Reunion
WHEN THE DOORBELL RINGS YOU ARE ALREADY AT YOUR mother’s sink, putting down the teacup and its chipped saucer, wiping your hands at the hem of the faded yellow dishrag folded neatly into a square. You turn your eyes away from the photograph in the copy of National Geographic that lies open on the counter. “I’ll get it,” you say to your parents’ unmoving forms. They are statues, not unlike the photograph of the family sitting at the table in Pompeii when a shower of gas and ash from the volcanic eruption immortalized them without warning.
You are all up early. It is moving day for you—you have found a furnished room near the community college. Baba wants you to have your own place but Ma wants you to stay and study from their apartment. You will try it, this rented room and your parents’ tether. If it all fails, you will flee to Canada and start over. Plan C. You haven’t told your parents about the possibility of Montreal or maybe Toronto, you hold these hopes like pearls, close to your heart. You carry your passport in the inside pocket of your backpack, a tangible secret.
Ma whispers through unmoving lips, “I can’t imagine anyone coming at this hour.” It is too early, morning. You wonder for a second as you turn the knob, if it is your father-in-law coming to fetch you, try to convince you to return to their apartment. You are tired, though you have had many hours of sleep. Always the same dreams: Khuku Roychowdhury standing at the doorway, then you are running as fast as you can but you can never catch up to Marie—she remains close to the horizon, a shadow blocking out the setting sun. You have stopped dreaming of Krishna. You want to share with Baba but it is still too soon to tell him.
You open the front door and find Crash leaning up against the wooden frame. “You have no idea how many people I had to bribe to get your address,” he says, a smile in each eye.
Your breath catches at the back of your throat. “I don’t live here,” you say too quickly. Your mouth parched and your palms rapidly damp. You stare. He looks like his father, the young Mr. Grimaldi in the photograph Ma has kept for more than two decades.
“Is that the first thing you’re going to say to me?” he asks.
You want to draw him close, take in the aftershave, and touch the salt that glistens prematurely in the pepper of his wavy hair. You want to scream at him for making you believe that he might be dead for all of these months. Instead you gulp. “I have to close the door now.”
Then Crash straightens himself and stands to his full height, a grin rippling to the outer edges of his face. “You’re not going to invite me in?”
You stare at his mouth for a second too long. “This isn’t my home anymore.”
A body behind you comes to life. “Who is it, Heera?”
Even now, Ma won’t acknowledge your name, the name you have had ever since Marie died. Even now, Ma won’t acknowledge your enduring sadness.
Crash crosses his arms and rocks a little on the balls of his feet. “How is she?” he asks, his voice dropping to a gossipy whisper. “Has she missed me?”
You bite the inside of your cheek to keep a straight face. “I promised her I’d never see you again.” You shake your head for a moment.
“Promises like that . . .” he says as he spreads out his hands in front of you, “are meant to be broken.”
You do the same, spread your hands like a fan. You both wear wedding bands.
“Heera? Is it the milkman, finally?”
His band contains ridges on the outer side like the edge of an ocean as it reaches a shoreline, and then you look down at your own, a perfect match. “We picked the same rings,” you say, then chuckle.
“It’s a sign,” Crash answers.
Your eyes sting a little at first and then you smile to yourself that you’re both the same kind of human, wearing wedding rings even after the marriages are over. You’re both the same kind of human, hopeful but slow to change.
“Don’t stand in the doorway,” Baba calls out. “There’s a draft. Go out to the hallway or invite your guest in.”
Crash’s eyes are twin snowcapped peaks on a cloudless day they are so bright. He mouths the word guest.
But you shake your head. No. “I cannot ever let you inside this door.”
“But he invited me.” His hand is on yours and they stick together as if glued. Your heart beats so fast you believe it will run away.
He steps inside, drops his backpack to the ground, and you shut the door behind him. You hear the chair legs squeak and your parents move, rise from the table and walk out of the kitchen. You hear Baba’s breath turn into a lingering cough, the kind that won’t disappear for another three months and Ma’s increasingly voluminous exclamations in Bengali: “My god, my god. How could you invite Marco here, Heera? How could you let him back into our lives? Is that why you came here?”
You are grateful Ma’s outburst is not English. But Crash knows this tone. You wait for Crash to defend himself, offer an apology for disturbing your parents so early in the morning, and deny aloud that you have lured him there. Instead he lingers in the tiny foyer, his eyes affixed on the glossy eighteen-by-twenty-four wedding photo hanging on the front wall in a gilded frame that is wearing thin at the corners. Portrait of a bride, standing in an empty room. Alone.
