The Shape of Family Read online

  And that’s what he began to strive for, with what was left of his family. He still had a beautiful, intelligent wife in Jaya. He still had a smart and healthy daughter. They could still be a family. They still were a family. He had more than the department head, Bill Jeffs, and his high-powered wife in another executive suite, who collected expensive motorcycles instead of having kids. He had more than Chris Murphy, with his string of girlfriends but no one he deemed worthy of settling down with. Keith had a wife, a daughter, a home and a career. He had a family and a life worth preserving, and he was going to fight for them.

  After several visits to the grief counselor, Karina said she didn’t want to go back anymore. She was spending a lot of time at her friend Isabelle’s house, which he understood to be a good thing. The counselor said that Karina reconnecting with her support network was important to her healing process. He didn’t see much point in forcing her to continue seeing the counselor when she seemed to be doing fine on her own. Karina had always been tough. When she’d slammed her finger in the car door at the age of six, she wailed loudly, but by the time he’d run back outside with an ice pack, her tears had dried and she was ready to go to gymnastics class. Some kids were just built strong like that; they could withstand more than others.

  * * *

  His mother-in-law had been with them for eight weeks when she took Keith aside in the kitchen one morning and told him it was time for her to return to India.

  “Of course,” Keith said. “I’m sure your husband is eager to have you back.”

  “Yes, we have a family wedding to attend,” she said. “But that’s not the main reason.”

  Keith looked at her with curiosity. He’d never felt like he’d truly gotten to know this woman for himself. Jaya had told him many stories about her mother’s talent as a dancer, her skills as a hostess, how rigorously she managed their childhoods. But with only a handful of visits over the past two decades, Keith didn’t feel as though he knew her beyond the immaculate facade she presented. Now, she spoke plainly.

  “My daughter is a very strong woman,” she said, and Keith nodded in agreement. “She has the internal fortitude to get through this. But she will not discover that strength so long as I am here. It will be difficult”—her voice caught, and she cleared her throat—“to leave her like this, but I think it is best. She will learn to get back on her feet.”

  “Is she . . . talking to you . . . at all?” Keith was stumbling over his words.

  “She seems to be finding some solace in her prayers,” Jaya’s mother said. “She sits there for an hour sometimes or more, and she seems calmer afterwards.”

  Keith glanced through the kitchen doorway to the makeshift temple his mother-in-law had set up in their dining room. He’d assumed she had brought it for herself, to stand in for the small alcove they had in their flat in Delhi, but if Jaya was finding some peace that way, he was relieved. He felt a surge of emotion swelling inside him. “She . . . we’ve been lucky to have you all this time. I don’t know how to thank you.”

  She waved away his comment. Keith could hear the echo of Jaya’s voice in his mind, explaining that you don’t thank in Indian families; you just do. Help is given, without being asked for. He felt it now, the unwavering foundation of her support, holding him up, the way he had felt when wrapped in his father’s strong embrace after Prem’s memorial service. He hadn’t relied on his parents for anything—financial or emotional—since he’d left home twenty-five years earlier. But he’d needed his father that day to help him stand upright.

  “Jaya will find her way,” she said. “You must look after yourself too.” She peered at him. “And Karina. She acts strong, but she’s still a child.”

  * * *

  After Jaya’s mother left, Keith hoped their lives would regain some normalcy. He was back to a regular schedule at work, and Karina had started high school, where she could ride her bike and buy her lunch in the cafeteria. But Jaya said she wasn’t ready to go back to work yet. He worried about her, alone at home. Some days, when he came back, the house and kitchen looked just as they had when he’d left in the morning. Up in the bedroom, he found open sleeves of crackers and empty cartons of yogurt on her nightstand. Jaya was in the shower with the bathroom door locked. He suspected she stayed in bed all day, getting out only when she heard the garage door open.

  Every night, he laid out takeout food on the kitchen table. When Jaya came down, wet hair combed back into a loose ponytail, she looked at the food with disinterest but always thanked him for bringing it. As she ate, she asked him about his day, listening to his answers with a glazed look in her eyes. When Keith asked her what she had done, she shrugged and her eyes grew sad. She shook her head and smiled apologetically, as if she had disappointed him. When Karina was home for dinner, they let her carry much of the conversation, telling them about her new high school classes, cross-country practices and band rehearsals. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he heard Jaya downstairs on the phone, talking to her brother, Dev, in London in a low murmur he couldn’t decipher. He was grateful she was talking to someone, yet felt hurt that it wasn’t him. He was right here with her in the same house every day, wrestling with the same grief.

  Keith tried again to get Jaya to see the grief counselor, but his efforts failed, so after a few more visits, he stopped going too. He knew they each had to mourn in their individual ways. Jaya was taking solace in prayer, and she often spent time in Prem’s room. Karina carried around her brother’s pocketknife and slept with it on her nightstand. Keith still couldn’t bring himself to be in Prem’s space, around his stuff. Who was to say therapy was the right way to process grief after all? Maybe they were all on their own parallel paths of mourning and would meet on the other side, intact or even stronger.

