A Change of Heart (19 page)

“It surprised me too. It was really unusual how we connected.”

Nikhil narrowed his eyes at her. It was the slightest move, but of course his cousin caught it. Weren't pregnant women supposed to get all fuzzy in the head? This one was as sharp as a crow's beak.

She used it to peck some more. “How did you meet Nikhil? Did Jen introduce the two of you?” Well, at least she was no longer having trouble saying Jen's name in Nikhil's presence.

“You're full of questions today, Ria.” So he did decide to help her out after all. “Jess found me on the cruise ship.” Or to throw her under a speeding cruise ship.

“Found you? She just happened to be on the same cruise ship as you?”

Nikhil didn't look like he was going to answer, so she did. “Actually, I went there looking for him. I wanted to make sure he was okay. It's what Jen wanted.”

“Jen asked
you
to take care of him?” Ria's eyes went all wide with hurt, but the way she said the word
you,
as though no one in their right mind could possibly put someone like her above The Ice Princess, made it impossible for Jess to conjure up any sympathy for the star.

So she wasn't born with a silver spoon in her perfectly etched mouth, but she was the one who had dragged Nikhil off the ship.
He's been on that cruise ship for two years. I didn't see anyone else boarding the ship to bring him home.
She wanted to say the words so badly she had to clench her jaw to keep from saying them.

Nikhil's suddenly furious gaze was filled with warning.

Not that she needed the warning. She couldn't go up against Princess Ria and win. She knew that.

“I'd still be on the cruise ship if Jess hadn't shown up,” he said, jabbing the carrot
halwa
with his spoon.

“You asked us not to come,” Ria Parkar said, throwing another loaded glare at Jess. But when she looked at Nikhil her eyes were sad again.

He pushed away the bowl of
halwa
. “So I did,” he said in a tone so sad, there was no way to respond to it. And just like that they were back to where they had started.

26

 

—Dr. Jen Joshi

 

 

S
he slipped out of the kitchen and headed for the stairs, leaving the family to the sadness she had no place in. It marked her indelibly as the outsider she was.

But she couldn't go back to that room that was every little boy's dream and which reminded her too much of her little boy and the fact that she had failed to protect him. She let herself out the front door. Almost all the snow was gone, leaving behind endless wetness. Instead of the sharp bite of cold, there was a gentle chill in the air that smelled like winter but felt like spring, and it brought back a million memories from her childhood.

The scrape of wool against chapped skin, the slap of icy wind on her cheeks. It had been a million years since she'd felt anything but the Mumbai heat, sticky as a blanket of steam that wrapped around you and didn't ease up for anything. This cold scraped at her and soothed her all at once.

She spread out her arms and embraced it, wanting to spin and spin in it until time turned back. She wanted to scream at the sky. Wanted to go back in there and shout into Nikhil's face, into his smug cousin's face. Wanted to tell them to just stop it and hold each other. To be the family they were. But she couldn't remember the last time she'd let anything inside her loose or said what she wanted to say.

There was this tree at the edge of the river in her village that she had loved jumping off. What she loved most about it was that moment when she threw herself into the air. She would squeeze her eyes shut and imagine that the river had suddenly dried up. That false moment of terror had sent a heady flare of adrenaline through her. But that deep knowing that the water would be there to keep her from breaking her bones was what she had really loved most. That welcome slap of water so dependable it reinforced her own existence. She no longer knew what that felt like.

The carpet of grass beneath her feet was waterlogged. It sloshed around her ankles, making her glad that she had left her shoes in the house. She had walked through snow in handmade shoes as a child. Her feet ate up the wet cold, hungrily consuming the sense memories as she put distance between herself and new memories she knew she shouldn't be making.

No matter how much she hid from it, her mind kept reaching for how necessary Nikhil had made her feel in that basement. The warmth of his arms around her sat heavy on her skin. She rubbed her arms to erase it, to embrace it. But it had felt so good. He had felt so good. His trust had felt so good. Then there was that other feeling. The one that had made her belly clench as his body pressed against hers and his arms wrapped around her to keep her from falling.

She waited for the panic to follow, for her memories to rip away the warm, safe haven of that fleeting feeling.

There was no panic.

Knowing it was Nikhil took away the panic.

That's what made him dangerous. She didn't want these feelings. Not knowing was so much better than being handed this list of everything your life was missing.

