18
R
ia heard another car and rushed to her bedroom window. She pulled back a slit in the curtain and peeked out at the street. It was two in the morning. Light spilled from a solitary lamp at the end of the driveway and painted everything a surreal gray. She had run to the window so many times since coming home from Devon, she was amazed the carpet didn’t have a permanent path carved into it. Absently, she rubbed the depressed fibers with her big toe, and watched the car drive by without stopping.
Her laptop sat open on the bed, providing the only light in the room. She had tried to read the blasted script, but she couldn’t get the cut slashed into Vikram’s skin out of her head. Instead of taking her mind off the metallic stench of blood that clung to her nostrils like rotten molasses, the script had only intensified it. One gruesome death followed another against the backdrop of exploding vehicles and burning buildings. Fire and blood interspersed with more fire and blood.
Another car purred down the street, and Ria inched back the drapes to take another peek. This time the car turned up the driveway and bounced to a halt. The lighted
AMERICAN TAXI
sign on top flickered. Vikram staggered out of the backseat, his big body almost flying facedown on the concrete.
“You need help, man?” the driver asked from inside the cab.
“Nah, thanks, man. I got it.” Was he slurring?
He righted himself and gave the driver a salute before he drove off. He had changed back into his golf shirt and jeans. Light reflected off the tape she had pressed against his temple. Slung over his shoulder was her bloodstained scarf.
He weaved slowly up the path to the house. Suddenly, he stopped and looked up at her window. She jumped back, ducking away from the drapes, and plastered herself against the wall. Oh please, let him not have seen her.
For long seconds she heard nothing more. The only sound was her heart pounding in her ears. She tiptoed to her bedroom door and pressed her ear to the cool wood, straining to listen. Finally the key turned in the front door. It opened with one click, then shut with another. Another long moment of silence followed. Then she heard his footfalls going down the stairs.
Only instead of fading away, the footsteps grew louder.
She pulled away from the door. He wasn’t going down the stairs, he was coming up the stairs.
Shit.
She ran to the bed, slammed the laptop shut, and dived under the sheets. In the dead silence, she heard the precise moment when he reached the top of the stairs. She heard every slow deliberate step he took toward her door. She heard the precise moment when his hand touched her doorknob. The softest thud sounded against the door.
Her heart raced in her chest. She tried to relax her grip on the comforter, to even out her breathing. He twisted the doorknob. The tension in the springs coiled inside her belly. She held her breath and waited for the door to open. Every passing second stretched and pulsed in the stillness.
The door didn’t move.
Very slowly she heard him release the doorknob. With a whisper of a sound it clicked back in place. Just as softly, she heard him take his hand off the knob and make his way back down the stairs.
She was shaking. But it wasn’t relief she felt. It was something else entirely. She tried not to acknowledge it, tried to push it away before her mind articulated the thought. But she couldn’t. She had been waiting, praying for the door to open. For a long time, she lay there motionless, the deadening pain in her heart weighing her down into the suddenly cold bed.
She hadn’t thought about going crazy in close to a week. The constant noise inside her head asking to count, to check, to stay in control had gone completely silent, and she hadn’t even noticed—but now the warm slickness of his blood came alive on her fingers and brought it back. She rolled over and rubbed her fingers into the sheets, but she couldn’t wipe it off. The slickness spread up her arm and covered her body and she fell back in time, her body shrinking into tiny breakable arms, into tiny curious feet.
Tiny seven-year-old feet she had used to follow the moans up the creaking stairs all those years ago. It was the moans that had called to Ria. They had been her earliest memory, those animal cries that had echoed through the house and woken her in the middle of the night.
But she’d never gone up those stairs before. She’d known they were forbidden even before Aji had cupped her face in her hands and issued the soft command.
You don’t ever go up there, you hear me?
But a few days before her seventh birthday Aji had died, and Aji’s cousin had come to stay the day of her funeral. Ria didn’t like Aji’s cousin. The moment Baba left the house, the gnarled old lady pushed Ria out of the kitchen.
