The Shape of Family Read online

  It was equal parts torture and excitement the following twenty-seven days as they dutifully waited for the oversized bandage to do its job. Karina came to understand what people meant when they said half the enjoyment of something was in the anticipation. The underlying tension of what was coming permeated their daily interactions, their frequent text messages. She and James discussed how to make their first time special, to infuse it with the meaning it deserved, and finally decided on an upcoming weekend when they were invited to a friend’s family beach house. There would be grilling on the deck, boogie-boarding in the ocean, a keg of beer and the requisite drinking games. And James and Karina would make love for the first time, losing their virginity together.

  * * *

  The first night at the beach house, after the evening’s festivities, Karina showered and returned to their room, where James was waiting for her. He slipped her robe off her shoulder and leaned in to kiss her collarbone, then pulled her over to the bed. As James untied her robe and rolled on top of her, Karina reached to switch off the bedside lamp. She breathed in the salty flavor of his skin. In the dark, they groped and bumped into each other like two inept dance partners. Eventually, they found a rhythm. She was trying to understand this new sensation, of having him inside her, when he opened his eyes and looked at her.

  “I love you,” he said softly. It wasn’t the first time he’d said those words to her—and she’d said them too—but they nonetheless took on new meaning that day. They slept naked and entwined. When they awoke, sunlight was falling through the window shutters and across the bed, and James’s arm was wrapped around her shoulders. It felt to Karina like a perfectly happy moment.

  “You should really come boogie-boarding today,” James said. “Those waves were awesome yesterday.”

  Karina drew in a slow breath and let it go. “My brother’s name was Prem,” she said softly. “He called me Kiki.”

  James raised his head slightly from the pillow to look at her face. She didn’t turn around, but she clasped his hand under hers. “He was eight years old. He drowned in our swimming pool.” She heard his sudden intake of breath.

  “Is that why you don’t swim?” he asked cautiously.

  “I can swim. I love the ocean, actually. I just . . .” Although she still went out of her way to avoid swimming pools, she felt comfortable at the ocean. When she thought about its expanse and driving currents, its inherent danger, her feelings didn’t seem rational. This was one of many things she didn’t understand about the way her mind worked. She had stopped trying to make sense of why cutting herself felt good, or why she didn’t feel like a blend of her parents, but like something apart from both of them.

  Now, James nuzzled his nose and mouth gently into her ear and tightened his arm around her body. She rested her chin on his forearm and closed her eyes, still feeling the narrow rays of sun across her face.

  “I was the one, who found him,” Karina said. “I tried. To save him.” She told James about her failed attempts at resuscitation. She described how her mother had retreated to bed for weeks and later emerged with the elements Karina had loved about her scraped out like the innards of a squash, only a hard shell remaining. A new person had grown in her place, who sat all day in the shrine she had built to her only son, who would never come back.

  Hot tears slipped down her face and onto James’s arm. She tasted salt as they ran over her lips, and she wiped her face against the bedsheets. “It changed me too. Made me more independent. I learned to cook and do my own laundry. I got really focused about school and college. And that’s when I grew really close with Izzy and her family.”

  James kissed the top of her head. “You must think about him all the time.”

  She nodded, her chin against the forearm he wrapped tightly around her. “He’d be thirteen now, the same age I was when . . .” She hesitated, unsure if she should share the next thought with him. “Sometimes I picture him . . . sitting next to me in the front seat of the car when I drive home to Los Altos. I explain how to drive, how to merge onto the highway. He loved understanding the mechanics of how things worked.” Was it crazy that she had imagined him growing up alongside her, a way to recapture all the moments they had lost together?

  “I’m glad you told me,” James said, nuzzling her head before drifting off to sleep again.

  There it was, Karina thought as she lay awake in his arms, listening to his breath grow heavy. Izzy had been right. She’d told him the worst of her past, the worst of her truth, and he still loved her. He loved her, and she was worthy of his love.

