Where Earth Meets Water Read online

  “I’m going for a run,” I announced to the living room.

  “Want some company?”

  “I’ll just do a quick loop and be back soon.”

  “Okay.” Karom smiled at me. “Hey. You okay?”

  I nodded. “Just...antsy. Cabin fever.”

  He nodded and turned back to the op-ed.

  On the street, I bent down to tie my shoes. Karom’s neighborhood was strange. People here didn’t jog, so when others went out in their sporty gear designed to absorb sweat, pedestrians watched them warily, untrusting. A couple watched as I stretched my calves against the building, weaving my hands over my head in an arc and leaning up. I was satisfied when I heard the gentle pop of my back. I slipped my headphones on and started jogging.

  The northern half of the path was empty on weekend afternoons. The day was strange: it was white and bright, but the sun hadn’t made an appearance all morning. Most joggers did their training in the morning, but I was fired up, and as I entered the trail, I ran faster and faster. I knew I’d hit my wind at the top of the hill, where I’d tire and have to double over at the waist to catch my breath. But when I’d sprinted up Harlem Hill, I kept on going. I caught up to the Lama, a wiry Asian man who was renowned in the park for running with bells attached to his waist and speakers droning out Tibetan chants. He ran every day in the park without fail, his long gray locks twisted into a topknot at the crown of his head and sweatbands at his temples and wrists. I smiled as I passed the Lama. Constants are reassuring.

  At the bend there was another constant: Shepherdess, the woman with the two Border collies the color of sand. I’d learned they were part of a litter of eight, and they kept pace with their mistress, one always outdistancing the other by a few feet. The other was more loyal and ran alongside her mistress, whereas the other danced up to me in recognition, wanting to play. What did you call children that were separated from a larger group or litter? I wondered. Were they twins? Or still considered octuplets?

  “Leave her alone, Max,” the woman called, waving at me. “She’s on a mission.”

  Who said there was no community in New York City? My breath was hard and visible, but I pushed myself past the ache in my side. I’d peter out before the 10K mark, but I held my pace. Look at all these friendly people. Constants. More constants.

  I’d been running for a few years, but it wasn’t until recently that I learned how therapeutic it really was. I could ignore a silly Karom fight or a down period at work or a dissatisfied client if I just fought through the ache in my legs and the tearing in my lungs and focused on my ability to breathe through it all. I could concentrate on the patterns of salt that traced across my face and how my eyes burned with sweat as it trickled past my lashes. In the winter, I’d be distracted by the numbness of my fingertips and my wary observation of black ice. I’d look out for park regulars, constants, and keep my eyes peeled for repeat runners that I could add to my collection.

  Although my senses were alert as I traversed over steep inclines and soggy dead leaves, I kept thinking back to that article. That article could undo Karom more than it had already undone me. What if those are his parents, I kept wondering. I couldn’t tell any resemblance by the fuzzy image and the ravage that the disaster had permanently etched across their faces, but what if, what if. And if they weren’t his parents, wouldn’t there—no, couldn’t there—be many other families still out there searching for their long-lost children, their families, their lives?

  There were shouts and peals of laughter and ’80s pop emanating from the core of the ice-skating rink as I ran by. The ground here was slick; the hill leading up to it was a steep incline and I nearly slipped on a patch of ice cleverly hidden by a cluster of whisper-thin dry leaves. Up ahead I could see one more constant: Shirtless Wonder. Shirtless Wonder was a beautifully sculpted man with floppy, bouncing hair and lazy gray eyes. We made eye contact each time he passed me in the park. In fact, it seemed that we never ran in the same direction; he always approached and passed me, as he did now, without a shirt on. But he never acknowledged me, never bobbed his head in recognition even though we were somehow on the same running schedule, regardless of whether I ventured out on a morning or an afternoon. Once, I’d smiled as he approached me, hoping to make a connection as I had with the woman with the dogs or the hot-dog man whose cart jutted into the path at Seventy-Ninth Street, who always waved at me and pretended to pass me a bottle of Gatorade like a baton as I sprinted past him. But the man had turned his head slightly, and I’d felt wounded and never tried to engage him again.

