by Rahul Mehta
“What the fuck!” Sissy said. She stormed five steps in one direction, spun around, stormed back. It took a moment for what had happened to sink in for everyone.
“Let’s wait a few minutes,” Tina finally said. “Maybe Matt’s just joyriding around the block.”
“Is Val a virgin?” Kiran heard one girl whisper to another, but he didn’t catch the answer. Kiran, not quite sure where to look, glanced at his shoes. A breeze blew down the tree-lined street, leaves like cards being shuffled in a deck.
“I would’ve gone,” Carla muttered to no one in particular. “He didn’t have to take her. I would have gone gladly.”
Kiran looked at her: her round wire-rimmed John Lennon glasses, her frizzy hair pulled back in a loose braid, an extra-large T-shirt that read “Lilac Festival 1988.”
“They probably went back to the house,” Sissy said after several minutes, sounding uncertain.
They piled into Carla’s subcompact. Tina had to sit in the front, otherwise she got carsick. In the backseat, Sissy, having claimed a window, wasn’t budging, so Kiran squeezed into the middle, Rick on his right. In the small seat, Kiran’s and Rick’s thighs pressed against each other, and when the car turned, their bodies collided, fused, until they straightened themselves. Their thighs might not have been touching the whole time had Rick sat with his knees together, like Kiran did, but Rick didn’t, or wouldn’t, or couldn’t. Some men couldn’t. They must sit with their legs wide open always, as if to announce, My boy down there, he needs all the space he can get.
“Probed in the Probe.” Rick chuckled.
“She’s fifteen,” Carla said.
Kiran was aware of the heat of Rick’s thigh against his own. Was Matt touching Val’s thigh at that very moment? It was so difficult to know what had happened back on the street. Hadn’t Val wanted to go with Matt? Or had she been taken, as Carla seemed to suggest? Kiran couldn’t help thinking of his sister so many years ago in the woods, her naked torso covered in goose bumps.
At the house, there was no sign of Matt and Val. Inside, Carla’s father had not retired to his bedroom as they had hoped. He’d passed out in the brown recliner. Carla couldn’t rouse him. They distributed themselves between the couch and the love seat on either side of the recliner. Tina and Rick claimed the love seat, Tina curling catlike against him. Carla switched on cable: The Lost Boys. Her father wheezed like a woolly mammoth, and Carla kept upping the volume.
The girls—perhaps to distract themselves from thinking about what might be happening to Val—debated which of the teenage vampires was the hottest. “What do you think?” Carla asked Rick.
“I’m no faggot.”
Kiran looked at Rick. Something about the way his face hardened when he said “faggot” seemed so familiar to Kiran. In fact, all night he’d thought he recognized Rick, and it was only now that he realized he was the elf-eared boy from the scratchy plaid couch his family had bought secondhand when he was a child, the boy who was teased and farted on in school.
“No,” Carla said, “but, like, if someone was holding a gun to your head, and you had to say?”
“I’d take the bullet.”
“You’d rather be shot in the head than say which guy is hotter?”
“I told you: I’m not a fag.”
“How about you, Kiran?”
“Huh?”
“Which one?”
He hesitated a moment. Rick, when farted on, had looked at Kiran as if to say, It should be you. “I’m with Rick.”
From the love seat, Tina frowned. Kiran worried. What did she think she knew? He held her gaze for several seconds before looking back to the screen.
The scene was this: The Lost Boys are hanging from a high bridge, a train rumbling overhead. One by one they let go, disappearing into the darkness below. The newest vampire is the only one left. He doesn’t yet know he is immortal, that he can fly. He doesn’t believe. He clings to the bridge. But eventually he can’t hold on any longer. He closes his eyes and lets go.
They didn’t ring or knock, just stumbled in: Val, limp, was wrapped toga-style around Matt, chest-puffed, chin forward, shit-eating grin tattooed on his face: “She’s maybe had a little too much.” The girls all popped up and extracted Val from Matt, then collapsed, all four of them, onto the couch, kittens in a litter, purring, petting, licking each other. On the love seat, Matt and Rick snickered, elbowing each other. Kiran sat knees-to-chest on the floor by the couch. Carla’s father huffed, belly heaving. The TV flickered, though no one was watching anymore. Fifteen minutes passed this way.
