The Fates Will Find Their Way (10 page)

And they stayed like that for another hour, maybe two, Nora talking incessantly, more than she’d ever talked in those last several years, until the first of the morning light came through the high bedroom windows and she realized the girls would wake soon.

“It’s time,” she said.

“If you say so,” the Mexican said.

“Stay in bed,” she said. “Pretend to sleep. It will be easier for me.”

“Nora wants what Nora gets,” he said.

“No,” she said. “Nora
gets
what Nora
wants
.”

“Ah,” he said. “Of course.”

She pulled the blanket up over his shoulders. She put her hands on his eyes, now dry. “Go to sleep,” she said. And the Mexican did go to sleep, and when he woke, another hour later, Nora was gone.

It is too much to imagine anything different.

14

S
he was in Mumbai for the bombings. She was on television—wasn’t she?—in the background, behind the news anchor from our hometown, the one who had, amazingly, made it to prime time. It’s a wonder the anchor didn’t recognize her, though understandable given that strange and humid city in ragtags all around her. But what a story that would have been—to see Nora, to bring her home, to finally solve the mystery that’s been nagging us all these years.

We all turned thirty the year of the bombings, which means Nora did too, or at least she would have. Stu Zblowski said he saw her on the television screen, a thirty-year-old version of the sixteen-year-old who’d disappeared. Marty Metcalfe said he saw her too. (Marty was watching because he was in love with the news anchor. She’d been at a New Year’s party his parents had thrown when Marty was only seventeen. She’d gotten drunk, made an error in judgment that she swore to Marty would never happen again, and Marty had been in love ever since. It’s like that sometimes.) Stu called his mom to tell her what he’d seen, but Marty was too distracted by the news anchor and the danger he believed she was in to remember to call home.

Just a month after the bombings, at someone’s Christmas party (the Rutherfords? the Boyds? It was the party with the tree that had been decorated with red chili pepper–shaped lights instead of tiny white bulbs), we questioned Stu about what he’d seen. (Marty, though he was there, often proved useless when pressed for information, as if the only thing on his mind at any given minute was the news anchor and the coat closet at his parents’ house and the taste of Chablis on that older, wetter tongue. Not surprisingly, Marty—like Trey Stephens and Danny Hatchet—never married. All three of them carrying the strange, unfair burdens of childhood through their entire adult lives.)

“Was it definitely her? Or was it just possibly her?” A few of us ushered Stu into the basement, away from our wives and mothers, where we could be as openly curious about Nora as we wanted.

“Clear as day,” said Stu. “It was her, definitely.” Stu was in town only for the holidays. He’d moved to New England, as promised, when Bethany got pregnant. And Bethany, just as
she’d
promised, gave him a new yellow Lab that readily answered to the name Stu.

Danny Hatchet scratched at his thighs, then produced a joint from a back pocket. The rest of us shook our heads like we were disappointed, or like of course Danny would have a joint in his pocket and shouldn’t he just grow up already? But when he offered it around the room, every one of us accepted. A few of us perhaps shooting quick glances towards the stairway and the door at the top, making sure it was closed, making sure we wouldn’t be caught, though we were adults and these were our lives and our decisions and who, really, was left to scold us in any truly meaningful way?

“What the fuck would she be doing in Mumbai?” Drew Price still dropped f-bombs like they were articles, a way of making up for being almost a foot shorter than the rest of us.

“What if she’s been alive all this time and then died in the bombings?” said Chuck Goodhue. “Like the minute we almost found her, she went and died all over again, only this time for real.”

“Yeah. What if? Don’t be an idiot.” It was Paul Epstein talking, strangely aggressive for someone who’d been reticent about Nora after that year of calling Sissy a slut—a year that most of us agree caused her to leave us in favor of boarding school almost a decade and a half ago.

“How am I an idiot?” It was Chuck Goodhue talking.

“You really want me to explain it to you?” Paul took the joint from Danny and we all watched the way he inhaled without a pause and it was the first time, probably, that any of us accepted that he was a man now, that in spite of all his literal and metaphorical shortcomings, he was, after all, one of us too.

“Fuck you, Paul.”

“Fuck you, Chuck.” Most of us were laughing by this point. We didn’t mean to, but we couldn’t control it. “Say hi to your wife for me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” It wasn’t Chuck who asked the question. It was someone else. Danny? Jack? Who can remember? But it was Chuck who told us to let it go. And it was Chuck who was first to walk up the staircase to leave the party. We tried to watch him leave, tried to give his exit the respect it deserved, but our minds got away from us.

