And my mother’s car had been a dark green Jaguar.
Such a stunning hue.
So easy to miss among the deep greens of the forest.
But while I could imagine a single car being swallowed up by the forest, I also knew someone might’ve helped the forest along. It wouldn’t have needed to be much. A few branches thrown over the Jaguar, some vines. Nature would’ve soon taken over. Especially after all that nourishing rain.
“You have a good memory.” Hands in his pants pockets, Regan appeared only idly interested.
I wondered if I was a suspect. After all, sixteen isn’t a child. “That was the day my mother vanished. Every minute detail of it is engraved on my memory, along with the days immediately following.” Days when I’d still hoped and waited.
“Of course, of course.” A glance at Neri.
I didn’t care what they thought of me, what conclusions they’d drawn in the car on the way here. I was more interested in what lay below. Even knowing the Jaguar was down there, I couldn’t see it.
When the two officers stepped aside to confer with another colleague, I said, “Why did she scream that night, Dad?”
The question lay between us, dark and taunting.
“Know your place, boy,” he finally spit out before heading to the sedan.
The keys were still in the ignition and he started the engine while giving me a challenging look through the windscreen. When I didn’t run to heel as he expected, he backed up the vehicle and did a U-turn to return to the Cul-de-Sac.
Such a pretentious name. As if there were only one Cul-de-Sac in the world, nestled in this isolated and green tributary of Auckland. The name also conjures up images of street parties and block barbeques, when these days, the Cul-de-Sac is a frosty place where opinions are hidden beneath a gauzy layer of politeness, and neighbors keep to themselves.
In my mind, it all changed that night. As if my mother’s disappearance took the life out of the Cul-de-Sac.
I was still standing there staring at the forest long after the sound of the sedan’s engine had faded, my mind on the wall of rain that night, the sound of it hushed thunder across the world. It was her scream that had woken me, piercing the veil to jerk me to heart-pounding alertness. I hadn’t been sure exactly what I’d heard, my pulse a drum in my ears as I waited for more.
I’d almost convinced myself I’d imagined it, until I heard the bang of the front door.
Once. Twice.
Scrambling out of bed, I’d run to the sliding doors that led to my private balcony. But the door had stuck as it always did when it rained. By the time I’d stepped out naked into the chilling rain, needles of water stabbing my skin, the Jaguar’s distinctive taillights were already fading into the rain-blurred distance.
Transcript
Session #1
“How does this work? Do you ask about my parents, my childhood?”
“Is that what you want to talk about?”
[no answer]
“This space is a safe one for you. Nothing you say within these walls will leak to the outside world, but we’re also not in a rush. You can take your time, decide where you want to go.”
[no answer]
“Why don’t we start with why you decided to make this appointment?”
“The dreams.”
“Dreams?”
“Over and over again, the same dreams. Always about her.”
4
“Mr. Rai.” Constable Neri at my elbow, her gaze incisive in a softly rounded face, and her skin a midbrown shade made dull by the lack of sunlight. “Would you like me to drive you home?”
“That’s my father,” I said. “Call me Aarav.” Not Ari. Never that. It’s what my mother called me, and I couldn’t bear to hear it from any other lips. The last girlfriend who’d tried had been so frightened by my reaction that she’d packed up and left the same day.
“You looked like you wanted to strangle me,” she’d said on the phone the next day. “That much rage, your face all twisted up until I didn’t know you anymore …” Her voice had broken. “Aarav, you need to see a shrink or you’ll hurt someone.”
I’d hung up and erased her number from my phone.
It had taken another year and Paige’s concern for me to admit I needed to talk to someone, and now I’m one of those people who has a therapist. Dr. Wendall Jitrnicka. He wears bow ties and we talk about shit. But I go every two weeks. Turns out I have a lot of shit in my head.
“When will you bring her out?” I asked Neri when she didn’t respond.
“As soon as forensics is done with the site. It could be hours.” A pause. “The body’s been in situ a long time.”
“I understand.” There was no rush. Better they take their time and gather as much evidence as possible. “I’ll wait.”
“Mr.—”
“Aarav.”
“Aarav. Nothing much is going to occur here. We only informed you because there’s an unfortunate risk the media will turn up and we wanted you forewarned.”
I looked down at the mass of foliage again, ancient trees with twisted limbs alongside huge tree ferns entwined with vines. The canopy screened the car more effectively than any man-made barrier. “She’s been alone a long time. I can’t leave her that way.”
Constable Neri gave a crisp nod as she left, but I could almost see her making notes in a mental file: Flat affect, macabre obsession with death, was home on the night of the incident.
When they dig deeper, they’ll discover that I’d only been a little shorter and less muscled than I am now. Plenty big enough to deal with a petite woman. Nina Rai had entered her marriage a sylph-like twenty-one-year-old, but unlike many of her peers, who’d eventually allowed time and happiness to soften their edges, gently pad their bodies, my mother had clung to her youthful shape with a kind of feral obsession.
“Control, Ari,” she’d said to me more than once when she skipped a meal or replaced it with black coffee. “It’s about control.”
