reflection, just like a village girl who is surprised in the act of drawing water at the well, and who must now read the intentions of the tall, smiling avatar whom she sees standing behind her.
Then, in slow motion, as if this were a dance, and both of us dancers, she turned and faced me.
I moved to her. “Here we are,” I said again, my arms extending toward her. “We can go home now, Ma.”
It must have seemed to her a very strange thing, even the wrong thing, to say. To live purely in the here and now, to look forward but never to the past—that was vintage Shiva. “Here we are,” I said.
She came into my arms.
We held her tight.
53. She Is Coming
ON A BEAUTIFUL MORNING, just three weeks after Shiva's transference, Hema and I took leave of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour. Thomas Stone insisted on being our escort. We stepped outside into air so crisp I felt a cough or a sneeze would shatter it like glass. The brick facade of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour glistened with dew as we said our good-byes. The hospital's recent turn in the limelight had brought in special city funds and sparked emergency repairs; as a result, the monsignor in the fountain was no longer tilting, his swizzle stick was gone, as was his crusting of bird droppings. Polished and sanguine, he looked emasculated and alien to the place where I had spent the last seven years of my life.
Our yellow cab sped across the Whitestone Bridge to Kennedy Airport. The sun had barely come up, and yet the freeway was thick with cars, the solitary drivers insulated from one another in wafer-thin metal, which at these speeds offered only the illusion of protection. We merged like wingmen rejoining the formation. Hema looked out meditatively just as I had when I arrived seven years before. I wondered if she could hear the hum of the uberconsciousness, the superorganism who kept this from descending into chaos.
The year 1986 was a disaster for our family. Hema believed that it had something to do with the number, because it had birth in the 1 and destiny in the 8. Nineteen eighty-six had started off terribly with the
There was yet another death eight days later that had bearing on us: my neighbor Holmes came with Appleby of the detective agency to let me know that Genet had passed away in a prison hospital in Galveston just as I was regaining my strength. Genet's son had been adopted by a family in Texas, and she had gone in search of him. Shed been living hand-to-mouth in a cardboard lean-to a few blocks from the seawall when she was picked up. She was a mere skeleton and survived just two days in the prison infirmary. She had supposedly died of adrenal failure caused by tuberculosis. I knew better. She had died chasing greatness and never saw it each time it was in her hand, so she kept seeking it elsewhere, but never understood the work required to get it or to keep it. I'm ashamed to say I felt relief when the word came; only her death could ensure that we didn't keep tearing each other apart for what remained of our lives.
IN THE INTERNATIONAL DEPARTURE HALL, I heard snatches of Bengali, Arabic, and Tagalog. A man bound for Lagos protested in screeching pidgin about the unfairness of British Airways, because there was no way he was four pounds over. In this setting, Thomas Stone, without his white coat or scrubs, looked like the newly arrived foreigner.
“Will you be back, Marion?” he asked when it was time for saying good-bye.
All I knew was that I wanted to be with Hema when she interred Shiva's ashes between Ghosh and Sister Mary Joseph Praise. The grotto by Missing's back wall and in earshot of the little creek was rapidly becoming the family burial plot. I was going back also to see Matron, Almaz, and Gebrew. I knew that my presence would help console them. Beyond that, I hadn't given great thought to my future.
“Of course I'll be back,” I said. “I still have my house, the car, my job …”
“Be careful what you eat, drink …,” he said. It was his way of telling me to protect his handiwork.
I felt better than well. Other transplant patients had to fight to keep their bodies from rejecting the lifesaving organ. The cortisone they took led to cataracts, diabetes, hip fractures, and other side effects. I was blessed not to have to swallow a single pill. I felt no pain if you didn't count the twinges under my ribs, which I considered promising and not painful; they were the sign of Shiva's half liver growing to fully occupy its new home.
“How about you?” I had yet to find a comfortable way to address my father; it was “Dr. Stone” in the hospital and nothing at times like this. “Will you have a job to go back to?” I teased. He hadn't seen Boston since I fell ill.
His slow smile only exaggerated the sadness in his face. He took Shiva's death personally, as if fate had never forgotten that he'd once attempted to destroy Shiva, and so when he had operated to save Shiva, his original intent had betrayed him.
My father made no attempt to shake my hand. Our one hug after Shiva's passing was good for a lifetime. We parted with a nod.
Hema, however, took Thomas Stone's hand in both of hers. I had missed their reunion at my bedside. Now, I watched like a nosy child.
“Thomas, stop this at once!” Hema said, chiding him for his melancholic expression. “You did everything you could, do you hear me? You did your best for your sons. No one else in the world could have done what you did. Thomas, if Ghosh were here, he'd say the same thing. He'd have been so proud of you and he'd say, ‘Go on with your work because it is so important.’ “ She released his hand, after patting it one last time, then she turned and walked away.
Later, as our plane banked over Queens and headed for open water, I thought about Hema's parting words to Stone. Buried in there had been her apology for having fashioned him into a monster in her mind for all these years. In patting his hand and walking away, she was releasing herself.
Alitalia took us to Rome. Mechanical problems on the connecting flight had the agent projecting a fourteen- hour layover. It gave me an idea. In no time Hema and I were once again in a taxi on a freeway, but this time we were heading to downtown Rome. We were like children playing hooky from school.
Hema had needed little convincing. We went to a first-class hotel, the Hassler, Rome's best, I was once told. It was a grand building that overlooked the Spanish Steps. From the rooftop at dusk the sky's red hue outlined the dome of St. Peter's in the distance.
Each morning we set out for the briefest sightseeing. We returned to our hotel for lunch and a long afternoon nap. The evenings we wandered down the streets and alleyways beneath the Spanish Steps. Eventually we'd pick an outdoor cafe for dinner. “It's so familiar, isn't it?” Hema said. “These menus, typed out and mimeographed, minestrone and
ON THE FOURTH MORNING, we let the concierge talk us into a private tour with a guide from our hotel. What did we want to see? Surprise us, we said. Take us off the cow path. Places where there isn't too much walking or waiting in line.
He began with the Santa Maria della Vittoria, a ten-minute ride from our hotel. It was a homely church, sitting right on the street, cars passing by, the elaborate facade looking as if it had been slapped on to the front of an unadorned stone box. Our guide said it was built about 1624, first dedicated to St. Paul, and later to the Virgin Mary. The interior was small—tiny when compared with St. Peter's—with a short nave under a low vault. Off to the side, Corinthian pillars flattened into the wall demarcated three “chapels” which were nothing more than recesses,
