Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors

by Sonali Dev

  Her attempt to roll her eyes hadn’t worked. “It’s my life, Darcy,” she’d said, sounding so very tired and terrified.

  All the anger had drained from him. “Your life is never just yours, love. My life is tied to yours because I love you.”

  She’d snorted out a laugh, but for the first time since he got here she had tears in her eyes. “America’s buggered with your head, hasn’t it? I like you well enough, but don’t get carried away with love and all.”

  He’d tugged her ponytail. “Give this a chance. Of course, I’ll stand by whatever you choose, but just give it a fair shake, all right?”

  Trisha had been right. Emma had needed to hear it almost as much as he’d needed to say it. She had walked into the tactile art center with her defenses down and walked out of there with all her resolve torn up to bits.

  After their visit, they’d driven Jane to Carmel for an appointment on their way back to Palo Alto, and she had insisted they try the ice cream. DJ suspected that Emma had laid a wager with her new best friend about how DJ would pitch a “Skinner from Ratatouille fit” after tasting any ice cream not made by him. He’d walked right into that trap, gladly. Because his ice cream was, indeed, better than this overly sweet travesty.

  “I’m so glad Trisha came to see me and that I got to meet you,” Jane said. “I’ve literally been looking for someone with art therapy experience to teach at the institute for two years now.”

  Emma laughed her big throaty laugh. “Are you actually cheering for my upcoming blindness?”

  “I always did want to try out for the cheer team,” Jane said, making sweeping movements with her arms and sending his sister into fits.

  He couldn’t have imagined anyone more irreverent than his sister, but now here was someone. “To Dr. Raje!” Jane held up her ice-cream cone in a toast and Emma tapped her cone against it in cheers. Both women gulped down the rest of their ice cream.

  Discomfort shifted inside DJ. It did feel like Trisha had been saving the day all over the place. He sat up, a thought that had been jabbing at his conscience finally solidifying into shape. “When did Trisha come to see you, Jane?” he asked, his heart beating in a way it only seemed to beat when the good doctor was in question.

  “Thursday afternoon.”

  Her words landed like a kick to his ball bag.

  Thursday was when they’d had that disastrous encounter at Naomi’s café.

  “Are you sure it was the afternoon?” he asked.

  “Dude, I may be blind but I’m very attached to my Braille watch.” She held up her wrist. “Our appointment was for four in the afternoon. She was exactly on time.”

  Everything around him seemed to slow.

  Jane stood. “Speaking of appointments, I’ve got to go. Mine is probably already here.”

  Emma jumped up from her beach chair. “I’ll walk with you there. I need to use the loo.”

  DJ said good-bye to Jane, his heart still pounding. Trisha had gone to see Jane right after she’d met him? Right after he’d shredded her to pieces. He thought about her leaving the café, the paper bag clutched to her belly. And she had sat in her car and driven to meet Jane, to find his sister a solution.

  Strange thing was, he could imagine her doing it. Going to see Jane for Emma after he’d been a giant git, the idea of hurting him after he’d hurt her not even striking her.

  He squeezed the bridge of his nose. A headache was starting between his brows. Every single thing the woman had ever done wouldn’t stop playing in his head. All the words she’d ever said wouldn’t stop ringing in his ears. All she’d done to help Emma, and Nisha, and Ashna, and him, too, actually.

  His phone beeped; he saw a couple of emails from Nisha—they’d been trying to sort out whether to go with ceviche or escabeche—and a missed call from Trisha. She had never called him before. She left fund-raiser business to Nisha and him. Something about working with food freaked her out. Suddenly he wanted to know how she’d been burned. And he wanted to know why she’d called him.

  He watched as Jane and Emma disappeared into the ice-cream shop, chattering away, and Emma threw her head back and laughed at something Jane said. DJ found himself smiling too.

  He responded to Nisha’s emails first, letting her know that mango and shrimp escabeche it would be, because, yes, ceviche was becoming a bit of a cliché.

  Then he tapped Trisha’s number, the strangest sensation bouncing in the pit of his stomach.

  For a few rings nothing happened. He almost disconnected. But then she answered, clearing her throat before getting out a breathless “Hello?”

  He could see her so clearly in his head. All the anticipation on her face creating a strange kind of unguardedness, and he had to rack his brains to conjure up that arrogance he’d held on to so tightly. “I had a missed call.”

  “Yes. Um . . . Are you in Carmel?”

  His surprise stole his voice.

  “Sorry. I can hear the ocean. And I knew you had an appointment with Jane.” She sounded terribly apologetic. The thought that he’d done that to her, caused her to sound like she constantly had something to defend, made discomfort stab inside him again. “How’s Emma? Did she fall under Jane’s spell yet?”

  He had to smile at that. “It’s impossible not to, isn’t it? Dr. Raje . . . Trisha, thank you. I don’t know how to—”

  “DJ, please, before you say anything, I have something I need to tell you. About Julia . . .” His hand tightened around the phone. “You were right, you deserve to hear the other side of whatever she told you.”

  “I thought you couldn’t talk about it.” He didn’t want her breaking confidences and suddenly he didn’t want her sounding like this, as though she’d found herself in a corner with nowhere to go.

