She sat across the table and handed me the pink file. I held it up to my nose, inhaling the camphor and ageing paper. One of my favourite smells. Slowly, I took out the three pieces of paper in the file.
The first, I had read a million times, and it mattered the least to me. A birth certificate, oversized, yellowing, the Sinhala typesetting already starting to smudge. Father’s name: unknown. Mother’s name: Kusuma Manike. Race: Sinhalese. It went on. All details I knew.
I lingered on the second document. It also wasn’t what I was here for, but it still made my heart hurt to look at it. The Sinhala handwriting was messy and hardly legible. I didn’t bother reading it closely. I knew what it said. It was what my mother signed when she left me. That she was handing me over to the girls’ home. That she couldn’t be responsible for me. That she didn’t want me. That she thought it was best.
I blinked hard as I put the paper down. I snuck a look over at Lihini to see if she had noticed, but she was studying her own file.
The third item wasn’t paper, but a card. A photograph. It was small. Smaller than my hand. And it was brown and white. A picture of her. Of Kusuma Manike. Of my mother.
She looked so serious in the picture. Almost angry. Her hair was in a long plait, like mine, but it frizzed around her face like a cloud. Her face was thin and long, and she wore round earrings. I looked at her ears, the line of her nose, the way her lips lay in a straight line.
“I definitely look like her,” I told Lihini.
She looked up at me, studying my face. I knew what she was about to say. We went over this every time.
“Yes, you do, sudhu.”
It was a lie. I was fair. My cheeks were round. My chin was sharp and my front tooth was chipped. My hair was straight, and while it was a little messy, it was nowhere as frizzy as hers. I looked more like Lihini than I did my own mother. The thought made me feel a little empty. Like I would always be missing something.
I stood up from the table, making it jerk.
“Be careful!”
But I grabbed the photo and went to the other corner of the room.
“Sudhu, what are you doing?” Her voice was sharp and urgent. For all the times we’d snuck in here, I’d never done this before.
I knew where I was going though. I had spotted it the last time. A small hand mirror, lying on a shelf. I grabbed it and rubbed it on my skirt, trying to clean the glass.
“You shouldn’t take that!”
“Stop worrying all the time, Lihini!”
I held the mirror up, trying to compare my face against the one I just saw. The features that were so fresh in my mind a second ago were now blurred. It wasn’t working.
I tried to hold the photo next to my face, but the mirror was too small. I needed more distance. I tried to balance it against a pile of tools that were on the shelf, wedging it between a hammer and a screwdriver to keep it upright.
“Paloma, do you know who that belonged to?”
Did it look like I cared? I needed to see. I needed to make sure I was actually hers. If I couldn’t have her, could I at least have this?
The mirror kept sliding around, so I pushed the hammer in a little further. Not perfect. But at least I could try to—
The crash was loud and sudden.
Lihini rushed to my side.
Oh gosh. The mirror had slid right off the shelf and onto the ground.
“That’s seven years of bad luck,” I said. My throat felt tight.
“It might be a little more than that.”
“Why? We could just sweep the glass under the table over there. No one comes in here anyway. I’m sure no one will know it’s us.”
“It’s not that.” Her eyes were wide and she was breathing hard.
“Then what?”
“The mirror. I’ve seen it before. It belonged to her.”
“To who?” She really frustrated me sometimes.
“To Mrs. Perera.”
Perera sir’s dead wife.
My body went cold. I took a deep breath and crossed myself, the way Miss Sarah did sometimes.
“We need to clean this up before Miss Chandra finds out.” Lihini’s voice was urgent, but I stood rooted on the spot.
“Come on, sudhu.” She crouched down and started picking up the shards of glass. “Help me, will you?”
I was going to have bad luck for seven years. Why should I bother picking up the glass? I took a step back. I needed to sit down.
“Paloma! Haiyyo what’s wrong with—oww!” Lihini’s cry was soft, but it echoed through the empty room, bouncing off the unused furniture and boxes. She held up her hand. A trail of blood dripped down her palm and fell to the floor with a ripe splat.
15
SAN FRANCISCO, CA
I WAS OUTSIDE MY apartment building, but I couldn’t bring myself to go in. She was suddenly everywhere—the woman who brushed past me in a hurry, the man whistling something as he walked by, scrolling on his phone. It wasn’t the same song. It couldn’t be. But I could feel her, like a spiderweb I had walked into, clinging to my skin, refusing to be brushed off, strangling me.
Inhale, Paloma.
It isn’t real. None of this is real.
Just go inside and get your things. You can do this. You’ve escaped her before, you can do it again.
And so, even though it felt like I was moving in slow motion, even though my legs felt heavy and my chest hurt when I took a deep breath, I put one foot in front of the other and made my way inside.
There was one thing that drove me forward—one thing more important than my toothbrush or clean clothes or my laptop or fresh packs of lacy underwear. And that’s my mail.
My mailbox was on the ground floor, and that was the first step. I just had to make it there first.
And I was in luck.