  * * *

  As the end of the school year approached, Karina found herself dreading the separation she and James would have to endure. For nearly three months, they would be thousands of miles apart and, because of the remoteness of their locations, would have limited ability to communicate. James would be working with a trail repair crew along the Pacific Crest Trail, covering some 600 miles by truck and by foot. Karina was going to Ecuador for an internship with the Fair Coffee Co-op, a pioneer in organic farming, recommended by her professor, Dr. Choi. The prospect was exciting and scary, but Stephanie had bolstered her. “I would go in a minute, if it paid anything. And you might even lose that gringo accent,” she teased.

  In the last week of school, after they’d both finished their final exams and papers, James surprised her by driving them out to a lake about twenty minutes from campus. There, under a tree, he laid out a plaid blanket and a spread of picnic food. After they’d enjoyed a languid meal of cheese, bread, grapes and wine, they lay back on the blanket and snapped a selfie of themselves. Her head rested on James’s chest, her hair splayed out like an ink blot around her face. James’s face was the best part. That’s what her eyes always returned to. He looked blissful.

  She revisited that photo daily during the time she was in Ecuador. She spent her days teaching classes to the employee-owners in Spanish and writing a report documenting the co-op’s successful practices. At night, she lay in bed listening to love songs with her headphones, waiting for sleep to come. At the end of the summer, when Karina said her goodbyes, part of her felt guilty for having spent some part of the past ten weeks counting down until this moment, when she could return to the familiarity of home, of James.

  21 | keith

  AUGUST 2014

  Keith was squeezing in one last meeting before Karina came home tomorrow for the summer. He had arranged to take off the entire week she was to stay with him before she spent the second week with Jaya, an arrangement they had confirmed a few nights ago. They still spoke every few weeks, usually about Karina, the house or other administrative tasks they shared, and caught up on the outlines of their lives. Occasionally, Jaya brought up an anecdote she’d remembered about Prem and they would laugh about it. Other times, when she claimed to actually sense Prem’s spirit in someone else, Keith grew so uncomfortable he’d find a way to end the call.

  When they’d spoken a few days ago, Jaya had seemed particularly distracted, as if she was eager to get back to something else. Could she be seeing someone? She could, of course, and she had every right to. Keith had been dating freely—though only for casual recreation—for years now. What he and Jaya had had together was irretrievably gone, and he did want her to be happy. Still, the thought of another man being with her was difficult to stomach, and somehow felt like a final failure of the life they’d shared.

  Now, sitting in the reception area of Machtel Industries, the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturer, Keith glanced at his watch and noted there were still ten minutes before his meeting with the CEO, Jeff Erstine. It was Keith’s policy to be early for meetings like this, a regular check-in to stay abreast of his client’s needs; it signaled he knew the CEO’s time was more important than his. Humility was rare in investment banking and it went a long way with these entrepreneurial guys. His phone buzzed and his sister’s name flashed on the screen. As the sibling who’d stayed near their hometown, it fell to her to check up on
their parents. He was grateful for this and sent her extravagant birthday gifts and money whenever she even hinted at a need. But he had to bolster himself for her phone calls, which inevitably detailed their mother’s crippling arthritis and father’s descent into frailty. He muted his phone and slipped it into his pocket.

  “Be right back,” Keith told the receptionist, then showed himself to the restroom. He knew his way around this office, built three years earlier from the proceeds of the secondary offering he’d led. It was his first huge fee for the firm, eighty million dollars. He’d celebrated by buying a box of authentic Cubans for Jeff and the Porsche for himself. As Keith walked down the corridor, he saw, through the ten-foot glass walls of a conference room, a group of suited Asian men packing up their things. He slowed his pace and looked more closely, spotting what he thought was a familiar face. In the bathroom, a quick check on his phone confirmed who he’d recognized: John Cho, scion of Korean semiconductor maker HyunCom.

