Side by Side

by Anita Kushwaha

  But she couldn’t. She knew they weren’t to blame.

  “You should be here watching the hawks,” she said to Sunil.

  But you were too slow, said Anchor as it pulled. You let him down. The sinking feeling spread.

  Black Gloom slowly crushed her from crown to toe and she wondered how it was possible that she could be simultaneously sitting and flattened on the car mats.

  Then she felt them all mixing together. Anchor and Blaze and Black Gloom, all at once, like a maelstrom—heavy, feverish, thick—churning under her skin. She couldn’t hold them. She wanted them out.

  She lit a cigarette, sucked in a long drag, and butted it out on her palm, pressing its molten tip into the place along her lifeline where everything had gone wrong. A yowl spurted up her throat like bile, sharp and scathing as her wound, but she stoppered it in her throat, where it shook. Guilty people didn’t deserve to scream. They hadn’t earned the right.

  With a pulsing stare, she focused on the pain—hot, deep, sharp. That pain she could manage. That pain she knew she deserved.

  Then she gagged the yowling welt with tissues and climbed out of the car. Hiked up to the crowded lookout point. Slipped into an opening along the curved stone wall and let the panoramic view calm her breath. To the right were the rolling hills of the Eardley Escarpment, which from a distance, resembled sleeping Vishnu covered in mosses. She admired the pines and cedars, as verdant as coriander chutney, and leafy trees, vibrant with shades of turmeric and saffron and paprika. Below, a steep drop gave way to farmland that marked the landscape like earth-toned Hippie patchwork cloth. Straight ahead in the distance, the Ottawa River trenched through the land, gleaming.

  And above, the soaring hawks, like kites, only freer because they had no cords to bind them to the ground.

  “That’s why you loved them,” she said to Sunil. He envied them. Maybe he even wanted to be one of them.

  A dark-haired woman with a green Tilley hat beside her said, “Pardonnez-moi?”

  Kavita glanced at her and left.

  On Halloween, she kept the lights off, and paused her hunger strike for the evening, telling herself that she was eating the candies for Sunil. He always loved Halloween candies, especially mini chocolate bars. She sat outside his bedroom in the dark with a bag of them and ate her way through it until all that was left was a mess of wrappers littered around her like decaying leaves. While she gorged, they reminisced.

  “Bear, do you remember the year you dressed up like a woman? I don’t know if kids do that anymore. Mom gave you one of her old dresses and a bra. You stuffed it with cantaloupes, I think. Or was it grapefruits? And you let me put makeup on you! Every little sister’s dream. What was I that year? The Karate Kid? I wore an old gi of yours, and you drew a beard on my face with Mom’s eyeliner. She wasn’t too pleased about that. We’ve got the pictures somewhere.” Maybe one day she would have to will to look at them again.

  She unwrapped a Coffee Crisp and ate the top wafer first, the way Sunil had taught her to do. As she nibbled, she felt the lightness she had momentarily enjoyed start to drain away as another memory surfaced. “Then there was the year I told you I wanted to go trick-or-treating with my friends. I must’ve been about eleven, I think. I can still see the wounded look in your eyes, like I’d rejected you.” Why did the memory come back to her now? To punish her? To show her that she had always been careless with him?

  A short while later, her stomach rejected the treats, heave by heave.

  Are you surprised? Anchor said, as she rinsed the sweet and bitter tastes from her mouth. She held the counter against its drag. You didn’t deserve the chocolates in the first place. Sunil doesn’t get to enjoy any. Why should you get a night off from remembering why?

  As she stood there, staring into the whiteness of the sink, it seemed to Kavita that Anchor was making more and more sense. She had let herself off too easily. Was she ever going to learn? Was she ever going to become a better person? The kind of person that did what needed to be done and said what needed to be said, at the right time, and the right place, when it mattered.

  She pressed her thumb into her scar, breathing into its sting and screams.

  One day, she finally forced herself to call Dr. Jones. Patty had been leaving polite yet insistent reminders on the answering machine about the life insurance paperwork and the report that needed to be filled our by Sunil’s physician. Underneath some papers on her desk, she found one of Sunil’s old appointment cards with the doctor’s information. As she stared at the date and time written on the card, she remembered waiting for Sunil in the clinic parking lot with starved eyes, the fraying hope as the minutes ticked by without his arrival, the wordless shock of the long drive home without him.

  Clenching the scar on her palm, which was healing but still ached, she dialled the doctor’s number. After a few of minutes of being put on hold, he answered.

  “This is Dr. Jones,” he said, in the same clip voiced she remembered.

  “Dr. Jones, my name is Kavita Gupta. My brother, Sunil, was one of your patients. Sunil Gupta.”

  “Yes, of course. I was sorry to hear about him.”

  For a few seconds, his words didn’t make sense. “You know about what happened to him?”

  “Yes, the police notified us.”

  The police. She forgot that they had requested the phone numbers of Sunil’s dentist and doctor.

  “Is there something I can do for you?”

  Why had she called?

  “Miss Gupta?”

