At the Bottom of Everything(48)

In that moment I could see something happening in Manish’s face as if he’d been stuck with a syringe: he’d been turning between the two of us, one skeletal and solemn, one fluid and apologetic, and he’d realized just then that the skeleton was the one telling the truth. Suddenly he was looking only at Thomas, and, although his expression hadn’t changed, he’d started to cry; tears ran straight from the outer corners of his eyes.

“What are you telling me, please?”

Maybe that was my actual coyote-in-a-wolf-pack moment. Can you die of a desire not to be where you are? My ears for some reason felt in danger of combusting. There was nowhere I could safely look. I couldn’t speak or move.

Thomas opened his eyes. The sentences he spoke (and his tone was steady, step after step on a tightrope) weren’t so different from the ones that had been fermenting in me for the past decade, although they seemed to take an hour for him to get out. He’d been playing a game with his parents’ car. He’d jumped out while it was moving. He’d panicked, and wept, and watched the news. He’d tried to live his life, but found that it wasn’t possible. He knew he was beyond forgiving.

By this point the son was standing behind Manish’s chair, with one hand on his father’s shoulder. If anyone was going to kill us, I thought (and this did seem like more than a theoretical possibility), it was going to be the son; his jaw was clenched, his eyes were fixed and shrinking.

“And who are you?” the son said.

“I’m his friend.”

“Were you there? Why are you in my house right now?”

Manish, taking off his glasses, waved his son off and made a strange, wincing face, almost as if he were about to laugh. He sat forward so that his knees were touching the edge of the coffee table.

“Do you know,” he said, so quietly that I couldn’t hear him and breathe at the same time, “do you know that my wife has not prayed, has not cooked Sunday dinner, for twelve years? That we have moved across the world, to not be on streets that we used to be on, to not see faces in parking lots and to wonder if they are classmates?”

Thomas laid his hands on his legs and lowered his head, and I thought: Is he getting ready to be killed? Is he about to pull a samurai sword out of the leg of his pants? Manish kept talking.

“Our life in Washington … we used to love Washington very much. When Mira was young she would lay her clothes on the floor, in the arrangement she was going to wear them. She counted the brushes of her hair. She would tease me for my belly, make me stop from going to Ben and Jerry’s.”

Amita must have heard something in her husband’s voice; she appeared in the hallway; she was tiny, in an orange nightshirt, with plump bare feet and a gray braid to the bottom of her back. Her face looked as if all the blood, all the everything, had been drained out of it.

“When the phone call came,” Manish said, “I was downstairs in the kitchen. Amita had never heard me scream that way. She thought I had burned myself. She came into the room, she saw my face, she fell to the floor. In the hospital there were so many machines I did not at first think Mira was in the bed. The doctor wanted to give me a shot, but I wouldn’t let him.”

“Mumma,” the son said to Amita, “go back to bed,” then something low in Hindi, going over to her, putting his arm around her.

“Here we keep a nice house,” Manish said. “You see the tomato garden, good family, nice friends. It is a puppet show. We wake up, go to work, go to sleep, the clock is the puppeteer. All the time we are in Washington. All the time we are trying not to say certain things.” (The son had led Amita out of the room now; down a hallway I heard a door close.) “I did not believe, you know. I did not believe there was a second car. Amita did. She would say to me, ‘He would not lie, I saw it in his face.’ I couldn’t look at his face.”

I must, without noticing it, have been moving farther away from Thomas on the couch, because I was almost sitting on the arm. Manish was silent now, not looking at either of us; he looked as if he were alone. I don’t know if a minute passed or a half hour. I don’t think I could have told you just then, listening to Thomas breathing and my watch ticking, a single thing that had happened in the past decade of my life. What should have happened immediately after the accident—prison, execution, vaporization—was going to happen now. Those years had been a rest between chords.

“I would like for you now,” Manish said, “to leave my house.” His eyes were on Thomas again. “You will think I must hate you, that I wish you harm, and if it were nine years, ten years ago, I would. But now I do not. I do not wish you happiness, but I see, I see in you, that you do not have it. I waited for your phone calls, for you to visit. I was very fearful; I thought there might be a great change. Now I don’t know why. I am sorry. You must go.”