“What did he do?” asked the woman. “Why did I—Dev, why did Victor tell me to kill him?”
“I’m sure you know,” I told the woman. Because I hadn’t heard. I hadn’t seen.
“But Dev,” she said. She raised a hand to touch my tear-streaked face. I flinched back. “But Dev, why are you here?”
“I couldn’t leave you back there. But this is the end of it.”
The woman was silent. She touched her throat with one clean, wet hand. She looked at me, and then at that hand, like she hardly recognized us both. Then she was crying. “The hands,” she said, “I did it because Red Man showed me … the hands … Dev, don’t do this, please—”
“You know exactly who you work for,” I said. And I stood up. And I left her there, a woman, a killer that I used see around town, a sweet dame with a lethal edge. But I never let it catch me, did I? I got the better end of that deal, didn’t I? She was the killer—I might have loved the sight of that woman streaked with another man’s blood, but I’d kept my own sainted hands clean, clean, clean.
The thing that she was—I couldn’t love her—I loved her like crazy—I would shutter my heart to her, keep myself in close darkness.
There would be no more revelations. No more holding my despised pieces to the light and finding them, improbably, precious.
16
Pea’s hair is wreathed in holly, gilded with snow. Wet curls fall onto her forehead and around her freckled ears. She is wrapped to her neck in a red mink coat. Beneath it she wears a dress of yellowed ivory that belonged to her mother. The candlelight dances across her face in shifting bands of yellow and blue.
“Lord it’s cold out here,” says Tamara, warming her hands on her third mug of cider. “We’re done, right? Are we done?”
Pea laughs so hard she sways into me. The officer of the peace, having just concluded the ceremony, looks mildly scandalized.
“Sure, Tammy,” Pea says. The hands gripping mine are warm and strong and so sure. She’d catch me if she could.
“Just hold on,” I say. “We’re not quite done.”
Pea raises her eyebrows.
“We are married, right?” I ask the justice, just for effect. Walter and Alvin snort with laughter.
He sighs. “As the state can make you, Mr. Patil.”
“Well, then,” I say. I dip her into a kiss that is mostly a joke until our lips touch. We kissed for the first time more than a decade ago. Her back against a tree in the North Woods, her hair still wet from the shower I watched her take. She tasted like strawberry ice cream and cigarettes. She asked me what I was thinking. And she still wears it, that skirt of hands.
She blinks rapidly when I pull her upright amid the catcalls and whistles. Walter’s camera nearly blinds us with the flash. The muscle by her jaw trembles.
“Everything all right?” I ask. She’s fainted once since the massacre. At least this time I caught her. It has something to do with the baby, with the struggle of bringing into the world whatever power that child has.
But Pea shakes her head softly. “She’s fine. Let’s go inside.”
Pea’s nephew Tom plays clarinet as we pass, a sweet “Begin the Beguine” that we clap to while Tamara and Pea laugh their way through the one verse they remember. Tammy holds on to my other side to keep from tripping in the snow, or just to feel my heat.
Inside, the women have laid out the meal they spent the last two days preparing. The feast would overwhelm Christmas, and be equal to my grandmother’s Diwali. Roast ham and turkey and beef, vegetables from the garden that Pea had pickled and canned and frozen, now baked and stuffed and pureed into soups and sauces and other unidentifiable delicacies. There are collard greens and sweet potatoes and black-eyed peas mashed and fried with peanut oil. A little apart from the rest sits a dish of yellow potatoes and a basket of brown, bubbled flatbread. A memory of my grandmother’s kitchen here in this faraway place: potatoes cooked with mustard seeds and turmeric and a dozen other hard-to-find spices. My favorite dish as a child. I turn to Pea when I see it.
“I called your mother.” A faint grimace passes through her smile. “She found the recipe for me. She’s put the rest in the mail, every one your grandmother wrote down while you all lived in India. She has ordered me to take care of you.”
“Ah,” I say. “Will you?”
Something fierce sweeps across those dark eyes. “Just come back, Dev. Just come back.”
“Aunt Pea, can we eat now?”
Pea lifts Ida onto her hip and tugs on one of the bright silk ribbons at the end of her braids. “Of course, honey. Walter, will you carve the turkey or should I?”
Walter carves. I uncork a few bottles of wine to compensate for our rapidly dwindling stores of cider. Ida asks her mom if she can have some, since her brother has a mug. While Gloria attempts with fading patience to explain why Ida is still too young, Alvin offers to show Ida the family of deer that have wandered into the backyard.
“Thank you,” Gloria whispers, and Alvin smiles shyly. He seems more reserved now. Watchful. I don’t imagine his anger will ever leave him—it hasn’t left me—but he is drained of that desperate ferocity. Relieved of the burden of the hands, it is no longer his duty to make it right, only to make do.
“Shame what happened to that boy,” Gloria says quietly.
“Oh, he’ll be fine,” Mae says. “He’s a fighter, always has been.”
“Like his mother?” I pass her a glass of wine. Gloria goes to join her daughter by the window.
Mae’s red eyes crinkle at the edges, but the smile doesn’t reach her mouth. “Like all of us. Not
