The Prayer Room

by Shanthi Sekaran

  Babygirl had been given a bed in the children’s unit after arriving in the same ambulance as Stan. George imagined her sitting upright in the large transport section of the vehicle, strapped into a fold-down seat, unable to take her eyes off the old man stretched on a gurney with medics buzzing around him, machines bleeping. (In reality, Babygirl had ridden in the backseat, wrapped in a thermal blanket, and Lupe had held her hand.) Her vital signs checked, she was given a bed, hot chocolate, and warming blankets. When George found her, she was still shivering, though he sensed with relief that she enjoyed the shivering, that the clacking of teeth entertained her in some way. There were rainbows painted on the walls. She finished one hot chocolate and asked for another, leaving only a few coagulated clumps of cocoa powder to rest at the bottom of the mug. She fell asleep, and in case she was indeed still cold, he climbed onto the child-size bed. He wrapped his legs around her and pulled her to his chest so that her head rested just below his neck. It was the closest he could come to carrying her inside him.

  If only his children could have stayed in the womb, protected by its liquid cushion, where nutrition was a given, and safety as natural as breath. In the uterine world, water didn’t kill. It didn’t fill his daughter’s lungs or seize her small body in its frozen fist. When his children had been inside Viji, he’d never had to feel the guilt of not being around when he was needed. He’d never had to think about what he’d been doing when his child had almost died, whether he was already at the office, or whether it happened, by spiteful coincidence, in those moments when he’d sat in his car and peered down a driveway to watch Kamla water her lawn. But that place, where all was safe, that was a mother’s world, closed off to the likes of him. He hadn’t been able to touch his children then, or smell the chlorine in their hair. This place, with its frigid air and metal hospital beds and shatter proof windows and rainbows painted on the wall, this place was his.

  He’d always imagined heartbreak to be a sudden thing, like a vase shattering on a marble floor. His own heart cowered somewhere in a corner of his chest. It had been pinched and bullied. It was covered in stress fractures, tiny enough to go unnoticed but large enough to leak away all that he’d once thought was his. His father’s heart, on the other hand, was whole and beating weakly, a few floors up, in the intensive-care unit. The doctors—he imagined a crew of them standing white-coated in a dark room that glowed with X-rays—were deciding whether an operation would be too risky.

  Meanwhile, he realized, he’d have to corral the events of the next few days into some sort of manageability. He had a talk with the children.

  “I’d like you to do something for me,” he said to them. He stood blocking the television. They craned their necks to see around him. “I think we should keep quiet about the swimming pool around Mum. All right?”

  “Why?” Babygirl had been looking forward to spreading the tale of her brush with death.

  “I don’t think she’d take it very well. She’s been through a lot lately.” They’d all been through a lot. Even the triplets, whether or not they knew it. He could see, in their screen-addled eyes, a sort of gravity that hadn’t been there before. Yes, they must have known it. He spent the rest of the afternoon waiting for the phone to ring. It would be Viji or the doctor.

  His father could die. Correction: his father would die—if not now, then soon enough. George gathered his disparate trinkets of emotion and tried to whip them into a foam of sadness, something he’d be able to feel. But he couldn’t do it. He was unable to feel a thing that hadn’t happened yet. It would be practical to think now about this death, before the reality of it made him useless. If Stan died now—today or tomorrow, say—would George send him back to England, fly back with him on the plane, the coffin thrumming and sliding in storage below? He had no idea how bodies were transported—in coffins, metal cases, or maybe nylon sacks: black, with zippers going all around the edges, like the protective bag he got when he bought a new suit. And if he did take Stan home, he’d have to arrange a funeral—for whom? Barney from the taxi firm, the men at the pub, the obese landlady, rough as bricks, Victoria? No, he would keep Stan here. He would bury him in the dry ground, in the January sun.