Stay away from me, you cursed child,
she hissed.
That woman should never have married your father. Never brought her curse into the family. He should have made her spill you before you were born. Now he’s stuck with you and your devil’s possession.
You come from insanity. It’s your destiny. As if hiding it in an attic will make it go away.
Then she lit an oil lamp in the altar and walked it around the kitchen to get rid of Ria’s cursed presence as Ria watched her through the slit in the door
.
Suddenly the strangeness of her life made sense to Ria—why Baba never sent her to school or let her play with the kids down the lane, why the neighbors disappeared like raindrops on gravel when Baba and she walked past them to the market. Why her gentle father turned dark and menacing if anyone so much as approached their wooden gate.
She stared up at the green painted attic door with its huge brass latch and threw one last look over her shoulder.
You don’t ever go up there, you hear me?
Did you have to keep your promises to dead people?
She reached up and grabbed the massive latch with both hands. She could just about reach it, and it took all her strength to drag it back and forth until the door swung open. And she staggered into the room.
The animal grunts hit her first. Matted hair and tattered cloth flew at her and knocked her flat and straddled her body. Spittle sprayed Ria’s face. Wild eyes darted all over the room. Ria shoved at the creature, trying to get away, and it sprang off her, struggling with its bound wrists, moaning and grunting. Ria scooted back on her elbows, tried to scream, but it lunged at her again before the sound made it out.
Teeth sank into flesh. Razors pierced Ria’s skin, crunched against bone. Wetness slithered down her body. The grunting moans grew to a fevered pitch. Something hard and heavy crashed into Ria’s head. Pain exploded in her ribs, something tore inside her belly. Hands lifted her, threw her against a wall. Blood filled her mouth and pooled under her on the cold cement floor. Fingers grabbed her throat, shaking her and squeezing and squeezing. She struggled to keep her eyes open, but warm liquid dripped onto her lids.
Baba rose from the red haze. He lifted the creature off her. He was sobbing. His eyes ablaze with anger, but his hands gentle on the thrashing creature in his arms. “Shh, please, it’s just Ria. It’s our daughter.”
Blood dripped in rivulets from the creature’s teeth. Her eyes bulged with confusion, pleading with Ria, wanting something.
Darkness wrapped around Ria, fading the face from view. But not before she’d seen the widow’s peak on the wide forehead, seen the bottle-brown eyes, and felt the shock of knowing that looking at the creature was exactly like looking in a mirror.
Ria sat up in bed, the pain in her seven-year-old body swelling to fill her adult form, the insanity inside her clawing like a beast. She rubbed her skin. All the near-invisible scars carved into her body throbbed to life. Tattoos commemorating her one and only encounter with the monster who had brought her into this world. Indelible brands of what she was destined to become.
She stepped off the bed and slipped into her kimono and slippers. She had to get out of her room.
It’s your destiny.
She would never let herself forget again.
You come from Insanity.
Vikram’s mother had repeated those words a decade later, the terror of what Ria could do to her son making each word a trembling whisper.
You. Come. From. Insanity.
As if Insanity were a planet from where ticking time bombs were launched onto Earth, where they ultimately detonated into madness.
It’s genetic. All the women in your family have had it. Why would it stop at you? Why?
It wouldn’t. Ria had been stupid enough to forget once. The mistake had destroyed her life and almost destroyed Vikram’s. Almost.
There was only one place to go. Only one place that could drag her back into the present. She slipped out of the kitchen onto the deck and let her feet take her to the oak. The canopy was tinged with yellow. The early-morning light caught each yellowing leaf and turned it into gold. An intense urge to capture it with brushstrokes, to wrap it in paint, overwhelmed her. But the last thing she needed was another way to draw out the crazies.
She wrapped her arms around herself and leaned her back into the trunk. Her body still hurt from her dream. That was the thing about being beaten—you never forgot the pain or the shock of how much it hurt. Or the shame of having deserved it.
