by SJ Sindu
“I—just the theatre building.” I gave her directions.
“I didn’t know there were dorms in the theatre building.”
I dried my face with my sleeves and didn’t correct her.
•••
I wake up in Louisville. Tasha shakes my arm. I stretch my legs by walking them up the sun-warmed windshield.
Louisville is too bright. The air conditioning blows tepid and dusty against my arms. Sunlight rushes around the car. I squint against it, using my hand for shade. We pass a baseball stadium near an overpass. Great cracks run through the highway, patched over with tar.
We drive into a small cluster of city-like buildings, all gray steel and blue-green glass. Buildings flash by in a whirl of brick. A large poster of Muhammad Ali watches us from a concrete museum. A scooped-out façade of a building rises on a road by the shore. The Ohio River blinks at us through the empty windows.
“Destination on your right,” the GPS says. The blue of the river unfolds on Tasha’s side of the car. Metal sculptures dot the wide sidewalks of Main Street. People in business suits swarm on the sidewalks, women in too-small skirts, men in pinstripe and Windsor knots. I can’t imagine Vidya among these too-clean people, her ruffled skirts and her wild hair.
The building the GPS leads us to is dark brick with white Grecian trim, an Italian restaurant and a couple of boutique stores on the first floor.
I wipe my sweaty palms on my jeans.
“Where the hell are we supposed to park?” Tasha swings the car right, up a hill, past fancy hotels.
Vidya’s building is shrinking, sliced by the defroster grid of the car’s back window. Tasha pats my knee. The concrete runs seamless down the buildings, across the streets and up the other side.
We find a parking garage with water-stained cement floors. Our sneakers squeak on it, even after we get onto dry concrete. I crack my knuckles one by one. The tips of my fingers have lost all warmth. Upright, I can feel the blood falling inside me. It magnifies in my head.
Tasha bumps my shoulder with hers, winds her arm around mine and weaves our fingers together. My palms sweat but she doesn’t flinch away.
We walk to Vidya’s building faster than I expect. Our palms are plastered together with sweat. I shake mine out of her grasp to let the air in.
Outside the building, two intertwining bodies make a bright orange metal sculpture. I squint at it, trying to make out where one form ends and the other begins. It’s familiar, the shape of the sculpture, but I can’t think of why.
The glass doors of the building open into a circular lobby. Grass-textured walls wind close on all sides. We get in the gilded elevator and watch the floor fall away. Fourth floor. A blank wall and a hallway carpeted with crimson filigree like a twenties hotel. Vidya’s door is glossy black like all the others, six paneled with a peephole and a tarnished gold knocker with the face of a lion. Apartment 429. I lift the knocker’s circular handle and let it fall down onto the door. We wait.
I knock again. We wait.
Eventually Tasha knocks at number 428. Nothing. I knock at number 427. The door opens. A little kid with a round, broad face pops his head around the door, hiding.
“Do you know who lives in this apartment?” Tasha points to Vidya’s door.
The little kid looks at the carpet and nods.
“Do you know where they are?”
He looks at Vidya’s door, then at us, and shuts the door. Tasha knocks again. A woman opens the door and hangs her head out into the hallway.
“Do you know where the people in apartment four twenty-nine are?”
“Why do you want to know?”
I step forward. “I’m her sister.”
The woman looks me up and down. “You don’t look like her sister.”
“We look a lot alike. She has longer hair, curly.” I show her the picture that came with the letter.
The woman takes the photo. I want to snatch it back.
“This woman hasn’t lived here in years. She moved out with her little girl.”
“Where did she go?”
“She said something about Pennsylvania.” The woman taps her finger on her chin. “I may not be remembering right.”
The blood has fallen away from my fingers, leaving me empty. Tasha grabs my hand and puts her fingers through mine. She thanks the woman and pulls me toward the elevator. I follow, grinding my shoes into the carpet so that they squeak.
Outside, I blink into the sun and trace the lines of the orange sculpture again, trying to find the point of separation between the two forms. Tasha pulls out a cigarette and lights it. She walks around and around the sculpture, taking puffs of smoke and blowing it around the metal.
“What now?” she asks.
“I guess we go back.”
She stands near the sculpture’s plaque for a long time. She takes a drag from the cigarette and throws it down. “Come here and look at this.”
The town of Louisville proudly sponsors The Living Art Walk. Title: “The Lovers.” Artist: Vidya Jeyakumar.
I reach up and press my hand to the metal. It’s warm, the orange paint starting to pucker and bubble.
Vidya Jeyakumar. She never changed her name.
“Why would she put this address on a letter if she doesn’t live here anymore?” I ask.
“The city hall will have records of the artists who contributed,” Tasha says. “They may have a current address on file.”
But they don’t. All they have is the address in Louisville. I can’t feel the blood inside me. Vidya is good at disappearing, but I don’t know what she’s running from anymore.
•••
When Vidya came to get me from college and brought me home to Amma, she asked me why I didn’t tell her.
“Tell you what?” I fiddled with the zipper on my backpack.
“Tell me what happened with Amma.”
“I didn’t know how you felt about—you know.”
She stared straight ahead at the lines of the curving highway and blinked rapidly. “I’m your sister.”