“Better head,” Matt finally said. “Long drive to State College tomorrow.”
In the car, driving Tina back to her house, Kiran asked, “What happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“With Matt and Val. When he took her.” Unsure of the wording, Kiran revised. “When she went with him.”
“She wouldn’t say.”
“She seemed fine. Didn’t you think? She didn’t seem”—he searched for the word—“hurt.” Kiran remembered sidelong glances at his own sister, atop Prabhu Kaka’s shoulders, surveying her for signs of injury as they all huffed down the hill.
“No,” Tina agreed. They pulled up in front of her house. The porch light glowed yellow. Her parents had left lights on for her in the living room, too. Tina unbuckled her seat belt. “Sometimes it comes later.”
When he reached home, Kiran didn’t go inside. He sneaked around the side yard, walking the property line like a tightrope, six-pack left from the water tower swinging in his hand. On the back patio, he cracked open a can of Beast, chugged then crunched it. He opened another. With one hand he popped the tab, with the other he fumbled in his leather jacket for his cigarette pack, dropping it twice on the concrete. He lit a cigarette, took a drag, took a sip of his beer, looked up at the sky, at the moon. It’s huge . . . and rising. But it wasn’t rising, not anymore. Midnight was long gone; the moon was in descent.
Back at college, there was a game Kiran and Jeffrey and Michaela played. When not sullying the fourth-floor lounge, they liked to sit outside the dining hall, rating students passing by. They’d imagine that a giant anvil was falling from the sky, about to crush Person X and Person Y. You only had time to push one out of the way. Who did you choose? Recently, Michaela had introduced a twist. It was you under the falling anvil; you and Person X. Who would you save? It was a dumb game, Kiran thought. Wouldn’t you always save yourself?
Kiran glanced at his bedroom window. He saw Bharat watching, his face in shadows and moonlight. Kiran took a long, exaggerated drag from his cigarette and exhaled luxuriously. He raised his beer to Bharat, and then looked away to take a swig. When he looked back, the face he saw was not Bharat’s but Prabhu’s. It was ten years earlier. They were standing on the slate of the split-level foyer. Prabhu had asked Kiran a question. The key in the lock of the front door was turning.
Chapter 12
“I just want to sleep in my own bed,” Kiran had said, but Shanti insisted it was too disruptive to shift Bharat just for four days; besides, where would she put him? “It’s OK for you to sleep in your sister’s room, but not Bharat.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not . . . pukka . . . what do you say? Kosher.”
Kiran harrumphed. Since when had his meat-eating mother cared about kosher?
That conversation had played out over the phone a couple of days earlier, and now Kiran, drunk, tripped into Preeti’s room. The clothes he’d worn on the train, which he had strewn on the floor, had been folded neatly and stacked on his duffel bag. His bedcovers had been turned down.
It had been four years since Preeti occupied this room with any regularity, but it was exactly the same (as far as Kiran could tell; admittedly, he was most used to viewing her room and its contents through the slats of her closet door). Yellow daisies on the wall. A cheerleading trophy on the dresser. On a high shelf, a dollhouse. An enormous corkboard with small mementos from every party
, every outing, every date: a ticket stub, an invitation, a silver streamer, a cocktail napkin, a tiny slip of paper with a Chinese fortune. Kiran had not been invited to parties when he was a teenager, and the parties he did go to did not have invitations or napkins or streamers. Over Preeti’s bed hung a white cross edged in gold paint. On the bedside table, next to the alarm clock, was a page from a Verse-A-Day calendar dated January 14, 1983, and preserved in a gold frame: “I call on the Lord in my distress, and He answers me. Psalm 120:1.” Kiran shed his pants and shirt and slid under the covers in his boxer shorts.
He last saw Preeti over the summer during a family vacation at Myrtle Beach. It was meant to be a gift for graduation (Kiran from high school, Preeti from Ole Miss), though a week of forced merriment with family hardly seemed celebratory to either sibling.