  I shivered as he sprinted toward me. He never had a shirt on, even now when the trees were sparse and the ground was cold and hard. As he passed, I inhaled his fresh sweat. Around the apex of the park again, I slowed and that was when it happened. My ankle gave and I stumbled, falling to the ground, the gloved heels of my hands striking the earth. I sat on the ground, my ankle throbbing and splayed out in front of me, dazed as I looked about. A woman who had been power walking jogged toward me.

  “Are you okay?”

  I squinted up at her. Even though there was no sun, the sky was bright and it hurt to look at it directly. I looked back down at my ankle.

  “I think I twisted it.” The woman held her hand out and I grasped it, putting my weight on my other foot. The pain shot through it and I winced. “Yeah, it’s shot.”

  “Do you live around here? Want me to call you a cab?”

  “My boyfriend does. Do you have a cell phone I could use?”

  The woman helped me to a bench on the side of the road, where I reassured her that I was fine waiting for Karom alone.

  “He knows the park. Really, I’ll be fine. Thank you.” I sat on the bench, curling my good leg up under me, the twisted ankle dangling off the side. The wind sliced through me; my sweat was cooling and I was beginning to freeze. I peeled my gloves off and bit my fingers one by one. My fingertips were white; I couldn’t feel them. I stuck them under my arms and jiggled my good leg under me. But all I could think of were the expressions of the two people in the article.

  Who knew what was going through the minds of people who had lost everything in one instant, in one bad move, in one decision to work at a company that would kill thousands in an instant and then disfigure hundreds over the years? Who knew what would go through Karom’s already overactive mind if he learned about this? Who knew if I’d ever be able to comfort him? Who knew if the cycle would ever end?

  As the wind rustled the few remaining leaves on the tree over my head, Shirtless Wonder ran past again, this time in the opposite direction. He met my eye again as he ran off. I shook my head. I didn’t get the arrogance of people sometimes. We saw one another nearly every day, yet the man didn’t have the decency to nod recognition.

  “Is that him?” Karom asked, jutting his chin toward the man’s retreating back. He was walking toward me wheeling a bicycle. “Your park boyfriend?” I nodded. I hoped he couldn’t see the guilt from the hidden article written across my face, like the telltale sign of crumbs trailing across the lips of a child who’s been dipping into the cookie jar. I also hoped he hadn’t gone snooping into my sock drawer after I’d left.

  “He’s nuts. It’s below freezing. Your beautiful, stupid Adonis. So, what happened, Geets? You overdo it?” I scowled, looking at the ground. “What hurts?”

  I gestured toward my dangling foot. “Ankle.”

  “Come on.” He held the bicycle with one hand and pulled me up by the other, his arm around my waist as he hugged me to him. Sometimes his height and stature made me forget how strong he was. He turned me toward the bicycle.

  “I can’t ride that. It hurts....”

  “Just sit on it. I’ll hold it and guide you back.”

  I straddled the bike, holding on to his upper arm.

  “Thank you.” I smiled through tears.

  �
�Does it hurt that badly?” Karom must have been surprised to see me cry. I’m pretty tough, able to withstand pain. I barely wrinkle my nose at horror movies when people are sliced and diced with chain saws and axes, as though they were paper cuts. I never get angsty during menstruation.

  “I’m just mad at myself. I didn’t warm up enough. I didn’t watch the ground.”

  He rubbed the back of my head where my hair was moist from sweat. “I’m sure it’s an innocent sprain. Let’s get you home.”

