On the twenty-first day of owning a nonsensically large position in Genertech, I turned on my computer and was flooded with over fifty Google alerts, messages I’d signed up for every time Genertech was mentioned in the news. It was happening. Lockheed Martin had made a bid to buy the company. The futures were going wild. In premarket trading, Genertech was selling for $16.00. When the market opened, I put in my orders. When my orders filled within the first half hour, I knew there was still plenty of room to go with this stock. But I was a disciplined money manager, and I wasn’t looking to ride it to the top, just to make the fortune I needed to get the school started. I got what I wanted out of this bid, and I was happy with this. As Sir John Templeton once said, “Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism, and die on euphoria.” I always got out before the euphoria.
When I’d once told Dad this maxim, and how I never waited for euphoria, he had of course translated the aphorism to my love life: “Lovey,” he said. “You’re one hell of a money manager, but every now and then—in life, in love—you need to ride it to the top. All the way to euphoria.”
I allowed the days that followed to suck me into their vortex. Working fourteen hours straight, I did the work that needed to be done to get our school off the ground. Each day I drafted and edited and revised what would become our grant application, to obtain money to fund our project. After hours of grinding away on our submission for funds, I pulled up a new document, the template for a letter to be sent to certain philanthropic organizations that funded causes such as ours. Where the grant applications were written straight, these letters were written with heart—leaning on pure pathos to appeal to the emotions of the readers.
“These Indian girls are marginalized from the start, their worth and value stripped from them at birth. They are born and raised to work, to submit to their father’s rule, then their husband’s. These girls crave education as plants crave sunlight. Our objective is to change the lives of however many girls as we can. This is a global initiative springing from a local application. Together, we can alter the course of India—one girl at a time.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Thirty days after I had returned home, I prepared to board another plane back to India. This time, Lucas drove me.
In the last month, Lucas and I had settled into a comfortable routine. Plans had been made for our wedding: a small ceremony at a nondenominational church. Lucas’s parents, Jenny, Paul, and a few distant relatives would stand up for us. An intimate dinner at the country club would follow. Soon enough, we would be Mr. and Mrs. Lucas Anderson. A joint tax return would bear both of our names.
When I arrived in India this time, what I saw outside the airport terminal—the terrain, the people, the dwellings—struck me not as shockingly depressing, abhorrently sad or dismal. Instead I saw optimism, because Reina and I were going to change the world. The idea that forty girls might be saved to go on and save others was mind-altering. It lifted me as surely as my father’s zest for seeing the good in everything. Think globally, act locally. I knew I was thinking in terms of clichés, bumper stickers, and my Dad’s well-known quips, but the adrenaline rushing through me was unstoppable. We were going to do this, one child at a time. We were going to educate a handful of girls, and these girls would take their new knowledge home, spread it to their younger siblings, and uplift their parents. My father—with good reason—had accused me of spending my life on the safe middle ground, of never reaching heights where I might occasionally taste euphoria, but he could no longer say that Missy Fletcher was insulated in her comfort zone.
And in a short hour from now, I’d meet Reina and we’d travel to the orphanage again. I had never felt so exhilarated in my life.
I turned on my phone and waited to hear from Reina. She was due to arrive from London any minute. When an hour had passed, I began to look around for my shiny friend. I checked the board. The flight had landed. But Reina was nowhere to be found.
When two hours had passed, I started to panic. I checked my phone again. I called her again and again. I texted. I waited. When three hours had passed, I acknowledged the truth: I was alone in India without a translator, without the cool confidence of world-traveler Reina, without a hotel reservation or a driver or a plan.
Just me. Just doe-eyed, naïve, ready-to-be-scammed me.
With the sun setting, the sky growing dark, and the crowds of people morphing from friendly to suspicious in my worried eyes.
I had read about scams in India. Restaurants that laced their food with bacteria, forcing the patrons to enter dodgy health clinics with whom they were in cahoots. I read about food infused with marijuana so that patrons would leave groggy and uncertain, making them effortless targets to pickpockets and worse. Left to my own devices, I would be an easy victim.