“I’m thirty years old,” Winston was saying, “and Maggie’s a month away from a baby and I’ve got a great mortgage and a great lease on a car, but Nora’s in Mumbai with bombs going off and I’m fucking jealous. Someone explain that to me.”

But we couldn’t. We sipped our beers and shut our mouths. And while we waited out the final hour of the Christmas party—milling about the living room upstairs, hoping for our wives to tell us it was time to go—we wondered one by one, the thoughts perhaps overlapping, about not just the
possibility
of Nora in Mumbai, but the
plausibility
. Because, if she had been there since she’d gone missing, how’d she get there? Where did she get the money? From the man in the Catalina? Had she been there all this time? Did she steal it? When, and from whom? And what about a passport? What about any of the logistics? None of it made sense. All of it was unlikely. And yet. Stu Zblowski. Marty Metcalfe. They were so sure. It was impossible to ignore at least the chance that it was true.

A
sk any one of us and we’ll tell you that the liquor went down easily the last hour of that year’s holiday party. High from Danny’s stale weed, agitated by the new information (even misinformation) about Nora, we found ourselves gulping what was meant to be sipped. Every time we glanced at our wives and were given the gentle but unmistakable shake of the head that
no
, it was
not
yet time to leave, we found our way to the makeshift bar in the kitchen, pouring whatever the guest before us had left out—eggnog, hot rum toddy, straight warm gin—into our tumblers.

In spite of that, in spite of our too-ready gullets and our lubed-up heads, there were certain other details about that party that have stayed with us. Details, surprisingly, that had nothing to do with Nora. And not just details like the fact that the chili pepper–shaped lights gave off an eerie pink glow (Was it the Rutherfords? Were they that tacky already? Or were they being ironic? Surely someone must remember at whose house this all took place?), but details, for instance, like the fact that Trey Stephens was there. We were still ten years away from the things he’d do with Paul Epstein’s daughter, then only three years old. But it’s the sort of thing one remembers later, when the crime is finally committed, when the past is recounted, reviewed, reevaluated, and sometimes even revised. As in,
That party? Jesus. Wasn’t Trey Stephens at that party? Can you imagine? Jesus. If only we’d known
. And perhaps that, more than anything, was the refrain that was and should be reserved for Trey.
If only we’d known
. But we didn’t know. We never know. No matter how many times we revisit that party or any other. The fact is, until it happened, until Trey changed how we viewed him, how we viewed and view ourselves—as men, as fathers, as friends and husbands—we could never know enough to change the outcome. Not his. Not ours. Certain outcomes are unavoidable, invariable, absolutely unaffectable, and yet completely unpredictable. Certain outcomes are that way. But maybe not Nora’s. Maybe she was the only one who escaped; who had the chance to become something not completely inevitable. Maybe. Or maybe she died when she was sixteen years old in a snowstorm that overtook her, in a foreign grouping of trees, close to the water, a mere two counties over.

But forget Nora for now. That’s the point. Even without Nora, that party was memorable also because Chuck Goodhue—the one who’d been so quick to break Paul Epstein’s heart in high school, by spreading the news of Sissy and Kevin Thorpe in the Jeffreys’ mudroom—was caught necking with Minka Dinnerman in the upstairs guest bedroom. Minka was unmarried, but Chuck’s new bride was downstairs. Ironically it had been Paul who walked in on the pair, which now explains his outburst in the basement, but didn’t explain it at the time. Paul kept his mouth shut about what he’d seen until five years later, at Minka’s funeral.

He wasn’t being cruel when he put his hand on Chuck’s shoulder and said, “I’m sorry. I know she meant something to you.” And he hadn’t meant to be obvious either, but when Chuck wiped away what looked like a tear and when his wife turned red and walked away, we all understood what must have happened. And in case we hadn’t put it together then, we definitely put it together a few hours later, in Paul’s basement, where we held a wake of our own in honor of Minka, not having been invited to the family-only event being held at the Dinnerman house, hosted no doubt by that now older, still gorgeous Russian beauty, Mrs. Dinnerman.

In Paul’s basement, safely out of earshot of Chuck or his wife (because of course they didn’t come; they were already too busy trying to repair the injuries of a five-year infidelity), Paul told us what he’d seen.

“So it’s been going on that long,” said Winston Rutherford. “I figured it out last year, but Chuck said it was a one-time thing.” And for some reason this turned the wake even more morose than Minka’s death itself. As if the realization that there’s so much that we didn’t—that we don’t—know that it’s frightening, that it’s distancing and isolating and sad.

