Trail of Broken Wings (34 page)

“I guess I should have done more research, tried to figure out what to give a girl like Gia,” Trisha says.

“What does that mean?” Marin demands, her own laughter coming to a halt.

“Why wouldn’t she tell you what was happening to her?” Trisha demands. “Hard to figure out.” Trisha stacks a box atop another. “Don’t you think?”

Marin slowly approaches Trisha without breaking her gaze. “You don’t want to know what I’m thinking right now.”

“Gia is a teenager,” Ranee interrupts, coming to stand between the two of them. “It does not always make sense why they do what they do.”

“I just think—” Trisha begins, but Marin interrupts.

“I think my daughter is none of your business,” Marin lashes out, clearly ignoring Ranee’s attempt at diplomacy. “And you’ll understand my hesitancy to accept any advice from the woman who can’t have any children of her own.” Hands on her hips, she has the stance of one ready for battle. A thought seems to occur to her, the revelation clear on her face. “Is that why Eric left? Because you couldn’t have children?”

“I didn’t want any,” Trisha says slowly, her words laced with venom. “Good thing too, huh? Given the track record of our ability to mother.”

“Everything my daughter is, is because of me,” Marin throws out.

“Including the bruises?” Trisha demands. The words are whispered, said so quietly that Ranee isn’t sure anyone heard. But when Marin grabs her purse and moves toward the door, Ranee accepts that she did.

“Good luck with the move,” Marin says.

Ranee wants to call out, to beg her daughter to stop before it is too late, but the words stay stuck in her throat. Her only option is to watch her family tear themselves up from the inside, until nothing but fragments remain of who they could have been. Just as Ranee starts to turn away, to accept the inevitable, Trisha reaches the door before her sister.

“Marin,” she says, her face filled with apology, “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.” She lays a palm against the wood, curling it into a fist as if she can hold on. “I love Gia. I love you. I’m just not in a good place right now.” She steps forward, her body tense, almost preparing for a rejection. When none comes, she slips her arms around Marin’s
shoulders and brings her sister in for an embrace. They stand in silence for only a few seconds before Marin steps away. Opening the door, she walks out, shutting it quietly behind her.

Ranee walks through the darkened home, running her hands over the polished wood and fine furniture. The three of them finished packing the rest of the house in silence and then made a simple meal of potato sakh with naan. No one brought up what had happened between Trisha and Marin, preferring to pretend rather than confront. With so much they were already dealing with, selective amnesia felt easier. Sonya left soon after.

Ranee and Trisha quickly cleaned up after dinner. Trisha had released Eloise from her duties soon after Eric walked out, so the two of them were left to deal with the dishes. Once the kitchen sparkled, Trisha murmured that she was going to go lie down for a while. Ranee simply nodded, watching her daughter wearily climb the stairs toward her bedroom. She decided not to leave, an urge to remain with Trisha stronger than the desire to escape to the security of her own vacant home.

As the night sky falls, casting the room into darkness, Ranee chooses a seat in the den, glancing around at her daughter’s choice of décor. Simple but elegant, a statement on how far she has come from the humble home she was raised in. Ranee is the first to admit she does not have an eye for decorations. It seemed pointless to decorate a home that felt more like solitary confinement. But Trisha clearly had no similar notions and chose to make the most of her house. She allowed it to become the vessel for her dreams, the place where she made reality fit her vision of a life well lived.

But she rejected the one thing that promised her everything—a child. The irony does not escape Ranee. Her children bound her to
the man she was forced to marry, while Trisha’s refusal to have a baby caused her to lose the man she loved. In the deafening quiet, Ranee imagines she can hear Trisha’s cries on the bed upstairs. Her weeping for the castle that has crumbled around her. Oblivious to the truth, she never knew the castle was built from a lie—a grenade meant to explode.

The truth, when she learned it, leveled Ranee. In a moment of vulnerability, Brent had uttered the words that Ranee was sure would stop her heart. That they didn’t shames her even now. Because his revelation, the one that no mother should imagine, let alone hear, is what makes women fall to their knees and wail, wonder how they could have failed so completely.

Brent whispered his secret not to make it better, or to seek justice for his deeds. No, he confessed to unburden his own soul. For all the sins he had committed, this was the one he did not want to take with him to the other side. He hadn’t been feeling well, knew something was off. Wondered aloud if his time was near. When Ranee agreed it might be, he had dropped his head, gripped the armrests of the chair he was seated on, and admitted a wrong Ranee had never conceived. When he was done, when he laid his head back against the chair and closed his eyes, Ranee walked out and didn’t return home until hours later.

Since then, she’d rehearsed the words, created the perfect scenario to tell Trisha the secret no one knew. But no setting seemed right; no combination of words fit together to make sense. Maybe now, Ranee thinks, the time has arrived. Without planning, without preparation, maybe the moment has finally come to admit the occurrence that Trisha needs to hear. Has the right to know.

Heroes are not born or created. They become so in the passing moments of life. When something or someone demands you be more than you have been, when you must put aside your own needs and what is best for you to fight for another, no matter the cost. The past, the day-to-day living becomes irrelevant. All that matters is that instant
when the ticking of the clock is louder than an ocean’s wave hitting the rocks, when time does not stand still, but slows, every second longer than the last one. This is when the decision becomes the only thing you can hear and see. When the choice falls out of your hand and fate intervenes. When your life is no longer yours but conjoined with another’s, each dependent upon the other to survive and thrive.