I’d often been a surprise to those who didn’t know the family. Strangers would compliment her on her cute younger brother, only for her to shock them by claiming me as her son.
“But you’re so young!” they’d inevitably exclaimed. “And your waist is so tiny!”
She’d been so proud of that waist, so proud that she could still fit into the clothes she’d brought from India all those years ago.
Not that she’d ever worn those clothes in the years following her determined embrace of her new life. Yet she’d kept them. A talisman to remind her of the poverty-stricken village from which she’d come?
Perhaps.
I’d seen her sitting on her bed once, a pale blue top in her hands, her fingers running over the stitches. “Amma made me this,” she’d said when I came closer. “A ‘fancy embroidered’ top for my fancy new life. ‘So lucky, meri Nina. Marrying such a dhanee man. Wah! You’ll wear diamonds and silk. The gods are smiling on you!’ ”
She’d laughed then, the sound a shard of broken glass edged with blood.
Handling a woman that slender, that small, wouldn’t have been difficult for an athletic sixteen-year-old boy who had several inches on her. After all, I’d done it many times by then, sweet cocktail fumes thickening the air around me as I carried my mother to the sofa or the bed.
“My son.” Her hand against my cheek, the points of her long nails pressing into my skin. “My pride. Mere dil ka tukda.”
Laughter again. It grated, nails on a chalkboard, even after all these years.
Because if I’d been a piece of her heart, it was a piece she’d alternately adored and resented. I’d been the weight that held her to her toxic marriage. My father would’ve discarded her without a backward look should she have pushed for a divorce. But his son and heir? Never. Ishaan Rai would’ve battled to the bitter end to keep hold of me.
A burst of dazzling white against the green. It was a scene-of-crime officer
. A second SOCO became visible in a small gap between the trees the next instant, his overalls the same crisp white except where they were streaked with dirt and crushed green.
Ironic, that she’d have all this attention now, my mother, who’d craved it her entire life.
“Here.” Constable Neri returned with a bright orange plastic crate. “You’re probably not meant to stand for long.”
Once, I might’ve been embarrassed at being treated like an invalid. Today, I didn’t care. “Thanks.” Politeness is a good thing; it works to keep people onside, keep them talking—and keep them from looking too deep. People tell me all kinds of things because I’m polite and empathic.
Dr. Jitrnicka tells me it’s a controlling tactic because I do it with so much self-awareness.
I waited to sit until after Constable Neri had turned away. It was an ungainly process, but I finally got myself down, the moon boot stuck out in front of me, and my crutches laid down neatly on one side. Face flushed from the maneuver, I reached inside one of the pockets of my sweatpants—which were slit open on one side to accommodate the boot—to pull out the strip of tablets I kept in there.
“These are for the migraines,” Dr. Binchy had said as he wrote out the prescription. “Use them with thought, but don’t hold off if you feel one building up. They work better if you get in early. Let it dissolve on your tongue, then swallow.”
The dull throbbing in my temples heralded the onset of one of the fuckers that had haunted me since the accident. Still, I hesitated. The medication worked but, for me, led to an inevitable wave of exhaustion in the hours following. Take one now and I’d be in bed after lunch for at least two hours.
The throbbing increased, nausea churning in my gut.
“Shit.” Removing one of the tablets, I placed it on my tongue, let the pharmaceuticals work their magic.
“Drugs will eat your brain, Ari, leave you with an empty khopdi.” My mother, standing in the doorway to my room with a cut-glass tumbler in hand, her black dress a fine wool that hugged her curves. “Promise me you’re not into that stuff.”
“I’m not,” I’d said, not sharing that drugs were passed around like candy at my exclusive private school. “I don’t like being zoned out.”
True then, and true now.
But the medication would give me clarity for a few hours before I crashed. Better that than a vise around my brain, crushing until tiny lights popped in front of my eyes and my eyesight began to go. I’d had a panic attack the first time it had happened, thinking I was going blind.
Sweat broke out along my spine.
I don’t know how long I sat there before the huge truck with a crane built onto its bed turned up. When I spoke about the truck with the nearest officer, a uniformed probationary constable, she told me the police had blocked off the road for some distance, putting detours in place long before anyone could make a turn that’d leave them stuck for hours.
“This’ll take a bit of time.” Young and sweet-faced, she didn’t seem to know who I was—but because I clearly had permission to be here, she didn’t watch her words. “The cars found in places like this are the worst to get out. Especially when the bush has had time to eat it up.”
Eat it up.
Yes. The jagged, lovely landscapes of this land had a way of swallowing up the unwary. Some, lost in crevices in the mountains, or buried under the sprawling canopy of an ancient forest giant, would never be found.
People forever lost.
Declared dead by the coroner.
My mother had never been declared dead. My father had simply waited the two years it took to get a divorce, then pushed it through without her consent. I didn’t know how. I never bothered to find out. It was obvious there had to be some law to deal with spouses who couldn’t or wouldn’t be found.
