Where Earth Meets Water Page 17

  I’d settled back into the sofa, sipping my coffee. The Brighton Beach man was certifiably crazy in my book, but somehow, he seemed at peace with himself, at peace with his routine. He was striking, with a shock of white hair that blew in the wind in the black-and-white snaps. His hair had turned white overnight, the article said, on the evening that his mother passed away.

  Grief had been converted into activity in his mind, at least something healthy that might occupy those early-morning hours of mind-wandering and supposing. None of this ridiculous game-playing, I’d thought. That needed to stop soon.

  “Tell me,” Dr. Rhodes said, “what does his being an orphan mean to you? What implications does it have, not only now but in the long term?”

  “Well—” I chewed again on the inside of my cheek “—it means to some extent, I have to be his family. I have to readopt him.”

  “Does he want to be adopted?”

  “I don’t think he has a choice. He can’t go on alone like this forever. It’s destructive.”

  “Have you had that conversation?”

  “Not in words.”

  “And what does adopting him entail?”

  “I...” I faltered. “I almost have to treat him like a baby. Start from scratch. Clean slate. Teach him my family’s idiosyncracies, Konkani—that’s the language my mother speaks—terms of endearment, how to eat pinekjott at Christmas and enough Norwegian curses to keep up with my cousins in Bergen. I have to make him our own. I have to retrain him.”

  “How do you mean? Doesn’t he have the life skills to move forward on his own? Does he have to do everything like you and your family?”

  “Of course not. He can physically survive on his own. But emotionally? He’s a ticking time bomb. I don’t trust him on his own. I think learned behavior is essential. And then there’s the watch.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  “He wears this vintage Rolex. It used to belong to his grandfather, his mom’s dad, who passed away during the tsunami. It was the only thing that they sent him after the disaster. They claimed all the passports and the money had to be kept in governmental offices for documentation, which is bullshit if you ask me. Those passports went on the black market as soon as they could and the money was swiftly pocketed into some politician’s bank account. But anyway, this Rolex was a gift from his grandmother to his grandfather on their wedding night. It has an inscription on the back. It says ‘Together we learn there’s nothing like time.’ It’s just this constant reminder to Karom about what happened. I feel like every time he looks at it, it reminds him that he has to play this game. It’s not allowing him to move forward. I mean, I think a lot of things aren’t allowing him to move forward, but this is like some amulet that he wears to remind himself, when all I think it’s doing is further compounding his game.”

  Dr. Rhodes paused here, scribbling furiously onto her notepad, knotting her eyebrows in concentration.

  “I want to switch gears for a moment. What about you? Is there anything we can work on together to make sure you’re in a good place, taking care of yourself?”

  “I’m fine. Except for this bum foot.” I grinned down sheepishly.

  “Okay.” The minutes ticked by, though I was thankful that her office didn’t have one of those obnoxious clocks with a loud second hand that elevated the soar of silence. “I know that coming here, making the effort, wasn’t easy. That was a big first step.”

  “First pivot.”

  “Right. We can end here today if you’d like. I won’t force you to stay until you’re ready to talk. This shouldn’t be torture. This is for you.”

  “Well, there is this one thing, but it’s so stupid and insignificant. It’s embarrassing....”

  “I should’ve said this from the start, but there is absolutely no judgment in this room, nor will there ever be. I will only ever make suggestions to help you, to encourage you. Okay?”

  I nodded. “I read this newspaper article a few weekends ago that really destroyed me. I don’t feel ready to face the day anymore. I’m not prepared for anything that comes my way. I feel lost. I always prided myself on having so much direction, so much fire it always burst forward from my insides. I always knew what to do or where to go, and even if I didn’t, I was always really good at faking it or making others believe it. But I just feel empty now. And I don’t know how to get it back.”

  “What was the article about?”

  “It’s about...this couple. In India. They are in their fifties now, but when the thing in Bhopal happened, they were married and had a son and somehow they got separated. And they lost one another and they lost their son in the melee and were put in hospitals and somehow got out, eked out an existence and then they recently found one another. And now they are looking for their son, because somehow they are convinced he’s alive, or at least they are convinced that it wasn’t Bhopal that killed him. And it’s crazy, and it’s a one-in-a-million shot, but all signs point to the fact that these could be Karom’s parents, this could be Karom’s life. And I can’t stand that idea. That he might be torn away from me and all the progress we have made together. The game...”

  “What about the game?”

  “What if it picks up? What if he’s rattled to the point of not being able to survive? What if he...?” I trailed off, unable to finish the thought. “But this will annihilate everything he has worked toward. He has just about accepted his parents’ deaths. Both of them. And if one of them comes back to life, I’m just not sure he could handle it.”

  “Well, hang on. For one thing, you aren’t even sure that these are his parents.”

  “No, I’m not. But the article just opened up this whole possibility.”

  “Let me ask you—don’t you think that there are other people out there, other people that aren’t his parents but that could be his family? You said that his entire family was wiped out in that disaster back in 2004. Wouldn’t it be nice for Karom if he knew some of his people were still around?”

