Star Daughter

by Shveta Thakrar

  Since when did anything matter?

  Dev’s claim that she’d inspired him set her even more on edge. She tugged on a piece of fringe lining a throw pillow, almost unraveling it. How could that be true?

  Sheetal’s messenger bag sat at her feet. Now it dinged with a text message. Her eyes dry and scratchy, her nerves sparking like live wires, she reached in and pulled out her phone.

  I never wanted you to inspire me. I want to write songs about you, not because of you.

  “Who was that?” Radhikafoi called from the kitchen. “Is it that boy?”

  “It’s no one.” Even as Sheetal lied, she sent back a string of flame emojis followed by plenty of knives and skulls. It felt awesome.

  But not for long. Smoldering underneath was the hurt, the broken heart emojis she typed and then deleted before pushing her phone away. It wasn’t just that he’d lied, as much as that rankled. But by not telling her the truth, he’d cheated her. She could have had one more person who shared her secret, someone she could’ve been herself with while hiding from the rest of the world.

  Her throat stung. She wouldn’t have had to be so alone.

  “Chhokri,” said Dad from his recliner, calling her “girl” in the angry tone he almost never took with her, “what did I tell you about boys?”

  Radhikafoi bustled into the room, set down three cups of masala chaa on the coffee table, shooed out Akshay and Kumar, and commenced hovering.

  “Well,” continued Dad, “I’m waiting. What did I say?”

  Sheetal stared at the teacups, at the wisps of spiced steam dancing up from them. “You said no boys until I’m older.” Which was so unfair; when had she ever given Dad a reason to worry about her with Dev?

  She glared at her phone. Though apparently he’d been right to worry about Dev.

  The starsong, which had been chiming nonstop since the sun set, rang out fully, and Sheetal’s palms tingled with the force of it. She couldn’t sit still, her feet digging into the sofa cushion and her fingers tearing at the skin around her thumbnail. What good was being half star if she couldn’t burn the feelings out of her chest?

  “Chhokri,” Dad said again, sipping his tea, “I’ve been lenient with you, and you went behind my back. What does that tell me? That I should start listening to your foi and keeping you home?”

  “When we were children, we would never have dreamed of disobeying our parents,” Radhikafoi interjected. “Even today, if my mother came in and told me to sit down, I would sit down without thinking.”

  “We’re not in India,” Sheetal said, knowing she was out of line and not caring. At least she didn’t add, Where Dad told me you two got in trouble all the time.

  “Aray vaah! Listen to this girl, so much smarter and grown up than us,” her auntie mocked. “So in America, you talk back and misbehave?”

  “Didi.” Dad raised his hand. “Let me handle it.”

  “I’m only saying, Tashan’s mummy told me she is busy working through the PSAT practice test book while Sheetal wants to waste her summer running around with boys!”

  You’re not my mom, Sheetal thought. It’s not your business what I do! Sweat dribbled down her back and pooled under her arms. Gods, she hated this stupid leather sofa and the way it clung to her skin. “Can we please turn on the AC? It’s burning up in here!”

  Radhikafoi gave her an odd look. “It is on. Beti, you don’t look well. I’ll get you some water.” She scampered into the kitchen, then returned with a metal cup of cold water.

  Sheetal gulped the water, enjoying the cup’s chill on her prickling palms, as Dad explained the need to be respectful and trust one’s parents. “We don’t say these things just to say them. My job is to keep you out of trouble.”

  “Really, Dad?” she interrupted finally, unable to take it anymore. Her heart blistered with resentment. “We’re talking about trust? That’s funny.”

  Dad exchanged a worried glance with Radhikafoi. “What do you mean?”

  Once the words started to flow, Sheetal couldn’t hold them back. “Did you know? About stars inspiring humans? I mean, of course you knew. You were married to Mom.”

  Dad’s shoulders drooped like she’d struck the wind out of him. He opened his mouth and closed it again.

  Radhikafoi, of course, had no problem answering, but whatever she said blended into an insipid hum as Sheetal focused on Dad.

