Side by Side

by Anita Kushwaha

  “What shall I tell them?”

  “Please don’t be like that, Niru.”

  “She’s acting like she’s ashamed.”

  “It isn’t about shame. She just wants to keep him safe. You heard her story about that horrible pandit.”

  “Everyone’s always saying we need to speak up about these sorts of things, isn’t it?”

  “Well, it’s easy to be brave in a commercial.” Real life was riskier. Real people, harder to predict. Not everyone was worthy of the personal truths entrusted to them. Whom you told was as important as telling.

  Nirav slings his backpack over one shoulder and marches for the door.

  “Niru?”

  “I’ll call you later.”

  Kavita slumps on the edge of the bed, too exhausted to convince her husband of why he should stay.

  Kavita has always been a terrible actor. But if she hopes to make it through the long list of phone calls in front of her, she is going to need lines. Seated at her desk, she considers the two scripts scribbled on the notepad in front of her: the fiction and the truth.

  First, she practices the fiction.

  “I’m sorry to call you with bad news,” she recites to her imaginary listener. “It’s about Sunil. He passed away unexpectedly. It was a car accident. We’re having a memorial soon. I’ll have to get back to you with the date and time. Yes, of course, I’ll tell them.”

  She blinks at her notes, equally unsatisfied with her material as with her performance. She clears her throat. Next, the truth.

  “I’m sorry to call you with bad news. It’s about Sunil.” Her heart beats in her throat. “He passed away unexpectedly. He was very sick. He succumbed to his illness.” But even this is only a partial truth. The whole truth is something she has voiced inside her head but has yet to say out loud. A steep drop plunges between the partial and whole truth—a freefall. Where is the bottom of this grief? Will her body bounce when she slams against it? Or will she just keep falling, and falling?

  “He killed himself,” she says, numb. It is the whole truth that sounds like fiction to her ears. It is the whole truth that is too unfathomable to be real. Kavita tears the scripts away from the notepad and squelches the stories in her fist.

  Without thinking, she picks up her cell and dials her best friend, Chi. Back in grade nine, Chi had a crush on Sunil. Her nickname for him was Hot Chocolate, HC for short, not that she ever had the nerve to say it to his face.

  Kavita bites her lower lip as she listens to the ring, three times.

  “Kavs!” Chi booms at last. “She lives!”

  “Hi, Chi,” Kavita mumbles. She’s unprepared for her friend’s cheerfulness, as if suddenly remembering there is another world, intact, even joyful, which exists on the other end of the line. “Sorry it’s been a while.”

  “I’ve been swamped, too. I don’t have long to chat, though. Just on a smoke break before heading back to the clinic.” Chi promised to quit smoking after her residency in emergency medicine.

  “I can call you back later.”

  “You sound out of it. What’s up?”

  Kavita takes a bracing breath. Clenches her left fist. Stares at the crumpled script on her desk, wishing she hadn’t crumpled it. “I don’t know how to tell you this.”

  “Tell me what?”

  She hoods her eyes. “It’s about Sunil.”

  “Has HC gotten himself into trouble? He better not be engaged!”

  Engaged, Kavita thinks. Something else he’ll never do. The realization slams into her like a sandbag swinging on a rope. Kavita sees him dressed in wedding finery, taking the seven steps around the sacred fire with an unknown woman, promising the commitment of seven lifetimes. Seven. “Oh, Chi,” she whimpers. Her heart pounds thickly in her ears. “He’s gone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s gone,” Kavita hears herself repeating.

  “You mean he’s missing?”

  “No, not anymore.”

  “He was missing?”

  “Yes,” she says. “But not anymore.”

  “Kavita, I don’t understand. If he’s not missing anymore, then how can he be gone?”

  “He’s…he died.” The words take everything Kavita has—blood, air, bones. She feels as if she might collapse into a sack of skin on her bedroom floor.

  “Oh my God,” Chi says, horrified. “What happened?”