Up until this moment, I hadn’t realized how much of my bravery was wrapped up in my role as Reina’s sidekick. Now, alone, what would happen to me?
My chest tightened, my lungs fought for air. The onset of a panic attack. I reached into my bag, snapped a Xanax in half, considered swallowing it before I couldn’t breathe.
But I wasn’t in the United States. I wasn’t on an airplane. I was on a bench outside Arrivals at Indira Gandhi airport in New Delhi. And Reina was nowhere to be found. And people were watching me, I felt. I would be robbed, or attacked, or tricked, I was sure. And I needed a clear head, at the minimum. No Xanax. I dropped it to the bottom of my bag.
Just then, a text message from Reina. It had been sent a good six hours ago but only arrived now, seemingly trapped in the lost dimensions of wireless transmissions.
Missy, Got delayed in London on UNICEF business. I’ll be to Rohtak by tomorrow. Hire a car to take you to the orphanage without me. I’ll meet you there! Can’t wait!
I didn’t need to go to Rohtak. I could take a taxi to the Sheraton that I could see from this bench. I could check into the American-based hotel and stay in my room and order room service and watch movies and hold out for Reina.
I could wait to be saved. I could rely on others. I could depend on everyone but myself.
Or I could get in a car and go to Rohtak.
Was it really that simple? Could I really just hop in a car and direct it to take me to Rohtak, a good hour’s drive away?
I studied my options. There were taxis. There were town cars for hire. There was a train. As I was considering my options, the transportation steward asked if I needed a vehicle. Yes, I said, and glanced at the black town car. Before I knew it, he was holding the door open for me.
Inside the car, I plastered on a mask of false confidence. “Hello!” I said to the driver. “I need to get to Rohtak, please.”
“Rohtak, so far,” he said. “Have you been?”
I laughed heartily. “Oh yes, of course, many times.” To my scaredy-cat ears, I sounded like a cartoon.
I glanced at his meter, and though I hadn’t a clue what all the numbers meant, I could tell that he hadn’t reset any buttons. Reina had warned me to always make sure the meters were started fresh. My chest squeezed. I peeled my top lip from my front teeth. “Is that your meter?” I asked.
“Yes, ma’am, this is the meter,” he said, and did nothing to zero it out. My heart seared with anger. He planned to scam me. Kindly reset it, I needed to say. I opened my mouth, but no sound came out.
We bumped across town in his slightly off-odored town car. Was it traces of alcohol, vomit? The driver watched me from the rearview mirror. He was oily, shifty, and he was heading out of town in a different direction than we had gone the first time I had come. I knew Rohtak was an hour away, but time passed and he was still weaving through the city, just skating the outskirts. Anxiety, panic, fury grew in me as I considered what he might be up to. Was he running up the cab fare, or was he planning a scam? We entered and exited three different roundabouts. My sense of direction was now jumbled. I reached into
my backpack for my travel compass.
“Why’s it taking so long to get out of the city?” I asked.
“Traffic,” he said. “Many detours.”
I could demand that he let me out, and try to find a different cab. But being let out in a part of the city I didn’t know made about as much sense as a preppy schoolgirl demanding to be let off on a ghetto corner, clutching her Kate Spade handbag against her chest. I closed my eyes and swallowed an imaginary dose of courage.
Then he turned left, off the city street and onto what might be considered a highway, except that there were no delineated lanes, just a massive tangle of six impromptu tracks trying to feed into one. Horns blared, fists threw out the window, bumpers threatened to nudge the cars in front of them.
“What’s going on here?” I asked.
“Construction,” he said.
Fifteen minutes passed and we’d hardly moved, then a half hour, then an hour. The bottleneck was ludicrous. We inched forward, jockeyed for position, made very little progress. Finally, the swollen jam thinned, and the six lanes that funneled into one spread again, back into six. Panic, anger, anxiety. I held the Xanax between my thumb and forefinger. My breathing was shallow. An hour had passed, and we were still in the city limits of New Delhi. The taxi meter ran.
