The Weight of Heaven

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Authors: Thrity Umrigar

Tags: #Americans - India, #Murder, #Psychological Fiction, #Married People, #India, #Family Life, #Crime, #Psychological, #Family & Relationships, #General, #Americans, #Bereavement, #Death; Grief; Bereavement, #Adoption, #Fiction

BOOK: The Weight of Heaven
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T h e

Weigh t

of

H e av en

A N o v e l

Thrity Umrigar

for A n n e R ei d

a n d

C y n di H o wa rd ,

pea ce a n d l o ve

Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be

The blood of paradise? And shall the earth

Seem all of paradise that we shall know?

—“sunday morning,” Wallace Stevens

Sleep child, for your parents’ sake.

Soon you must wake.

—“a lullabye,” James Agee

Contents

Epigraph
iii

Prologue

A few days after Benny’s death, Ellie and Frank Benton…

1

Book One

5

Chapter 1

They had finished dinner a half hour ago, and now…

7

Chapter 2

Trouble’s coming.

17

Chapter 3

Through the curtain of fog and rain, the distant lights…

30

Chapter 4

Prakash felt as if even the sea was receding away…

41

Chapter 5

Ellie had not left the house in over a week,…

46

Chapter 6

Prakash glanced at the big clock in the kitchen again.

64

Chapter 7

Ellie crossed the courtyard behind the house and opened the…

72

Chapter 8

At exactly six a.m. the following morning, there was a…

84

Chapter 9

Edna seemed thrilled at the prospect of her son’s outing…

97

Chapter 10

Ellie gritted her teeth and swore to herself. Edna was…

113

Chapter 11

Bombay. 122

Chapter 12

The Fourth of July picnic was held on the grounds…

135

Chapter 13

Ellie leaned her head against the car door and stared…

151

Book Two

159

Chapter 14

He wanted to buy her.

161

Chapter 15

All that fall, it smelled of watermelons. And burning firewood.

174

Book Three

185

Chapter 16

The world had never seemed crueler in its bounty and…

187

Chapter 17

The disappointment was a new feeling. From the first day…

201

Chapter 18

She wanted him to laugh. But that seemed impossible. So…

208

Book Four

215

Chapter 19

The drumming was thrilling—loose and wild and yet totally controlled. 217

Chapter 20

Ellie heard it first. A chattering, a sound that appeared…

231

Chapter 21

The young woman sitting across from him reminded Frank of…

242

Chapter 22

Frank looked at his watch again. It was ten o’clock.

250

Chapter 23

Prakash tried lifting the pot from the stove but couldn’t.

259

Chapter 24

Frank was in a meeting when Ellie called him the…

263

Book Five

275

Chapter 25

The sun was God.

277

Chapter 26

For two months now he had been losing his son…

287

Chapter 27

Arthur D’Mello, HerbalSolutions’ IT man, laid the laptop down on…

291

Chapter 28

Ramesh was gone. Vanished. Disappeared. Along with his father.

297

Chapter 29

They stood silently in front of the modest stucco house,…

308

Chapter 30

Five days had gone by since Prakash had brought the…

314

Chapter 31

“So what’s he doing that’s making you so nervous?” Nandita…

320

Chapter 32

Somehow, he managed to shake Ramesh off. Told the boy…

324

Chapter 33

“Thanks for coming on such short notice,” Frank told the…

326

Chapter 34

It wasn’t until eight on Saturday evening that Frank began…

334

Chapter 35

Ellie miss was to have left for the train station…

341

Chapter 36

He ran. Down the steps of the porch leading to…

351

Chapter 37

The sky dripped gold that evening. And reds and purples,…

364

Acknowledgments
367

About the Author

Other Books by Thrity Umrigar

Credits

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

A few days after Benny’s death, Ellie and Frank Benton broke into

separate people. Although they didn’t know it then. At that time, all

they could do was concentrate on getting through each bewildering

day, fighting to suppress the ugly memories that burst to the surface like fish above water. On the day of the funeral, Frank urged

himself to go up to Ellie and say something brave and consoling to

her, something that would reassure her that he understood, that he

did not blame her for what had happened. But he was felled by a

clear, sharp thought: He didn’t know how. Without Benny, he had

forgotten how to make his way home, how to make his marriage

whole again. Benny had been dead for less than a week, and already

his marriage felt like a book he had read in high school and Ellie

a character in it whose name he had forgotten. Something inexplicable happened in the days following Benny’s death—it was as if a

beautiful blue bowl, no, it was as if the world itself had fallen and

broken into two halves. Try as he might, Frank couldn’t help but

feel toward Ellie how he imagined Adam had felt toward Eve after

the Fall—hostile and compassionate. Sad and doomed and resentful. Above all, lonely. Above all, unable to regain that lost, broken

thing.