Preeti had a job in a greenhouse and was aiming to apply for nursing school come fall, a plan she announced over dinner at Fiesta Cantina their second night there.
“Why would you want to do that?” Nishit asked.
“I want to help people,” she drawled in a southern accent she’d perfected within weeks of arriving in Mississippi. She fluttered blue-shadowed eyelids.
“Then be a doctor,” he said just as the food was arriving. There was a flurry of flautas and tostadas and chimichangas. Orders were mixed up. Kiran slid Preeti’s enchiladas down the wooden table after having accidentally taken a bite. “Ew” flickered across Preeti’s face as though they were children and she thought he had cooties. Once the plates were finally settled, Nishit said, as if to himself, but loud enough for everyone to hear, “I raised my children to be doctors, not nurses.”
It took a moment for Preeti to absorb the blow; it rippled through her body before settling. “Doctors treat diseases,” she said, finally. “Nurses treat people. In the end, we are the ones left holding the patients’ hands.”
Preeti was quiet the rest of the meal, prim in her chair, taking tiny bites she politely chewed. She was wearing full makeup, everything about her trimmed and tamed, polished and coiffed, nails painted, pulse points perfumed. Her armor, Kiran thought. Still, it was a step up from the kabuki whiteface of her high school days: foundation five shades too light layered like cake icing. Many years from now, seeing a Christmas card on Kiran’s fridge—Preeti and her family posing in their best red and white, gold crosses around the necks of mother and daughter—a drag queen friend would say, “Your sister’s serving Grand Ol’ Party Anita Bryant realness,” though of course there was nothing real about it. It was a mask like any other. Or armor: that was the right reference point. At Fiesta Cantina, every inch of Preeti was shellacked, her body made waterproof, impermeable: nothing getting in, nothing getting out. Perfect protection. But from what? Or from whom? It was only them there.
In Preeti’s bed, Kiran tugged at her pink comforter, tucking it under his chin. The pattern was roses, but the flower he was thinking of now was lilac: the lilacs from Carla’s shirt that night, the lilacs that bloomed in their own yard in May. Not their yard, technically; the bush probably was more accurately in the Yamamoto’s yard, just on the edge of the property line, but the branches spilled over onto their side, and Shanti insisted that those blossoms were fair game. The week they bloomed she clipped them, arranging them in vases around the house: one in the kitchen, one in the family room, one on the small table in the split-level foyer. The thick smell thrummed through the house, settling into every corner, every crack. Shanti kept them too long, and their sweetness turned rank. Or was it that their sweetness faded, revealing the rankness that was always there underneath? Kiran wondered. It was like Rick’s and Matt’s cologne, he thought, like Rick and Matt themselves.
Before Kiran knew it, he had pulled Preeti’s comforter fully over his head.
When Kiran, as a child, visited his friends and played in their rooms, he was surprised to realize that they made their beds by merely pulling their comforters over their mattresses and smoothing them out. It was so simple. In his house, it was different. He had to remove the comforter, fold it, put it in the closet, remove the night pillows, fluff them, put them in the closet. In the closet was the bedspread; that’s what got unfolded, what he laid on the mattress, tucking it tightly, just like his mom had shown him, all four corners, all four sides, even the long side pushed up against the wall, Just because you can’t see that side doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to be tucked tight. There were the day pillows, the ones covered in the same fabric as the bedspread, plus a round pillow, plus a bolster. He was to do all of this before anything else. He was thirteen when he stopped. By then he was old enough to shut his bedroom door and bold enough to say “Stay the hell out,” and even then his parents had bigger worries about Kiran than whether he was making his bed. And in college, well, in college he hadn’t even washed his sheets this semester, let alone made the bed.
Kiran, still half asleep, more than half asleep, ninety percent still asleep (it was nine a.m.; it would be another five hours before he left the room and started his day), stumbling down the hall returning from the bathroom, stopped to watch, through the crack in his bedroom door, Bharat making his bed, Kiran’s bed, in just the way Kiran’s mother had instructed Kiran so many years ago.
