Trail of Broken Wings (37 page)

“He raped you,” Mama whispers, each word sounding as if torn from her throat. I take two steps back, her admission repeating itself over and over in my head. I was blind for so long that now I wonder how I will ever learn to see again.

“How did you know?” Maybe she is mistaken. I still hold on to the chance that maybe it’s all a dream, that I was confused. That the fiction I created, built a life on, is what is real, and she is spewing a lie.

“He told me.” She reaches for me again, and this time I am too weak to fight her. His admission makes it real. Her petite body fits against mine. “A few months back, he told me everything.” Her tears start to soak my blouse as I stand completely still. “He hadn’t been feeling well. Wanted to confess. He said he’d been living with the guilt ever since that night.” She steps back, facing me. Cradles my face in her frail hands. “I’m so sorry, Beti. I’m so sorry.”

RANEE

Three months had passed since Sonya’s birthday. Brent was getting weaker over time. He had gone to the doctor’s but was not a fan of them telling him how to take care of himself. Because of his diabetes, they insisted he limit his sugar intake. He refused to give up on his vice and assumed he would be fine. But time proved him wrong. He started to feel worse and began to fear for his health.

“Ranee,” Brent called out one early morning. They were scheduled to have lunch with Trisha later that afternoon. Ranee had started to clean the house while Brent rested in his favorite chair.

“Yes?” Ranee swiped the counters clean, removing the few specks of dirt.

“Can you get me a glass of water?” he asked. Only recently had he begun to ask rather than tell.

Ranee took her time, secure in the knowledge that he could do nothing but wait for her. Filling a glass with lukewarm water instead of the cold that he preferred, she handed it to him and started to turn away when he said, “Trisha—every time we see her she is happy.”

“Yes,” Ranee agreed. Trisha had made it. Untouched, she was the one Ranee could point to and say something went right. “Her life is everything she wants it to be.”

“Yes.” Brent laid his head back, releasing a deep sigh. “It is good.”

Something in his voice tugged at her, made her stop and stare. “She was the one who was never hurt,” Ranee said, the words an accusation. “She was the lucky one. Happiness is hers to have.”

Opening his eyes, Brent didn’t respond to her statement directly. Instead, he watched her, fear filling his features. “What do you think happens to us when we die?” he asked.

The question took Ranee aback. She rarely gave death a thought when life took so much of her energy. “I don’t know. I imagine we face our creator, have to explain our actions,” she said, jabbing at him however she could. “Give a reason for hurting the ones we did.”

“And if there is no reason?” Brent whispered. “If it was a mistake you never imagined making?”

It was a question Ranee never believed Brent capable of asking. Staring at him, wondering if he felt regret for all of his actions, she asked, “Then why did you do it?”

“You know?” Brent whispered, his round eyes large in his weathered face. “How?”

“I was right here,” Ranee bit out, wondering if he was losing his mind. “Every single day, when you hit me and my two girls, I was standing right here!” she said, her voice nearly a scream.

Closing his eyes, he turned his face away, relief washing over him. Ignoring her outburst, he said, “Never mind.”

There was something he wasn’t telling her, Ranee was sure. She knew it the way she knew what was coming minutes before he started hitting. The way she knew that if there was ever good in his heart, it was long gone. Fear gripped her, pushed her to take a seat across from him. Staring at the man who once held her life in his palm, she demanded, “What did you do?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Brent whispered. A lone tear fell from his eye over his cheek. Too weak to wipe it away, he let it linger, the wetness leaving a trail.

“It does,” Ranee pushed, fighting against the voice in her head that demanded she let it be. For her entire life she had let things go. Suddenly, a force greater than the beaten voice demanded she act. “Tell me or I swear on the mangalsutra I wear around my neck that I will leave you right now to die alone.”

“There are some things better left unsaid,” he said quietly, his breath ragged.

“For whom?” Ranee demanded, the room closing in on her. Taking a step toward him, she towered over him. “For the first time in a long time, I want to hear you speak.”