  As she stands at the precipice of the truth she has yet to voice, Kavita feels herself sway, her body preparing to surrender to the freefall. She swallows, saliva thick in her throat. There is no other way to tell Chi but plainly. “He was having a tough time, recently.” Key moments of regret flash inside Kavita’s head. “Things didn’t go the way they were supposed to. He….” She trails off. Even now, she can’t bring herself to say it. “He’s gone, Chi. He’s just gone.”

  The silence stretches on long enough for Kavita to start wondering if her call has been dropped. Then, in the background, she hears the distant chatter of passers-by, the horn of a car, Chi pulling a drag and exhaling deeply.

  “Chi?” she says, unable to bear the nothingness any longer. “Please, say something.” Please reach back.

  “A guy I went to school with in first year killed himself,” Chi mutters, emotionless. “A janitor found him in one of the labs. It was right before an exam. One more bad grade and he was going to get kicked out of the program, or at least that’s what he was afraid of. The pressure got to him, I guess. Classes were cancelled for a day. They brought in counsellors. All I could think was, sure we all want to be doctors, but it’s not worth dying for. Nothing’s that important.”

  “Well, it was different for Sunil.”

  Kavita waits, hopeful Chi might practice some of the bedside manner she has been honing. Instead, all Kavita hears is another puff of cigarette smoke. Suddenly she wants nothing more than to get off the phone. She feels so naked, waiting there for a morsel of kindness. “We’re going to have a memorial soon. Will you come?” The way the conversation has gone, she can’t be sure.

  “I’ll try.”

  “Thank you, Chi. Sunil always—”

  “Listen, I hate to do this, but I’ve got to go.”

  “Okay. Sure.”

  Kavita listens to the nasal drone of the dial tone while she tries to figure out what just happened. She is learning people in crisis behave like exaggerated versions of themselves. Nirav is more reticent. Her parents are more divided. And Chi is more Chi.

  Letting out a deep breath, she tells herself: Shake it off. There’s work to do. Next, she calls Sunil’s office.

  “Hello, Patty speaking.”

  Was it Patty that Sunil said was the horrible HR gossip? “My name’s Kavita Gupta. I’m Sunil’s sister. I’m not sure if you’re the one we met the other day?”

  “When Sunil stopped by to fill out forms? No, unfortunately I was off sick that day. But Cathy told me about Sunil when I got back.”

  I’m sure she did, Kavita thinks.

  “How’s he feeling? You’ll have to tell him we didn’t win the lottery. Not even a free ticket since he’s been away. He’s our good luck charm.”

  “Actually, he’s my reason for calling.”

  “Oh?”

  Kavita hesitates. “He was very sick. He succumbed to his illness. He died of….” She is that far along in her head when she realizes she hasn’t spoken yet.

  “Hello?”

  “A car accident,” Kavita says, wooden. “He passed away unexpectedly. In a car accident.”

  Patty doesn’t know what to say. She asks Kavita to please pass on her condolences. Kavita says of course she will. But there’s more, Patty goes on: paperwork needs to be filled out by the executor of Sunil’s estate. (Kavita.) He had a life insurance policy. There’s a section that will have to be filled out by his docto
r. As Patty prattles on about forms, Kavita wonders if Dr. Jones already knows about Sunil’s death. Did the police tell him? And before that, did he ever wonder what might have happened to his distressed patient when Sunil didn’t show up to his follow-up appointments with the social worker and psychiatrist?

  Kavita tunes back into the conversation she is supposed to be having with the woman from HR. Patty is sorry about all the paperwork. It can be exhausting. One last thing, about the life insurance: Kavita is the beneficiary. Did she know?

  No, Kavita replies, cold. She didn’t know. The thought of benefitting from their tragedy sickens her. Money has no value. It can’t resurrect, or change the past, or answer the phone, or laugh until it hurts. If an insurance company is going to give her money, all it will ever do is remind Kavita of what she has lost, and more significantly, of what Sunil has lost because of her. Perhaps that is the money’s true purpose.

  Kavita feels a familiar weight, an unyielding downward pull, as she did when she first opened her eyes to this awful day. Like an anchor, she thinks.

