by Sadie Sumner
Monica stood in line and studied the menu behind the counter and decided on an iced caramel skinny macchiato. As she ordered she realized she’d forgotten her handbag back in the hotel.
“I’ve left my money at the hotel,” she said. The boy behind the counter moved his head and turned to the next customer.
“Hey,” Monica knew she was shouting. The other customers stared at her. “I want to order. I’ll get my money after.” Monica settled her hands on her hips, her fighting stance.
The server shook his head in the quintessential Indian way. “Madam, we can not give you coffee without money.”
“You must give it to me!” It felt good to shout. “For fuck’s sake,” she elongated the words. “Just give me the damn coffee before I rip your dick off with a bat of my eye.” Sweat dripped down her face, and she considered climbing the counter to get to the server.
Gil and Rufus burst into the café and rushed to her side. “God help us if he shows fear,” Gil said to Rufus. But the server remained calm. “No, Madam,” he said pleasantly.
His softness undid her, and she began to cry with gusto. Emotion came in great gulping waves, and she put her hands to her face and wailed.
Gil tried to put his arm around her. “Coffee, I just want coffee,” she said and pushed him away.
Rufus held up fingers for two more and put the money on the counter. He nodded to the server who moved his head as if he saw such things every day. People turned away and returned to their conversations.
Monica wiped her face with a napkin and wrapped her arms around herself. When the coffee was ready, Rufus handed them out. Gil sniffed his and then gulped it.
“I didn’t know you liked Starbucks,” Monica said.
Gil shrugged. “I haven’t had one in years. You banned them, remember?”
Monica blew her nose. “How did you find me?” she asked.
“Rufus, he said you go there whenever you’re stressed. The concierge drew us a map.”
“Park. Let’s take these to the park.” Rufus used a singsong voice.
“You know you use that same voice when you talk to your rabbit,” Monica said.
They walked in a line through the crowds, past the broad steps that led down to the alley of multi-colored market stalls. A man with a withered leg and a homemade crutch pulled at Rufus’s sleeve and offered to guide them through the market.
“Pickpockets,” Monica said as if she'd been living there for years. “They’re everywhere around here.” She kept walking.
The park was an open area with thick trees along one border. At one end, men in white played cricket with serious intent, each thwack of the ball heralded by clapping and shouting.
“Oh god.” Monica held her coffee high. “There’s dog shit everywhere.”
Grandmothers and mothers with small children spread out over all the park benches as if they intended to stay all day. They found a spare seat near the trees, and Monica saw there were small encampments hidden in the undergrowth. Gil used his Starbucks napkin to wipe the seat, and they sat with Monica between them and sipped the last of their coffees. A group of unkempt children gathered round, and Monica stared at them until they wandered back to their homemade bat and tattered ball.
Finally, Gil spoke. “I’m sorry. For everything.”
Monica shook her head. “If you say sorry to me once more, ever, I promise I will never to speak to you again. I’m bone tired of your sorry.” She placed her empty cup on the ground. Rufus glanced at Gil, and they each tried to take a hand.
“God, what is it with the touchy-feely? Like a creepy intervention.” She threw them off as if they were contaminated. “You know how they say the wife always knows, even when she pretends she doesn’t?” She glanced from one to the other. “Well, I knew. I did. Look at you both. It’s so fucking obvious.”
“Really?” Rufus sounded amazed.
“I didn’t know,” Gil said.
“White t-shirts. Hello,” Monica laughed dryly.
“Don’t be rude Monica,” Rufus said.
Gil stood. “Okay. Stop, both of you. All of us have a right to be angry, at least with ourselves. But this is my life. If I hadn’t spent half of it being your footnote, perhaps I would have realized. And I’m sick of you disparaging me.”
“Oh, poor baby,” Monica made to get up, but Rufus held her arm. “Both of you. Just stop. We have to sort this out,” he said.
A cricket ball whizzed past them and into the trees behind. Monica jumped up and chased it and threw it towards the boy with the bat. He swatted it back to her, and she caught it and threw it at Gil, as hard as she could. It struck him in the chest, his eyes wide with surprise. He picked up the ball and felt its weight and lobbed it up and caught it a couple of times. He rubbed his chest and aimed it at Monica.
Rufus grabbed his arm and Gil whirled on him and slapped his face and Rufus hit him back. They squared off, and Rufus ducked under Gil’s swinging fist and smacked him again, and they scuffled with each other and fell to the ground and rolled around in the dust and garbage. The children ran from all across the park, pointing and laughing. Monica grabbed the boy’s bat and raised it above her head and ran towards them, screaming at the top of her lungs, screaming into a void of silence. She slashed at them, and they gave up fighting to protect themselves.
Rufus seized the bat and twisted it from her grasp and the three of them stopped mid-movement, frozen in place. Monica’s hearing returned and the roar of the city engulfed them.
Gil handed the bat to one of the children.
“It smells awful here. I think you might have stepped in some shit.” Monica said then she saw the blood. “Oh, god. Look at his nose. Gil, give him your hanky.”