He glanced at her, seeming to gauge whether she was serious. Ranee watched as he opened his mouth, but no words came out. He wrung his hands together; hands that were once so powerful were now weak and frail. “Please,” he begged, the first time in his life. Ranee stared at him before making her decision. Knowing he could not follow, she reached for her keys and started to walk out of the house. “Ranee,” he called out.

Refusing to turn, she demanded, “Tell me.”

“I drank the liquor I brought home.”

“The bottles you threatened us with?” Ranee turned to stare at him. She still remembered the dozens of unopened bottles she would throw out. Stepping closer to him, she dropped her purse on the counter. “When?”

He struggled, something Ranee had never seen him do. “The night of Marin’s wedding.” Refolding the paper, he shifted in his seat. Rubbing his hand over his face, he refused to meet Ranee’s stare. “I drank all of it.”

Ranee racked her brain, trying to remember that night, but she couldn’t. Exhausted from the day’s events, she had fallen into a deep sleep. “Did you come to bed after?”

“Not ours, no,” Brent answered softly.

A slow buzzing started in her brain. From the base of her neck, rising to the top, drowning out every other noise. She felt the pounding between her eyes and at her temples like a bulldozer. The room began to spin. She clutched her mangalsutra, but it burned her fingers. Letting it go, she stared down at her hands. Small red hives started to pop up on her arms. Her vision began to blur, but she refused to let it—for the first time in her life, she had to keep her control. When her focus returned, the first thing she saw was the fire poker on the fireplace. For just a heartbeat she imagined walking over, pulling it out of the holder, and bashing him with it.

“Whose bed?” she demanded but already knew the answer. The only one he loved.

“Trisha’s.” He started to sob, the sound reverberating through the house. “I never meant to do that to her.”

“You raped her,” she said aloud, still in disbelief. Tears coursed down her face, drenching her neck and shirt. Everything in Ranee wanted him dead, but she knew he was already dying. Left with no other way to hurt him, she walked away, though she promised him she wouldn’t. Grabbing her purse, she left the house and drove around for hours, with no place to go. When she returned, she found him collapsed on the ground, his breathing erratic and his mind gone.

SONYA

“Do you believe in miracles?”

“Excuse me?” I am behind the nurses’ desk, storing the cameras for the evening.

“Divine intervention.” The nurse is inputting information about a patient into a computer. “An act from somewhere out there”—she waves her hand toward nothing—“making everything right.”

I have never thought of miracles, never believed they were mine to have. If there were such a thing, then I wouldn’t have had the childhood I did. “I don’t know,” I say honestly, leaning against the station. “Do you?”

“Didn’t used to,” she comments. “But after last night, I’m starting to wonder.”

“What happened last night?” I ask, searching my brain for news I may have heard but not registered. David was right; information spreads like wildfire in the hospital. Good or bad, everyone seems to know events as fast as they happen. “I think I’m out of the loop.”

Over the last few weeks, I’ve started to make friends. It’s a new concept for me, given the last years of my life. Friends were the casualty of my nomad existence, a necessary loss for my survival. But now,
seeing these same people every day, watching them dedicate their lives to helping others who are suffering, I realize that the world is not just black and white. It isn’t just my suffering and the darkness that became my umbrella versus those who seemed to have everything right—instead, there are shades of all the colors, each one seeping into the other, changing the landscape, an evolution of the human soul.

“Tessa died last night.”

I stop, my hands gripping air. She was the little girl I worked with when I began. Who titled her book
ME
. I saw her regularly after that, and she seemed to be getting better, stronger. “What happened?” I ask, dread settling in me like a lost friend.

“She sat up, asked us to call her family.” The nurse stares at me, her face filled with wonder. “They arrived immediately. Tessa started naming members of her family that had passed on. People she had never met before. Told her mom and dad that those people were there, that they would take care of her.” The nurse continues to input information into the computer. “She said everything was going to be all right.”

I don’t want to listen anymore. I want to leave the conversation, go back to taking pictures, believing in what I know to be real. “What did they say?”

“They listened. They held her. She closed her eyes, and a few minutes later her heart stopped.” The nurse shakes her head in seeming confusion. “It was a code blue. They did everything to resuscitate her.”

