The Shape of Family Read online

  Mom is the other person people blame a lot for my death, right after they say it couldn’t have been Kiki’s fault because she was just a child. (By the way, when I was still alive, Kiki would have been really mad if someone called her just-a-child.) People blame Mom for leaving us alone together, but Kiki was already thirteen when I died.

  Thirteen years old!

  She was babysitting Mrs. Mandell’s boys (who were younger than me) and helping old Mrs. Gustafson down the street by walking her dogs and watering her plants. Kiki was helping to keep alive six plants, two dogs and three little boys, not including me. She was practically the oxygen of our block. So, you really can’t blame her, and not because she was “just a child herself, poor girl.” She was NOT a child. She was my big sister, and even though she always hogged the TV remote and never wanted to play Space Rangers, I still love her the best of any person in the world.

  I didn’t know this until after I died, but it turns out Mom always felt bad about leaving us at home after school, even before all those people started blaming her. But I say, Forget That! Kiki and I loved hanging out together. We ate ice cream sandwiches right on the couch in the TV room, which was usually Not Allowed, except for special occasions like Guests or the Olympics. Sometimes, Kiki played dominoes with me or helped me build huge Lego towers. Sometimes, she let me snuggle up on her bed to read comic books while she did her homework. Those were the best times, so Forget That, Mom. I try to tell her, but I don’t think she can hear me.

  So, who is to blame then? If not Mom or Kiki, and not Dad because he was At Work as usual, then who?

  Simple.

  The water. The water decided to swallow me up that day, and if you’ve ever seen the Pacific Ocean or Niagara Falls, you know that when the water decides to do something, you can’t stop it, no matter how hard you try. So, I definitely don’t blame Karina, and you shouldn’t either. She was the only one who kept me company while I was dying. She held my hand and kissed my forehead. She was the only one with me on the last day of my life.

  7 | jaya

  JUNE 2009

  It was like no kind of sleep she’d ever had. Some might call it a dreamless sleep, but that made it seem unpleasant, as if it was lacking something vital. No, this was the best kind of sleep, the kind that transported her to another place. Sometimes, as she was waiting to succumb, she envisioned a giant pillowy cloud carrying her off into the sky, enveloping her until she was no longer visible. What she appreciated about this sleep was that it occupied both mind and body. She rarely woke before late morning, and she woke gradually, emerging from fog.

  And then. And then, the beauty of that black vacuum dissolved, and the realization intruded. It started slowly, just an inkling, and then came crashing over her all at once, and there was no escaping it. This, too, took over her body and mind. Her eyes stung, the inside of her throat thickened, and the weight on her chest pressed the breath out of her. The dark haze engulfed her once again. In that darkness, she relived each important moment—was it to torture herself or to ensure she would never forget?

  The first moment. Her phone rang as she drove home from work. The officer’s flat, procedural voice came through the car speaker, the words he spoke incomprehensible. She felt anew the sense of dread and panic as she gripped the wheel. She pulled diagonally into the driveway and up onto a flower bed—she saw later—leaving the engine running as she ran around the house to where all those medics and police officers were standing: foreign bodies in her cultivated landscape. And then, the worst moment of all: the moment she saw Prem’s thin body, lifeless and alone on the ground.

  A police officer was standing in front of her then, saying something, more words that couldn’t be computed by her brain. She stepped around him and moved toward her son. She touched his body and was struck by how cold he was. She took off her jacket and draped it over him, but that wasn’t enough to warm him, and so she draped him with her body too. The police officer was still speaking to her, a hand on her shoulder, but she couldn’t understand any of it, couldn’t move her body away from her little boy. In that moment of disbelief suspended: police radios crackling in the background, the pool gate clanging, heavy footsteps treading around her. If she didn’t open her eyes, if she just held Prem’s hand in hers, if she kept singing his favorite song as she did when he was sick or had trouble sleeping, this moment would pass, and she could open her eyes to see her smiling, lively boy again. It would pass.