One: This is how it feels to have someone make you tea without even thinking about it.

Two: This is what it's like to have someone leave food out for you, even if you're an afterthought.

It made you start wondering what it would be like to feel those things for real, for life.

A pang of longing for her mother sliced through her. She spun around and looked at the huge house. Big enough for ten families, and her aama had died in a seven-foot-by-seven-foot room with a crumbling cement floor and peeling walls, the lime dust from the whitewash hurrying up the degeneration of her malignant lungs.

She wanted to pick up a rock and hurl it at the house. Its solid serenity against the bright sky an abomination of the memory of the house that had chewed up her mother and then spit her out like the red
katha
-stained tobacco her uncle had loved to squirt into walls after it had served its purpose. Its warm coziness an abomination of the house that had raped her childhood out of her.

If you let me touch those, I'll give you my wife's old wool coat.
The shopkeeper who owned the shanty grocer's shop at the end of her lane had begun eying her chest long before her breasts had started to bud. He'd repeated some form of that offer every time she passed by shivering in the cold. His eyes doing the job when there were other customers present and his mouth couldn't.

The memory of him stroking his thing through his pants every time her aunt sent her to pick up eggs and bread still made her sick to her stomach. Even as far back as eight years old, she remembered it tenting his pants as he tried to stroke her hand while slipping her the bags. She had learned to stop crying before she got home. The only thing more shameful than ignored tears was exposing your sick mother to more pain.

When she turned fourteen and her breasts became impossible to squish into the cotton inners her mother sewed for her, he had become more and more insistent. Until one day he'd come around the display of orange candies and biscuits and tried to push her into the corrugated iron sheets that held up the rusted roof of his shanty store.

She had kneed him. With so much force, spittle had flown from his mouth as he went down. It had been stained with blood from him biting down on his own tongue. She wished he'd bitten it off and choked on it. She had wanted to go on kicking him. Instead, she'd spit on him as he lay writhing in the ditch sobbing over his smashed balls.

“If you touch me again, I'll find you and cut off your stick in your sleep,” she'd hissed at him.

Back then she'd still known how to say what she felt. She'd still felt like she could fight.
We are copper,
kanchi
. We bend but they can't break us.

She hadn't known then quite how much they could bend you. Aama had been wrong. If they bent you enough, no matter how strong your copper, you broke.

The hill rose, she crested it, and came upon the most beautiful sight. A huge tree at the edge of a river. Once she'd seen the water she heard it. She walked to the water's edge and sat down on the bank. The swollen river raged with the force of melting ice. Looking around to make sure she was alone, she rolled up her sweatpants and slipped her feet in. This was like the ice-water footbaths she needed when she danced too long, but with a live, healing current. The icy sting felt sinfully good.

All the feeling was gone from her feet when he spoke behind her.

“I'm sorry.”

The sorrys were starting to fall too thick between them. She didn't even know what he was apologizing for this time. He squatted down next to her.

“Why did you leave?”

She shouldn't answer. Already she had allowed herself to get sucked into this far more than she should have. “I wasn't needed there.”

The look he gave her broke her heart.

He needed her. He hated needing her.

“Why is it so hard for you, being in a room with them?” He was in the mood to push. She could tell.

She considered slipping into the water. Letting the swollen current take her away.

“Why is it so hard for you, sharing how much you're hurting with them?”

The hurt in his eyes shoved her back in time to when she'd first found him. He opened his mouth, shut it again, and sprang up.

From the periphery of her vision, she saw his feet spin around and walk away. But she refused to turn toward him.

She hadn't meant to push him away like that, but she couldn't go after him either. This is what you got when you hurt each other because you needed distraction from your own pain.

His feet reappeared next to her, bare this time.

They were long-toed and pale, the nails neatly trimmed. Something hot and helpless squeezed inside her. She was used to seeing him vulnerable. He had never bothered to hide the depth of his grief from her. But the sight of his feet, his toes tucked into the grass, ripped her heart out.

He lowered himself next to her again and put his feet in the water. Not bothering to roll up his jeans. “They're still hurting too,” he said without looking at her. “And I can't add to that. I don't want them to be stuck in hell.”

Like him. But he didn't say that.

He couldn't see it yet, but the two days around his family had been really good for him. It had helped the man he was behind the man he'd become to find his feet.