So much shame that it had taken her words. All of them. She’d woken up in the hospital with Baba stroking her face.
“There’s my
rani,
my baby princess. How are you?” he’d asked, tears streaming from his sad eyes.
And she’d had no answer. Not to that question, not to all the questions that came after that, from doctors, from teachers, from Baba. Questions that had turned to pleading and goading and threats.
She’d had no answers.
Until those pale gray-blue eyes, the kind she had never before seen, had finally asked a question she could answer.
You want to be friends?
She was about to close her eyes when the branch above her moved. She looked up and found those eyes staring down at her again.
Not him. Not here.
Please.
His eyes were more weary than she’d ever seen them, tinged with red and ringed with shadows. They widened with panic when they caught what she was so desperately trying to hide. He hopped off his perch and landed on the wet grass next to her. “My God, Ria, what happened?” He grabbed her by her arms.
She closed her eyes and let her chin drop to her chest, letting hair cascade around her face and hide her from his searching gaze. If the tears started again she would never forgive herself.
“Hey.” He tried to pull her close.
She shoved him away. “Why can’t you leave me alone, Vikram? What’s wrong with you? Can’t you just go away and leave me alone?”
He didn’t budge, so she pulled her arms from his grasp and moved away herself.
“I would love to, Ria. But first I need to know what the hell is going on with you.” The pulse in his throat set off its familiar beat.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He touched his bandage with two fingers. His forehead was tinged purple under the gauze. The jeans he’d worn all day still hung low on his hips, but he had changed into a white T-shirt that caught the dawn’s light. “You keep telling me you don’t want me. But I would have to be blind to believe you. I would have to be a fool to buy any of this bullshit.” He waved his hands around. Her scarf was rolled around his fist. “What’s going on, Ria? Why do you even do it?”
“Do what?” She didn’t bother to conceal her weariness and leaned back into the gnarly bark.
His chest rose under the snug cotton. “For starters, why do you deal with this shit—the fans, the attention? It’s obvious how much you hate it.”
“I don’t hate it.” At least not as much as she used to.
“Come on, Ria, things didn’t turn out like you expected, why is it so damn hard to admit it?” He reached out and tipped her chin up, forcing her to look into his eyes. “We were so young. So we made mistakes, so what?” Understanding softened his eyes, tinted them with insidious hope. For a few seconds his hope seeped into her heart. Then it gave way to panic.
She pushed his hand away. “It turned out exactly as I had expected.” She thrust her chin up. “I was given an opportunity and I took it. And it turned out great. Why is that so hard for you to accept?”
That earned her a disbelieving frown.
She matched it with a determined one. “At least I took the opportunities I was given. At least I didn’t run from them.”
His eyes narrowed. He took an unconscious step back, and that pushed her over the edge. “What about V-learn? It puts that stupid ecstatic look on your face. How can you not do anything with it?”
“You don’t know anything about V-learn. You don’t know anything about me anymore. Stop acting like you do.”
“Fine. Then tell me. Tell me what you do.”
Tell me I didn’t ruin your life.
“Okay. I teach a class at the University of Chicago. A special workshop on sustainable construction techniques. You have to qualify for my class, you can’t just take it. Because when I was running around the world after my girlfriend dumped me, I spent so much time on construction sites I figured out that indigenous populations use some amazing technologies that won’t fucking kill our planet. And because I couldn’t sleep for years I figured out how to apply them to modern construction. And now they think I’m some sort of fucking expert. But you know what else I figured out? That there’s more to life than chasing shit. That I didn’t have to achieve things to be someone everyone wants me to be.
“Oh, and those videos on V-learn—they didn’t make themselves. I put them there and I put more on every day. But V-learn is mine. I can give it to whoever wants it, whoever needs it. I don’t want someone to take it and turn it into another moneymaking machine. I don’t want it to turn into another screw-the-little-guy tool. Does that answer your question?” He was breathing hard. And he had put several feet between them.