  And for a second, she thought it did. The moment was interrupted by a cry, childlike and helpless, calling to her. Mama. Mama! She pulled back from Prem’s body and called his name. His face remained unchanged, his eyes unopened, his body unmoving. But someone was calling her. She turned around to see Karina, running toward her from the house. The sight of her daughter in that moment was confounding, disappointing. How could this be?

  Jaya stayed in bed until the realization suffused the sheets surrounding her, and finally she had to leave her bed to escape it. That was the only reason she ever left her bed: when it became a haunted space. Then, she turned to the shower, her no-man’s land between sleep and waking, where the steady stream of water flowing onto her face and body washed away the haunting. When the hot water ran out, she occupied herself with all the meaningless rituals everyone was so desperate for her to resume: dressing, putting food in her mouth, receiving people. The longer she stayed in bed, the fewer hours she had to spend doing these things. At the end of the day, she returned upstairs to the freshly made bed, which showed no signs of the haunting. She could slip one of those small white caplets into her mouth, slide between the sheets, and wait for the sleep to take her again.

  * * *

  Jaya saw the way they looked at her: at the memorial service, at the temple, when they came to the house bearing fruit baskets and covered dishes and potted orchids. The pity—that was universal. They looked at her as if they were surprised she was still here on earth, still able to stand and walk and breathe. I am surprised too, she wanted to tell them. She was surprised every morning when she woke up. How could it be that the very being she had given life to, whom she had carried in her own body and manifested into the world, could be gone and yet she was still here? It was wrong. Jaya knew it and she saw in others’ eyes: they knew it too. Often, they did not even meet her eyes, or they looked away when they did, as if her grief might be contagious.

  And she felt their blame, the other women’s. The mothers who stayed home with their kids, volunteering at school. The ones with high-powered jobs who hired expensive nannies to shuttle their children around to their rigorous schedule of daily activities. The crunchy-granola types who refused to use plastic containers or toys, who had rid their homes of dangerous shampoos. Jaya was none of those mothers. She was the mother who left her children on their own for two hours after school every day. She was the mother who had let her child die.

  Who else could it be? Karina, responsible but still a child herself? Prem, innocent and inquisitive? There was no other alternative. So, she accepted their blame, felt it nest deep inside her. She had relinquished her maternal responsibility to a wrought-iron fence and the CPR skills of a thirteen-year-old. Don’t you think I know? Jaya wanted to scream at them. Don’t you think I’ve already revisited every single meeting, every email I wrote, between the hours of 3:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. that day, and every day? I have asked and answered that question a million times, she wanted to tell them. In their eyes, and in her own, she would always be the mother who had let her child die.

  * * *

  In her darkest moments, Jaya would wonder if Prem’s life was tainted from the start, because of the way he’d struggled to come into it, and the world into which he was born. It had been difficult for her to get pregnant a second time, though Karina had been easy. Jaya knew they shouldn’t have waited so long to start a family, four years after getting married, but Keith had an archaic male notion of being financially stable first. She would remind him of this delay many times as they tried t
o conceive, she was ashamed to admit. She would denounce “his misplaced obsession with money” and “his preoccupation with material success over what was important.” Those words caused a wound Jaya could never erase, no matter how many times she apologized.

  When she finally became pregnant with Prem, it was the turning point that gave them something positive to look forward to, to build from. A little brother for Karina, the first grandson in the family—he was their new beginning. She had been in her final month of pregnancy when she was awoken by a familiar discomfort in her lower back. Her eyes were adjusting to the still darkness when the phone trilled across the bedroom. She cursed and lumbered to reach it, praying Karina and Keith would sleep through the noise.

  “Is Keith in New York?” Her mother’s voice came through in a rush.

  “What? No, he’s right here, asleep. He’s not going till Thursday.”

  Her mother let out an audible sigh. “Thank god. You’ve seen it on TV? Horrible.”