Technically, at that point, my mother had still been a fugitive. Oddly enough, it was the divorce that had turned her back into a law-abiding citizen. The court had granted her half the value of the family home despite my father’s attempts to hold on to it.
“I built it! I paid for it!” he’d raged the night of the ruling. “All she fucking did was spend my money!”
In the end, the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars she’d taken had been worked into the settlement, and my father kept the house—worth two million dollars at the time of the divorce. One million dollars to each party, straight down the middle. Had my mother been in court, she would’ve fought for more—shares, investments, all the money he’d hidden in offshore accounts, but she never turned up and so got the bare minimum.
Somewhere in the court system is a trust account in the name of Nina Parvati Rai that holds seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars plus ten years of interest payments.
Waiting for her to return.
Now, it would be mine.
She’d shown me her will once, hinted that she’d managed to save far more money than my father realized. “It’ll all be yours, Ari. Sell off the jewels, use the money how you want. Just look after your nani.”
I’d done that. My mother’s mother lives a comfortable life in the small Indian village she’d never wanted to leave. She rises every morning to pray for her long-dead husband and beloved daughter, and she ends every day the same.
I call her once a week, to check if she needs anything.
She always has the same request: “I want to talk to Nina, beta. Can you get Nina?”
I won’t tell her that they’ve finally found her Nina. She’d forget by the next call, and her heart would break over and over again. No, I’ll do as I’ve always done and tell her that her Nina is busy in another part of the house and she’ll call later.
Nani never remembers that her daughter doesn’t ever make that call.
To my left, the truck driver nudged his vehicle to the edge of the road, maintaining the bare margin of safety. Then he began to unfurl the crane, while his partner shouted out instructions. Never having seen one of these before, I watched with detached interest as the crane unfolded itself piece by piece, clunky metal origami.
A massive hook swung at one end.
5
I wondered aloud how they planned to hook it to the car and the young probationary constable said, “Oh, they’ve already got a sling down there. Designed for this kind of thing. Super strong, with straps and all.”
“Of course.” My mother would’ve hated this, to be hauled up like a piece of meat in a butcher’s shop.
Only … No, there were the SOCOs again, walking up with a pitifully small body bag on a stretcher. I watched but didn’t attempt to get closer, didn’t scream or cry or drop to my knees and sob.
My unshed tears had hardened to stone inside me.
And those were just bones, all traces of my mother long gone.
The smell of the pungent and sharply sweet perfume that had always made me a little dizzy, the flawless creamy brown of her skin, the bitter laughter, it was all gone. What remained were bones abandoned and forgotten in the midst of an endless and dark green quiet.
Constable Neri came my way. She’d changed at some point into coveralls of her own—a dark blue—to work the scene. A single hard look and the younger officer next to me flushed before fading away.
Pushing back the hood of her coveralls, Neri revealed sweat-dampened hair pulled back into a thick braid, fine marks around her mouth from what must’ve been a mask. “Do you have any cultural or religious practices we should be aware of?” Her voice was even. “There’s time to do a prayer as the tūpāpaku can’t be taken away while the truck is blocking the road.”
The tūpāpaku.
It was the respectful Māori word for a dead body. But it didn’t sound right. It was too fresh a word. My mother had been too long dead to be considered a body.
“No,” I said, thinking of the small prayer shrine kept by Shanti, my father’s second wife. No doubt she’d pray for her predecessor and fret over the lack of customary ritu
als, but she’d never known Nina Rai. “My mother was never very traditional or religious. It’d be hypocritical to do all that for her now.”
Though if my father had his way, he’d likely do it all, just to save face.
I wasn’t about to allow it—he’d divorced her, no longer had any rights over her. I’d make damn sure he remembered that and I didn’t plan to be polite about it. “Is there anything else you can tell me? Did you find anything that points conclusively to an accident?”
Neri unzipped the top part of the coveralls, revealing a white tee. “We found a bottle of whiskey in the car. Empty, cap off.”
The laughter after the drinks, the weaving steps, the need for her son to put her to bed, her breath heavy with an overpowering sweetness—memories as much a part of my childhood as the shouts and the screams and the expensive cakes my mother would bring home on impulse simply because they were my favorite.
There was just one problem. “My mother drank, often to excess, but she never touched whiskey. She said she’d rather drink horse piss.”
No flinch from Constable Neri. “People who drink to excess have a tendency to take what’s available.”
“My father’s bar was always stocked with plenty of vodka.” A standing order placed by my mother. “Some of the bottles from ten years ago are probably still there. He’s the one who drinks whiskey. Can’t stand vodka.”
A stillness to her now, the watchfulness even more intense. I thought of Paige again, how she’d sit in her favorite balcony armchair and look at me, as if trying to see through my skin, through my skull.
“What exactly are you saying?” Neri asked.
I shrugged. “Only that if she wanted to drink, it didn’t have to be whiskey.”
The SOCOs carrying the bones of my mother had reached the roadside. They placed those bones in a dark gray vehicle I hadn’t even realized was a hearse, it was so discreet and ordinary-looking.
Soon, I would send those bones into a crematorium fire.
Quiet in Her Bones Page 2