My heart seared with anger; I reached back into my Chronicles of Cowardice, my internal record of the times in my life when I had been taken, used, mistreated because I wasn’t brave enough to stand up for myself. In the third grade, when kids cheated off my spelling test. In middle school, when Cheryl Foxworth made fun of my jeans. In college, when a frat boy pushed his inebriated body against mine, admonishing me for being such a prudish bitch. In grad school, when my professor held my grade hostage every semester until I ate dinner with him.
My heart threatened to combust for every time I kept quiet. The rage poured from my pores. I wondered if he could smell my fury. “Why are you headed south?” I asked. “It doesn’t appear you’re going the right way.”
He looked at me through his rearview mirror. Our eyes locked in a game of chicken. I didn’t blink.
“You want to be the driver?” he said.
And that’s all it took. Something inside of me cracked, snapped. Thirty-six years of people pleasing, of being agreeable, of taking the backseat to the bigmouths, was enough. This creep had just dumped gasoline on a flame, because all of a sudden I was burning and I wasn’t the least bit worried about him hurting me. The only thing I was worried about was having to live with the humiliation of being duped, of having to fall asleep tonight knowing that this scammer took me for a ride just to see me squirm and then charged me ten times the price. I couldn’t bear telling Reina that I’d let some jerk drive me around and terrorize me and that I’d paid for it. I couldn’t live with that. More gasoline. My fire roared.
“Listen, mister, I’ve been to Rohtak before, I know how much I paid, and I know which route I took. I need you to zero out your meter and drive in the right direction.”
I shot lasers into the rearview mirror, and this time he blinked. And reset his meter. He puffed himself up a bit and spit out the window, but we both knew what had just happened.
He turned west.
Soon he left the city streets and started down the road I had remembered. My nerves were shot. Sweat trickled down my rib cage. With the fire still burning, I revisited the perpetrators of my past. I walked up to the third graders and told the kids to keep their eyes on their own test, then I strolled into Brookhaven Middle School and broke the news to Cheryl Foxworth: “Hey, Cheryl, I may not wear the right jeans, but in a few years you’re going to find yourself pregnant your sophomore year, and wearing the right jeans then will hardly matter.” And then I found Scotty the frat guy pushing up against some other unsuspecting girl, and did her a favor, by spraying his eyes with mace and kicking him in the nuts. And then I located my skeevy professor in his book-lined office and told him he was the worst offender, because he used his position of authority against the people who valued him the most.
The driver drove. I texted on my phone. Every five minutes. To Reina. Just so she knew, just so someone knew my whereabouts. Just in case.
7:50 p.m.—Driving to Rohtak in town car #34867.
By the time we arrived at the Home for the Orphaned and Malnourished Girls, I wanted to cry. I was so happy to get out of this creep’s car. Maybe he was harmless; maybe he wasn’t. I was happy to never know.
I paid him and watched him drive away up the dirt road, then I turned toward the sagging building. The long day of travel and the questionable car ride had dampened my enthusiasm from that of an evangelist to that of a telemarketer. I could read the script, but my heart wasn’t in it. I wished for Reina. I was angry with her. She should have known better than to leave me alone. But maybe she didn’t know better. Maybe I had fooled her into thinking I was brave enough to get here on my own. That was an interesting thought.
I walked toward the orphanage and pushed through the ornate back door, the same entrance we had used the first time. As I drew closer to the kitchen and the dining room, chatter escalated, as if I were slowly turning the knob on a stereo—first a low mumble, and then a graduated chatter, until finally the combined voices of a gaggle of little girls sitting with their backs against the wall sharing a meal crescendoed into a roar. I watched as they used their hands as utensils to swipe the food in the compartments of their tin plates. When the children saw me, they rose like flowers and waved their hands and granted me a roomful of the most beautiful smiles. The girls—little ones of two or three up to the bigger ones of eight or nine—ran to me and circled me until all I saw was a rainbow of saris and a carpet of braided hair. I was instantly rejuvenated, happier than I had ever been in my entire life.
