I don’t know how long I lay there imagining them when I heard someone climb off their bunk. I knew it wasn’t Lihini. I could hear her breathing from above me.
It was dark in the dormitory, so I stuck my head out to see who it was. If it was Maya trying to scare us again, I’d have no choice but to complain to Miss Chandra tomorrow morning.
But it wasn’t Maya.
It was Shanika.
I should have known. We gave up trying to stop her sleepwalking ages ago.
She hadn’t joined us when we were telling ghost stories. Why should she, when it seemed like she was barely alive herself?
Shanika’s eyes were unfocused and she was humming softly as she floated past the beds and towards the door. She held on to the dirty plastic doll that she took with her almost everywhere. The scars covering the side of her face seemed to glow, even in the darkness.
I strained to hear the words, even though I knew what they were. We sang it almost every day at the orphanage. We didn’t have an official anthem or anything, but if we did, I’m certain it would be this. It’s one of my favourites, when it wasn’t being sung by Shanika in the middle of the night.
Que sera, sera
Whatever will be, will be
The future’s not ours to see
I broke out in goose bumps again, though I wasn’t quite sure why.
3
SAN FRANCISCO, CA
THE NEAT SHOTS OF rum did nothing to dull my anger. If anything, it just made it throb and echo inside me, so it was all I could do to even get back to my apartment, I was trembling so much.
Screw him. This was the last thing I needed. I wish I had never met him. He’d seemed so meek when he responded to my ad online. Almost fearful. I practically held his damn chai for him while he stuck the knife in my back.
My keys rattled against the door. It took me a few tries to get them in. It was the anger, not the rum. I pushed my therapist’s disappointed expression out of my mind. Definitely not the rum.
It was dark inside. Had he left? Fuck. I’d asked him to stay put. But then again, I had been gone for much longer than I said I’d be. Rum always made me lose track of time.
“Arun?” I called out. I was surprised at how much my voice trembled.
“Arun, you in here?”
I fumbled with the lights in the entryway. It was a clear line of sight from the front door into the kitchen.
The asshole had fallen asleep, his head resting on the table. How the hell could he sleep at a time like this? I mean, my entire life rested in his despicable, blackmailing hands, and he decided to take a nap?
“Arun, look, I think I have an idea about how we could work this out.” I didn’t really, but I needed to buy as much time as I could until I figured out how to gather up enough money to have him disappear from my life.
He didn’t move.
I crossed over to the kitchen. My feet felt unsteady beneath me. Focus, Paloma. You can’t afford to be a drunk bitch right now.
“Arun?”
There wasn’t as much light in the kitchen as there was in the living room.
“Arun? Hey?”
He didn’t stir. I rapped the table with my palm, hoping to wake him, but my fingers came away wet.
What the fuck, Arun? I hoped he hadn’t gone and spilled curry all over my spotless kitchen again. The last time he decided to make butter chicken, the walls were covered in a splatter of neon orange that took a round of bleach to remove.
I reached over to the wall and turned on the kitchen light.
There was a dark puddle on the table, around Arun’s head.
“Arun?”
I shook him on the shoulder first, but he didn’t move, so I grabbed the collar of his shirt and pulled him back on his chair.
His empty black eyes stared out. Blank, and unfocused, and definitely, surely dead.
Oh, fuck.
I stumbled backwards, grabbing on to the wall to steady myself. It was crimson when I pulled my hand away, the shape of those Thanksgiving turkeys we drew in the fall. My hand was sticky, like it was covered in glue. No sound escaped me, but I was screaming with every fiber of my being.
I needed to get it off me.
I rushed to the bathroom and yanked open the faucet. My hands shivered on their own as I held them under the cold water. Rust swirled down the drain in ribbons. Thick. Brown. Sticky.
What the fuck was happening?
Focus. I was stern with myself as I looked in the mirror.
How the hell had this happened? Healthy, blackmailing Indian boys don’t just drop dead. There was blood. That meant—
My body went cold.
That meant he must have been killed.
And that meant that the killer could be in the apartment right now.
Oh, fuck.
I haphazardly looked around the bathroom for anything I could use as a weapon.
Something moved behind me, I could see it in the mirror.
I whipped around.
That’s when I saw her. Mohini. It was just for a second. A fraction of a second, but I knew. I knew she was back. Her black hair, her pale face. All these years I had spent trying to convince myself that she didn’t exist, that she was a ghost from my childhood, just a product of an overactive imagination, and now here she was.
Fresh waves of fear crashed down on me. I had to get out of here. I had to get out. Or I’d be next.
I bolted to the door and just about made it to my corridor when I sensed her behind me. I was moving and frozen all at the same time. The elevator was too far. I ran to the stairwell. I needed to leave. I needed to get as far away as possible.
I had just reached the steps when I felt her fingers around my neck. Felt her breathing in my ear. I couldn’t fight her again. I let the floor open up and swallow me whole.