  The only place Keith truly felt better was at the office. At work, he understood the rules and knew how to succeed. His colleagues treated him as they always had. Keith was surprised by how grateful he felt for the career he’d built. In college, he’d assembled a list of the highest-paid professions: cardiac surgeon, actuary, investment banker. He wasn’t very good at science and only moderately so at math, so that ruled out the first two options. By the time he was a senior, Keith had narrowed his sights on Wall Street. He managed to collect three of those coveted offers, to the annoyance of peers who were struggling to find jobs in an economy still jittery from the 1987 stock market crash.

  Keith had the grades, but what those white-shoe investment bankers really loved to hear was how he’d worked his way through college by holding down two part-time jobs during the school year and working with his father’s enterprise in the summers. He left out the detail that his father had lost his college fund savings in the 1982 recession, forcing Keith to scramble for tuition money. He omitted the financial truth of his father’s ventures, simply referring to him as a serial entrepreneur, which was technically true.

  At Morgan Stanley, he worked day and night, crashing at the office as often as at home. In what little free time he had, he enjoyed the food and restaurant scene in New York in a way he hadn’t been able to as a student. He realized his goal of becoming a top-ranked M&A analyst in his first two years, giving him his pick of where to spend his optional third year. By the time Keith was headed to London, the hub of M&A activity in Europe and a food capital of the world, he had already surpassed his parents in terms of professional achievement.

  At the end of the year in which Prem had died, Keith was promoted to managing director, one of only four on the West Coast. He worried the position might have been a sympathy gift before remembering that no one in investment banking did anything out of sympathy. As a partner, Keith was expected to bring in new business and clients, and he discovered he loved the thrill of chasing a deal. The combination of his modest suburban upbringing, the entrepreneurial spirit bred into him by his father, and his name-brand MBA made him the kind of guy everyone could relate to. It brought him great satisfaction to know he’d brought in a big p
iece of a business for the firm, which would be reflected in his year-end bonus.

  As the numbers accumulated on Keith’s mental balance sheet, it became a security blanket he could wrap around himself and his family. He hadn’t been able to protect Prem, he couldn’t bring him back, and he couldn’t spare his family the pain that had descended on them. But he could do this one thing—perhaps small or inconsequential—but he could at least do this and do it well. He could give his family a sense of financial security and well-being for the rest of their lives, something his own father had not been able to do.

  14 | karina

  JANUARY 2010

  Sitting at a school library computer, Karina smiled at her first semester report card and printed out the page to tuck into her backpack. She declined Izzy’s invitation to come over after school and enjoyed her bike ride home despite the light drizzle in the air. She had worked relentlessly all semester, and to actually accomplish what she’d put her mind to filled her with hope. She was eager to share the news with her parents. Good report cards had always been a cause for celebration in their house; perhaps this was a chance to recapture something that had been lost. Her mother had been getting out more lately, usually to go to the Hindu temple. She’d also begun practicing new customs at home: praying before breakfast, lighting incense sticks, cracking open a coconut each weekend.

  As they waited for their usual Friday night pizza delivery, Mom tossed a salad with dressing while Dad poured two glasses of wine and opened a bottle of ginger ale for Karina. Karina pulled the page out of her backpack and slid it across the kitchen island toward her parents. Her father picked it up and looked at her, a smile forming on his lips.

  “Wow, look at this.” He showed the paper to Mom. “Karina’s report card. She totally kicked ass.”

  Mom gave him a weary glance but didn’t remark on his language, then looked down at the page on the counter as she continued tossing the salad.

  “Straight A’s out of the gate in high school,” Dad said, beaming now. “Who does that? Amazing.”

  “A-plus in biology.” Mom made an effort to smile, though the sadness never really left her eyes. “That’s great, honey.”

  Dad wrapped an arm around her. “I’m so proud of you, sweetheart.”

  When the pizza arrived, they ate sitting on barstools around the kitchen island. Without ever discussing it, they had abandoned the kitchen table after her grandmother returned to India.

  “Mrs. Galbraith asked me to join the Science Olympiad team,” Karina said, feeling the need to fill the silence with something. “It’s usually just for sophomores and up, but she wants me to join now.”

  “Great.” Dad poured himself some more wine. “You’re going to do it?” He turned to Mom with the wine bottle poised over her glass, but she shook her head.

  “Yeah, I think so. I mean, it’s a commitment—a couple hours a week now, but a lot more the month before the competition.”

  “I’m sure you can handle it. You’re already acing your classes. Don’t you think, Jaya?”

  “Hmm?” Mom said, looking up from the salad she was pushing around with her fork.

  “Shouldn’t she join the Science Olympiad team?” Dad repeated, pointedly.

  “You’ve always been good at science,” Mom said. She left unspoken what they were all thinking: Karina had always been good at science and math, while languages and arts had been Prem’s domain. He’d had the most imaginative mind for telling stories; he even won the best essay prize last year for his comic strip featuring a superhero named WaterMan, who saved the world from impending drought. Now, Karina understood, she had to be everything, to fulfill all her parents’ dreams for her and Prem.