  Keith’s mind began churning. What was going on here? Was Machtel considering acquiring HyunCom, or entering into some kind of manufacturing or distribution partnership? That would make damn good sense. Machtel had the North American and European markets cornered, and HyunCom was the leader in Asia. Together, they would be a powerhouse and drive all the smaller players out of the market, taking their share. It was such a good idea, dammit, that Keith was disappointed he hadn’t proposed it himself.

  Who was Jeff working with on this? Was there another bank involved? That would really gall Keith, to not even have been given a chance to compete for the business. Shaking off his annoyance, he walked briskly back to the reception area, where a smiling young woman was waiting for him in a narrow skirt and clingy blouse. She introduced herself as Rachel, Jeff’s second assistant, and appeared to be at least two decades younger than the assistant Keith knew.

  “I’ll take you back, Mr. Olander. Would you like anything for lunch? I just brought in a sandwich for Mr. Erstine.”

  “No, thank you,” Keith said, a little flustered by what he’d just seen, and now by this woman. How did Jeff concentrate with a nymph sitting right outside his door? He collected himself before entering Jeff’s office.

  “Keith!” Jeff walked out from behind his desk to shake his hand and gestured for Keith to take a seat at the table, where his lunch sat, wrapped. “Sorry, have to make this a working lunch. Crazy day. Can Rachel get you something?”

  “No, thanks. She already offered.” Keith gave a friendly wave in Rachel’s direction and watched as she left the office. He tried not to be rankled by the implied downgrade of their business relationship from their usual high-priced restaurant lunches.

  “So, what’s going on?” Jeff asked, unwrapping his sandwich.

  Keith was wary of asking directly about the HyunCom executives. Instead, he asked Jeff some detailed questions about the business and industry, for which he’d been prepped by his research analysts. How was quality control out of the new plant? Where did orders stand compared to last quarter? When did he expect the design for the new chip to be finished? In between bites of turkey sandwich, Jeff answered by simply repeating statements from the last quarterly earnings call. Growing impatient, Keith found himself unable to stay away from what he’d seen. “Do you have any major partnerships in the works? I have a couple M&A ideas I’d like to run by you. If you acquired one of the Asian market leaders, for example, you could really dominate the whole space.”

  Jeff chuckled and shook his head as he tossed his crumpled sandwich wrapper cleanly into the trash can. “Keith, I’m just focused on running the business I have, maintaining quarter-over-quarter growth, and keeping our recruiting yield up in this market. We can’t hire people fast enough to support our growth.”

  “Well, I hope if you ever have needs in that area, you’d come to us, at least give us a chance to help you out.” Keith hated sounding like he was groveling. “You’re a very important client to the firm, you know.”

  “Yeah, for a half-point cut.” Jeff grinned at him.

  “Well . . .” Keith shrugged, feeling like a schoolboy who’d been called to the principal’s office. “Yes, but I hope you feel we’ve given you excellent service for your fees. Like I said, you’re a very important client.”

  “Absolutely, Keith, absolutely. And I appreciate everything you’ve done.” Jeff stood up, Keith’s cue to do the same, not even forty-five minutes after he’d arrived. “Let’s definitely keep in touch.”

  “Yes, will do,” Keith said. “Next time, I’ll take you to my club for a real lunch. Get you out of this office for a break.”

  Jeff smiled, they shook hands, and Keith headed for the door. As he passed her desk, Rachel called out, “Bye, Mr. Olander.”

  Keith stopped. “Call me Keith.”

  “Okay. Keith,” she said, tilting her head and smiling at him.

  Keith leaned in a little closer. “So, Rachel, since I didn’t manage to eat any lunch, would you like to grab some dinner tonight?”

  * * *

  Rachel didn’t hesitate to drink three strong cosmos on a weeknight, prompting Keith to wonder how long she would last as Jeff’s second assistant. By the time they ended up at his place, she had told him about the international flights she’d booked for the executives from Seoul and the teams of attorneys that had taken up residence in their conference room over the previous weeks. A deal was going down, no question. Keith was annoyed with himself for not thinking of it, irate that his firm had been cut out.

