“I did know him a little before,” she said a few moments later. “After I finished school and couldn’t find work, I used to come help clean the house with my amma. The doctors were so busy with the clinic and Mr.and Mrs.Prasad-ji, the elder ones, they were already looking after the children. So the doctors hired Amma to clean.”
I invited her to sit at the table, but she waved it off to remain on her feet. “Bobby was a nice boy,” she said, the tray on which she’d brought me sautéed okra, dhal, steaming jasmine rice, and homemade mango pickles tucked under her arm. “Funny, too—he used to do the dialogues of Dr.Sarita’s favorite actor. That’s how everyone started calling him Bobby.”
I absorbed that unexpected little piece of information with dull resignation for something that couldn’t help me.
“He even helped us mop sometimes,” Kushma added. “But mostly he was at school when we came, so I didn’t talk to him much. He always had a lot of school papers in his room—he studied hard.”
She had nothing much more to tell me when it came to Bobby, and when I asked about Ani and Diya, all she said was, “Oh, such sweet babies, they were. It was so sad what happened to Ani.”
“Would anyone else know more about the family?” I dared ask.
Kushma, already heading down the stairs, shook her head. “Most of the doctors’ friends went overseas already, and other people they knew from around here moved away to work in the cities.”
Despite the fact that Kushma hadn’t told me anything useful, she had given me one idea:papers.
I spent the rest of the day methodically searching the house for hidden journals, notes, paperwork of any kind that might shed light on the events that had taken place close to two decades earlier.
All I found was a box hidden in the closet of the upstairs master bedroom that held a small stack of photos, a bracelet of tiny black-and-white beads small enough to fit a child’s fragile wrist, and a birth certificate…for Annika Sonakshi Prasad.
Ani.
—
If I’d imagined I’d sleep easy again a second night, I was proven very wrong.
The house creaked and groaned, the wind chime shivered its sorrowful music, while the ocean’s pounding surf sounded like it was right on top of me. I tossed and turned, snatching bits of sleep here and there.
Only to fall into the past.
I dreamed of Susanne and how she’d been at the end, so emaciated beneath her glamorous makeup that she’d been bones and tendons held together by skin gone translucent. She’d done a stellar job of hiding the ravages of the cancer our final night out. No one at the bar to which we’d gone to drink her favorite champagne had blinked an eye at a woman they’d probably taken to be fashionably thin.
But Susanne had been far beyond thin at that point.
“I’m ready to die, Tavish.” A phantom whisper from the past. “And I’m going to do it on my own terms. A raised finger to the universe.”
Husky laughter that morphed into a hacking cough so terrible it jerked me to wakefulness. “Fuck.”
Susanne’s hollow eyes stared at me from inside my memories, the pill bottles scattered all around her as she lay on the cotton throw of her bed dressed once again in that glittering red dress she loved, her makeup flawless.
I’d never seen her that way, her nurse the one who’d discovered her body, but I’d read the coroner’s report.
And I knew Suzi W.
It wouldn’t have been pajamas or underwear for her. Only sophisticated, independent beauty, all the way to the very end.
“Nothing that’ll make me vomit, dear,” she’d told me when talking about her requirements for a painless drug-induced death. “How utterly embarrassing to go out with such a lack of style.”
Shoving off the thin sheet I’d been using as a blanket, my boxer briefs my pajamas, I picked up my phone to look at the time: four a.m.
I should’ve tried to go back to sleep, but I got up and walked out onto the front verandah instead…and realized that I’d never been in darkness such as this. The only light came from the small bedsidelamp I’d turned on in my room. A soft glow that was already attracting moths, their fluttery shadows as powder soft as their wings.
The rest of the world was pitch-black. No streetlights, no car lights, nothing but a blackness broken only by the starry pinpricks above. Even the wind chime had gone silent, the surf a distant thunder my brain had finally learned to tune out at some point during my fitful sleep.
Something croaked so close that I jolted.
More croaks came from everywhere all at once.
Then the lawn started to move.
