She straightens out the bed covers, smoothing wrinkles she knows Trisha must have attended to once already on her daily visit to Brent. It is past midnight. The hospital halls are eerily quiet. For Brent, it must make no difference; his mind is living in complete solitude. Lost in a world that is void of sense.
In Marin’s first year of school in the US, she told Ranee that she’d learned in science class you could tell a tree’s age by the number of rings on the stump. Marin yearned to take a trip to Yosemite to learn the ages of fallen trees but Brent refused. Ranee wondered if there was any way for someone to tell her real age—or could people only see the one that the multitude of worry lines on her face indicated?
Ranee learned how to speak proper English from the soap operas on television and how to read it from the newspaper. Since arriving in America, she often thought what it would be like if she brought home pay equal to Brent’s. Would that have changed the dynamic of their relationship, or was she destined to live in battle with him as the guaranteed victor?
“I envy you,” she said quietly, making sure no one could overhear. The nurses were constantly in and out, as if their noise could be the jarring he needed to awake. “There is no one you have to face for your deeds.”
An outlawed practice in India, sati, required a widow to throw herself on her deceased husband’s burning body during cremation. The assumption was that no woman would want to live without her husband to support and love her. Ranee had seen the practice as a child. Children were not allowed at funerals, but she had sneaked into one. As smoke billowed into the air and sobs were heard, a young widow in a white sari threw herself onto her husband’s pyre. Her screams silenced the group as they watched her burn to death. Ranee had covered her eyes, praying for someone to rescue the woman from her demise. But everyone stood in place, watching the widow do the right thing. When the village folk told the couple’s orphaned children the news, they fell to the ground sobbing. An uncle pulled them into his arms and explained that their mother had died with honor and they should be proud. They could now hold their heads high because of her actions.
“I won’t die with you,” Ranee says to Brent’s still body. “So many years I wished I were dead that now I choose to live.” The argument with Sonya replays in her mind. Her belief that she was a burden. “But she was never a burden, was she, Brent?” The ticking of the clock echoes in the hospital room. Her husband remains the silent companion in the conversation. “None of our girls were. But I believed you when you said you knew what was best. When you told me that I was stupid and you were smart.” She lowers her head in shame. “I believed you when you said the stress of our new country was too much to bear. That because you had to stand silent in our new world . . .” She pauses, a sob building. “I convinced myself that in our home you had the right to be strong.”
Despair and regret grip Ranee. He was not strong but instead the weakest of them all. Her children were pawns in his game. A voice in her head that sounds eerily familiar to his reminds her that he provided her with a home and food. That he gave her everything when she had nothing. She dismisses the voice, her own finally strong enough to hear.
“But I never knew the full story, did I? Maybe I didn’t want to see.” In the belly of a whale, Ranee knows she is drowning but is helpless to save herself. “But it was past time for me to save our daughters. I—we owed them that much.”
She lays her head on the bed, next to his like she has for all the years of marriage, and weeps. Her mangalsutra, the sacred necklace she wears of gold and black beads, falls forward, intertwining them. A symbol of love and marriage, he gave it to her during their wedding ceremony as required by tradition. Slowly, she brings her hands around to the clasp and undoes it, dropping the necklace between them before wiping her tears and walking out.