  “I don’t think it would be good for him. I don’t think it would be good, because it would shake his world that he knows so well. He has a life and a job and friends here. He has me.”

  “Ah.” Dr. Rhodes continued to scribble. “If I may...”

  “Please,” I said. “Total honesty. It’s what I came for.”

  “I can’t help but point out that you’re being rather selfish with this.”

  “Of course I’m being selfish. I have to be. There’s a chance I’ll lose him in all this. There’s a chance he might not need me anymore after all. That he’ll escape and move back to India, that he will no longer need me as he has for all these years. I...I just feel like the whole situation is a snake, like it’s this winding serpent that’s escaped into my house, my life, my body, and I can’t find it to take it out and put it back in the zoo. I feel...violated.”

  “That’s a big feeling to be having. The way I see it, you have two options. You show him the newspaper article and you let him determine what this means for him or for the both of you. Or you don’t, and you continue your lives and you go to India this spring as planned.”

  “I don’t know that I could live with the guilt that there’s something out there to upset the balance.”

  Dr. Rhodes shifted in her seat and turned toward me. “That’s just something you’re going to have to figure out on your own.”

  “But what if it’s in the newspaper again? What if there’s a follow-up?”

  “If it upsets you that much, turn the page.”

  “It’s that easy?”

  “It can be. It can be as simple or as difficult as you like.”

  “Tough love,” I snorted. “I get it.”

  “Not tough love,” Dr. Rhodes said, leaning forward in her chair. “An option.”

  “I’d like it to be easy. I just
didn’t know it could be.”

  “Most things are.” She smiled at me before leaning back in her chair and scribbling something in her pad.

  * * *

  “I booked the tickets,” Karom said, looking up from the chopping board as I struggled to pull the key from the lock. I dropped my purse on the floor and kicked the shoe off my good foot. I leaned my crutches against the wall and walked gingerly toward him. “You’re not supposed to walk on that yet. Hi.” He kissed me completely and thoroughly, as he always did, though he was up to his wrists in red onion.

  I vaulted myself onto the counter next to him. “Did you get the dates we wanted?”

  “Everything. We fly into Bombay and out of Delhi. Trains are booked, hotels are booked. Everything. Done.”

  I leaned my forehead against the arm that held the onion. “You...are the best.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Just a little tired. Those crutches are a workout.”

  “Go lie down for a bit. I’ll call you for dinner.”

  “No, it’s okay.” I loved watching Karom in the kitchen. I always joked that he should have given up this copywriter pretense and gone straight to cooking school. He had the technique; he could slice onions so thin you could see through them, his knife a blur as it weaved skillfully across a bamboo board. He never cried; he claimed that crying during onion chopping was a genetic thing and that he’d inherited it from his mother. I’d squeezed his shoulder after he said that. It didn’t mean the same thing to him as it did to me.

  “The invitation came today.” He pointed his knife toward the table near the door where mail piled up. I cantilevered myself off the marble top and reached for the cream envelope with curly writing like parsley sprigs.

  “Wow, June? What’s the rush?”

  “I was wondering the same thing.”

  “He didn’t tell you? While you guys were best-man planning?”

  “He hasn’t told me anything except to look out for an invitation and to wear black tie, a necktie, not a bow tie, and that’s it.”

  “You boys are so low maintenance. I wish bridesmaids got off so easy. So these are their colors?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Don’t you guys talk about anything?”

  “Only things of consequence.”

  I waited until he set the knife down before I swatted his arm.

  That night, I snuggled down next to Karom in bed. For the first time in days, I suddenly felt at peace. Maybe I was comforted by my frank conversation with Dr. Rhodes or by the fact that we would be traveling to India in a few short months, where I could introduce Karom to my grandmother, one woman whose opinion I yearned for above almost all the others. My parents had raised us to be almost blasé about opinions. So long as you were happy, that was all that mattered. Of course, I was happy. I wanted Karom, but sometimes it was nice to have a familial barometer to assess your decision. I could imagine us walking around Gandhi Park, sitting on the same bench that thousands upon thousands of tourists visit each day at the Taj Mahal, striking the same poses, snapping the same photographs. I didn’t care. I wanted it all, especially with him. I didn’t know how we were going to work up to this trip together. Whether we would have to run emergency drills or review hypothetical situations in our minds. How did one prepare for a trip to a land where not one but two sets of your family had been killed, or now, had potentially been killed? How did one begin to face that kind of trauma and acceptance?

  Karom must have felt at peace, too, because it was one of the first nights in a long time that he slept through without awakening or grappling with his internal demons. I woke up a few times to check on him, but he slept soundly, his eyebrows relaxed and his jaw loose, dreaming through the night.

  There was one other thing still plaguing me, so the next Thursday, after I locked the door to my office and hobbled across the waiting room, I was poised on the edge of the threshold giving myself a pep talk. I would blurt it all out in one go as if it were poison, just rid myself of it. I needed advice.