Baba continues to cough and Ma’s voice becomes louder than the groan of the air-conditioning unit, gasping and moaning as it stops and starts. White noise, a constant pattern repeating itself and presenting nothing new. At first you wait for Ma to stop yelling, and then wait for Baba’s coughs to subside, and then wait for Crash to stop staring at the bejeweled copy of your face and look at the real girl. But nothing changes, they continue on their own paths, together in one room again but each alone. In the old days before your marriage, your parents would not turn away any guest at the door, there was always a welcome proffered, however awkward the moment or the lateness of the hour.
You meet Ma’s eyes and put a finger to your own lips. Baba’s coughs subside. Your mother abruptly sits down, in a chair across from your father.
Crash finally looks at you, sadness dulling his eyes. You say to him, “Please sit down with them, I’ll make some more tea.”
Crash takes a chair with no back cushion as you scurry into the kitchen and put water in the kettle.
“How do you take your tea these days?” you ask.
No one speaks.
You open the fridge but find nothing suitable to eat, last night’s leftover chicken in an airtight container with a bright red lid staring back at you. No rice. A pot of orange marmalade rests alone on the shelf in the fridge doorway, but no bread anywhere. You spy a half carton of eggs and a wedge of red onion wrapped in plastic behind your parents’ considerable medicines that require refrigeration. “How about an omelet?”
Still nothing.
You cannot stand still, you cannot sit down, you cannot control the sudden tremors in your hands. You calm yourself by moving about the spare room, pushing in the kitchen chairs with their yellow vinyl backs so they are tucked under the tabletop, carrying your parents’ teacups to the counter next to the stove—and placing them next to the good mug you have taken out of the cupboard for Crash. You open the cupboard and get one more cup for yourself but then put it back.
In a cabinet, you find a package of cream crackers, already opened—you put a corner in your mouth and taste the musty air of the kitchen. You put it on the snack plate anyway.
The kettle whistles.
“I take it black,” Crash calls out.
“Like your heart,” Ma says in Bengali to no one in particular.
They drink in silence and you watch.
You remember your last conversation, the threat of returning to Raleigh permanently. You ask, “Are you here for good?”
“I think so.” His voice low and steady like the hum of the fluorescent beam in the next room. “I got the job.”
You ask him if it’s the job he’d been preparing for in February. Ma’s glance at you is a shard of glass.
“I couldn’t go empty-handed, with my portfolio in such bad shape,” he says, his voice quiet. “You taught me that.”
You nod. “Everything okay at home?” You should be enraged at him for not telling you that he was all right. You should be so angry that your last conversation was an argument, that your last conversation with him could have been a permanent goodbye. Still, you drink in the air he makes electric, your heartbeat keeping swimmer’s pace. You see how he’s aged, come into a peaceful confidence.
“You saved us all,” he says, gratitude warming his skin. He puts down his teacup and braids his fingers together in his lap. “We were having a huge fight at her parents’ apartment that day, so none of us were inside the tower.” Katrina, he adds, has left with her parents, gone back to North Carolina. For good. “But I’m staying on.” He pauses. “I had to make a plan about everything before I saw you again.”
Baba nods.
Taking a cream cracker from the plate and snapping it in two, Ma asks, “You’ll be in town?” She starts to take a bite but stops.
“In between assignments,” Crash replies, then brings the cup of tea to his lips.
“This is a big city.” Her eyes are hot.
“In a free country,” Crash says, his cup landing with a thud on the coffee table, some tea sloshing out and down the side.
“Don’t start,” you say as quietly as you can.
Baba rises from his seat, takes a napkin, and wipes the side of Crash’s cup. “Our daughter no longer belongs to this family.” His tone is as soft as the used napkin he places under Crash’s mug, as a coaster.
You try not to react, you try not to think of Neel—even though he has broken your marriage contract, you are still not free.
“And yet she is here when I finally find her,” Crash says.
Ma sighs audibly.
“That is a coincidence,” you say, not looking at your parents or at Crash but at the cracker you’ve just crushed in your hand.
“You don’t believe that,” Crash says. He leans over, takes a fresh napkin from the table, and offers it to you.
When you reach for it, your fingers touch. A tiny bolt of electricity shoots through...