  He went through his father’s closet that morning to look for a suit. Of course Stan hadn’t brought a suit with him. George found a shirt with buttons and a decent pair of trousers. These would do, if the need arose. Into the pocket of the decent trousers he slipped the blue crystal earrings. He spent the rest of the day reading every article in the newspaper, standing at the window, and watching the phone. He longed to leave but knew that he’d miss the call if he did. He made several pots of tea and let most of them go cold. These could be the last hours of his father’s life. Stan could be slipping off at that very moment. And where was George? At the kitchen window, waiting for a phone call and burning his lips with tea.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Viji stood at the foot of the drive, her suitcase at her feet. The taxi left only fumes. She couldn’t believe how large her lawn was. The way her house sprawled, it was a foreign thing, alien to her. The bushes around the entrance were lush and green after the winter rains. The eucalyptus trees looked sullen, impatient for summer—this was not their season. From where she stood, the house looked unnaturally still. She hoped someone was home. She didn’t have a key.

  For the first time in twelve years, she rang the bell and waited at her own door.

  Eight notes, one missing in the middle, where Avi had pulled down a chime. Inside the house, the bells would echo for seconds after the ring had finished.

  George opened the door. His movements were unreal and stilted, as if he were stuck in a dream. When she handed him her suitcase, it felt empty, like a stage prop. He took it from her, and she stepped in.

  “I wasn’t sure when you’d arrive,” he said. And between them, the seconds froze. How real he suddenly looked, here in the light and shadow of their home. She could see the heat in his face, she could smell his wheatiness from where she stood. It was a scent like baked bread, and it would fade as she got used to him again. She breathed deeply. “Viji,” he said, and took her hand. She couldn’t stop the shaking in her wrist. They stood this way for several seconds or maybe minutes, until the final echo of the doorbell faded and they were left in silence.

  The next morning, George woke early. He’d heard Viji get up in the middle of the night and pad out of the bedroom. They’d slept in the same bed. They had not made love. Nor had they kissed goodnight. He felt almost as if they’d never touched each other before. A kiss now would feel like their first, with all the accompanying uncertainty, the negotiation of space and force, the placement of lips and nose, the skirting of the tongue. When she came back to bed he placed his hand over hers. And that, for the moment, was enough.

  Ten o’clock, and she was still in bed. They were going to see Stan that day, the doctors had decided to send him home. George stood at the window with his tea. He stood at the window with his tea and watched, as if on a movie screen, as a figure turned the corner and headed for the drive. She was brisk. Her legs moved like pistons.

  The pavement sent spikes of cold through his socks, but he didn’t have time for shoes. He jogged clumsily to the mailbox at the end of the drive.

  “What are you doing?” she grinned, pointing to his feet.

  “What are you doing here, Kamla?” He didn’t smile back.

  “I heard that Viji’s back.”

  How had she known? He scanned the surrounding houses.

  “She’s in bed.”

  “Hmm. Jet lag, it must be. She must be so tired.”

  They hadn’t seen each other since the day on the bed. Kamla hadn’t asked after Babygirl, nor had she said anything about her daughter or what her daughter had done to his daughter.

  “You probably shouldn’t be here.”

  “Nonsense, George.” Kamla patted his chest. “Bygones, all right? I just want to see how Viji is.”

  “You shouldn’
t be here, Kamla.” At the other end of his drive, his family hung together precariously. Their pieces had floated back somehow, and rejoined.

  “You should go,” he said. His words were final.

  Viji was not asleep. Viji was awake, standing and looking out the bathroom window when she saw George in socks running down the driveway. She saw him speak with Kamla, his hands on his hips. She saw Kamla smile, then not smile, and at last she saw her walk away. None of this made sense to her—it might have, if she’d thought about it and come up with various scenarios of what could have happened between George, her husband, and Kamla, her only friend. But after everything, she decided not to think but to let the matter go. What a lesson to learn in the end.

  The first shower after a twelve-hour flight is like a new birth. Viji closed her eyes and smiled into the torrent of water. The door opened. It was George, standing in the bathroom, watching her. She didn’t mind. After twelve years she could move freely before him, attending to the business of washing, cleaning her ears, soaping her breasts. But she couldn’t keep the shyness from her voice. “Do you want to come in?” she asked.