B
ut we were five years from that specific isolation, and back at the Christmas party with the chili pepper–shaped lights and the weirdly oily hors d’oeuvres, we found ourselves milling about the basement and then milling about the living room. We were thinking about Nora Lindell, every one of us convinced we were the only one, and the thought all the more tender because of it. We were thinking about Mumbai and all those people and the noise and the heat and the smell, and we were imagining ourselves there in it. We were imagining our own café table, our own chai tea and straw, our own glimpse of Nora, safe, alive, alone. We could feel the sweat forming on our upper lips. We could hear the screaming, the dull, directionless moaning of people scrambling for cover. We could feel the explosions, the thud of fear in our hearts. My god, yes, we could see Mumbai clear as day, a city in smoke, a city in ruins.

15

M
aybe, in Mumbai, Nora Lindell danced. She drank, too, maybe. She wore saris and bracelets and sandals. And when she danced or drank or danced
and
drank, the bracelets jangled together the entire length of her arms. Perhaps she called herself Trinka, a name that was meaningless, that she’d pulled from the air, like it had always been there, waiting to be taken. She’d gained weight since Arizona, if Arizona had existed at all. The point is, she’d gained weight since us, since high school. She’d grown taller, wider, more feminine. The breasts she’d never wanted had also grown. And, in spite of herself, she admired them. She wore clothes to complement them, to complement the fact that she was—whether or not she liked it—a woman. Thin-strapped dresses and weightless T-shirts. Somehow, her gender didn’t matter in India. She was something other than a woman in India. She was an outsider. She was a foreigner. She could do anything she wanted, and the attention, when she danced, was exhilarating.

Who knows how she got there or how long she’d been there before the bombings? Maybe she had gotten there by way of Arizona and a couple of babies. Maybe by way of the man in the Catalina. Maybe she’d been there since the year she went missing, or maybe she arrived only a few months before the bombings. Who knows?

What matters is that when she got to Mumbai she would have started drinking, taken up dancing, begun wearing dresses that were loose and tight at the same time, that hugged her body even as her body was finally allowed to move freely. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, somewhere in the dancing and the drinking and the sheer enjoyment of life as it is meant to be lived, Nora Lindell would have fallen in love. She would have fallen in love with a woman. Why? Simple. Because we are men. And so let us say that she fell for a woman. A henna tattoo artist who worked in a small room across from the hotel where Nora stayed.

“American,” the tattoo artist said one day. “American. Come here.”

Nora crossed the street. It never would have occurred to her that she shouldn’t.

“Are you teasing me with your body?” asked the tattoo artist. “Every day you walk by me and every day I am thinking you are teasing me.”

Nora shook her head.

“You have no answer,” said the woman. “Then I am right.”

Nora shook her head again, perhaps she even laughed a little, charmed. A faint blush spread across her chest.

“You are older the nearer you come, yes?”

“I am not a child, if that’s what you mean,” said Nora. It was the first thing she had ever said to the woman. She would remember it always.
I am not a child
. Why had she said it? Hadn’t she wanted nothing more than to remain a child? Sitting in that Catalina, her future so unknown, hadn’t she wished to be stripped of sex, to be stripped of experience, of skin, of anything carnal? Hadn’t she wanted, even more, to become something genderless, something impossible and alien and innocent all at once? That girl was so far from her now. That childhood so much a thing of the past.

The tattoo artist laughed. “No, you are not a child. With that body, you could never be a child. You were born a woman, I think. Born into that body to tease me.”

Again Nora blushed. But probably, in spite of the flattery, she was annoyed. She was annoyed because she didn’t understand what the tattoo artist wanted or why she’d been called across the street. She was annoyed because she hadn’t realized, until the tattoo artist started speaking, that she was lonely. That she had been missing, for a very long time now, the simple act of verbal communication. And she was annoyed because she might have continued on just a little longer without making this realization, without the weight of loneliness suddenly upon her.

T
he attraction was fast, complicated, inexplicable. It must have been the tattoo artist who made the first move because Nora wouldn’t have known how—man or woman, she wouldn’t have known how.

The artist’s name was Abja. Abja Safia—“because I was born in water and my father would have me be chaste, which I am not,” she told Nora on the night they first met, lying on the floor, their backs against pillows, “because every name must mean something. Everything has meaning. You understand this. Yes?”

“Yes,” said Nora.

“Good, then you will stop calling yourself Trinka. It has no meaning.”