  “Come in,” Dr. Rhodes said, holding the door open so that I could pitch myself into the room. I settled in the only chair that would accommodate me putting my foot up, as the doctor had suggested. I won’t lie; I was milking this situation for all it was worth—on the subway, with my clients, with my parents. Dr. Rhodes didn’t buy it, I could tell. This therapy business was like a ballet, and the show always went on.

  “You think I’m a horrible person, don’t you?” I asked.

  “How so?”

  “For withholding that article from Karom. For holding the fact that he might still have connections out there. For not encouraging him to seek them out.”

  “Gita, it would be dishonest for me to tell you that I don’t have opinions or that I don’t have an opinion about your situation. But the reason you came to me seems to be because you have an opinion about your situation, and you’re trying to come to grips with it. So let’s talk about that.”

  “I have a secret.”

  “The article?”

  “No. I have another.”

  “I’m all ears.” Dr. Rhodes opened her notebook, twirled her pen between her fingers and began the adagio: “So.”

  All at once, I felt a big rush inside me, like a wave barreling forth from the pit of my stomach. It started in my groin and pushed forward, gathering speed. For a moment I thought I was going to throw up. But it was better than that; it was release. Go. Now. Erupt. Speak, it said. So I did.

  “So,” I said. “As you know, I’m here because I want to help Karom get through whatever it is that he’s dealing with. You know this much. You know that I’m committed to helping him. I have to help him. He has no family—at least I have to operate under that assumption. And he isn’t exactly forthright with his friends about his feelings and emotions and how he deals with the issues that invade his head. He isn’t even honest with himself. But I have something else to admit. Something else that no one knows, especially not Karom.”

  Dr. Rhodes bowed her head and let me have the floor for my big solo.

  “So. I go to India every year, to visit my grandmother, Ammama. She and I are close, but she’s also getting older and she lives alone—a stubborn lady who refuses to move into any assisted-living complex or have anyone stay with her. But I try to see as much of India as I can just so I am not just spending time in Delhi in the confines of her apartment. Last year was particularly bad for Karom. I keep a log of his episodes. He had seventy-three. Seventy-three, can you imagine? Either night sweats or ‘tests’ or whatever he calls them. But seventy-three. I guess they were getting better, because the year before, there were eighty. But I don’t know if that was a significant improvement or whatever. I never paid attention in statistics.

  “So last year, in light of what was happening with Karom, I decided to go to Bhopal. I didn’t tell Karom. I just went. I told my grandmother that I was going to Aurangabad to see the Buddhist caves and I took the overnight train to Bhopal. I knew she wouldn’t understand. ‘What are you going to that wretched place for?’ she’d ask. Where would I stay? We have no family there. I knew she’d think it was dangerous, still dangerous, to send a girl from America who was already prone to fever and Delhi belly and malaria and Third World disease. But I knew Karom’s story and I wanted to see where he was from. I wanted to understand it for myself. I felt so removed, never having met his parents or any of his family. It was like he was this tiny survivor from this host of people who I would never know, but maybe going to his homeland would help me get it.

  “I arrived in the morning with a modest bag and walked from the train station into town. There was a smell in the air, something like burning rubber, that never seemed to dissipate, and once it did, I think it was only because I had gotten accustomed to it. I walked into sludge and washed my slippers in a trench whose wa
ter was only mildly cleaner than the slime that had sullied me in the first place. There were children everywhere, peering out from around corners and slapped-together porches and vestibules. Some of them smiled at me intentionally. Others had no choice but to smile, because they had cleft palates or faces contorted into what appeared to be cheerful grimaces.

  “None of these children wore shoes. Had this been a New York City street, at the intersection of Broadway and Columbus, where Lincoln Center sprouts from the crossing of these two giant avenues, and children ran about the fountain lit in the moonlight, I would have gaped. Had they bounded around the 1 train, gripping the cold steel poles as the cars lurched and rumbled, it would have been a spectacle. But in this city—in all cities in India—it’s natural, normal, expected, to see dry cracked heels and bare toes white with dirt. I pretended not to see them. I pretended not to notice these small creatures’ plights, their bellies distended and their legs bent with iron deficiencies. Because had I gaped, had I pointed out the discrepancy between myself and them, I would have been the infiltrator, the odd person standing out. I would have been the alien in this world, this world that to them was all they knew or was all they would ever know. I would be the one that caused alarm, the source of gossip. So I kept quiet.

  “I walked around for hours, watching these children pump water—poison—from spigots into plastic tubs to take home to their families for washing clothes, for washing themselves, for pouring into their bodies. I’d read that the groundwater in Bhopal was still contaminated. The earth was toxic and it was affecting everything they did, down to the water they used and the air they breathed. I visited children’s trusts and watched flies alight on the crud that leaked out of babies’ eyes as they lay indifferently in beds crammed together like crackers. I watched children hobble around on feet twisted like tree roots, their arms gnarled and devoid of ability to clutch, to hold. These children can’t talk. Their tongues loll about their mouths like dead weight. They make horrible moaning noises if they are hungry or sleepy or in pain. I saw children playing on corrugated metal, completely oblivious to the fact that they were walking on death itself. There were telltale signs of asbestos everywhere.