  She hated seeing him so despondent, but she also hated that he’d thought it was okay to hide this from her. Enough with secrets. Keeping them hadn’t helped anybody. “I know stars are muses, Dad. I saw it.”

  With a sigh, Dad moved to sit by her on the couch. “Tell me what happened. Did you inspire Dev?”

  “So you did know.” It still felt like a blow to the stomach. She choked back the sudden rush of tears in her throat. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Dad patted her knee. “I wanted to protect you, dikri.”

  “We both did,” added Radhikafoi. “For your own good.”

  The humming worsened into a whine. Sheetal’s brain was vaporizing. Her core was liquefying. Radhikafoi, always interfering. Always presuming to know what was best for everyone else.

  For a second, all Sheetal saw was silver.

  “From what?” she demanded. “Didn’t Mom inspire you?”

  Dad stilled. “Once. The Nobel Prize.”

  When Sheetal was five, Dad and his team of researchers had won the prize for a theoretical discovery that addressed the problem of radiation exposure during space travel. The award was a sensational first milestone in what should have been a long and illustrious career.

  But it hadn’t been. Making that discovery was the last time Dad had ever stood out, to the point that his colleagues called it a cosmic fluke.

  How had Sheetal not known? How had she not realized?

  Her phone dinged. Another message from Dev. I was going to tell you, I swear. Eventually.

  “Does he know?” Dad asked urgently.

  “That I inspired him? What I am? All of the above.” Sheetal left out the part about Dev’s ancestor attacking hers. Radhikafoi didn’t deserve the satisfaction. “You should have told me, Dad.”

  Trying to ignore the sweat beading over her entire body, she leaned back against the couch and closed her eyes. The whine in her head grew louder, one question repeating itself: Why would Dad have kept this from her?

  Radhikafoi came over and felt Sheetal’s forehead. “You’re burning up!” To Dad, she said, “First her roots, now this. It’s happening.”

  Sheetal jerked away. “It’s not a big deal. Honestly.”

  Ding. I threw away the song. I’m sorry. Just talk to me?

  “I wanted to spare you this.” Dad’s mouth turned down, and he sighed again. “I’m sorry, dikri. I thought if we just kept you safe . . .”

  She grabbed the now-lukewarm chaa he’d abandoned and gulped it down. She was so hot, so thirsty. Someone had switched out her heart for a live coal, and she felt incandescent. She felt like starlight and fire and fury all mixed into one. All she could do was burn.

  Ding. Sheetal?

  “If we don’t look out for you, beti,” asked Radhikafoi, “who will?” She turned to Dad. “Bhai, we have to give it to her. It’s time.”

  The astral melody brushed past Sheetal’s ears, her heart, soft as rays of starlight.

  All the words began to smear together—Dad’s, Radhikafoi’s, Dev’s. The red of the sofa and the yellow of the lamplight swirled before Sheetal’s eyes until all she could see was the spark that had flared within her. She stared, transfixed. It appeared in her left palm, then in her right, and then . . .

  No, thought Sheetal. No.

  The flame in her rose up.

  Sheetal had only glowed once before in her life, and that was when she’d danced with her mother in the shadow-cloaked field behind their house, their constellation—their family—singing above them. It had been so natural to unleash the radiance inside her, simple and automatic as the beat of h
er breath. She was half a star, after all.

  The flame rose higher still.

  Yet after a night of nursing her fears, Charumati had warned Sheetal about people who would hurt her, had warned Radhikafoi, and Sheetal had had no choice but to push it all down. Until now.

  Her phone rang, and she jumped, knocking it to the floor.

  Dad grasped her wrist. “Sheetal.”

  Her hands, one wrist securely in Dad’s grip, sparkled.

  It was the silver fire at her core, eager to be free—and for the space of a second, it was.

  The brush of eyelash meeting eyelash.

  And it should have been all right—would have been all right—except Dad didn’t let go. In that same instant, the silver flame limned him, searing.

  Gasping, brown face gray, Dad dropped her wrist and clutched his chest. Before Sheetal could say a word, before she could do a thing, he collapsed.