The strangest thought struck her.

Whatever Ria Parkar and his mother had been planning, their version of the baby shower, Ria was convinced he wouldn't be able to handle it. But it might just be exactly what he needed.

“Can I ask you something?”

“It's never a good sign when people ask you that before they ask you a question.”

Despite herself, her lips pushed up on one side. “You're right. This is your warning: It's a hard question.”

He didn't look away, just waited.

“How do you feel about your cousin's pregnancy?”

His pause was slight, but she couldn't tell if that was surprise or deliberate thought to find the right answer. “What do you mean, how do I feel? Ria is healthy and I'm thrilled to bits she and Vic are going to be parents.”

“No, I mean the fact that she didn't tell you about it. Why are you so angry about that?”

He studied their rippling feet beneath the racing water. “I don't know. I guess I do understand why they didn't tell me. Jen's pregnancy was the last conversation we had before she died. Why are you asking me this?”

“No reason, it just seemed to create such an undercurrent between you and Ria Parkar.”

“I told you Ria and I were raised like siblings, so, like all siblings, our relationship is all about undercurrents.”

“So she lives here?” She tilted her chin toward the house. “With your parents? She and Vikram?”

“No, they have a home in Mumbai and in San Francisco, and they spend part of the year at each place and then travel for Vic's work.” His brows drew together. “I wonder what Ria and Vic are doing here,” he said absently.

Suddenly, his eyes narrowed and his focus sharpened—his patented I'm-studying-you look.

She pulled her feet out of the water and wiggled her toes to bring back the feeling in them.

“What?” he asked, not looking away from her face.

“What?”

“You know something I don't.”

“That would be many, many things. Which one are you talking about?” She focused harder on her toes. She'd left them in the freezing water too long the way she always did when it felt so good.

His finger crooked under her chin and turned her face to him, his eyes sparkling with such amusement for a moment she forgot what they were talking about. “I can see it written all over your face.”

Warmth kissed her cheeks and spread. “I'd better go wash my face then,” she said, pulling away to smack her forehead. “That was a manner of speaking, wasn't it?” She blinked up at him.

“Very funny.” He didn't smile, but he was amused, she knew it.

“Thanks,” she said, needing desperately to set that amusement free, to have it tease those dimples out of his cheeks. “It's not bad for what I had to work with.”

“Stop deflecting. I'm not that stupid.”

“Oh, you're not stupid at all. Your mother was telling me you skipped two grades and you had perfect SET scores.”

“Still deflecting. But it's SAT and, FYI, Vic had the perfect SAT score, not me. I was one point short on the ACT and three points short on the SAT.”

She clucked her tongue. “How sad. Seems like the story of everyone's life around here. Keeping Up With Vikram.”

* * *

Nic had the craziest urge to smile. Who would have thought the Goddess of Darkness could tease him like this. How had he ever even thought of her as that? There was no darkness in her when she was like this.

“Are you going to stop deflecting and tell me why Ria and Vic are here? And why you didn't tell me before that you knew?”

“First, how would I know why they are here? Second, even if I did, when did I ever agree to share everything with you? And you're throwing stones from a glass house.”

Her usually placid eyes did that soft blaze again with that amalgam of hope and spunk and something else he didn't want to name. Suddenly, he didn't feel like smiling anymore. “I'm letting you look at the carcass of my marriage, for God's sake. What have I hidden from you?”

She wasn't smiling anymore either, but she didn't withdraw into her shell, and the relief of it was a sucker punch to his gut. “For starters, you said all the boxes were here.”

He hadn't expected that, and it must've shown on his face because she looked like she wanted to scream “Aha!” at him, the way they did in old sleuth movies when they figured out who the killer was. Suddenly, he wanted to smile again.

“I was going to tell you,” he said, refusing to sound sheepish.

“I'm sure you were.”

She was still teasing him, but there was a razor edge to it. Her eyes challenged him to back off. Nothing soft about their interaction anymore. “You know what. You're right. There's no deal between us for sharing things.”

“So that's it?” She tucked her feet under her. Not looking disappointed, not looking afraid either. This strange, pushy side of her making it impossible for him to withdraw from her. “There are more boxes, you know where they are, and all I get is that.” She pointed at him with her entire hand. Palm up.