Gil took it out and folded it over his earlier blood stain and handed it to Rufus.
“I think you broke my nose,” Rufus said.
“We need to get back to Nina,” Gil said.
Monica sat down on the bench. “What are we going to do?” she groaned. “Somebody please tell me, what the fuck are we going to do?”
Twenty-Eight
The children formed a loose guard of honor as Monica, Gil and Rufus left the park in single file. Rufus held the folded handkerchief beneath his nose. The city pressed in on them, sweltering and rank with sweat and decay. Monica felt as if she was no longer an anonymous tourist, but a woman with all her secrets emblazoned across her back.
Gil led the way through the oppressive air, and they followed him into the rushing tide of bodies. He ducked assertively through a knot of tuk-tuks, and around carts of fruit and a mat spread with handmade leather sandals. Monica stopped to tie her lace and realized a monkey was staring at her from under a furry brow. She touched her blind eye to make sure it was real and held out a piece of granola bar from her pocket, and a plan began to form. She hated brides. Hated marriage too, if she was honest. She would stay in India for a while. Travel with Nina to the places Dotty had visited and see it all for herself. She could set up a factory here and design the clothes she'd always wanted. Stylish, functional, athletic clothes for busy mothers like her. She raced to catch up with the men, and the monkey leaped from the canvas awnings to a stone wall and an overhanging tree branch in pursuit.
In the hotel lobby, the air conditioning pulled the breath from her lungs and instantly chilled her skin. The monkey had gone, and she wondered for a moment if it was as illusory as the phantom baby.
Rufus waited for her at the elevator. “Do you think Kavitha heard the arguments?” She flapped her blouse to dry off the sweat.
“Every word,” Rufus said.
Embarrassment welled up. “You were with Nina all morning, how’s she doing?”
Rufus frowned as though he did not understand the question. “Monica. I have to ask. Do you feel anything, I mean anything real, for her?” He wiped at the dried blood beneath his nose.
“I do. I mean, okay, probably not as much as I expected, but it will come. I’m sure it will. It says in the booklet.
It sometimes takes a while.” The words spilled from her.
Gil limped towards them; one side of his face was red, and he held his hand over his chest. “Cricket balls are hard, did you know that?” He poked angrily at the elevator button.
The concierge took Rufus aside and asked for extra money, to cover the cost of cleaning the room.
Rufus pointed to Monica and Gil. “Tell them,” he said. “It’s their room.”
The concierge glanced towards them and moved his head.
“He’s saying you are the sensible one.” Monica rolled her eyes. “I’m just beginning to decode the head thing.” She laughed too loudly.
“Monica, you can’t say things like that.” Gil grabbed her arm and grimaced. He held out his hand. The wound across his palm had opened up, and the cup of his hand filled with fresh blood.
Monica pointed to the concierge. “You could get them both some medical supplies.”
The elevator arrived, and she got in by herself. The men stood together and watched as the doors closed. Inside Monica pressed her forehead against the wall and knocked it rhythmically.
The clean room was like a miracle, and she lay on the bed and listened to the muted discord of the city. The outside world no longer unnerved her. The traffic and the lumpish cows, the open-air stalls and the constant smell of spice and urine and unwashed bodies. It all felt normal. It was the other life that now seemed alien. She wondered if this was how Dotty felt and if every return home was a dislocation, a journey away from her real self.
She scrolled through her phone to the yoga app and put the chain on the door, stripped to her underwear and followed the instructor. As she stretched and bent and engaged every muscle, the tensions began to melt. How had she not noticed Gil was gay? Half her clients were gay. Her business partner too. But her husband? And she saw her willful blindness as if she’d been living in a thick fog since she was a teenager. Since she was 16 and the night that changed everything.
Through the wall, she heard a baby cry, and for a moment, she did not connect the sound with Nina. Then it crashed in on her. Nina was her baby, and she could no longer avoid her.
She showered quickly and dressed in her sweats and brushed her hair and tied it back and glanced at her face without makeup and thought; this is me. I’m a new mother. She tapped lightly on the door connecting their rooms.
Kavitha was on the sofa with Nina at her breast. She lifted her eyes from the baby’s face for just a moment. The contrast in their skins struck Monica, and she wondered if the smell of incense and the lilt of Kavitha’s voice would lodge in Nina as a compass finds true north.
Kavitha patted the sofa beside her. “You hold her like this.” She showed Monica how to support Nina’s head and rub her back to bring up her wind.
Monica breathed in the delicate traces of baby and milk. “What’s it like, giving birth?”
Kavitha sat very still. “It is agony. And joy. Just that.”
“How will I feed her? I have nothing for her.”
Kavitha pointed to a small freezer. “From the agency. I have been expressing my milk, enough for a start. She needs a bath.” Kavitha fussed with the water and laid out fresh clothes and a new diaper. “This is her first. It is traditional to wait, for her skin. Now you are here you can do it.” She put her finger in the water to check the temperature.