I had the usual supermarket deals and cheap Wi-Fi promotions, but nestled in the middle of them was a lifeline. A rectangular card bearing the photograph of a leopard. I couldn’t tell if it was Mom or Dad who had written this one. The writing had gotten smudged, but I could still make out Love to our sweet girl! I felt lighter as I tucked the postcard into the pocket of my hoodie. I swear sometimes these postcards were the only thing keeping me going.
I took the stairs up. It took longer, but it gave me more time to prepare myself. The stairwell was pretty dark, so I turned on the flashlight on my phone and tried my best not to think about the last time I was there. It smelled like a fucking porta potty in here, so that did a pretty good job of distracting me. Silver goddamned linings.
My hands shook as I unlocked the door, but once I got inside, it was all business. I wasn’t good at many things, but one thing I managed to excel at was shutting my mind down and focusing on whatever the fuck needed to get done.
I turned on all the lights and strode over to the curtains in the living room, tugging them open.
Bathed in light, my apartment revealed itself to be exactly what it was—small, overpriced, clean, and devoid of any fucking demons unless you counted the bitch in the apartment next door.
I glanced at my empty kitchen, just once, to make sure, and then kept my back firmly turned away from it. There was no blood anywhere, not even where I touched the wall on my way to the bathroom. Did blood clean away from wall paint so easily? I know that baking soda usually does the trick, but I’d have to google it later.
Grabbing a large duffel bag from the hallway closet, I went into my room and started to pack.
I wasn’t like my mom. I never coordinated outfits into color-coded packing cubes and used those ridiculous miniature plastic bottles for my toiletries that would barely last one shower, let alone an entire trip, but even Mom would have a meltdown if she saw the way I yanked random pieces of clothing out from various corners of my room and stuffed them in my bag. Tank tops, sweaters, an extra pair of jeans
. Thank god my homeless-person vibe didn’t take much coordination.
A cold breeze found its way into the room.
I must have left my window open the last time I was here, because hydrangea petals from Mrs. Jenson’s balcony upstairs swept over my comforter. I stuck my head out the window and peered up. Her caretaker sometimes came out to the fire escape to have a smoke. I wonder if she saw anything that night.
But the fire escape was empty, and I shut the window, making sure it was latched.
I grabbed some new packages of underwear, my laptop, camera, and the notebook where I wrote down my client requests—the last one wanted me wearing cotton panties, size small, preferably with a heart or bow print on them, with ribbons at the waist. And he made it very, very clear that I had to be hairless when wearing them. He didn’t want a Polaroid.
I rolled my eyes just thinking about it. This thinly veiled pedo’s request wasn’t even the creepiest one I’d got. The world was full of sick assholes, and here I was, afraid of a ghost from when I was twelve years old.
Que sera, sera
Whatever will be, will be
I couldn’t help the words drifting into my mind much more than I could stop the memory of her wrapping her fingers around my neck, breathing into my ear. Arun’s empty eyes staring right past me as blood continued to leak down the back of his skull.
Breathe, Paloma. None of this shit is real.
I kept a bottle of Captain Morgan hidden under the sink for emergencies. It was emptier than I remembered, but hey, if being in an apartment where you saw your dead roommate wasn’t an emergency, I don’t know what was.
I took a little swig and nudged open Arun’s bedroom door. I hadn’t been inside since he moved in, not even when the police went in to check if he was in there, so I had no way of knowing whether anything was out of place.
The room was empty. Not just empty of a person. Empty of everything. The stripped-down mattress that came with the ratty box bed stood near the radiator, but there was nothing else. No clothes, no bedsheets, not a thing to suggest that an actual human being, let alone an extorting asshole, had lived here for a couple of months except for the stale smell of Axe aftershave that lingered on the cheap carpet.
What the actual hell? Did the police take his things as evidence or something? But they wouldn’t do that, would they?
No wonder Officer Keller thought I was batshit crazy. It didn’t look like Arun existed at all.
The closet was empty. I got on my knees and looked under the bed. I don’t know what I was expecting—a box, perhaps, or a file full of secrets. A USB drive full of clues. I guess I’d been watching too much TV.
Just dust bunnies. Not even a stray sock. Nothing, absolutely not a fucking thing to suggest that I had a roommate to begin with.
But I did have a roommate.
He found out my secret and blackmailed me.
And then he died.
I took another sip of Captain Morgan to steady myself.
I just wish there was a way I could retrace my steps that night. Or at least see if anyone else entered my apartment.
Hang on.
There was something. A speck of dust floating just out of my reach. It was something Officer Keller had said.
We didn’t see anything on your building’s CCTV footage to suggest suspicious activity.
I stood right up and set down my bottle. CCTV footage. Of course. I was such a fucking idiot for not thinking of this sooner. I mean, how the hell would Officer Keller know who was suspicious and who wasn’t? The moron could barely comprehend what I was telling him.
16
SAN FRANCISCO, CA
I KNOCKED FIRMLY ON Jason Wong’s office door, holding a cup of coffee and a blueberry muffin that I had run across the street to buy. I wasn’t sure if he even drank coffee, but there were a few things I picked up from my mom over my teenage years—one of the most important being that people rarely said no to you if they felt they owed you something.