  “I talked to Yash. He thinks you should know. But, please, this has to stay between us.”

  He sat up on the beach chair. “You don’t have to—”

  “No, please, hear me out.”

  “Okay.”

  There was a long pause; he imagined her neck stretching as she swallowed and steeled herself. “As I’ve mentioned before, my family is very aware of the gifts we’ve been given and I swear we do our best to use them to do good. It’s all we were ever taught. But we were also taught that the world isn’t forgiving to those who want to change things. Trusting people outside of the family is not one of our strengths.” There was another pause.

  Then she went on. “My greatest lesson in this came from Julia. She and I were roommates at Berkeley. Yash had just graduated from law school and was working for the then U.S. Attorney for Northern California. At the end of our freshman year, he came to Berkeley to speak at the law school. Julia went with me to listen to his speech, and she was instantly smitten.

  “The first thing I remember her saying when she saw him onstage was, ‘How does anyone in the U.S. Attorney’s office ever get any work done with him around?’ I was used to that reaction. I had heard some form of it all my life. Even back then Yash was mesmerizing to listen to. If you’ve heard him give a speech, you know that anytime he takes the podium—he makes magic.

  “It’s his ability to let people into his mind, which happens to be beautiful and brilliant. Listening to him even if you’re in a room full of people feels like being alone with him. It feels like being in the presence of someone who has the power to understand every problem, break it down, and make it disappear. He’s always had it. That combination of intellect, humility, and an insatiable need to care and serve. Every time I hear my brother speak, I believe in the world again.

  “His speech was about the history of the role of the judiciary in social programs and the responsibility of democratic governments toward those in need of assistance. Naturally the subject matter only helped mesmerize Julia. After the speech, Yash took us out to dinner. From the way she hung on to his every word, it was clear that she had it bad.

  “Julia was the first real friend I ever made. Through school there had hardly been any ti
me for friends and having five siblings and cousins in the house meant never really feeling the need for friends. The first time in my life that I remember being lonely was that first week at Berkeley. Then Julia showed up with her bright smile and easy humor.

  “She had grown up in the California heartland in a town called Hesperia. I didn’t find out until after the private investigators came into it that she had worked for an old people’s home through high school and that there were a few cases against her by families of patients for theft and pressuring patients to change their wills. But charm wasn’t fraud and she had never been convicted.

  “She has a vulture’s instinct when it comes to identifying your vulnerabilities and filling them up until you let her in. In me she saw someone who was such a part of something that there was never anything that was just mine. She became that, a friend who was just mine. I loved having a friend whose family was not friends with mine, who didn’t even know who my family was. She was the first person I knew who saw me only as an individual and still acted as though I was cool and funny and enough. And I let the headiness of that put my brother at risk.

  “She was so inspired by Yash’s speech that she switched to prelaw. Then she started pushing me to get him to take her on as an intern. Yash has been engaged—or at least betrothed—to his childhood friend Naina for many years. I told Julia this. I had started to get uncomfortable with how obsessed she was getting. I tried to make her see sense. When she acted like she got it, I believed her.

  “Then one day, without telling me, she used my computer to email Yash as me from my account, asking him to employ her.

  “The awful part, the part that I will never forgive myself for, is that after I found out that she had impersonated me to my brother, instead of going to him, I confronted her, because I didn’t want to lose her friendship. She apologized and begged me to let her have this opportunity, told me I was like a sister to her, that she needed my help because she had no one else and that she wanted this internship more than she had ever wanted anything in her life. And I let it go. I didn’t tell my brother.

  “I let him give her that internship, when I knew in my gut that something was very wrong. I put him at risk, knowingly.” She stopped. Somewhere during the course of the conversation, her voice had become so choked up that DJ wanted to say something to make it better. But something told him she needed to get this out, so he stayed silent.

  “No one outside of our family and Yash’s most trusted political aides know this next part.” Again he almost told her she didn’t need to tell him. But she’d chosen to tell him, and he knew she hadn’t done that lightly, given how much guilt she carried about it, and he couldn’t stop her.

  “I’m listening.” That was all he said.

  With a quiet sniff she went on. “A week into her internship she took him to a bar under the pretext of meeting me and discussing some problems I was supposedly struggling with at school. There, while they waited for me because I was ‘late’ she drugged Yash’s drink. Then she taped them having sex. She was seventeen—both of us had graduated from high school early—and he was twenty-three and she worked for him.

  “Her intent at that point had been to send the video to his girlfriend so she would break up with him. Naina isn’t just Yash’s girlfriend, she’s the daughter of close family friends. She’s family. Naina took the video to Yash. She . . . she did what I hadn’t done. She did the right thing. Yash was running for San Francisco alderman then. It was his first campaign. We all knew that it wasn’t going to be his last. It’s a joke in our family that my dad had a road map planned out for all Yash’s future campaigns since before he learned to walk. Except, it’s not really a joke.

  “The footage could have destroyed everything. My family hired the best private investigators. They dug up all sorts of dirt on her. They threatened her with ruin and gave her the option to transfer from Berkeley elsewhere. As long as she never came back to California and never mentioned Yash again. She signed the papers, took an insane sum of money, and disappeared for the past fifteen years.