  “Kavita?”

  She wonders if her brother named his torment, the way she has named hers. Or did he make the mistake of calling it Sunil?

  “Hello?”

  I don’t want money.

  “Are you still there?”

  I want Sunil.

  “Did she hang up?”

  SunilSunilSunil….

  Digging her nails deeply into her palm, Kavita focuses on the sharp pain, the captive heat burning in her flesh that won’t know the release of broken skin. This pain she can handle. This pain she knows she deserves.

  “I’ll get the forms to you as soon as I can.”

  There is still so much to do. But Kavita can’t think straight. A short break, she promises, as though a grief foreman is keeping time. She paces the room while kneading a knot in her lower back. Listening to Chi smoke over the phone has wakened a latent desire in her. She has been craving a menthol ever since. No, a whole pack. She quit smoking when she started dating Nirav, but he won’t be home for hours. She will buy some gum, too.

  Kavita pulls on a pair of jeans and a hoodie, and grabs Sunil’s rakhi from her nightstand, stuffing it into her pocket. On her way out, she checks in on her mother. Her bedroom is dim. Kavita hears soft snoring. Grateful, she gingerly closes the door.

  Outside, she finds her father sitting on a patio chair, staring at the hedge with a meditative gaze, his plastic chair a step beyond the umbrella’s circle of shade. How odd it is to see him sitting in daylight, and darkness, at the same time.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Hm?” her father says, drawing himself out from whatever inward place he has been.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  He blinks. “What is there to do?”

  She presses her lips together. “I’m going out for a bit. Can I borrow the station wagon?” As she waits, she feels about seventeen years old. That was the year Sunil had taught her how to drive in the Zellers parking lot. That summer, she drove the family all the way to Wasaga Beach for their yearly vacation, with Sunil in the front seat, easing her through every highway merge and lane change, while their parents sat nervously in the backseat. There was nothing to worry about, he reassured them. A twinge to think of his confidence in her.

  Her father turns away, resuming his yogic watch of the hedge.

  “Did you want me to pick up anything? Maybe some of the cereal you like? Or those muffins with the….” Kavita stops. She knows she is talking to herself. “Okay then.” She backs away. “I won’t be long.”

  She waves him goodbye, not that he sees.

  Menthols and gum on the dashboard, she drives. Half an hour later, she pulls into the marina parking lot. Turns off the ignition. Sits with her hands in her lap and looks around. On the green she sees a woman stretched out on a blanket, reading. A man playing tag with a toddler. A couple of guys tossing a football back and forth.

  Now that she is there, having a smoke seems trivial. She senses something else has brought her to the marina. Could it be Sunil? Maybe there is an answer tucked under a pebble that can make sense of all the senselessness surrounding her now.

  Squinting against the light of midday, she turns to face the harbour. A few sails are on the water. In the distance, she sees the lighthouse. Its magnetic pull moves her forward.

  The breeze carries with it the fetid water of the river, thick today with the scent of earthworms. As she walks along the pier, her memories overlay the surroundings like an acetate transparency. She sees the old man fishing, the young family of four feeding fries to seagulls, the woman reading. Her feet move her no farther.

  “We had fun, didn’t we?” she asks Sunil. “There was at least something good about the last day we spent together, right?” She waits for a reply. Hears the squawk of seagulls. Grows impatient with his silence. “You could at least send me a sign, like, if a seagull shits on me, that mean ‘no.’ That sort of thing.” The seagulls squawk and squawk. “Come on, Bear,” she pleads, weakly. “Haunt me a little. I promise not to faint.”

  She starts walking again. At the lighthouse, she stands on the pebbled shore, watching as she and Sunil skip stones while nestled in an easy silence. She stuffs her hands into her pockets. Feels the smooth thread of the rakhi, and winces, as though it has transformed from an object of protection into an object of punishment. She drops her gaze to the rocks.

  “I see everything so clearly now.” She squeezes the rakhi tighter, wishing the barbs she imagines were real. “Can you forgive me?”