  * * *

  The next morning as I hobbled into my office, I threw my crutches into the corner. I’ve always seen people on crutches maneuvering the streets so easily before; it almost looks like fun, taking longer strides than normal, galloping down the sidewalk and receiving a wide berth. They look like they are skipping from stone to stone over a calm river, bypassing extra steps. I’m not one of those people. I just barely managed to get myself into the door before I collapsed on my Eames lounge chair that I bought for guests and clients. My office is small, not at all what you would expect of an interior designer. I have dreams of opening up a large warehouse space, high soaring ceilings, exposed brick walls, snapshots of my past work scrolling past on plasma screens as you enter the reception area. I want the light to come rolling in from the outside—no curtains, no blinds, just the outside world and maybe five or six track lights that project onto the model I’m working on at the moment or that light up the reception area just outside the elevator embankment. I have grand plans. But right now I rent an old office that used to belong to a clinical psychologist. It’s in the back of an old apartment building just off Central Park, low ceilinged and spatially challenged. It’s dark and looks out onto an air shaft, and when I work late at night, I can see into the kitchen of an older woman who lives alone and cooks herself elaborate meals and eats them at her table decorated with a single flower and a single votive. We make eye contact from time to time and I smile at her, feeling sad about her life while I imagine she feels sad about mine.

  I have a shared reception area with three other psychologists, which makes me feel awfully unprofessional, but I console myself with the fact that it’s a start. I can’t expect to own a corner office in SoHo at this point in my life. I will get there, and not a moment too soon. I did some very basic redecoration in this space when I moved in, just enough so that potential clients wouldn’t be scared off when they came for a consultation and saw the mosaic carpet with cigarette holes burned into the border, almost as if it were a pattern. I don’t want to know what happened in this office before I took it over.

  I stripped the carpet and installed hardwood floors. I painted the walls lavender and honey, a color I created myself one afternoon at Benjamin Moore. My Mac is the most stylish and certainly the most expensive piece in the space and so it is accented by a single spotlight that hangs above it. When I first started out, even before I had business cards printed up, my parents let me do their house, little by little. I tackled the library first, a small bedroom that none of us wanted to occupy during our time at home. It had previously been filled with IKEA bookshelves and stuffed from floor to ceiling with books. Some of the books themselves were archaic: Backpacking in Asia in the 1980s; Learn to Swim the Salazar Method; Do Your Taxes Yourself. With permission from my parents, I took some of these books, painted the covers, hollowed out the insides, propped them up on their sides and placed family photographs inside. Most of the rest of them, I donated to Goodwill. People don’t realize that 50 percent of interior decoration is decluttering. Essentially, I got a degree in throwing things out. Their budget was meager, but I frequented thrift stores and yard sales and taught myself to reupholster. I used my father’s Scandinavian background as the inspiration for the minimalistic decor; everything was a blond wood except where I’d lit a highlight with cherry or marble. The furniture was cushy and warm yet refined. I had an ironic plaster bust of my parents made that I placed at the far corner of the room, surveying the scene. I used old silk saris of my mother’s that were fraying and falling apart at the golden threads to accent corners of the room, drawing attention to nooks and books and hidden treasures, like the signed first-edition copy of Shanta Nayak’s True Stories of Make Believe, a book my mother had found in an ancient bookshop on Nineteenth Cross when we were small children. We grew up with this book and its prequel, Tales of Girls and Animals, and for years neither my sisters nor I could turn in to bed without a story read from its pages.

  Their library became the project that lifted my business off the ground. My father’s college friend came to visit and he loved it so much that he asked me to come to his corner office at Columbia, where he was a professor of political philosophy, to rethink the “drab fluorescent-lit cave” where he spent most of his time, to his wife’s chagrin. Something struck me about that description. A learned man so held hostage by his work, by his desire to learn, to educate, to decipher, that he squirrels himself away in a corner of the Earth to seek the truth and think. It was such a simple thought. I remembered the bespectacled badger from The Wind in the Willows wearing a corduroy jacket with leather patches on the sleeves, and Professor Healdon’s office transformed itself in my mind. It helped that he too looked a bit like a badger, with his pointy nose and shadows under his eyes like two black stripes that stretched to the back of his head. I created a warm, wintry space with muted wall sconces and an accountant’s lamp as the only desk light by which to pore over articles and papers. I hauled in Persian carpets from the flea market in Hell’s Kitchen, grasping them by their fat middles and praying that a cabdriver would take pity on me and drive me up to Morningside Heights.