“Where was the miracle?” I demand, my heart breaking, angry at life’s unfairness. Tessa was young, just a child. She had just started to live, the future unwritten, waiting for her to decide on the story she would tell. There should be a rule somewhere, somehow, that happiness is the default, the fallback for every situation. Every turn, every twist should lead toward a better beginning. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel; instead, the entire path is paved with sunshine.

“She came back to life. Minutes after they pronounced her dead, she came back.”

I don’t respond, have no answer. I have never wondered about more than here and now . . . it is all I have had the capacity for. If there is a life after now, a profound reason for what happens today, then I have missed the memo or purposely ignored it. Either way, I have no opinion on life after this one. But the breath I hold, the sadness I swallow, leaves my body in one swoop. She is alive. For now, she is still alive.

“Do good in this life so your karma allows a wonderful life next time,” Mom used to tell us. Karma was both a threat and a beacon; the life lived now would determine the future.

I leave the nurse, still shocked by the previous night’s events, and make my way to Tessa’s room. I know it by heart, her room just a few hallways down from where I am. It is late, so I know Tessa will already have had dinner. Most likely her parents have left for the night; with other children at home, they can only be spread so thin. I listen at the door for voices. When I hear none, I quietly push open the door. Peeking in, I see what I need—Tessa sleeping peacefully, her skin healthier, her vitals better than ever before. Nodding to myself, I start to close the door quietly as David approaches.

“So you heard?”

Though the hospital is large, it is nearly impossible to avoid someone. Similar patients, same diagnostic areas—all of it leading to an eventual encounter. Being near him, in the quiet of the hallway, I automatically go to our last encounter, when I almost lost myself with him and after.

“Yes,” I say, stepping away from him. “It’s a miracle.”

“That’s what everyone’s saying,” he responds. I watch him, his movements, the way he speaks, all of it feeling familiar in a way that it shouldn’t, that makes no sense.

“She’s going to be all right?” I ask, afraid of the answer. If I were God, my first decree would be that once you have a miracle, nothing bad can happen. After a magic hand has touched you, after you have been deemed special, there is no going back. Forever after you
are blessed. My second would be that everyone is worthy of their own miracle. “The cancer?”

“We think so,” David answers, somehow understanding my deeper question. “What happened, what she said, can only give us hope.”

Like a rainbow after a tornado, I think. I was in the Southwest for a photo shoot when a mile-wide tornado ravaged the community. I took shelter like everyone else, waiting for nature’s evil to pass. Sirens blared; thunder clapped around us as the winds screamed their power. For ten minutes, we stood frozen, waiting without any other option. When silence descended, everyone ran out, trying to calculate with their eyes the irreparable damage done. As people scattered, searching for loved ones, someone cried out, pointing toward the sky. Every face lifted in dread, sure it was another twister, but instead a multitude of colors spanned the horizon, offering beauty in the face of despair.

“Then it’s a good thing.” I search for a way out, anything to avoid a repeat of what happened with David. I can’t lose myself like that again, if only because I fear I might not find my way out twice. I start to walk away, the only thing I know how to do, when he stops me.

“I miss you.”

He says it where anyone can hear. I look around, fearing an audience. The hallway is quiet. “You can’t miss what’s not yours,” I say, lashing out, trying to hurt.

“You’re right,” he agrees. “Doesn’t seem to stop it, unfortunately.”

I look into his eyes and see in them the sadness we both feel.

“I was never supposed to be here.” I start to say more, to fight a battle that hasn’t begun, when a nurse moves past us to enter Tessa’s room. Using the excuse, I flee, the only answer I have.

MARIN

They are seated around the dinner table, each at an equal distance from the other. The meal completed, they stare, first at each other and then at anything that holds their interest. Raj is the first to speak, reaching across the table for Gia’s hand. “How are you doing, Beti?” he asks.

“I’m fine, Daddy,” Gia says, pulling her hand away after a second. “Everything is good.”

Her demeanor contradicts her words. Her hair lies limply around her shoulders. There are dark circles beneath her eyes, and her nails, usually painted and trimmed, have been bitten to the skin. “You don’t look fine,” Marin says, her voice harsher than she meant. “You look terrible.”