  “And now, when Yash has just announced his candidacy, she’s back in town. I know that it’s a free country, but she’s been looking for patients in my department’s waiting room. If you believe her intention is innocent, it’s your prerogative. But please, please be careful.”

  He stood, too restless to stay in the chair. In front of him the ocean churned. “I don’t know what to say.” Except that, yes, Julia had found him in the waiting room. But he was too embarrassed to say it.

  “I’m sorry. This is a lot to dump on you, and I know how horribly selfish what I did was. But you should also know that I regret it every day.”

  He paced toward the beach. How is this your fault? he wanted to ask her. But he understood exactly how she had convinced herself that it was. That moment when Mum had collapsed when the detectives had picked him up for questioning blazed to life in his head. Her brother was running for governor. Julia could ruin that.

  Of course her family would fire him if they found out. And she’d warned him over and over again. God, what had it cost her? “What about the dinner?” he asked. As soon as he said it he realized how self-serving it sounded. He was about to clarify that he wouldn’t blame her if her family decided not to let him do it when he heard a loud knocking on her side of the line.

  “I’m so sorry; I have to go,” she said, sounding alarmed, and before he could finish asking what the matter was, she hung up.

  JUST AS TRISHA disconnected the phone her office door flew open.

  “I’m having a hard time believing how your mother and I raised someone as irresponsible as you.” HRH in all his HRH glory stormed into her office. For the first time in her life.

  “Hi, Dad. Come on in,” she mumbled as he shut the door behind him, making it feel like he’d slammed it even though he hadn’t.

  “Everything’s a joke to you. That’s the problem.”

  Right, that was definitely her problem, when her father had called her irresponsible loud enough that everyone up and down the hallway might have heard. Ha ha, Dad.

  He walked straight to her desk, placed both hands on it, and leaned forward, rage and disappointment spilling from him. Trisha shrank back into her chair. She had never in her life shrunk away from her father. But then, she’d never in her life seen him like this.

  “You knew that the chef catering Yash’s fund-raiser is going out with that woman, and you did not bother to inform me!”

  DJ was dating Julia? What the hell?

  “He’s not . . . I don’t . . .”

  “And you go running to your brother? After barely giving a damn about what he’s been up to for fifteen years, you go to him and tell him to look the other way? What the hell is wrong with you? And you’re letting your patients do video documentaries with her? Would you also like to invite her into our home so she can drug and screw us all?”

  Trisha winced. She had seen her father angry a lot, but she’d never heard him swear and she’d certainly never heard him be crass.

  “You will drop that patient. You will recuse yourself of the case and pass it on to Entoff. I’ve spoken to him.”

  Trisha stood. Her hands slammed on the desk, exactly the way HRH’s had. “You spoke to my boss about my work?”

  They were eye to eye. “I don’t care about your work. I care that you do not mess up your brother’s life yet again because you can’t think about anyone but yourself. How many times did I warn you?” He gave her another incredulous glare, then finally he turned away, as though looking at her was no longer bearable. Then he spun back around. “You’re not seventeen anymore. Getting involved with the wrong people and then letting the rest of the family suffer the brunt is no longer acceptable. No more, Trisha. You will not work with this patient and that’s that.”

  “Dad! You know I can’t do that. I won’t do that.”

  He pressed his hand into his forehead, and she found herself mirroring the action. “Entoff is ful
ly capable of doing the surgery. He has twenty years on you. And much as you don’t see it, experience counts. Some of us choose to learn from it.”

  She met his eyes squarely. “You are right; experience does count. I made a mistake when I was seventeen years old. I am no longer seventeen. I know what I’m doing. She is my patient. She has nothing to do with any of this. I will be the one operating on her.”

  His face darkened. The very room seemed to darken. “You will not work with a patient who is working with that woman. It’s too dangerous, it’s too close to the campaign. I won’t argue this with you. This is not a choice. It’s too late for that. You will listen to me or you will not set foot in my home ever again.”

  Her knees buckled and her hands tightened on the desk. But she couldn’t move, couldn’t sit back in her chair. “You don’t mean that.”

  “Do I look like I don’t mean it? The Chronicle is already trying to make the fact that Naina and he haven’t married after being together for so long an issue; they’re digging around for something sordid in his past. And now this woman is back, and her work depends on getting attention, and speaking about Yash and our family will give her all the attention she needs. Did I teach you nothing? Do the right thing, for God’s sake.” With that he headed for the door. “I’m not making empty threats, Trisha. The Anchorage is my home, this is my family. If you choose to continue to be callous, you can do it where I don’t have to watch you do it.”

  And just like that he was gone, the soft click of the door behind him feeling like another slam.

  She collapsed into her chair. Could any more shit possibly blow up?

  The second she’d formed the thought she knew she shouldn’t have because this was not the time to tempt fate.

  Her phone rang and it was DJ. She had hung up on him just as he’d asked about the dinner. Naturally, that was the part he cared about. But she didn’t have an answer for him, especially now. Despite all good sense telling her to let the call go to voice mail, she took it, because it was DJ and Emma was her patient.