Handling a woman that slender, that small, wouldn’t have been difficult for an athletic sixteen-year-old boy who had several inches on her. After all, I’d done it many times by then, sweet cocktail fumes thickening the air around me as I carried my mother to the sofa or the bed.
“My son.” Her hand against my cheek, the points of her long nails pressing into my skin. “My pride. Mere dil ka tukda.”
Laughter again. It grated, nails on a chalkboard, even after all these years.
Because if I’d been a piece of her heart, it was a piece she’d alternately adored and resented. I’d been the weight that held her to her toxic marriage. My father would’ve discarded her without a backward look should she have pushed for a divorce. But his son and heir? Never. Ishaan Rai would’ve battled to the bitter end to keep hold of me.
A burst of dazzling white against the green. It was a scene-of-crime officer. A second SOCO became visible in a small gap between the trees the next instant, his overalls the same crisp white except where they were streaked with dirt and crushed green.
Ironic, that she’d have all this attention now, my mother, who’d craved it her entire life.
“Here.” Constable Neri returned with a bright orange plastic crate. “You’re probably not meant to stand for long.”
Once, I might’ve been embarrassed at being treated like an invalid. Today, I didn’t care. “Thanks.” Politeness is a good thing; it works to keep people onside, keep them talking—and keep them from looking too deep. People tell me all kinds of things because I’m polite and empathic.
Dr. Jitrnicka tells me it’s a controlling tactic because I do it with so much self-awareness.
I waited to sit until after Constable Neri had turned away. It was an ungainly process, but I finally got myself down, the moon boot stuck out in front of me, and my crutches laid down neatly on one side. Face flushed from the maneuver, I reached inside one of the pockets of my sweatpants—which were slit open on one side to accommodate the boot—to pull out the strip of tablets I kept in there.
“These are for the migraines,” Dr. Binchy had said as he wrote out the prescription. “Use them with thought, but don’t hold off if you feel one building up. They work better if you get in early. Let it dissolve on your tongue, then swallow.”
The dull throbbing in my temples heralded the onset of one of the fuckers that had haunted me since the accident. Still, I hesitated. The medication worked but, for me, led to an inevitable wave of exhaustion in the hours following. Take one now and I’d be in bed after lunch for at least two hours.
The throbbing increased, nausea churning in my gut.
“Shit.” Removing one of the tablets, I placed it on my tongue, let the pharmaceuticals work their magic.
“Drugs will eat your brain, Ari, leave you with an empty khopdi.” My mother, standing in the doorway to my room with a cut-glass tumbler in hand, her black dress a fine wool that hugged her curves. “Promise me you’re not into that stuff.”
“I’m not,” I’d said, not sharing that drugs were passed around like candy at my exclusive private school. “I don’t like being zoned out.”
True then, and true now.
But the medication would give me clarity for a few hours before I crashed. Better that than a vise around my brain, crushing until tiny lights popped in front of my eyes and my eyesight began to go. I’d had a panic attack the first time it had happened, thinking I was going blind.
Sweat broke out along my spine.
I don’t know how long I sat there before the huge truck with a crane built onto its bed turned up. When I spoke about the truck with the nearest officer, a uniformed probationary constable, she told me the police had blocked off the road for some distance, putting detours in place long before anyone could make a turn that’d leave them stuck for hours.
“This’ll take a bit of time.” Young and sweet-faced, she didn’t seem to know who I was—but because I clearly had permission to be here, she didn’t watch her words. “The cars found in places like this are the worst to get out. Especially when the bush has had time to eat it up.”
Eat it up.
Yes. The jagged, lovely landscapes of this land had a way of swallowing up the unwary. Some, lost in crevices in the mountains, or buried under the sprawling canopy of an ancient forest giant, would never be found.
People forever lost.
Declared dead by the coroner.
My mother had never been declared dead. My father had simply waited the two years it took to get a divorce, then pushed it through without her consent. I didn’t know how. I never bothered to find out. It was obvious there had to be some law to deal with spouses who couldn’t or wouldn’t be found.
Technically, at that point, my mother had still been a fugitive. Oddly enough, it was the divorce that had turned her back into a law-abiding citizen. The court had granted her half the value of the family home despite my father’s attempts to hold on to it.
“I built it! I paid for it!” he’d raged the night of the ruling. “All she fucking did was spend my money!”
In the end, the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars she’d taken had been worked into the settlement, and my father kept the house—worth two million dollars at the time of the divorce. One million dollars to each party, straight down the middle. Had my mother been in court, she would’ve fought for more—shares, investments, all the money he’d hidden in offshore accounts, but she never turned up and so got the bare minimum.
Somewhere in the court system is a trust account in the name of Nina Parvati Rai that holds seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars plus ten years