“Still.”
“It doesn’t change anything,” she said.
“Does Shyama know?”
“No.”
“Don’t tell her.” I pressed my forehead against the cold window. I couldn’t talk around the fear in my throat.
“It’s not a terrible thing, Lucky.”
I swallowed down the lump. “Amma will never accept this.”
“She has to change.”
“She won’t.” I turned my face so she couldn’t see me cry. “She stopped transferring me money. I’ve been living in the prop room.”
Vidya slowed and stopped the car on the side of the road. She pulled me to her and held me. Her hands shook. I felt her crying on my scalp.
I hoped that Amma would’ve gone to bed by the time we made it to Winchester, but the lights were on and through the kitchen window I saw her making sambol. She pounded dried peppers, onions, and coconut shavings in a stone mortar.
Vidya took my duffel bag and unlocked the front door. I stayed in the car.
She dropped my bag off inside and came back out. “You can’t stay in there forever.”
“Watch me.”
“I promise you I won’t leave your side.” I remember Vidya said that then, though neither of us could’ve known that she’d be gone by the end of the year.
I couldn’t make myself move. She grabbed a handful of my T-shirt and pulled me out. I couldn’t make myself resist.
I walked in the door and into the kitchen. Amma froze for a moment, her back tense. For a second no one moved. Then Amma hunched her shoulders and scraped the sambol out of the mortar.
I stepped forward. I couldn’t breathe. “Amma.” I had prepared a speech during the ride, everything I wanted to say. But no words
came to me in the too bright kitchen, cold vinyl floor under my feet. “Amma.”
“This isn’t something she can control,” Vidya said. “You have to accept this.”
Amma put the sambol aside and cut into a fresh onion.
“Amma, talk to her. Please.”
Amma’s grip on the knife loosened. Her cutting stilled. “I can’t accept a daughter like this.”
Something was rising in my throat. I swallowed it down.
“This is no kind of life,” Amma said.
“This is a perfectly fine kind of life,” Vidya said. Her voice rose. She was going to fight for me. But I didn’t want to fight anymore. I didn’t want to live in the prop room and I didn’t want to walk away.
“Amma,” I said. “I want to marry Kris. I love him.”
•••
On the way back to Boston from Louisville, I get a short and clipped phone call from Amma, her voice scratchy under bad reception in the mountains.
“Come home.” Her voice sounds hollow, like she isn’t really there.
I lose reception as we drive, chased by a knife-thin moon. I could go back to her house. Or I could walk away, cover my tracks, disappear. I hold my face in my hands and breathe in the wet blackness around me, my body too heavy, a balloon filled with water, dragging me down, crushing me into the seat of the car.
•••
Nisha finally calls that night, after we get back to the rugby house and just as I’m getting ready to pass out. She doesn’t answer right away when I say hello. Silence stretches and stretches on the line.
“Hello?” I cup the phone to block out the sound of Tasha and Jesse playing Guitar Hero. I walk outside onto the porch and shut the door. The night chill wraps around me. “Hello?”
A sniff. More silence.
“If you don’t answer, I’ll hang up,” I say.
Another sniff.
“Nisha.”
“Take me away from here.” Her voice tight like a violin string. “Please.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“You said we’d go somewhere.”
Through the window, the rugby girls are still playing. My absence is unnoticed.
“You said we’d go,” Nisha says.
“Now?”
She makes angry sounds, none of them actual words. “You said. You promised.”
Jesse hollers her victory dance.
“You promised.”
“Okay, okay. Okay. We’ll go.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow. Meet me at Alewife at ten.”
Her voice breaks, halting. “Thank you.”
I stay out on the deck after I put away my phone. The cold from the creaky floorboards soaks into my feet. The moon lights the deck in blue.
I can’t take Nisha to Toronto like she wants. But I can take her to Bridgeport, to my house. Kris will understand. Her parents won’t find her there.
The wind feels new, but then again Boston wind always feels new, solid and pregnant with the sea. Windows glow stark yellow against the painted blue of the buildings. Alewife at ten. Tomorrow everything will change, or maybe it’s already changed, and I’m just waiting for it to sprout like spring growth. Tomorrow I’ll bring Nisha home, and she’ll belong to no one.
Eight o’clock. My alarm bounces off the walls of the rugby house and echoes inside my head. No one is up this early. Tasha moans a complaint and pulls the rainbow quilt over her face. I dive for my phone and shut off the alarm. I want to sink into the mattress. I massage the sleep out of my eyes and swing my feet over the edge of the bed.
“Where are you going?” Tasha’s voice is muffled by the quilt.
“Back home.”
“This early?”
I roll my shoulders to get some feeling into them, but even that takes an enormous amount of effort. “I’m getting old.”
She rolls over and pokes me in the side, where love handles are starting to form. “Don’t forget to come back.”
I want to tell her about Nisha but I can’t find the words.
Eight twenty-three. When I get changed and out of the bathroom, Tasha’s in the kitchen.
“Coffee.” She gives me the boob cup. “I put milk and sugar in it.”
I let the coffee slide down my throat. Beer might be a better start to the day. Whiskey. It would still my fingers.