  The reason flooded back to her, and she detached, floating above the current of the things that didn’t make sense—like Sunil’s death, and insurance forms, and his doctor knowing about his suicide but never calling to make sure they were okay. She spoke numbly about the forms.

  “You can mail them or drop them off at my office, if you prefer. I’ll let my receptionist know to keep an eye out for them.”

  “Oh, okay,” she said. The task she had agonized over for weeks was a matter of daily business for Dr. Jones.

  “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  An entire unspoken conversation lay in the cradle of her partially-opened mouth, but she couldn’t find her courage, nor the dexterity to unloop the stubborn knot in her tongue. “Uh-uh,” she managed to grunt in reply.

  “Well then, I apologize, but I have another patient waiting.”

  The electric drone of the dial tone resonated in her eardrum, packing it with sound. She hung up the phone and lowered it to the desk.

  It was possible that this was simply how things were done. She wouldn’t know. Even if that was the case, however, Kavita found herself asking whether it should be.

  He didn’t ask if we were okay. He didn’t offer counselling. He didn’t ask us to come in to discuss where the failure in your treatment occurred. Your family doctor. Yet here we are, your family, in pieces, and he’s on to the next patient.

  Blaze would have stirred then, but the chill of her shock was greater than even its fire. She crossed her arms over the cold balling in her stomach.

  She had things to say to Dr. Jones. Things she had been working out over the past several weeks. Things she wanted to say on Sunil’s behalf. Like: “You wrote the note.” And, “You put it in his hands.” And, “You wrote completely debilitated on a piece of paper and put that paper in a suicidal man’s hand. He read your words, completely debilitated, and believed it. Yes, it’s true, Sunil took his life. But you should know that you may have taken the last of his hope.”

  She wanted to say all of that. Yell it. Stand up for Sunil. But she didn’t. When was she going to learn? When was she going to become a better person? The kind of person that did what needed to be done and said what needed to be said, at the right time, and the right place, when it mattered.

  Anchor pulled, pulled, pulled.

  Yes, she
agreed with it. She was failing him, again.

  Shortly after that, the weather grew damp and autumn quickly sloped from vibrant rhapsody to grim decay. As if synchronizing with the season, Kavita went into hibernation like the skeletal trees outside her bedroom window.

  She stopped going for walks, or changing out of her pyjamas, she even stopped smoking. She lost interest in chasing Chi, and Nirav, and the world in general. Nothing seemed to matter outside the cave of sorrow that had domed around her, rock by rock.

  She cooked but only because it was for someone else. Ate mouthfuls here and there but nothing substantial. Tried to read but couldn’t focus. Attempted to ease the ache in her back with heating pads and Advil but found no relief. Napped to make up for her insomnia but grew too afraid of her nightmares.

  She relived losing Sunil many times each day.

  Beneath her mute exterior lurked tremors. Danger was imminent. She knew it in her quivering cells. With every car-alarm blare in her gut. Something bad was going to happen. She didn’t know what or when. All she knew was that something else was about to blown up and scatter around them. Danger, danger, danger.

  She needed to be ready. She would be ready this time, she told herself. Not like last time. Last time she was caught off guard and did all the wrong things and Sunil paid the price. But she wasn’t going to fail again. She had made a promise to Sunil and this time she wouldn’t break her promise. She would keep their parents safe. She would keep them alive. Sunil could trust her. Really, he could. She wasn’t going to fail him. This time, she would be ready.

  She kept all of this to herself, because like Anchor, Black Gloom was making more and more sense lately too. It told her that she was enough of a burden already, so she should keep quiet, and besides, she deserved whatever was happening to her, didn’t she know that? Yes, she agreed, increasingly, she did.

  9.

  KAVITA LIES IN BED under the duvet with the cordless held up to her ear. For the several weeks, she and Nirav have ended their days this way, with a quick catch up. Already the ration of daylight is in decline. Although it’s just after six o’clock, she switches on the lamp on the nightstand, which fills the room with milky, tapering light. Outside her window, dusk tints the surroundings in a deep grey-blue, revealing the first of the stars, opalescent and winking.

  Lately, their conversations seem to follow a script. There are the usual warm-up questions to rely on: How was your day? How’s the cat? What did you have for dinner? But once they exhaust these subjects, neither of them seems to know how to follow up, their chitchat encumbered by the questions that linger in their tense silences, both lacking the courage to ask them.

  In the early days after Sunil’s death, the early days of their separation, when Nirav moved back to the condo, they had put some effort into their nightly conversations, constructing elaborate replies to satisfy their need to hear the other’s voice, as if the sound were a salve for their loneliness. Those conversations reminded her of the others they had endured during the arduous year they had spent apart, when they were dating long-distance.

  Now, it seems as though they are facing a different kind of distance, an insidious, emotional type that has little to do with physical geography.