Being a building superintendent has got to be one of the shittier jobs in the world. Not the worst, of course, that was reserved for pedicurists and preschool teachers, but it sure couldn’t be fun being the go-to person when a toilet needed unclogging. I’m sure he’d appreciate a kind gesture, even if it did come with a string or two attached. I hadn’t been best buds with Mr. Wong, but I wasn’t exactly a bitch to him, like Mrs. Jenson upstairs was, either.
“Come in,” he called out.
I set my duffel bag out in the hallway—no way in hell I was going back to my apartment again if I could help it—and pushed my way inside.
The office was nondescript. Just a grey little box and a hard fluorescent light that gave Mr. Wong some of the worst under-eye shadows I’ve ever seen. No pictures on the wall, no knickknacks on the desk, no plants, no windows, no soul. A bit like Jason Wong himself.
“Paloma Evans, 17D, right?” he asked.
Maybe under normal circumstances I would be weirded out that he remembered me, but then again, not many tenants brought a team of police officers into the building before you could have your first cup of coffee for the morning.
“Yep, that’s me.” I smiled. “I just wanted to apologize, for the other day, you know.”
“Apologize?” He looked surprised. I guess everyone really did treat him like shit.
“Yeah, I know it must have been a shock to you. Police coming into the building so early in the morning. Causing all that disturbance. I just wanted to say sorry.” My cheeks felt artificially plumped up as I kept smiling.
“Oh, okay. I mean, it’s not me you should apologize to. It’s Miss Fabien. She was the one whose child you woke up when, you know.” He rubbed his head, his elbow sticking up in the air. His hair poked out in greasy clumps, and the armpit of his white T-shirt was yellow. I handed the coffee and muffin over to him instead of setting it on the table just so he would put his arm back down. My smile stayed put and I made sure not to wrinkle my nose. And I definitely resisted the urge to let him know that adding half a cup of borax to his laundry would get rid of his disgusting pit stains.
Miss Fabien, huh? Guess the bitch neighbor with the bratty kid had a name.
“I just, I’m so confused, you know.” I pulled out a chair that was next to his desk and sat down, ignoring that he looked uncomfortable. He didn’t say anything, though, so I continued, leaning forward slightly.
“That night was such a blur to me. I think I might have been sick. I really wish there was a way for me to figure out what happened.” I leaned forward a little further, hoping he would take the bait.
“You want to see the CCTV footage, don’t you?”
“If it’s not too much trouble.”
“Sure. I have it all ready anyway. Since the cops reviewed it and everything.”
So it looked like the police did take me seriously, even though they didn’t give a shit when we spoke.
“They didn’t find anything out of the ordinary though. And neither will you.”
I couldn’t quite read his expression. He turned on an ancient desktop computer and sat there, staring at the start-up screen, waiting patiently. I could see the old Windows hourglass reflected in his glasses. He tapped his finger against the mouse. You would have thought he had all the time in the world.
My tooth gave another small throb but I ignored it and smiled at Wong instead. “Technology, huh? Supposed to make our lives easier . . .”
But I guess Jason Wong gave zero fucks about making small talk.
“The computer is slow,” he said simply. I don’t need you to be a fucking narrator, Wong, just show me the goddamned footage.
After an adequately torturous length of time, he found the file we were looking for.
“This is what I showed the cops.” He opened up the video and made it full screen, although it was so grainy and pixelated that it ha
rdly did any good. The CCTV camera was located about seven feet away from my apartment, and angled away from my door towards the elevator. You couldn’t really see anyone entering or leaving through my front door, per se, but you couldn’t reach the elevator without passing by the camera. The stairs were closer to my door, so there wasn’t a clear line of sight if you weren’t standing right in the middle of the corridor.
The corridor was very dimly lit, and this translated to barely more than dark outlines of people as they walked by to the elevator or stairwell.
He dragged the cursor back and forth a little, stopping a bit to make sure of the time.
Three thirty-five p.m. showed me storm towards the elevator and punch the button repeatedly. Figures. I had just argued with Arun and was heading over to the bank. I was pissed as hell.
The doors finally opened and I got on.
Mr. Wong hit the fast-forward button and we watched the video whiz by.
No other movement. No one entered or left.
It was a small, quiet building, so this wasn’t strange. Mostly retirees and a few single moms who were getting priced out of anywhere decent in the city but weren’t able to take the plunge to move out of the Bay Area.
I came back at 10:16 p.m., and stumbled as I stepped off the elevator. My stomach twisted as I remembered the drinks I chugged to gather up the courage to confront Arun. I really thought I’d come back earlier than that. And more sober than that.
“Had a couple?” Mr. Wong asked.
Fuck you, Wong. Why the hell does everyone think I’m some sort of raging alcoholic? You would want some goddamned liquid courage, too, if the roommate you tried to help out betrayed you and then wound up dead.
I wasn’t able to say anything, though, because the fast-forwarded video showed me rush out of my apartment a few minutes later, at 10:22 p.m.
“Hey, just a sec.”
“Sorry?” said Mr. Wong, hitting pause.
My Sweet Girl Page 9