“Miss Missy!” they cried. “Miss Missy, Miss Lady, it’s you!”
“Hi, girls!” I cried. Seeing these beauties was better than a shot of adrenaline, and having them in my arms brought back every ounce of enthusiasm I had had hours ago when I landed in this country, plus some. I was an evangelist and a coach and Frank Fletcher’s daughter, all in one. This orphanage—come hell or high water—was going to become a school for girls.
The next afternoon, Reina arrived. Brimming with energy, beaming her magnetic smile, eyes as bright as the desert sun, decked out in jeans and a T-shirt and a scarf looped casually around her neck, her Ray-Ban Aviators resting on her head, a shiny ponytail bobbing to her step. We hugged as if we’d known each other our entire lives. In a way, I had known her: she was just like my father with her optimistic energy, and being with her was almost like being with him.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
I no longer required the strong medication to fly. The Xanax had done the trick, but coming off of it was no easier than recovering from the stronger medication. Now back in DC, I picked cotton balls from my throat, ears, and eyes, trying to shake off the killer flight. My fat cow’s tongue barely fit inside my papery mouth. My ears rang the same annoying tone that played when the television people tested for an emergency. If this were a real emergency . . .
Exhausted and hazy, I deplaned and beelined to the ladies’ restroom, where I splashed water on my bleary-eyed face, slapped my cheeks, and subdued my tornado hair into a ponytail. “You made it!” I said to my reflection, as though it still baffled me that the Boeing jumbo jet hadn’t plummeted into the ocean. I stopped at the first Starbucks and ordered a shot of espresso and a water bottle. I tore open a packet of sugar and poured it into the strong coffee, downed it, and then twisted off the cap to the water bottle. I chugged half the bottle until my stomach felt sloshy with liquid.
I proceeded through customs and the baggage claim, and was on my way to ground transportation when my medicated haze began to clear, leaving me with just the buzzy disorientation of jet lag to deal with. Jenny was scheduled to pick me up at two o’clock. The plan was that she would cruise by the
Arrivals curb, and I would just hop in.
I found an edge of a bench and plopped down my bags onto the sidewalk and then sat, glancing at each passing car, trying to locate her whale of a pearl-colored Cadillac. I was excited to see Jenny, to fold into her warm arms, to inhale her familiar scent. I was happy to be home. I fished around my purse for a pack of gum, found it, and chewed two bracing pieces of spearmint, still trying to clear the gauzy film from my mouth.
Jenny was late. She’d probably just run into traffic, but I was beginning to worry. I set my shoulder bag onto the ground and bent over to root through the pockets for my cell phone. As I searched the bag, a tide of legs and feet and suitcases and children in strollers slid along the upper periphery of my vision until my eyes were drawn to a shiny prosthetic leg halted before me. I noted how neatly it sprouted from a colorful Nike sneaker, how tanned and muscular its opposite leg was. God bless our veterans, I could hear Dad say. Such a patriotic, grateful man, a veteran himself who never forgot his buddies who hadn’t made it home.
I tucked down more deeply into my bag and finally located my phone. I started a text: Everything okay—
“Missy?”
The familiarity of the low male voice that had spoken my name hit me hard, like tasting Kool-Aid after thirty years and remembering exactly what it felt like to be five years old. I froze, the dissonance of knowing and not knowing at the same time striking a sort of paralysis in me.
“Missy?” he said again.
I looked up. In front of me was a mirage. A hallucination, a figment of my deluded brain. In front of me was my history, stepping into my present. Perhaps I was still asleep on the airplane, in my jet-lagged Xanax haze, loopy and dopey and dreaming a bunch of nonsense.
“Missy,” he said for a third time.
The Light of Hidden Flowers Page 22