She flips pancakes on the stove, adds one to a short stack and brings the plate over.
I sit down and pour maple syrup over them. “You didn’t have to do all this.”
“I always cook for girls who stay the night. I figured you’d need your strength to face your family.” She cuts a piece of my pancake stack and puts it in her mouth.
My fingers clamp on the fork and cut large, messy pieces.
Nine forty-seven. I take the T from JP to Alewife, walk up out of the concrete building, and sit on the bench where smokers mill about. The sun slants under the roof of the parking garage and warms the tops of my shoulders, working the tension out. I smell cold in the air, but the nip isn’t strong enough for a winter jacket.
A curvy woman in a business suit smokes in her stilettos, flicking the cigarette repeatedly and squinting up at the sky. “Hope this heatwave lasts,” she says to me.
I want to feel the cold air around me. This chill is too mild for the end of October. I want the trees to crust over with frost, to see Boston dusted with white before Thanksgiving like when I was a kid.
The woman stamps the cigarette with a pointy-toed shoe. She squints at the sky again, her hand shielding her face, and walks down the steps to the trains.
Ten o’clock. I watch the time on my phone. It gets hard to swallow or breathe.
Ten fifteen. Nisha is late. I send her texts, try to call. Her phone is out of service. She’s supposed to be bringing my car.
Ten thirty-two. I walk around to get the feeling back into my legs, and sit down again next to a homeless man in a dirty, torn military jacket who keeps wiping at his nose with his sleeve. He ignores me.
Eleven forty-four. Nisha isn’t coming. She’s not coming. Traffic wouldn’t be this bad on a Sunday. Her phone is still out of service.
I kick at a trashcan. The homeless man stares at me, wiping at his nose. I sit back down on the bench and put my head in my hands. She might still come. Anger clenches my insides. I have to get my car from her place. I get up and move toward the buses.
Eleven forty-six. I walk back to the bench and sit back down. Could her parents have found out and stopped her? This may not be her fault.
Twelve thirty-six. The homeless man gets half of a burger from a hurried passenger. He holds it out to me in silent offer, wiping his nose.
“Thank you, but you can have it.”
He bites into the burger. Ketchup drips down his chin.
I stand up and head inside the station to the buses.
Three minutes past one. Curtains are pulled tight against the windows of Nisha’s house. My car sits in the driveway where I left it, its white coat gleaming under the high sun.
Trying to ignore the feeling that I’m stealing my own car, I get in. The leather scalds the backs of my thighs. I turn the AC on to full blast, and drive away. I’m too tired to care. I want to sleep for weeks.
•••
Amma’s car is in the driveway. My car crunches into its spot. My stomach churns.
When I was little, Amma used to say that I brought the most happiness into her life. After losing a daughter, my birth was a miracle. They named me Lakshmi. Beauty. Wealth. A few months later my father got tenure, and somehow I got all the credit.
I walk up the steps to our front door. The blue door is bumpy where the paint dripped from the edges. I slide my key into the lock, and let myself in.
I’m named after a goddess whose husband sleep
s in a cosmic ocean of milk. One legend says that gods and demons churned the milk together, hoping for immortality, but instead they turned the milk to poison.
Amma sits at the dining table, almost hidden behind a stack of dentistry journals, her laptop open in front of her, reading glasses on. She looks up at me when I come in and goes back to reading something in one of the journals she has propped open with a coffee cup.
I try to summon up that numbness, to spread it through me and help me walk up the stairs to my room where I can sleep. I want to fall to the floor, fall through the floorboards and be swallowed up. I can’t make the numbness come. I drag my legs to the dining table and sit down.
Amma ignores me and keeps reading. The skin under her bloodshot eyes hangs dark.
I sit and trace a deep groove in the pine table. Amma and Appa bought it when they first moved in and it amassed a collection of nicks and scratches over the years. Amma covers it when people come over.
I run the edge of my fingernail in the groove, around the crescent shape of it. I don’t remember who made it, but it looks like the mark of a knife. I scratch at it, up and down and around, the wood digging under my nail.
When Lakshmi’s husband incarnated as the human prince Rama, she became the avatar Sita, the most beautiful woman in the world. A good wife follows her husband. Sita was captured by a demon, imprisoned for years, and finally rescued after a great war. But now her chastity was in question. Rama ordered her to walk through fire to prove her purity. She didn’t burn.
Amma shuts the laptop with a thud. She takes off her reading glasses and stretches her hands in front of her. She leans her elbow on her laptop and pinches the bridge of her nose. “It’s not easy, Lucky,” she says. “After your father left, I worked hard to be part of this community. I paid a lot for my mistakes. I don’t want you to suffer like I did.”
I make my voice as soothing as I can. “I won’t suffer, Amma.”
“Of course you will.” She spits out the words. “You don’t know how hard it’ll be until you don’t have it. Our world isn’t kind to women without husbands.”
I’m not part of this world she’s afraid of, this community she clings to, these uncles and aunties who compare each other’s kids like pieces of fine jewelry. These people don’t belong to me. The words sound harsh even in my head. They get caught on my tongue. I dig my nail into the knife mark, up and down and around.