  Suddenly, Mom stood and reached across the island for her phone. “We should go to the temple tomorrow, to give thanks for your report card.” She began dialing. “I’ll call the priest to arrange a prayer ceremony.” She was more animated now than she’d been all night, but not for reasons Karina wanted.

  Karina looked at Dad with disbelief, but his expression was blank. Having been raised a half-hearted Lutheran, he was happy to leave the family’s spiritual well-being to her mother. It had been a cursory education: Mom had taught them a few Hindu prayers, taken them to the temple for Diwali, obliged Karina to tie a decorative thread around Prem’s wrist once a year in exchange for a coin. Now, Karina felt anger rise uncontrollably within her. She stood up and carried her plate to the sink. “God didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “What?” Her mother stopped, looking up from her phone.

  “I said, God didn’t have anything to do with my report card. And I don’t want to go to the temple. I have a big history project to work on.” It was the last thing Karina wanted to be associated with, that nonsense that swept her mother away from their family for hours at a time.

  The atmosphere in the kitchen was tense as they silently cleared the dishes. Afterwards, her mother retreated upstairs for her evening prayers, and Dad proposed watching a movie. Karina offered to make popcorn while he got settled on the couch. As the din of the popping kernels waned, she heard angry voices coming from upstairs. Karina moved toward the staircase in the hallway and heard her father shouting, “You have to do something, Jaya. You still have another child—have you forgotten her?”

  “And you had another child—have you forgotten him?” her mother screamed back.

  A pause, followed by some words Karina couldn’t make out, and her father’s booming voice again: “You have to find a way to move forward.”

  “What does that mean, move forward? Go back to work? I’m home now, all the time. Nothing can go wrong. Isn’t that what you want?”

  “Why would you think that?” her father said. “Jaya, you have to stop blaming yourself.”

  “That’s what you think, isn’t it? It was my fault!”

  Karina shut herself into the small bathroom under the staircase, the room where they were supposed to shelter in case of a natural disaster, the only room in the house with no windows. She switched on the fan and ran the faucet to shield herself from the sounds upstairs, then knelt to the floor and searched through the vanity cabinet, looking for something to take away her pain. She found a safety pin and used it to draw a thin line of blood on her inner thigh, relieved to feel the familiar sense of release. Karina sat on the cold tile floor, leaning against the wall as warm tears dripped down her face and the satisfying taste of salt reached her lips. This feeling, a reminder she was still alive.

  Back in that basement office, the therapist had asked Karina about happy memories of her family, and she could recall many: riding bicycles together in Napa, where they’d traveled for a wedding; enduring a long layover at O’Hare airport with a marathon of Crazy Eights; padding around the house in fuzzy slippers on Sunday mornings as Dad kissed Mom on the back of the head and handed her a cup of tea. These fleeting images of contentment came to Karina in the weeks after Prem’s death, when it seemed as if happiness had been torn away from them as a family, as if it was something they had always possessed, their lives an uninterrupted tapestry of joy.

  But that was not true, Karina began to see now that more time had passed. When her parents began fighting more, it wasn’t unfamiliar, just more exposed. Those little jabs had been there before. Karina remembered mornings in the kitchen when Mom and Dad avoided each other, clearly having fought the night before. She and Prem would try not to disturb the water, to keep their parents happy at those moments. At school, they heard kids of divorce talk about shuttling between two houses, the tense communication between their parents over swapping weekends. She and Prem agreed they had to do everything they could to avoid that fate, to prevent the dissolution of the family that was the only place the two of them belonged.

  There was something Karina hadn’t told anyone, ever: in those moments that felt like hours, after she pulled Prem from the water and tried to breathe life back into him, she offered to make a silent deal with God. He could have her parents, if
only Prem could live. She and her brother could survive their parents’ divorce, together. But without him, she couldn’t endure anything. Having not believed in prayer or faith or miracles before that moment, she wasn’t sure why she thought her wish would come true, the deal honored. Perhaps because it was her first show of faith, that she was willing to sacrifice something so important.

  That had to be worth something, right?

  Karina longed to tell her mother, as she now sat in prayer upstairs, that it was futile to appeal to God for anything. Had they ever been truly happy? She didn’t know anymore. She knew only that any chance they had at happiness died along with Prem.

  * * *

  Toward the end of the school year, Karina came home one day to find a construction truck parked in the driveway and the sounds of a jackhammer coming from the backyard. She recalled her mother mentioning that the project would start this week: the swimming pool was being filled in and covered with a new patch of lawn. Her father had come into Karina’s room and nervously asked her if it was okay with her. Inwardly, she was relieved. It may have been the first thing in the past year all three of them agreed on. Karina had found herself unable to walk by the pool, or even to look at it from her bedroom window, and had taken to keeping her window shades closed. Now, she followed the pounding noises to the yard and watched for a few minutes as the hollow shell of the pool was punctured, concrete and tile rubble littering its bottom.