Ranee stands and walks toward the stairs, prepared to take each one, but her courage fails her. Today is not the day. Ranee was not born to be a hero or a savior. She is not ready and wonders if she ever will be. Knowing that Trisha has mapped out her own life, fully aware that she holds the pen to help Trisha redraw the lines, Ranee is nonetheless too afraid to tell the truth. Instead, she walks to the front door, following the same path her other two daughters did before her, leaving Trisha all alone.

MARIN

Brent insisted Marin take Home Economics in high school. Along with Calculus and Biology, he was sure the class would fully round out her résumé. Marin didn’t mind. They scrambled eggs, a food Marin never had before, and ate it with toast and jelly. She was used to roti and pickled turmeric root every morning; the American breakfast staple was a novelty. Marin devoured the meal, savoring the unique tastes. Afterward, as they were cleaning up, the students started playing a game.

“If you could be any kind of fruit, what would you be?” one of the girls asked aloud to no one specifically.

“An apple, because everyone loves them,” one girl replied.

“A tomato,” one of the guys said, “because it’s a stupid question.”

“Well, technically, a tomato could be considered a fruit, so thank you,” the girl who asked the question returned.

They went around the room, Marin murmuring “Grapes,” but offering no reason when it was her turn. But when another girl said pineapple, Marin paid attention, curious about the choice. “Because it’s prickly on the outside and impossible to cut through. But once you
get to the fruit, it’s worth the trouble,” the girl explained. “So don’t always believe what you see.”

Marin eats alone at her desk. She and Raj have barely spoken to one another since Gia returned to school. The prosecutor assigned to Adam’s case keeps them abreast of any updates, but the backlog means things move slowly. Marin tries to temper her need for the process to speed up, wishing she could control it like she does her work. She’s refocused her energy on her job, grateful that their family life has returned to some semblance of what it used to be. The only difference now is that Raj and Marin take turns picking up Gia from school every afternoon, having lost trust she’ll be honest regarding her whereabouts.

“Three o’clock?” Marin is on the phone, attempting to reschedule a meeting she missed while dealing with Gia’s situation. “I’ll have to get back to you.” Hanging up, she searches for Raj to see if he’ll be able to switch pickup duties. She finds him in his office, staring out the window. Knocking once on the open door, as if they were colleagues instead of married, she catches his attention. “Can you get Gia today? I have a call I need to take.”

He doesn’t answer her, offering her a cursory glance before returning to staring out the window.

“Raj!” Marin loses her patience. “Can you get Gia after school today?”

He remains silent, instead holding out a sheet of paper for her. Marin stares at it in his hands, refusing to take it. “What is it?” she demands.

“I found it a few days ago. I think it’s time I share.”

Moving forward on legs that barely hold her, Marin takes the paper. Something in his eyes, in his voice, gives her a sense of foreboding, a wish to be back in her office, overwhelmed with work. At
first glance she recognizes Gia’s handwriting. It starts with a paragraph about love and loss. About being all alone. Marin reads through the words quickly, Gia’s heartbreak laid out in detail. It is the last few words that cause Marin to stumble, to wonder when it all went wrong, when she had planned it so perfectly to go right. Gia’s soliloquy speaks of life and wonders if death is not easier. If maybe life isn’t meant to be lived, that somewhere it had to be easier than it was here. Sure she can’t be everything everyone wants her to be. That in the end, she just wants to be herself, but fears that it will never be enough.

“Where did you get this?” Marin demands, finally finished.

“I found it in her diary. It was dated three days ago,” Raj says quietly, still not meeting Marin’s eyes.

“You searched her room?” Marin asks, needing someone or something to blame.

“This from the woman who had Gia followed? Who raised her hand to our daughter when she was already covered in bruises? Who decided to humiliate her in front of all her friends and classmates by bringing in the police to arrest her boyfriend?” He finally turns his head to stare at her, the air filling with his disgust. “You dare to stand in judgment of me?”

“I did it all for her,” Marin says, her breath shallow, uneven. “I did what I thought was right for her life.”

“The life she doesn’t care to live.” Raj stands, tearing the paper out of Marin’s hands. “I have followed your lead for years. Trusted you knew what school was best for her, what activities. The focus on her grades trumping all else. I have abdicated all decisions, trusting you completely. I now see my mistake.”

“You think you know better than I do?” Marin holds back an expletive. “Let’s be realistic.”

“I am,” Raj says quietly, his demeanor more serious than Marin has ever seen. “She’s hurting, and as much as you had hoped sending Adam
to jail would solve all our problems, it hasn’t. We’re pulling her out of school immediately. Giving her some time off.”

“We will do no such thing,” Marin says, the room closing in on her. Her daughter’s success, the routes that would define her place in the world, start to erode, washed under a tsunami, left only with debris. “I won’t allow you to mess with her future.”

“She has no future,” Raj spits out. He shakes the paper in Marin’s face. “This is all she has. All she is.”

“We’ll send her to a therapist,” Marin decides, remembering the card thrown carelessly into a drawer. “Karen mentioned someone. I can set up some appointments for after school.”