But adult Bharat, unlike child Kiran, had not needed instructions. He was observant, compliant. He had noticed, his first day there, exactly how the bed was made, and each morning he replicated it meticulously, the design on the bedspread perfectly centered, the pillows arranged, ordered, tilted in precise angles. He passed hours alone in this house every day. He knew every corner, every inch: the faded spot on the living room carpet, the slightly crooked picture frame, the creaking step, the stray glass bead on the dining room windowsill. Day after day he had heard the house whisper, had listened to it breathe. He knew its secrets.
The door groaned open. Kiran cleared his throat but said nothing.
Bharat swung around and greeted his cousin standing in the doorway: “Good morning.”
“Morning.” Kiran coughed. “Slept well?”
“It’s your room. You should be sleeping here. I told your mother.”
“I know. Don’t worry about it.”
“How did you sleep?”
“Still sleeping,” Kiran said, rubbing his eyes. “Hey, what did your father tell you about his time here?”
“That was a long time ago.”
“I know. I was just wondering.”
“Papa doesn’t talk much. You know that.”
“Yeah, but he must have told you some stories.”
“He told me some stories.” Bharat placed the last pillow, fluffing it first. “You should go back to sleep. You had a long night.”
Bharat found that the photograph often caught him off guard, though why should it? It was always there, just as it was in his own house in India: the slightly blurry, stern-looking portrait of the mother he had never known. He was certainly used to being in houses where his mother loomed day and night like sun and moon. Still, he found himself forgetting. He’d return from community college, climb the stairs, feeling lost, and there she’d be, at the top in the alcove, looking back at him, and he’d wonder—as he did about his own self—What is she doing here?
It was the only photograph of her as an adult (other than a few wedding photos, which were too painful a reminder for Prabhu to permit anyone to see), and so the expression on her face was the only one Bharat knew. He was told this representation was not representative. By all accounts (though there were not many; his father barely spoke of her, and his grandparents weren’t much better) she was a joking, joyful woman; girlish; eighteen; still just a girl. The photo, taken for an application for a passport she didn’t live long enough to receive, showed none of this.
Bharat was now seven years older than she was when she died. She was the same age as Kiran. Would she have been proud of her son? Was she? Was she watching over him the way her picture was?
Bharat wanted to believe. There were moments he sensed her b
eside him. Then he’d think it was only an air current from an open window, and he’d go to close it. He wanted to believe and didn’t want to believe, the prospect of being constantly watched both comforting and terrifying. Like everyone else, he had selves that shone bright, and selves he knew were best left unseen.
Nishit had delivered his pain-is-inevitable-even-beneficial discourse many times. It was not a coach’s pat no-pain-no-gain chant, but rather the philosophy of a surgeon who was accustomed to seeing bodies over time deteriorate and fail. Medically speaking, according to Nishit, everything after a certain age—say twentyish—was downhill. Our bodies never again would be so resilient, so pliant. Our brain synapses would never fire so fast. Our heart would never be so strong. Breakdowns were inevitable, Nishit said. A car could only run so long. Pain, too, was a warning, a light on the dashboard; it told us when we needed service, when we needed fuel, and when it was time to stop. Nishit was referring to physical pain, but if asked, he would insist that the same applied to other kinds. Emotional pain, like physical pain, was a fundamental truth of being alive.
It was dinner, Kiran’s last night at home before returning to college. Shanti noticed him and Bharat at the table not talking, not even looking at one another, alone behind whatever walls they had erected. She wished—despite Nishit’s insistence about pain—that she could take theirs away. Would Nishit say she was robbing them of something essential, a part of the very thing that made them human?
She had watched them these last days: Kiran, waking late, staying holed up in Preeti’s room, then emerging ears encased in headphones; Bharat, sleepwalking, counting days, hours, until his exile would end. She watched them slide silently past each other in the hallway, strangers; worse than strangers. For reasons she didn’t understand (and that even Kiran didn’t fully understand), they were foes. This same sliding past would play out the next morning at the train station, cousin-brothers slipping in and then back out of each other’s lives, a hard rock now wedged between them. She felt Kiran’s pain especially acutely, and knew—the way mothers know, the way Kiran did not—the pain that lay ahead for him.