  6

  Someone at the ICU finally waved Sheetal through, and someone else escorted her to the door of Dad’s private room. All she could see was an army of ugly machines surrounding an adjustable gurney. Screens, wires, electric arms . . . Where was Dad?

  There, lost in the metal-frame hospital bed. He’d been dressed in a sad little paper gown. Wires and tubes protruded from what seemed to be every part of him, chaining him to hulking devices with their monitors and pitiless beeping.

  Go home, Sheetal told herself even as she approached the bed, where Radhikafoi stood talking to the attending physician, a black woman with a light blue surgical mask hanging around her neck and a matching scrub cap. You don’t want to see this.

  “Your brother has suffered a severe cardiac arrest,” the doctor explained. “We’ve stabilized him, but there’s been loss of tissue. How much, we’re not yet sure. We’re going to continue monitoring him.”

  Radhikafoi mouthed a prayer to the wallet-sized picture of Gayatri Ma she always kept in her purse. Its saturated turquoise and lotus pink made the rest of the room look washed out in comparison.

  Sheetal fought against the urge to get lost in those colors until she shut down. Severe cardiac arrest. Loss of tissue, her mind chanted. Because of her.

  The doctor noticed Sheetal and softened her tone. “I need to warn you that it might be hard to see your father like this. He’s on a respirator, and there are a lot of wires and equipment. It can be frightening if you’re not used to it.”

  “It’s all right if you change your mind,” Radhikafoi said in Gujarati.

  “I need to see him,” Sheetal stated in English, so the doctor would hear, too.

  The doctor nodded. “We’ll need to keep this visit brief, to allow him to rest,” she said as she left. “Just five minutes.”

  Sheetal skimmed Dad’s sleeping face. The mild pitting at his temple held her fast. It was the enduring stamp of childhood chickenpox. Run, her heart cried. She could pretend she’d never seen the scar, pretend she didn’t know this withered man.

  The doctor was wrong. It wasn’t the machines that scared her. It was this.

  Beep. Beep. Beep.

  Dad. Sheetal closed her eyes, then fumbled for his hand. It was warm, his pulse thready. This strong, careful hand had taught her how to hold a pencil, then how to use that pencil to add and subtract and play with imaginary numbers. It had patted her head when she’d done well and tweaked her nose when she hadn’t. Even more than the scar, this hand told her the doctors hadn’t made a mistake.

  She sucked in air until it hurt. Her lips trembled as she squeezed his unresponsive hand. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t.

  Helplessness ate at her stomach. If she hadn’t gone to see Dev, Dad wouldn’t have gotten so stressed, and they wouldn’t have fought, and she wouldn’t have burned him.

  She had put Dad in this bed. She was responsible.

  Beep. Beep. Beep.

  She looked down at the wound on her thumb, barely scabbed over. Something glimmered within her—her own blood. A memory surfaced, one she’d locked away with everything else.

  Years ago, Sheetal had crashed her bike and scraped her knees. She’d sobbed as Charumati later dabbed the skin with rubbing alcohol but had forgotten to cry when her normally garnet blood then turned the color of stardust. Her mother had offered a shaky smile. “Stay calm, and it will go back to the way it was,” she’d murmured, blowing on the abrasions, and it had. “Let us keep this our little secret, shall we?”

  No matter how many times Sheetal had gotten injured after that, she’d never seen the silver again.

  Beep. Beep. Beep. The annoying machine shocked her back to the present. Radhikafoi now stood on the opposite side of the bed, clutching Dad’s other hand. What an awful room this was, with its sand-pale walls and sick, antiseptic smell. A room to die in.

  “It doesn’t look good, dikra,” her auntie murmured. Her purplish lipstick had worn away, leaving only a ring around the edges of her mouth. It made her look old. “Internal hemorrhaging. They’ve stopped the bleeding, but they can’t repair the tissue that’s already dead.”

  Something hot and consuming engulfed Sheetal. “Who said that? Who said it doesn’t ‘look good’?”

  Radhikafoi fished a paper napkin out of her purse. “The doctor. She didn’t want to say it in front of you, but she doesn’t think he’ll wake up.”

  “What does she know?”