  As she holds the receiver to her ear, she realizes that several moments have passed since either of them last spoke. The static sound of his breath brushes against the sensitive hairs of her inner ear. Just over a year ago, on their honeymoon in Jasper—a wedding present from Sunil—they soaked in the Miette hot springs with their limbs entwined and promised each other between ardent kisses to always tell each other everything without exception. She knew they would never suffer the taciturn plague that had turned her parents’ mouths black and shrivelled their voices from lack of use. Back then, she would never have believed she and Nirav were capable of such prolonged silences—silences that seemed electrified with all they hesitated to say out loud. How long ago that dizzying utopian time feels from the reticent place they occupy now.

  “Kavita?” he says. “Are you still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Well?”

  “I don’t know.” She gnaws on her thumbnail still unsure of how to circumvent his question.

  “You’re just being paranoid, Kavita.”

  “You only say that because you’re never here.”

  Ten seconds tick by.

  “I just want my wife back.”

  “You know where I am.”

  He clears his throat. This is as much as she has said about his absence in weeks. He wants me to be his wife, she thinks, but where has my husband been?

  “We aren’t like your family with aunties and uncles all over the place. It’s a luxury. The only family we have here is each other. We have to stick together.” Sticking together has always been a necessity, and now more than ever, it was a matter of survival.

  “Your parents have each other.”

  “No, they don’t.” At least not in any romantic sense that might sustain a couple during hard times, the way fat reserves kick in during lean periods. No, their marriage, if you could call it that, was less than skin and bones. Until she started school, Kavita thought that all married people met the way her parents had, all marriages were arranged. Just like until her first sleepover, she thought that all married people slept in separate bedrooms. It was an awful burden to grow up knowing that the origin of one’s birth was obligation, not love.

  “The other day I went for a walk,” she continues. “When I came back, I found them fighting in the living room. You know what Mom said? That she never loved Dad. You should’ve seen the look in her eyes, Nirav. I don’t know what might’ve happened if I hadn’t come home when I did. Don’t you see? I’m here to keep them in their separate corners. To keep them civil. Just like Sunil and I always have.”

  “That’s not your responsibility.”

  “But it is.”

  “Why?”

  She shuts off the lamp on the nightstand. She has never learned how to talk about such things in the light.

  “Because we’re the reason they stayed together. We’re the reason they’re so miserable.” It was an awful burden to grow up knowing that one’s existence was the cause of so much unhappiness. “They’ve never asked me to touch their feet, but this is my way of doing it. This is how I repay them.”

  Sometimes she wonders if her parents’ marriage would have worked out had they stayed in India. Maybe the success of arrangements like theirs was contingent on having ample buffers around, people to give advice, check behaviour, remind them that they were part of an ecosystem, that the integrity of the family web depended on cohesion.

  “You need to live your own life.”

  “My family is my life, Nirav. Their pain is my pain. As long as we stay together, we’ll survive this. I have to cling to that. It’s the only thing keeping me sane.”

  He sighs. Pauses for a few moments. Then asks, “How are you managing?” with a strained voice, as if frightened by his own question, as if already frightened by the answer, which is perhaps why he so rarely asks.

  Silently, Kavita considers the excrescences of her new inner world.

  How can she tell him about the nightmares where she sees Sunil’s death but is powerless to stop it. And the way her heart sprints every time she sees a police cruiser. And the way she clutches inside when someone knocks on the door or calls, the warming beacon in her gut blaring: danger, danger, danger.

  Or about how every time she hears the word suicide it triggers her memory, drawing her into her horrors, scenes replaying themselves without warning or consent.

  Or how she stops breathing for a second every time she sees a sky-blue car roll by the house, losing herself in a moment of hope, believing Sunil has finally come home.

  How does she tell her husband that between violent bouts of sobbing, she dips into numb periods of di
sbelief, as though her brain can’t fully process or believe that Sunil killed himself, even now, months later.

  She wonders if on his rare visits he has noticed the plum segments under her eyes, or the prominence of her ribs and pelvic bones when he holds her, or the Band Aid on her hand no one asks about.

  How can she describe to him the waterlogged feeling of her limbs, the fuddled plodding of her mind, and the ache that has colonized every muscle in her body, maybe even every cell?

  Then there are her guests.

  How would Nirav react if she dared to tell him about Anchor’s pull, or Blaze’s heat, or Black Gloom’s slowly crushing weight? What would he say if she told him about their distinct voices, which sound like her, and yet not.

  No, she can’t tell him.

  He would send her away.

  He would leave her.

  And what about the other voice? The one she turns away from. Quiet and self-preserving, small and still, that tells her staying at her parents’ house is slowly corroding her health with wrenching memories embedded in every room, piece of furniture, family portrait, even the air.

  This is not your home anymore, it has been trying to convince her. This place is a trigger zone. Staying here is making you sick.

  This is where I belong, she tells it.

  No, Anchor says. This is what you deserve.

  Is Anchor right? she wonders. When she looks at the armchair by the front window, does she deserve to get transported to the first night of Sunil’s disappearance, to the place she waited all night, watching the street for his car, every part of her singularly focused on willing him home? When she gets the briefest glimpse of a family photograph, does she deserve to lose Sunil all over again?