  “Really?”

  She pointed to the other showerhead, the one they’d never used.

  “It would save time,” George mused, “if not water.” Soon his clothes lay in a pile and he was in, as naked as she was, his back turning pink from the pinging spray of her shower. In the steam, he looked like an apparition. Moving to the other end of the large cubicle, he began to fiddle with the tap.

  Out shot a jet of cold water that made George squeal and Viji laugh. The shower gurgled and sputtered and petered into a trickle, the faucet head blocked by rust and neglect. A single runtish stream dripped down on him, making bird tracks in his chest hair. He reached for the soap and began to wash.

  “Don’t be silly,”Viji said. And with this, George crossed to her side. There was plenty of shower for two. When they turned the water off, the room was cushioned in steam and the ceiling dripped down on them. George kissed Viji. It was hesitant at first, and then permitted and, as it turned out, nothing like their first kiss. That one had meant almost nothing, it had been fueled by gin, planted firmly in a first meeting. This kiss held in it everything that had come before. It teetered at the summit of twelve years.

  That evening, the triplets looked up to see a man in the hallway with a shock of white hair. This was Grandad Stan and this was not Grandad Stan. He nodded to them and made his way slowly to his room. Avi got up and followed.

  “He’s wearing a towel on his head,” Avi said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. He looks smaller, too.” To Avi, Grandad Stan looked as if the hospital had vacuumed something out of him.

  Babygirl stayed away from Stan’s room. She didn’t understand why he looked at her the way he did now, peering into her eyes as if trying to hunt something down. He did it at the kitchen table, he called to her from his bed whenever she passed his door. Each time he called her she scurried away from him, pretending she hadn’t heard.

  “I wonder if it hurt,” Kieran said. “I wonder what it felt like.” To Kieran, a heart attack sounded like a bludgeoning, like a surprise machete out of nowhere.

  “Let’s leave Grandad to rest,” George said. “Let’s save the questions for later.”

  Stan would be with them for five more days. George spent much of this time stationed at his father’s door, just out of sight. He’d had a dog when he was in school. The dog was hit one day by a car speeding on the Sneinton main road. He hadn’t died immediately. When George found him, he was lying on a neighbor’s lawn, mewling weakly. He didn’t seem to be in terrible pain, but he couldn’t be moved. More than anything, he seemed a bit miffed to have been run down, annoyed at the bother of it. There was nothing for George to do but stroke the dog and wait for him to either get up or die. Animals could be stroked, children could be held. Stan sat upright in bed with a towel over his head, draped from shoulder to shoulder. It made him look like a Monty Python woman.

  Sick man, injured dog. It was a cruddy, obvious metaphor and George tried to push it from his mind. All he wanted was to touch his father without being told to sod off, but that was impossible. So George watched from the other side of his door as his father stared at the wall, as he let his head fall to the side for a doze, as he picked the tobacco packet from his bedside table, pinched a bit of the dried mulch, and placed it on his tongue. He spent a good deal of time gazing at the walls, as if the room were new and foreign to him. The heart attack had left him stunned in a way George had never seen, as if he’d awoken to a wrecking ball crashing through his home. George did get to bring Stan to the kitchen for meals. At those times, he could touch his back and hold him by the elbow. When he raised and lowered him from his chair, he held Stan firmly around the shoulder, in a disguised sort of hug. It was a comfort to feel his bulk.

  Only Viji could sit with Stan. She brought him his tea in the afternoons. When she tried to get up from his bed, he pulled her back down by the wrist. She had to wait until every drop was drunk, and then she could leave. Not even Lupe was allowed in with him. She spent the first afternoon in Viji’s kitchen, waiting at the table for Stan to summon her. When he didn’t, Viji sent George to remind Stan of his visitor. When George came back, shaking his head, Lupe went back to the Bauers’ and never returned.