  Radhikafoi didn’t respond, only dabbed at her eyes, and that made Sheetal even angrier.

  Her dad was in that bed. Her dad, who called her his little sparrow and played Scrabble with her and had surprised her with her very first book on astronomy. That still, silent body lying there now, the body she couldn’t look at—how could that be him?

  Her auntie always had something to say. Why wasn’t she offering solutions now?

  Sheetal held her breath, hoping. Hating herself for needing Radhikafoi to take charge.

  More than anything, for needing Radhikafoi to say it was nobody’s fault.

  When her auntie stayed quiet, Sheetal paced around the room, skirting the bed. She couldn’t look down. She couldn’t quit being mad. Without her ire, she’d be small and squishy, a snail without a shell.

  Snails without shells got stepped on and smashed into the pavement.

  “I don’t want this, either,” Radhikafoi said, but that was it.

  Sheetal clawed through her memories, hunting for something, anything her mother might have said or done. A clue.

  One of the monitors tracing Dad’s vital signs lit up, and she automatically glanced toward it. She found herself gazing right at Dad, at the sallowness of his skin, and felt like someone had body-slammed her.

  There had to be something. There just had to.

  Her frenzied thoughts chased one another by the tail, circling around a particular vision. Silver . . . the drop of blood . . . that star . . .

  Sheetal fast-forwarded to the end of Dev’s dream, even though it made her gag. That man, that monster, had lit up with avarice when he’d—what? She froze that frame and zoomed in. There it was—his smirk, his fully mended hand. The moment when he’d realized the star’s blood had done it, and that she could still be useful to him, after all.

  Sheetal’s own palms prickled in sympathy. Then—she jammed her fist against her mouth—then he’d cut the star. He’d meant to bleed her. Again and again. So he could sell it. Again and again.

  Because, like a magic potion, the star’s blood could heal.

  Sheetal gulped down huge lungfuls of chemical-tasting hospital air. She was half a star. A star’s blood flowed in her veins. What if?

  She had to try.

  Pushing Dev and his horrible ancestor out of her head, pushing aside Radhikafoi and her judgment, Sheetal ripped away the scab on her thumb.

  A single red droplet welled up.

  Still watching Dad’s face, she shoved down the collar of his hospital gown. Then, pretending to hug him, she pressed her torn cuticle to the skin over his heart. His pulse beat weakly beneath his ribs, but at leas
t it was there.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered against his chest.

  Please, she begged the blood, the gods, that long-ago star. Be enough. Help him.

  The smear of blood flashed pewter like mercury, becoming light, a beautiful, soothing, starry light. She stared at it, waiting for Dad’s pulse to gain strength, praying he would open his eyes. Please. Please, please, please.

  It fizzled out, fading back to scarlet.

  A nurse rapped on the doorframe. “Time’s up,” she said firmly.

  Now Sheetal did cry—ugly, snotty, racking sobs. She’d failed. At the sight of the red smudge, the guilt she’d kept at bay stormed over her, leaden, devastating. She barely felt Radhikafoi’s hand on her back, guiding her out.

  She was going to lose Dad, and it was all her fault.

  Sheetal had barely gotten out of the car before Minal hopped up from Radhikafoi’s front stoop and pounced, nearly knocking her over and setting off the motion light in the process. “Sheetal texted me,” she explained. “I’m so sorry, Auntie.”

  A solitary point of warmth glimmered amidst the cold and sorrow in Sheetal’s chest. She hugged Minal back as tight as she could.

  “Thank you, beti. Come in. Just be quiet; the boys are sleeping.” Radhikafoi unlocked the door and hurried them inside to the great room, where she turned on a standing lamp before heading upstairs.

  “All right,” said Minal, sprawling over the leather sofa. It squeaked in protest. “Lay it on me. How’s your dad? How’re you?”

  Sheetal sat down, too, trying not to think of how, just hours earlier, she’d been here with Dad. “He’s—not great.”

  She recounted the afternoon at Dev’s, coming home to burn Dad, and her botched attempt to heal him. Like a ticking clock, the astral melody framed the moment in chimes and trills.

  As if she didn’t know how little time Dad had.