4
SAN FRANCISCO, CA
THE WOMAN’S BREATH WAS tuna melt and cigarettes as she leaned over me, her sparse eyebrows pulled together in annoyance. I knew her. She lived a few doors down.
“You alive?” she asked. I tried not to gag. My head was pounding.
She held her toddler to her hip. How the hell was the kid not throwing up at the smell of her breath? It was like something had crawled into her mouth and died. I tried to answer her, but the words were stuck in my throat.
I fought my way back to my senses and pushed myself into a sitting position on the floor like it was the most natural thing in the world to be found passed out on the stairway of my apartment building.
I guess my neighbor didn’t seem to think so.
“I told you that I’d call 911 if I found you passed out in the hallway again. I don’t need this”—she stabbed a finger in my direction—“around my child.”
If constipation were a person, this is what they would look like. I remembered how she watched me drop a bag of groceries when I staggered home last week. She didn’t even offer to pick up the oranges that bounced towards her.
I smiled weakly.
“I’m okay. Just not feeling too great.”
Her kid was starting to fidget, and she carried a large reusable shopping bag in her other hand. She didn’t have time for the irresponsible woman down the hall who drank too much and passed out in full view of her child.
Except—
The reality of what happened slapped me hard in the face.
I didn’t just pass out. I had seen her. Mohini. But that couldn’t be. She didn’t exist. I had spent years in therapy understanding just that. Mohini was just a story we told ourselves in the orphanage. She wasn’t real.
Then what the hell had I seen in my apartment last night?
Fear flooded through me, the pounding in my head getting harder and faster. My front tooth started to hurt.
Arun.
Arun was dead.
>
I took a deep breath and tried to steady myself. What the hell happened?
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
I pressed my thumb against my tooth to dull the ache.
“Anyway, the cops should be here soon. I really suggest you take a good look at yourself and think about how you could turn your life around.”
Oh god, please make her stop talking.
I rubbed my face.
Wait, the cops were coming?
I pulled out my phone, thank god it was still in my pocket, and checked the time. It was 6:48 a.m. Fuck, I’d been out cold on the stairwell all night. Had I really passed out for so long?
“I’m going to wait for them downstairs. This behavior stops today, you hear me? I can’t be raising my child around drunks like you.”
But I wasn’t drunk. I’d just seen my roommate slumped dead across the kitchen table. I wanted to cry. What the fuck was even happening?
I just needed the spinning to stop so I could think.
The texts, a voice broke through the throbbing in my head. Delete the goddamned texts.
I opened my inbox and found the conversation I needed right at the top.
I’m going to fucking kill u u piece of shit
I hit delete just as the sound of a door closing made me jump. It wasn’t from my floor, so I peered up the stairs. It was just Mrs. Jenson being wheeled into the elevator by her caretaker, her big brown coat engulfing her tiny body and a large hat pulled low on her head. I needed to stop being so goddamned jumpy.
I took another deep breath.
And another.
“He was like this when I found him, Officer.”
“No, I’d been out all evening.”
“I’m Paloma. My roommate’s name is Arun.”
I practiced what I would tell them while I waited. It was all I could do, shivering on the stairs. I don’t know how long I was sitting there before they found me. It could have been a minute or a day. I just sat there, shaking, until an officer with kind eyes reached me.
“It’s my roommate,” I told her. “He’s been killed.”
I ignored the incredulous look on her face as I pointed out my apartment to them and continued to wait on the stairs as they went inside.
And then, another officer, one whose eyes were not kind, was asking me to get up.
“Ma’am, could you please come in with us?”
I couldn’t move. There was no way in hell I was going in there.
But he insisted. And he must have convinced me, because suddenly I was following him back inside my apartment.
Back to where I saw Arun’s body.
And back to where I saw her.
Last night was starting to come into focus. Her face. The way her skin was so pale it was almost translucent. The way her eyes bored into mine. And the way Arun’s lifeless eyes had stared out, leaving no doubt in my mind that he was dead.
The front door opened into the tiny living room, and I squeezed my eyes shut at the flood of light.
I had to open them.
I had to do this.
Come on, Paloma. You’ve dealt with worse.
One eyelid first, then the other.
My tooth throbbed as I adjusted my eyes.
There was no body at the table, no blood on the wall. Nothing.
The bottle of Dawn dish soap half-full by the sink. A browning banana on the counter. And not a single fucking splatter of blood.
This couldn’t be.
I had seen him.
I had seen her.
I took a few steps inside. This must be a mistake.
“Are we in the right apartment?” The officer’s eyes didn’t seem as kind as before.
I looked around me. A neat pile of takeout menus on the coffee table. Shitty drapes held open by shoelaces because who the hell wastes cash on those fancy curtain-band things? Generic Ikea kitchen table with a faded blue stain from when a pen leaked. Yep. This was my apartment.
“I—I don’t understand.”
“You said your roommate was attacked?”