  Jaya’s hands shook as she exchanged the phone receiver for the television remote control on their dresser. Keith sat up in bed as the images unfolded on the small screen: smoke billowing from a hole in the high tower like a bleeding wound. They watched together in silence as the skyscraper began to fall in on itself and tumble, slowly, silently to the ground, sending up a giant plume, masking what had been there just moments before. Over a hundred stories of steel and concrete, engineering and human ingenuity disappeared in an instant, a magician’s trick.

  Jaya watched television all day and the following days, as Karina played with wooden blocks and tottered around the house in Jaya’s high-heeled shoes, all permitted so long as she was safely out of view of the TV. Jaya watched through streaming tears as people posted homemade signs all over lower Manhattan, for boyfriends, sisters, fathers and roommates who had gone to work on a clear Tuesday morning and had not been heard from since. Behind all these seekers and tellers, a gargantuan pile of rubble rose from the ground, smoke climbing from the wreckage while brave firemen trudged atop the mass in the vain hope of finding somebody, anybody.

  Keith was alive only due to his arbitrary meeting schedule. She was only here in this country because of a chance meeting at a pub in London. Now the borders were closed, shutting her off from the rest of her family. All their lives were ruled by the whims of fate, and this realization made her feel powerless. This was the world in which they were raising Karina, into which their son would be born—this ugly, cruel, awful, dangerous world full of horror, where planes flew into buildings and people jumped from towers.

  That had been eight years ago, when she recognized how the world was filled with dangers unseen and unanticipated. But this time, they had not been fortunate enough to escape the worst. And now, in her grief, her love for Prem had no home.

  8 | karina

  JUNE 2009

  Two weeks after Prem’s cremation ceremony, a period during which Mom had hardly left her bed, she finally wandered down to the kitchen, hair mussed and a sour smell trailing her. Karina was so surprised to see her that she just sat at the kitchen counter, watching as her mother opened the refrigerator and stared blankly inside before saying, “We don’t have eggs?” No one had been to the grocery store in weeks. Dad had been sustaining himself on black coffee, and Karina on cold cereal.

  Something sparked inside Karina with the simple query, something her mother might have said Before. “I . . . I’ll go next door and get some,” Karina said. “Be right back.” She ran out the front door in bare feet and crossed the dewy lawn separating their house from the neighbor’s. A few eggs. A few eggs would make things better, would make her mother happy, would bring normalcy back to their home. The guilt and shame that had been burning inside her for weeks abated for the first time as she knocked on the neighbor’s door.

  Karina returned a few minutes later with a full carton and set a pot of water to boil, rushing around the kitchen to prepare everything the way her mother liked, the way she and Prem had helped their father make it for Mother’s Day—a hard-boiled egg, seasoned with salt and red chili pepper, buttered wheat toast and a sliced banana—the kind of breakfast she’d never seen at her friends’ homes, filled with chocolate chip pancakes and waffles. She took the tray upstairs, but her mother had fallen asleep again, curled tightly into a ball, clenching a pillow to her chest like a child with a stuffed animal. Karina placed the tray next to the bed, where it sat untouched until her father later cleared it away.

  * * *

  “Karina was so good, so responsible,” Mom said, placing one limp hand on Karina’s knee, leaning toward her daughter. “She tried to save him.”

  “Mm-hmm,” said the twelfth auntie of the week, sitting across from them on one of the dining chairs Dad had moved into the living room to accommodate the overflow of visitors who had been coming to pay their respects.

  “We had that fence installed as soon as we moved into this house, to prevent just this kind of thing,” Mom said, answering a question that had not been asked.

  The auntie drew in her breath sharply and clucked her tongue. Karina hated these Indian ladies from the temple who came to the house in a steady stream, with their foil-wrapped dishes and fabricated concern.