The tattoo artist was dangerous in her intensity, which was probably what attracted Nora to her. Imagine her. Because we did. When our wives were not with us, when we were alone and momentarily unashamed, we imagined long fine limbs, aggressive foreign eyes. Perhaps we were simply imagining Mrs. Dinnerman, as we remembered her from our youth. We were imagining an Indian version of the Russian beauty—darker, fiercer, childless—a version even more special than the original because she was our own invention, our own creation, and we had no one else to share her with but Nora.

The attraction made sense—to us, to anybody. Nora was Abja’s very own piece of untamed wilderness. Her very own America. She was something extraterrestrial and unfamiliar. And it’s true that Nora seemed somehow to be greater than her gender. Womanly, yes. But also so much more. Uncultivated, undomesticated, ungrounded. And already, that first night, they both felt the need to be in the same room as the other. And likewise, they both loved and hated that need for existing. It’s what we imagined love to be when we were still too young to know better. It’s what we always hoped for.

“Your hotel room has ceiling fans, yes?” It was night. They were drunk, or maybe it was only Nora who was drunk. They were still lying on the floor, still lying against the pillows whose fabric stuck to their skin in a not-unpleasant way.

“Yes,” said Nora, her arms in the air, the fingers of her right hand intermingled with the fingers of Abja’s left hand. She studied the way they joined together, the way they became something amorphous, something unified, and then the way they separated, the way she regained parts of her skin, finger by finger, until the hand was whole again, hers alone. “Ceiling fans.”

“Good,” said Abja. “Then you will sleep there tonight. It is too hot here for an American. Go home now, but in the morning come back and I will henna you. I will make your skin match mine.”

“I’m too tired to leave,” said Nora. “Why do you want me to leave?”

“This is no place for an American at night.” Abja stood and in a single motion knotted a sari around her shoulders, covering her dark hennaed breasts.

“I can’t remember seeing breasts before,” said Nora.

“Your own, every day.”

“That’s different.”

“Your mother’s, then.”

“She’s dead.”

“Before she died, then.”

“I can’t remember.”

“Then remember mine. Now you have seen breasts.” Abja laughed. “And you should never forget them, and I will certainly not forget yours.”

. . .

N
ora couldn’t remember how she got home that night. What she could remember was waking up, in the middle of the night, to the noises on the street. She had sweated, and under the breeze of the ceiling fan she shivered. She tried to remember her day, which she was able to do only in flashes. A sunrise. Trash. Banana peels and dark-skinned children. A glass of beer. Her feet. Her dirty toes. A woman. More glasses of beer. Pillows. Her own arms. Breasts.

She shivered again. The memories were neither real nor not real. They were neither fond nor not fond. They were, however, a catalyst for the acid in her stomach to rise, to grab hold. She clutched at her gut and turned on her side. She was too tired, too lazy to move to the bathroom. Her body heaved. Nothing came. She pulled the blanket up around her shoulders and grabbed her knees. If the man in the Catalina had ever existed, if that night so long ago in the woods, in the clearing, in the snow, under the leaves, had ever really happened, then surely Nora would have remembered that night at just this moment, just as we can’t help but remember it. She would have remembered the fear, the cold. She would have remembered the way her body folded into itself for warmth, the way she shoved her knees into her chest and clutched at her elbows, reducing her surface area.

But that’s only if the Catalina existed. If not, there’s no telling what she was thinking at that moment. Maybe her thoughts simply went to Abja. Maybe she was able to abandon mere images and begin to remember details, words, emotions. Maybe. The point is, this was the first night Nora ever remembered feeling her body was abandoning her. Even as she was finally discovering it, reclaiming it fully and robustly after a childhood during which she’d never wanted it, it was beginning already to disappear, weaken. She was scared, suddenly, by the possibility that there was less time than she’d imagined. Less time for her here, in India, but also here, alive, living. She thought briefly of her mother, but too much time had passed to be sad about that. She tried for a minute, but no specific feelings came. She thought next of Sissy—the first time in a very long time that she’d allowed herself to truly remember her sister. And this memory did the trick. It sharpened the pain in her breast, brought the tears to her eyes. But for some reason, the mere idea of Sissy made Nora’s own body feel even less significant, and it occurred to her that what she’d hoped was the aftereffect of too much beer, too much sun, was actually something more permanent, more sinister. There was something eating away at her. She couldn’t say what, but she felt quite sure that something uninvited had taken root inside. Her body heaved and the tears kept coming and, eventually, she slept.

In the morning she walked across the street to the tattoo artist’s room, where she undressed and allowed the tattoo artist to change the color of her skin.