“Yes. I—think so. His body was right here.”
“Right here in the kitchen?”
“Y-yes.”
“And where is he now?”
She was looking at me like I was crazy. Maybe I am crazy. Maybe after eighteen years of carrying this terrible secret, I had finally lost my fucking mind.
I know . . . Arun’s voice needled inside my head.
I looked around my apartment again. Where the actual fuck was Arun?
And if he was killed, did my secret die with him?
5
SAN FRANCISCO, CA
SO MUCH OF OUR lives is experienced in vignettes. Scenes, flipping through—high point, low point, curated, cultivated, clean-cut, and categorical. We remember what we want. Or maybe we just remember what we can. Who gives a fuck anyway?
At least, that’s how I humor myself as I wait for them.
I say them because I have no idea who the hell exactly I’m waiting for. Just that I’ve been asked to wait. They call this a waiting room. They were very careful about mentioning that. It’s a waiting room. Not a holding room. Not an interrogation room.
I’m just waiting.
It’s almost like I’m waiting for a cup of tea. Or to get my nails done.
They brought me here after the apartment. When it became clear that Arun wasn’t there. Dead or alive or hurt or maimed. He was nowhere to be found at all.
Except I know what I saw. You don’t look into someone’s blank, dead face and forget it in a hurry. Arun was dead and now his body was missing and everyone keeps looking at me like I’m some crazy drunk who doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
I shivered.
Not the kind of shivering that happens when you’re cold. The type that writhes deep in your belly. The kind that has a voice. The kind that wraps its arms around you and whispers, its tongue lightly grazing your ear—She’s back . . .
For what felt like the thousandth time, I checked to see if the letter was still in my pocket. It felt wrong to bring it with me into a police station. Like it tainted the rest of my story. But I wasn’t letting it out of my sight anytime soon. I was never taking a risk like that again.
“Someone will be with you. Sit tight.”
Sit tight. They said that to crazy people, didn’t they. Was I crazy? Am I crazy? But this wasn’t an interrogation room. I wasn’t in any kind of trouble.
They had noticed the empty bottles of Captain Morgan in the recycling bin I hadn’t taken out yet. They asked me if those were mine.
Ours, I told them, Nina’s disappointed face floating in my mind. And Arun had friends over that he drank with as well. This wasn’t a complete lie. I knew he had a girlfriend he was always singing Hindi songs to. Who was to say she didn’t need a shot of rum to get through his tuneless rendition of “Chinna chinna aasai”?
What the fuck had happened to Arun? Someone must have moved his body. That meant someone else was in my apartment.
Someone else was in your apartment, the voice taunted.
I pushed the thought away.
I’ll tell the police about seeing his body again. Someone has to believe me.
The door opened. Time to pull it together, Paloma. Time to put your grown-up mask back on.
I hadn’t met the policeman who walked in. He looked a bit more, well, policeman-like. I guess it was the shadows under his eyes and the way he looked me up and down, like he was displeased with what he saw. I smoothed back my hair. I’d spent the night on a fucking stairwell, it’s not like I looked, or smelled, even remotely presentable.
“I’m Officer Keller.” His voice grated against my ears, raw and phlegmy. It made me want to clear my throat. I didn’t, of course. He set a manila envelope and a yellow legal pad
on the table. There was no offer to shake my hand or anything.
“I’m Paloma. Paloma Evans. Nice to meet you.” My mother’s training kicked in and I gave him a little smile. Not wide enough to seem happy, but appropriate. I didn’t want him to think that this wild-haired, crazy woman who reeked of last night’s drink is who I really am.
The soft flesh of his thighs drooped over the sides of the too-small plastic chair as he sat down. I forced myself to focus on the linoleum table in front of me.
“You married?”
I shook my head, forcing a small, coy smile to hide my disgust. What did that have to do with anything?
“Evans, huh? Where are you from?” There it was. Looked like a missing Indian boy wasn’t enough to curb Officer Keller’s curiosity.
“The Bay Area.” I hoped my tone was enough to warn him, but I had no such luck.
“No, I mean—” The tinge of pink that spread across his face only deepened his dark circles. “You just don’t look like an Evans, that’s all.”
Are we still living in the Dark Ages? Who the hell says shit like that? I took a deep breath.
It certainly would not do to have Officer Keller pissed off at me, so I should just give him what he wants.
“I was adopted from an orphanage when I was younger. My parents gave me their last name.” I was laying it on thick, I know. I cast my eyes down and waited for it.
“Oh, I see. That makes a little more sense.” He smiled. His assumption was right, after all. “So where are you originally from? India?”
My jaw ached as it tightened, but I didn’t let the smile leave my face.
“Sri Lanka.”
“But you said your roommate, Arun, he was from India, right?”
We were finally getting down to business.
I nodded. “Yes.”
“What was his last name?”
“Kumar, I think.”
“Do you have a copy of his ID? Or passport?”
My Sweet Girl Page 2