Monica felt the anxiety return as she placed Nina on the bed and undressed her slowly. She touched each toe and traced the curve of her ear. She was afraid to bend her arms to remove her vest and when she turned for help Kavitha was gone, and she was alone with the baby.
She picked up Nina, terrified she would slip from her grasp as she carefully slid her into the bath. Nina gazed at her, still and solemn as if the water was a revelation even after nine months cocooned in it.
Her pale lips with their tiny frill of white opened and closed as Monica moved her gently in the warmth. She used a small muslin cloth to clean in the little crevices beneath her arms and behind her ears and in the crook of her elbows.
Nina began to grumble, and Monica lifted her out and laid her on the muslin towel and wrapped her up. She held her close and walked her around the room and wept into the soft nape of her neck.
When Kavitha returned, they were together on the sofa.
“She fell asleep before I could dress her,” Monica whispered and felt a flood of warmth, unlike any other.
Kavitha cleaned away the bath things. “Just a few more days,” she said. “Then you will have her all to yourself.” She picked up the used baby clothes and took them into the bathroom to rinse.
A twist of fear moved inside Monica. She had thought of the baby as barely more than a sweet face wrapped in a soft blanket, a distant child who smiled and cooed and stopped crying the moment she was picked up. She had not once considered the feeding and washing, wiping and cleaning and folding.
The men arrived. There was a fresh bandage on Gil’s hand, and Rufus had a plaster across his nose. Monica put her finger to her lips, and they watched her as she rocked the baby, and no one spoke. From the bathroom, they heard Kavitha sing, and an impasse grew into the silence that surrounded them.
Gil sat next to her. Finally, he spoke. “She’s beautiful.”
Monica looked at him hopefully, but he shook his head. “I know she’s mine. I’ll send money whenever I can, but I still can’t do this.” He pressed his mouth into a thin furrow. “I’d like to teach her how to take photos one day and be with her when she’s older, but I don’t have it in me to be a father.” His voice faded, and he looked at the baby with a blank expression. “But it’s not even that. I don’t want to spend years putting a child first. I’d resent every minute.”
Monica hugged Nina tighter as if his words would assault the child.
“That would be worse, don’t you think, than pretending to be a loving father?” His voice was different. The question was gone, the subtle passing of responsibility that so infuriated Monica.
She peered at him and felt nothing. Not a blank nothing or the spaciousness brought on by shock. It was as if her tangled feelings for him rose up from her and shook themselves into a semblance of order. And all at once she did not remember loving him. Instead, she remembered the disinterest in his voice when he knelt beside her all those months ago.
“I was raped,” she said.
Gil blinked. “When?”
“When I was sixteen. All these years, I’ve been telling myself that we were two young people experimenting, exploring, like you’re meant to do. But it was not like that. Maybe Dotty thought it was innocent, or somehow bohemian. But he kept his hand over my mouth, ripped my pants and forced himself into me.” She rocked the baby. “Then Dotty made me have an abortion. You remember that night when I was on the floor, and you told me you’d come back when I pulled myself together. I should have said then, or before. So many times I could have told you. But that was when it all came back. Like a freight train just smashed into me.”
“Oh no, you poor thing.” Rufus stroked her sleeve.
Gil looked at both of them. “I’m sorry I said that. It was wrong of me to walk away.”
She moved the baby into the crook of her arm and gazed into her sleeping face. “It was.” She knew that was as far as he could go, and it would have to be enough. “What will you do?” she asked Gil.
He shrugged. “Stay here, I think. In India. Take photos, as you said.” He ran his fingers over his camera.
“Okay,” Rufus said. “But not so fast.”
They both looked at him in surprise.
“I called Antoinette. We have legal issues. You have to be her father Gil, or Monica can’t take her out of the country. Two parents, and only married mixed couples. Whatever happens, you and Gil need to present a united front.” He gazed at the baby. “I’ll take a shower.”
As he left, Ria poked her head around. “We bought Mango Kulfi.” She held up the sweet frozen treat, and Kavitha came from the bathroom and clapped her hands.
“What is it like, being a Sadhu?” Gil asked.
Arun picked up Gil’s camera and felt the weight and touched the lens cap. “Not so good for my digestion. And the ablutions.” He moved his head.
“Do you think I could do it?” Gil asked, and Arun laughed out loud.
“We had a Frenchman with us.” Arun stroked the camera. “It is popular with certain people seeking enlightenment.” He ran his finger along the camera strap.
“How did it go for him, the Frenchman?” Gil asked.
“He died, infection from a dog bite.” Arun looked away as he spoke.
Kavitha sat next to Monica. “I hardly recognize him.” She said as she watched her husband. “A pilgrimage to atone. It is not easy.” She gave him a glimmer of a smile, and he put his palms together and brought his hands to his chest and bowed his head to her.
“With the naked holy men,” Ria added, and Kavitha chuckled.
“A man who I have barely seen naked in all our years.”
Ria made a face. “Are you thinking of joining them?” she asked Gil.