She grunted. “Just say what you want to say, Neha.”
She sighed and got ready for bed. She’d deal with it in the morning. She changed into her pajamas and tucked herself under a blanket on the couch. Her cased arm lay heavy on her stomach after she turned off the lights. It wasn’t just the cast; exhaustion weighed her down.
Dust it off. Her mother’s favorite saying. Hannah had been pragmatic to a fault. Meena hadn’t gotten the part she’d wanted in the school production of The Nutcracker? Move on. Find something else. Hadn’t gotten on the gymnastics team? There were other clubs. If something hadn’t worked out, Hannah hadn’t seen the point in dwelling on it.
They had been so different, Neha and Hannah. There had never been any meandering to Hannah’s practicality. Always straightforward, always efficient. Neha had hidden little notes in odd places, notes that had no dates, no timeline, no logic. Like a jigsaw puzzle Meena wasn’t sure she wanted to solve.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Daylight fading, Meena huddled in the garden with a red-and-green checkered blanket she’d found in the bottom drawer of a large antique cabinet. She’d been relieved not to find a note. They were starting to make her twitchy.
She crossed her legs and put both feet on the metal bench so they were tucked under the blanket. The lights in the back garden gave off a soft glow. It was pristine, even as fall closed in on winter. The bare branches and twigs were trimmed. The sturdy winter plants bloomed, arranged in a row of pots that were color coordinated from deep red to light pink, like ombré but with planters. Even the rocks around the large dogwood in the corner were in immaculate order, each piece the exact same size and shape as the one beside it. There was too much symmetry. Too little color now that the leaves had been cleaned away.
Sam and Wally came out of the house. Wally, off his leash, charged toward her. Put his front paws on her lap. Meena gave him the requested scratches. He tried to climb on her, but Sam directed him down.
“He’s not allowed to jump up.” Sam spoke to Wally: “OK, pal. Go do your business.”
The dog left her to sniff the ground.
“He’s starting to listen to you,” Meena observed.
“When he feels like it.” Sam sat next to her.
They watched Wally take a sniffing tour, going wherever the smells led him.
“It’s a nice garden.”
“Sabina’s mother was the previous keeper, her grandmother before her. It’s changed little with each generation.”
“It’s Sabina’s even though it belongs to the building?”
Sam shrugged. “It’s communal, and she’s the caretaker.”
“And no one minds?” Meena asked. “Like what if I wanted to replace those rocks with daffodils or plant a large tree in that empty corner? Do I have to get permission?”
Sam laughed. “You wouldn’t get approval.”
“Then it isn’t really communal.”
They watched as Wally lifted a leg to water a rosebush.
“Neha must have hated it,” Meena mused.
“She avoided the garden,” Sam said. “Preferred the inside to out. That didn’t stop her from needling Sabina or making snippy comments about the lack of wildness.”
“Sounds like they had an interesting relationship.”
“That’s probably the best word to describe it. To some extent, it was like that with all three aunties. There was an age difference, with Neha being older. She wasn’t part of the trio, but when Neha was left on her own, the aunties became self-appointed caretakers. Not that she wanted or needed it. Neha liked to complain, indirectly, about everything.”
“You were the one she vented to.”
Sam gave her a sad smile. “I think she was lonely. She wanted to be left alone but didn’t like that she’d been left, if that makes sense.”
“In a way.” It was something Meena was starting to think about. Aloneness was a choice, but loneliness felt different. A disconnection from others that felt more like a condition of how she lived her life. Meena was beginning to relate to Neha.
“What about you?” Sam asked. “You must know a lot of people, though you only ever talk about Zoe.”
Leave it to Sam to ask a question she didn’t have a scripted answer for. “I haven’t really thought about it. My work, there are a lot of people involved. Yes, it’s me and the camera, but there are editors, sometimes assistants. There are other journalists, a network of hundreds. You can’t be lonely when you’re out in the world surrounded by people living their lives.” A lie she’d been telling herself for a very long time.
“Right,” Sam said. “I’ve looked up some of your work. It’s fantastic. The photo of the kayaker in that small village in Norway is unforgettable.”
She’d spent two weeks in the Lofoten Islands, waited out three storms. “I took that from a bridge to get the wide shot. I wanted to show the tiny village that had survived for hundreds of years against this massive backdrop of rocks and water.” Now, she thought sadly, it’s overrun by tourists who want to stand in front of the red wooden houses for their Instagram followers.
“I added it to my list,” Sam said. “Of places to go.”
“I thought you were a homebody.”
“I am. That doesn’t mean I don’t like to travel. We used to take two family vacations every year. One in the summer and one over winter break. My brother likes to ski and scuba dive, so we went to places where we could do those things.”
“What about what you liked to do?”
Sam kept his attention on Wally. “I don’t mind skiing. Though if I don’t dive again, I won’t miss it.”
That wasn’t what she’d asked. “You don’t talk about your family much.”
He shrugged. “Two parents still married. A younger brother, also married, with three kids. The usual.”
He talked about them as if he were an outsider looking in. “And you.”
“And me,” Sam said. “We’re not close. I don’t think they even know what I do or have seen the movies I’ve worked on.”