  One Saturday afternoon, just as I was dragging the third carpet that would complete the Professor Healdon project down Ninth Avenue, I felt a tap on my shoulder. The carpet had been wrapped in eight black trash bags and it resembled a giant sushi roll being tugged down the street. I was sure I looked ridiculous, but the generous paycheck—and the many referrals that the professor had given me—helped me swallow my pride. When I turned around, the tallest Indian man I had ever seen was looking at me quizzically.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, and before I could even answer, he had hoisted one side of the carpet under his arm and started down the street. For a moment, I considered the situation: he was a tall, dark stranger who had come to my rescue on Fortieth Street. I’d always considered that conflict—that Americans, white Americans, searched for the dark man, even yearned to grow shades darker on their own, as they cooked in the sun on beaches, applied orange-tinted self-tanner and roasted themselves on indoor capsules that radiated cancerous rays. However, on the flip side, I’d seen my mother surreptitiously collect tubes of Fair & Lovely cream from her friends whenever they traveled to India, and when she herself visited, she preserved a section of her suitcase for at least seven or eight more tubes to keep and distribute among her friends, and she applied the paste lovingly each night before she went to bed. I didn’t think the mixture had done much for her, but she had been using it religiously for years, so I wasn’t exactly sure what her natural skin color truly was. I knew this strange ritual wasn’t just my mother’s quirk: it was an Indian thing, this desire to drop a few shades down the color palette, to appear lighter, brighter and fair. Both she and her mother, my ammama, followed this paint-chip hierarchy and would never have approved of this man based on his dark complexion. But neither of them were around to see how handsome he was.

  I stood, my mouth agape, watching him take a few steps before he turned around. “I did say ‘help.’ There’s another end to this thing and it appears to be dragging.” I grinned and grabbed the other side. We marched the sushi roll to the corner, where I stopped.

  “If you’d ‘help’ me into a cab, I can take it from here,” I said.

  “So you’re telling me there’s a gallant man with a long reach and an equally long stride on the other end of your ride?”

  “Not exactly. But there
is a strong gal who’s been doing it on her own all this time.” But I was intrigued and attracted. I allowed him to get into the cab when one came and he got out on the other end and helped me carry the carpet up the stairs to the professor’s office. I let myself in with the key and he helped me unwrap the carpet and we rolled it out, tucking it under chairs and lifting up the bookcase and the standing lamp so it could fit under, and then he looked around the room, reading the titles of books aloud and admiring the wallpaper and the lighting until ultimately I tapped him on the shoulder and told him that he deserved a drink for all his do-gooding for the day, so I took him to the nearest dive bar and we got drunk off vodka gimlets. And that was how I met Karom.

  * * *

  I pulled the Eames chair around to rest my foot before logging in to my computer. I brought up the Mackie file, along with some snapshots I had taken when I’d last visited their home. The Mackies lived in a two-bedroom apartment not far from my office. I knew them through a friend of a friend. She’d been trying for years to get pregnant, and finally, after numerous fertility treatments, she’d recently birthed triplets. However, at the moment, they couldn’t afford to move into a larger space that could accommodate all of them, so they’d consulted me to divide the extra bedroom into the semblance of a nursery or playroom that would encourage both play and sleep. I considered sleep nooks, lofts that the children could enjoy once they outgrew their cribs, a prairie theme that could easily be converted into light, restful colors. I sketched all morning, my brow furrowed, licking my lips until they became chapped. When I took a break at noon, I allowed myself to think of anything but my work. I’m good at that—compartmentalizing.

  But then it all rushed back to me—the man’s scarred face, the woman’s desperate eye and their desire to be reunited with their only son. I’d dissected it over and over in my brain. What if this was a ploy to be taken care of in their old age? What if they had just created a son to take them in and nurse them until they died? I had watched too many old Bollywood movies. Karom was right—I have such an imagination. The one question I couldn’t bring myself to shake was, What would this do to Karom if he found out? How would he react? As it was, we were wrestling with the game day after day. It wasn’t always active, but it was omnipresent and we never knew when it would rear up. The game had control of me more than I could say. And who knew how it would change with this piece of information. Maybe it would even get better. Maybe it would finally end.