  On the third day, Stan refused his tea. He didn’t eat breakfast that morning and he tried to avoid lunch. On the fourth day, he skipped both breakfast and lunch. He had little interest in food and could think of nothing that he wanted to eat, not even when Viji offered to make a roast. But Viji didn’t mind—Stan made sense to her now. He was, at last, an old man.

  On the fifth day, dinner was quiet. Stan ate boiled potatoes and peas, and the children watched him cautiously, still awed by this new and brittle version of their grandfather. “Couldn’t get their potatoes right in that bloody hospital” was all he said. Viji took this as a compliment to her cooking. He went to bed early that night and, somewhere in the middle of it, he died.

  “George,” she said. Viji called him to come and see: his father, chilled and gray, his eyes closed and mouth wide open. George shuddered and turned to leave, but Viji held his wrist and kept him in the room. This was death, empty and rattling. Viji wanted him to see. She sat next to Stan on the bed and, cupping his jaw in her hand, she closed it. This didn’t bother her; she would have done it for her own father. George sat next to Viji and placed a hand on his father’s forehead. Then he leaned over and rested his head on his chest. There was no heartbeat there, just a silent rush, the sound of the ocean. George sat up. He began to suck in heaving breaths, shaking his head. What he felt was rarefied fear. Because he couldn’t look away, he stared at his father’s corpse, stared and stared. He felt the skin had been peeled from his own body, that it was left flapping and raw in the wind.

  Death had turned him into a small boy. Not Stan, but George. George fell asleep that night with his head on Viji’s chest, his arms twined around her waist. His hold on her was fierce, even after his face had gone slack with sleep. Again, it was five in the morning and she was awake. She pried his hands from her, rose, and walked straight to the hallway closet. There would be a new photo for the puja room. She couldn’t deny that she was pleased in some way. She was a collector at heart.

  She knew the right one when she found it in a shoebox at the back of the cupboard. How handsome he looked in his navy uniform with the white sailor hat. His small smile said, I’m going to war now, but I don’t want any trouble. He had George’s eyebrows, the same shallow divot at the side of his mouth. She’d had this young sailor in her home. She had hated him and fed him and found him dead one morning. From the closet she chose a frame and, kneeling on the carpet, she put it all together.

  In the puja room, she hung him next to Marla. She lit an oil lamp, straightened the frame. The scant light left the other photos in shadow. As far as she could see, Stan and Marla hung on her wall—
Stan and Marla and nobody else. She stroked her belly. The pains were gone for good. Now, for a few weightless moments, she felt what it was to be a girl: a purity of limbs and hair and fresh white teeth. She dabbed her finger in the oil lamp, dabbed it again in the small pot of vermillion, and smudged it onto Stan’s forehead. She touched some to her own forehead, blew out the lamp, and left.

  Avi and Kieran were in their sleeping bags, Babygirl in her bed. The children wouldn’t go near their grandfather’s room—now it was the death room—and she couldn’t blame them. Even she had begun to hurry past its door after she’d found him that morning, staring past her, past the wall, all the way to England or into eternity. Never mind. A fresh coat of paint would help.

  She sat on Babygirl’s bed, just on the edge of it so as not to shake the mattress. She used to do this. She used to watch her children sleep, back when they all fit into one bed or within the bars of a single crib. These days they didn’t like to sleep. In a few years they would want nothing else. She noticed a pink bracelet on Babygirl’s nightstand. It was the kind they used in hospitals, made of semiclear plastic that had to be cut off with scissors, with a name typewritten and taped onto the surface. Stan had one also. Viji smiled at the thought of a nurse making this for Babygirl, probably to humor her while the children were visiting Stan. Children loved these knickknacks that meant nothing to adults.

  From their window she could see the swimming pool. Someone had left the pool light on and it glowed in the night like a warm wound. The switch was outside. She cherished this hour, just before morning, when she could be alone with the ceiling and the windows and the walls of her home. As she crossed the dark well of the living room she thought of Aaron, how he’d kept his jet lag. What a thing to do.