2 Th r i t y U m r i g a r

It was not as though Benny had always been part of their marriage. He and Ellie had been married for eleven years, and Ben

had been seven when he died. And that was not counting the year

of courtship, when he and Ellie were inseparable. A lot of history

there, as Ellie might have said to one of her clients. A lot of great

times even before they had conceived
of
Benny, let alone conceived

him. But a strange thing happened once Benny was born. It was as

if they all ceased to be individual people. Three people merged into

one and became a unit, a family. The unit traveled together or stayed

home together and breathed the same domestic air. Even when they

were apart—when Frank was flying to Thailand, say, to supervise

a new project, or Ellie was counseling her clients, or Benny was at

school, they were linked to each other, their awake thoughts full of

each other. Hope Ellie remembered to fax Benny’s math homework

to the hotel, Frank would think while sitting in a meeting in Bangkok. Fuck. Did I remember to buy peanut butter yesterday? Ellie

would wonder while listening to a client tell her about how her sister

had embarrassed her in front of the whole family at Thanksgiving

dinner. Little Benny would memorize a joke someone had told at

school and repeat it as soon as he got home, giggling so hard that he

often messed up the punch line.

And now, they were two. Benny was gone. What was left behind

was mockery—objects and memories that mocked their earlier,

smug happiness. Benny was gone, an airplane lost behind the clouds,

but he left behind a trail of smoke a mile long: the tiny baseball glove,

the Harry Potter books, the Mr. Bean videos, the Bart Simpson Tshirt, the fishing rod, the last Halloween costume. A tiny rosewood

box with a few strands of his hair. A mug that read, #1 mom. His

school photo. Photographs of the three of them at Disney World.

The Arts and Crafts bungalow in Ann Arbor was positively shimmering with mockery.

Even so, Frank didn’t leap at the chance when his boss, Pete

Th e We i g h t o f H e av e n

3

Timberlake, asked if he was interested in heading the new factory

that the company had bought two years ago in Girbaug, India.

Four months after Benny’s death he was still concentrating on the

Herculean business of putting one foot in front of the other. Of

making up reasons to get out of bed in the morning. He mumbled

something to Pete about how much he appreciated the vote of confidence, but that it wasn’t the right time in his life to relocate. But

Ellie heard about the offer from the wife of another executive. And

saw in it what Frank couldn’t—a chance to save her marriage. To

start clean in a new place. To put the baseball glove and the sizefour Nike sneakers in storage, to not be slapped daily by the patter

of feet not heard, by the sound of a high-pitched voice not squealing its exuberance over breakfast. And so Ellie broke the cardinal rule that she had always preached to her own clients: the one

about not making any major decisions for a year after a life-altering

event. Accept Pete’s offer, she urged her husband. And Frank, too

tired to argue, to think, let himself be guided by the faint light of

hope he saw in his wife’s eyes. India, he thought. He knew about

the new, deregulated, globalized India that everyone was raving

about, of course. The booming stock market. The billion-dollar

acquisitions. The call centers, the manicured IT campuses. But he

let himself dream of the old India, which he believed was the real

country. India, he thought. Elephants. Cows on the streets. Snake

charmers.

Above all, he comforted himself with the thought of being in

a country with a new moon, a new coastline, a new sky. Of living

in a house whose walls did not carry the telltale pencil marks of

measuring a child’s height. Whose rooms did not echo with the

sounds of a boy’s whoops of laughter. A country where there was no

possibility of running into one of his son’s teachers. Whose parks,

rivers, lakes, stadiums, video parlors, movie theaters did not constantly taunt him, remind him to look at his own broken, empty

4 Th r i t y U m r i g a r

hands. He went into Pete Timberlake’s office on Monday morning

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