When she indicated my tee, I looked down to see smears of red.
Diya’s blood.
This nurse must not have been on the floor earlier.
“I came in with my wife—she was stabbed. Taken straight into surgery. They wouldn’t let me stay with her. Diya Prasad.” All her legal documentation was still in her maiden name even though she’d decided to take mine after marriage.
“Diya Advani,” she’d said, sounding it out. “I like it.”
I wasn’t sure if she’d even had the chance to begin thechange-of-surname paperwork, or what that entailed. She’d mentioned something about updating her driver’s license for starters, but neither of us had been in a rush about it. We were married, were one; the rest of it was window dressing.
“Hold on a minute.” The nurse left.
She returned to find me in exactly the same spot. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have a plan in mind, my usually agile brain on the fritz.
“Your wife is no longer on this floor,” the nurse said. “Here are directions to a waiting area close to the ICU, where she’ll be brought after surgery.”
She put a piece of paper into my hand, as if aware that, right now, I didn’t have the capacity to retain too much new information. “I’ve told the ICU staff where you’ll be if they need to get hold of you. Before you go to the waiting area, though, I’d suggest changing.” She indicated my long-sleeved T-shirt. “I found a clean scrub top for you.”
I took the offered item, suddenly viscerally conscious of being covered in Diya’s blood. My skin crawled. “Wait,” I said before she could move away. “Will my sister-in-law also be brought to the ICU? Shumi Prasad. She was stabbed, too.”
The nurse’s eyes widened. “Are you next of kin?”
Another crackle in my brain, another struggle to find the right words. “Her husband…was in the fire. Her family’s based in another part of the country and I don’t know how to get in touch with them. My wife would know, but…” I fisted my hands. “I’m the only one here right now.”
“You might have to wait for the police in that case.” A sympathetic smile.
A woman walked into the ER just then, crying and doubled over in pain, and the nurse had no more time for me. She was gone before I could think up an argument that might get her to divulge Shumi’sstatus or location. Shoving the piece of paper she’d given me into my pocket, I made my way to the closest guest toilets.
Someone had stuck a small sticker to the wall just outside, of curving green against a black background.
One look and I was thrown back to my first local bushwalk with Diya. She’d pointed out the tight curving curl of a fern frond, said, “The koru design I showed you at the airport? It comes from these fronds. It’s a symbol of endurance and growth.”
A slow smile, her hand sliding into mine. “It’s peaceful here, right?”
I’d known why she was asking; she understood that her new husband was a man drowning in darkness who needed the embrace of such nonjudgmental silence. She didn’t know the why of my nightmares—how could I tell her what I’d done? What I’dbeen?—but she’d soothed me many a night.
It’s okay, Tavi. It’s okay.
It was only on that forest walk that she’d asked me the most important question: “Who’s Joss?”
The name I called out in the night over and over, the guilt that whispered to me like that heartbeat in the creepy Poe story we’d had to study in high school. Only this one was all vicious laughter and the scent of expensive tobacco.
Jocelyn “Joss” Wai had never smoked anything so cheap as a store-bought cigarette.
Diya had protected me from the storms since the very first night we spent together, Jocelyn’s vengeful ghost deciding to visit me on the day when I was the happiest I’d ever been.
Back then, far from this land that she called her own, far from the family that cherished and protected her, she’d been the stronger of the two of us. In those nighttime hours after a terror that woke meon a reverberating scream, my fears of her drifting away had seemed foolish, a fanciful whimsy.
Diya had been the most solid thing in the room.
It was only after we came to New Zealand that I’d realized my wife’s flame sometimes flickered so low that it came close to extinction. Not even a hint of a smile for days, a black cloud hanging over her head that seemed ready to suffocate her. She’d felt distant, even when she was in my arms, as if she’d gone somewhere I couldn’t follow.
It’s fine! I have enough!
Words I’d overheard when she’d moved into my Venice Beach condo after her original hotel booking ran out five days from that night on the rooftop where I’d fallen in love with my girl in the green dress. I’d thought her family was worried about her financial status after she’d impulsively decided to stay on in the city, and had told her she didn’t have to stress about finances.
“I have plenty of money,” I’d said, standing on the balcony of that piece of beachfront real estate I’d owned since I was twenty-two. “Please let me spend it on you.”
