over his ears. “It’s better that I don’t know.”

I smile because my father is trying to be funny. I wish I could tell them about Ryan. What he means to me. But it’s more of a feeling than words. Instead, I say, “I’m going to take a shower,” and begin mounting the stairs to the second floor.

“Again?” Preeti asks.

“Leave your sister alone,” my mother says.

• • •

I’ve taken to showering several times a day. There’s something delicious in being clean. I have a near constant desire to feel water running over my skin. When I’m not in the shower, I’m outside. My mother keeps yelling at me to put on a hat, that it’s November and I’m going to freeze, but I love the way the breeze tickles my scalp, how the cold sends shivers through my body, the way the crisp air burns my lungs.

Once in the bathroom, I turn the water to hot and step into the stream. Mist envelops me. When I can’t take any more heat, I turn the water to cool, then sit on the floor of the shower and let the rain fall down. As the steam dissipates, I see my story.

It came to me one night in Ahmedabad. I was lying awake in my sleeping bag on the floor of my cousin’s bedroom, watching patterns of headlights from the street below trace across her ceiling, and smelled a familiar smell. Following the scent, I found henna. There’d recently been a wedding of some other distant relation, and all the girls had been decorated with mehndi.

Bored, I took a bag from the pile. It was still moist. I began to draw on the top of my foot—just a mindless doodle, I thought. But it grew. The drawing circled my ankle. The waving lines curved into wings. They were my flight from the men who’d tried to hurt me. The wings became hands, the man’s as he grabbed at me. Fingers forked up my calves.

It became my secret ritual. Every night, more of the story poured out of my fingers all over my skin. Bruises were encircled and inscribed with symbols: where they came from, when. My left hand was a lotus blossom, the palm, Nani’s eyes.

Family members began to look at me funny. I ignored them. I hunched in front of a floor-length mirror on the bedroom wall and sketched curling smoke cut by beams of light across my lower back. Silhouettes of bodies crawled over the peaks of my hips.

My cousin Idaya, in whose room I was staying, interrupted me one night. “Are you okay?” she asked, yawning.

I was mid-drawing, working slowly around my belly button—a swirling pattern to capture that fluttery feeling I felt climbing with Ryan that first time. “I’m sorry,” I said, dropping the bag.

“It’s fine,” she said, warily. “I have lots of henna. You’re just kind of putting on a lot.”

“I do it all the time at home,” I said, trying to come up with some explanation that didn’t involve my being insane.

“Oh.”

“Nani let me use hers.”

Idaya’s eyes widened. “I’m so sorry,” she said. She was my father’s brother’s daughter, not related to Nani.

I decided to use the excuse she gave me. “Thanks,” I said. If she wanted to believe this was for Nani, that was fine. In a way, it was.

• • •

In the shower, water courses over my skin, adding patterns to patterns, glittering over parts of the story, bleeding them together. The earliest designs are fading. What’s weird is that as the pictures go, so do the memories. I’m losing the feeling of that panicked run through the dark. I no longer taste the sour spit of that bastard who attacked me every time I close my mouth.

Everyone please move on, let fade the bruise.

The last design I traced was a repeat of the one I’d made that night before everything. The one Nani had feared revealing to my father, the one that drove us to the mall so early that Saturday. I finished it the night before the celebration of her life—the traditional calendar of mourning had been abandoned, seeing as Nani had been dead for so long, and there was no body to burn anyway.

I wore a loose white salwar kameez. The fabric was so fine that the red-brown of my henna story was visible to any who wished to look. When it was my turn to say something, I read a favorite Tagore poem of Nani’s, one she’d read often after Nana’s death.

Peace, my heart, let the time for the parting be sweet.

Let it not be a death but completeness.

Let love melt into memory and pain into songs.

Let the flight through the sky end in the folding of the wings over the nest.

Let the last touch of your hands be gentle like the flower of the night.

Stand still, O Beautiful End, for a moment, and say your last words in silence.

I bow to you and hold up my lamp to light you on your way.

• • •

I step out of the shower and am confronted with myself. I had wanted to show this skin to Ryan, had wanted to take him to a room and just throw off my clothes as a test: Would he know the secret meaning? But I don’t need to test Ryan. And more, I see now that no one could understand this story. That this is just for my eyes. That I told this story to myself.

We interrupt this program for breaking news.

My hand stretches out, finger points, and on the steam-shrouded glass of the mirror I scrawl:
We interrupt this program for breaking news.

A knock on the door. “Shaila? That’s long enough,” my mother says. “The steam’s fogging up the windows out here.”

I turn off the water, open the door.

My mother is in the hall, placing towels in the linen closet.

“I wasn’t there when she died,” I say.

“What?” My mother jams another towel onto the shelf.

“Nani,” I say. “I saw her after. There had been a riot, and I got trampled by the crowds, and when I woke up, she was gone.”

My mother gives the pile a hard shove with both hands. “Your nani, she could get all these towels in the closet. Even pushing with all my strength, I can’t get them in.”

I rest my fingers on my mother’s arm. We haven’t really touched that much since I got home, so we both look up, surprised at the contact.

“She rolled them,” I say, taking out a towel. “That’s how she got everything to fit.” I unfold the towel, snap it straight, and roll it into a tube. It slides into a small crevice on top of my mother’s pile, which threatens to avalanche onto the rug.

“Right,” my mother says. “Yes. She rolled them. I remember.”

“I want to tell you what happened,” I say, “if you want to know.”

My mother touches the hem of the rolled towel. “I’ve been trying to find the right way to ask, to talk to you. I was afraid if I said anything, it would be the wrong thing. How can I ask you to talk about such horrors?”

I take out the whole pile of towels and sit on the rug. “I want to tell you,” I say, taking one from the top and beginning to roll. “It all started because of the henna tattoo, the one on my face.”

By the time I’m finished talking, we’ve rolled all the towels, folded all the sheets, and fit everything neatly in the closet, just the way Nani always did.

My mother then touches my ankle. “And this?” she asks.

My eyes bloat. My throat contracts.

“You don’t have to hide from me,” she says.

And I’m back there, in the dark, eyes flashing in scraps of light, hands raking my skin. I can’t tell her this.

“It’s all I thought about,” she says. “My two beautiful girls, trapped in that huge place, alone among thousands of strangers.”