  He fumed about it all week, his mind rattling with the news and its repercussions. When his colleagues learned he’d missed out on the deal, it would look like he was losing his edge, not to mention the big payday. Keith did what he often did in times of stress: he spent many hours late each night reviewing his investment portfolio, assessing his returns and making a few key stock purchases to rebalance his asset mix. The only thing that kept him from decompensating entirely was having Karina there with him for the week. She talked endlessly about her classes, her dorm and her new friends at the Botany Lab. She divulged that she had a boyfriend at school, and Keith had a cocktail of emotional reactions to this news. He was pleased that she’d confided in him. There were some things he’d just relinquished to the mother-daughter domain, types of conversations he assumed he would never get to have after losing his son. Still, he warned Karina not to get too serious about James, who was probably, at some level, like all guys his age. “Just be careful, honey. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “I know, Dad. Don’t worry.” She smiled, threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on the cheek.

  Keith couldn’t remember when he’d seen his daughter so light and happy. It was heartening for him to know that after everything she’d been through, Karina seemed to have landed on her feet.

  22 | jaya

  AUGUST 2014

  Jaya had purchased her tickets as soon as they’d gone on sale three months earlier, when it was announced that the Guru was coming to town. He was scheduled to speak at the San Jose Convention Center for five days—full days, from ten in the morning until eight at night. Now, as she shuffled along slowly in the entry line that wrapped around the convention center and into the parking lot, she felt her excitement, which had been building over the past couple of weeks, climb to an intensity that took her by surprise.

  Her cousin in India had sent Jaya a CD of the Guru’s lectures a few years back, after Prem died and Keith moved out, but she hadn’t opened it until after Karina left for college. Once Jaya started listening, the Guru’s words captivated and lifted her. Human life was full of suffering, and all suffering was caused by attachments; this was an essential truth in the Gita and many other scriptures. In pursuit of simplicity over the past few years, Jaya had shed the things with power to hurt or distract her: her work, her husband, her friends. She could focus exclusively on connecting to the higher spiritual force guiding the universe when she sat in Prem’s ashram and find solace there. But once she left tha
t room to rejoin the outside world, with its attendant perils and reminders, her fears and guilt returned. She felt compelled to do everything in exactly the right way—from her prayer rituals to her Ayurvedic food preparation—to avoid the disaster and penance she always felt lurking. Jaya realized, after listening to the Guru, that she had simply exchanged one form of suffering for another. He explained how it was possible to not just numb her pain temporarily, but to rise above it. His words guided her gently through an exploration of her grief, probing her feelings as an inner witness who was present and yet could stand apart from them. Jaya was eager to continue this process of detachment, from not only external pressures, but those internal feelings as well; to reach the higher plane of consciousness of which he spoke.

  The Guru’s words brought her peace when she thought of Prem. All our lives on earth were fleeting, connected to who we were before and everything that would come after, he explained. In this way, she was never really separated from her son. Jaya had been acquainted with reincarnation since she was a child—the cycle of birth, life and death repeating itself over time, throughout the ages—and believed it to be true in a nebulous way. But now she found herself looking for signs of Prem everywhere: his smile on a newborn baby, the joyful squeal in a younger child scrambling across a hanging rope bridge. At times, she felt his presence so strongly, it was as if he was right next to her, telling her something funny to make her laugh out loud, guiding her gently away from the dark abyss of sadness. Other times, it felt like an effort in vain, like she was trying to recapture something that was forever gone.

  Up ahead, there was a small scuffle in the line as a group of ladies tried to cut in to join their friends. Voices were raised and some elbows thrown to block the line-cutters, but eventually the host organism flexed to accommodate the invaders, and the slow procession of the line resumed. Jaya carried a tote bag with only a floor cushion, a water bottle, and her car keys. A simple vegetarian lunch would be served in the middle of the day.