  Mom paused and took a sip of her tea. Then she gripped Karina’s thigh tightly with her hand. “But Karina was such a good girl. The paramedics said she was calmly administering CPR when they arrived. She did everything she could to save her brother. She jumped right in after him.” Mom turned to her, a pained smile on her face as tears welled in her eyes.

  The auntie invoked God, as they all did, claiming to know that Bhagwan would take care. Karina felt her lungs grow tight with air she had trouble expelling. She didn’t understand why they had to endure these visits, which left her feeling worse and didn’t seem to help her mother. Karina thought she might have to cry out to relieve the pressure tightening in her throat. She quietly excused herself and went upstairs to the bathroom, the one she’d yearned to have to herself when she shared it with Prem. After locking the door, she leaned against the cool stone edge of the vanity and stared at herself in the mirror, her breath coming rapidly. She turned on the faucet and splashed cold water on her face, then rubbed it dry with a towel. She leaned closer to the mirror, taking in each blemish on her face: the dark patchy skin, the sprinkling of pimples across her upper cheeks, the hair sprouting on the bridge of her nose, beginning to knit her brows together. A sense of ugliness overwhelmed her, and strangely, it also somehow felt right. This was how people saw her from the outside: awkward, ugly, awful. And it reflected how she felt on the inside: rotten, undeserving of love or pride or anything good. She closed her eyes, longing to erase her image and replace it with a blank face that would fade into the background.

  Her mother’s words hung there, haunting her with their fundamental mistruth. The hurt in Mom’s eyes, the sound of Dad crying from the garage at night, all the pain she had brought upon her family—there was nothing she could do to alleviate it. Karina opened the drawer of the vanity and rummaged around. There was no amount of mascara or eyeliner that would rehabilitate her ugliness, but she had been thinking about another way, waiting for the courage to try. The feeling of unease grew in her abdomen, infecting her from within until she thought she might have to throw up. She wanted to release it all, this pain that threatened to consume her.

  When her fingers landed upon it, she knew. She retrieved the small blue Swiss Army knife she had given Prem, along with a compass, for his last birthday after he’d joined the Boy Scouts. She sat down on the bathroom rug and pulled out each of the tools: the blade, the screwdriver, the scissors. When she got to the nail file, she closed the others and slid the narrow metal tip under her fingernail until the pain in that delicate space intensified and began to throb.

  And then, she felt a small rush of something else: a wave of relief.

  Karina reopened the blade. She placed it in the same space under her fingernail and pressed down until the pain
sharpened and she cried out. It felt as if the black cloud that had been surrounding her began to open up and rain down on her. She closed her eyes, leaned her head back against the cabinet and sank into that feeling: the pain and punishment for how bad she knew she had been. When she opened her eyes, there was a bright red line of blood spreading under her fingernail.

  Karina heard her mother calling her from downstairs. She didn’t like to be left alone with visitors for too long. Karina put her finger to her mouth and tasted the blood, its metallic flavor sharp and familiar. She rinsed her finger in the sink and rummaged through the medicine cabinet for a bandage. She could only find Space Rangers bandages, deep blue and undersized, for a child’s hands. For Prem’s hands.

  Over the next few weeks, their house was frequented with visitors from the temple, the neighborhood, Dad’s office, Mom’s work and their school. During those visits, when she was expected to sit politely in the living room or the kitchen, Karina was always thinking about how to find a moment to escape to the bathroom upstairs that was now hers alone. Each time, as she climbed the stairs, she felt her heart beat faster. Behind the locked door, she would splash water on her face or brush her hair, but no matter how many ways she tried to avoid it, eventually she always found herself reaching for the Swiss Army knife at the back of the drawer. When she had bandages on a couple of fingers, she began to make the cuts on her inner thigh, where no one would see them.

  She always felt the rush of relief, a release from all the poison that had been building up inside her. By the time she left the bathroom, the shame over what she’d done began to creep back into her mind, as she went downstairs to rejoin Mom and their guests for tea.