  She holds her breath for a sign: a gust of wind, a rainbow, a thunderbolt. She would even settle for a milky splat of bird shit on the top of her head. Anything.

  “Please, Sunil.”

  Anything at all.

  “Please.”

  But he doesn’t come to her.

  Anchor pulls at her insides.

  You know why he won’t speak to you, it says in a flat, unwavering tone. He blames you. You know this. You agree with him.

  I just—

  You deserve this….

  You deserve worse.

  Kavita drops to her knees, the way she had yesterday, after the police left them with their fresh grief. The rocks beneath her shins hurt. She welcomes the hurt. She knows the hurt is all she deserves.

  After a little while, she notices a dark blue stone to the right of her knees. Weathered smooth and oval, a natural worry stone. She picks up the striking pebble, and without thinking, starts rubbing it with her thumb.

  “Dark blue,” she mutters. Like the meaning of Sunil’s name. She clutches the stone to her chest.

  He might’ve touched this one. Her heart beats quicker with the thought.

  Yes, she tells herself.

  He did.

  He touched this one.

  She caresses the stone with reverence, pressing it to her lips, as if it still carries the memory of her brother’s hand.

  As she rises to her feet, she drops the stone into her pocket, where it slides next to the crimson thread.

  4.

  A WEEK AND A HALF LATER, Sunil’s remains are transported from Montréal to Ottawa. In the meantime, Kavita met with a funeral director who guided her through the business of death with the gentle care of a grief counsellor. While he didn’t know the circumstances of Sunil’s death, he knew it was unusual enough to involve the police and coroner’s office one province over, and was courteous enough not to pressure Kavita into elaborating any further. Most importantly, he knew how to handle bodies that had been found several days after the spirit had passed on. When Kavita asked if they could see Sunil’s body once he was returned, the portly man told her, “In cases like these, the coffin is nailed shut.” Until then, it hadn’t occurred to Kavita how decomposed Sunil’s body would have been by then. She had been so focused on getti
ng her brother back, she hadn’t stopped to consider that what she got back wouldn’t resemble any brother she had ever known. For a few moments, as she sat stunned in the funeral director’s office, she wondered what Sunil might look like now, then pushed the gruesome image out of her mind. Kavita decided then she wanted to remember Sunil as he was, full and unblemished. That was the image she would project into the nailed coffin.

  “The coroner’s office sent a bag of his clothes,” the funeral director continued, shaking his head, “but I don’t think you’ll be able to save them. Perhaps the shoes?” The shoes. Which ones had he been wearing that day? The Nikes. His favourite pair of sneakers. The ones he used on their night runs. The ones that made no sound as he snuck out the door. No, she instructed, dispose it all.

  Next, he handed her a large envelope heavy with death certificates. According to the thick-bond, official-looking document, her brother was dead. Because everything about his dying had happened beyond her view, and compounded by the fact she would never see his body, the proclamation seemed unreal. If Sunil had died an old man—as he was supposed to have died—there would have been a body for her to cleanse and honour according to the last rites. But there was no chance of that happening now.

  On the certificate, no cause of death was listed, yet. The police had informed her the backlog for toxicology reports was about a year, if not more. If Sunil had died an old man—as he was supposed to have died—there would have been a cause of death listed on the certificate now. Something like, pneumonia or cardiac arrest or achingly-beautiful old age. Something natural.

  There was no obituary in the paper. No memorial Facebook page. No announcement on the funeral home website with a section for family and friends to write messages of condolence. Their grief was silence, overwritten with fiction.

  As they enter the stone building, the funeral director is waiting for them in the front lobby, dressed in a dark suit and tie. His wisps of grey hair are smoothed over his speckled rose scalp. His neck bulges over his collar.

  He welcomes them with a slight bow and a thin smile. There is an enigmatic look in his eyes, some mysterious combination of pity and perplexity. He leads them through a set of French doors. The chapel is large, with high ceilings and maroon carpeting. Rows of wooden benches line the aisle, and at the end, rests a mahogany casket.